Tess of the D'urbervilles

unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one

moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured

to do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede,

and in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with

peculiar emendations of his own--

God's NOT in his heaven:

All's WRONG with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his

own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.

XXXVIII

As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her

youth began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor.

Her first thought was how would she be able to face her parents?

She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the

village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who

had kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had

probably left on New Year's Day, the date when such changes were

made. Having received no intelligence lately from her home, she

asked the turnpike-keeper for news.

"Oh--nothing, miss," he answered. "Marlott is Marlott still. Folks

have died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter

married this week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house,

you know; they was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that

high standing that John's own folk was not considered well-be-doing

enough to have any part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know

how't have been discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman

himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own vaults to

this day, but done out of his property in the time o' the Romans.

However, Sir John, as we call 'n now, kept up the wedding-day as well

as he could, and stood treat to everybody in the parish; and John's

wife sung songs at The Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock."

Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide

to go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She

asked the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his

house for a while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed

her carriage, and went on to the village alone by a back lane.

At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how she could

possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were

calmly supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively

rich man, who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here

she was, friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself,

with no better place to go to in the world.

She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the garden-hedge she

was met by a girl who knew her--one of the two or three with whom she

had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how

Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted

with--

"But where's thy gentleman, Tess?"

Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,

leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus

made her way to the house.

As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the

back door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on

the doorstep in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this

without observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed

her.

The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old

quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was

about to plunge her arms in anew.

"Why--Tess!--my chil'--I thought you was married!--married really and

truly this time--we sent the cider--"

"Yes, mother; so I am."

"Going to be?"

"No--I am married."

"Married! Then where's thy husband?"

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

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

"Yes, Tuesday, mother."

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

"Yes, he's gone."

"What's the meaning o' that? 'Nation seize such husbands as you seem

to get, say I!"

"Mother!" Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon

the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs. "I don't know how to tell

'ee, mother! You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell

him. But I did tell him--I couldn't help it--and he went away!"

"O you little fool--you little fool!" burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,

splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. "My good God! that ever

I should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having

relaxed at last.

"I know it--I know--I know!" she gasped through her sobs. "But,

O my mother, I could not help it! He was so good--and I felt

the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had happened!

If--if--it were to be done again--I should do the same. I could

not--I dared not--so sin--against him!"

"But you sinned enough to marry him first!"

"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get

rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if

you knew--if you could only half know how I loved him--how anxious I

was to have him--and how wrung I was between caring so much for him

and my wish to be fair to him!"

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a

helpless thing, into a chair.

"Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why

children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than

other people's--not to know better than to blab such a thing as

that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!" Here Mrs

Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to

be pitied. "What your father will say I don't know," she continued;

"for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The

Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their

rightful position through you--poor silly man!--and now you've made

this mess of it! The Lord-a-Lord!"

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard

approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately,

and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him

herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present. After her first

burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had

taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday

or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them

irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be

borne with; not a lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been

shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for

two younger children. There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on

there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live

hen. He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his

second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen

had been carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show

people that he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs

tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

"We've just had up a story about--" Durbeyfield began, and thereupon

related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the

inn about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having

married into a clerical family. "They was formerly styled 'sir',

like my own ancestry," he said, "though nowadays their true style,

strictly speaking, is 'clerk' only." As Tess had wished that no

great publicity should be given to the event, he had mentioned no

particulars. He hoped she would remove that prohibition soon. He

proposed that the couple should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville,

as uncorrupted. It was better than her husbands's. He asked if any

letter had come from her that day.

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

unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen

mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence

of the cheering glass. Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved

his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the

minds of others.

"To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!" said Sir John.

"And I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as

big as Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes

and sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in

history. And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The

Pure Drop will say to me! How they'll squint and glane, and say,

'This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true

level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!' I feel this is too

much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and all--I can bear

it no longer! ... But she can make him keep her if he's married

her?"

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

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

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.

The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own

parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could

have done. How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her

father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance

doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at

the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing

her that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In

her craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to

hide from her parents the vast extent of the division between them,

she made use of this letter as her reason for again departing,

leaving them under the impression that she was setting out to join

him. Still further to screen her husband from any imputation of

unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare

had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife

of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a

slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon

them in years past. With this assertion of her dignity she bade them

farewell; and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield

household for some time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother

saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which had arisen

between the young husband and wife had adjusted itself under their

strong feeling that they could not live apart from each other.

XXXIX

It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself

descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his

father. With his downward course the tower of the church rose into

the evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no

living person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less

to expect him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his

own footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.

