Tess of the d'Urbervilles By Thomas Hardy

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of
things. Then, far beyond the ploughing-teams, a black
speck was seen. It had come from the corner of a
fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up
the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the
proportions of a mere point it advanced to the shape of
a ninepin, and was soon perceived to be a man in black,
arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The man
at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes,
continually observed the comer, but Tess, who was
occupied, did not perceived him till her companion
directed her attention to his approach.
It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was
one in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented
what had once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville.
Not being hot at his preaching there was less
enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the
grinder seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was
already on Tess's face, and she pulled her curtained
hood further over it.
D'Urberville came up and said quietly----
"I want to speak to you, Tess."
"You have refused my last request, not to come near
me!" said she.
"Yes, but I have a good reason."
"Well, tell it."
"It is more serious than you may think."
He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They
were at some distance from the man who turned the
slicer, and the movement of the machine, too,
sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other
ears. D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess
from the labourer, turning his back to the latter.
"It is this," he continued, with capricious
compunction. "In thinking of your soul and mine when
we last met, I neglected to inquire as to your worldly
condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think
of it. But I see now that it is hard--harder than it
used to be when I--knew you--harder than you deserve.
Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to me!"
She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as,
with bent head, her face completely screened by the
hood, she resumed her trimming of the swedes. By going
on with her work she felt better able to keep him
outside her emotions.
"Tess," he added, with a sigh of discontent,--"yours
was the very worst case I ever was concerned in! I had
no idea of what had resulted till you told me. Scamp
that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole blame
was mine--the whole unconventional business of our time
at Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am
but the base imitation, what a blind young thing you
were as to possibilities! I say in all earnestness
that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls
in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that
the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a
good one or the result of simple indifference."
Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one
globular root and taking up another with automatic
regularity, the pensive contour of the mere fieldwoman
alone marking her.
"But it is not that I came to say," d'Urberville went
on. "My circumstances are these. I have lost my mother
since you were at Trantridge, and the place is my own.
But I intend to sell it, and devote myself to
missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I
shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want
to ask you is, will you put it in my power to do my
duty--to make the only reparation I can make for the
trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go
with me? ... I have already obtained this precious
document. It was my old mother's dying wish."
He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a
slight fumbling of embarrassment.
"What is it?" said she.
"A marriage licence."
"O no, sir--no!" she said quickly, starting back.
"You will not? Why is that?"
And as he asked the question a disappointment which was
not entirely the disappointment of thwarted duty
crossed d'Urberville's face. It was unmistakably a
symptom that something of his old passion for her had
been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.
"Surely," he began again, in more impetuous tones, and
then looked round at the labourer who turned the
slicer.
Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended
there. Informing the man that a gentleman had come to
see her, with whom she wished to walk a little way, she
moved off with d'Urberville across the zebra-striped
field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed
section he held out his hand to help her over it; but
she stepped forward on the summits of the earth-rolls
as if she did not see him.
"You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a
self-respecting man?" he repeated, as soon as they were
over the furrows.
"I cannot."
"But why?"
"You know I have no affection for you."
"But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps--as
soon as you really could forgive me?"
"Never!"
"Why so positive?"
"I love somebody else."
The words seemed to astonish him.
"You do?" he cried. "Somebody else? But has not a
sense of what is morally right and proper any weight
with you?"
"No, no, no--don't say that!"
"Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only
a passing feeling which you will overcome----"
"No--no."
"Yes, yes! Why not?"
"I cannot tell you."
"You must in honour!"
"Well then ... I have married him."
"Ah!" he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at
her.
"I did not wish to tell--I did not mean to!" she
pleaded. "It is a secret here, or at any rate but dimly
known. So will you, PLEASE will you, keep from
questioning me? You must remember that we are now
strangers."
"Strangers--are we? Strangers!"
For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face;
but he determinedly chastened it down.
"Is that man your husband?" he asked mechanically,
denoting by a sign the labourer who turned the machine.
"That man!" she said proudly. "I should think not!"
"Who, then?"
"Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!" she begged,
and flashed her appeal to him from her upturned face
and lash-shadowed eyes.
D'Urberville was disturbed.
"But I only asked for your sake!" he retorted hotly.
"Angels of heaven!--God forgive me for such an
expression--I came here, I swear, as I thought for your
good. Tess--don't look at me so--I cannot stand your
looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before
Christianity or since! There--I won't lose my head;
I dare not. I own that the sight of you had waked up my
love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished with
all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage
might be a sanctification for us both. 'The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband', I said
to myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must
bear the disappointment!"
He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.
"Married. Married! ... Well, that being so," he added,
quite calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves
and putting them in his pocket; "that being prevented,
I should like to do some good to you and your husband,
whoever he may be. There are many questions that I am
tempted to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in
opposition to your wishes. Though, if I could know your
husband, I might more easily benefit him and you.
Is he on this farm?"
"No," she murmured. "He is far away."
"Far away? From YOU? What sort of husband can he be?"
"O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He
found out----"
"Ah, is it so! ... That's sad, Tess!"
"Yes."
"But to stay away from you--to leave you to work like
this!"
"He does not leave me to work!" she cried, springing to
the defence of the absent one with all her fervour.
"He don't know it! It is by my own arrangement."
"Then, does he write?"
"I--I cannot tell you. There are things which are
private to ourselves."
"Of course that means that he does not. You are a
deserted wife, my fair Tess----"
In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the
buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough
leather fingers which did not express the life or shape
of those within.
"You must not--you must not!" she cried fearfully,
slipping her hand from the glove as from a pocket, and
leaving it in his grasp. "O, will you go away--for the
sake of me and my husband--go, in the name of your own
Christianity!"
"Yes, yes; I will," he said abruptly, and thrusting the
glove back to her he turned to leave. Facing round,
however, he said, "Tess, as God is my judge, I meant no
humbug in taking your hand!"
A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which
they had not noticed in their preoccupation, ceased
close behind them; and a voice reached her ear:
"What the devil are you doing away from your work at
this time o' day?"
Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the
distance, and had inquisitively ridden across, to learn
what was their business in his field.
"Don't speak like that to her!" said d'Urberville, his
face blackening with something that was not
Christianity.
"Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa'sons have
to do with she?"
"Who is the fellow?" asked d'Urberville, turning to
Tess.
She went close up to him.
"Go--I do beg you!" she said.
"What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his
face what a churl he is."
"He won't hurt me. HE'S not in love with me. I can
leave at Lady-Day."
"Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose.
But--well, goodbye!"
Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant,
having reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued
his reprimand, which Tess took with the greatest
coolness, that sort of attack being independent of sex.
To have as a master this man of stone, who would have
cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after
her former experiences. She silently walked back
towards the summit of the field that was the scene of
her labour, so absorbed in the interview which had just
taken place that she was hardly aware that the nose of
Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders.
"If so be you make an agreement to work for me till
Lady-Day, I'll see that you carry it out," he growled.
"'Od rot the women--now 'tis one thing, and then 'tis
another. But I'll put up with it no longer!"
Knowing very well that he did not harass the other
women of the farm as he harassed her out of spite for
the flooring he had once received, she did for one
moment picture what might have been the result if she
had been free to accept the offer just made her of
being the monied Alec's wife. It would have lifted her
completely out of subjection, not only to her present
oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to
despise her. "But no, no!" she said breathlessly; "I
could not have married him now! He is so unpleasant to
me."
That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare,
concealing from him her hardships, and assuring him of
her undying affection. Any one who had been in a
position to read between the lines would have seen that
at the back of her great love was some monstrous
fear--almost a desperation--as to some secret
contingencies which were not disclosed. But again she
did not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go
with him, and perhaps he did not care for her at all.
She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would
ever reach Angel's hands.
After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily
enough, and brought on the day which was of great
import to agriculturists--the day of the Candlemas
Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were
entered into for the twelve months following the
ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the farming population
who thought of changing their places duly attended at
the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly all
the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended flight,
and early in the morning there was a general exodus in
the direction of the town, which lay at a distance of
from ten to a dozen miles over hilly country. Though
Tess also meant to leave at the quarter-day she was one
of the few who did not go to the fair, having a
vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to
render another outdoor engagement unnecessary.
It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness
for the time, and one would almost have thought that
winter was over. She had hardly finished her dinner
when d'Urberville's figure darkened the window of the
cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to
herself today.
Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the
door, and she could hardly in reason run away.
D'Urberville's knock, his walk up to the door, had some
indescribable quality of difference from his air when
she last saw him. They seemed to be acts of which the
doer was ashamed. She thought that she would not open
the door; but, as there was no sense in that either,
she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped back
quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself down
into a chair before speaking.
"Tess--I couldn't help it!" he began desperately, as he
wiped his heated face, which had also a superimposed
flush of excitement. "I felt that I must call at least
to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been
thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now
I cannot get rid of your image, try how I may! It is
hard that a good woman should do harm to a bad man; yet
so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!"
The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost
pitiable, and yet Tess did not pity him.
"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am
forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the
world would alter His plans on my account?"
"You really think that?"
"Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking
otherwise."
"Cured? By whom?"
"By my husband, if I must tell."
"Ah--your husband--your husband! How strange it seems!
I remember you hinted something of the sort the other
day. What do you really believe in these matters,
Tess?" he asked. "You seem to have no
religion--perhaps owing to me."
"But I have. Though I don't believe in anything
supernatural."
D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.
"Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?"
"A good deal of it."
"H'm--and yet I've felt so sure about it," he said
uneasily.
"I believe in the SPIRIT of the Sermon on the Mount,
and so did my dear husband....But I don't believe-----"
Here she gave her negations.
"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your
dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he
rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or
reasoning on your own part. That's just like you women.
Your mind is enslaved to his."
"Ah, because he knew everything!" said she, with a
triumphant simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the
most perfect man could hardly have deserved, much less
her husband.
"Yes, but you should not take negative opinions
wholesale from another person like that. A pretty
fellow he must be to teach you such scepticism!"
"He never forced my judgement! He would never argue on
the subject with me! But I looked at it in this way;
what he believed, after inquiring deep into doctrines,
was much more likely to be right than what I might
believe, who hadn't looked into doctrines at all."
"What used he to say? He must have said something?"
She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter
of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not
comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless
polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as
it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of
thinking aloud with her at his side. In delivering it
she gave also Clare's accent and manner with
reverential faithfulness.
"Say that again," asked d'Urberville, who had listened
with the greatest attention.
She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville
thoughtfully murmured the words after her.
"Anything else?" he presently asked.
"He said at another time something like this"; and she
gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled
in many a work of the pedigree ranging from the
DICTIONNAIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE to Huxley's ESSAYS.
"Ah--ha! How do you remember them?"
"I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't
wish me to; and I managed to coax him to tell me a few
of his thoughts. I can't say I quite understand that
one; but I know it is right."
"H'm. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't
know yourself!"
He fell into thought. "And so I threw in my spiritual
lot with his," she resumed. "I didn't wish it to be
different. What's good enough for him is good enough
for me."
"Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?"
"No--I never told him--if I am an infidel."
"Well--you are better off today that I am, Tess, after
all! You don't believe that you ought to preach my
doctrine, and, therefore, do no despite to your
conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought to
preach it, but like the devils I believe and tremble,
for I suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to
my passion for you."
"How?"
"Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to
see you today! But I started from home to go to
Casterbridge Fair, where I have undertaken to preach
the Word from a waggon at half-past two this afternoon,
and where all the brethren are expecting me this
minute. Here's the announcement."
He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was
printed the day, hour, and place of meeting, at which
he, d'Urberville, would preach the Gospel as aforesaid.
"But how can you get there?" said Tess, looking at the
clock.
"I cannot get there! I have come here."
"What, you have really arranged to preach, and----"
"I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be
there--by reason of my burning desire to see a woman
whom I once despised!--No, by my word and truth, I
never despised you; if I had I should not love you now!
Why I did not despise you was on account of your being
unsmirched in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from
me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the
situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there
was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no
contempt, and you are she. But you may well despise me
now! I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I
find I still serve in the groves! Ha! ha!"
"O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean? What have I
done!"
"Done?" he said, with a soulless sneer in the word.
"Nothing intentionally. But you have been the
means--the innocent means--of my backsliding, as they
call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those
'servants of corruption' who, 'after they have escaped
the pollutions of the world, are again entangled
therein and overcome'--whose latter end is worse than
their beginning?" He laid his hand on her shoulder.
"Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social
salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly
shaking her, as if she were a child. "And why then
have you tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till
I saw those eyes and that mouth again--surely there
never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!" His
voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black
eyes. "You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of
Babylon--I could not resist you as soon as I met you
again!"
"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess,
recoiling.
"I know it--I repeat that I do not blame you. But the
fact remains. When I saw you ill-used on the farm that
day I was nearly mad to think that I had no legal right
to protect you--that I could not have it; whilst he
who has it seemed to neglect you utterly!"
"Don't speak against him--he is absent!" she cried in
much excitement. "Treat him honourably--he has never
wronged you! O leave his wife before any scandal
spreads that may do harm to his honest name!"
"I will--I will," he said, like a man awakening from a
luring dream. "I have broken my engagement to preach
to those poor drunken boobies at the fair--it is the
first time I have played such a practical joke. A
month ago I should have been horrified at such a
possibility. I'll go away--to swear--and--ah, can I!
to keep away." Then, suddenly: "One clasp, Tessy--one!
Only for old friendship-----"
"I am without defence. Alec! A good man's honour is in
my keeping--think--be ashamed!"
"Pooh! Well, yes--yes!"
He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his
weakness. His eyes were equally barren of worldly and
religious faith. The corpses of those old fitful
passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his
face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come
together as in a resurrection. He went out
indeterminately.
Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of
his engagement today was the simple backsliding of a
believer, Tess's words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had
made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so
after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if
his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of
possibility that his position was untenable. Reason
had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion,
which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in
search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by
his mother's death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of
his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to
stagnation. He said to himself, as he pondered again
and again over the crystallized phrases that she had
handed on to him, "That clever fellow little thought
that, by telling her those things, he might be paving
my way back to her!"
XLVII
It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at
Flintcomb-Ash farm. The dawn of the March morning is
singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show
where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight
rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood
forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the
wintry weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of
operations only a rustling denoted that others had
preceded them; to which, as the light increased, there
were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the
summit. They were busily "unhaling" the rick, that is,
stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down
the sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and
Tess, with the other women-workers, in their
whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering,
Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on the
spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the
end of the day. Close under the eaves of the stack,
and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the
women had come to serve--a timber-framed construction,
with straps and wheels appertaining--the
threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a
despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and
nerves. A little way off there was another indistinct
figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that
spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long
chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth
which radiated from the spot, explained without the
necessity of much daylight that here was the engine
which was to act as the PRIMUM MOBILE of this little
world. By the engine stood a dark motionless being, a
sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of
trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the
engineman. The isolation of his manner and colour lent
him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had
strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region
of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had
nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its
aborigines.
What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural
world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these
denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather,
frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm
to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam
threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.
He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts
being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron
charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and
caring for them not at all: holding only strictly
necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some
ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his
will in the service of his Plutonic master. The long
strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to
the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line
between agriculture and him.
While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic
beside his portable repository of force, round whose
hot blackness the morning air quivered. He had nothing
to do with preparatory labour. His fire was waiting
incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few
seconds he could make the long strap move at an
invisible velocity. Beyond its extent the environment
might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the same to
him. If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what
he called himself, he replied shortly, "an engineer."
The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then
took their places, the women mounted, and the work
began. Farmer Groby--or, as they called him, "he"--had
arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on
the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed
it, her business being to untie every sheaf of corn
handed on to her by Izz Huett, who stood next, but on
the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and spread
it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every
grain in one moment. They were soon in full progress,
after a preparatory hitch or two, which rejoiced the
hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped on
till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for
half an hour; and on starting again after the meal the
whole supplementary strength of the farm was thrown
into the labour of constructing the straw-rick, which
began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch
was eaten as they stood, without leaving their
positions, and then another couple of hours brought
them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheel
continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the
thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near
the revolving wire-cage.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past
days when they had been accustomed to thresh with
flails on the oaken barn-door; when everything, even
to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to
their thinking, though slow, produced better results.
Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the
perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could
not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words.
It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so
severely, and began to make her wish that she had never
some to Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the
corn-rick--Marian, who was one of them, in
particular--could stop to drink ale or cold tea from
the flagon now and then, or to exchange a few gossiping
remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the
fragments of straw and husk from their clothing; but
for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never
stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she,
who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could
not stop either, unless Marian changed places with her,
which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of
Groby's objections that she was too slow-handed for a
feeder.
For some probably economical reason it was usually a
woman who was chosen for this particular duty, and
Groby gave as his motive in selecting Tess that she was
one of those who best combined strength with quickness
in untying, and both with staying power, and this may
have been true. The hum of the thresher, which
prevented speech, increased to a raving whenever the
supply of corn fell short of the regular quantity. As
Tess and the man who fed could never turn their heads
she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a
person had come silently into the field by the gate,
and had been standing under a second rick watching the
scene, and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a
tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay
walking-cane.
"Who is that?" said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at
first addressed the inquiry to Tess, but the latter
could not hear it.
"Somebody's fancy-man, I s'pose," said Marian
laconically.
"I'll lay a guinea he's after Tess."
"O no. 'Tis a ranter pa'son who's been sniffing after
her lately; not a dandy like this."
"Well--this is the same man."
"The same man as the preacher? But he's quite
different!"
"He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher,
and hev cut off his whiskers; but he's the same man for
all that."
"D'ye really think so? Then I'll tell her," said
Marian.
"Don't. She'll see him soon enough, good-now."
"Well. I don't think it at all right for him to join
his preaching to courting a married woman, even though
her husband mid be abroad, and she, in a sense, a
widow."
"Oh--he can do her no harm," said Izz drily. "Her mind
can no more be heaved from that one place where it do
bide than a stooded waggon from the hole he's in. Lord
love 'ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching, nor the
seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when
'twould be better for her that she should be weaned."
Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon
Tess left her post, her knees trembling so wretchedly
with the shaking of the machine that she could scarcely
walk.
"You ought to het a quart o' drink into 'ee, as I've
done," said Marian. "You wouldn't look so white then.
Why, souls above us, your face is as if you'd been
hagrode!"
It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess
was so tired, her discovery of her visitor's presence
might have the bad effect of taking away her appetite;
and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend by
a ladder on the further side of the stack when the
gentleman came forward and looked up.
Tess uttered a short little "Oh!" And a moment after
she said, quickly, "I shall eat my dinner here--right
on the rick."
Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages,
they all did this; but as there was rather a keen wind
going today, Marian and the rest descended, and sat
under the straw-stack. The newcomer was, indeed, Alec
d'Urberville, the late Evangelist, despite his changed
attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that the
original WELTLUST had come back; that he had restored
himself, as nearly as a man could do who had grown
three or four years older, to the old jaunty, slapdash
guise under which Tess had first known her admirer, and
cousin so-called. Having decided to remain where she
was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight of
the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by, she
heard footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after
Alec appeared upon the stack--now an oblong and level
platform of sheaves. He strode across them, and sat
down opposite of her without a word.
Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of
thick pancake which she had brought with her. The
other workfolk were by this time all gathered under the
rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable
retreat.
"I am here again, as you see," said d'Urberville.
"Why do you trouble me so!" she cried, reproach
flashing from her very finger-ends.
"I trouble YOU? I think I may ask, why do you trouble
me?"
"Sure, I don't trouble you any-when!"
"You say you don't? But you do! You haunt me. Those
very eyes that you turned upon my with such a bitter
flash a moment ago, they come to me just as you showed
them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever
since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as
if my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong
puritanical stream, had suddenly found a way open in
the direction of you, and had all at once gushed
through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith;
and it is you who have done it!"
She gazed in silence.
"What--you have given up your preaching entirely?" she
asked. She had gathered from Angel sufficient of the
incredulity of modern thought to despise flash
enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was somewhat appalled.
In affected severity d'Urberville continued--
"Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that
afternoon I was to address the drunkards at
Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows what I am
thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No
doubt they pray for me--weep for me; for they are kind
people in their way. But what do I care? How could I
go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in
it?--it would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind!
Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus and
Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they
might learn not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge you
have taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you.
Four years after, you find me a Christian enthusiast;
you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete
perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you,
this is only my way of talking, and you must not look
so horribly concerned. Of course you have done nothing
except retain your pretty face and shapely figure.
I saw it on the rick before you saw me--that tight
pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet--you
field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish
to keep out of danger." He regarded her silently for a
few moments, and with a short cynical laugh resumed:
"I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I
thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face,
he would have let go the plough for her sake as I do!"
Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all
her fluency failed her, and without heeding he added:
"Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good
as any other, after all. But to speak seriously.
Tess." D'Urberville rose and came nearer, reclining
sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon his elbow.
"Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what you
said that HE said. I have come to the conclusion that
there does seem rather a want of common-sense in these
threadbare old propositions; how I could have been so
fired by poor Parson Clare's enthusiasm, and have gone
so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make
out! As for what you said last time, on the strength of
your wonderful husband's intelligence--whose name you
have never told me--about having what they call an
ethical system without any dogma, I don't see my way to
that at all."
"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and
purity at least, if you can't have--what do you call
it--dogma."
"O no! I'm a different sort of fellow from that! If
there's nobody to say, 'Do this, and it will be a good
thing for you after you are dead; do that, and if will
be a bad thing for you,' I can't warm up. Hang it, I
am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and
passions if there's nobody to be responsible to; and if
I were you, my dear, I wouldn't either!"
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in
his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which
in the primitive days of mankind had been quite
distinct. But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her
absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of
emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on.
"Well, never mind," he resumed. "Here I am, my love,
as in the old times!"
"Not as then--never as then--'tis different!" she
entreated. "And there was never warmth with me!
O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has
brought you to speak to me like this!"
"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be
upon your sweet head! Your husband little thought how
his teaching would recoil upon him! Ha-ha--I'm awfully
glad you have made an apostate of me all the same!
Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity
you too. For all your closeness, I see you are in a
bad way--neglected by one who ought to cherish you."
She could not get her morsels of food down her throat;
her lips were dry, and she was ready to choke. The
voices and laughs of the workfolk eating and drinking
under the rick came to her as if they were a quarter of
a mile off.
"It is cruelty to me!" she said. "How--how can you
treat me to this talk, if you care ever so little for
me?"
"True, true," he said, wincing a little. "I did not
come to reproach you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say
that I don't like you to be working like this, and I
have come on purpose for you. You say you have a
husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I've
never seen him, and you've not told me his name; and
altogether he seems rather a mythological personage.
However, even if you have one, I think I am nearer to
you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of
trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face!
The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to
read come back to me. Don't you know them, Tess?--'And
she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not
overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not
find him; then shall she say, I will go and return to
my first husband; for then was it better with me than
now!' ... Tess, my trap is waiting just under the hill,
and--darling mine, not his!--you know the rest."
Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while
he spoke; but she did not answer.
"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he
continued, stretching his arm towards her waist; "you
should be willing to share it, and leave that mule you
call husband for ever."
One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to
eat her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the
slightest warning she passionately swung the glove by
the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and
thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the
mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the
recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors
were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his
reclining position. A scarlet oozing appeared where
her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began
dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon
controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from
his pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.
She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now,
punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with
the hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its
captor twists its neck. "Whip me, crush me; you need
not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry
out. Once victim, always victim--that's the law!"
"O no, no, Tess," he said blandly. "I can make full
allowance for this. Yet you most unjustly forget one
thing, that I would have married you if you had not put
it out of my power to do so. Did I not ask you flatly
to be my wife--hey? Answer me."
"You did."
"And you cannot be. But remember one thing!" His
voice hardened as his temper got the better of him with
the recollection of his sincerity in asking her and her
present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her side
and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook under
his grasp. "Remember, my lady, I was your master once!
I will be your master again. If you are any man's wife
you are mine!"
The threshers now began to stir below.
"So much for our quarrel," he said, letting her go.
"Now I shall leave you, and shall come again for your
answer during the afternoon. You don't know me yet!
But I know you."
She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned.
D'Urberville retreated over the sheaves, and descended
the ladder, while the workers below rose and stretched
their arms, and shook down the beer they had drunk.
Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the
renewed rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position
by the buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf
after sheaf in endless succession.
XLVIII
In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick
was to be finished that night, since there was a moon
by which they could see to work, and the man with the
engine was engaged for another farm on the morrow.
Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded
with even less intermission than usual.
It was not till "nammet"-time, about three o-clock,
that Tess raised her eyes and gave a momentary glance
round. She felt but little surprise at seeing that
Alec d'Urberville had come back, and was standing under
the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes,
and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a
kiss. It meant that their quarrel was over. Tess
looked down again, and carefully abstained from gazing
in that direction.
Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank
lower, and the straw-rick grew higher, and the
corn-sacks were carted away. At six o'clock the
wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground.
But the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed
countless still, notwithstanding the enormous numbers
that had been gulped down by the insatiable swallower,
fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young hands
the greater part of them had passed. And the immense
stack of straw where in the morning there had been
nothing, appeared as the FAECES of the same buzzing red
glutton. From the west sky a wrathful shine--all that
wild March could afford in the way of sunset--had burst
forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and
sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a
coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the
women, which clung to them like dull flames.
A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed
was weary, and Tess could see that the red nape of his
neck was encrusted with dirt and husks. She still
stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face
coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet
embrowned by it. She was the only woman whose place
was upon the machine so as to be shaken bodily by its
spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated
her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing
duties with her as they had done. The incessant
quivering, in which every fibre of her frame
participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie
in which her arms worked on independently of her
consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and did
not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her hair
was tumbling down.
By degrees the freshest among them began to grow
cadaverous and saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her
head she beheld always the great upgrown straw-stack,
with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the gray
north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a
Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed
straw ascended, a yellow river running uphill, and
spouting out on the top of the rick.
She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene,
observing her from some point or other, though she
could not say where. There was an excuse for his
remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its
final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men
unconnected with the threshing sometimes dropped in for
that performance--sporting characters of all
descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious pipes,
roughs with sticks and stones.
But there was another hour's work before the layer of
live rats at the base of the stack would be reached;
and as the evening light in the direction of the
Giant's Hill by Abbot's-Cernel dissolved away, the
white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon
that lay towards Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the
other side. For the last hour or two Marian had felt
uneasy about Tess, whom she could not get near enough
to speak to, the other women having kept up their
strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done without
it through traditionary dread, owing to its results at
her home in childhood. But Tess still kept going: if
she could not fill her part she would have to leave;
and this contingency, which she would have regarded
with equanimity and even with relief a month or two
earlier, had become a terror since d'Urberville had
begun to hover round her.
The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick
so low that people on the ground could talk to them.
To Tess's surprise Farmer Groby came up on the machine
to her, and said that if she desired to join her friend
he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would
send somebody else to take her place. The "friend" was
d'Urberville, she knew, and also that this concession
had been granted in obedience to the request of that
friend, or enemy. She shook her head and toiled on.
