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!"