Tess of the D'urbervilles

their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,

while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have

regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to

help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty

is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home

till milking."

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

stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards. "So I can help

Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you

needn't come down till milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that

afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared

as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.

Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the

work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable

that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running

her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned

it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy

came convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently. "I

wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have

been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall

soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for

my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will

you be that woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an

impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of

proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated

upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her

without quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was

like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her

indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

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

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and

she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more

greedily close. "Do you say no? Surely you love me?"

"O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the

world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.

"But I CANNOT marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to

marry some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

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

I only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry

such as me. She will want you to marry a lady."

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

home."

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

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

"Yes--I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he

said. "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.

I'll not allude to it again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and

began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact

under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try

as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes

in the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two

blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend

and dear advocate, she could never explain.

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

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began

talking in a more general way:

You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered

people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few

remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very

High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard

every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had

never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I

do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow

to me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his

father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she

did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad. He

himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,

apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to

phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise,

to disturb them was his last desire:

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;

Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse

A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but

he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode

of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the

undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead

after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down

the milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she

ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of

herself.

"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his

troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress

me. He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from

people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't

like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more

particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried

so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in

which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some

missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a

place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate

with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some

landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.

My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there

was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I

must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the

probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless. But whatever

he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;

and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely

vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered. He says

he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;

but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and

would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but

she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare's revived thoughts of

his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went

on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished

and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their

pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As

Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had

heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec

d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with

a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad

constraint. All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows

were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold

grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women

accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to

the air as a swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to him

now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained

Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.

XXVIII

Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare.

His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that

the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the

affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in

the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to

the dallyings of coyness. That she had already permitted him to

make love to her he read as an additional assurance, not fully

trowing that in the fields and pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no

means deemed waste; love-making being here more often accepted

inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake than in the carking,

anxious homes of the ambitious, where a girl's craving for an

establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion as an end.

"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?" he asked her in

the course of a few days.

She started.

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

worthy enough."

"How? Not fine lady enough?"

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

me."

"Indeed, you mistake them--my father and mother. As for my brothers,

I don't care--" He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her

from slipping away. "Now--you did not mean it, sweet?--I am sure you

did not! You have made me so restless that I cannot read, or play,

or do anything. I am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know--to hear

from your own warm lips--that you will some day be mine--any time you

may choose; but some day?"

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

Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as

if they had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real.

"Then I ought not to hold you in this way--ought I? I have no

right to you--no right to seek out where you are, or walk with you!

Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?"

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

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

"I don't repulse you. I like you to--tell me you love me; and you

may always tell me so as you go about with me--and never offend me."

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

"Ah--that's different--it is for your good, indeed, my dearest!

O, believe me, it is only for your sake! I don't like to give

myself the great happiness o' promising to be yours in that

way--because--because I am SURE I ought not to do it."

"But you will make me happy!"

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

At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be

her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he

would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile--which

was certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him

having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments

of his knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender

contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the

remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room,

if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an

apparently phlegmatic negative.

The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the

side of his--two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience--

that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power.

She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could

she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her

husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her

conscience had decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not

to be overruled now.

"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said. "It was only

forty miles off--why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know!"

Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.

For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad

countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not

only as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for

themselves that she did not put herself in his way.

Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life

was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and

positive pain. At the next cheese-making the pair were again left

alone together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but

Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a

suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they walked

so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the

dairyman left them to themselves.

They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into

the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a

large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess

Durbeyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.

Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased,

and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above

the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft

arm.

Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from

her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a

new-gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such

a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the

touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the cool arms

flushed hot. Then, as though her heart had said, "Is coyness longer

necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman, as between man and

man," she lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her

lip rose in a tender half-smile.

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

"Because you love me very much!"

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

"Not AGAIN!"

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

her own desire.

"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I CANNOT think why you are so tantalizing.

Why do you disappoint me so? You seem almost like a coquette, upon

my life you do--a coquette of the first urban water! They blow

hot and blow cold, just as you do, and it is the very last sort of

thing to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothays. ... And yet,

dearest," he quickly added, observing now the remark had cut her, "I

know you to be the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived.

So how can I suppose you a flirt? Tess, why don't you like the idea

of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?"

"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it;

because--it isn't true!"

The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip quivered, and she

was obliged to go away. Clare was so pained and perplexed that he

ran after and caught her in the passage.

"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her, in

forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you won't belong

to anybody but me!"

"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed. "And I will give you a

complete answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my

experiences--all about myself--all!"

"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number." He expressed

assent in loving satire, looking into her face. "My Tess, no doubt,

almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the

garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time.

Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more

about not being worthy of me."

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

week."

"Say on Sunday?"

"Yes, on Sunday."

At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in

the thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where

she could be quite unseen. Here Tess flung herself down upon the

rustling undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed, and remained

crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy,

which her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.

In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her

breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was

a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.

Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the

altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe

pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon

her: that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy

Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement,

wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere

isolation, love's counsel would prevail.

The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows.

She heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands;

the "waow-waow!" which accompanied the getting together of the cows.

But she did not go to the milking. They would see her agitation;

and the dairyman, thinking the cause to be love alone, would

good-naturedly tease her; and that harassment could not be borne.

Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some

excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls

given. At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with

the aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous

pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows,

tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became

spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in and

upstairs without a light.

It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully

at her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her. The indoor

milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something

definite was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in

the bedchamber. Friday passed; Saturday. To-morrow was the day.

"I shall give way--I shall say yes--I shall let myself marry

him--I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to

the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his

name in her sleep. "I can't bear to let anybody have him but me!

Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows! O my

heart--O--O--O!"

XXIX

"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?" said

Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling

gaze round upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye

think?"

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

she knew already.

"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted 'hore's-bird of a

feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman."

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

The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for

it was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had

afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the

butter-churn.

"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?"

asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was

reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs

Crick, in her sense of his gentility.

"Not he, sir. Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As I say, 'tis

a widow-woman, and she had money, it seems--fifty poun' a year or so;

and that was all he was after. They were married in a great hurry;

and then she told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty poun'

a year. Just fancy the state o' my gentleman's mind at that news!

Never such a cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since!

Serves him well beright. But onluckily the poor woman gets the worst

o't."

"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of

her first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.

"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively. "Still, you can see

exactly how 'twas. She wanted a home, and didn't like to run the

risk of losing him. Don't ye think that was something like it,

maidens?"

He glanced towards the row of girls.

"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to church, when he

could hardly have backed out," exclaimed Marian.

"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.

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

cried Retty spasmodically.

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

"I think she ought--to have told him the true state of things--or

else refused him--I don't know," replied Tess, the bread-and-butter

choking her.

"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck Knibbs, a married

helper from one of the cottages. "All's fair in love and war. I'd

ha' married en just as she did, and if he'd said two words to me

about not telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first

chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the

rolling-pin--a scram little feller like he! Any woman could do it."

The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a

sorry smile, for form's sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was

tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose

from table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her,

went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the

irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main

stream of the Var. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up

the river, and masses of them were floating past her--moving islands

of green crow-foot, whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks

of which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows

from crossing.

Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her

story--the heaviest of crosses to herself--seemed but amusement to

others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.

"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,

alighting beside her feet. "My wife--soon!"

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

no!"

"Tess!"

"Still I say no!" she repeated.

Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the

moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The

younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose

on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending

church, a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads

against the cows.) If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he

would have kissed her; it had evidently been his intention; but

her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their

condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such

disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to

her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have

honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released

her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.

It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse

him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman;

and that would have been overcome in another moment. But Angel said

no more; his face was perplexed; he went away.

Day after day they met--somewhat less constantly than before; and

thus two or three weeks went by. The end of September drew near, and

she could see in his eye that he might ask her again.

His plan of procedure was different now--as though he had made up

his mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth

startled by the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of

her manner when the subject was under discussion countenanced the

idea. So he played a more coaxing game; and while never going beyond

words, or attempting the renewal of caresses, he did his utmost

orally.

In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of

the purling milk--at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings,

at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs--as

no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.

Tess knew that she must break down. Neither a religious sense of a

certain moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious wish

for candour could hold out against it much longer. She loved him so

passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though

untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary

guidance. And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can

never be his wife," the words were vain. A proof of her weakness lay

in the very utterance of what calm strength would not have taken the

trouble to formulate. Every sound of his voice beginning on the old

subject stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the

recantation she feared.

His manner was--what man's is not?--so much that of one who would

love and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes,

charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it.

The season meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though

it was still fine, the days were much shorter. The dairy had again

worked by morning candlelight for a long time; and a fresh renewal

of Clare's pleading occurred one morning between three and four.

She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as usual;

then had gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes

was walking to the head of the stairs with the candle in her

hand. At the same moment he came down his steps from above in his

shirt-sleeves and put his arm across the stairway.

"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said peremptorily. "It is a

fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer. You MUST tell

me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house. My door was

ajar just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You

don't know. Well? Is it to be yes at last?"

"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take me to

task!" she pouted. "You need not call me Flirt. 'Tis cruel and

untrue. Wait till by and by. Please wait till by and by! I will

really think seriously about it between now and then. Let me go

downstairs!"

She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle

sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words.

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

"Angel."

"Angel dearest--why not?"

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

"It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me;

and you were so good as to own that long ago."

"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I MUST," she murmured, looking

at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding

her suspense.

Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her

promise; but somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up

milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there

should be leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done,

he broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one

moment. She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at

him or saying another word. The other maids were already down,

and the subject was not pursued. Except Marian, they all looked

wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the sad yellow rays which

the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals

of the dawn without.

When skimming was done--which, as the milk diminished with the

approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by day--Retty and

the rest went out. The lovers followed them.