The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had

known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical

man; though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity

stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art,

but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with

the leer of a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond

description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his

agricultural plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in

the manner recommended by the great and wise men of all ages, he

concluded that very few of those great and wise men had ever gone so

far outside themselves as to test the feasibility of their counsel.

"This is the chief thing: be not perturbed," said the Pagan moralist.

That was just Clare's own opinion. But he was perturbed. "Let not

your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," said the Nazarene.

Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart was troubled all the same.

How he would have liked to confront those two great thinkers, and

earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them

to tell him their method!

His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length

he fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive

interest of an outsider.

He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been

brought about by the accident of her being a d'Urberville. When he

found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of

the new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not

stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles? This was what

he had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.

Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He

wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that

he ate, and drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the

motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself

to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as

a dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and

ways.

In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small

town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of

the Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist.

Land was offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil

somewhat attracted him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him

there, and perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions

and habits the conventions would not be so operative which made life

with her seem impracticable to him here. In brief he was strongly

inclined to try Brazil, especially as the season for going thither

was just at hand.

With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan

to his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of

arriving without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated

them. As he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just

as the old one had done in the small hours of that morning when he

had carried his wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard

of the monks; but his face was thinner now.

Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival

stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher

stirs a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the

drawing-room, but neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel

entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.

"But--where's your wife, dear Angel?" cried his mother. "How you

surprise us!"

"She is at her mother's--temporarily. I have come home rather in a

hurry because I've decided to go to Brazil."

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

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

But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical

land could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare's natural interest

in their son's marriage.

"We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken

place," said Mrs Clare, "and your father sent your godmother's gift

to her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be

present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and

not at her home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed

you, and given us no pleasure. Your bothers felt that very strongly.

Now it is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits you for

the business you have chosen to follow instead of the ministry of the

Gospel. ... Yet I wish I could have seen her first, Angel, or have

known a little more about her. We sent her no present of our own,

not knowing what would best give her pleasure, but you must suppose

it only delayed. Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your

father's against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much

better to reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her.

And now you have not brought her. It seems strange. What has

happened?"

He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should to

go her parents' home for the present, whilst he came there.

"I don't mind telling you, dear mother," he said, "that I always

meant to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could

some with credit to you. But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent

one. If I do go it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my

first journey. She will remain at her mother's till I come back."

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

He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been, as he had

said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while--not

to wound their prejudices--feelings--in any way; and for other

reasons he had adhered to it. He would have to visit home in the

course of a year, if he went out at once; and it would be possible

for them to see her before he started a second time--with her.

A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further

exposition of his plans. His mother's disappointment at not seeing

the bride still remained with her. Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess

had infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost

fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth--a charming

woman out of Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate.

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

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

covered its bitterness.

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

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

"I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day that she was

fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid's bow;

dark eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's

cable; and large eyes violety-bluey-blackish."

"I did, mother."

"I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she naturally had

scarce ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw

you."

"Scarcely."

"You were her first love?"

"Of course."

"There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls

of the farm. Certainly I could have wished--well, since my son is to

be an agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should

have been accustomed to an outdoor life."

His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the

chapter from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers,

the Vicar observed to Mrs Clare--

"I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to

read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should

have had in the usual course of our reading?"

"Yes, certainly," said Mrs Clare. "The words of King Lemuel" (she

could cite chapter and verse as well as her husband). "My dear son,

your father has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise

of a virtuous wife. We shall not need to be reminded to apply the

words to the absent one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!"

A lump rose in Clare's throat. The portable lectern was taken out

from the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old

servants came in, and Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse

of the aforesaid chapter--

"Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far

above rubies. She riseth while it is yet night, and

giveth meat to her household. She girdeth her loins

with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She

perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle

goeth not out by night. She looketh well to the ways

of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.

Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband

also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done

virtuously, but thou excellest them all."

When prayers were over, his mother said--

"I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear

father read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you

have chosen. The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an

idler; not a fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and

her heart for the good of others. 'Her children arise up and call

her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters

have done virtuously, but she excelleth them all.' Well, I wish I

could have seen her, Angel. Since she is pure and chaste, she would

have been refined enough for me."

Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which

seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good night to

these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew

neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts, only

as something vague and external to themselves. He went to his own

chamber.

His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to

discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.

"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you go away so

soon? I am quite sure you are not yourself."

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

"About her? Now, my son, I know it is that--I know it is about her!

Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?"

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

difference--"

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

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of

trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her

son.

"She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to

eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

"Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in

nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which

may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,

disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition."

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the

secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this

marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the

disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his

career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on

account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the

candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on

sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and

a failure.