The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the
hunt began. The creatures had crept downwards with the
subsidence of the rick till they were all together at
the bottom, and being now uncovered from their last
refuge they ran across the open ground in all
directions, a loud shriek from the by-this-time
half-tipsy Marian informing her companions that one of
the rats had invaded her person--a terror which the
rest of the women had guarded against by various
schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat
was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs,
masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings,
and confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last
sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she
stepped from the machine to the ground.
Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching,
was promptly at her side.
"What--after all--my insulting slap, too!" said she in
an underbreath. She was so utterly exhausted that she
had not strength to speak louder.
"I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at
anything you say or do," he answered, in the seductive
voice of the Trantridge time. "How the little limbs
tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you
are; and yet you need have done nothing since I
arrived. How could you be so obstinate? However, I
have told the farmer that he has no right to employ
women at steam-threshing. It is not proper work for
them; and on all the better class of farms it has been
given up, as he knows very well. I will walk with you
as far as your home."
"O yes," she answered with a jaded gait. "Walk wi' me
if you will! I do bear in mind that you came to marry
me before you knew o' my state. Perhaps--perhaps you
are a little better and kinder than I have been
thinking you were. Whatever is meant by kindness I am
grateful for; whatever is meant in any other way I am
angered at. I cannot sense your meaning sometimes."
"If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I
can assist you. And I will do it with much more regard
for your feelings than I formerly showed. My religious
mania, or whatever it was, is over. But I retain a
little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all
that's tender and strong between man and woman, trust
me! I have enough and more than enough to put you out
of anxiety, both for yourself and your parents and
sisters. I can make them all comfortable if you will
only show confidence in me."
"Have you seen 'em lately?" she quickly inquired.
"Yes. They didn't know where you were. It was only by
chance that I found you here."
The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess's fagged face
between the twigs of the garden-hedge as she paused
outside the cottage which was her temporary home,
d'Urberville pausing beside her.
"Don't mention my little brothers and sisters--don't
make me break down quite!" she said. "If you want to
help them--God knows they need it--do it without
telling me. But no, no!" she cried. "I will take
nothing from you, either for them or for me!"
He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived
with the household, all was public indoors. No sooner
had she herself entered, laved herself in a
washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than she
fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under
the wall, by the light of her own little lamp wrote in
a passionate mood--
MY OWN HUSBAND,--Let me call you so--I must--even if it
makes you angry to think of such an unworthy wife as I.
I must cry to you in my trouble--I have no one else! I
am so exposed to temptation, Angel. I fear to say who
it is, and I do not like to write about it at all. But
I cling to you in a way you cannot think! Can you not
come to me now, at once, before anything terrible
happens? O, I know you cannot, because you are so far
away! I think I must die if you do not come soon, or
tell me to come to you. The punishment you have
measured out to me is deserved--I do know that--well
deserved--and you are right and just to be angry with
me. But, Angel, please, please, not to be just--only a
little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and
come to me! If you would come, I could die in your
arms! I would be well content to do that if so be you
had forgiven me!
Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to
blame you for going away, and I know it was necessary
you should find a farm. Do not think I shall say a
word of sting or bitterness. Only come back to me. I
am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate! I
do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one
little line, and say, "I AM COMING SOON," I will bide
on, Angel--O, so cheerfully!
It has been so much my religion ever since we were
married to be faithful to you in every thought and
look, that even when a man speaks a compliment to me
before I am aware, it seems wronging you. Have you
never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when
we were at the dairy? If you have, how can you keep
away from me? I am the same women, Angel, as you fell
in love with; yes, the very same!--not the one you
disliked but never saw. What was the past to me as soon
as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I
became another woman, filled full of new life from you.
How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this?
Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and
believe in yourself so far as to see that you were
strong enough to work this change in me, you would
perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.
How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could
trust you always to love me! I ought to have known
that such as that was not for poor me. But I am sick
at heart, not only for old times, but for the present.
Think--think how it do hurt my heart not to see you
ever--ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart
ache one little minute of each day as mine does every
day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to
your poor lonely one.
People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel
(handsome is the word they use, since I wish to be
truthful). Perhaps I am what they say. But I do not
value my good looks; I only like to have them because
they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at
least one thing about me worth your having. So much
have I felt this, that when I met with annoyance on
account of the same I tied up my face in a bandage as
long as people would believe in it. O Angel, I tell
you all this not from vanity--you will certainly know I
do not--but only that you may come to me!
If you really cannot come to me will you let me come to
you? I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do what I
will not do. It cannot be that I shall yield one inch,
yet I am in terror as to what an accident might lead
to, and I so defenceless on account of my first error.
I cannot say more about this--it makes me too
miserable. But if I break down by falling into some
fearful snare, my last state will be worse than my
first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me come at
once, or at once come to me!
I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your
servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could
only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of
you as mine.
The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not
here, and I don't like to see the rooks and starlings
in the field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you
who used to see them with me. I long for only one
thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet
you, my own dear! Come to me--come to me, and save me
from what threatens me!--Your faithful heartbroken
TESS
XLIX
The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of
the quiet Vicarage to the westward, in that valley
where the air is so soft and the soil so rich that the
effort of growth requires but superficial aid by
comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where
to Tess the human world seemed so different (though it
was much the same). It was purely for security that
she had been requested by Angel to send her
communications through his father, whom he kept pretty
well informed of his changing addresses in the country
he had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy heart.
"Now," said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read
the envelope, "if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a
visit home at the end of next month, as he told us that
he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his plans; for
I believe it to be from his wife." He breathed deeply
at the thought of her; and the letter was redirected to
be promptly sent on to Angel.
"Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely," murmured
Mrs Clare. "To my dying day I shall feel that he had
been ill-used. You should have sent him to Cambridge in
spite of his want of faith, and given him the same
chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out
of it under proper influence, and perhaps would have
taken Orders after all. Church or no Church, it would
have been fairer to him."
This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever
disturbed her husband's peace in respect to their sons.
And she did not vent this often; for she was as
considerate as she was devout, and knew that his mind
too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this
matter. Only too often had she heard him lying awake
at night, stifling sighs for Angel with prayers. But
the uncompromising Evangelical did not even now hold
that he would have been justified in giving his son, an
unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had
given to the two others, when it was possible, if not
probable, that those very advantages might have been
used to decry the doctrines which he had made it his
life's mission and desire to propagate, and the mission
of his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a
pedestal under the feet of the two faithful ones, and
with the other to exalt the unfaithful by the same
artificial means, he deemed to be alike inconsistent
with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.
Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in
secret mourned over this treatment of him as Abraham
might have mourned over the doomed Isaac while they
went up the hill together. His silent self-generated
regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which his
wife rendered audible.
They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If
Angel had never been destined for a farmer he would
never have been thrown with agricultural girls. They
did not distinctly know what had separated him and his
wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken
place. At first they had supposed it must be something
of the nature of a serious aversion. But in his later
letters he occasionally alluded to the intention of
coming home to fetch her; from which expressions they
hoped the division might not owe its origin to anything
so hopelessly permanent as that. He had told them that
she was with her relatives, and in their doubts they
had decided not to intrude into a situation which they
knew no way of bettering.
The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were
gazing at this time on a limitless expanse of country
from the back of a mule which was bearing him from the
interior of the South-American Continent towards the
coast. His experiences of this strange land had been
sad. The severe illness from which he had suffered
shortly after his arrival had never wholly left him,
and he had by degrees almost decided to relinquish his
hope of farming here, though, as long as the bare
possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this
change of view a secret from his parents.
The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out
to the country in his wake, dazzled by representations
of easy independence, had suffered, died, and wasted
away. He would see mothers from English farms trudging
along with their infants in their arms, when the child
would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother
would pause to dig a hole in the loose earth with her
bare hands, would bury the babe therein with the same
natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and again trudge
on.
Angel's original intention had not been emigration to
Brazil but a northern or eastern farm in his own
country. He had come to this place in a fit of
desperation, the Brazil movement among the English
agriculturists having by chance coincided with his
desire to escape from his past existence.
During this time of absence he had mentally aged a
dozen years. What arrested him now as of value in life
was less its beauty than its pathos. Having long
discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began
to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He
thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral
man? Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman?
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in
its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its
true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.
How, then, about Tess?
Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty
judgement began to oppress him. Did he reject her
eternally, or did he not? He could no longer say that
he would always reject her, and not to say that was in
spirit to accept her now.
This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point
of time with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was
before she had felt herself at liberty to trouble him
with a word about her circumstances or her feelings.
He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to
her motives in withholding intelligence he did not
inquire. Thus her silence of docility was
misinterpreted. How much it really said if he had
understood!--that she adhered with literal exactness
to orders which he had given and forgotten; that
despite her natural fearlessness she asserted no
rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect
the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.
In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the
interior of the country, another man rode beside him.
Angel's companion was also an Englishman, bent on the
same errand, though he came from another part of the
island. They were both in a state of mental
depression, and they spoke of home affairs. Confidence
begat confidence. With that curious tendency evinced
by men, more especially when in distant lands, to
entrust to strangers details of their lives which they
would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted
to this man as they rode along the sorrowful facts of
his marriage. The stranger had sojourned in many more
lands and among many more peoples than Angel; to his
cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social norm,
so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole
terrestrial curve. He viewed the matter in quite a
different light from Angel; thought that what Tess had
been was of no importance beside what she would be, and
plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away
from her.
The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm.
Angel's companion was struck down with fever, and died
by the week's end. Clare waited a few hours to bury
him, and then went on his way.
The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of
whom he knew absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace
name, were sublimed by his death, and influenced Clare
more than all the reasoned ethics of the philosophers.
His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.
His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had
persistently elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense
of Christianity; yet in that civilization an illegal
surrender was not certain disesteem. Surely then he
might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact
state, which he had inherited with the creed of
mysticism, as at least open to correction when the
result was due to treachery. A remorse struck into
him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in
his memory, came back to him. He had asked Izz if she
loved him, and she had replied in the affirmative. Did
she love him more than Tess did? No, she had replied;
Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself
could do no more.
He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of
the wedding. How her eyes had lingered upon him; how
she had hung upon his words as if they were a god's!
And during the terrible evening over the hearth, when
her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful
her face had looked by the rays of the fire, in her
inability to realize that his love and protection could
possibly be withdrawn.
Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.
Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but
no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew
them. The mistake of expressing them had arisen from
his allowing himself to be influenced by general
principles to the disregard of the particular instance.
But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and
husbands have gone over the ground before today.
Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it.
Men are too often harsh with women they love or have
loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are
tenderness itself when compared with the universal
harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the
position towards the temperament, of the means towards
the aims, of today towards yesterday, of hereafter
towards today.
The historic interest of her family--that masterful
line of d'Urbervilles--whom he had despised as a spent
force, touched his sentiments now. Why had he not
known the difference between the political value and
the imaginative value of these things? In the latter
aspect her d'Urberville descent was a fact of great
dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most
useful ingredient to the dreamer, to the moralizer on
declines and falls. It was a fact that would soon be
forgotten--that bit of distinction in poor Tess's blood
and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary
link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at
Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own
romances. In recalling her face again and again, he
thought now that he could see therein a flash of the
dignity which must have graced her grand-dames; and the
vision sent that AURA through his veins which he had
formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of
sickness.
Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in
such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her
fellows. Was not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim
better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?
So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's
devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded
to him by his father; though owing to his distance
inland it was to be a long time in reaching him.
Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would
come in response to the entreaty was alternately great
and small. What lessened it was that the facts of her
life which had led to the parting had not
changed--could never change; and that, if her presence
had not attenuated them, her absence could not.
Nevertheless she addressed her mind to the tender
question of what she could do to please him best if he
should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that
she had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his
harp, that she had inquired more curiously of him which
were his favourite ballads among those the countrygirls
sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling,
who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance
Amby remembered that, amongst the snatches of melody in
which they had indulged at the dairyman's, to induce
the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed to
like "Cupid's Gardens", "I have parks, I have hounds",
and "The break o' the day"; and had seemed not to care
for "The Tailor's Breeches" and "Such a beauty I did
grow", excellent ditties as they were.
To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire.
She practised them privately at odd moments, especially
"The break o' the day":
Arise, arise, arise!
And pick your love a posy,
All o' the sweetest flowers
That in the garden grow.
The turtle doves and sma' birds
In every bough a-building,
So early in the May-time
At the break o' the day!
It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her
singing these ditties, whenever she worked apart from
the rest of the girls in this cold dry time; the tears
running down her cheeks all the while at the thought
that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her,
and the simple silly words of the songs resounding in
painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.
Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she
seemed not to know how the season was advancing; that
the days had lengthened, that Lady-Day was at hand, and
would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the end of her
term here.
But before the quarter-day had quite come something
happened which made Tess think of far different
matters. She was at her lodging as usual one evening,
sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the
family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired
for Tess. Through the doorway she saw against the
declining light a figure with the height of a woman and
the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish creature
whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the
girl said "Tess!"
"What--is it 'Liza-Lu?" asked Tess, in startled
accents. Her sister, whom a little over a year ago she
had left at home as a child, had sprung up by a sudden
shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as yet
Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the
meaning. Her thin legs, visible below her once long
frock now short by her growing, and her uncomfortable
hands and arms, revealed her youth and inexperience.
"Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess," said
Lu, with unemotional gravity, "a-trying to find 'ee;
and I'm very tired."
"What is the matter at home?"
"Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she's
dying, and as father is not very well neither, and says
'tis wrong for a man of such a high family as his to
slave and drave at common labouring work, we don't know
what to do."
Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of
asking 'Liza-Lu to come in and sit down. When she had
done so, and 'Liza-Lu was having some tea, she came to
a decision. It was imperative that she should go home.
Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth
of April, but as the interval thereto was not a long
one she resolved to run the risk of starting at once.
To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but
her sister was too tired to undertake such a distance
till the morrow. Tess ran down to where Marian and Izz
lived, informed them of what had happened, and begged
them to make the best of her case to the farmer.
Returning, she got Lu a supper, and after that, having
tucked the younger into her own bed, packed up as many
of her belongings as would go into a withy basket, and
started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.
L
She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the
clock struck ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the
steely stars. In lone districts night is a protection
rather than a danger to a noiseless pedestrian, and
knowing this Tess pursued the nearest course along
by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the
day-time; but marauders were wanting now, and spectral
fears were driven out of her mind by thoughts of her
mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile, ascending
and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about
midnight looked from that height into the abyss of
chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the
vale on whose further side she was born. Having already
traversed about five miles on the upland she had now
some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey
would be finished. The winding road downwards became
just visible to her under the wan starlight as she
followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting
with that above it that the difference was perceptible
to the tread and to the smell. It was the heavy clay
land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which
turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions
linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been
forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert
something of its old character, the far and the near
being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the
most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted
here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked, the
green-spangled fairies that "whickered" at you as you
passed;--the place teemed with beliefs in them still,
and they formed an impish multitude now.
At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign
creaked in response to the greeting of her footsteps,
which not a human soul heard but herself. Under the
thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld relaxed tendons
and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath
coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and
undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for
renewed labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink
nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.
At three she turned the last corner of the maze of
lanes she had threaded, and entered Marlott, passing
the field in which as a club-girl, she had first seen
Angel Clare, when he had not danced with her; the sense
of disappointment remained with her yet. In the
direction of her mother's house she saw a light.
It came from the bedroom window, and a branch waved in
front of it and made it wink at her. As soon as she
could discern the outline of the house--newly thatched
with her money--it had all its old effect upon Tess's
imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed
to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its
gables, the broken courses of brick which topped the
chimney, all had something in common with her personal
character. A stupefaction had come into these
features, to her regard; it meant the illness of her
mother.
She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the
lower room was vacant, but the neighbour who was
sitting up with her mother came to the top of the
stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess
prepared herself a breakfast, and then took her place
as nurse in her mother's chamber.
In the morning, when she contemplated the children,
they had all a curiously elongated look; although she
had been away little more than a year their growth was
astounding; and the necessity of applying herself heart
and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.
Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind,
and he sat in his chair as usual. But the day after
her arrival he was unusually bright. He had a rational
scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.
"I'm thinking of sending round to all the old
antiqueerians in this part of England," he said,
"asking them to subscribe to a fund to maintain me.
I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical, and
proper thing to do. They spend lots o' money in
keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o' things,
and such like; and living remains must be more
interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed of me.
Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what
there is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of
him! If Pa'son Tringham, who discovered me, had lived,
he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."
Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till
she had grappled with pressing matters in hand, which
seemed little improved by her remittances. When indoor
necessities had been eased she turned her attention to
external things. It was now the season for planting
and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the
villagers had already received their spring tillage;
but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields
were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this
was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,----that last lapse of the improvident.
At the earliest moment she obtained what others she could
procure, and in a few days her father was well enough
to see to the garden, under Tess's persuasive efforts:
while she herself undertook the allotment-plot which
they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of
the village.
She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick
chamber, where she was not now required by reason of
her mother's improvement. Violent motion relieved
thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open
enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired
labour of the day had ended. Digging began usually at
six o'clock, and extended indefinitely into the dusk or
moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were
burning on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring
their combustion.
One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with
their neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote
flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots. As
soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the
couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up
the allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and
disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the
wind. When a fire glowed, banks of smoke, blown level
along the ground, would themselves become illuminated
to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which
was a wall by day and a light by night, could be
understood.
As evening thickened some of the gardening men and
women gave over for the night, but the greater number
remained to get their planting done, Tess being among
them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one
of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her
fork, its four shining prongs resounding against the
stones and dry clods in little clicks. Sometimes she
was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then
it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the
brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed
tonight, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her
attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a
short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole
being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The
women further back wore white aprons, which, with their
pale faces, were all that could be seen of them in the
gloom, except when at moments they caught a flash from
the flames.
Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which
formed the boundary of the field rose against the pale
opalescence of the lower sky. Above, Jupiter hung like
a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost to throw a
shade. A few small nondescript stars were appearing
elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
occasionally rattled along the dry road.
Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it
was not late; and though the air was fresh and keen
there was a whisper of spring in it that cheered the
workers on. Something in the place, the hours, the
crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there.
Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a
fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a
tranquillizer on this March day.
Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of
all were on the soil as its turned surface was revealed
by the fires. Hence as Tess stirred the clods and sang
her foolish little songs with scarce now a hope that
Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time
notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a
long smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same
plot as herself, and whom she supposed her father had
sent there to advance the work. She became more
conscious of him when the direction of his digging
brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them;
then it swerved, and the two were visible to each other
but divided from all the rest.
Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he
speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to
recollect that he had not been there when it was broad
daylight, and that she did not know him as any one of
the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her
absences having been so long and frequent of late
years. By-and-by he dug so close to her that the
fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel
prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the
fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found
that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared
up, and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.
The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness
of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was
now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the
labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as
to its bearing. D'Urberville emitted a low long laugh.
"If I were inclined to joke I should say, How much this
seems like Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking
at her with an inclined head.
"What do you say?" she weakly asked.
"A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You
are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you
in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be
quite up in that scene of Milton's when I was
theological. Some of it goes----
"Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
Beyond a row of myrtles....
... If thou accept
My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon."
"Lead then," said Eve.
And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you
as a thing that you might have supposed or said quite
untruly, because you think so badly of me."
"I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don't
think of you in that way at all. My thoughts of you
are quite cold, except when you affront me. What, did
you come digging here entirely because of me?"
"Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock,
which I saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an
afterthought, that I mightn't be noticed. I come to
protest against your working like this."
"But I like doing it--it is for my father."
"Your engagement at the other place is ended?"
"Yes."
"Where are you going to next? To join your dear
husband?"
She could not bear the humiliating reminder.
"O--I don't know!" she said bitterly. "I have no
husband!"
"It is quite true--in the sense you mean. But you have
a friend, and I have determined that you shall be
comfortable in suite of yourself. When you get down to
your house you will see what I have sent there for
you."
"O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all!
I cannot take it from you! I don't like--it is not
right!"
"It IS right!" he cried lightly. "I am not going to
see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for
you, in trouble without trying to help her."
"But I am very well off! I am only in trouble
about--about--not about living at all!"
She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears
dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.
"About the children--your brothers and sisters,"
he resumed. "I've been thinking of them."
Tess's heart quivered--he was touching her in a weak
place. He had divined her chief anxiety. Since
returning home her soul had gone out to those children
with an affection that was passionate.
"If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do
something for them; since your father will not be able
to do much, I suppose?"
"He can with my assistance. He must!"
"And with mine."
"No, sir!" "How damned foolish this is!" burst out
d'Urberville. "Why, he thinks we are the same family;
and will be quite satisfied!"
"He don't. I've undeceived him."
"The more fool you!"
D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge,
where he pulled off the long smockfrock which had
disguised him; and rolling it up and pushing it into
the couch-fire, went away.
Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she
felt restless; she wondered if he had gone back to her
father's house; and taking the fork in her hand
proceeded homewards.
Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of
her sisters.
"O, Tessy--what do you think! 'Liza-Lu is a-crying,
and there's a lot of folk in the house, and mother is a
good deal better, but they think father is dead!"
The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as
yet its sadness; and stood looking at Tess with
round-eyed importance, till, beholding the effect
produced upon her, she said--
"What, Tess, shan't we talk to father never no more?"
"But father was only a little bit ill!" exclaimed Tess
distractedly.
'Liza-Lu came up.
"He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there
for mother said there was no chance for him, because
his heart was growed in."
Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the
dying one was out of danger, and the indisposed one was
dead. The news meant even more than it sounded. Her
father's life had a value apart from his personal
achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much.
It was the last of the three lives for whose duration
the house and premises were held under a lease; and it
had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for his
regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage
accommodation. Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of
in villages almost as much as little freeholders,
because of their independence of manner, and when a
lease determined it was never renewed.
Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw
descending upon them the destiny which, no doubt, when
they were among the Olympians of the county, they had
caused to descend many a time, and severely enough,
upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves
were not. So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of
change--alternate and persist in everything under the
sky.
LI
At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the
agricultural world was in a fever of mobility such as
only occurs at that particular date of the year. It is
a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service
during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are
to be now carried out. The labourers--or "work-folk",
as they used to call themselves immemorially till the
other word was introduced from without--who wish to
remain no longer in old places are removing to the new
farms.
These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the
increase here. When Tess's mother was a child the
majority of the field-folk about Marlott had remained
all their lives on one farm, which had been the home
also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly
the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high
pitch. With the younger families it was a pleasant
excitement which might possibly be an advantage. The
Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the
family who saw it from a distance, till by residence
there it became it turn their Egypt also; and so they
changed and changed.
However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible
in village life did not originate entirely in the
agricultural unrest. A depopulation was also going on.
The village had formerly contained, side by side with
the argicultural labourers, an interesting and
better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the
former--the class to which Tess's father and mother had
belonged--and including the carpenter, the smith, the
shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript
workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people who
owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact
of their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or
copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders. But
as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again let
to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not
absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.
Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land
were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of
some starved the trade of others, who were thus obliged
to follow. These families, who had formed the backbone
of the village life in the past who were the
depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek
refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously
designated by statisticians as "the tendency of the
rural population towards the large towns", being really
the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by
machinery.
The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in
this manner considerably curtailed by demolitions,
every house which remained standing was required by the
agriculturist for his work-people. Ever since the
occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow
over Tess's life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent
was not credited) had been tacitly looked on as one
which would have to go when their lease ended, if only
in the interests of morality. It was, indeed, quite
true that the household had not been shining examples
either of temperance, soberness, or chastity. The
father, and even the mother, had got drunk at times,
the younger children seldom had gone to church, and the
eldest daughter had made queer unions. By some means
the village had to be kept pure. So on this, the first
Lady-Day on which the Durbeyfields were expellable, the
house, being roomy, was required for a carter with a
large family; and Widow Joan, her daughters Tess and
'Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham and the younger children, had
to go elsewhere.
On the evening preceding their removal it was getting
dark betimes by reason of a drizzling rain which
blurred the sky. As it was the last night they would
spend in the village which had been their home and
birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham had
gone out to bid some friends goodbye, and Tess was
keeping house till they should return.
She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to
the casement, where an outer pane of rain-water was
sliding down the inner pane of glass. Her eyes rested
on the web of a spider, probably starved long ago,
which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no
flies ever came, and shivered in the slight draught
through the casement. Tess was reflecting on the
position of the household, in which she perceived her
own evil influence. Had she not come home her mother
and the children might probably have been allowed to
stay on as weekly tenants. But she had been observed
almost immediately on her return by some people of
scrupulous character and great influence: they had seen
her idling in the churchyard, restoring as well as she
could with a little trowel a baby's obliterated grave.
By this means they had found that she was living here
again; her mother was scolded for "harbouring" her;
sharp retorts had ensued from Joan, who had
independently offered to leave at once; she had been
taken at her word; and here was the result.
"I ought never to have come home," said Tess to
herself, bitterly.
She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly
at first took note of a man in a white mackintosh whom
she saw riding down the street. Possibly it was owing
to her face being near to the pane that he saw her so
quickly, and directed his horse so close to the
cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the
narrow border for plants growing under the wall. It
was not till he touched the window with his riding-crop
that she observed him. The rain had nearly ceased, and
she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.
"Didn't you see me?" asked d'Urberville.
"I was not attending," she said. "I heard you, I
believe, though I fancied it was a carriage and horses.
I was in a sort of dream."
"Ah! you heard the d'Urberville Coach, perhaps.
You know the legend, I suppose?"
"No. My--somebody was going to tell it me once, but
didn't."
"If you are a genuine d'Urberville I ought not to tell
you either, I suppose. As for me, I'm a sham one, so
it doesn't matter. It is rather dismal. It is that
this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard
by one of d'Urberville blood, and it is held to be of
ill-omen to the one who hears it. It has to do with a
murder, committed by one of the family, centuries ago."
"Now you have begun it, finish it."
"Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted
some beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the
coach in which he was carrying her off, and in the
struggle he killed her--or she killed him--I forget
which. Such is one version of the tale.... I see that
your tubs and buckets are packed. Going away, aren't
you?"
"Yes, tomorrow--Old Lady Day."
"I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it
seems so sudden. Why is it?"
"Father's was the last life on the property, and when
that dropped we had no further right to stay. Though
we might, perhaps, have stayed as weekly tenants--if it
had not been for me."
"What about you?"
"I am not a--proper woman."
D'Urberville's face flushed.
"What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their
dirty souls be burnt to cinders!" he exclaimed in tones
of ironic resentment. "That's why you are going, is it?
Turned out?"
"We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we
should have to go soon, it was best to go now everybody
was moving because there are better chances."
"Where are you going to?"
"Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so
foolish about father's people that she will go there."
"But your mother's family are not fit for lodgings, and
in a little hole of a town like that. Now why not come
to my garden-house at Trantridge? There are hardly
any poultry now, since my mother's death; but there's
the house, as you know it, and the garden. It can be
whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there
quite comfortably; and I will put the children to a
good school. Really I ought to do something for you!"