"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?" he

musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping

before him through the frigid pallor of opening day.

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

"Why do you think that?"

"There are very few women's lives that are not--tremulous," Tess

replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. "There's

more in those three than you think."

"What is in them?"

"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make--perhaps would

make--a properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you as well

as I--almost."

"O, Tessy!"

There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the

impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let

generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she

had not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then.

They were joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more

was said on that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that

this day would decide it.

In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and assistants

went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where

many of the cows were milked without being driven home. The

supply was getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the

supernumerary milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.

The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall

cans that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought

upon the scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away.

Dairyman Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming

miraculously white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked

at his heavy watch.

"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said. "Begad! We shan't be

soon enough with this milk at the station, if we don't mind. There's

no time to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending

off. It must go to station straight from here. Who'll drive it

across?"

Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business,

asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had

been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with

her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not

dressed for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her

scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her. She assented by

relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and

mounted the spring-waggon beside Clare.

XXX

In the diminishing daylight they went along the level roadway through

the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed in

the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of

Egdon Heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees,

whose notched tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning

black-fronted castles of enchantment.

They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that

they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken

only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them.

The lane they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had

remained on the boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the

blackberries hung in heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would

fling the lash of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give

it to his companion.

The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down

herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into

a fitful breeze which played about their faces. The quick-silvery

glaze on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light

they changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a

rasp. But that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her

countenance, a natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season,

had deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her

hair, which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual, caused to

tumble down from its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her

calico bonnet, was made clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was

better than seaweed.

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

sky.

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

here!"

Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid gauze. The

evening grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates, it was

not safe to drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather

chill.

"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and

shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle

won't hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think

that the rain might be helping me."

She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a

large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun

off the milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as

herself, Clare's hands being occupied.

"Now we are all right again. Ah--no we are not! It runs down into

my neck a little, and it must still more into yours. That's better.

Your arms are like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now,

if you stay quiet, you will not get another drop. Well, dear--about

that question of mine--that long-standing question?"

The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of

the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk

in the cans behind them.

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I do," she replied.

"Before we get home, mind."

"I'll try."

He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor

house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course

passed and left behind.

"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old

place--one of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman

family formerly of great influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles.

I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them. There

is something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even

if it was fierce, domineering, feudal renown."

"Yes," said Tess.

They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand

at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot

where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the

dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between

their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its

steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the

native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what

it touched had been uncongenial.

They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a

little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one

sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the

celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The

cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little

shelter from a neighbouring holly tree.

Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently

upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into

the truck. The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess

Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No

object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and

wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the

rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at

pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet

drooping on her brow.

She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience

characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had

wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they

plunged back into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that

the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress

lingered in her thought.

"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won't they?"

she asked. "Strange people that we have never seen."

"Yes--I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its

strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their

heads."

"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and

tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."

"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."

"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how

we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might

reach 'em in time?"

"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we

drove a little on our own--on account of that anxious matter which

you will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put

it in this way. You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I

mean. Does it not?"

"You know as well as I. O yes--yes!"

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

"My only reason was on account of you--on account of a question. I

have something to tell you--"

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

convenience also?"

"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my

life before I came here--I want--"

"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a

very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable

as a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in

the country. So please--please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of

the feeling that you will stand in my way."

"But my history. I want you to know it--you must let me tell

you--you will not like me so well!"

"Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history then. Yes,

I was born at so and so, Anno Domini--"

"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words as a help,

lightly as they were spoken. "And I grew up there. And I was in the

Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness,

and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should

be one. But there was trouble in my family; father was not very

industrious, and he drank a little."

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

to his side.

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

was--"

Tess's breath quickened.

"Yes, dearest. Never mind."

"I--I--am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville--a descendant of the

same family as those that owned the old house we passed. And--we are

all gone to nothing!"

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

"Yes," she answered faintly.

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

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

He laughed.

"Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic

principle of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners

the only pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of

the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity. But

I am extremely interested in this news--you can have no idea how

interested I am! Are you not interested yourself in being one of

that well-known line?"

"No. I have thought it sad--especially since coming here, and

knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to

my father's people. But other hills and field belonged to Retty's

people, and perhaps others to Marian's, so that I don't value it

particularly."

"Yes--it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil

were once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school

of politicians don't make capital of the circumstance; but they don't

seem to know it... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of

your name to d'Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption. And

this was the carking secret!"

She had not told. At the last moment her courage had failed her;

she feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct

of self-preservation was stronger than her candour.

"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should have been glad

to know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering,

dumb, unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from

the self-seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense of

the rest. But I am corrupted away from that by my affection for you,

Tess (he laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise. For your

own sake I rejoice in your descent. Society is hopelessly snobbish,

and this fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference

to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I have made you the

well-read woman that I mean to make you. My mother too, poor soul,

will think so much better of you on account of it. Tess, you must

spell your name correctly--d'Urberville--from this very day."

"I like the other way rather best."

"But you MUST, dearest! Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom

millionaires would jump at such a possession! By the bye, there's

one of that kidney who has taken the name--where have I heard of

him?--Up in the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think. Why, he is the

very man who had that rumpus with my father I told you of. What an

odd coincidence!"

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

perhaps!"

She was agitated.

"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you. Take my name,

and so you will escape yours! The secret is out, so why should you

any longer refuse me?"

"If it is SURE to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you

feel that you do wish to marry me, VERY, VERY much--"

"I do, dearest, of course!"

"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly

able to keep alive without me, whatever my offences, that would make

me feel I ought to say I will."

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

ever."

He clasped her close and kissed her.

"Yes!"

She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so

violent that it seemed to rend her. Tess was not a hysterical girl

by any means, and he was surprised.

"Why do you cry, dearest?"

"I can't tell--quite!--I am so glad to think--of being yours, and

making you happy!"

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

"I mean--I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I said I would

die unmarried!"

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

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

"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited,

and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very

complimentary. How came you to wish that if you care for me? Do you

care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way."

"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a

distraction of tenderness. "Will this prove it more?"

She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an

impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she

loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.

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

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

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the

sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against

them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first.

The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous

force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the

helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over

the social rubric.

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

that?"

"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know

how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how

wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?"

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

"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer--"

"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me.

O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"

XXXI

Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very

next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication

arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.

DEAR TESS,--

J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well,

as they leave me at Present, thank God for it. Dear

Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are going really

to be married soon. But with respect to your question,

Tess, J say between ourselves, quite private but very

strong, that on no account do you say a word of your

Bygone Trouble to him. J did not tell everything

to your Father, he being so Proud on account of his

Respectability, which, perhaps, your Intended is

the same. Many a woman--some of the Highest in the

Land--have had a Trouble in their time; and why should

you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs? No

girl would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long

ago, and not your Fault at all. J shall answer the

same if you ask me fifty times. Besides, you must bear

in mind that, knowing it to be your Childish Nature to

tell all that's in your heart--so simple!--J made you

promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having

your Welfare in my Mind; and you most solemnly did

promise it going from this Door. J have not named

either that Question or your coming marriage to your

Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple

Man.

Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send

you a Hogshead of Cyder for you Wedding, knowing there

is not much in your parts, and thin Sour Stuff what

there is. So no more at present, and with kind love

to your Young Man.--From your affectte. Mother,

J. DURBEYFIELD

"O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.

She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most

oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's elastic spirit. Her mother did not

see life as Tess saw it. That haunting episode of bygone days was

to her mother but a passing accident. But perhaps her mother was

right as to the course to be followed, whatever she might be in her

reasons. Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her adored

one's happiness: silence it should be.

Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had

any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calmer. The

responsibility was shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had

been for weeks. The days of declining autumn which followed her

assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a season through

which she lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching

ecstasy than any other period of her life.

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her

sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be--knew all that

a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line

in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his

soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom

of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be

wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it,

made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes

catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking

at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before

her.

She dismissed the past--trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on

a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous,

protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from

all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed;

but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself

well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not

cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot--less Byronic than

Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially

inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion

which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.

This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so

infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against

the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.

They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her honest faith

she did not disguise her desire to be with him. The sum of her

instincts on this matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the

elusive quality of her sex which attracts men in general might be

distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it

must in its very nature carry with it a suspicion of art.

The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during

betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no

strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he

saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk,

regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons

they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the

brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden

bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of

the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own

murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the

mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They

saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time

that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the

ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess

would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long

fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted

against the sloping sides of the vale.

Men were at work here and there--for it was the season for "taking

up" the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter

irrigation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows.

The shovelfuls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river

when it was as wide as the whole valley, were an essence of soils,

pounded champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized to

extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the

mead, and of the cattle grazing there.

Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these

watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to public

dalliance, though actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and

eyes askance on the labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the

while.

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

gladly.

"O no!"

"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that

you are walking about like this with me, a milkmaid--"

"The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen."

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

"My dear girl--a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare! It is a

grand card to play--that of your belonging to such a family, and I

am reserving it for a grand effect when we are married, and have

the proofs of your descent from Parson Tringham. Apart from that,

my future is to be totally foreign to my family--it will not affect

even the surface of their lives. We shall leave this part of

England--perhaps England itself--and what does it matter how people

regard us here? You will like going, will you not?"

She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so great was the

emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with

him as his own familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears

like a babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes. She put her hand

in his, and thus they went on, to a place where the reflected sun

glared up from the river, under a bridge, with a molten-metallic glow

that dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the

bridge. They stood still, whereupon little furred and feathered

heads popped up from the smooth surface of the water; but, finding

that the disturbing presences had paused, and not passed by, they

disappeared again. Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog

began to close round them--which was very early in the evening at

this time of the year--settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it

rested like crystals, and on his brows and hair.