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with

his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to

practise deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his

anger, as if she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice,

plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch

of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air

the warmth of her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how

great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a

deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the

shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of

judgement this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product

of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and

conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No

prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself,

that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the

praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same

dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by

achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand

suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without

shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their

distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering

what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the

defective can be more than the entire.

XL

At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a

hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil,

notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who

had emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months.

After breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such

trifling matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from

the local bank all the money he possessed. On his way back he

encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose walls she

seemed to be a sort of emanation. She was carrying an armful of

Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which

produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her--an

enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained

by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what

an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

"Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,"

he replied. "But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of

existence. Perhaps a cloister would be preferable."

"A cloister! O, Angel Clare!"

"Well?"

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

Catholicism."

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

state, Angel Clare."

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

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods

in which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close

to him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas

he could think of. His momentary laughter at the horror which

appeared on her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety

for his welfare.

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

crazy!"

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare

re-entered the Vicarage. With the local banker he deposited the

jewels till happier days should arise. He also paid into the bank

thirty pounds--to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might

require; and wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to

inform her of what he had done. This amount, with the sum he had

already placed in her hands--about fifty pounds--he hoped would be

amply sufficient for her wants just at present, particularly as in

an emergency she had been directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her

by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had

really happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his

mother suggested that he should do so. During the day he left the

parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary

for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent

with Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent

having to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied,

and two or three small articles fetched away that they had left

behind. It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown

upon his life had stretched its gloom over him. Yet when he had

unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the memory

which returned first upon him was that of their happy arrival on a

similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing a habitation

conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire with

joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit,

and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen

with a renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he

went upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed

was smooth as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of

leaving. The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed

it. Having been there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and

the leaves and berries were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed

it into the grate. Standing there, he for the first time doubted

whether his course in this conjecture had been a wise, much less

a generous, one. But had he not been cruelly blinded? In the

incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside

wet-eyed. "O Tess! If you had only told me sooner, I would have

forgiven you!" he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs.

At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her

turning up her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

"Mr Clare," she said, "I've called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to

inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again."

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet

guessed his; an honest girl who loved him--one who would have made as

good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess.

"I am here alone," he said; "we are not living here now." Explaining

why he had come, he asked, "Which way are you going home, Izz?"

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

"Why is that?"

Izz looked down.

"It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way."

She pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was

journeying.

"Well--are you going there now? I can take you if you

wish for a lift."

Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.

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

He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and

the few other items which had to be considered by reason of the

sudden abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare's return to his horse

and gig, Izz jumped up beside him.

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

"Going to Brazil."

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

"She is not going at present--say for a year or so. I am going out

to reconnoitre--to see what life there is like."

They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making

no observation.

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

"She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin

and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever

fall in love wi' her any more," said Izz absently.

"And Marian?"

Izz lowered her voice.

"Marian drinks."

"Indeed!"

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

"And you!"

"I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline. But--I am no great things

at singing afore breakfast now!"

"How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn ''Twas

down in Cupid's Gardens' and 'The Tailor's Breeches' at morning

milking?"

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

there a bit."

"Why was that falling-off?"

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

answer.

"Izz!--how weak of you--for such as I!" he said, and fell into

reverie. "Then--suppose I had asked YOU to marry me?"

"If you had I should have said 'Yes', and you would have married a

woman who loved 'ee!"

"Really!"

"Down to the ground!" she whispered vehemently. "O my God! did you

never guess it till now!"

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

"I must get down. I live out there," said Izz abruptly, never having

spoken since her avowal.

Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly

disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a

corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be

revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,

instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring

manner?

"I am going to Brazil alone, Izz," said he. "I have separated from

my wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with

her again. I may not be able to love you; but--will you go with me

instead of her?"

"You truly wish me to go?"

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

least love me disinterestedly."

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

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

"It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over

there--that's good enough for me."

"Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought

to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of

civilization--Western civilization, that is to say."

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

there's no other way!"

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

He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing

any signs of affection.

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

"I do--I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the

dairy together!"

"More than Tess?"

She shook her head.

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

"How's that?"

"Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! ... She would

have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more."

Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken

perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her

rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words

from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was

something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, "SHE

WOULD HAVE LAID DOWN HER LIFE FOR 'EE. I COULD DO NO MORE!"

"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the horse's head

suddenly. "I don't know what I've been saying! I will now drive

you back to where your lane branches off."

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

I--how can I!"

Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw

what she had done.

"Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one?

O, Izz, don't spoil it by regret!"

She stilled herself by degrees.

"Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying, either,

wh--when I agreed to go! I wish--what cannot be!"

"Because I have a loving wife already."

"Yes, yes! You have!"

They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an

hour earlier, and she hopped down.

