XXVI



It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale—either in
England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he had
not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had
felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.

"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."

This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then
six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming business
he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all matters—
some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic labours
of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be well, there-
fore, for him to marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question—

"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"

"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters
little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and
neighbour, Dr Chant—"

"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and rear
chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate
the value of sheep and calves?"

"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable." Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before. "I
was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you will
not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more to
your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you used
to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour Chant's
daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round
about us for decorating the Communion-table—alter, as I was shocked to
hear her call it one day—with flowers and other stuff on festival
occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as
I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish outbreak which, I am
sure, will not be permanent."

"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant, but
one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself, would
suit me infinitely better?"

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to advance
the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that
fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every
qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist, and was decidedly
of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had
attached herself to the sound Low Church School of his father; but she
would probably be open to conviction on that point; she was a regular
church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent,
graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in personal appearance,
exceptionally beautiful.

"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into—a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.

"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to say.
But she is a lady, nevertheless—in feeling and nature."

"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."

"Pooh!—what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly. "How
is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have, and
shall have to do?"

"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm," returned
his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.

"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in
the life I am going to lead?—while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression. She lives what paper-poets only write... And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."

"O Angel, you are mocking!"

"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you will
tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel
that I may do worse than choose her." Angel waxed quite earnest on that
rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming
that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight
when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of
its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said finally
that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would not
object to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt
that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet
existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people,
which it would require some tact to overcome. For though legally at
liberty to do as he chose, and though their daughter-in-law's
qualifications could make no practical difference to their lives, in
the probability of her living far away from them, he wished for
affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the most important
decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he
loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the
dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple
formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence
required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He
held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion
and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It was probable that,
in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual
training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involun-
tary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up
to the present day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to
have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been
brought under its influence. This belief was confirmed by his exper-
ience of women, which, having latterly been extended from the cul-
tivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how
much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise wo-
man of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another
social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise and the fool-
ish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the
Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to
return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel might have
accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays.
He would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the
most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-
versed Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing
consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had
been prepared for him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to
mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him, on his
own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well advanced his
own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on
together through the shady lanes, to his father's account of his parish
difficulties, and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved,
because of his strict interpretations of the New Testament by the light
of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.

"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea. He
told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the
instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young up-
start squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in the
neighbourhood of Trantridge.

"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son. "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"

"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty or
eighty years ago—at least, I believe so. This seems to be a new family
which had taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly line I
hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd to hear you express
interest in old families. I thought you set less store by them even
than I."

"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a little
impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of their being
old. Some of the wise even among themselves ‘exclaim against their own
succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically, dramatically, and even
historically, I am tenderly attached to them."

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too subtle
for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had been about
to relate; which was that after the death of the senior so-called
d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable passions,
though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have made him know
better. A knowledge of his career having come to the ears of Mr Clare,
when he was in that part of the country preaching missionary sermons,
he boldly took occasion to speak to the delinquent on his spiritual
state. Though he was a stranger, occupying another's pulpit, he had
felt this to be his duty, and took for his text the words from St Luke:
"Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee!" The young
man much resented this directness of attack, and in the war of words
which followed when they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr
Clare, without respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself to
such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"

"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give me any
pain, or even his blows? ‘Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we
suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the filth of the
world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this day.' Those
ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly true at this
present hour."

"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"

"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state of
intoxication."

"No!"

"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt of
murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived to
thank me, and praise God."

"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently. "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."

"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray for
him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never meet
again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in
his heart as a good seed some day."

Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though the
younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered his
practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he revered
his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that, in the
question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once thought of
inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless. The same
unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting a living as a
farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the position of poor
parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel admired it none the
less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was
nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren.



XXVII



An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a
mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green
trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.
Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial
soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the
summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast
pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very
bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot
that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long distance
off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury
that he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side,
in a way that had been quite foreign to him in his student-days; and,
much as he loved his parents, he could not help being aware that to
come here, as now, after an experience of home-life, affected him like
throwing off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on the
humours of English rural societies being absent in this place, Talbothays
having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were all
enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the exceedingly
early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the
wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung
like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed
there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening
milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of the
house to the back quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained
snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down;
the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further
distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their
broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's, who
in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had
been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up
cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn;
her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their
pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a
moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time;
when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the
outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before
the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look
of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed—"O Mr Clare! How you
frightened me—I—"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender look
as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his
face to her flushed cheek. "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me any
more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they
stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the
window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her
inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm,
and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down
in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not
look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the
deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of
blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at
her second waking might have regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is
not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home till
milking."

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards. "So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as
having light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every
time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her
hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she
seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it
in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came
convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently. "I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been
thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall soon
want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife
a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be that
woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon
this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without
quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the
bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable
and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

"O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!"

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close. "Do you say no? Surely you love me?"

"O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the world,"
returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl. "But I
cannot marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to marry
some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

"I don't want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot! I
only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
such as me. She will want you to marry a lady."

"Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went home."

"I feel I cannot—never, never!" she echoed.

"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"

"Yes—I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
said. "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as
she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in
the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring
tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear
advocate, she could never explain.

"I can't skim—I can't!" she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
talking in a more general way:

"You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining
Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High,
they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every
week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard
him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow to
me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad. He himself
knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently
imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology,
and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to disturb them
was his last desire:

　　　　　Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
　　　　　Her early Heaven, her happy views;
　　　　　Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
　　　　　A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode of
life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the undula-
tions disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead after
another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she ventured
to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of herself.

"Yes—well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his troubles
and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me. He is so
zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a
different way of thinking from himself, and I don't like to hear of
such humiliations to a man of his age, the more particularly as I don't
think earnestness does any good when carried so far. He has been
telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite
recently. He went as the deputy of some missionary society to preach in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and
made it his business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with
somewhere about there—son of some landowner up that way—and who has a
mother afflicted with blindness. My father addressed himself to the
gentleman point-blank, and there was quite a disturbance. It was very
foolish of my father, I must say, to intrude his conversation upon a
stranger when the probabilities were so obvious that it would be
useless. But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in
season or out of season; and, of course, he makes many enemies, not
only among the absolutely vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate
being bothered. He says he glories in what happened, and that good may
be done indirectly; but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is
getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare's revived thoughts of his
father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went on
down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished and
drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their pails,
and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As Tess withdrew
to go afield to the cows he said to her softly—

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no—no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had heard
anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec d'Urberville.
"It can't be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with a
bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad constraint.
All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in
the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild
animals—the reckless, unchastened motion of women accustomed to
unlimited space—in which they abandoned themselves to the air as a
swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was
again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained Nature, and not from
the abodes of Art.



XXVIII



Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare. His
experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the
negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative;
and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the
present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of
coyness. That she had already permitted him to make love to her he read
as an additional assurance, not fully trowing that in the fields and
pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no means deemed waste; love-making
being here more often accepted inconsiderately and for its own sweet
sake than in the carking, anxious homes of the ambitious, where a
girl's craving for an establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a
passion as an end.

"Tess, why did you say ‘no' in such a positive way?" he asked her in
the course of a few days.

She started.

"Don't ask me. I told you why—partly. I am not good enough—not worthy
enough."

"How? Not fine lady enough?"

"Yes—something like that," murmured she. "Your friends would scorn me."

"Indeed, you mistake them—my father and mother. As for my brothers, I
don't care—" He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her from
slipping away. "Now—you did not mean it, sweet?—I am sure you did not!
You have made me so restless that I cannot read, or play, or do
anything. I am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know—to hear from your
own warm lips—that you will some day be mine—any time you may choose;
but some day?"

She could only shake her head and look away from him.

Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as if
they had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real.

"Then I ought not to hold you in this way—ought I? I have no right to
you—no right to seek out where you are, or walk with you! Honestly,
Tess, do you love any other man?"

"How can you ask?" she said, with continued self-suppression.

"I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you repulse me?"

"I don't repulse you. I like you to—tell me you love me; and you may
always tell me so as you go about with me—and never offend me."

"But you will not accept me as a husband?"

"Ah—that's different—it is for your good, indeed, my dearest! O,
believe me, it is only for your sake! I don't like to give myself the
great happiness o' promising to be yours in that way—because—because I
am sure I ought not to do it."

"But you will make me happy!"

"Ah—you think so, but you don't know!"

At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be
her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would
say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile—which was
certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him having
led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his
knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender contests and her
victory she would go away by herself under the remotest cow, if at
milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room, if at a leisure
interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an apparently
phlegmatic negative.

The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the side
of his—two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience—that she
tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power. She had
come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could she agree
to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her husband for
his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her conscience had
decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not to be overruled
now.

"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said. "It was only
forty miles off—why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know!"

Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.

For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not only
as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for themselves
that she did not put herself in his way.

Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was
so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive
pain. At the next cheese-making the pair were again left alone
together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but Mr Crick,
as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a suspicion of
mutual interest between these two; though they walked so circumspectly
that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the dairyman left them
to themselves.

They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into
the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a
large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess
Durbeyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased, and
laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above the
elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft arm.

Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from her
dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a new-
gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such a sheaf
of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the touch, her
blood driven to her finger-ends, and the cool arms flushed hot. Then,
as though her heart had said, "Is coyness longer necessary? Truth is
truth between man and woman, as between man and man," she lifted her
eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her lip rose in a tender
half-smile.

"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said.

"Because you love me very much!"

"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty."

"Not again!"

She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under her
own desire.

"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I cannot think why you are so tantalizing.
Why do you disappoint me so? You seem almost like a coquette, upon my
life you do—a coquette of the first urban water! They blow hot and blow
cold, just as you do, and it is the very last sort of thing to expect
to find in a retreat like Talbothays.... And yet, dearest," he quickly
added, observing how the remark had cut her, "I know you to be the most
honest, spotless creature that ever lived. So how can I suppose you a
flirt? Tess, why don't you like the idea of being my wife, if you love
me as you seem to do?"

"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it;
because—it isn't true!"

The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip quivered, and she was
obliged to go away. Clare was so pained and perplexed that he ran after
and caught her in the passage.

"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her, in forgetfulness
of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you won't belong to anybody but
me!"

"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed. "And I will give you a
complete answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my
experiences—all about myself—all!"

"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number." He expressed
assent in loving satire, looking into her face. "My Tess, no doubt,
almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the
garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time. Tell
me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more about not
being worthy of me."

"I will try—not! And I'll give you my reasons to-morrow—next week."

"Say on Sunday?"

"Yes, on Sunday."

At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in
the thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where
she could be quite unseen. Here Tess flung herself down upon the
rustling undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed, and remained
crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy,
which her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.

In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her
breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a
voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.
Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the
altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe
pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon
her: that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy
Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement,
wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere isolation,
love's counsel would prevail.

The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows. She
heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands; the
"waow-waow!" which accompanied the getting together of the cows. But
she did not go to the milking. They would see her agitation; and the
dairyman, thinking the cause to be love alone, would good-naturedly
tease her; and that harassment could not be borne.

Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some
excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls
given. At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with the
aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous
pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows,
tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became
spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in and
upstairs without a light.

It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully at
her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her. The indoor
milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something definite
was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in the
bedchamber. Friday passed; Saturday. To-morrow was the day.

"I shall give way—I shall say yes—I shall let myself marry him—I cannot
help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to the pillow that
night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep. "I
can't bear to let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him,
and may kill him when he knows! O my heart—O—O—O!"



XXIX



"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?" said Dairyman
Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling gaze round
upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye think?"

One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not guess, because she
knew already.

"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted 'hore's-bird of a
feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman."

"Not Jack Dollop? A villain—to think o' that!" said a milker.

The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for it
was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had
afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the
butter-churn.

"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?"
asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was
reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs
Crick, in her sense of his gentility.

"Not he, sir. Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As I say, 'tis a
widow-woman, and she had money, it seems—fifty poun' a year or so; and
that was all he was after. They were married in a great hurry; and then
she told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty poun' a year. Just
fancy the state o' my gentleman's mind at that news! Never such a
cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since! Serves him well
beright. But onluckily the poor woman gets the worst o't."

"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of her
first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.

"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively. "Still, you can see
exactly how 'twas. She wanted a home, and didn't like to run the risk
of losing him. Don't ye think that was something like it, maidens?"

He glanced towards the row of girls.

"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to church, when he
could hardly have backed out," exclaimed Marian.

"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.

"She must have seen what he was after, and should ha' refused him,"
cried Retty spasmodically.

"And what do you say, my dear?" asked the dairyman of Tess.

"I think she ought—to have told him the true state of things—or else
refused him—I don't know," replied Tess, the bread-and-butter choking
her.

"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck Knibbs, a married
helper from one of the cottages. "All's fair in love and war. I'd ha'
married en just as she did, and if he'd said two words to me about not
telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first chap that I
hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the rolling-pin—a
scram little feller like he! Any woman could do it."

The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry
smile, for form's sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was tragedy
to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose from
table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her, went
along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the
irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main
stream of the Var. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up the
river, and masses of them were floating past her—moving islands of
green crow-foot, whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks of
which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows from
crossing.

Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her
story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but amusement to
others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.

"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,
alighting beside her feet. "My wife—soon!"

"No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say no!"

"Tess!"

"Still I say no!" she repeated.

Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the
moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The younger
dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose on Sunday
mornings before building it up extra high for attending church, a style
they could not adopt when milking with their heads against the cows.)
If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he would have kissed her; it had
evidently been his intention; but her determined negative deterred his
scrupulous heart. Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her,
as the woman, to such disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he
felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he
might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He
released her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.

It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse
him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman;
and that would have been overcome in another moment. But Angel said
no more; his face was perplexed; he went away.

Day after day they met—somewhat less constantly than before; and thus
two or three weeks went by. The end of September drew near, and she
could see in his eye that he might ask her again.

His plan of procedure was different now—as though he had made up his
mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth
startled by the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of her
manner when the subject was under discussion countenanced the idea. So
he played a more coaxing game; and while never going beyond words, or
attempting the renewal of caresses, he did his utmost orally.

In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of the
purling milk—at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings, at
cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs—as no
milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.

Tess knew that she must break down. Neither a religious sense of a
certain moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious wish
for candour could hold out against it much longer. She loved him so
passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though
untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary
guidance. And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can never
be his wife," the words were vain. A proof of her weakness lay in the
very utterance of what calm strength would not have taken the trouble
to formulate. Every sound of his voice beginning on the old subject
stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the recantation
she feared.

His manner was—what man's is not?—so much that of one who would love
and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes, charges, or
revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it. The season
meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though it was still
fine, the days were much shorter. The dairy had again worked by morning
candlelight for a long time; and a fresh renewal of Clare's pleading
occurred one morning between three and four.

She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as usual; then
had gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes was
walking to the head of the stairs with the candle in her hand. At the
same moment he came down his steps from above in his shirt-sleeves and
put his arm across the stairway.

"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said peremptorily. "It is a
fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer. You must tell
me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house. My door was ajar
just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You don't know.
Well? Is it to be yes at last?"

"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take me to task!"
she pouted. "You need not call me Flirt. 'Tis cruel and untrue. Wait
till by and by. Please wait till by and by! I will really think seriously
about it between now and then. Let me go downstairs!"

She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle
sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words.

"Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare."

"Angel."

"Angel dearest—why not?"

"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?"

"It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me; and
you were so good as to own that long ago."

"Very well, then, ‘Angel dearest', if I must," she murmured, looking
at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding
her suspense.

Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her promise;
but somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up milking
gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there should be
leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done, he broke his
resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one moment. She passed
downstairs very quickly, never looking back at him or saying another
word. The other maids were already down, and the subject was not
pursued. Except Marian, they all looked wistfully and suspiciously at
the pair, in the sad yellow rays which the morning candles emitted in
contrast with the first cold signals of the dawn without.

When skimming was done—which, as the milk diminished with the approach
of autumn, was a lessening process day by day—Retty and the rest went
out. The lovers followed them.

"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?" he
musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping
before him through the frigid pallor of opening day.

"Not so very different, I think," she said.

"Why do you think that?"

"There are very few women's lives that are not—tremulous," Tess
replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. "There's
more in those three than you think."

"What is in them?"

"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make—perhaps would make—a
properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you as well as I—almost."

"O, Tessy!"

There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the
impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let
generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she had
not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were
joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more was said on
that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that this day would
decide it.

In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and assistants
went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where many
of the cows were milked without being driven home. The supply was
getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary
milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.

The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall cans
that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought upon the
scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away. Dairyman
Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming miraculously
white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked at his heavy watch.

"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said. "Begad! We shan't be soon
enough with this milk at the station, if we don't mind. There's no time
to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending off. It
must go to station straight from here. Who'll drive it across?"

Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business,
asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had been
warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with her
milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed
for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her scant
habiliments; but Clare gently urged her. She assented by relinquishing
her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and mounted the
spring-waggon beside Clare.



XXX



In the diminishing daylight they went along the level roadway through
the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed in the
extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon
Heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose
notched tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted
castles of enchantment.

They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that
they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken
only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them. The lane
they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had remained on the
boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung
in heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would fling the lash of his
whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give it to his companion.

The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down
herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into a
fitful breeze which played about their faces. The quick-silvery glaze
on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light they
changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a rasp. But
that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her countenance, a
natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season, had deepened its
tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her hair, which the
pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual, caused to tumble down from
its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was
made clammy by the moisture till it hardly was better than seaweed.

"I ought not to have come, I suppose," she murmured, looking at the
sky.

"I am sorry for the rain," said he. "But how glad I am to have you
here!"

Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid gauze. The evening
grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates, it was not safe to
drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather chill.

"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and
shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle won't
hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think that the
rain might be helping me."

She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a large
piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off the
milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as herself,
Clare's hands being occupied.

"Now we are all right again. Ah—no we are not! It runs down into my
neck a little, and it must still more into yours. That's better. Your
arms are like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now, if you
stay quiet, you will not get another drop. Well, dear—about that
question of mine—that long-standing question?"

The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of
the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in
the cans behind them.

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I do," she replied.

"Before we get home, mind."

"I'll try."

He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course
passed and left behind.

"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old place—one
of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman family
formerly of great influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles. I never
pass one of their residences without thinking of them. There is
something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it
was fierce, domineering, feudal renown."

"Yes," said Tess.

They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand
at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot
where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the
dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between
their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its
steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the
native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it
touched had been uncongenial.

They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a
little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one
sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the
celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The cans
of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter
from a neighbouring holly tree.

Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently
upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into the
truck. The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess
Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object
could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than
this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and
hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the print
gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.

She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience
characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had
wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they
plunged back into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that the
few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress lingered in
her thought.

"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won't they?"
she asked. "Strange people that we have never seen."

"Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its strength
has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their heads."

"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and
tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."

"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."

"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how
we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might
reach 'em in time?"

"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we
drove a little on our own—on account of that anxious matter which you
will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put it in
this way. You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I mean. Does
it not?"

"You know as well as I. O yes—yes!"

"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?"

"My only reason was on account of you—on account of a question. I have
something to tell you—"

"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly
convenience also?"

"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my
life before I came here—I want—"

"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a
very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable as
a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in the
country. So please—please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of the
feeling that you will stand in my way."

"But my history. I want you to know it—you must let me tell you—you
will not like me so well!"

"Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history then. Yes, I
was born at so and so, Anno Domini—"

"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words as a help,
lightly as they were spoken. "And I grew up there. And I was in the
Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness,
and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should be one.
But there was trouble in my family; father was not very industrious,
and he drank a little."

"Yes, yes. Poor child! Nothing new." He pressed her more closely to his
side.

"And then—there is something very unusual about it—about me. I—I was—"

Tess's breath quickened.

"Yes, dearest. Never mind."

"I—I—am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville—a descendant of the same
family as those that owned the old house we passed. And—we are all gone
to nothing!"

"A d'Urberville!—Indeed! And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?"

"Yes," she answered faintly.

"Well—why should I love you less after knowing this?"

"I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families."

He laughed.

"Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic principle
of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only
pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and
virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity. But I am extremely
interested in this news—you can have no idea how interested I am! Are
you not interested yourself in being one of that well-known line?"

"No. I have thought it sad—especially since coming here, and knowing
that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to my father's
people. But other hills and fields belonged to Retty's people, and
perhaps others to Marian's, so that I don't value it particularly."

"Yes—it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil were
once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school of
politicians don't make capital of the circumstance; but they don't seem
to know it... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of your name
to d'Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption. And this was the
carking secret!"

She had not told. At the last moment her courage had failed her; she
feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct of
self-preservation was stronger than her candour.

"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should have been glad to
know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering, dumb,
unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from the
self-seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense of the
rest. But I am corrupted away from that by my affection for you, Tess
(he laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise. For your own sake
I rejoice in your descent. Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this
fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference to its
acceptance of you as my wife, after I have made you the well-read woman
that I mean to make you. My mother too, poor soul, will think so much
better of you on account of it. Tess, you must spell your name
correctly—d'Urberville—from this very day."

"I like the other way rather best."

"But you must, dearest! Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom
millionaires would jump at such a possession! By the bye, there's one
of that kidney who has taken the name—where have I heard of him?—Up in
the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think. Why, he is the very man who
had that rumpus with my father I told you of. What an odd coincidence!"

"Angel, I think I would rather not take the name! It is unlucky,
perhaps!"

She was agitated.

"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you. Take my name, and
so you will escape yours! The secret is out, so why should you any
longer refuse me?"

"If it is sure to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you
feel that you do wish to marry me, very, very much—"

"I do, dearest, of course!"

"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly
able to keep alive without me, whatever my offences, that would make me
feel I ought to say I will."

"You will—you do say it, I know! You will be mine for ever and ever."

He clasped her close and kissed her.

"Yes!"

She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so
violent that it seemed to rend her. Tess was not a hysterical girl by
any means, and he was surprised.

"Why do you cry, dearest?"

"I can't tell—quite!—I am so glad to think—of being yours, and making
you happy!"

"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!"

"I mean—I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I said I would die
unmarried!"

"But, if you love me you would like me to be your husband?"

"Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!"

"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited,
and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very
complimentary. How came you to wish that if you care for me? Do you
care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way."

"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a distraction
of tenderness. "Will this prove it more?"

She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an
impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she
loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.

"There—now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.

"Yes. I never really doubted—never, never!"

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the
sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first. The
"appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous force
which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless
weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social
rubric.

"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my doing that?"

"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know
how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how
wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?"

"At the same place—Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."

"Ah, then I have seen you before this summer—"

"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me. O, I
hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"



XXXI



Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very
next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.

Dear Tess,

J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well, as they
leave me at Present, thank God for it. Dear Tess, we are all glad
to Hear that you are going really to be married soon. But with
respect to your question, Tess, J say between ourselves, quite
private but very strong, that on no account do you say a word of
your Bygone Trouble to him. J did not tell everything to your
Father, he being so Proud on account of his Respectability, which,
perhaps, your Intended is the same. Many a woman—some of the
Highest in the Land—have had a Trouble in their time; and why
should you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs? No girl
would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long ago, and not your
Fault at all. J shall answer the same if you ask me fifty times.
Besides, you must bear in mind that, knowing it to be your Childish
Nature to tell all that's in your heart—so simple!—J made you
promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having your Welfare
in my Mind; and you most solemnly did promise it going from this
Door. J have not named either that Question or your coming marriage
to your Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple Man.

Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send you a Hogshead
of Cyder for you Wedding, knowing there is not much in your parts,
and thin Sour Stuff what there is. So no more at present, and with
kind love to your Young Man.—From your affectte. Mother,

J. Durbeyfield


"O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.

She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most
oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's elastic spirit. Her mother did not
see life as Tess saw it. That haunting episode of bygone days was to
her mother but a passing accident. But perhaps her mother was right as
to the course to be followed, whatever she might be in her reasons.
Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her adored one's happiness:
silence it should be.

Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had
any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calmer. The
responsibility was shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had been
for weeks. The days of declining autumn which followed her assent,
beginning with the month of October, formed a season through which she
lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any
other period of her life.

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime
trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide,
philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the
contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the
soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love
for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a
crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift
up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large,
worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their
depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.

She dismissed the past—trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a
coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous,
protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from all
that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was,
in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and
was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was
rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love
desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the
imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could
jealously guard the loved one against his very self. This amazed and
enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so infelicitous till
now; and in her reaction from indignation against the male sex she
swerved to excess of honour for Clare.

They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her honest faith she
did not disguise her desire to be with him. The sum of her instincts on
this matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the elusive
quality of her sex which attracts men in general might be distasteful
to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it must in its very
nature carry with it a suspicion of art.

The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during
betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no
strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw
how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk,
regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons
they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks
of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges
to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of
some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while
the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a
pollen of radiance over the landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the
shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there was bright
sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so
flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a
mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where the
green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale.

Men were at work here and there—for it was the season for "taking up"
the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter irri-
gation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The
shovelfuls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river when it
was as wide as the whole valley, were an essence of soils, pounded
champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized to
extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the
mead, and of the cattle grazing there.

Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these watermen,
with the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance, though
actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the
labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the while.

"You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!" she said
gladly.

"O no!"

"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that you
are walking about like this with me, a milkmaid—"

"The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen."

"They might feel it a hurt to their dignity."

"My dear girl—a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare! It is a grand
card to play—that of your belonging to such a family, and I am
reserving it for a grand effect when we are married, and have the
proofs of your descent from Parson Tringham. Apart from that, my future
is to be totally foreign to my family—it will not affect even the
surface of their lives. We shall leave this part of England—perhaps
England itself—and what does it matter how people regard us here? You
will like going, will you not?"

She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so great was the
emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with
him as his own familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears
like a babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in
his, and thus they went on, to a place where the reflected sun glared
up from the river, under a bridge, with a molten-metallic glow that
dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the bridge.
They stood still, whereupon little furred and feathered heads popped up
from the smooth surface of the water; but, finding that the disturbing
presences had paused, and not passed by, they disappeared again. Upon
this river-brink they lingered till the fog began to close round
them—which was very early in the evening at this time of the
year—settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it rested like crystals,
and on his brows and hair.

They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark. Some of the
dairy-people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening
after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to
fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed;
noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the
leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented
pauses, the occasional little laugh upon which her soul seemed to
ride—the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won
from all other women—unlike anything else in nature. They marked the
buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not quite
alighted.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it
enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of
her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist
in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She
knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing
light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry
subjection there.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance.
She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those
shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they
might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day.

One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors keeping house,
all the other occupants of the domicile being away. As they talked she
looked thoughtfully up at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.

"I am not worthy of you—no, I am not!" she burst out, jumping up from
her low stool as though appalled at his homage, and the fulness of her
own joy thereat.

Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was
only the smaller part of it, said—

"I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess! Distinction does not
consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in
being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and
pure, and lovely, and of good report—as you are, my Tess."

She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had that string of
excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years, and how
strange that he should have cited them now.

"Why didn't you stay and love me when I—was sixteen; living with my
little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? O, why didn't
you, why didn't you!" she said, impetuously clasping her hands.

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly
enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have
to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him.

"Ah—why didn't I stay!" he said. "That is just what I feel. If I had
only known! But you must not be so bitter in your regret—why should you
be?"

With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged hastily—

"I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have
now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done—I should have
had so much longer happiness!"

It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her
who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and
twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird
in a springe. To calm herself the more completely, she rose from her
little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts
as she went.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green
ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and
hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she was
herself again.

"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?" he
said, good-humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the stool, and
seated himself in the settle beside her. "I wanted to ask you something,
and just then you ran away."

"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured. She suddenly approached
him, and put a hand upon each of his arms. "No, Angel, I am not really
so—by nature, I mean!" The more particularly to assure him that she was
not, she placed herself close to him in the settle, and allowed her
head to find a resting-place against Clare's shoulder. "What did you
want to ask me—I am sure I will answer it," she continued humbly.

"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and hence there
follows a thirdly, ‘When shall the day be?'"

"I like living like this."

"But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the new
year, or a little later. And before I get involved in the multifarious
details of my new position, I should like to have secured my partner."

"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite practically, wouldn't it be
best not to marry till after all that?—Though I can't bear the thought
o' your going away and leaving me here!"

"Of course you cannot—and it is not best in this case. I want you to
help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be? Why not a
fortnight from now?"

"No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so many things to think of
first."

"But—"

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near. Before
discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round
the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr
Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her
face flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.

"I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she cried, with
vexation. "I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us! But I
wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might ha' seemed as if I
was almost!"

"Well—if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we shouldn't ha' noticed
that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light," replied the
dairyman. He continued to his wife, with the stolid mien of a man who
understood nothing of the emotions relating to matrimony—"Now,
Christianer, that shows that folks should never fancy other folks be
supposing things when they bain't. O no, I should never ha' thought a
word of where she was a sitting to, if she hadn't told me—not I."

"We are going to be married soon," said Clare, with improvised phlegm.

"Ah—and be ye! Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir. I've thought you
mid do such a thing for some time. She's too good for a dairymaid—I
said so the very first day I zid her—and a prize for any man; and what's
more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer's wife; he won't
be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at his side."

Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck with the look
of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick's blunt praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present. A
light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed,
awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.
They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to
have. Their condition was objective, contemplative.

"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking eyes off Tess.
"How her face do show it!"

"You be going to marry him?" asked Marian.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When?"

"Some day."

They thought that this was evasiveness only.

"Yes—going to marry him—a gentleman!" repeated Izz Huett.

And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another, crept
out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess. Retty
put her hands upon Tess's shoulders, as if to realize her friend's
corporeality after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms
round her waist, all looking into her face.

"How it do seem! Almost more than I can think of!" said Izz Huett.

Marian kissed Tess. "Yes," she murmured as she withdrew her lips.

"Was that because of love for her, or because other lips have touched
there by now?" continued Izz drily to Marian.

"I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply. "I was on'y feeling
all the strangeness o't—that she is to be his wife, and nobody else. I
don't say nay to it, nor either of us, because we did not think of
it—only loved him. Still, nobody else is to marry'n in the world—no
fine lady, nobody in silks and satins; but she who do live like we."

"Are you sure you don't dislike me for it?" said Tess in a low voice.

They hung about her in their white nightgowns before replying, as if
they considered their answer might lie in her look.

"I don't know—I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle. "I want to hate
'ee; but I cannot!"

"That's how I feel," echoed Izz and Marian. "I can't hate her. Somehow
she hinders me!"

"He ought to marry one of you," murmured Tess.

"Why?"

"You are all better than I."

"We better than you?" said the girls in a low, slow whisper. "No, no,
dear Tess!"

"You are!" she contradicted impetuously. And suddenly tearing away from
their clinging arms she burst into a hysterical fit of tears, bowing herself
on the chest of drawers and repeating incessantly, "O yes, yes, yes!"

Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.

"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried. "I think I ought to make
him even now! You would be better for him than—I don't know what I'm
saying! O! O!"

They went up to her and clasped her round, but still her sobs tore her.

"Get some water," said Marian, "She's upset by us, poor thing, poor
thing!"