They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark. Some of the

dairy-people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening

after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to

fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed;

noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by

the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her

contented pauses, the occasional little laugh upon which her soul

seemed to ride--the laugh of a woman in company with the man she

loves and has won from all other women--unlike anything else in

nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a

bird which has not quite alighted.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being;

it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness

of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would

persist in their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness, care,

shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the

circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them

in hungry subjection there.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual

remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the

background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might

be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little

every day.

One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors keeping house,

all the other occupants of the domicile being away. As they talked

she looked thoughtfully up at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.

"I am not worthy of you--no, I am not!" she burst out, jumping up

from her low stool as though appalled at his homage, and the fulness

of her own joy thereat.

Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was

only the smaller part of it, said--

"I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess! Distinction does not

consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but

in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and

pure, and lovely, and of good report--as you are, my Tess."

She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had that string

of excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years, and

how strange that he should have cited them now.

"Why didn't you stay and love me when I--was sixteen; living with my

little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? O, why

didn't you, why didn't you!" she said, impetuously clasping her

hands.

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly

enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would

have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on

him.

"Ah--why didn't I stay!" he said. "That is just what I feel. If I

had only known! But you must not be so bitter in your regret--why

should you be?"

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

"I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have

now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done--I should

have had so much longer happiness!"

It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her

who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and

twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird

in a springe. To calm herself the more completely, she rose from her

little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts

as she went.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green

ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and

hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she

was herself again.

"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?"

he said, good-humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the

stool, and seated himself in the settle beside her. "I wanted to

ask you something, and just then you ran away."

"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured. She suddenly

approached him, and put a hand upon each of his arms. "No, Angel,

I am not really so--by nature, I mean!" The more particularly to

assure him that she was not, she placed herself close to him in the

settle, and allowed her head to find a resting-place against Clare's

shoulder. "What did you want to ask me--I am sure I will answer it,"

she continued humbly.

"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and hence there

follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day be?'"

"I like living like this."

"But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the

new year, or a little later. And before I get involved in the

multifarious details of my new position, I should like to have

secured my partner."

"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite practically, wouldn't it

be best not to marry till after all that?--Though I can't bear the

thought o' your going away and leaving me here!"

"Of course you cannot--and it is not best in this case. I want you

to help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be? Why

not a fortnight from now?"

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

first."

"But--"

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near. Before

discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round

the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr

Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her

face flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.

"I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she cried, with

vexation. "I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us!

But I wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might ha' seemed

as if I was almost!"

"Well--if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we shouldn't ha'

noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,"

replied the dairyman. He continued to his wife, with the stolid

mien of a man who understood nothing of the emotions relating to

matrimony--"Now, Christianer, that shows that folks should never

fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain't. O no, I

should never ha' thought a word of where she was a sitting to, if

she hadn't told me--not I."

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

phlegm.

"Ah--and be ye! Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir. I've

thought you mid do such a thing for some time. She's too good for a

dairymaid--I said so the very first day I zid her--and a prize for

any man; and what's more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer's

wife; he won't be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at his side."

Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck with the

look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick's blunt

praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present. A

light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed,

awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.

They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to

have. Their condition was objective, contemplative.

"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking eyes off

Tess. "How her face do show it!"

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

"Yes," said Tess.

"When?"

"Some day."

They thought that this was evasiveness only.

"YES--going to MARRY him--a gentleman!" repeated Izz Huett.

And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another,

crept out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess.

Retty put her hands upon Tess's shoulders, as if to realize her

friend's corporeality after such a miracle, and the other two laid

their arms round her waist, all looking into her face.

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

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

"Was that because of love for her, or because other lips have touched

there by now?" continued Izz drily to Marian.

"I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply. "I was on'y feeling

all the strangeness o't--that she is to be his wife, and nobody else.

I don't say nay to it, nor either of us, because we did not think

of it--only loved him. Still, nobody else is to marry'n in the

world--no fine lady, nobody in silks and satins; but she who do live

like we."

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

They hung about her in their white nightgowns before replying, as if

they considered their answer might lie in her look.

"I don't know--I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle. "I want to

hate 'ee; but I cannot!"

"That's how I feel," echoed Izz and Marian. "I can't hate her.

Somehow she hinders me!"

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

"Why?"

"You are all better than I."

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

no, dear Tess!"

"You are!" she contradicted impetuously. And suddenly tearing away

from their clinging arms she burst into a hysterical fit of tears,

bowing herself on the chest of drawers and repeating incessantly,

"O yes, yes, yes!"

Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.

"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried. "I think I ought to

make him even now! You would be better for him than--I don't know

what I'm saying! O! O!"

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

her.

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

thing!"

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

her warmly.

"You are best for'n," said Marian. "More ladylike, and a better

scholar than we, especially since he had taught 'ee so much. But

even you ought to be proud. You BE proud, I'm sure!"

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

When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian whispered

across to her--

"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told

'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not

hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and

we never hoped to be chose by him."

They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging tears

trickled down upon Tess's pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a

bursting heart, to tell all her history to Angel Clare, despite her

mother's command--to let him for whom she lived and breathed despise

her if he would, and her mother regard her as a fool, rather then

preserve a silence which might be deemed a treachery to him, and

which somehow seemed a wrong to these.

XXXII

This penitential mood kept her from naming the wedding-day. The

beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he

asked her at the most tempting times. But Tess's desire seemed to be

for a perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was

then.

The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early

afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and the state of

dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling.

Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening

ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary,

like the track of moonlight on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing

of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this

pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out

of its line, and were quite extinct. In the presence of these things

he would remind her that the date was still the question.

Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission

invented by Mrs Crick to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a

journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how

the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton to which they

were relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought great

changes to the world of kine. Batches of the animals were sent away

daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their

calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the calf could

walk, mother and offspring were driven back to the dairy. In the

interval which elapsed before the calves were sold there was, of

course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been

taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.

Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great

gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where they stood still and

listened. The water was now high in the streams, squirting through

the weirs, and tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all

full; there was no taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers

were compelled to follow the permanent ways. From the whole extent

of the invisible vale came a multitudinous intonation; it forced upon

their fancy that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur was

the vociferation of its populace.

"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess; "holding

public-meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching,

quarrelling, sobbing, groaning, praying, and cursing."

Clare was not particularly heeding.

"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much

assistance during the winter months?"

"No."

"The cows are going dry rapidly."

"Yes. Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the

day before, making nearly twenty in the straw already. Ah--is it

that the farmer don't want my help for the calving? O, I am not

wanted here any more! And I have tried so hard to--"

"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require you. But,

knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-natured

and respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at

Christmas I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would

do without you he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a

time of year when he could do with a very little female help. I am

afraid I was sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this

way forcing your hand."

"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel. Because 'tis

always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis

convenient."

"Well, it is convenient--you have admitted that." He put his finger

upon her cheek. "Ah!" he said.

"What?"

"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught! But why should

I trifle so! We will not trifle--life is too serious."

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

She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him after all--in

obedience to her emotion of last night--and leave the dairy, meant

to go to some strange place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in

request now calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm

where no divine being like Angel Clare was. She hated the thought,

and she hated more the thought of going home.

"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued, "since you will

probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and

convenient that I should carry you off then as my property. Besides,

if you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you would

know that we could not go on like this for ever."

"I wish we could. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you

always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have

done through the past summer-time!"

"I always shall."

"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour of faith

in him. "Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for

always!"

Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk

home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.

When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told--with

injunctions of secrecy; for each of the lovers was desirous that the

marriage should be kept as private as possible. The dairyman, though

he had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about

losing her. What should he do about his skimming? Who would make

the ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies?

Mrs Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last

come to an end, and said that directly she set eyes on Tess she

divined that she was to be the chosen one of somebody who was no

common outdoor man; Tess had looked so superior as she walked across

the barton on that afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good

family she could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember

thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she approached;

but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination aided

by subsequent knowledge.

Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the

sense of a will. The word had been given; the number of the day

written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit

the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who

associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their

fellow-creatures; and she accordingly drifted into that passive

responsiveness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic of

the frame of mind.

But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the

wedding-day; really to again implore her advice. It was a gentleman

who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently

considered. A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with

a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received with the same

feeling by him. But this communication brought no reply from Mrs

Durbeyfield.

Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself and to Tess

of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in

truth an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a

later date. He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and

fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for

him. He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to

an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this

idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes. Unsophistication

was a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one

until he came here. Yet he was very far from seeing his future track

clearly, and it might be a year or two before he would be able to

consider himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge

of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense

that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices

of his family.

"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait till you

were quite settled in your midland farm?" she once asked timidly.

(A midland farm was the idea just then.)

"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere

away from my protection and sympathy."

The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His influence over her

had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his

speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. And to leave her

in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with

him. He wished to have her under his charge for another reason.

His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he

carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and

as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention,

he judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings

whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social

assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal--her

presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.

Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill,

having an idea that he might combine the use of one with

corn-growing. The proprietor of a large old water-mill at

Wellbridge--once the mill of an Abbey--had offered him the inspection

of his time-honoured mode of procedure, and a hand in the operations

for a few days, whenever he should choose to come. Clare paid a

visit to the place, some few miles distant, one day at this time,

to inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in the evening.

She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge

flour-mills. And what had determined him? Less the opportunity of an

insight into grinding and bolting than the casual fact that lodgings

were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its

mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville

family. This was always how Clare settled practical questions; by

a sentiment which had nothing to do with them. They decided to go

immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead

of journeying to towns and inns.

"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of

London that I have heard of," he said, "and by March or April we will

pay a visit to my father and mother."

Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day,

the incredible day, on which she was to become his, loomed large in

the near future. The thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was

the date. His wife, she said to herself. Could it ever be? Their

two selves together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared

by them; why not? And yet why?