"But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!" she
declared. "And we can wait there----"
"Wait--what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now
look here, Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in
mind the GROUNDS of your separation, I am quite
positive he will never make it up with you. Now,
though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even
if you won't believe it. Come to this cottage of mine.
We'll get up a regular colony of fowls, and your mother
can attend to them excellently; and the children can go
to school."
Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she
said--
"How do I know that you would do all this? Your views
may change--and then--we should be--my mother would
be--homeless again."
"O no----no. I would guarantee you against such as
that in writing, if necessary. Think it over.
Tess shook her head. But d'Urberville persisted; she
had seldom seen him so determined; he would not take a
negative.
"Please just tell your mother," he said, in emphatic
tones. "It is her business to judge--not yours. I
shall get the house swept out and whitened tomorrow
morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the
evening, so that you can come straight there. Now
mind, I shall expect you."
Tess again shook her head; her throat swelling with
complicated emotion. She could not look up at
d'Urberville.
"I owe you something for the past, you know," he
resumed. "And you cured me, too, of that craze; so I
am glad----"
"I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had
kept the practice which went with it!"
"I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a
little. Tomorrow I shall expect to hear your mother's
goods unloading.... Give me your hand on it now--dear,
beautiful Tess!"
With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a
murmur, and put his hand in at the half-open casement.
With stormy eyes she pulled the stay-bar quickly, and,
in doing so, caught his arm between the casement and
the stone mullion.
"Damnation--you are very cruel!" he said, snatching out
his arm. "No, no!--I know you didn't do it on purpose.
Well I shall expect you, or your mother and children at
least."
"I shall not come--I have plenty of money!" she cried.
"Where?"
"At my father-in-law's, if I ask for it."
"IF you ask for it. But you won't, Tess; I know you;
you'll never ask for it--you'll starve first!"
With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of
the street he met the man with the paint-pot, who asked
him if he had deserted the brethren.
"You go to the devil!" said d'Urberville.
Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden
rebellious sense of injustice caused the region of her
eyes to swell with the rush of hot tears thither. Her
husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like others, dealt
out hard measure to her, surely he had! She had never
before admitted such a thought; but he had surely!
Never in her life--she could swear it from the bottom
of her soul--had she ever intended to do wrong; yet
these hard judgements had come. Whatever her sins,
they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence,
and why should she have been punished so persistently?
She passionately seized the first piece of paper that
came to hand, and scribbled the following lines:
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I
did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget
you. It is all injustice I have received at your
hands! T
She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him
with her epistle, and then again took her listless
place inside the window-panes.
It was just as well to write like that as to write
tenderly. How could he give way to entreaty? The
facts had not changed: there was no new event to alter
his opinion.
It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room.
The two biggest of the younger children had gone out
with their mother; the four smallest, their ages
ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all in
black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling
their own little subjects. Tess at length joined them,
without lighting a candle.
"This is the last night that we shall sleep here,
dears, in the house where we were born," she said
quickly. "We ought to think of it, oughtn't we?"
They all became silent; with the impressibility of
their age they were ready to burst into tears at the
picture of finality she had conjured up, though all the
day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of a
new place. Tess changed the subject.
"Sing to me, dears," she said.
"What shall we sing?"
"Anything you know; I don't mind."
There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first,
in one little tentative note; then a second voice
strengthened it, and a third and a fourth chimed in
unison, with words they had learnt at the
Sunday-school----
Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In Heaven we part no more.
The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of
persons who had long ago settled the question, and
there being no mistake about it, felt that further
thought was not required. With features strained hard
to enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the
centre of the flickering fire, the notes of the
youngest straying over into the pauses of the rest.
Tess turned from them, and went to the window again.
Darkness had now fallen without, but she put her face
to the pane as though to peer into the gloom. It was
really to hide her tears. If she could only believe
what the children were singing; if she were only sure,
how different all would now be; how confidently she
would leave them to Providence and their future
kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do
something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to
not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire
in the poet's lines----
Not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of
degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness
nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best
could only palliate.
In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her
mother with tall 'Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs
Durbeyfield's pattens clicked up to the door, and Tess
opened it.
"I see the tracks of a horse outside the window," said
Joan. "Hev somebody called?"
"No," said Tess.
The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one
murmured----
"Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!"
"He didn't call," said Tess. "He spoke to me in
passing."
"Who was the gentleman?" asked the mother. "Your husband?"
"No. He'll never, never come," answered Tess in stony
hopelessness.
"Then who was it?"
"Oh, you needn't ask. You've seen him before, and so
have I."
"Ah! What did he say?" said Joan curiously.
"I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at
Kingsbere tomorrow--every word."
It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a
consciousness that in a physical sense this man alone
was her husband seemed to weigh on her more and more.
LII
During the small hours of the next morning, while it
was still dark, dwellers near the highways were
conscious of a disturbance of their night's rest by
rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till
daylight--noises as certain to recur in this particular
first week of the month as the voice of the cuckoo in
the third week of the same. They were the
preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of
the empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the
migrating families; for it was always by the vehicle of
the farmer who required his services that the hired man
was conveyed to his destination. That this might be
accomplished within the day was the explanation of the
reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim
of the carters being to reach the door of the outgoing
households by six o'clock, when the loading of their
movables at once began.
But to Tess and her mother's household no such anxious
farmer sent his team. They were only women; they were
not regular labourers; they were not particularly
required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at
their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.
It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the
window that morning, to find that though the weather
was windy and louring, it did not rain, and that the
waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre which
removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp
bedding, damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train
of ills.
Her mother, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but
the younger children were let sleep on. The four
breakfasted by the thin light, and the "house-ridding"
was taken in hand.
It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly
neighbour or two assisting. When the large articles of
furniture had been packed in position a circular nest
was made of the beds and bedding, in which Joan
Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through
the journey. After loading there was a long delay
before the horses were brought, these having been
unharnessed during the ridding; but at length, about
two o'clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot
swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield
and family at the top, the matron having in her lap, to
prevent injury to its works, the head of the clock,
which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon, struck
one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the
next eldest girl walked alongside till they were out of
the village.
They had called on a few neighbours that morning and
the previous evening, and some came to see them off,
all wishing them well, though, in their secret hearts,
hardly expecting welfare possible to such a family,
harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except
themselves. Soon the equipage began to ascend to
higher ground, and the wind grew keener with the change
of level and soil.
The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield
waggon met many other waggons with families on the
summit of the load, which was built on a wellnigh
unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the
rural labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The
groundwork of the arrangement was the family dresser,
which, with its shining handles, and finger-marks, and
domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly in
front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect
and natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant
that they were bound to carry reverently.
Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some
were stopping at the doors of wayside inns; where, in
due time, the Durbeyfield menagerie also drew up to
bait horses and refresh the travellers.
During the halt Tess's eyes fell upon a three-pint blue
mug, which was ascending and descending through the air
to and from the feminine section of a household,
sitting on the summit of a load that had also drawn up
at a little distance from the same inn. She followed
one of the mug's journeys upward, and perceived it to
be clasped by hands whose owner she well knew. Tess
went towards the waggon.
"Marian and Izz!" she cried to the girls, for it was
they, sitting with the moving family at whose house
they had lodged. "Are you house-ridding today, like
everybody else?"
They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for
them at Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost
without notice, leaving Groby to prosecute them if he
chose. They told Tess their destination, and Tess told
them hers.
Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice.
"Do you know that the gentleman who follows 'ee--you'll
guess who I mean--came to ask for 'ee at Flintcomb
after you had gone? We didn't tell'n where you was,
knowing you wouldn't wish to see him."
"Ah--but I did see him!" Tess murmured. "He found me."
"And do he know where you be going?"
"I think so."
"Husband come back?"
"No."
She bade her acquaintance goodbye--for the respective
carters had now come out from the inn--and the two
waggons resumed their journey in opposite directions;
the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the
ploughman's family with whom they had thrown in their
lot, being brightly painted, and drawn by three
powerful horses with shining brass ornaments on their
harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield and
her family rode was a creaking erection that would
scarcely bear the weight of the superincumbent load;
one which had known no paint since it was made, and
drawn by two horses only. The contrast well marked the
difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer
and conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one's
coming.
The distance was great--too great for a day's
journey--and it was with the utmost difficulty that the
horses performed it. Though they had started so early
it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned the
flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland
called Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and
breathe themselves Tess looked around. Under the hill,
and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of
their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors
of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness:
Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which
could be considered the d'Urbervilles' home, since they
had resided there for full five hundred years. A man
could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards
them, and when he beheld the nature of their
waggon-load he quickened his steps.
"You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?"
he said to Tess's mother, who had descended to walk the
remainder of the way.
She nodded. "Though widow of the late Sir John
d'Urberville, poor nobleman, if I cared for my rights;
and returning to the domain of his forefathers."
"Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be
Mrs Durbeyfield, I am sent to tell 'ee that the rooms
you wanted be let. We didn't know that you was coming
till we got your letter this morning--when 'twas too
late. But no doubt you can get other lodgings
somewhere."
The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become
ash-pale at his intelligence. Her mother looked
hopelessly at fault. "What shall we do now, Tess?" she
said bitterly. "Here's a welcome to your ancestors'
lands! However, let's try further."
They moved on into the town, and tried with all their
might, Tess remaining with the waggon to take care of
the children whilst her mother and 'Liza-Lu made
inquiries. At the last return of Joan to the vehicle,
an hour later, when her search for accommodation had
still been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the
goods must be unloaded, as the horses were half-dead,
and he was bound to return part of the way at least
that night.
"Very well--unload it here," said Joan recklessly.
"I'll get shelter somewhere."
The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a
spot screened from view, and the driver, nothing loth,
soon hauled down the poor heap of household goods.
This done she paid him, reducing herself to almost her
last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them,
only too glad to get out of further dealings with such
a family. It was a dry night, and he guessed that they
would come to no harm.
Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The
cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously
upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried
herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles
of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all
been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case,
all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor
articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless
exposure for which they were never made. Round about
were deparked hills and slopes--now cut up into little
paddocks--and the green foundations that showed where
the d'Urberville mansion once had stood; also an
outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always
belonged to the estate. Hard by, the aisle of the
church called the d'Urberville Aisle looked on
imperturbably.
"Isn't your family vault your own freehold?" said
Tess's mother, as she returned from a reconnoitre of
the church and graveyard. "Why, of course 'tis, and
that's where we will camp, girls, till the place of
your ancestors finds us a roof! Now, Tess and 'Liza
and Abraham, you help me. We'll make a nest for these
children, and then we'll have another look round."
Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an
hour the old four-post bedstead was dissociated from
the heap of goods, and erected under the south wall of
the church, the part of the building know as the
d'Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay.
Over the tester of the bedstead was a beautiful
traceried window, of many lights, its date being the
fifteenth century. It was called the d'Urberville
Window, and in the upper part could be discerned
heraldic emblems like those on Durbeyfield's old seal
and spoon.
Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an
excellent tent of it, and put the smaller children
inside. "If it comes to the worst we can sleep there
too, for one night," she said. "But let us try further
on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess,
what's the use of your playing at marrying gentlemen,
if it leaves us like this!"
Accompanied by 'Liza-Lu and the boy she again ascended
the little lane which secluded the church from the
townlet. As soon as they got into the street they
beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. "Ah--
I'm looking for you!" he said, riding up to them.
"This is indeed a family gathering on the historic spot!"
It was Alec d'Urberville. "Where is Tess?" he asked.
Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily
signified the direction of the church, and went on,
d'Urberville saying that he would see them again, in
case they should be still unsuccessful in their search
for shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had
gone d'Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after
came out on foot.
In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the
bedstead, remained talking with them awhile, till,
seeing that no more could be done to make them
comfortable just then, she walked about the churchyard,
now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of
nightfall. The door of the church was unfastened, and
she entered it for the first time in her life.
Within the window under which the bedstead stood were
the tombs of the family, covering in their dates
several centuries. They were canopied, alter-shaped,
and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken;
their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes
remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the
reminders that she had ever received that her people
were socially extinct there was none so forcible as
this spoliation.
She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:
OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE
Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she
knew that this was the door of her ancestral sepulchre,
and that the tall knights of whom her father had
chanted in his cups lay inside.
She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an
altertomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a
recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not noticed it
before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an
odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew
close to it she discovered all in a moment that the
figure was a living person; and the shock to her sense
of not having been alone was so violent that she was
quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not,
however, till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in
the form.
He leapt off the slab and supported her.
"I saw you come in," he said smiling, "and got up there
not to interrupt your meditations. A family gathering,
is it not, with these old fellows under us here?
Listen."
He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor;
whereupon there arose a hollow echo from below.
"That shook them a bit, I'll warrant!" he continued.
"And you thought I was the mere stone reproduction of
one of them. But no. The old order changeth. The
little finger of the sham d'Urberville can do more for
you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath....
Now command me. What shall I do?"
"Go away!" she murmured.
"I will--I'll look for your mother," said he blandly.
But in passing her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be
civil yet!"
When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the
vaults, and said--
"Why am I on the wrong side of this door!"
In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed
onward with the chattels of the ploughman in the
direction of their land of Canaan--the Egypt of some
other family who had left it only that morning. But
the girls did not for a long time think of where they
were going. Their talk was of Angel Clare and Tess,
and Tess's persistent lover, whose connection with her
previous history they had partly heard and partly
guessed ere this.
"'Tisn't as though she had never known him afore," said
Marian. "His having won her once makes all the
difference in the world. 'Twould be a thousand pities
if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can never
be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to
her, and not try to mend this quarrel? If he could
on'y know what straits she's put to, and what's
hovering round, he might come to take care of his own."
"Could we let him know?"