They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where they kissed her
warmly.

"You are best for'n," said Marian. "More ladylike, and a better scholar
than we, especially since he had taught 'ee so much. But even you ought
to be proud. You be proud, I'm sure!"

"Yes, I am," she said; "and I am ashamed at so breaking down."

When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian whispered
across to her—

"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told
'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not
hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and we
never hoped to be chose by him."

They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging tears trickled
down upon Tess's pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a bursting
heart, to tell all her history to Angel Clare, despite her mother's
command—to let him for whom she lived and breathed despise her if he
would, and her mother regard her as a fool, rather then preserve a
silence which might be deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow
seemed a wrong to these.



XXXII



This penitential mood kept her from naming the wedding-day. The
beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he asked
her at the most tempting times. But Tess's desire seemed to be for a
perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was then.

The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early
afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and the state of
dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling.
Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening
ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary,
like the track of moonlight on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing of their
brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway,
irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out of its
line, and were quite extinct. In the presence of these things he would
remind her that the date was still the question.

Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission
invented by Mrs Crick to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a
journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how
the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton to which they
were relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought great
changes to the world of kine. Batches of the animals were sent away
daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their
calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the calf could
walk, mother and offspring were driven back to the dairy. In the
interval which elapsed before the calves were sold there was, of
course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been
taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.

Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great
gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where they stood still and
listened. The water was now high in the streams, squirting through the
weirs, and tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all full;
there was no taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers were
compelled to follow the permanent ways. From the whole extent of the
invisible vale came a multitudinous intonation; it forced upon their
fancy that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur was the
vociferation of its populace.

"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess; "holding
public-meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching,
quarrelling, sobbing, groaning, praying, and cursing."

Clare was not particularly heeding.

"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much
assistance during the winter months?"

"No."

"The cows are going dry rapidly."

"Yes. Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the
day before, making nearly twenty in the straw already. Ah—is it that
the farmer don't want my help for the calving? O, I am not wanted here
any more! And I have tried so hard to—"

"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require you. But,
knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-natured and
respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at Christmas
I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would do without
you he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a time of year
when he could do with a very little female help. I am afraid I was
sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this way forcing your
hand."

"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel. Because 'tis always
mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis convenient."

"Well, it is convenient—you have admitted that." He put his finger upon
her cheek. "Ah!" he said.

"What?"

"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught! But why should I
trifle so! We will not trifle—life is too serious."

"It is. Perhaps I saw that before you did."

She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him after all—in obedience
to her emotion of last night—and leave the dairy, meant to go to some
strange place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in request now
calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm where no divine
being like Angel Clare was. She hated the thought, and she hated more
the thought of going home.

"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued, "since you will
probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and
convenient that I should carry you off then as my property. Besides, if
you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you would know
that we could not go on like this for ever."

"I wish we could. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you
always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done
through the past summer-time!"

"I always shall."

"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour of faith in him.
"Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for always!"

Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk home,
amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.

When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told—with
injunctions of secrecy; for each of the lovers was desirous that the
marriage should be kept as private as possible. The dairyman, though he
had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about
losing her. What should he do about his skimming? Who would make the
ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies? Mrs
Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last come to
an end, and said that directly she set eyes on Tess she divined that
she was to be the chosen one of somebody who was no common outdoor
man; Tess had looked so superior as she walked across the barton on that
afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good family she could have
sworn. In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember thinking that Tess was
graceful and good-looking as she approached; but the superiority might
have been a growth of the imagination aided by subsequent knowledge.

Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the
sense of a will. The word had been given; the number of the day written
down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic
convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more exten-
sively with natural phenomena than with their fellow-creatures; and she
accordingly drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things her
lover suggested, characteristic of the frame of mind.

But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the wedding-day;
really to again implore her advice. It was a gentleman who had chosen
her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently considered. A
post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with a light heart by
a rougher man, might not be received with the same feeling by him. But
this communication brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.

Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself and to Tess
of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in truth
an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a later
date. He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully
than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him. He
had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to an
unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this
idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes. Unsophistication was
a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one until
he came here. Yet he was very far from seeing his future track clearly,
and it might be a year or two before he would be able to consider
himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness
imparted to his career and character by the sense that he had been
made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family.

"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait till you were
quite settled in your midland farm?" she once asked timidly. (A midland
farm was the idea just then.)

"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere away
from my protection and sympathy."

The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His influence over her
had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his
speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. And to leave her in
farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with him. He
wished to have her under his charge for another reason. His parents had
naturally desired to see her once at least before he carried her off to
a distant settlement, English or colonial; and as no opinion of theirs
was to be allowed to change his intention, he judged that a couple of
months' life with him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous
opening would be of some social assistance to her at what she might
feel to be a trying ordeal—her presentation to his mother at the
Vicarage.

Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill, having
an idea that he might combine the use of one with corn-growing. The
proprietor of a large old water-mill at Wellbridge—once the mill of an
Abbey—had offered him the inspection of his time-honoured mode of
procedure, and a hand in the operations for a few days, whenever he
should choose to come. Clare paid a visit to the place, some few miles
distant, one day at this time, to inquire particulars, and returned to
Talbothays in the evening. She found him determined to spend a short
time at the Wellbridge flour-mills. And what had determined him? Less
the opportunity of an insight into grinding and bolting than the casual
fact that lodgings were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which,
before its mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the
d'Urberville family. This was always how Clare settled practical
questions; by a sentiment which had nothing to do with them. They
decided to go immediately after the wedding, and remain for a
fortnight, instead of journeying to towns and inns.

"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of
London that I have heard of," he said, "and by March or April we will
pay a visit to my father and mother."

Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day,
the incredible day, on which she was to become his, loomed large in the
near future. The thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was the
date. His wife, she said to herself. Could it ever be? Their two selves
together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared by them; why
not? And yet why?

One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and spoke privately
to Tess.

"You was not called home this morning."

"What?"

"It should ha' been the first time of asking to-day," she answered,
looking quietly at Tess. "You meant to be married New Year's Eve,
deary?"

The other returned a quick affirmative.

"And there must be three times of asking. And now there be only two
Sundays left between."

Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be
three. Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there must be a week's post-
ponement, and that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover? She
who had been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and alarm
lest she should lose her dear prize.

A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned the omission of
the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron's privilege of
speaking to Angel on the point.

"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare? The banns, I mean."

"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare.

As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:

"Don't let them tease you about the banns. A licence will be quieter
for us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you. So if
you go to church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own name,
if you wished to."

"I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said proudly.

But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess
notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would stand up
and forbid the banns on the ground of her history. How events were
favouring her!

"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself. "All this good fortune
may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill. That's how Heaven
mostly does. I wish I could have had common banns!"

But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her
to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to buy a
new one. The question was set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by
the arrival of some large packages addressed to her. Inside them she
found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to shoes, including a
perfect morning costume, such as would well suit the simple wedding
they planned. He entered the house shortly after the arrival of the
packages, and heard her upstairs undoing them.

A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in her
eyes.

"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek upon his
shoulder. "Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My own love—how good,
how kind!"

"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London—nothing more."

And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go
upstairs, and take her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not, to
get the village sempstress to make a few alterations.

She did return upstairs, and put on the gown. Alone, she stood for a
moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and
then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic robe—

　　　　That never would become that wife
　　　　That had once done amiss,

which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely
and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune.
Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe had
betrayed Queen Guinevere. Since she had been at the dairy she had not
once thought of the lines till now.



XXXIII



Angel felt that he would like to spend a day with her before the
wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last jaunt in her company
while there were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day, in
circumstances that would never be repeated; with that other and greater
day beaming close ahead of them. During the preceding week, therefore,
he suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town, and they
started together.

Clare's life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in respect the
world of his own class. For months he had never gone near a town, and,
requiring no vehicle, had never kept one, hiring the dairyman's cob or
gig if he rode or drove. They went in the gig that day.

And then for the first time in their lives they shopped as partners in
one concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its loads a holly and mistletoe,
and the town was very full of strangers who had come in from all
parts of the country on account of the day. Tess paid the penalty
of walking about with happiness superadded to beauty on her counte-
nance by being much stared at as she moved amid them on his arm.

In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had put up, and
Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse and gig
brought to the door. The general sitting-room was full of guests, who
were continually going in and out. As the door opened and shut each
time for the passage of these, the light within the parlour fell full
upon Tess's face. Two men came out and passed by her among the rest.
One of them had stared her up and down in surprise, and she fancied he
was a Trantridge man, though that village lay so many miles off that
Trantridge folk were rarities here.

"A comely maid that," said the other.

"True, comely enough. But unless I make a great mistake—" And he
negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.

Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and, confronting the man
on the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of Tess. The
insult to her stung him to the quick, and before he had considered
anything at all he struck the man on the chin with the full force of
his fist, sending him staggering backwards into the passage.

The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare,
stepping outside the door, put himself in a posture of defence. But his
opponent began to think better of the matter. He looked anew at Tess as
he passed her, and said to Clare—

"I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake. I thought she was another
woman, forty miles from here."

Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was,
moreover, to blame for leaving her standing in an inn-passage, did what
he usually did in such cases, gave the man five shillings to plaster
the blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a pacific good
night. As soon as Clare had taken the reins from the ostler, and the
young couple had driven off, the two men went in the other direction.

"And was it a mistake?" said the second one.

"Not a bit of it. But I didn't want to hurt the gentleman's feelings—not I."

In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.

"Could we put off our wedding till a little later?" Tess asked in a dry
dull voice. "I mean if we wished?"

"No, my love. Calm yourself. Do you mean that the fellow may have time
to summon me for assault?" he asked good-humouredly.

"No—I only meant—if it should have to be put off."

What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss such
fancies from her mind, which she obediently did as well as she could.
But she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she thought, "We
shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles from these
parts, and such as this can never happen again, and no ghost of the
past reach there."

They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare ascended to
his attic. Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites, lest the
few remaining days should not afford sufficient time. While she sat she
heard a noise in Angel's room overhead, a sound of thumping and
struggling. Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her anxiety
lest Clare should be ill she ran up and knocked at his door, and asked
him what was the matter.

"Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within. "I am so sorry I disturbed
you! But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and dreamt
that I was fighting that fellow again who insulted you, and the noise
you heard was my pummelling away with my fists at my portmanteau,
which I pulled out to-day for packing. I am occasionally liable to these
freaks in my sleep. Go to bed and think of it no more."

This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her indecision.
Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not; but there was
another way. She sat down and wrote on the four pages of a note-sheet a
succinct narrative of those events of three or four years ago, put it
into an envelope, and directed it to Clare. Then, lest the flesh should
again be weak, she crept upstairs without any shoes and slipped the
note under his door.

Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she listened for
the first faint noise overhead. It came, as usual; he descended, as
usual. She descended. He met her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed
her. Surely it was as warmly as ever!

He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought. But he said not a
word to her about her revelation, even when they were alone. Could he
have had it? Unless he began the subject she felt that she could say
nothing. So the day passed, and it was evident that whatever he thought
he meant to keep to himself. Yet he was frank and affectionate as
before. Could it be that her doubts were childish? that he forgave her;
that he loved her for what she was, just as she was, and smiled at her
disquiet as at a foolish nightmare? Had he really received her note?
She glanced into his room, and could see nothing of it. It might be
that he forgave her. But even if he had not received it she had a
sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely would forgive her.

Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New Year's Eve
broke—the wedding day.

The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through the whole of
this last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something of
the position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her own.
When they arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were surprised to
see what effects had been produced in the large kitchen for their glory
since they had last beheld it. At some unnatural hour of the morning
the dairyman had caused the yawning chimney-corner to be whitened, and
the brick hearth reddened, and a blazing yellow damask blower to be
hung across the arch in place of the old grimy blue cotton one with a
black sprig pattern which had formerly done duty there. This renovated
aspect of what was the focus indeed of the room on a full winter
morning threw a smiling demeanour over the whole apartment.

"I was determined to do summat in honour o't", said the dairyman. "And
as you wouldn't hear of my gieing a rattling good randy wi' fiddles and
bass-viols complete, as we should ha' done in old times, this was all I
could think o' as a noiseless thing."

Tess's friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have been
present at the ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact nobody
was invited from Marlott. As for Angel's family, he had written and
duly informed them of the time, and assured them that he would be glad
to see one at least of them there for the day if he would like to come.
His brothers had not replied at all, seeming to be indignant with him;
while his father and mother had written a rather sad letter, deploring
his precipitancy in rushing into marriage, but making the best of the
matter by saying that, though a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law
they could have expected, their son had arrived at an age which he
might be supposed to be the best judge.

This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would have
done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to surprise
them ere long. To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as a d'Urberville
and a lady, he had felt to be temerarious and risky; hence he had
concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized with worldly ways
by a few months' travel and reading with him, he could take her on a
visit to his parents and impart the knowledge while triumphantly
producing her as worthy of such an ancient line. It was a pretty
lover's dream, if no more. Perhaps Tess's lineage had more value for
himself than for anybody in the world beside.

Her perception that Angel's bearing towards her still remained in no
whit altered by her own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful
if he could have received it. She rose from breakfast before he had
finished, and hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once
more into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare's den, or rather
eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood at the open door
of the apartment, regarding and pondering. She stooped to the threshold
of the doorway, where she had pushed in the note two or three days
earlier in such excitement. The carpet reached close to the sill, and
under the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint white margin of
the envelope containing her letter to him, which he obviously had never
seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it beneath the carpet as
well as beneath the door.

With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it was—
sealed up, just as it had left her hands. The mountain had not yet
been removed. She could not let him read it now, the house being in
full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room she
destroyed the letter there.

She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious. The
incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it prevented a
confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need not; there was
still time. Yet everything was in a stir; there was coming and going;
all had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick having been asked to
accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate talk was
well-nigh impossible. The only minute Tess could get to be alone with
Clare was when they met upon the landing.

"I am so anxious to talk to you—I want to confess all my faults and
blunders!" she said with attempted lightness.

"No, no—we can't have faults talked of—you must be deemed perfect
to-day at least, my Sweet!" he cried. "We shall have plenty of time,
hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at
the same time."

"But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you could
not say—"

"Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say, as soon as we
are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my faults
then. But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent
matter for a dull time."

"Then you don't wish me to, dearest?"

"I do not, Tessy, really."

The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this.
Those words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection. She
was whirled onward through the next couple of critical hours by the
mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further
meditation. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to
call him her lord, her own—then, if necessary, to die—had at last
lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway. In dressing, she
moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which
eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive,
particularly as it was winter. A closed carriage was ordered from a
roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the old
days of post-chaise travelling. It had stout wheel-spokes and heavy
felloes, a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole
like a battering-ram. The postilion was a venerable "boy" of sixty—a
martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive exposure in youth,
counter-acted by strong liquors—who had stood at inn-doors doing
nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed since he
had no longer been required to ride professionally, as if expecting the
old times to come back again. He had a permanent running wound on
the outside of his right leg, originated by the constant bruisings of
aristocratic carriage-poles during the many years that he had been in
regular employ at the King's Arms, Casterbridge.

Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind this decayed
conductor, the partie carrée took their seats—the bride and
bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel would have liked one at least of
his brothers to be present as groomsman, but their silence after his
gentle hint to that effect by letter had signified that they did not
care to come. They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be
expected to countenance it. Perhaps it was as well that they could not
be present. They were not worldly young fellows, but fraternizing with
dairy-folk would have struck unpleasantly upon their biased niceness,
apart from their views of the match.

Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew nothing of this, did not
see anything, did not know the road they were taking to the church. She
knew that Angel was close to her; all the rest was a luminous mist. She
was a sort of celestial person, who owed her being to poetry—one of
those classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to her about
when they took their walks together.