One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and spoke

privately to Tess.

"You was not called home this morning."

"What?"

"It should ha' been the first time of asking to-day," she answered,

looking quietly at Tess. "You meant to be married New Year's Eve,

deary?"

The other returned a quick affirmative.

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

Sundays left between."

Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be

three. Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there must be a week's

postponement, and that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover?

She who had been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and

alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.

A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned the omission

of the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron's privilege

of speaking to Angel on the point.

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

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

As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:

"Don't let them tease you about the banns. A licence will be quieter

for us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you.

So if you go to church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own

name, if you wished to."

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

But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess

notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would stand

up and forbid the banns on the ground of her history. How events

were favouring her!

"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself. "All this good

fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill. That's

how Heaven mostly does. I wish I could have had common banns!"

But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her

to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to

buy a new one. The question was set at rest by his forethought,

disclosed by the arrival of some large packages addressed to her.

Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to

shoes, including a perfect morning costume, such as would well suit

the simple wedding they planned. He entered the house shortly after

the arrival of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing them.

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

her eyes.

"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek upon his

shoulder. "Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My own love--how

good, how kind!"

"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London--nothing

more."

And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go

upstairs, and take her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not,

to get the village sempstress to make a few alterations.

She did return upstairs, and put on the gown. Alone, she stood for a

moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and

then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic

robe--

That never would become that wife

That had once done amiss,

which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely

and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune.

Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe

had betrayed Queen Guinevere. Since she had been at the dairy she

had not once thought of the lines till now.

XXXIII

Angel felt that he would like to spend a day with her before the

wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last jaunt in her

company while there were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day,

in circumstances that would never be repeated; with that other and

greater day beaming close ahead of them. During the preceding week,

therefore, he suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town,

and they started together.

Clare's life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in respect the

world of his own class. For months he had never gone near a town,

and, requiring no vehicle, had never kept one, hiring the dairyman's

cob or gig if he rode or drove. They went in the gig that day.

And then for the first time in their lives they shopped as partners

in one concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its loads a holly and

mistletoe, and the town was very full of strangers who had come in

from all parts of the country on account of the day. Tess paid the

penalty of walking about with happiness superadded to beauty on her

countenance by being much stared at as she moved amid them on his

arm.

In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had put up, and

Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse and gig

brought to the door. The general sitting-room was full of guests,

who were continually going in and out. As the door opened and shut

each time for the passage of these, the light within the parlour fell

full upon Tess's face. Two men came out and passed by her among the

rest. One of them had stared her up and down in surprise, and she

fancied he was a Trantridge man, though that village lay so many

miles off that Trantridge folk were rarities here.

"A comely maid that," said the other.

"True, comely enough. But unless I make a great mistake--" And he

negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.

Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and, confronting the

man on the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of

Tess. The insult to her stung him to the quick, and before he had

considered anything at all he struck the man on the chin with the

full force of his fist, sending him staggering backwards into the

passage.

The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare,

stepping outside the door, put himself in a posture of defence. But

his opponent began to think better of the matter. He looked anew at

Tess as he passed her, and said to Clare--

"I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake. I thought she was

another woman, forty miles from here."

Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was,

moreover, to blame for leaving her standing in an inn-passage, did

what he usually did in such cases, gave the man five shillings to

plaster the blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a pacific

good night. As soon as Clare had taken the reins from the ostler,

and the young couple had driven off, the two men went in the other

direction.

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

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

feelings--not I."

In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.

"Could we put off our wedding till a little later?" Tess asked in a

dry dull voice. "I mean if we wished?"

"No, my love. Calm yourself. Do you mean that the fellow may have

time to summon me for assault?" he asked good-humouredly.

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

What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss

such fancies from her mind, which she obediently did as well as she

could. But she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she

thought, "We shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles

from these parts, and such as this can never happen again, and no

ghost of the past reach there."

They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare ascended to

his attic. Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites, lest

the few remaining days should not afford sufficient time. While she

sat she heard a noise in Angel's room overhead, a sound of thumping

and struggling. Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her

anxiety lest Clare should be ill she ran up and knocked at his door,

and asked him what was the matter.

"Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within. "I am so sorry I disturbed

you! But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and

dreamt that I was fighting that fellow again who insulted you,

and the noise you heard was my pummelling away with my fists at

my portmanteau, which I pulled out to-day for packing. I am

occasionally liable to these freaks in my sleep. Go to bed and

think of it no more."

This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her

indecision. Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not;

but there was another way. She sat down and wrote on the four pages

of a note-sheet a succinct narrative of those events of three or four

years ago, put it into an envelope, and directed it to Clare. Then,

lest the flesh should again be weak, she crept upstairs without any

shoes and slipped the note under his door.

Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she listened for

the first faint noise overhead. It came, as usual; he descended, as

usual. She descended. He met her at the bottom of the stairs and

kissed her. Surely it was as warmly as ever!

He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought. But he said not

a word to her about her revelation, even when they were alone. Could

he have had it? Unless he began the subject she felt that she could

say nothing. So the day passed, and it was evident that whatever

he thought he meant to keep to himself. Yet he was frank and

affectionate as before. Could it be that her doubts were childish?

that he forgave her; that he loved her for what she was, just as she

was, and smiled at her disquiet as at a foolish nightmare? Had he

really received her note? She glanced into his room, and could see

nothing of it. It might be that he forgave her. But even if he had

not received it she had a sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely

would forgive her.

Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New Year's Eve

broke--the wedding day.

The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through the whole of

this last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something

of the position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her

own. When they arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were

surprised to see what effects had been produced in the large

kitchen for their glory since they had last beheld it. At some

unnatural hour of the morning the dairyman had caused the yawning

chimney-corner to be whitened, and the brick hearth reddened, and a

blazing yellow damask blower to be hung across the arch in place of

the old grimy blue cotton one with a black sprig pattern which had

formerly done duty there. This renovated aspect of what was the

focus indeed of the room on a full winter morning threw a smiling

demeanour over the whole apartment.

"I was determined to do summat in honour o't", said the dairyman.

"And as you wouldn't hear of my gieing a rattling good randy wi'

fiddles and bass-viols complete, as we should ha' done in old times,

this was all I could think o' as a noiseless thing."

Tess's friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have

been present at the ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact

nobody was invited from Marlott. As for Angel's family, he had

written and duly informed them of the time, and assured them that he

would be glad to see one at least of them there for the day if he

would like to come. His brothers had not replied at all, seeming

to be indignant with him; while his father and mother had written

a rather sad letter, deploring his precipitancy in rushing into

marriage, but making the best of the matter by saying that, though

a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law they could have expected,

their son had arrived at an age which he might be supposed to be the

best judge.

This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would

have done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to

surprise them ere long. To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as

a d'Urberville and a lady, he had felt to be temerarious and risky;

hence he had concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized

with worldly ways by a few months' travel and reading with him, he

could take her on a visit to his parents and impart the knowledge

while triumphantly producing her as worthy of such an ancient line.

It was a pretty lover's dream, if no more. Perhaps Tess's lineage

had more value for himself than for anybody in the world beside.

Her perception that Angel's bearing towards her still remained in no

whit altered by her own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful

if he could have received it. She rose from breakfast before he had

finished, and hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once

more into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare's den, or rather

eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood at the open

door of the apartment, regarding and pondering. She stooped to the

threshold of the doorway, where she had pushed in the note two or

three days earlier in such excitement. The carpet reached close to

the sill, and under the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint

white margin of the envelope containing her letter to him, which he

obviously had never seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it

beneath the carpet as well as beneath the door.

With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it

was--sealed up, just as it had left her hands. The mountain had

not yet been removed. She could not let him read it now, the house

being in full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room

she destroyed the letter there.

She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious.

The incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it

prevented a confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need

not; there was still time. Yet everything was in a stir; there

was coming and going; all had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick

having been asked to accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or

deliberate talk was well-nigh impossible. The only minute Tess could

get to be alone with Clare was when they met upon the landing.

"I am so anxious to talk to you--I want to confess all my faults and

blunders!" she said with attempted lightness.

"No, no--we can't have faults talked of--you must be deemed perfect

to-day at least, my Sweet!" he cried. "We shall have plenty of time,

hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at

the same time."

"But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you

could not say--"

"Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything--say, as soon as

we are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my

faults then. But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will

be excellent matter for a dull time."

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

"I do not, Tessy, really."

The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this.

Those words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection.

She was whirled onward through the next couple of critical hours by

the mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further

meditation. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his,

to call him her lord, her own--then, if necessary, to die--had

at last lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway. In

dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured

idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its

brightness.

The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive,

particularly as it was winter. A closed carriage was ordered from

a roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the

old days of post-chaise travelling. It had stout wheel-spokes, and

heavy felloes a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a

pole like a battering-ram. The postilion was a venerable "boy" of

sixty--a martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive exposure

in youth, counter-acted by strong liquors--who had stood at inn-doors

doing nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed

since he had no longer been required to ride professionally, as if

expecting the old times to come back again. He had a permanent

running wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the

constant bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the many

years that he had been in regular employ at the King's Arms,

Casterbridge.

Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind this decayed

conductor, the _partie carrйe_ took their seats--the bride and

bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel would have liked one at least

of his brothers to be present as groomsman, but their silence after

his gentle hint to that effect by letter had signified that they did

not care to come. They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be

expected to countenance it. Perhaps it was as well that they could

not be present. They were not worldly young fellows, but fraternizing

with dairy-folk would have struck unpleasantly upon their biased

niceness, apart from their views of the match.

Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew nothing of this, did

not see anything, did not know the road they were taking to the

church. She knew that Angel was close to her; all the rest was

a luminous mist. She was a sort of celestial person, who owed

her being to poetry--one of those classical divinities Clare was

accustomed to talk to her about when they took their walks together.