They thought of this all the way to their destination;
but the bustle of re-establishment in their new place
took up all their attention then. But when they were
settled, a month later, they heard of Clare's
approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more
of Tess. Upon that, agitated anew by their attachment
to him, yet honourably disposed to her, Marian uncorked
the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few lines were
concocted between the two girls.
HONOUR'D SIR--Look to your Wife if you do love her as
much as she do love you. For she is sore put to by an
Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir, there is one near
her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be try'd
beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear
away a Stone--ay, more--a Diamond.
FROM TWO WELL-WISHERS
This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place
they had ever heard him to be connected with, Emminster
Vicarage; after which they continued in a mood of
emotional exaltation at their own generosity, which
made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the
same time.
END OF PHASE THE SIXTH
Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment
LIII
It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two
customary candles were burning under their green shades
in the Vicar's study, but he had not been sitting
there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire
which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the
spring, and went out again; sometimes pausing at the
front door, going on to the drawing-room, then
returning again to the front door.
It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside,
there was still light enough without to see with
distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been sitting in the
drawing-room, followed him hither.
"Plenty of time yet," said the Vicar. "He doesn't
reach Chalk-Newton till six, even if the train should
be punctual, and ten miles of country-road, five of
them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in a
hurry by our old horse."
"But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear."
"Years ago."
Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that
this was only waste of breath, the one essential being
simply to wait.
At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the
old pony-chaise appeared indeed outside the railings.
They saw alight therefrom a form which they affected to
recognize, but would actually have passed by in the
street without identifying had he not got out of their
carriage at the particular moment when a particular
person was due.
Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door,
and her husband came more slowly after her.
The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their
anxious faces in the doorway and the gleam of the west
in their spectacles because they confronted the last
rays of day; but they could only see his shape against
the light.
"O, my boy, my boy--home again at last!" cried Mrs
Clare, who cared no more at that moment for the stains
of heterodoxy which has caused all this separation than
for the dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed,
among the most faithful adherents of the truth,
believes the promises and threats of the Word in the
sense in which she believes in her own children, or
would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed
against their happiness? As soon as they reached the
room where the candles were lighted she looked at his
face.
"O, it is not Angel--not my son--the Angel who went
away!" she cried in all the irony of sorrow, as she
turned herself aside.
His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was
that figure from its former contours by worry and the
bad season that Clare had experienced, in the climate
to which he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion
to the mockery of events at home. You could see the
skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind
the skeleton. He matched Crivelli's dead CHRISTUS.
His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue, and the light
in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines
of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in
his face twenty years before their time.
"I was ill over there, you know," he said. "I am all
right now."
As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs
seemed to give way, and he suddenly sat down to save
himself from falling. It was only a slight attack of
faintness, resulting from the tedious day's journey,
and the excitement of arrival.
"Has any letter come for me lately?" he asked.
"I received the last you sent on by the merest chance,
and after considerable delay through being inland;
or I might have come sooner."
"It was from your wife, we supposed?"
"It was."
Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it
on to him, knowing he would start for home so soon.
He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much
disturbed to read in Tess's handwriting the sentiments
expressed in her last hurried scrawl to him.
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I
did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget
you. It is all injustice I have received at your
hands. -- T
"It is quite true!" said Angel, throwing down the
letter. "Perhaps she will never be reconciled to me!"
"Don't, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the
soil!" said his mother.
"Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the
soil. I wish she were so in the sense you mean; but
let me now explain to you what I have never explained
before, that her father is a descendant in the male
line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good
many others who lead obscure agricultural lives in our
villages, and are dubbed 'sons of the soil.'"
He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling
exceedingly unwell, he remained in his room pondering.
The circumstances amid which he had left Tess were such
that though, while on the south of the Equator and just
in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the
easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms
the moment he chose to forgive her, now that he had
arrived it was not so easy as it had seemed. She was
passionate, and her present letter, showing that her
estimate of him had changed under his delay--too justly
changed, he sadly owned,--made him ask himself if it
would be wise to confront her unannounced in the
presence of her parents. Supposing that her love had
indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of
separation, a sudden meeting might lead to bitter
words.
Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare
Tess and her family by sending a line to Marlott
announcing his return, and his hope that she was still
living with them there, as he had arranged for her to
do when he left England. He despatched the inquiry
that very day, and before the week was out there came a
short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield which did not remove
his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though to
his surprise it was not written from Marlott.
SIR
J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away
from me at present, and J am not sure when she will
return, but J will let you know as Soon as she do.
J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where she is
temperly biding. J should say that me and my Family
have left Marlott for some Time.----
Yours, J. DURBEYFIELD
It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at
least apparently well that her mother's stiff reticence
as to her whereabouts did not long distress him. They
were all angry with him, evidently. He would wait till
Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess's return,
which her letter implied to be soon. He deserved no
more. His had been a love "which alters when it
alteration finds". He had undergone some strange
experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual
Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia
in a corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman
taken and set in the midst as one deserving to be
stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen;
and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess
constructively rather than biographically, by the will
rather than by the deed?
A day or two passed while he waited at his father's
house for the promised second note from Joan
Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a little more
strength. The strength showed signs of coming back,
but there was no sign of Joan's letter. Then he hunted
up the old letter sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess
had written from Flintcomb-Ash, and re-read it. The
sentences touched him now as much as when he had first
perused them.
I must cry to you in my trouble--I have no one else....
I think I must die if you do not come soon, or tell me
to come to you.... Please, please, not to be just--only
a little kind to me! ... If you would come, I could die
in your arms! I would be well content to do that if so
be you had forgiven me! ... If you will send me one
little line and say, "I AM COMING SOON," I will bide
on, Angel--O so cheerfully! ... Think how it do hurt my
heart not to see you ever--ever! Ah, if I could only
make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day
as mine does every day and all day long. It might lead
you to show pity to your poor lonely one....I would be
content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if
I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near
you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.
... I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or
under the earth, to meet you, my own dear! Come to
me--come to me, and save me from what threatens me.
Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her
more recent and severer regard of him; but would go and
find her immediately. He asked his father if she had
applied for any money during his absence. His father
returned a negative, and then for the first time it
occurred to Angel that her pride had stood in her way,
and that she had suffered privation. From his remarks
his parents now gathered the real reason of the
separation; and their Christianity was such that,
reprobates being their especial care, the tenderness
towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity, even her
poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited by
her sin.
Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles
for his journey he glanced over a poor plain missive
also lately come to hand--the one from Marian and Izz
Huett, beginning----
"HONOUR'D SIR----Look to your Wife if you do love her
as much as she do love you," and signed, "FROM TWO
WELL-WISHERS."
LIV
In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house,
whence his mother watched his thin figure as it
disappeared into the street. He had declined to borrow
his father's old mare, well knowing of its necessity to
the household. He went to the inn, where he hired a
trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing. In
a very few minutes after he was driving up the hill out
of the town which, three or four months earlier in the
year, Tess had descended with such hopes and ascended
with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and
trees purple with buds; but he was looking at other
things, and only recalled himself to the scene
sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In
something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted
the south of the King's Hintock estates and ascended to
the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand, the unholy
stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec
d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the
strange oath that she would never wilfully tempt him
again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the
preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the banks,
young green nettles of the present spring growing from
their roots.
Thence he went along the verge of the upland
overhanging the other Hintocks, and, turning to the
right, plunged into the bracing calcareous region of
Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had written
to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to
be the place of sojourn referred to by her mother.
Here, of course, he did not find her; and what added to
his depression was the discovery that no "Mrs Clare"
had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by the
farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough
by her Christian name. His name she had obviously
never used during their separation, and her dignified
sense of their total severance was shown not much less
by this abstention than by the hardships she had chosen
to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time)
rather than apply to his father for more funds.
From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had
gone, without due notice, to the home of her parents on
the other side of Blackmoor, and it therefore became
necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had told him
she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously
reticent as to her actual address, and the only course
was to go to Marlott and inquire for it. The farmer
who had been so churlish with Tess was quite
smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man
to drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in
being sent back to Emminster; for the limit of a day's
journey with that horse was reached.
Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle
for a further distance than to the outskirts of the
Vale, and, sending it back with the man who had driven
him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered on foot
the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's
birth. It was as yet too early in the year for much
colour to appear in the gardens and foliage; the
so-called spring was but winter overlaid with a thin
coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his
expectations.
The house in which Tess had passed the years of her
childhood was now inhabited by another family who had
never known her. The new residents were in the garden,
taking as much interest in their own doings as if the
homestead had never passed its primal time in
conjunction with the histories of others, beside which
the histories of these were but as a tale told by an
idiot. They walked about the garden paths with
thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost,
bringing their actions at every moment in jarring
collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as
though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit
intenser in story than now. Even the spring birds sang
over their heads as if they thought there was nobody
missing in particular.
On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even
the name of their predecessors was a failing memory,
Clare learned that John Durbeyfield was dead; that his
widow and children had left Marlott, declaring that
they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of
doing so had gone on to another place they mentioned.
By this time Clare abhorred the house for ceasing to
contain Tess, and hastened away from its hated presence
without once looking back.
His way was by the field in which he had first beheld
her at the dance. It was as bad as the house--even
worse. He passed on through the churchyard, where,
amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a somewhat
superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:
In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d'Urberville, of
the once powerful family of that Name, and Direct
Descendant through an illustrious Line from Sir Pagan
d'Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror. Died
March 10th, 18--
HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.
Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare
standing there, and drew nigh. "Ah, sir, now that's a
man who didn't want to lie here, but wished to be
carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be."
"And why didn't they respect his wish?"
"Oh--no money. Bless your soul, sir, why--there,
I wouldn't wish to say it everywhere, but--even this
headstone, for all the flourish wrote upon en, is not
paid for."
"Ah, who put it up?"
The man told the name of a mason in the village, and,
on leaving the churchyard, Clare called at the mason's
house. He found that the statement was true, and paid
the bill. This done he turned in the direction of the
migrants.
The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt
such a strong desire for isolation that at first he
would neither hire a conveyance nor go to a circuitous
line of railway by which he might eventually reach the
place. At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but
the way was such that he did not enter Joan's place
till about seven o'clock in the evening, having
traversed a distance of over twenty miles since leaving
Marlott. The village being small he had little
difficulty in finding Mrs Durbeyfield's tenement, which
was a house in a walled garden, remote from the main
road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old
furniture as best she could. It was plain that for
some reason or other she had not wished him to visit
her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an
intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the light
from the evening sky fell upon her face.
This was the first time that Clare had ever met her,
but he was too preoccupied to observe more than that
she was still a handsome woman, in the garb of a
respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that he
was Tess's husband, and his object in coming there, and
he did it awkwardly enough. "I want to see her at
once," he added. "You said you would write to me
again, but you have not done so."
"Because she've not come home," said Joan.
"Do you know if she is well?"
"I don't. But you ought to, sir," said she.
"I admit it. Where is she staying?"
From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed
her embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of
her cheek.
"I--don't know exactly where she is staying," she
answered. "She was--but----"
"Where was she?"
"Well, she is not there now."
In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger
children had by this time crept to the door, where,
pulling at his mother's skirts, the youngest
murmured----
"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"
"He has married her," Joan whispered. "Go inside."
Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked----
"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her?
If not, of course----"
"I don't think she would."
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure she wouldn't."
He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's
tender letter.
"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately.
"I know her better than you do."
"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known
her."
"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in
kindness to a lonely wretched man!" Tess's mother again
restlessly swept her cheek with her vertical hand, and
seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is a low
voice----
"She is at Sandbourne."
"Ah--where there? Sandbourne has become a large place,
they say."
"I don't know more particularly than I have said--
Sandbourne. For myself, I was never there."
It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and
he pressed her no further.
"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.
"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided
for."
Without entering the house Clare turned away. There
was a station three miles ahead, and paying off his
coachman, he walked thither. The last train to
Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare on its
wheels.
LV
At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at
one of the hotels and telegraphed his address to his
father immediately on his arrival, he walked out into
the streets of Sandbourne. It was too late to call on
or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed
his purpose till the morning. But he could not retire
to rest just yet.
This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and
its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines,
its promenades, and its covered gardens, was, to Angel
Clare, like a fairy place suddenly created by the
stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.
An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste
was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny
piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this
pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the
space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity
of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an
undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been
turned there since the days of the Caesars. Yet the
exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd;
and had drawn hither Tess.
By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding
way of this new world in an old one, and could discern
between the trees and against the stars the lofty
roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
fanciful residences of which the place was composed.
It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean
lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now
by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.
The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it
murmured, and he thought it was the pines; the pines
murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought
they were the sea.
Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young
wife, amidst all this wealth and fashion? The more he
pondered the more was he puzzled. Were there any cows
to milk here? There certainly were no fields to till.
She was most probably engaged to do something in one of
these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at
the chamber-windows and their lights going out one by
one; and wondered which of them might be hers.
Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o'clock
he entered and went to bed. Before putting out his
light he re-read Tess's impassioned letter. Sleep,
however, he could not--so near her, yet so far from
her--and he continually lifted the window-blind and
regarded the backs of the opposite houses, and wondered
behind which of the sashes she reposed at that moment.
He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the
morning he arose at seven, and shortly after went out,
taking the direction of the chief post-office. At the
door he met an intelligent postman coming out with
letters for the morning delivery.
"Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?" asked Angel.
The postman shook his head.
Then, remembering that she would have been likely to
continue the use of her maiden name, Clare said----
"Of a Miss Durbeyfield?"
"Durbeyfield?"
This also was strange to the postman addressed.
"There's visitors coming and going every day, as you
know, sir," he said; "and without the name of the house
'tis impossible to find 'em."