The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people
in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced no
more effect upon her. They were at stellar distances from her present
world. In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her faith to him
the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy. At a pause in the
service, while they were kneeling together, she unconsciously inclined
herself towards him, so that her shoulder touched his arm; she had been
frightened by a passing thought, and the movement had been automatic,
to assure herself that he was really there, and to fortify her belief
that his fidelity would be proof against all things.

Clare knew that she loved him—every curve of her form showed that—
but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its
single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed,
what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.

As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their rests,
and a modest peal of three notes broke forth—that limited amount of
expression having been deemed sufficient by the church builders for the
joys of such a small parish. Passing by the tower with her husband on
the path to the gate she could feel the vibrant air humming round them
from the louvred belfry in the circle of sound, and it matched the
highly-charged mental atmosphere in which she was living.

This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation
not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till
the sound of the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the
wedding-service had calmed down. Her eyes could dwell upon details more
clearly now, and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig to be
sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple, she observed
the build and character of that conveyance for the first time. Sitting
in silence she regarded it long.

"I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy," said Clare.

"Yes," she answered, putting her hand to her brow. "I tremble at many
things. It is all so serious, Angel. Among other things I seem to have
seen this carriage before, to be very well acquainted with it. It is
very odd—I must have seen it in a dream."

"Oh—you have heard the legend of the d'Urberville Coach—that well-
known superstition of this county about your family when they were
very popular here; and this lumbering old thing reminds you of it."

"I have never heard of it to my knowledge," said she. "What is the
legend—may I know it?"

"Well—I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A certain
d'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a
dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time members of the
family see or hear the old coach whenever—— But I'll tell you another
day—it is rather gloomy. Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been
brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable caravan."

"I don't remember hearing it before," she murmured. "Is it when we are
going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it when we
have committed a crime?"

"Now, Tess!"

He silenced her by a kiss.

By the time they reached home she was contrite and spiritless. She was
Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any moral right to the name? Was
she not more truly Mrs Alexander d'Urberville? Could intensity of love
justify what might be considered in upright souls as culpable reticence?
She knew not what was expected of women in such cases; and she had
no counsellor.

However, when she found herself alone in her room for a few minutes—
the last day this on which she was ever to enter it—she knelt down and
prayed. She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had
her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself
almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion
expressed by Friar Laurence: "These violent delights have violent
ends." It might be too desperate for human conditions—too rank, to
wild, too deadly.

"O my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there alone; "for she
you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have
been!"

Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided
to fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old
farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during his
investigation of flour processes. At two o'clock there was nothing left
to do but to start. All the servantry of the dairy were standing in the
red-brick entry to see them go out, the dairyman and his wife following
to the door. Tess saw her three chamber-mates in a row against the
wall, pensively inclining their heads. She had much questioned if they
would appear at the parting moment; but there they were, stoical and
staunch to the last. She knew why the delicate Retty looked so fragile,
and Izz so tragically sorrowful, and Marian so blank; and she forgot
her own dogging shadow for a moment in contemplating theirs.

She impulsively whispered to him—

"Will you kiss 'em all, once, poor things, for the first and last
time?"

Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality—which
was all that it was to him—and as he passed them he kissed them in
succession where they stood, saying "Goodbye" to each as he did so.
When they reached the door Tess femininely glanced back to discern the
effect of that kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her glance, as
there might have been. If there had it would have disappeared when she
saw how moved the girls all were. The kiss had obviously done harm by
awakening feelings they were trying to subdue.

Of all this Clare was unconscious. Passing on to the wicket-gate he
shook hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed his last
thanks to them for their attentions; after which there was a moment of
silence before they had moved off. It was interrupted by the crowing of
a cock. The white one with the rose comb had come and settled on the
palings in front of the house, within a few yards of them, and his
notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling away like echoes down a
valley of rocks.

"Oh?" said Mrs Crick. "An afternoon crow!"

Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding it open.

"That's bad," one murmured to the other, not thinking that the words
could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.

The cock crew again—straight towards Clare.

"Well!" said the dairyman.

"I don't like to hear him!" said Tess to her husband. "Tell the man to
drive on. Goodbye, goodbye!"

The cock crew again.

"Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!" said the
dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him
away. And to his wife as they went indoors: "Now, to think o' that just
to-day! I've not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year afore."

"It only means a change in the weather," said she; "not what you think:
'tis impossible!"



XXXIV



They drove by the level road along the valley to a distance of a few
miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the
left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half
its name. Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had
engaged lodgings, whose exterior features are so well known to all
travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of a fine manorial
residence, and the property and seat of a d'Urberville, but since its
partial demolition a farmhouse.

"Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!" said Clare as he handed
her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it was too near a satire.

On entering they found that, though they had only engaged a couple of
rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their proposed presence during
the coming days to pay a New Year's visit to some friends, leaving a
woman from a neighbouring cottage to minister to their few wants. The
absoluteness of possession pleased them, and they realized it as the
first moment of their experience under their own exclusive roof-tree.

But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his
bride. When the carriage was gone they ascended the stairs to wash
their hands, the charwoman showing the way. On the landing Tess stopped
and started.

"What's the matter?" said he.

"Those horrid women!" she answered with a smile. "How they frightened
me."

He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built
into the masonry. As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these
paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred
years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long
pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of
merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of
the other suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the
beholder afterwards in his dreams.

"Whose portraits are those?" asked Clare of the charwoman.

"I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the d'Urberville
family, the ancient lords of this manor," she said, "Owing to their
being builded into the wall they can't be moved away."

The unpleasantness of the matter was that, in addition to their effect
upon Tess, her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these
exaggerated forms. He said nothing of this, however, and, regretting
that he had gone out of his way to choose the house for their bridal
time, went on into the adjoining room. The place having been rather
hastily prepared for them, they washed their hands in one basin. Clare
touched hers under the water.

"Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up. "They
are very much mixed."

"They are all yours," said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be
gayer than she was. He had not been displeased with her thoughtfulness
on such an occasion; it was what every sensible woman would show: but
Tess knew that she had been thoughtful to excess, and struggled against
it.

The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it
shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which
stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark
set upon her. They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they
shared their first common meal alone. Such was their childishness, or
rather his, that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and-
butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from her lips with his
own. He wondered a little that she did not enter into these frivolities
with his own zest.

Looking at her silently for a long time; "She is a dear dear Tess," he
thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of a
difficult passage. "Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and
irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or
bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were
a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she
must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect
her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a
crime!"

They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage, which the
dairyman had promised to send before it grew dark. But evening began to
close in, and the luggage did not arrive, and they had brought nothing
more than they stood in. With the departure of the sun the calm mood of
the winter day changed. Out of doors there began noises as of silk
smartly rubbed; the restful dead leaves of the preceding autumn were
stirred to irritated resurrection, and whirled about unwillingly, and
tapped against the shutters. It soon began to rain.

"That cock knew the weather was going to change," said Clare.

The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for the night,
but she had placed candles upon the table, and now they lit them. Each
candle-flame drew towards the fireplace.

"These old houses are so draughty," continued Angel, looking at the
flames, and at the grease guttering down the sides. "I wonder where
that luggage is. We haven't even a brush and comb."

"I don't know," she answered, absent-minded.

"Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening—not at all as you used
to be. Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled you. I am
sorry I brought you here. I wonder if you really love me, after all?"

He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent; but she was
surcharged with emotion, and winced like a wounded animal. Though she
tried not to shed tears, she could not help showing one or two.

"I did not mean it!" said he, sorry. "You are worried at not having
your things, I know. I cannot think why old Jonathan has not come with
them. Why, it is seven o'clock? Ah, there he is!"

A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody else to answer
it, Clare went out. He returned to the room with a small package in his
hand.

"It is not Jonathan, after all," he said.

"How vexing!" said Tess.

The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who had arrived
at Talbothays from Emminster Vicarage immediately after the depart-
ure of the married couple, and had followed them hither, being under
injunction to deliver it into nobody's hands but theirs. Clare brought
it to the light. It was less than a foot long, sewed up in canvas,
sealed in red wax with his father's seal, and directed in his father's
hand to "Mrs Angel Clare."

"It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess," said he, handing it to
her. "How thoughtful they are!"

Tess looked a little flustered as she took it.

"I think I would rather have you open it, dearest," said she, turning
over the parcel. "I don't like to break those great seals; they look so
serious. Please open it for me!"

He undid the parcel. Inside was a case of morocco leather, on the top
of which lay a note and a key.

The note was for Clare, in the following words:

My dear son,—

Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your godmother,
Mrs Pitney, when you were a lad, she—vain, kind woman that she
was—left to me a portion of the contents of her jewel-case in trust
for your wife, if you should ever have one, as a mark of her
affection for you and whomsoever you should choose. This trust I
have fulfilled, and the diamonds have been locked up at my banker's
ever since. Though I feel it to be a somewhat incongruous act in
the circumstances, I am, as you will see, bound to hand over the
articles to the woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime will
now rightly belong, and they are therefore promptly sent. They
become, I believe, heirlooms, strictly speaking, according to the
terms of your godmother's will. The precise words of the clause
that refers to this matter are enclosed.


"I do remember," said Clare; "but I had quite forgotten."

Unlocking the case, they found it to contain a necklace, with pendant,
bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other small ornaments.

Tess seemed afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes sparkled for a
moment as much as the stones when Clare spread out the set.

"Are they mine?" she asked incredulously.

"They are, certainly," said he.

He looked into the fire. He remembered how, when he was a lad of
fifteen, his godmother, the Squire's wife—the only rich person with
whom he had ever come in contact—had pinned her faith to his success;
had prophesied a wondrous career for him. There had seemed nothing at
all out of keeping with such a conjectured career in the storing up of
these showy ornaments for his wife and the wives of her descendants.
They gleamed somewhat ironically now. "Yet why?" he asked himself. It
was but a question of vanity throughout; and if that were admitted into
one side of the equation it should be admitted into the other. His wife
was a d'Urberville: whom could they become better than her?

Suddenly he said with enthusiasm—

"Tess, put them on—put them on!" And he turned from the fire to help
her.

But as if by magic she had already donned them—necklace, ear-rings,
bracelets, and all.

"But the gown isn't right, Tess," said Clare. "It ought to be a low one
for a set of brilliants like that."

"Ought it?" said Tess.

"Yes," said he.

He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her bodice, so as
to make it roughly approximate to the cut for evening wear; and when
she had done this, and the pendant to the necklace hung isolated amid
the whiteness of her throat, as it was designed to do, he stepped back
to survey her.

"My heavens," said Clare, "how beautiful you are!"

As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a peasant girl but
very moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her simple
condition and attire will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a
woman of fashion with the aids that Art can render; while the beauty of
the midnight crush would often cut but a sorry figure if placed inside
the field-woman's wrapper upon a monotonous acreage of turnips on a
dull day. He had never till now estimated the artistic excellence of
Tess's limbs and features.

"If you were only to appear in a ball-room!" he said. "But no—no,
dearest; I think I love you best in the wing-bonnet and cotton-
frock—yes, better than in this, well as you support these dignities."

Tess's sense of her striking appearance had given her a flush of
excitement, which was yet not happiness.

"I'll take them off," she said, "in case Jonathan should see me. They
are not fit for me, are they? They must be sold, I suppose?"

"Let them stay a few minutes longer. Sell them? Never. It would be a
breach of faith."

Influenced by a second thought she readily obeyed. She had something to
tell, and there might be help in these. She sat down with the jewels
upon her; and they again indulged in conjectures as to where Jonathan
could possibly be with their baggage. The ale they had poured out for
his consumption when he came had gone flat with long standing.

Shortly after this they began supper, which was already laid on a
side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke,
the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant
had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused
by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the
passage, and Angel went out.

"I couldn' make nobody hear at all by knocking," apologized Jonathan
Kail, for it was he at last; "and as't was raining out I opened the door.
I've brought the things, sir."

"I am very glad to see them. But you are very late."

"Well, yes, sir."

There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail's tone which had not been
there in the day, and lines of concern were ploughed upon his forehead
in addition to the lines of years. He continued—

"We've all been gallied at the dairy at what might ha' been a most
terrible affliction since you and your Mis'ess—so to name her now—left
us this a'ternoon. Perhaps you ha'nt forgot the cock's afternoon crow?"

"Dear me;—what—"

"Well, some says it do mane one thing, and some another; but what's
happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown herself."

"No! Really! Why, she bade us goodbye with the rest—"

"Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis'ess—so to name what she lawful
is—when you two drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on their
bonnets and went out; and as there is not much doing now, being New
Year's Eve, and folks mops and brooms from what's inside 'em, nobody
took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had summut
to drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they
seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads as if for
home, and Marian going on to the next village, where there's another
public-house. Nothing more was zeed or heard o' Retty till the water-
man, on his way home, noticed something by the Great Pool; 'twas
her bonnet and shawl packed up. In the water he found her. He and
another man brought her home, thinking 'a was dead; but she fetched
round by degrees."

Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy
tale, went to shut the door between the passage and the ante-room to
the inner parlour where she was; but his wife, flinging a shawl round
her, had come to the outer room and was listening to the man's
narrative, her eyes resting absently on the luggage and the drops of
rain glistening upon it.

"And, more than this, there's Marian; she's been found dead drunk by
the withy-bed—a girl who hev never been known to touch anything
before except shilling ale; though, to be sure, 'a was always a good
trencher-woman, as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had all
gone out o' their minds!"

"And Izz?" asked Tess.

"Izz is about house as usual; but 'a do say 'a can guess how it
happened; and she seems to be very low in mind about it, poor maid, as
well she mid be. And so you see, sir, as all this happened just when we
was packing your few traps and your Mis'ess's night-rail and dressing
things into the cart, why, it belated me."

"Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs, and drink a cup
of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be
wanted?"

Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire,
looking wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan Kail's heavy footsteps up
and down the stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and heard him
express his thanks for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the
gratuity he received. Jonathan's footsteps then died from the door, and
his cart creaked away.

Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and
coming in to where she sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks between
his hands from behind. He expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the
toilet-gear that she had been so anxious about, but as she did not rise
he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on the supper-table
being too thin and glimmering to interfere with its glow.

"I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls,"
he said. "Still, don't let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid,
you know."

"Without the least cause," said Tess. "While they who have cause to
be, hide it, and pretend they are not."

This incident had turned the scale for her. They were simple and
innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen;
they had deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved
worse—yet she was the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all
without paying. She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would
tell, there and then. This final determination she came to when she
looked into the fire, he holding her hand.

A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and
back of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons,
and the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the
mantel-shelf was flushed with the high-coloured light, and the legs of
the table nearest the fire. Tess's face and neck reflected the same
warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a
constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their
hues with her every pulsation.

"Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about tell-
ing our faults?" he asked abruptly, finding that she still remained
immovable. "We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well have done so.
But for me it was no light promise. I want to make a confession to you,
Love."

This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of a
Providential interposition.

"You have to confess something?" she said quickly, and even with
gladness and relief.

"You did not expect it? Ah—you thought too highly of me. Now listen.
Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me, and not to be
indignant with me for not telling you before, as perhaps I ought to
have done."

How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did not speak, and
Clare went on—

"I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering my chance of
you, darling, the great prize of my life—my Fellowship I call you. My
brother's Fellowship was won at his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy.
Well, I would not risk it. I was going to tell you a month ago—at the
time you agreed to be mine, but I could not; I thought it might
frighten you away from me. I put it off; then I thought I would tell
you yesterday, to give you a chance at least of escaping me. But I did
not. And I did not this morning, when you proposed our confessing our
faults on the landing—the sinner that I was! But I must, now I see you
sitting there so solemnly. I wonder if you will forgive me?"