The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people

in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced

no more effect upon her. They were at stellar distances from her

present world. In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her

faith to him the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy.

At a pause in the service, while they were kneeling together, she

unconsciously inclined herself towards him, so that her shoulder

touched his arm; she had been frightened by a passing thought, and

the movement had been automatic, to assure herself that he was really

there, and to fortify her belief that his fidelity would be proof

against all things.

Clare knew that she loved him--every curve of her form showed that--

but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its

single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed,

what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.

As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their

rests, and a modest peal of three notes broke forth--that limited

amount of expression having been deemed sufficient by the church

builders for the joys of such a small parish. Passing by the tower

with her husband on the path to the gate she could feel the vibrant

air humming round them from the louvred belfry in the circle of

sound, and it matched the highly-charged mental atmosphere in which

she was living.

This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation

not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till

the sound of the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the

wedding-service had calmed down. Her eyes could dwell upon details

more clearly now, and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig

to be sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple, she

observed the build and character of that conveyance for the first

time. Sitting in silence she regarded it long.

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

"Yes," she answered, putting her hand to her brow. "I tremble at

many things. It is all so serious, Angel. Among other things I seem

to have seen this carriage before, to be very well acquainted with

it. It is very odd--I must have seen it in a dream."

"Oh--you have heard the legend of the d'Urberville Coach--that

well-known superstition of this county about your family when they

were very popular here; and this lumbering old thing reminds you of

it."

"I have never heard of it to my knowledge," said she. "What is the

legend--may I know it?"

"Well--I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A certain

d'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a

dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time members of

the family see or hear the old coach whenever--But I'll tell you

another day--it is rather gloomy. Evidently some dim knowledge of

it has been brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable

caravan."

"I don't remember hearing it before," she murmured. "Is it when we

are going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it

when we have committed a crime?"

"Now, Tess!"

He silenced her by a kiss.

By the time they reached home she was contrite and spiritless. She

was Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any moral right to the name?

Was she not more truly Mrs Alexander d'Urberville? Could intensity

of love justify what might be considered in upright souls as culpable

reticence? She knew not what was expected of women in such cases;

and she had no counsellor.

However, when she found herself alone in her room for a few

minutes--the last day this on which she was ever to enter it--she

knelt down and prayed. She tried to pray to God, but it was her

husband who really had her supplication. Her idolatry of this man

was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was

conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Laurence: "These violent

delights have violent ends." It might be too desperate for human

conditions--too rank, to wild, too deadly.

"O my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there alone; "for

she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I

might have been!"

Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided

to fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old

farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during

his investigation of flour processes. At two o'clock there was

nothing left to do but to start. All the servantry of the dairy were

standing in the red-brick entry to see them go out, the dairyman and

his wife following to the door. Tess saw her three chamber-mates

in a row against the wall, pensively inclining their heads. She

had much questioned if they would appear at the parting moment; but

there they were, stoical and staunch to the last. She knew why the

delicate Retty looked so fragile, and Izz so tragically sorrowful,

and Marian so blank; and she forgot her own dogging shadow for a

moment in contemplating theirs.

She impulsively whispered to him--

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

time?"

Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality--which

was all that it was to him--and as he passed them he kissed them in

succession where they stood, saying "Goodbye" to each as he did so.

When they reached the door Tess femininely glanced back to discern

the effect of that kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her

glance, as there might have been. If there had it would have

disappeared when she saw how moved the girls all were. The kiss had

obviously done harm by awakening feelings they were trying to subdue.

Of all this Clare was unconscious. Passing on to the wicket-gate he

shook hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed his last

thanks to them for their attentions; after which there was a moment

of silence before they had moved off. It was interrupted by the

crowing of a cock. The white one with the rose comb had come and

settled on the palings in front of the house, within a few yards of

them, and his notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling away like

echoes down a valley of rocks.

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

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

"That's bad," one murmured to the other, not thinking that the words

could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.

The cock crew again--straight towards Clare.

"Well!" said the dairyman.

"I don't like to hear him!" said Tess to her husband. "Tell the man

to drive on. Goodbye, goodbye!"

The cock crew again.

"Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!" said the

dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him

away. And to his wife as they went indoors: "Now, to think o' that

just to-day! I've not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year

afore."

"It only means a change in the weather," said she; "not what you

think: 'tis impossible!"

XXXIV

They drove by the level road along the valley to a distance of a few

miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the

left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place

half its name. Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they

had engaged lodgings, whose exterior features are so well known to

all travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of a fine

manorial residence, and the property and seat of a d'Urberville, but

since its partial demolition a farmhouse.

"Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!" said Clare as he handed

her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it was too near a satire.

On entering they found that, though they had only engaged a couple

of rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their proposed presence

during the coming days to pay a New Year's visit to some friends,

leaving a woman from a neighbouring cottage to minister to their

few wants. The absoluteness of possession pleased them, and they

realized it as the first moment of their experience under their own

exclusive roof-tree.

But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his

bride. When the carriage was gone they ascended the stairs to wash

their hands, the charwoman showing the way. On the landing Tess

stopped and started.

"What's the matter?" said he.

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

frightened me."

He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built

into the masonry. As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these

paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred

years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten.

The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so

suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large

teeth, and bold eye of the other suggesting arrogance to the point

of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.

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

"I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the

d'Urberville family, the ancient lords of this manor," she said,

"Owing to their being builded into the wall they can't be moved

away."

The unpleasantness of the matter was that, in addition to their

effect upon Tess, her fine features were unquestionably traceable

in these exaggerated forms. He said nothing of this, however, and,

regretting that he had gone out of his way to choose the house for

their bridal time, went on into the adjoining room. The place having

been rather hastily prepared for them, they washed their hands in one

basin. Clare touched hers under the water.

"Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up.

"They are very much mixed."

"They are all yours," said she, very prettily, and endeavoured

to be gayer than she was. He had not been displeased with her

thoughtfulness on such an occasion; it was what every sensible woman

would show: but Tess knew that she had been thoughtful to excess,

and struggled against it.

The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it

shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which

stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark

set upon her. They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and

here they shared their first common meal alone. Such was their

childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting to use the

same bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from her

lips with his own. He wondered a little that she did not enter into

these frivolities with his own zest.

Looking at her silently for a long time; "She is a dear dear Tess,"

he thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of

a difficult passage. "Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and

irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good

or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless

I were a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I

become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall

I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God

forbid such a crime!"

They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage, which the

dairyman had promised to send before it grew dark. But evening began

to close in, and the luggage did not arrive, and they had brought

nothing more than they stood in. With the departure of the sun the

calm mood of the winter day changed. Out of doors there began noises

as of silk smartly rubbed; the restful dead leaves of the preceding

autumn were stirred to irritated resurrection, and whirled about

unwillingly, and tapped against the shutters. It soon began to rain.

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

The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for the night, but

she had placed candles upon the table, and now they lit them. Each

candle-flame drew towards the fireplace.

"These old houses are so draughty," continued Angel, looking at the

flames, and at the grease guttering down the sides. "I wonder where

that luggage is. We haven't even a brush and comb."

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

"Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening--not at all as you

used to be. Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled

you. I am sorry I brought you here. I wonder if you really love me,

after all?"

He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent; but she

was surcharged with emotion, and winced like a wounded animal.

Though she tried not to shed tears, she could not help showing one

or two.

"I did not mean it!" said he, sorry. "You are worried at not having

your things, I know. I cannot think why old Jonathan has not come

with them. Why, it is seven o'clock? Ah, there he is!"

A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody else to answer

it, Clare went out. He returned to the room with a small package in

his hand.

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

"How vexing!" said Tess.

The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who had arrived

at Talbothays from Emminster Vicarage immediately after the departure

of the married couple, and had followed them hither, being under

injunction to deliver it into nobody's hands but theirs. Clare

brought it to the light. It was less than a foot long, sewed up in

canvas, sealed in red wax with his father's seal, and directed in his

father's hand to "Mrs Angel Clare."

"It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess," said he, handing it

to her. "How thoughtful they are!"

Tess looked a little flustered as she took it.

"I think I would rather have you open it, dearest," said she, turning

over the parcel. "I don't like to break those great seals; they look

so serious. Please open it for me!"

He undid the parcel. Inside was a case of morocco leather, on the

top of which lay a note and a key.

The note was for Clare, in the following words:

MY DEAR SON--

Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your

godmother, Mrs Pitney, when you were a lad, she--vain,

kind woman that she was--left to me a portion of the

contents of her jewel-case in trust for your wife, if

you should ever have one, as a mark of her affection

for you and whomsoever you should choose. This trust

I have fulfilled, and the diamonds have been locked up

at my banker's ever since. Though I feel it to be a

somewhat incongruous act in the circumstances, I am, as

you will see, bound to hand over the articles to the

woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime will now

rightly belong, and they are therefore promptly sent.

They become, I believe, heirlooms, strictly speaking,

according to the terms of your godmother's will. The

precise words of the clause that refers to this matter

are enclosed.

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

Unlocking the case, they found it to contain a necklace, with

pendant, bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other small

ornaments.

Tess seemed afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes sparkled for

a moment as much as the stones when Clare spread out the set.

"Are they mine?" she asked incredulously.

"They are, certainly," said he.

He looked into the fire. He remembered how, when he was a lad of

fifteen, his godmother, the Squire's wife--the only rich person

with whom he had ever come in contact--had pinned her faith to his

success; had prophesied a wondrous career for him. There had seemed

nothing at all out of keeping with such a conjectured career in the

storing up of these showy ornaments for his wife and the wives of

her descendants. They gleamed somewhat ironically now. "Yet why?"

he asked himself. It was but a question of vanity throughout; and

if that were admitted into one side of the equation it should be

admitted into the other. His wife was a d'Urberville: whom could

they become better than her?