One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the
name was repeated to him.
"I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name
of d'Urberville at The Herons," said the second.
"That's it!" cried Clare, pleased to think that she has
reverted to the real pronunciation. "What place is The
Herons?"
"A stylish lodging-house. 'Tis all lodging-houses
here, bless 'ee."
Clare received directions how to find the house, and
hastened thither, arriving with the milkman. The
Herons, though an ordinary villa, stood in its own
grounds, and was certainly the last place in which one
would have expected to find lodgings, so private was
its appearance. If poor Tess was a servant here, as he
feared, she would go to the back-door to that milkman,
and he was inclined to go thither also. However, in
his doubts he turned to the front, and rang.
The hour being early the landlady herself opened the
door. Clare inquired for Teresa d'Urberville or
Durbeyfield.
"Mrs d'Urberville?"
"Yes."
Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt
glad, even though she had not adopted his name.
"Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to
see her?"
"It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?"
"Angel."
"Mr Angel?"
"No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She'll
understand."
"I'll see if she is awake."
He was shown into the front room--the dining-room--and
looked out through the spring curtains at the little
lawn, and the rhododendrons and other shrubs upon it.
Obviously her position was by no means so bad as he had
feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow
have claimed and sold the jewels to attain it. He did
not blame her for one moment. Soon his sharpened ear
detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his heart
thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm.
"Dear me! what will she think of me, so altered as I
am!" he said to himself; and the door opened.
Tess appeared on the threshold--not at all as he had
expected to see her--bewilderingly otherwise, indeed.
Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened,
rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely
wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white,
embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore
slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of a frill
of down, and her well-remembered cable of dark-brown
hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of
her head and partly hanging on her shoulder--the
evident result of haste.
He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to
his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still
in the opening of the doorway. Mere yellow skeleton
that he was now he felt the contrast between them, and
thought his appearance distasteful to her.
"Tess!" he said huskily, "can you forgive me for going
away? Can't you--come to me? How do you get to
be--like this?"
"It is too late," said she, her voice sounding hard
through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally.
"I did not think rightly of you--I did not see you as
you were!" he continued to plead. "I have learnt to
since, dearest Tessy mine!"
"Too late, too late!" she said, waving her hand in the
impatience of a person whose tortures cause every
instant to seem an hour. "Don't come close to me,
Angel! No--you must not. Keep away."
"But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have
been so pulled down by illness? You are not so
fickle--I am come on purpose for you--my mother and
father will welcome you now!"
"Yes--O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late."
She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who
tries to move away, but cannot. "Don't you know
all--don't you know it? Yet how do you come here if
you do not know?"
"I inquired here and there, and I found the way."
"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones
suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos. "But you did
not come! And I wrote to you, and you did not come!
He kept on saying you would never come any more, and
that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me,
and to mother, and to all of us after father's death.
He----"
"I don't understand."
"He has won me back to him."
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her
meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his
glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy,
were now white and more delicate.
She continued----
"He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a
lie--that you would not come again; and you HAVE come!
These clothes are what he's put upon me: I didn't care
what he did wi' me! But--will you go away, Angel,
please, and never come any more?"
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of
their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both
seemed to implore something to shelter them from
reality.
"Ah--it is my fault!" said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as
silence. But he had a vague consciousness of one
thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that
his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize
the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like
a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated
from its living will.
A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone.
His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood
concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after
he found himself in the street, walking along he did
not know whither.
LVI
Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The
Herons, and owner of all the handsome furniture, was
not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long
and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon
Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own
sake, and apart from possible lodgers' pockets.
Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her
well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville, as she
deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of
time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity
which had been stifled down as useless save in its
bearings to the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway,
without entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who
stood within the partly-closed door of her own
sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear
fragments of the conversation--if conversation it could
be called--between those two wretched souls. She heard
Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the
departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door
behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut,
and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her
apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed,
Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for
some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood
at the door of the front room--a drawing-room,
connected with the room immediately behind it (which
was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.
This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks's best
apartments, had been taken by the week by the
d'Urbervilles. The back room was now in silence; but
from the drawing-room there came sounds.
All that she could at first distinguish of them was one
syllable, continually repeated in a low note of
moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some
Ixionian wheel----
"O--O--O!"
Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again----
"O--O--O!"
The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small
space of the room inside was visible, but within that
space came a corner of the breakfast table, which was
already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside.
Over the seat of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her
posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands
were clasped over her head, the skirts of her
dressing-gown and the embroidery of her night-gown
flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless
feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded
upon the carpet. It was from her lips that came the
murmur of unspeakable despair.
Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom----
"What's a matter?"
She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a
soliloquy rather than an exclamation, and a dirge
rather than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks could only catch a
portion:
"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ...
and I did not know it! ... And you had used your cruel
persuasion upon me ... you did not stop using
it--no--you did not stop! My little sisters and
brothers and my mother's needs--they were the things
you moved me by ... and you said my husband would never
come back--never; and you taunted me, and said what a
simpleton I was to expect him! ... And at last I
believed you and gave way! ... And then he came back!
Now he is gone. Gone a second time, and I have lost
him now for ever ... and he will not love me the
littlest bit ever any more--only hate me! ... O yes,
I have lost him now--again because of--you!" In writhing,
with her head on the chair, she turned her face towards
the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it;
and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her
teeth upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed
eyes stuck in wet tags to her cheeks. She continued:
"And he is dying--he looks as if he is dying! ... And
my sin will kill him and not kill me! ... O, you have
torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed
you in pity not to make me be again! ... My own true
husband will never, never--O God--I can't bear this!--
I cannot!"
There were more and sharper words from the man; then a
sudden rustle; she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks,
thinking that the speaker was coming to rush out of the
door, hastily retreated down the stairs.
She need not have done so, however, for the door of the
sitting-room was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it
unsafe to watch on the landing again, and entered her
own parlour below.
She could hear nothing through the floor, although she
listened intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to
finish her interrupted breakfast. Coming up presently
to the front room on the ground floor she took up some
sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might
take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself,
to discover what was the matter if possible. Overhead,
as she sat, she could now hear the floorboards slightly
creak, as if some one were walking about, and presently
the movement was explained by the rustle of garments
against the banisters, the opening and the closing of
the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the
gate on her way into the street. She was fully dressed
now in the walking costume of a well-to-do young lady
in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that
over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.
Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of
farewell, temporary or otherwise, between her tenants
at the door above. They might have quarrelled, or Mr
d'Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an
early riser.
She went into the back room which was more especially
her own apartment, and continued her sewing there. The
lady lodger did not return, nor did the gentleman ring
his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the delay, and on what
probable relation the visitor who had called so early
bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant
back in her chair.
As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the
ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle
of its white surface which she had never noticed there
before. It was about the size of a wafer when she
first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the
palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it
was red. The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet
blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace
of hearts.
Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got
upon the table, and touched the spot in the ceiling
with her fingers. It was damp, and she fancied that it
was a blood stain.
Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and
went upstairs, intending to enter the room overhead,
which was the bedchamber at the back of the
drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now
become, she could not bring herself to attempt the
handle. She listened. The dead silence within was
broken only by a regular beat.
Drip, drip, drip.
Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door,
and ran into the street. A man she knew, one of the
workmen employed at an adjoining villa, was passing by,
and she begged him to come in and go upstairs with her;
she feared something had happened to one of her
lodgers. The workman assented, and followed her to the
landing.
She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back
for him to pass in, entering herself behind him. The
room was empty; the breakfast--a substantial repast of
coffee, eggs, and a cold ham--lay spread upon the table
untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that
the carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to go
through the folding-doors into the adjoining room.
He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came
back almost instantly with a rigid face. "My good God,
the gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt
with a knife--a lot of blood had run down upon the
floor!"
The alarm was soon given, and the house which had
lately been so quiet resounded with the tramp of many
footsteps, a surgeon among the rest. The wound was
small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart
of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead,
as if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the
blow. In a quarter of an hour the news that a
gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had
been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street
and villa of the popular watering-place.
LVII
Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along
the way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel,
sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness.
He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a
sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which he took
his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had
brought with him, and went out.
At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to
him--a few words from his mother, stating that they
were glad to know his address, and informing him that
his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted
by Mercy Chant.
Clare crumpled up the paper, and followed the route to
the station; reaching it, he found that there would be
no train leaving for an hour and more. He sat down to
wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour felt that
he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and
numbed, he had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to
get out of a town which had been the scene of such an
experience, and turned to walk to the first station
onward, and let the train pick him up there.
The highway that he followed was open, and at a little
distance dipped into a valley, across which it could be
seen running from edge to edge. He had traversed the
greater part of this depression, and was climbing the
western acclivity, when, pausing for breath, he
unconsciously looked back. Why he did so he could not
say, but something seemed to impel him to the act. The
tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as
far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot
intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.
It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a
dim sense that somebody was trying to overtake him.
The form descending the incline was a woman's, yet so
entirely was his mind blinded to the idea of his wife's
following him that even when she came nearer he did not
recognize her under the totally changed attire in which
he now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close
that he could believe her to be Tess.
"I saw you--turn away from the station--just before I
got there--and I have been following you all this way!"
She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every
muscle, that he did not ask her a single question, but
seizing her hand, and pulling it within his arm, he led
her along. To avoid meeting any possible wayfarers he
left the high road, and took a footpath under some
fir-trees. When they were deep among the moaning
boughs he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.
"Angel," she said, as if waiting for this, "do you know
what I have been running after you for? To tell you
that I have killed him!" A pitiful white smile lit her
face as she spoke.
"What!" said he, thinking from the strangeness of her
manner that she was in some delirium.
"I have done it--I don't know how," she continued.
"Still, I owed it to you, and to myself, Angel. I
feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my
glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set
for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through
me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he
can never do it any more. I never loved him at all,
Angel, as I loved you. You know it, don't you? You
believe it? You didn't come back to me, and I was
obliged to go back to him. Why did you go away--why
did you--when I loved you so? I can't think why you
did it. But I don't blame you; only, Angel, will you
forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him?
I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to
forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a
shining light that I should get you back that way. I
could not bear the loss of you any longer--you don't
know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving
me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do,
now I have killed him!"
"I do love you, Tess--O, I do--it is all come back!"
he said, tightening his arms round her with fervid
pressure. "But how do you mean--you have killed him?"
"I mean that I have," she murmured in a reverie.
"What, bodily? Is he dead?"
"Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly
taunted me; and called you by a foul name; and then I
did it. My heart could not bear it. He had nagged me
about you before. And then I dressed myself and came
away to find you."
By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had
faintly attempted, at least, what she said she had
done; and his horror at her impulse was mixed with
amazement at the strength of her affection for himself,
and at the strangeness of its quality, which had
apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether.
Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct she seemed
at last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon
his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what
obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to
this aberration--if it were an aberration. There
momentarily flashed through his mind that the family
tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen
because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these
things. As well as his confused and excited ideas
could reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad
grief of which she spoke her mind had lost its balance,
and plunged her into this abyss.
It was very terrible if true; if a temporary
hallucination, sad. But, anyhow, here was this
deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond woman,
clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be
anything to her but a protector. He saw that for him
to be otherwise was not, in her mind, within the region
of the possible. Tenderness was absolutely dominant in
Clare at last. He kissed her endlessly with his white
lips, and held her hand, and said--
"I will not desert you! I will protect you by every
means in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have
done or not have done!"
They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her
head every now and then to look at him. Worn and
unhandsome as he had become, it was plain that she did
not discern the least fault in his appearance. To her
he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally
and mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo
even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to
her affectionate regard on this day no less than when
she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the
one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had
believed in her as pure!
With an instinct as to possibilities he did not now, as
he had intended, make for the first station beyond the
town, but plunged still farther under the firs, which
here abounded for miles. Each clasping the other round
the waist they promenaded over the dry bed of
fir-needles, thrown into a vague intoxicating
atmosphere at the consciousness of being together at
last, with no living soul between them; ignoring that
there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for several
miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her,
and said, timidly----
"Are we going anywhere in particular?"
"I don't know, dearest. Why?"
"I don't know."
"Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it
is evening find lodgings somewhere or other--in a
lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you walk well, Tessy?"
"O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm
round me!"
Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon
they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and
following obscure paths tending more or less northward.
But there was an unpractical vagueness in their
movements throughout the day; neither one of them
seemed to consider any question of effectual escape,
disguise, or long concealment. Their every idea was
temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two
children.
At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess
would have entered it with him to get something to eat,
but he persuaded her to remain among the trees and
bushes of this half-woodland, half-moorland part of the
country, till he should come back. Her clothes were of
recent fashion; even the ivory-handled parasol that she
carried was of a shape unknown in the retired spot to
which they had now wandered; and the cut of such
articles would have attracted attention in the settle
of a tavern. He soon returned, with food enough for
half-a-dozen people and two bottles of wine--enough to
last them for a day or more, should any emergency
arise.
They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their
meal. Between one and two o'clock they packed up the
remainder and went on again.
"I feel strong enough to walk any distance," said she.
"I think we may as well steer in a general way towards
the interior of the country, where we can hide for a
time, and are less likely to be looked for than
anywhere near the coast," Clare remarked. "Later on,
when they have forgotten us, we can make for some
port."
She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him
more tightly, and straight inland they went. Though
the season was an English May the weather was serenely
bright, and during the afternoon it was quite warm.
Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath
had taken them into the depths of the New Forest, and
towards evening, turning the corner of a lane, they
perceived behind a brook and bridge a large board on
which was painted in white letters, "This desirable
Mansion to be Let Furnished"; particulars following,
with directions to apply to some London agents. Passing
through the gate they could see the house, an old brick
building of regular design and large accommodation.