"O yes! I am sure that—"

"Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don't know. To begin at the
beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that I am one of the
eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in good
morals, Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men,
and it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter
the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to
it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of
plenary inspiration, one must heartily subscribe to these words of
Paul: ‘Be thou an example—in word, in conversation, in charity, in
spirit, in faith, in purity.' It is the only safeguard for us poor
human beings. ‘Integer vitae,' says a Roman poet, who is strange
company for St Paul—

　　　　The man of upright life, from frailties free,
　　　　Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.

"Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt
all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred in
me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell."

He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been
made when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a
cork on the waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours' dissipation
with a stranger.

"Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly," he
continued. "I would have no more to say to her, and I came home. I have
never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with
perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling
this. Do you forgive me?"

She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.

"Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too painful as it is for
the occasion—and talk of something lighter."

"O, Angel—I am almost glad—because now you can forgive me! I have
not made my confession. I have a confession, too—remember, I said so."

"Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one."

"Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours, or more so."

"It can hardly be more serious, dearest."

"It cannot—O no, it cannot!" She jumped up joyfully at the hope. "No,
it cannot be more serious, certainly," she cried, "because 'tis just
the same! I will tell you now."

She sat down again.

Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate were lit by
the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Imagination might have beheld
a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face
and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and
firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose
upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on
her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's; and pressing her forehead
against his temple she entered on her story of her acquaintance with
Alec d'Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without
flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.



　　　　　　　END OF PHASE THE FOURTH




Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays



XXXV




Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations
were done. Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its
opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she
had not wept.

But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer
transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate
looked impish—demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least
about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care.
The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic
problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility
with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments
when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of
things. But the essence of things had changed.

When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous
endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains,
repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind
foolishness.

Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the intelligence
had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring the embers
he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted itself
now. His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his concentration
he treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any contrivance, think
closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague movement. When
he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace voice of the
many varied tones she had heard from him.

"Tess, am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true.
You cannot be out of your mind, though you ought to be. Yet you are
not. I see nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that." He
stopped; to resume sharply, "Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes,
you would have told me, in a way—but I hindered you, I remember!"

These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of
the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and
bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where
he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.
Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this
position she crouched in a heap.

"In the name of our love, forgive me!" she whispered with a dry mouth.
"I have forgiven you for the same!"

And, as he did not answer, she said again—

"Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel."

"You—yes, you do."

"But you do not forgive me?"

"Forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;
now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness meet such a
grotesque prestidigitation as that!"

He paused, then suddenly broke into horrible introspective laughter—as
unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.

"Don't—don't! It kills me quite, that!" she shrieked. "O have mercy
upon me—have mercy!"

He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.

"Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?" she cried out. "Do you
know what this is to me?"

He shook his head in uncomprehensive reverie.

"I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have
thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be
if I do not! That's what I have felt, Angel!"

"I know that."

"I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self! If it is I you
do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me!
Having begun to love 'ee I love 'ee for ever—in all changes, in all dis-
graces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O
my own husband, stop loving me?"

"I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you."

"But who?"

"Another woman in your shape."

She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive
foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of
imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was
upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth
had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his
view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped forward,
thinking she was going to fall.

"Sit down, sit down," he said gently. "You are ill; and it is natural
that you should be."

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look
still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.

"I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?" she asked
helplessly. "It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he
says."

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was
ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she
turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had
happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of
the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the
violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had
lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

"Angel," she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice
of terror having left her now. "Angel, am I too wicked for you and me
to live together?"

"I have not been able to think what we can do."

"I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no
right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married,
as I said I would do; and I shan't finish the good hussif I cut out and
meant to make while we were in lodgings."

"Shan't you?"

"No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away
from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if you never speak to me any more I
shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may."

"And if I order you to do anything?"

"I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down
and die."

"You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony
between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of
self-preservation."

To fling elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like fling-
ing them at a dog or cat. The charms of their subtlety passed by
her unappreciated, and she only received them as inimical sounds
which meant that anger ruled. She remained mute, not knowing that
he was desperately smothering his affection for her. She hardly ob-
served that a tear came out upon his cheek, descending slowly, a
tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which
it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. But reillumination
as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought
in his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desper-
ately to advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some
consequent action was necessary; yet what?

"Tess," he said, as gently as he could speak, "I cannot stay—in this
room—just now. I will walk out a little way."

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had
poured out for their supper—one for her, one for him—remained on the
table untasted. This was what their Agape had come to. At tea, two or
three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk
from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to,
roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily
flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting
out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and
the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without
purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black, sinister,
and forbidding, and she she had forgotten to take off the jewels of
which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her
footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no
difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning arches of the
great bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain
having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away.
Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick
transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining
overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things of the
universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley as
Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings
being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the
road wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare
without any attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with
dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and
still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great
after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air
had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse;
she knew that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness;

Time　was chanting his satiric psalm at her then—

　　Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
　　Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. For thy
　　life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; And the veil of
　　thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.

He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now
insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a
weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help
addressing Clare.

"What have I done—what have I done! I have not told of anything that
interferes with or belies my love for you. You don't think I planned
it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is
not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you
think me!"

"H'm—well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same.
But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not; and I
will do everything to avoid it."

But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things
that would have been better left to silence.

"Angel!—Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing
of men."

"You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit."

"Then will you not forgive me?"

"I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all."

"And love me?"

To this question he did not answer.

"O Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—she knows several
cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it
much—has got over it at least. And yet the woman had not loved him as I
do you!"

"Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different manners. You
are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been initiated
into the proportions of social things. You don't know what you say."

"I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!"

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.

"So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your
pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot
help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your
want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit con-
duct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by
informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung
child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete
aristocracy!"

"Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family were once
large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And the Debbyhouses,
who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I
everywhere; 'tis a feature of our county, and I can't help it."

"So much the worse for the county."

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their
particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to
all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a
cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met
two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one
behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he
obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and
sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field,
progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the
cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation
with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not
bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long
while after.

During the interval of the cottager's going and coming, she had said to
her husband—

"I don't see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all
your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I
am not afraid."

"I don't wish to add murder to my other follies," he said.

"I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on account of my
shame. They will not blame you then."

"Don't speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have
such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical
laughter than for tragedy. You don't in the least understand the
quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by
nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by
returning to the house, and going to bed."

"I will," said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins
of the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries
past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still
worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished,
creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the
temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having
been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying
his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the
main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back,
everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning.
She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to
her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down
on the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to
undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon
the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she
lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had
put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of
that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and
bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time
would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he
had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked
now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that
he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.
When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. A-
mong so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which
welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,
surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,
possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.
Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the
manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon
the old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a
sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and
listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that
she was sleeping profoundly.

"Thank God!" murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of
bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that
having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now
reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door
again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d'Urberville dames,
whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess's bedchamber.
In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister
design lurked in the woman's features, a concentrated purpose of
revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice
of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess's had been when he tucked it
in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing
sensation of a resemblance between them.

The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his
powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible sterile
expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the
face of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no
advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing
contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.
Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all
the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but

　　　　The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not
indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate
to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which
as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was
telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,
discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the
light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and
indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness,
and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the
happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or
change of mien.



XXXVI



Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though
associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct
embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of
untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the
other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able
to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above
there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the
door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager's wife,
who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward
just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed
her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She
had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.
When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the
house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,
butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast
laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in
domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the
chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were
passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied
their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the
stairs, called in a conventional voice—

"Breakfast is ready!"

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.
When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the
sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was
fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two
or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he
went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at
the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale
blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face
appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the
bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare's
tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a
new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the
hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed
as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any
more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemonstrative-
ness. At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply-defined face
as one who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object
also.

"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as
a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh
the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek
still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left
glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as
pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress
of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further
pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes,
and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set
such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at
her with a stupefied air.

"Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!"

"It is true."

"Every word?"

"Every word."

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie
from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort
of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated--

"It is true."

"Is he living?" Angel then asked.

"The baby died."

"But the man?"

"He is alive."

A last despair passed over Clare's face.

"Is he in England?"

"Yes."

He took a few steps in a circle.

"My position—is this," he said abruptly. "I thought—any man would
have thought—that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social
standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure
rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but—How-
ever, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not."

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been
needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost
all round.

"Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not
known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I
hoped you would never—"

Her voice grew husky.

"A last way?"

"I mean, to get rid of me. You can get rid of me."

"How?"

"By divorcing me."

"Good heavens—how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?"

"Can't you—now I have told you? I thought my confession would give you
grounds for that."

"O Tess—you are too, too—childish—unformed—crude, I suppose! I don't
know what you are. You don't understand the law—you don't understand!"

"What—you cannot?"

"Indeed I cannot."

A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's face.

"I thought—I thought," she whispered. "O, now I see how wicked I seem
to you! Believe me—believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you
could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you
could cast me off if you were determined, and didn't love me at—at—all!"

"You were mistaken," he said.

"O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I
hadn't the courage. That's just like me!"

"The courage to do what?"

As she did not answer he took her by the hand.

"What were you thinking of doing?" he inquired.

"Of putting an end to myself."

"When?"

She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. "Last night," she
answered.

"Where?"

"Under your mistletoe."

"My good—! How?" he asked sternly.

"I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!" she said, shrinking.
"It was with the cord of my box. But I could not—do the last thing! I
was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name."

The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not
volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting
his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, "Now, listen to this.
You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You
will promise me as your husband to attempt that no more."

"I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was."

"Wicked! I am shocked at the idea beyond description."

"But, Angel," she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon
him, "it was thought of entirely on your account—to set you free
without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to
get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it
with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined
husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love you more,
if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do it, since
there's no other way of escape for 'ee. I feel I am so utterly
worthless! So very greatly in the way!"

"Ssh!"

"Well, since you say no, I won't. I have no wish opposed to yours."

He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her
activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be
feared.

Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more or
less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their
glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing
each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the
amount of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over, he rose,
and telling her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went
off to the miller's in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying
that business, which had been his only practical reason for coming
here.

When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form
crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.
He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then,
without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began clearing
the table and setting it in order.

The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon
Tess, but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she left her
assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room,
waited for the reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge.

About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a
quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served
by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where they had
washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the
sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own
motion.

"How punctual!" he said.

"Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.

The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing
during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the
old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him
greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been
in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining
conventual buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in
the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself
through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way and,
when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made
herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work like this," he
said. "You are not my servant; you are my wife."

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. "I may think myself
that—indeed?" she murmured, in piteous raillery. "You mean in name!
Well, I don't want to be anything more."

"You may think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?"

"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her accents. "I thought
I—because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not
respectable enough long ago—and on that account I didn't want to marry
you, only—only you urged me!"

She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost have
won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of his
constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there
lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam,
which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It
had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of
Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and,
with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to
follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who
remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He
waited till her sobbing ceased.

"I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you," he said,
in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. "It isn't
a question of respectability, but one of principle!"

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being
still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with
such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by
appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of
sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.
But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and
hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed
almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he
could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked;
thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just now have been
Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.

This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding
ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did she—the
formerly free and independent Tess—venture to make any advances. It was
on the third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the
flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said "Goodbye," and she
replied in the same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the
way of his. He did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he
turned hastily aside—

"I shall be home punctually."

Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had he
tried to reach those lips against her consent—often had he said gaily
that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and
honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them,
and other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now. He
observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently—

"You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we
should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that
would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it is
only for form's sake."

"Yes," said Tess absently.

He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a
moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at
least.

Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same house,
truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It was
evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed
activities in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She was
awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent
flexibility. She no longer expected forgiveness now. More than once
she thought of going away from him during his absence at the mill; but
she feared that this, instead of benefiting him, might be the means of
hampering and humiliating him yet more if it should become known.

Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been unsus-
pended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking,
withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating, flexuous
domesticity. He walked about saying to himself, "What's to be done—
what's to be done?" and by chance she overheard him. It caused her
to break the reserve about their future which had hitherto prevailed.

"I suppose—you are not going to live with me—long, are you, Angel?" she
asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely mechanical
were the means by which she retained that expression of chastened calm
upon her face.

"I cannot" he said, "without despising myself, and what is worse,
perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you in the
ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you. And,
let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my difficulties. How can
we live together while that man lives?—he being your husband in nature,
and not I. If he were dead it might be different... Besides, that's not
all the difficulty; it lies in another consideration—one bearing upon
the future of other people than ourselves. Think of years to come, and
children being born to us, and this past matter getting known—for it
must get known. There is not an uttermost part of the earth but
somebody comes from it or goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of
wretches of our flesh and blood growing up under a taunt which they
will gradually get to feel the full force of with their expanding
years. What an awakening for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly
say ‘Remain' after contemplating this contingency? Don't you think we
had better endure the ills we have than fly to others?"

Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before.

"I cannot say ‘Remain,'" she answered, "I cannot; I had not thought so
far."

Tess's feminine hope—shall we confess it?—had been so obstinately
recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary
intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against
his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not
incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she
had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity.
Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to
hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to herself: yet
that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation had
now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never
thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who
would scorn her was one that brought deadly convictions to an honest
heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had
already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing
better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading
any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she
could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the
fiat, "You shall be born," particularly if addressed to potential issue
of hers.

Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess
had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might
result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had
bewailed as misfortune to herself.

She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the
self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto
arose in Clare's own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her
exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it promisingly.
She might have added besides: "On an Australian upland or Texan plain,
who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?"
Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the momentary present
ment as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right. The
heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its husband's,
and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed
to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears from
his own fastidious brain.

It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd
paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man.
We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault,
imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence
is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating
an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She
found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she
had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman
than the one who had excited his desire.

"I have thought over what you say," she remarked to him, moving her
forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring
that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. "It is quite true, all
of it; it must be. You must go away from me."

"But what can you do?"

"I can go home."

Clare had not thought of that.

"Are you sure?" he inquired.

"Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and done.
You once said that I was apt to win men against their better judgement;
and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change your
plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your
repentance and my sorrow will be terrible."

"And you would like to go home?" he asked.

"I want to leave you, and go home."

"Then it shall be so."

Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a difference
between the proposition and the covenant, which she had felt only too
quickly.

"I feared it would come to this," she murmured, her countenance meekly
fixed. "I don't complain, Angel, I—I think it best. What you said has
quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we
should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry
with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of my bygones,
you yourself might be tempted to say words, and they might be overheard,
perhaps by my own children. O, what only hurts me now would torture and
kill me then! I will go—to-morrow."

"And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to initiate it, I have
seen that it was advisable we should part—at least for a while, till I
can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write to you."

Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous; but,
as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths
of this gentle being she had married—the will to subdue the grosser to
the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the
spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the
tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.

He may have observed her look, for he explained—

"I think of people more kindly when I am away from them"; adding
cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day,
for weariness; thousands have done it!"

That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack
also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part the
next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures
thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom any
parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she
knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised over the
other—on her part independently of accomplishments—would probably in
the first days of their separation be even more potent than ever, time
must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments against accepting
her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more strongly in the
boreal light of a remoter time. Moreover, when two people are once
parted—have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment
—new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unfore-
seen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten.



XXXVII



Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it
in the Valley of the Froom.

Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in the darkened
farmhouse once the mansion of the d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the
upper chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step of
the staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the door of
her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the stream of
moonlight with a curiously careful tread. He was in his shirt and
trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she perceived that
his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy. When he reached
the middle of the room he stood still and murmured in tones of
indescribable sadness—

"Dead! dead! dead!"

Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force, Clare would
occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such as
he had done on the night of their return from market just before their
marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the man who
had insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought
him into that somnambulistic state now.

Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart, that, awake
or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If he had
entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her
trust in his protectiveness.