Suddenly he said with enthusiasm--

"Tess, put them on--put them on!" And he turned from the fire to

help her.

But as if by magic she had already donned them--necklace, ear-rings,

bracelets, and all.

"But the gown isn't right, Tess," said Clare. "It ought to be a low

one for a set of brilliants like that."

"Ought it?" said Tess.

"Yes," said he.

He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her bodice, so

as to make it roughly approximate to the cut for evening wear; and

when she had done this, and the pendant to the necklace hung isolated

amid the whiteness of her throat, as it was designed to do, he

stepped back to survey her.

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

As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a peasant girl but

very moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her simple

condition and attire will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a

woman of fashion with the aids that Art can render; while the beauty

of the midnight crush would often cut but a sorry figure if placed

inside the field-woman's wrapper upon a monotonous acreage of

turnips on a dull day. He had never till now estimated the artistic

excellence of Tess's limbs and features.

"If you were only to appear in a ball-room!" he said. "But

no--no, dearest; I think I love you best in the wing-bonnet and

cotton-frock--yes, better than in this, well as you support these

dignities."

Tess's sense of her striking appearance had given her a flush of

excitement, which was yet not happiness.

"I'll take them off," she said, "in case Jonathan should see me.

They are not fit for me, are they? They must be sold, I suppose?"

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

a breach of faith."

Influenced by a second thought she readily obeyed. She had something

to tell, and there might be help in these. She sat down with the

jewels upon her; and they again indulged in conjectures as to where

Jonathan could possibly be with their baggage. The ale they had

poured out for his consumption when he came had gone flat with long

standing.

Shortly after this they began supper, which was already laid on

a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the

fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if

some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had

been caused by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now

heard in the passage, and Angel went out.

"I couldn' make nobody hear at all by knocking," apologized Jonathan

Kail, for it was he at last; "and as't was raining out I opened the

door. I've brought the things, sir."

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

"Well, yes, sir."

There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail's tone which had not

been there in the day, and lines of concern were ploughed upon his

forehead in addition to the lines of years. He continued--

"We've all been gallied at the dairy at what might ha' been a most

terrible affliction since you and your Mis'ess--so to name her

now--left us this a'ternoon. Perhaps you ha'nt forgot the cock's

afternoon crow?"

"Dear me;--what--"

"Well, some says it do mane one thing, and some another; but what's

happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown

herself."

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

"Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis'ess--so to name what she

lawful is--when you two drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on

their bonnets and went out; and as there is not much doing now, being

New Year's Eve, and folks mops and brooms from what's inside 'em,

nobody took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they

had summut to drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross,

and there they seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the

water-meads as if for home, and Marian going on to the next village,

where there's another public-house. Nothing more was zeed or heard

o' Retty till the waterman, on his way home, noticed something by the

Great Pool; 'twas her bonnet and shawl packed up. In the water he

found her. He and another man brought her home, thinking a' was

dead; but she fetched round by degrees."

Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy

tale, went to shut the door between the passage and the ante-room

to the inner parlour where she was; but his wife, flinging a shawl

round her, had come to the outer room and was listening to the man's

narrative, her eyes resting absently on the luggage and the drops of

rain glistening upon it.

"And, more than this, there's Marian; she's been found dead drunk

by the withy-bed--a girl who hev never been known to touch anything

before except shilling ale; though, to be sure, 'a was always a good

trencher-woman, as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had

all gone out o' their minds!"

"And Izz?" asked Tess.

"Izz is about house as usual; but 'a do say 'a can guess how it

happened; and she seems to be very low in mind about it, poor maid,

as well she mid be. And so you see, sir, as all this happened just

when we was packing your few traps and your Mis'ess's night-rail and

dressing things into the cart, why, it belated me."

"Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs, and drink a

cup of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be

wanted?"

Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire,

looking wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan Kail's heavy footsteps

up and down the stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and

heard him express his thanks for the ale her husband took out to him,

and for the gratuity he received. Jonathan's footsteps then died

from the door, and his cart creaked away.

Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and

coming in to where she sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks

between his hands from behind. He expected her to jump up gaily and

unpack the toilet-gear that she had been so anxious about, but as she

did not rise he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on

the supper-table being too thin and glimmering to interfere with its

glow.

"I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls,"

he said. "Still, don't let it depress you. Retty was naturally

morbid, you know."

"Without the least cause," said Tess. "While they who have cause to

be, hide it, and pretend they are not."

This incident had turned the scale for her. They were simple and

innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen;

they had deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved

worse--yet she was the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all

without paying. She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would

tell, there and then. This final determination she came to when she

looked into the fire, he holding her hand.

A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides

and back of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished

andirons, and the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside

of the mantel-shelf was flushed with the high-coloured light, and

the legs of the table nearest the fire. Tess's face and neck

reflected the same warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran

or a Sirius--a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that

interchanged their hues with her every pulsation.

"Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about

telling our faults?" he asked abruptly, finding that she still

remained immovable. "We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well

have done so. But for me it was no light promise. I want to make

a confession to you, Love."

This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of

a Providential interposition.

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

gladness and relief.

"You did not expect it? Ah--you thought too highly of me. Now

listen. Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me, and

not to be indignant with me for not telling you before, as perhaps

I ought to have done."

How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did not speak,

and Clare went on--

"I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering my chance

of you, darling, the great prize of my life--my Fellowship I call

you. My brother's Fellowship was won at his college, mine at

Talbothays Dairy. Well, I would not risk it. I was going to tell

you a month ago--at the time you agreed to be mine, but I could not;

I thought it might frighten you away from me. I put it off; then I

thought I would tell you yesterday, to give you a chance at least of

escaping me. But I did not. And I did not this morning, when you

proposed our confessing our faults on the landing--the sinner that I

was! But I must, now I see you sitting there so solemnly. I wonder

if you will forgive me?"

"O yes! I am sure that--"

"Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don't know. To begin at

the beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that I am one

of the eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in

good morals, Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of

men, and it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not

enter the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no

claim to it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one

may think of plenary inspiration, one must heartily subscribe to

these words of Paul: 'Be thou an example--in word, in conversation,

in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.' It is the only

safeguard for us poor human beings. '_Integer vitae_,' says a Roman

poet, who is strange company for St Paul--

"The man of upright life, from frailties free,

Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.

"Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt

all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred

in me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself

fell."

He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been

made when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a

cork on the waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours' dissipation

with a stranger.

"Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly," he

continued. "I would have no more to say to her, and I came home. I

have never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat

you with perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without

telling this. Do you forgive me?"

She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.

"Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!--too painful as it is

for the occasion--and talk of something lighter."

"O, Angel--I am almost glad--because now YOU can forgive ME! I have

not made my confession. I have a confession, too--remember, I said

so."

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

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

"It can hardly be more serious, dearest."

"It cannot--O no, it cannot!" She jumped up joyfully at the hope.

"No, it cannot be more serious, certainly," she cried, "because 'tis

just the same! I will tell you now."

She sat down again.

Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate were lit

by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Imagination might have

beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on

his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her

brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her

shape rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which

each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's; and

pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on her story of

her acquaintance with Alec d'Urberville and its results, murmuring

the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.

END OF PHASE THE FOURTH

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays

XXXV

Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary

explanations were done. Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen

higher than its opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of

any kind, and she had not wept.

But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer

transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate

looked impish--demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least

about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not

care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a

chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their

irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had

changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather,

nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had

changed.

When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous

endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains,

repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind

foolishness.

Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the

intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After

stirring the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her

disclosure had imparted itself now. His face had withered. In the

strenuousness of his concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor.

He could not, by any contrivance, think closely enough; that was the

meaning of his vague movement. When he spoke it was in the most

inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she had heard

from him.

"Tess!"

"Yes, dearest."

"Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true.

O you cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are

not... My wife, my Tess--nothing in you warrants such a supposition

as that?"

"I am not out of my mind," she said.

"And yet--" He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses:

"Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a

way--but I hindered you, I remember!"

These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble

of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away,

and bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room,

where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not

weep. Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and

from this position she crouched in a heap.

"In the name of our love, forgive me!" she whispered with a dry

mouth. "I have forgiven you for the same!"

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

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

"You--yes, you do."

"But you do not forgive me?"

"O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one

person; now you are another. My God--how can forgiveness meet such

a grotesque--prestidigitation as that!"

He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into

horrible laughter--as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.

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

mercy upon me--have mercy!"

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

"Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?" she cried out. "Do

you know what this is to me?"

He shook his head.

"I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have

thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall

be if I do not! That's what I have felt, Angel!"

"I know that."

"I thought, Angel, that you loved me--me, my very self! If it is

I you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It

frightens me! Having begun to love you, I love you for ever--in all

changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more.

Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me?"

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

"But who?"

"Another woman in your shape."

She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive

foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of

imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was

upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her

mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible

sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he

stepped forward, thinking she was going to fall.

"Sit down, sit down," he said gently. "You are ill; and it is

natural that you should be."

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look

still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.

"I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?" she asked

helplessly. "It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved,

he says."

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was

ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she

turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had

happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the

woe of the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically,

till the violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of

weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

"Angel," she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry

voice of terror having left her now. "Angel, am I too wicked for

you and me to live together?"

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

"I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have

no right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be

married, as I said I would do; and I shan't finish the good-hussif'

I cut out and meant to make while we were in lodgings."

"Shan't you?"

"No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away

from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if you never speak to me any more

I shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may."

"And if I order you to do anything?"

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

and die."

"You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of

harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past

mood of self-preservation."

These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate

sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or

cat. The charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and

she only received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger

ruled. She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his

affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly

upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the

skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.

Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change that her

confession had wrought in his life, in his universe, returned to him,

and he tried desperately to advance among the new conditions in which

he stood. Some consequent action was necessary; yet what?

"Tess," he said, as gently as he could speak, "I cannot stay--in this

room--just now. I will walk out a little way."

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had

poured out for their supper--one for her, one for him--remained on

the table untasted. This was what their _agape_ had come to. At

tea, two or three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of

affection, drunk from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled

to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay.

Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and

followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back.

The rain was over and the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without

purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black,

sinister, and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the

jewels of which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at

hearing her footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed

to make no difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning

arches of the great bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain

having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away.

Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick

transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining

overhead if she had not seen them there--the vastest things of the

universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same

valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the

surroundings being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from

the house the road wound through the meads, and along these she

followed Clare without any attempt to come up with him or to attract

him, but with dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and

still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great

after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air

had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse;

she knew that he saw her without irradiation--in all her bareness;

that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then--

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee

shall hate;

Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.

For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;

And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown

shall be pain.

He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now

insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a

weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help

addressing Clare.

"What have I done--what HAVE I done! I have not told of anything

that interferes with or belies my love for you. You don't think I

planned it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at,

Angel; it is not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that

deceitful woman you think me!"

"H'm--well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the

same. But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will

not; and I will do everything to avoid it."

But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things

that would have been better left to silence.

"Angel!--Angel! I was a child--a child when it happened! I knew

nothing of men."

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

"Then will you not forgive me?"

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

"And love me?"

To this question he did not answer.

"O Angel--my mother says that it sometimes happens so!--she knows

several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not

minded it much--has got over it at least. And yet the woman had not

loved him as I do you!"

"Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different manners.

You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who

have never been initiated into the proportions of social things.

You don't know what you say."

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

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

"So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your

pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot

help associating your decline as a family with this other fact--of

your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills,

decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising

you more by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a

new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of

an effete aristocracy!"

"Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family were

once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And the

Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family.

You find such as I everywhere; 'tis a feature of our county, and I

can't help it."

"So much the worse for the county."

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their

particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and

to all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a

cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor,

met two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without

converse, one behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the

glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they

were anxious and sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the

same field, progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour

and of the cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his

preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness in his house,

that he did not bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he

recalled a long while after.

During the interval of the cottager's going and coming, she had said

to her husband--

"I don't see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all

your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in

it. I am not afraid."

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

"I will leave something to show that I did it myself--on account of

my shame. They will not blame you then."

"Don't speak so absurdly--I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense

to have such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one

for satirical laughter than for tragedy. You don't in the least

understand the quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the

light of a joke by nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please

oblige me by returning to the house, and going to bed."

"I will," said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of

the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries

past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still

worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished,

creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the

temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk

having been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and

in obeying his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge

across the main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she

got back, everything remained as she had left it, the fire being

still burning. She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute,

but proceeded to her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken.

Here she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking blankly around,

and presently began to undress. In removing the light towards the

bedstead its rays fell upon the tester of white dimity; something was

hanging beneath it, and she lifted the candle to see what it was.

A bough of mistletoe. Angel had put it there; she knew that in an

instant. This was the explanation of that mysterious parcel which it

had been so difficult to pack and bring; whose contents he would not

explain to her, saying that time would soon show her the purpose

thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it there. How

foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that

he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.

When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity.

Among so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which

welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,

surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,

possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.

Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the

manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon

the old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to

a sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and

listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told

that she was sleeping profoundly.

"Thank God!" murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of

bitterness at the thought--approximately true, though not wholly

so--that having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she

was now reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her

door again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d'Urberville

dames, whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess's

bedchamber. In the candlelight the painting was more than

unpleasant. Sinister design lurked in the woman's features, a

concentrated purpose of revenge on the other sex--so it seemed to

him then. The Caroline bodice of the portrait was low--precisely as

Tess's had been when he tucked it in to show the necklace; and again

he experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance between

them.

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

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing

his powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible

sterile expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure.

It was the face of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet who

found no advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding

the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness

of things. Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed

possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour

ago; but

The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not

indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate

to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes

which as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the

tongue was telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her

ostensible one, discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the

light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned

and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his

happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to

swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little

disturbance or change of mien.

XXXVI

Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as

though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its

extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full

glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and

his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of

not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be

done? From above there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came

a knock at the door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring

cottager's wife, who was to minister to their wants while they

remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely

awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window

and informed her that they could manage to shift for themselves that

morning. She had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave

at the door. When the dame had gone away he searched in the back

quarters of the house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was

plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare

soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered

him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood

rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local

people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married

couple, and envied their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the

stairs, called in a conventional voice--

"Breakfast is ready!"

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.

When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the

sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she

was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been

but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so

before he went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large

round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the

new frocks--a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of

white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly

been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire.

The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have

inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it

soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the

hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed

as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any

more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like

undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his

sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own

formed a visible object also.

"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly

as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the

flesh the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale

cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had

left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was

almost as pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still,

under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that

a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her

characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had

set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed

at her with a stupefied air.

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

"It is true."

"Every word?"

"Every word."

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a

lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some

sort of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated--

"It is true."

"Is he living?" Angel then asked.

"The baby died."

"But the man?"

"He is alive."

A last despair passed over Clare's face.

"Is he in England?"

"Yes."

He took a few vague steps.

"My position--is this," he said abruptly. "I thought--any man would

have thought--that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with

social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should

secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks;

but--However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not."

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been

needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had

lost all round.

"Angel--I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had

not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you;

though I hoped you would never--"

Her voice grew husky.

"A last way?"

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

"How?"

"By divorcing me."

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

"Can't you--now I have told you? I thought my confession would give

you grounds for that."

"O Tess--you are too, too--childish--unformed--crude, I suppose! I

don't know what you are. You don't understand the law--you don't

understand!"

"What--you cannot?"

"Indeed I cannot."

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

"I thought--I thought," she whispered. "O, now I see how wicked I

seem to you! Believe me--believe me, on my soul, I never thought but

that you could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a

doubt, that you could cast me off if you were determined, and didn't

love me at--at--all!"

"You were mistaken," he said.

"O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I

hadn't the courage. That's just like me!"

"The courage to do what?"

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

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

"Of putting an end to myself."

"When?"

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

she answered.

"Where?"

"Under your mistletoe."

"My good--! How?" he asked sternly.

"I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!" she said, shrinking.

"It was with the cord of my box. But I could not--do the last thing!

I was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name."

The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not

volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and,

letting his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, "Now,

listen to this. You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing!

How could you! You will promise me as your husband to attempt that

no more."

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

"Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description."

"But, Angel," she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon

him, "it was thought of entirely on your account--to set you free

without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to

get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to

do it with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my

ruined husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love

you more, if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do

it, since there's no other way of escape for 'ee. I feel I am so

utterly worthless! So very greatly in the way!"

"Ssh!"

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

He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night

her activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness

to be feared.

Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more

or less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that

their glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward

in hearing each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped;

moreover, the amount of eating done was small on both sides.

Breakfast over, he rose, and telling her the hour at which he might

be expected to dinner, went off to the miller's in a mechanical

pursuance of the plan of studying that business, which had been his

only practical reason for coming here.

When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form

crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.

He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared.

Then, without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began

clearing the table and setting it in order.

The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon

Tess, but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she

left her assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the

sitting-room, waited for the reappearance of Angel's form behind the

bridge.

About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a

quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner

served by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where

they had washed their hands together the day before, and as he

entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if

by his own motion.

"How punctual!" he said.

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

The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing

during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and

the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him

greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been

in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining

conventual buildings--now a heap of ruins. He left the house again

in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself

through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way

and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she

made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work like this," he

said. "You are not my servant; you are my wife."

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. "I may think myself

that--indeed?" she murmured, in piteous raillery. "You mean in name!

Well, I don't want to be anything more."

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

"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her accents. "I

thought I--because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I

thought I was not respectable enough long ago--and on that account

I didn't want to marry you, only--only you urged me!"

She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost

have won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of

his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general,

there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a

soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to

traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked

his acceptance of Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire

than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased

to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with many

impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what

they intellectually despise. He waited till her sobbing ceased.

"I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you," he

said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general.

"It isn't a question of respectability, but one of principle!"

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her,

being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls

with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by

appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of

sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.

But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts,

and hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was

indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing

that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not

provoked; thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just

now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking

modern world.

This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the

preceding ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did

she--the formerly free and independent Tess--venture to make any

advances. It was on the third occasion of his starting after a meal

to go out to the flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said

"Goodbye," and she replied in the same words, at the same time

inclining her mouth in the way of his. He did not avail himself of

the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily aside--

"I shall be home punctually."

Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had

he tried to reach those lips against her consent--often had he said

gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and

milk and honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance

from them, and other follies of that sort. But he did not care for

them now. He observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently--

"You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we

should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that

would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it

is only for form's sake."

"Yes," said Tess absently.

He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a

moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at

least.

Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same

house, truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It

was evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed

activities in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She

was awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent

flexibility. His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer

expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of going away

from him during his absence at the mill; but she feared that this,

instead of benefiting him, might be the means of hampering and

humiliating him yet more if it should become known.

Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been

unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with

thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former

pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself,

"What's to be done--what's to be done?" and by chance she overheard

him. It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had

hitherto prevailed.

"I suppose--you are not going to live with me--long, are you, Angel?"

she asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely

mechanical were the means by which she retained that expression of

chastened calm upon her face.