"I know it," said Clare. "It is Bramshurst Court. You
can see that it is shut up, and grass is growing on the
drive."
"Some of the windows are open," said Tess.
"Just to air the rooms, I suppose."
"All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our
heads!"
"You are getting tired, my Tess!" he said. "We'll stop
soon." And kissing her sad mouth he again led her
onwards.
He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a
dozen or fifteen miles, and it became necessary to
consider what they should do for rest. They looked
from afar at isolated cottages and little inns, and
were inclined to approach one of the latter, when their
hearts failed them, and they sheered off. At length
their gait dragged, and they stood still.
"Could we sleep under the trees?" she asked.
He thought the season insufficiently advanced.
"I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,"
he said. "Let us go back towards it again."
They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour
before they stood without the entrance-gate as earlier.
He then requested her to stay where she was, whilst he
went to see who was within.
She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and
Clare crept towards the house. His absence lasted some
considerable time, and when he returned Tess was wildly
anxious, not for herself, but for him. He had found
out from a boy that there was only an old woman in
charge as caretaker, and she only came there on fine
days, from the hamlet near, to open and shut the
windows. She would come to shut them at sunset.
"Now, we can get in through one of the lower windows,
and rest there," said he.
Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main
front, whose shuttered windows, like sightless
eyeballs, excluded the possibility of watchers. The
door was reached a few steps further, and one of the
windows beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and
pulled Tess in after him.
Except the hall the rooms were all in darkness, and
they ascended the staircase. Up here also the shutters
were tightly closed, the ventilation being
perfunctorily done, for this day at least, by opening
the hall-window in front and an upper window behind.
Clare unlatched the door of a large chamber, felt his
way across it, and parted the shutters to the width of
two or three inches. A shaft of dazzling sunlight
glanced into the room, revealing heavy, old-fashioned
furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous
four-post bedstead, along the head of which were carved
running figures, apparently Atalanta's race.
"Rest at last!" said he, setting down his bag and the
parcel of viands.
They remained in great quietness till the caretaker
should have come to shut the windows: as a precaution,
putting themselves in total darkness by barring the
shutters as before, lest the woman should open the door
of their chamber for any casual reason. Between six
and seven o'clock she came, but did not approach the
wing they were in. They heard her close the windows,
fasten them, lock the door, and go away. Then Clare
again stole a chink of light from the window, and they
shared another meal, till by-and-by they were enveloped
in the shades of night which they had no candle to
disperse.
LVIII
The night was strangely solemn and still. In the small
hours she whispered to him the whole story of how he
had walked in his sleep with her in his arms across the
Froom stream, at the imminent risk of both their lives,
and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined
abbey. He had never known of that till now.
"Why didn't you tell me next day?" he said. "It might
have prevented much misunderstanding and woe."
"Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not
going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who
knows what tomorrow has in store?"
But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet
and foggy, and Clare, rightly informed that the
caretaker only opened the windows on fine days,
ventured to creep out of their chamber, and explore the
house, leaving Tess asleep. There was no food on the
premises, but there was water, and he took advantage of
the fog to emerge from the mansion, and fetch tea,
bread, and butter from a shop in a little place two
miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and spirit-lamp,
that they might get fire without smoke. His re-entry
awoke her; and they breakfasted on what he had brought.
They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day
passed, and the night following, and the next, and
next; till, almost without their being aware, five days
had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a sight or
sound of a human being disturbing their peacefulness,
such as it was. The changes of the weather were their
only events, the birds of the New Forest their only
company. By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of
any incident of the past subsequent to their
wedding-day. The gloomy intervening time seemed to
sink into chaos, over which the present and prior times
closed as if it never had been. Whenever he suggested
that they should leave their shelter, and go forwards
towards Southampton or London, she showed a strange
unwillingness to move.
"Why should we put an end to all that's sweet and
lovely!" she deprecated. "What must come will come."
And, looking through the shutter-chink: "All is trouble
outside there; inside here content."
He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was
affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the
inexorable.
"And--and," she said, pressing her cheek against his,
"I fear that what you think of me now may not last.
I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me.
I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried
when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it
may never be known to me that you despised me."
"I cannot ever despise you."
"I also hope that. But considering what my life had
been I cannot see why any man should, sooner or later,
be able to help despising me.... How wickedly mad I
was! Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly or
a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to
make me cry."
They remained yet another day. In the night the dull
sky cleared, and the result was that the old caretaker
at the cottage awoke early. The brilliant sunrise made
her unusually brisk; she decided to open the contiguous
mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a
day. Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened
the lower rooms before six o'clock, she ascended to the
bedchambers, and was about to turn the handle of the
one wherein they lay. At that moment she fancied she
could hear the breathing of persons within. Her
slippers and her antiquity had rendered her progress a
noiseless one so far, and she made for instant retreat;
then, deeming that her hearing might have deceived her,
she turned anew to the door and softly tried the
handle. The lock was out of order, but a piece of
furniture had been moved forward on the inside, which
prevented her opening the door more than an inch or
two. A stream of morning light through the
shutter-chink fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped
in profound slumber, Tess's lips being parted like a
half-opened flower near his cheek. The caretaker was so
struck with their innocent appearance, and with the
elegance of Tess's gown hanging across a chair, her
silk stockings beside it, the pretty parasol, and the
other habits in which she had arrived because she had
none else, that her first indignation at the effrontery
of tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary
sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it
seemed. She closed the door, and withdrew as softly as
she had come, to go and consult with her neighbours on
the odd discovery.
Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal
when Tess woke, and then Clare. Both had a sense that
something had disturbed them, though they could not say
what; and the uneasy feeling which it engendered grew
stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly
scanned the lawn through the two or three inches of
shutter-chink.
"I think we will leave at once," said he. "It is a
fine day. And I cannot help fancying somebody is about
the house. At any rate, the woman will be sure to come
today."
She passively assented, and putting the room in order
they took up the few articles that belonged to them,
and departed noiselessly. When they had got into the
Forest she turned to take a last look at the house.
"Ah, happy house--goodbye!" she said. "My life can
only be a question of a few weeks. Why should we not
have stayed there?"
"Don't say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this
district altogether. We'll continue our course as
we've begun it, and keep straight north. Nobody will
think of looking for us there. We shall be looked for
at the Wessex ports if we are sought at all. When we
are in the north we will get to a port and away."
Having thus persuaded her the plan was pursued, and
they kept a bee-line northward. Their long repose at
the manor-house lent them walking power now; and
towards mid-day they found that they were approaching
the steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in
their way. He decided to rest her in a clump of trees
during the afternoon, and push onward under cover of
darkness. At dusk Clare purchased food as usual, and
their night march began, the boundary between Upper and
Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o'clock.
To walk across country without much regard to roads was
not new to Tess, and she showed her old agility in the
performance. The intercepting city, ancient
Melchester, they were obliged to pass through in order
to take advantage of the town bridge for crossing a
large river that obstructed them. It was about
midnight when they went along the deserted streets,
lighted fitfully by the few lamps, keeping off the
pavement that it might not echo their footsteps. The
graceful pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on
their left hand, but it was lost upon them now. Once
out of the town they followed the turnpike-road, which
after a few miles plunged across an open plain.
Though the sky was dense with cloud a diffused light
from some fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a
little. But the moon had now sunk, the clouds seemed to
settle almost on their heads, and the night grew as
dark as a cave. However, they found their way along,
keeping as much on the turf as possible that their
tread might not resound, which it was easy to do, there
being no hedge or fence of any kind. All around was
open loneliness and black solitude, over which a stiff
breeze blew.
They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles
further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some
vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the
grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.
"What monstrous place is this?" said Angel.
"It hums," said she. "Hearken!"
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice,
produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic
one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and
lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare
felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed
to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding.
Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had
come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar;
by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar
one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead
something made the black sky blacker, which had the
semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars
horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and
between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but
they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was
roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel,
perplexed, said----
"What can it be?"
Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like
pillar, square and uncompromising as the first; beyond
it another and another. The place was all doors and
pillars, some connected above by continuous
architraves.
"A very Temple of the Winds," he said.
The next pillar was isolated; others composed a
trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming
a causeway wide enough for a carriage and it was soon
obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped
upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple
advanced further into this pavilion of the night till
they stood in its midst.
"It is Stonehenge!" said Clare.
"The heathen temple, you mean?"
"Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the
d'Urbervilles! Well, what shall we do, darling?
We may find shelter further on."
But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon
an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was
sheltered from the wind by a pillar. Owing to the
action of the sun during the preceding day the stone
was warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough
and chill grass around, which had damped her skirts and
shoes.
"I don't want to go any further, Angel," she said,
stretching out her hand for his. "Can't we bide here?"
"I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day,
although it does not seem so now."
"One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts,
now I think of it. And you used to say at Talbothays
that I was a heathen. So now I am at home."
He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his
lips upon hers.
"Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an
altar."
"I like very much to be here," she murmured. "It is so
solemn and lonely--after my great happiness--with
nothing but the sky above my face. it seems as if
there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish
there were not--except 'Liza-Lu."
Clare though she might as well rest here till it should
get a little lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon
her, and sat down by her side.
"Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over
'Liza-Lu for my sake?" she asked, when they had
listened a long time to the wind among the pillars.
"I will."
"She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel--I wish
you would marry her if you lose me, as you will do
shortly. O, if you would!"
"If I lose you I lose all! And she is my
sister-in-law."
"That's nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws
continually about Marlott; and 'Liza-Lu is so gentle
and sweet, and she is growing so beautiful. O, I could
share you with her willingly when we are spirits! If
you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her
up for your own self! ... She had all the best of me
without the bad of me; and if she were to become yours
it would almost seem as if death had not divided us....
Well, I have said it. I won't mention it again."
She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far
north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level
streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud
was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at
the earth's edge the coming day, against which the
towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly
defined.
"Did they sacrifice to God here?" asked she.
"No," said he.
"Who to?"
"I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by
itself is in the direction of the sun, which will
presently rise behind it."
"This reminds me, dear," she said. "You remember you
never would interfere with any belief of mine before we
were married? But I knew your mind all the same, and I
thought as you thought--not from any reasons of my own,
but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do you
think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to
know."
He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.
"O, Angel--I fear that means no!" said she, with a
suppressed sob. "And I wanted so to see you again--
so much, so much! What--not even you and I, Angel,
who love each other so well?"
Like a greater than himself, to the critical question
at the critical time he did not answer; and they were
again silent. In a minute or two her breathing became
more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she
fell asleep. The band of silver paleness along the
east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great
Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous
landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity,
and hesitation which is usual just before day. The
eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly
against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone
beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.
Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering
little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay
still. At the same time something seemed to move on
the verge of the dip eastward--a mere dot. It was the
head of a man approaching them from the hollow beyond
the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but
in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The
figure came straight towards the circle of pillars in
which they were.
He heard something behind him, the brush of feet.
Turning, he saw over the prostrate columns another
figure; then before he was aware, another was at hand
on the right, under a trilithon, and another on the
left. The dawn shone full on the front of the man
westward, and Clare could discern from this that he was
tall, and walked as if trained. They all closed in
with evident purpose. Her story then was true!
Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon,
loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time
the nearest man was upon him.
"It is no use, sir," he said. "There are sixteen of us
on the Plain, and the whole country is reared."
"Let her finish her sleep!" he implored in a whisper of
the men as they gathered round.
When they saw where she lay, which they had not done
till then, they showed no objection, and stood watching
her, as still as the pillars around. He went to the
stone and bent over her, holding one poor little hand;
her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a
lesser creature than a woman. All waited in the
growing light, their faces and hands as if they were
silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the
stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a mass of
shade. Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon
her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and
waking her.
"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they
come for me?"
"Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come."
"It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am
almost glad--yes, glad! This happiness could not have
lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I
shall not live for you to despise me!"
She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither
of the men having moved.
"I am ready," she said quietly.
LIX
The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime
capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave
downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July
morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses
had almost dried off for the season their integument of
lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the
sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the
mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the
bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in
progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned
market-day.
From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every
Wintoncestrian knows, ascends a long and regular
incline of the exact length of a measured mile, leaving
the houses gradually behind. Up this road from the
precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly,
as if unconscious of the trying ascent--unconscious
through preoccupation and not through buoyancy. They
had emerged upon this road through a narrow barred
wicket in a high wall a little lower down. They seemed
anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and of
their kind, and this road appeared to offer the
quickest means of doing so. Though they were young
they walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the
sun's rays smiled on pitilessly.
One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall
budding creature--half girl, half woman--a
spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but
with the same beautiful eyes--Clare's sister-in-law,
'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk to
half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand,
and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads
being that of Giotto's "Two Apostles".
When they had nearly reached the top of the great West
Hill the clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a
start at the notes, and, walking onward yet a few
steps, they reached the first milestone, standing
whitely on the green margin of the grass, and backed by
the down, which here was open to the road. They
entered upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that
seemed to overrule their will, suddenly stood still,
turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside the
stone.
The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited.
In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left,
its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric
drawing--among them the broad cathedral tower, with
its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and
nave, the spires of St Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of
the College, and, more to the right, the tower and
gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the
pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind
the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's
Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the
horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging
above it.
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front
of the other city edifices, a large red-brick building,
with level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows
bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by
its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the
Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the
road in passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it
was visible enough up here. The wicket from which the
pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this
structure. From the middle of the building an ugly
flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east
horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its shady side
and against the light, it seemed the one blot on the
city's beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with
the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed.
Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the
hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff,
and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals,
in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in
their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent
themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and
remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the
flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had
strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.