Clare came close, and bent over her. "Dead, dead, dead!" he murmured.

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of
unmeasurable woe, he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled
her in the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as
much respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her across
the room, murmuring—

"My poor, poor Tess—my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so
true!"

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours, were
inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to
save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an
end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute
stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering what he was
going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the
landing.

"My wife—dead, dead!" he said.

He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the
banister. Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near
extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart
on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this
precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If
they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit,
how desirable.

However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support of
the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips—lips in the day-time
scorned. Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and
descended the staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken
him, and they reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands
from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar and
passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge of
the door. But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room for
extension in the open air, he lifted her against his shoulder, so that
he could carry her with ease, the absence of clothes taking much from
his burden. Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction of the
river a few yards distant.

His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and she
found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have
done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him that it
pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute possession,
to dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling, under the hovering
terror of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he really recognized her
now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that
recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of
harming her.

Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of—that Sunday morning when he
had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who
had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which Tess
could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but
proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill,
at length stood still on the brink of the river.

Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland, frequently
divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves around
little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying themselves
as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to which he had
brought her was such a general confluence, and the river was
proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow
foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away,
leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the
speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and
Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the day-time young men
walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had possibly
observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the plank, and,
sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.

Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was lonely, the
river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of accomplish-
ment. He might drown her if he would; it would be better than parting
to-morrow to lead severed lives.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting, and
splitting the moon's reflected face. Spots of froth travelled past, and
intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could both fall
together into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped
together that they could not be saved; they would go out of the world
almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to her, or to
him for marrying her. His last half-hour with her would have been a
loving one, while if they lived till he awoke, his day-time aversion
would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a
transient dream.

The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a
movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How she
valued her own life had been proved; but his—she had no right to tamper
with it. He reached the other side with her in safety.

Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds, and
taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they reached
the ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the
empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with a turn for
grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself. In this Clare carefully
laid Tess. Having kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as
if a greatly desired end were attained. Clare then lay down on the
ground alongside, when he immediately fell into the deep dead slumber
of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a log. The spurt of mental
excitement which had produced the effort was now over.

Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the
season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him to
remain here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to himself
he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled
to certain death. She had heard of such deaths after sleep-walking. But
how could she dare to awaken him, and let him know what he had been
doing, when it would mortify him to discover his folly in respect of
her? Tess, however, stepping out of her stone confine, shook him
slightly, but was unable to arouse him without being violent. It was
indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the
sheet being but a poor protection. Her excitement had in a measure kept
her warm during the few minutes' adventure; but that beatific interval
was over.

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she
whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could
summon—

"Let us walk on, darling," at the same time taking him suggestively by
the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had
apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward seemed
to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit,
and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to the
stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which they stood at
the manor-house door. Tess's feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt
her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in his woollen
stockings and appeared to feel no discomfort.

There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his own
sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood,
to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions she
thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the
exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed.

As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew
little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's
excursion, though, as regarded himself, he may have been aware that he
had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep
deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the
brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had
some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding. But the realities
of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the other subject.

He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that
if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the
light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure
reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far,
therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the
resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but
denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn;
standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there.
Clare no longer hesitated.

At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,
he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakeably that
Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the
reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know
that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his
common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised his
dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like
laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.

It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection
of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a
conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it
gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.

He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon
after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end—the
temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the
incident of the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The
luggage was put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and
the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their precipitate
departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the mill-work
was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement
that was true so far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the
manner of their leaving to suggest a fiasco, or that they were not
going together to visit friends.

Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such
solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind
up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick
a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their
unhappy state.

To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left the carriage by
the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and
descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut,
and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed
her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in
which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away behind the
cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of their first embrace.
The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours mean, the rich
soil mud, and the river cold.

Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing
into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays
and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs
Crick emerged from the house, and several others of their old
acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not seem to be there.

Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which
affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement
of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as
would have been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had
been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the
story of Marian and Retty. The later had gone home to her father's, and
Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere. They feared she would
come to no good.

To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her
favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she
and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul,
there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one
who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly
were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way,
as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as
"we", and yet sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually
stiff and embarrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up
to their profession of unity, different from the natural shyness of
young couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs
Crick said to her husband—

"How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood
like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn't it
strike 'ee that 'twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and
she's not now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man."

They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards
Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where
Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and entering
the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did
not know their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been
passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance
and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother's house it
was here that he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom
in the driver's presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps
on foot along one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the
man to wait a few minutes they strolled away.

"Now, let us understand each other," he said gently. "There is no anger
between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I
will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go
to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it—if it
is desirable, possible—I will come to you. But until I come to you it
will be better that you should not try to come to me."

The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of
her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of
one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had
done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the
point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.

"Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?"

"Just so."

"May I write to you?"

"O yes—if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not be
the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you."

"I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my
punishment ought to be; only—only—don't make it more than I can bear!"

That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she
made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane,
notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed,
he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood of
long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his best
advocate. Pride, too, entered into her submission—which perhaps was a
symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the
whole d'Urberville family—and the many effective chords which she could
have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.

The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now
handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had
obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest
in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only (if he understood the
wording of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for
safety; and to this she readily agreed.

These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the carriage, and
handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her.
Taking next his own bag and umbrella—the sole articles he had brought
with him hitherwards—he bade her goodbye; and they parted there and
then.

The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an
unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one
moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to
do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and
in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar
emendations of his own—

　　　　God's not in his heaven: All's wrong with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own
way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.



XXXVIII



As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her youth
began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor. Her
first thought was how would she be able to face her parents?

She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the
village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who had
kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably
left on New Year's Day, the date when such changes were made. Having
received no intelligence lately from her home, she asked the
turnpike-keeper for news.

"Oh—nothing, miss," he answered. "Marlott is Marlott still. Folks have
died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter married this
week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house, you know; they
was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that
John's own folk was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any
part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know how't have been
discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman himself by blood,
with family skillentons in their own vaults to this day, but done out
of his property in the time o' the Romans. However, Sir John, as we
call 'n now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could, and stood
treat to everybody in the parish; and John's wife sung songs at The
Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock."

Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide to
go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She asked
the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his house for a
while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage,
and went on to the village alone by a back lane.

At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how she could
possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were calmly
supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man,
who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was,
friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself, with no
better place to go to in the world.

She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the garden-hedge she
was met by a girl who knew her—one of the two or three with whom she
had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how
Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted
with—

"But where's thy gentleman, Tess?"

Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,
leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus
made her way to the house.

As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the back
door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the
doorstep in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this without
observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her.

The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old
quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was
about to plunge her arms in anew.

"Why—Tess!—my chil'—I thought you was married!—married really and truly
this time—we sent the cider—"

"Yes, mother; so I am."

"Going to be?"

"No—I am married."

"Married! Then where's thy husband?"

"Oh, he's gone away for a time."

"Gone away! When was you married, then? The day you said?"

"Yes, Tuesday, mother."

"And now 'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?"

"Yes, he's gone."

"What's the meaning o' that? 'Nation seize such husbands as you seem to
get, say I!"

"Mother!" Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the
matron's bosom, and burst into sobs. "I don't know how to tell 'ee,
mother! You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him.
But I did tell him—I couldn't help it—and he went away!"

"O you little fool—you little fool!" burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,
splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. "My good God! that ever I
should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having
relaxed at last.

"I know it—I know—I know!" she gasped through her sobs. "But, O my
mother, I could not help it! He was so good—and I felt the wickedness
of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If—if—it were to be
done again—I should do the same. I could not—I dared not—so sin—against
him!"

"But you sinned enough to marry him first!"

"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get
rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if
you knew—if you could only half know how I loved him—how anxious I was
to have him—and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my
wish to be fair to him!"

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a helpless
thing, into a chair.

"Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why
children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than
other people's—not to know better than to blab such a thing as that,
when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!" Here Mrs Durbeyfield
began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied. "What
your father will say I don't know," she continued; "for he's been
talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop every day
since, and about his family getting back to their rightful position
through you—poor silly man!—and now you've made this mess of it! The
Lord-a-Lord!"

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard approaching
at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately, and Mrs
Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess
keeping out of sight for the present. After her first burst of
disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess's
original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in
the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them irrespective of
desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a
lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for
two younger children. There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on
there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live hen.
He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second
horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen had been
carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show people that
he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the
table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

"We've just had up a story about—" Durbeyfield began, and thereupon
related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn
about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married
into a clerical family. "They was formerly styled ‘sir', like my own
ancestry," he said, "though nowadays their true style, strictly
speaking, is ‘clerk' only." As Tess had wished that no great publicity
should be given to the event, he had mentioned no particulars. He hoped
she would remove that prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple
should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was
better than her husbands's. He asked if any letter had come from her
that day.

Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess
unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen
mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of
the cheering glass. Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his
touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of
others.

"To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!" said Sir John. "And I
with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as
Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and
sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history.
And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop
will say to me! How they'll squint and glane, and say, ‘This is yer
mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer
forefathers in King Norman's time!' I feel this is too much, Joan; I
shall put an end to myself, title and all—I can bear it no longer!...
But she can make him keep her if he's married her?"

"Why, yes. But she won't think o' doing that."

"D'ye think he really have married her?—or is it like the first—"

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.
The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own
parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could
have done. How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her
father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance
doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the
end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her
that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In her
craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide
from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made
use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them
under the impression that she was setting out to join him. Still
further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her,
she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and
handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel
Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the
trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past. With
this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell; and after that
there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for some time on
the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed,
believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband
and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could
not live apart from each other.



XXXIX



It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself
descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his
father. With his downward course the tower of the church rose into the
evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living
person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to
expect him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own
footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.

The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known
it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man;
though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before
him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the
staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of
a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond
description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural
plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in the manner recommended
by the great and wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of
those great and wise men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to
test the feasibility of their counsel. "This is the chief thing: be not
perturbed," said the Pagan moralist. That was just Clare's own opinion.
But he was perturbed. "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
be afraid," said the Nazarene. Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart
was troubled all the same. How he would have liked to confront those
two great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to
fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their method!

His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length he
fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive interest
of an outsider.

He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been
brought about by the accident of her being a d'Urberville. When he
found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the
new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not
stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles? This was what he
had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.

Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He
wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that he
ate, and drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the
motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself
to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a
dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and ways.

In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small
town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of the
Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist. Land was
offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat
attracted him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him there, and
perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits
the conventions would not be so operative which made life with her seem
impracticable to him here. In brief he was strongly inclined to try
Brazil, especially as the season for going thither was just at hand.

With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan to
his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of arriving
without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated them. As
he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just as the old
one had done in the small hours of that morning when he had carried his
wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks; but
his face was thinner now.

Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival
stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher
stirs a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the drawing-
room, but neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel entered,
and closed the door quietly behind him.

"But—where's your wife, dear Angel?" cried his mother. "How you
surprise us!"

"She is at her mother's—temporarily. I have come home rather in a hurry
because I've decided to go to Brazil."

"Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!"

"Are they? I hadn't thought of that."

But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical land
could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare's natural interest in
their son's marriage.

"We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken
place," said Mrs Clare, "and your father sent your godmother's gift to
her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be
present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and
not at her home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed you,
and given us no pleasure. Your bothers felt that very strongly. Now it
is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits you for the
business you have chosen to follow instead of the ministry of the
Gospel.... Yet I wish I could have seen her first, Angel, or have known
a little more about her. We sent her no present of our own, not knowing
what would best give her pleasure, but you must suppose it only
delayed. Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your father's
against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much better to
reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her. And now you
have not brought her. It seems strange. What has happened?"

He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should go to
her parents' home for the present, whilst he came there.

"I don't mind telling you, dear mother," he said, "that I always meant
to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could come with
credit to you. But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent one. If I do
go it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my first journey.
She will remain at her mother's till I come back."

"And I shall not see her before you start?"

He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been, as he had
said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while—not to
wound their prejudices—feelings—in any way; and for other reasons he
had adhered to it. He would have to visit home in the course of a year,
if he went out at once; and it would be possible for them to see her
before he started a second time—with her.

A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further
exposition of his plans. His mother's disappointment at not seeing the
bride still remained with her. Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess had
infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost
fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth—a charming woman
out of Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate.

"Cannot you describe her? I am sure she is very pretty, Angel."

"Of that there can be no question!" he said, with a zest which covered
its bitterness.

"And that she is pure and virtuous goes without question?"

"Pure and virtuous, of course, she is."

"I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day that she was
fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid's bow; dark
eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's cable; and
large eyes violety-bluey-blackish."

"I did, mother."

"I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she naturally had scarce
ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw you."

"Scarcely."

"You were her first love?"

"Of course."

"There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls of
the farm. Certainly I could have wished—well, since my son is to be an
agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should have been
accustomed to an outdoor life."

His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the chapter
from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers, the Vicar
observed to Mrs Clare—

"I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to
read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should have
had in the usual course of our reading?"

"Yes, certainly," said Mrs Clare. "The words of King Lemuel" (she could
cite chapter and verse as well as her husband). "My dear son, your
father has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a
virtuous wife. We shall not need to be reminded to apply the words to
the absent one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!"

A lump rose in Clare's throat. The portable lectern was taken out from
the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old servants
came in, and Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse of the
aforesaid chapter—

"Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. She
riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. She
girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She
perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by
night. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not
the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her
husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously,
but thou excellest them all."

When prayers were over, his mother said—

"I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear father
read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you have chosen.
The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not a
fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for
the good of others. ‘Her children arise up and call her blessed; her
husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously,
but she excelleth them all.' Well, I wish I could have seen her, Angel.
Since she is pure and chaste, she would have been refined enough for
me."

Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which
seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good night to these
sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the
world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts, only as something
vague and external to themselves. He went to his own chamber.

His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to
discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.

"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you go away so soon?
I am quite sure you are not yourself."

"I am not, quite, mother," said he.

"About her? Now, my son, I know it is that—I know it is about her! Have
you quarrelled in these three weeks?"

"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said. "But we have had a
difference—"

"Angel—is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of
trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.

"She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to
eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

"Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in
nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which
may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,
disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition."

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the
secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this
marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the
disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his
career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on
account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the
candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on
sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and a
failure.

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with his
poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to practise
deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his anger, as if
she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in
expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips
passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of
her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how
great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper
shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of
his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgement
this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last
five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality
when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him,
and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this
young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any
other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value
having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the
figure near at hand suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its
sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in
that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering
what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the
defective can be more than the entire.



XL



At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a
hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil,
notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who had
emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months. After
breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such trifling
matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from the local bank
all the money he possessed. On his way back he encountered Miss Mercy
Chant by the church, from whose walls she seemed to be a sort of
emanation. She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such
was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others
wrought beatific smiles upon her—an enviable result, although, in the
opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of
humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what an
excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

"Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt," he
replied. "But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of existence.
Perhaps a cloister would be preferable."

"A cloister! O, Angel Clare!"

"Well?"

"Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman
Catholicism."

"And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art in a parlous
state, Angel Clare."

"I glory in my Protestantism!" she said severely.

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods in
which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close to
him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he
could think of. His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on
her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for his
welfare.

"Dear Mercy," he said, "you must forgive me. I think I am going crazy!"