"I cannot" he said, "without despising myself, and what is worse,

perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you

in the ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not

despise you. And, let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my

difficulties. How can we live together while that man lives?--he

being your husband in nature, and not I. If he were dead it might

be different... Besides, that's not all the difficulty; it lies in

another consideration--one bearing upon the future of other people

than ourselves. Think of years to come, and children being born to

us, and this past matter getting known--for it must get known. There

is not an uttermost part of the earth but somebody comes from it or

goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of wretches of our flesh and

blood growing up under a taunt which they will gradually get to feel

the full force of with their expanding years. What an awakening

for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly say 'Remain' after

contemplating this contingency? Don't you think we had better

endure the ills we have than fly to others?"

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

"I cannot say 'Remain,'" she answered, "I cannot; I had not thought

so far."

Tess's feminine hope--shall we confess it?--had been so obstinately

recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a

domiciliary intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness

even against his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual

sense, she was not incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency

of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies

in propinquity. Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this

failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of strategy,

she said to herself: yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish.

His last representation had now been made, and it was, as she said,

a new view. She had truly never thought so far as that, and his

lucid picture of possible offspring who would scorn her was one that

brought deadly convictions to an honest heart which was humanitarian

to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that in some

circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life,

and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. Like all

who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of

M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, "You shall be

born," particularly if addressed to potential issue of hers.

Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess

had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might

result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had

bewailed as misfortune to herself.

She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the

self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto

arose in Clare's own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based

on her exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it

promisingly. She might have added besides: "On an Australian upland

or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to

reproach me or you?" Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted

the momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she

may have been right. The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only

its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if these assumed

reproaches were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by

strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own fastidious

brain.

It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd

paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man.

We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a

fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal

presence is something less appealing than corporal absence; the

latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects

of the real. She found that her personality did not plead her cause

so forcibly as she had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true:

she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire.

"I have thought over what you say," she remarked to him, moving her

forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring

that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. "It is quite true,

all of it; it must be. You must go away from me."

"But what can you do?"

"I can go home."

Clare had not thought of that.

"Are you sure?" he inquired.

"Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and

done. You once said that I was apt to win men against their better

judgement; and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you

to change your plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and

afterwards your repentance and my sorrow will be terrible."

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

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

"Then it shall be so."

Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a

difference between the proposition and the covenant, which she had

felt only too quickly.

"I feared it would come to this," she murmured, her countenance

meekly fixed. "I don't complain, Angel, I--I think it best. What

you said has quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should

reproach me if we should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence,

you might get angry with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what

you do of my bygones, you yourself might be tempted to say words, and

they might be overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what only

hurts me now would torture and kill me then! I will go--to-morrow."

"And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to initiate it, I

have seen that it was advisable we should part--at least for a while,

till I can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write

to you."

Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous;

but, as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the

depths of this gentle being she had married--the will to subdue the

grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the

flesh to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead

leaves upon the tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.

He may have observed her look, for he explained--

"I think of people more kindly when I am away from them"; adding

cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day,

for weariness; thousands have done it!"

That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack

also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part

the next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures

thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom

any parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew,

and she knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised

over the other--on her part independently of accomplishments--would

probably in the first days of their separation be even more potent

than ever, time must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments

against accepting her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more

strongly in the boreal light of a remoter view. Moreover, when two

people are once parted--have abandoned a common domicile and a common

environment--new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated

place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are

forgotten.

XXXVII

Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce

it in the Valley of the Froom.

Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in the darkened

farmhouse once the mansion of the d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the

upper chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step

of the staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the

door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the

stream of moonlight with a curiously careful tread. He was in his

shirt and trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she

perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy.

When he reached the middle of the room he stood still and murmured in

tones of indescribable sadness--

"Dead! dead! dead!"

Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force, Clare would

occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such

as he had done on the night of their return from market just before

their marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the

man who had insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress

had wrought him into that somnambulistic state now.

Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart, that,

awake or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If

he had entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have

disturbed her trust in his protectiveness.

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

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of

unmeasurable woe, he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled

her in the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with

as much respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her

across the room, murmuring--

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

true!"

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours,

were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had

been to save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling,

have put an end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay

in absolute stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering

what he was going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out

upon the landing.

"My wife--dead, dead!" he said.

He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the

banister. Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near

extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart

on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this

precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If

they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit,

how desirable.

However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support

of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips--lips in the day-time

scorned. Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and

descended the staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken

him, and they reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his

hands from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar

and passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge

of the door. But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room for

extension in the open air, he lifted her against his shoulder, so

that he could carry her with ease, the absence of clothes taking much

from his burden. Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction

of the river a few yards distant.

His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and

she found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might

have done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him

that it pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute

possession, to dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling,

under the hovering terror of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he

really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off,

even if in that recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself

the right of harming her.

Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of--that Sunday morning when he

had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who

had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which

Tess could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her,

but proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining

mill, at length stood still on the brink of the river.

Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland, frequently

divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves

around little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying

themselves as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to

which he had brought her was such a general confluence, and the river

was proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow

foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away,

leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the

speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and

Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the day-time young

men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had

possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the

plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.

Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was lonely,

the river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of

accomplishment. He might drown her if he would; it would be better

than parting to-morrow to lead severed lives.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting,

and splitting the moon's reflected face. Spots of froth travelled

past, and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could

both fall together into the current now, their arms would be so

tightly clasped together that they could not be saved; they would

go out of the world almost painlessly, and there would be no more

reproach to her, or to him for marrying her. His last half-hour with

her would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke,

his day-time aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be

contemplated only as a transient dream.

The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a

movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How

she valued her own life had been proved; but his--she had no right to

tamper with it. He reached the other side with her in safety.

Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds,

and taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they

reached the ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall

was the empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with

a turn for grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself. In this

Clare carefully laid Tess. Having kissed her lips a second time he

breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained. Clare

then lay down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell into

the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a

log. The spurt of mental excitement which had produced the effort

was now over.

Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the

season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him

to remain here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to

himself he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and

be chilled to certain death. She had heard of such deaths after

sleep-walking. But how could she dare to awaken him, and let him

know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him to discover

his folly in respect of her? Tess, however, stepping out of her

stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to arouse him

without being violent. It was indispensable to do something, for she

was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection. Her

excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes'

adventure; but that beatific interval was over.

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she

whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could

summon--

"Let us walk on, darling," at the same time taking him suggestively

by the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words

had apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward

seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a

spirit, and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the

arm to the stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which

they stood at the manor-house door. Tess's feet were quite bare, and

the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in

his woollen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort.

There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his

own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of

wood, to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions

she thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might.

But the exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained

undisturbed.

As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew

little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's

excursion, though, as regarded himself, he may have been aware that

he had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from

a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments

in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its

strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.

But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the

other subject.

He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that

if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the

light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure

reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so

far, therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning

light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant

instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch

and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the

less there. Clare no longer hesitated.

At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,

he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakeably that

Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the

reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know

that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his

common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised

his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much

like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during

intoxication.

It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint

recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to

it from a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the

opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.

He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and

soon after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of

the end--the temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his

tenderness by the incident of the night raised dreams of a possible

future with him. The luggage was put on the top, and the man drove

them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman expressing some

surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to

his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he

wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went.

Beyond this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to

suggest a fiasco, or that they were not going together to visit

friends.

Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such

solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind

up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs

Crick a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of

their unhappy state.

To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left the carriage

by the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and

descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been

cut, and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had

followed her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the

enclosure in which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away

behind the cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of their

first embrace. The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the

colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold.

Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward,

throwing into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate

in Talbothays and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the

newly-married. Then Mrs Crick emerged from the house, and several

others of their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not

seem to be there.

Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which

affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit

agreement of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret

they behaved as would have been ordinary. And then, although she

would rather there had been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had

to hear in detail the story of Marian and Retty. The later had gone

home to her father's, and Marian had left to look for employment

elsewhere. They feared she would come to no good.

To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her

favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them with her hand, and as

she and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and

soul, there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their

aspect to one who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life,

as they outwardly were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching

him, facing one way, as against all the dairy facing the other,

speaking in their adieux as "we", and yet sundered like the poles.

Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in their attitude,

some awkwardness in acting up to their profession of unity, different

from the natural shyness of young couples, may have been apparent,

for when they were gone Mrs Crick said to her husband--

"How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they

stood like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream!

Didn't it strike 'ee that 'twas so? Tess had always sommat strange

in her, and she's not now quite like the proud young bride of a

well-be-doing man."

They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards

Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where

Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and

entering the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a

stranger who did not know their relations. At a midway point, when

Nuttlebury had been passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare

stopped the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return

to her mother's house it was here that he would leave her. As they

could not talk with freedom in the driver's presence he asked her to

accompany him for a few steps on foot along one of the branch roads;

she assented, and directing the man to wait a few minutes they

strolled away.

"Now, let us understand each other," he said gently. "There is no

anger between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at

present. I will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you

know where I go to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring

myself to bear it--if it is desirable, possible--I will come to you.

But until I come to you it will be better that you should not try to

come to me."

The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of

her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that

of one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman

who had done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could

contest the point with him no further. She simply repeated after him

his own words.

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

"Just so."

"May I write to you?"

"O yes--if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will

not be the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you."

"I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my

punishment ought to be; only--only--don't make it more than I can

bear!"

That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had

she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane,

notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was

possessed, he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood

of long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was

his best advocate. Pride, too, entered into her submission--which

perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too

apparent in the whole d'Urberville family--and the many effective

chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.

The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He

now handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which

he had obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants,

the interest in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only (if he

understood the wording of the will), he advised her to let him send

to a bank for safety; and to this she readily agreed.

These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the carriage,

and handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive

her. Taking next his own bag and umbrella--the sole articles he had

brought with him hitherwards--he bade her goodbye; and they parted

there and then.

The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an