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare
re-entered the Vicarage. With the local banker he deposited the jewels
till happier days should arise. He also paid into the bank thirty
pounds—to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and
wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of
what he had done. This amount, with the sum he had already placed in
her hands—about fifty pounds—he hoped would be amply sufficient for her
wants just at present, particularly as in an emergency she had been
directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her by
informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really
happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother
suggested that he should do so. During the day he left the parsonage,
for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary
for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with
Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having
to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or
three small articles fetched away that they had left behind. It was
under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had
stretched its gloom over him. Yet when he had unlocked the door of the
sitting-room and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon
him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first
fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal
together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit,
and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen with a
renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he went
upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth
as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving. The
mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it. Having been
there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and
berries were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed it into the
grate. Standing there, he for the first time doubted whether his course
in this conjecture had been a wise, much less a generous, one. But had
he not been cruelly blinded? In the incoherent multitude of his
emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed. "O Tess! If you had
only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you!" he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs. At
the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning up
her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

"Mr Clare," she said, "I've called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to
inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again."

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet
guessed his; an honest girl who loved him—one who would have made as
good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess.

"I am here alone," he said; "we are not living here now." Explaining
why he had come, he asked, "Which way are you going home, Izz?"

"I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir," she said.

"Why is that?"

Izz looked down.

"It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way." She
pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was
journeying.

"Well—are you going there now? I can take you if you wish for a lift."

Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.

"Thank 'ee, Mr Clare," she said.

He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and the
few other items which had to be considered by reason of the sudden
abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare's return to his horse and gig,
Izz jumped up beside him.

"I am going to leave England, Izz," he said, as they drove on. "Going
to Brazil."

"And do Mrs Clare like the notion of such a journey?" she asked.

"She is not going at present—say for a year or so. I am going out to
reconnoitre—to see what life there is like."

They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making no
observation.

"How are the others?" he inquired. "How is Retty?"

"She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin
and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever fall
in love wi' her any more," said Izz absently.

"And Marian?"

Izz lowered her voice.

"Marian drinks."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her."

"And you!"

"I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline. But—I am no great things at
singing afore breakfast now!"

"How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn ‘'Twas down
in Cupid's Gardens' and ‘The Tailor's Breeches' at morning milking?"

"Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when you had been
there a bit."

"Why was that falling-off?"

Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by way of answer.

"Izz!—how weak of you—for such as I!" he said, and fell into reverie.
"Then—suppose I had asked you to marry me?"

"If you had I should have said ‘Yes', and you would have married a
woman who loved 'ee!"

"Really!"

"Down to the ground!" she whispered vehemently. "O my God! did you
never guess it till now!"

By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.

"I must get down. I live out there," said Izz abruptly, never having
spoken since her avowal.

Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly
disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a
corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be
revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,
instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring
manner?

"I am going to Brazil alone, Izz," said he. "I have separated from my
wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with her
again. I may not be able to love you; but—will you go with me instead
of her?"

"You truly wish me to go?"

"I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief. And you at
least love me disinterestedly."

"Yes—I will go," said Izz, after a pause.

"You will? You know what it means, Izz?"

"It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over there—
that's good enough for me."

"Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought to remind
you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization—Western
civilization, that is to say."

"I don't mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and
there's no other way!"

"Then don't get down, but sit where you are."

He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing any
signs of affection.

"You love me very, very much, Izz?" he suddenly asked.

"I do—I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the dairy
together!"

"More than Tess?"

She shook her head.

"No," she murmured, "not more than she."

"How's that?"

"Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did!... She would have
laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more."

Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken
perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her
rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words
from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was
something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, "She
would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!"

"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the horse's head suddenly.
"I don't know what I've been saying! I will now drive you back to where
your lane branches off."

"So much for honesty towards 'ee! O—how can I bear it—how can I—how can
I!"

Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw what
she had done.

"Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O,
Izz, don't spoil it by regret!"

She stilled herself by degrees.

"Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying, either, wh—when
I agreed to go! I wish—what cannot be!"

"Because I have a loving wife already."

"Yes, yes! You have!"

They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an hour
earlier, and she hopped down.

"Izz—please, please forget my momentary levity!" he cried. "It was so
ill-considered, so ill-advised!"

"Forget it? Never, never! O, it was no levity to me!"

He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry
conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and took
her hand.

"Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow? You don't know what I've
had to bear!"

She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to
mar their adieux.

"I forgive 'ee, sir!" she said.

"Now, Izz," he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself
to the mentor's part he was far from feeling; "I want you to tell
Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give
way to folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy
men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and
well—remember the words—wisely and well—for my sake. I send this
message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them
again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my
wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery. Women may
be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things! On that one
account I can never forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl you
have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a
faithful friend. Promise."

She gave the promise.

"Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!"

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was
out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of
racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she
entered her mother's cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how
Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's parting
from her and her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching
thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That
evening he was within a feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road to
the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line of
South Wessex which divided him from his Tess's home. It was neither a
contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her heart, which
deterred him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz's
admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first, he was
right now. And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked
tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more
sustained force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon
come back to her. He took the train that night for London, and five
days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of
embarkation.



XLI



From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an
October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare
and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a
bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely
woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier
time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were
projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary
period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring
and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the
time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work
near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote
from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living
on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a condi-
tion which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.
Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the
presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there—he who, the
moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a
shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had
not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done
duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning,
she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty
of further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a contribu-
tion to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she had
put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now followed an
unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was obliged to
fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself—they appeared to have had as
yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own
experiences—and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But she
had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to
time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost
gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they were
in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the thatch of
the house, which required entire renewal; but this could not be done
because the previous thatching had never been paid for. New rafters and
a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which, with the previous
bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As her husband was a man
of means, and had doubtless returned by this time, could she not send
them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was
received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she
was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum
for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a
remark of Angel's that whenever she required further resources she was
to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to
take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be
called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to
his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her. They
probably despised her already; how much more they would despise her in
the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no effort
could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him know her
state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might, she
thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse
obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent
to her marriage they were under the impression that she was ultimately
going to join her husband; and from that time to the present she had
done nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his return
in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil would result
in a short stay only, after which he would come to fetch her, or that
he would write for her to join him; in any case that they would soon
present a united front to their families and the world. This hope she
still fostered. To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife,
dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own
hands for a living, after the éclat of a marriage which was to
nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had deposited
them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she
could only use and not sell them. Even were they absolutely hers it
would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which
was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial. At
this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba
in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted
by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and
farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither
by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless
assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English
uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been
born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were
surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns had
been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on
account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get
employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy,
health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from
seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of
means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From
that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might be
better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had
no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid
its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had
served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer re-
quired no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her at
Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her
life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax would be
too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized
husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered
remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would
almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual
there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each.
It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness
wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply knew
that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had
reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was
separated from her husband—probably through Izz Huett—and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had
hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to
this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that
she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the habitude
of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled
on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every
step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or con-
tingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by
others of importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the
attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of
distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her
natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been
prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her
no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper
of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than once; but
nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November
afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm
for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to
the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that region
unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at the
Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try
the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot
towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached the
top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in
glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few mo-
ments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and
said—

"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the
landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.

"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile—young
Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at that time, though I don't
live there now."

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot through
her, and she returned him no answer.

"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true,
though your fancy-man was so up about it—hey, my sly one? You ought to
beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."

Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind,
and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a
gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged,
and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe
against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off
draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them
into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess
crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard
strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the
breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the
other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself;
and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity." She repeated
the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most
inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that
more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of
thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind
it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction,
death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its
curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft
skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone
would be bare. "I wish it were now," she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any
wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it
was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came
from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the
boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy body upon
the ground. Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant
conditions she would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she
had at present no fear.

Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some
little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours had
grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked
around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb
her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot
into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable
ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage
dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some
staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some
stretched out—all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones
whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to
bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven
down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while
those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before
nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick
boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew weaker
with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one
as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking
over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their guns,
strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She had been
told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not
like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons
save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the
inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their
purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless feathered creatures,
brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propen-
sities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their
weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much
as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living birds
out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the
necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had
found them till the game-keepers should come—as they probably would
come—to look for them a second time.

"Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in
the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears running
down as she killed the birds tenderly. "And not a twinge of bodily pain
about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands
to feed and clothe me." She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the
night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation
under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.



XLII



It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon
the highway. But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at hand,
and Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the birds'
silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her the
relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she could
once rise high enough to despise opinion. But that she could not do so
long as it was held by Clare.

She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several
young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks. Somehow
she felt hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband also might
say these same things to her even yet? She was bound to take care of
herself on the chance of it, and keep off these casual lovers. To this
end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her appearance. As soon
as she got out of the village she entered a thicket and took from her
basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which she had never put on even
at the dairy—never since she had worked among the stubble at Marlott.
She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle
and tied it round her face under her bonnet, covering her chin and half
her cheeks and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache. Then
with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she
mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against
aggressive admiration, she went on her uneven way.

"What a mommet of a maid!" said the next man who met her to a
companion.

Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she heard him.

"But I don't care!" she said. "O no—I don't care! I'll always be ugly
now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care of me.
My husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any more; but
I love him just the same, and hate all other men, and like to make 'em
think scornfully of me!"

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a
fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a red
woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper,
and buff-leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become
faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and
the stress of winds. There is no sign of young passion in her now—

　　　　The maiden's mouth is cold
　　　　. . . . .
　　　　Fold over simple fold
　　　　Binding her head.

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a
thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a
pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and
ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty,
directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but
little. Her object being a winter's occupation and a winter's home,
there was no time to lose. Her experience of short hirings had been
such that she was determined to accept no more.

Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place
whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of
as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of
tempting. First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment, and,
as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied next for
the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry tendance
that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and course pursuits which
she liked least—work on arable land: work of such roughness, indeed, as
she would never have deliberately voluteered for.

Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land
or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli—as if Cybele the
Many-breasted were supinely extended there—which stretched between the
valley of her birth and the valley of her love.

Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown white
and dusty within a few hours after rain. There were few trees, or none,
those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed
down with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural enemies of
tree, bush, and brake. In the middle distance ahead of her she could
see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout, and they seemed
friendly. They had a low and unassuming aspect from this upland, though
as approached on the other side from Blackmoor in her childhood they
were as lofty bastions against the sky. Southerly, at many miles'
distance, and over the hills and ridges coastward, she could discern a
surface like polished steel: it was the English Channel at a point far
out towards France.

Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village. She
had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian's sojourn.
There seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to come. The
stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the kind of labour
in demand here was of the roughest kind; but it was time to rest from
searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly as it began to rain.
At the entrance to the village was a cottage whose gable jutted into
the road, and before applying for a lodging she stood under its
shelter, and watched the evening close in.

"Who would think I was Mrs Angel Clare!" she said.

The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that
immediately within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of
which came through the bricks. She warmed her hands upon them, and also
put her cheek—red and moist with the drizzle—against their comforting
surface. The wall seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so
little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night.

Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage—gathered together after
their day's labour—talking to each other within, and the rattle of
their supper-plates was also audible. But in the village-street she had
seen no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of
one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the print
gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess instinctively thought it
might be Marian, and when she came near enough to be distinguishable in
the gloom, surely enough it was she. Marian was even stouter and redder
in the face than formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any
previous period of her existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew
the acquaintance in such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive,
and she responded readily to Marian's greeting.

Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved by
the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition than at
first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.

"Tess—Mrs Clare—the dear wife of dear he! And is it really so bad as
this, my child? Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way? Anybody
been beating 'ee? Not he?"

"No, no, no! I merely did it not to be clipsed or colled, Marian."

She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest such wild
thoughts.

"And you've got no collar on" (Tess had been accustomed to wear a
little white collar at the dairy).

"I know it, Marian."

"You've lost it travelling."

"I've not lost it. The truth is, I don't care anything about my looks;
and so I didn't put it on."

"And you don't wear your wedding-ring?"

"Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on a ribbon. I
don't wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am married
at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life."

Marian paused.

"But you be a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly fair that you
should live like this!"

"O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy."

"Well, well. He married you—and you can be unhappy!"

"Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands—from
their own."

"You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's none. So it must
be something outside ye both."

"Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking
questions? My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my
allowance, so that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time. Do
not call me Mrs Clare, but Tess, as before. Do they want a hand here?"

"O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to come. 'Tis a
starve-acre place. Corn and swedes are all they grow. Though I be here
myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such as you to come."

"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."

"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink. Lord, that's the
only comfort I've got now! If you engage, you'll be set swede-hacking.
That's what I be doing; but you won't like it."

"O—anything! Will you speak for me?"

"You will do better by speaking for yourself."

"Very well. Now, Marian, remember—nothing about him if I get the
place. I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt."

Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain than
Tess, promised anything she asked.

"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come with me you
would know at once. I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis
because he's away, I know. You couldn't be unhappy if he were here,
even if he gie'd ye no money—even if he used you like a drudge."

"That's true; I could not!"

They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse, which was
almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight;
there was not, at this season, a green pasture—nothing but fallow and
turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to
unrelieved levels.

Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of
workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her. The
farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who
represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on her
agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was seldom
offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women
could perform as readily as men.

Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at
present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose
gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence that she
had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.

That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case
a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she did not
tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought
reproach upon him.



XLIII



There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm
as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian
herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village,
the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and
the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other
words, the village of a resident squire's tenantry, the village of free
or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village, farmed with the
land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel
Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was
a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground
of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of
siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of
each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the
business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole
field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of
skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper
and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at- the
white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls
crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical
regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian "wroppers"—
sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their
gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that reached
high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. he
pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of
the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect
they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of
their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist
in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said
that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would
not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,
that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally
upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till
they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really
meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is
called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in
a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,
then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work
on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,
demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They
were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and
loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land
where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,
emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of
the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the
irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating
Marian's remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains
of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers
clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in
memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

"You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o' Froom Valley from
here when 'tis fine," said Marian.

"Ah! Can you?" said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to
enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian's will had
a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon
wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited
Tess to drink. Tess's unassisted power of dreaming, however, being
enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest
sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

"I've got used to it," she said, "and can't leave it off now. 'Tis my
only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn't; and you can do without it
perhaps."

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by the dignity
of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian's
differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon
rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which
process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook
before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could
shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was
frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen
masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She
had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she
persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare's character would
lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped
flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely
obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom
was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;
and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old
times they had spent out there.

"Ah," said Marian, "how I should like another or two of our old set to
come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and
talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o' the old things
we used to know, and make it all come back a'most, in seeming!"
Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions
returned. "I'll write to Izz Huett," she said. "She's biding at home
doing nothing now, I know, and I'll tell her we be here, and ask her to
come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now."

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard
of this plan for importing old Talbothays' joys was two or three days
later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,
and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and
measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few
lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had
put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered
with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving
it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a
staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and
horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where
none had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the
crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from
salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when
strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on
the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical
eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in
inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had
ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;
which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by
the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of
colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the
expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These name-
less birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had
seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account.
The traveller's ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb
impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for
the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements
of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to
uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.
There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not
of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,
penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less
than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow
came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable
that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the
night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that
the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she
lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown
through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest
powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that
it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when
she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a
snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to
see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the
time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian
arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at
reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,
as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered
medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their
thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and
across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed
the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and
individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,
arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it
licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with
slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could
in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather
than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes
that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an
achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly
cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

"Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming," said Marian.
"Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from the North
Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching
weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!
Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does
it good."

"You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian," said Tess severely.

"Well, but—surely you care for 'n! Do you?"

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,
putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

"Well, well, I know you do. But 'pon my body, it is a rum life for a
married couple! There—I won't say another word! Well, as for the
weather, it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is
fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I'm
stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can't think why maister should have
set 'ee at it."

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long
structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was
carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the
evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the
women to draw from during the day.

"Why, here's Izz!" said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her
mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance
so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow
began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her
mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been
afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a
neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start
remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen
of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight
quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly
had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that
occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did
all kinds of men's work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,
ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted
reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with
some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the
press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under
which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam
being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves
diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors
upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls
pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the
presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and
Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.
Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode
up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and
remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned
at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she
perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she
had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her
history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,
when he said, "So you be the young woman who took my civility in such
ill part? Be drowned if I didn't think you might be as soon as I heard
of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the
first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the
road, when you bolted; but now I think I've got the better of you." He
concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a
clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could
read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had
nothing to fear from her employer's gallantry; it was rather the
tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare's treatment of him. Upon
the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to
endure it.

"You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose? Some women are such
fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there's nothing like
a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o' young wenches' heads;
and you've signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg
my pardon?"

"I think you ought to beg mine."

"Very well—as you like. But we'll see which is master here. Be they all
the sheaves you've done to-day?"

"Yes, sir."

"'Tis a very poor show. Just see what they've done over there"
(pointing to the two stalwart women). "The rest, too, have done better
than you."

"They've all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made
no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what
we do."

"Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared."

"I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the
others will do."

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not
have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than
gallantry. When two o'clock arrived the professional reed-drawers
tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,
tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done
likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer
hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at
the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, "Now, we've got it all to
ourselves." And so at last the conversation turned to their old
experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their
affection for Angel Clare.

"Izz and Marian," said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was
extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: "I can't
join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will
see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the
present, he is my husband."

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls
who had loved Clare. "He was a very splendid lover, no doubt," she
said; "but I don't think he is a too fond husband to go away from you
so soon."

"He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!"
pleaded Tess.

"He might have tided 'ee over the winter."

"Ah—that's owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won't argue
it," Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. "Perhaps there's a
good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,
without telling me; and I can always find out where he is."

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went
on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under
their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing
sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the
hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of
wheat-ears at her feet.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!" cried Marian. "It wants
harder flesh than yours for this work."

Just then the farmer entered. "Oh, that's how you get on when I am
away," he said to her.

"But it is my own loss," she pleaded. "Not yours."

"I want it finished," he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went
out at the other door.

"Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear," said Marian. "I've worked here
before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your
number."

"I don't like to let you do that. I'm taller than you, too."

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and
reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw
had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her
succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening
the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She
lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the
straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of
bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur
of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject
already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch
the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they
were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up
and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the
previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at
five o'clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her
stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without
suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,
to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of
sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great
door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every
afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a
romantic vein.

"I should not have thought it of him—never!" she said in a dreamy tone.
"And I loved him so! I didn't mind his having you. But this about Izz
is too bad!"

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger
with the bill-hook.

"Is it about my husband?" she stammered.

"Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don't 'ee tell her'; but I am sure I can't help
it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil
with him."

Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves
straightened. "And did Izz refuse to go?" she asked.

"I don't know. Anyhow he changed his mind."

"Pooh—then he didn't mean it! 'Twas just a man's jest!"

"Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station."

"He didn't take her!"

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,
burst out crying.

"There!" said Marian. "Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!"

"No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on
in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I
ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,
but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won't dally
like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving
everything to be done by him!"

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no
longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into
the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously
writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish
it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it
next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to
fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this
elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him
abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she
write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?


XLIV

By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the
direction which they had taken more than once of late—to the distant
Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband's parents that she had
been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to
them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no
claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these
notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own
parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This
self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with
her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity
to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts.
She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive
such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had been
established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that family, in a
season of impulse, writing his name in a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale, there was a limit
to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written to her?
He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her know of the
locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to
notify his address. Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it
for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon the courage of
solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and express her
grief at his silence. If Angel's father were the good man she had heard
him represented to be, he would be able to enter into her heart-starved
situation. Her social hardships she could conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was the
only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the
cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it would
be necessary to walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she
would have to allow herself a long day for the undertaking by rising
early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by a
hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to try
the experiment. At four o'clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs
and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still favourable,
the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the
journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage a
little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her
departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest
guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she,
knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was
indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now elapsed since her sad
marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from the wreck of
her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple
country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray woollen
gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her face and
neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

"'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now—you do look a
real beauty!" said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the
threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow
candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself
to the situation; she could not be—no woman with a heart bigger than a
hazel-nut could be—antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence
which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and
strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine
feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let her
go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn. They
heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her
full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without any
particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been
prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only
a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to
start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear
wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs,
was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting
was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to
that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which
stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the
dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the atmosphere down
there was a deep blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred
acres in which she was now accustomed to toil, there were little fields
below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked
from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was
whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet
it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not
love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in
the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing
above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from
Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy,
with the dell between them called "The Devil's Kitchen". Still
following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone
pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or
murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the straight and
deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which as soon as she
reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane into the small
town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the
distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily
enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage
by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by
way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the
spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her
enterprise loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such
staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in
danger of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a gate on
the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the Vicar
and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in her eyes. She
wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a week-day. Such a
good man might be prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday,
never realizing the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent upon
her to go on now. She took off the thick boots in which she had walked
thus far, put on her pretty thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing
the former into the hedge by the gatepost where she might readily find
them again, descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived
from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew near the
parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing
favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably in
the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of imagination,
dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was the residence of
near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion,
divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth, death, and
after-death, they were the same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang the
door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No; the thing
was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be
risen to and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of
the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles' walk, led
her to support herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip
and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The wind was so nipping
that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping
incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A
piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer's
dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to
rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she walked
out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And though she
looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to return, it was
with a breath of relief that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her
that she might have been recognized (though how she could not tell),
and orders been given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but
determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future
distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all
the windows.

Ah—the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She
remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the
household, servants included, going to morning-service, and, as a
consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore,
only necessary to wait till the service was over. She would not make
herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past
the church into the lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the
people began pouring out, and Tess found herself in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of
small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman
out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her
pace, and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat
between its hedges till the Vicar's family should have lunched, and it
might be convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the
churchgoers, except two youngish men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were
beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest
discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation,
did not fail to recognize in those noises the quality of her husband's
tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans,
Tess's one dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her
disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront them; for
though she felt that they could not identify her, she instinctively
dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly they walked, the more briskly
walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking a short quick stroll
before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs
chilled with sitting through a long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill—a ladylike young woman,
somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle guindée and prudish.
Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law
brought them so nearly behind her back that she could hear every word
of their conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly
interested her till, observing the young lady still further in front,
one of them remarked, "There is Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her."

Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel's
life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have
married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much
without previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the
brothers proceeded to say: "Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see
that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in
throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a
queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I
don't know; but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from
him."

"I can't say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered
marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was
begun by his extraordinary opinions."

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them
without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and
passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps
and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the
three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this
point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all
three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that
time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their
discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with
his umbrella, and dragged something to light.

"Here's a pair of old boots," he said. "Thrown away, I suppose, by some
tramp or other."

"Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and
so excite our sympathies," said Miss Chant. "Yes, it must have been,
for they are excellent walking-boots—by no means worn out. What a
wicked thing to do! I'll carry them home for some poor person."

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for
her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen
veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party
had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were
running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless
impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own
condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not
contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward omens. It
was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel's wife felt
almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by
those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been
inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the
sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less
starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.
As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those
habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt
how hopeless life was for their owner.

"Ah!" she said, still sighing in pity of herself, "they didn't know
that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these
pretty ones he bought for me—no—they did not know it! And they didn't
think that he chose the colour o' my pretty frock—no—how could they?
If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don't
care much for him, poor thing!"

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of
judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way
without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this
feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was
precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and
Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme
cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among
mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans
and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries
of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have
recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a
fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come
not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in
her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and
there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that
starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the
Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw
up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she
could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But
it was done with a sorry shake of the head. "It is nothing—it is
nothing!" she said. "Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about
the looks of a castaway like me!"

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no
sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of
Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and
paused by milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she
descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of
Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such
contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again
sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while
the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the
street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.

"The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?" she said.

"No, my dear," said the old woman. "'Tis too soon for that; the bells
hain't strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder
barn. A ranter preaches there between the services—an excellent, fiery,
Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don't go to hear'n! What comes in
the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I."

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against
the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central
part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn
not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the
preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon
catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The
sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on
justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This
fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in
a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a
dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address,
she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration—

"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not
obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently
set forth, crucified among you?"

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in
finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the view of
Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to
detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.
He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had
wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of
awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about
mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first
grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and
had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this
change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which,
impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d'Urberville. Her
face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the
barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the
great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open,
so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the
preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern
breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man
whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable
occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood
upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three
o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction
that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess
ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established
as a fact indeed.


End of Phase the Fifth


Phase the Sixth:

The Convert


XLV

Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d'Urberville since
her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to
permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was
unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a
converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear
overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor
advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,
and to behold it now!... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of
mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable
moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a
modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract
the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief
in his identity.

To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly bizarrerie, a
grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out
of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years
earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose
that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of
sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The
lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express
supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated
as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious
rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the
bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with
such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was
almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to
put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the
incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his
wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted
from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which
Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a
misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer.
D'Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his
wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural
in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at
hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner, the
greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian
history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict
definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would
allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had
obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon
her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his
presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,
seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the words
that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she faced
him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung confusedly
in every other direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap
every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however, but a short time;
for Tess's energies returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as
fast as she was able past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their
relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side
of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend,
it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon his
altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh extinguished.

She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed
with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her clothing—so alive was she
to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of
that barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy
with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its
trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time
displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still
engirdled her. It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical
despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present
existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.
Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at
right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely
to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its
dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single
figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings
which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting
this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning
she saw approaching that well-known form—so strangely accoutred as the
Methodist—the one personage in all the world she wished not to
encounter alone on this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she
yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake
her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by
the feelings within him.

"Tess!" he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

"Tess!" he repeated. "It is I—Alec d'Urberville."

She then looked back at him, and he came up.

"I see it is," she answered coldly.

"Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course," he added, with a
slight laugh, "there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in
seeing me like this. But—I must put up with that.... I heard you had
gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed
you?"

"I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!"

"Yes—you may well say it," he returned grimly, as they moved onward
together, she with unwilling tread. "But don't mistake me; I beg this
because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice
it—how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a
momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me, it was
natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think
me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all
persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the
wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously
wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in
view—nothing more."

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: "Have
you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say."

"I have done nothing!" said he indifferently. "Heaven, as I have been
telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can
pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself—the old
Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or
not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was brought
about, and I hope you will be interested enough at least to listen.
Have you ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster—you must have
done do?—old Mr Clare; one of the most earnest of his school; one of
the few intense men left in the Church; not so intense as the extreme
wing of Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but
quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger of whom
are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by their sophistries, till
they are but the shadow of what they were. I only differ from him on
the question of Church and State—the interpretation of the text, ‘Come
out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord'—that's all. He
is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more
souls in this country than any other man you can name. You have heard
of him?"

"I have," she said.

"He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of
some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted
him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show
me the way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that some day
I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit—that those who came to
scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange magic in his
words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of my mother hit me most;
and by degrees I was brought to see daylight. Since then my one desire
has been to hand on the true view to others, and that is what I was
trying to do to-day; though it is only lately that I have preached
hereabout. The first months of my ministry have been spent in the North
of England among strangers, where I preferred to make my earliest
clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before undergoing that
severest of all tests of one's sincerity, addressing those who have
known one, and have been one's companions in the days of darkness. If
you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at
yourself, I am sure—"

"Don't go on with it!" she cried passionately, as she turned away from
him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. "I can't
believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to
me like this, when you know—when you know what harm you've done me!
You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making
the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a
fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your
pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! Out upon such—I don't believe
in you—I hate it!"

"Tess," he insisted; "don't speak so! It came to me like a jolly new
idea! And you don't believe me? What don't you believe?"

"Your conversion. Your scheme of religion."

"Why?"

She dropped her voice. "Because a better man than you does not believe
in such."

"What a woman's reason! Who is this better man?"

"I cannot tell you."

"Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to
spring out at a moment's notice, "God forbid that I should say I am a
good man—and you know I don't say any such thing. I am new to goodness,
truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes."

"Yes," she replied sadly. "But I cannot believe in your conversion to a
new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don't last!"

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been
leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon the
familiar countenance and form, remained contemplating her. The inferior
man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor even
entirely subdued.

"Don't look at me like that!" he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien, instantly
withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with a flush, "I
beg your pardon!" And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment
which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly
tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing
wrong.

"No, no! Don't beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide your
good looks, why don't you keep it down?"

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, "It was mostly to keep off
the wind."

"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went on; "but it is
better that I should not look too often on you. It might be dangerous."

"Ssh!" said Tess.

"Well, women's faces have had too much power over me already for me not
to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they; and it
reminds me of the old times that I would forget!"

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and then
as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was going
with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate.
Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted thereon
in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he
knew who had been at the pains to blazon these announcements. He told
her that the man was employed by himself and others who were working
with him in that district, to paint these reminders that no means might
be left untried which might move the hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called "Cross-in-Hand." Of all
spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It
was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by
artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative
beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar
which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in
any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand. Differing
accounts were given of its history and purport. Some authorities stated
that a devotional cross had once formed the complete erection thereon,
of which the present relic was but the stump; others that the stone as
it stood was entire, and that it had been fixed there to mark a
boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow, whatever the origin of the relic,
there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in
the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most
phlegmatic passer-by.

"I think I must leave you now," he remarked, as they drew near to this
spot. "I have to preach at Abbot's-Cernel at six this evening, and my
way lies across to the right from here. And you upset me somewhat too,
Tessy—I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and get strength....
How is it that you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good
English?"

"I have learnt things in my troubles," she said evasively.

"What troubles have you had?"

She told him of the first one—the only one that related to him.

D'Urberville was struck mute. "I knew nothing of this till now!" he
next murmured. "Why didn't you write to me when you felt your trouble
coming on?"

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: "Well—you will
see me again."

"No," she answered. "Do not again come near me!"

"I will think. But before we part come here." He stepped up to the
pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but I
fear you at moments—far more than you need fear me at present; and to
lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you
will never tempt me—by your charms or ways."

"Good God—how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is furthest
from my thought!"

"Yes—but swear it."

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand
upon the stone and swore.

"I am sorry you are not a believer," he continued; "that some
unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no
more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who
knows what may not happen? I'm off. Goodbye!"

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his eyes
again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down in the
direction of Abbot's-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation,
and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his
pocket a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter,
worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D'Urberville opened the
letter. It was dated several months before this time, and was signed by
Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned joy at
d'Urberville's conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in
communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr Clare's
warm assurance of forgiveness for d'Urberville's former conduct and his
interest in the young man's plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would
much have liked to see d'Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he
had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have helped him to
enter a theological college to that end; but since his correspondent
had possibly not cared to do this on account of the delay it would have
entailed, he was not the man to insist upon its paramount importance.
Every man must work as he could best work, and in the method towards
which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself
cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till
his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer
troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her
nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary
shepherd.

"What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?" she asked of
him. "Was it ever a Holy Cross?"

"Cross—no; 'twer not a cross! 'Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was
put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured
there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie
underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks
at times."

She felt the petite mort at this unexpectedly gruesome information,
and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to
Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she
approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were
talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman,
in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly
air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a
stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a moment the
voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview
had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which
had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came close, the
girl turned serenely and recognized her, the young man walking off in
embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess's
excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not
explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact,
began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just
witnessed.

"He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at
Talbothays," she explained indifferently. "He actually inquired and
found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he's been
in love wi' me these two years. But I've hardly answered him."