"Izz--please, please forget my momentary levity!" he cried. "It was

so ill-considered, so ill-advised!"

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

He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry

conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and

took her hand.

"Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow? You don't know what

I've had to bear!"

She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to

mar their adieux.

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

"Now, Izz," he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing

himself to the mentor's part he was far from feeling; "I want you to

tell Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not

to give way to folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are

more worthy men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act

wisely and well--remember the words--wisely and well--for my sake.

I send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall

never see them again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your

honest words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards folly

and treachery. Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in

these things! On that one account I can never forget you. Be always

the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as

a worthless lover, but a faithful friend. Promise."

She gave the promise.

"Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!"

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare

was out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of

racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she

entered her mother's cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told

how Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's

parting from her and her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching

thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That

evening he was within a feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road

to the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line

of South Wessex which divided him from his Tess's home. It was

neither a contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her

heart, which deterred him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz's

admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first,

he was right now. And the momentum of the course on which he

had embarked tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by

a stronger, more sustained force than had played upon him this

afternoon. He could soon come back to her. He took the train that

night for London, and five days after shook hands in farewell of his

brothers at the port of embarkation.

XLI

From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to

an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting

of Clare and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions;

instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see

her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage,

as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample

means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through

this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the

spring and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers,

the time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service

at dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley,

equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays. She

preferred this to living on his allowance. Mentally she remained in

utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather

fostered than checked. Her consciousness was at that other dairy,

at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had

confronted her there--he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep

for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she

had not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but

had done duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now

beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble

to find plenty of further occupation, and this continued till harvest

was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's

allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a

contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which

she had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now

followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was

obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,

had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had

consecrated them to souvenirs of himself--they appeared to have had

as yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own

experiences--and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But

she had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to

time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost

gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they

were in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the

thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but this could

not be done because the previous thatching had never been paid for.

New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which,

with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As

her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by this

time, could she not send them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's

bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was

received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder

she was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal

sum for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound

had gone, a remark of Angel's that whenever she required further

resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to

take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be

called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own

parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to

his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.

They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise

her in the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no

effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him

know her state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might,

she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the

reverse obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit

subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she

was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the

present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was

awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey

to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would

come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any

case that they would soon present a united front to their families

and the world. This hope she still fostered. To let her parents

know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had

relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the

_йclat_ of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first

attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had

deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were

true that she could only use and not sell them. Even were they

absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal

title to them which was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial.

At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near

Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and

persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers

and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going

thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the

baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on

English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they

had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which

they were surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns

had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place,

while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult

to get employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence,

energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained

from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses,

people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other

than rural. From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.

Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience

of it. But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the

circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she

had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer

required no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her

at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as

her life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax

would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon

her idolized husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their

whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though

she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every

individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the

mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made

her sensitiveness wince. Tess could not account for this

distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,

to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had

reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was

separated from her husband--probably through Izz Huett--and the

good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had

hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to

this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her

there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true

that she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's

forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the

habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which

she rambled on--disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful

past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to

accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her

whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to

theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was

the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of

distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her

natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been

prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused

her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the

wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than

once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular

November afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland

farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was

nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that

region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at

the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to

try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching

afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass

the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of

the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached

the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length

in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few

moments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and

said--

"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the

landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.

"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile--

young Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at that time, though

I don't live there now."

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down

at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot

through her, and she returned him no answer.

"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was

true, though your fancy-man was so up about it--hey, my sly one? You

ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."

Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her

hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the

wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she

came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this

she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade

to be safe against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes

which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off

draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed

them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into

this Tess crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard

strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the

breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the

other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there

another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked

herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity."

She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this

was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought

as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself,

though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all

were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than

vanity--injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel

Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of

her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she

did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare. "I wish

it were now," she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound

among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any

wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes

it was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the

noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when,

originating in the boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall

of a heavy body upon the ground. Had she been ensconced here under

other and more pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed;

but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear.

Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some

little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours

had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and

looked around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to

disturb her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down

at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the

hedge being arable ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay

about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some

feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating

quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of them writhing in

agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the

night by the inability of nature to bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven

down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and

while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before

nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded

birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the

thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew

weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one

by one as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood,

looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their

guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She

had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they

were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil

persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like

the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made

it their purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless feathered

creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify

these propensities--at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards

their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as

much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living

birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she

broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie

where she had found them till the game-keepers should come--as they

probably would come--to look for them a second time.

"Poor darlings--to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth

in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears

running down as she killed the birds tenderly. "And not a twinge of

bodily pain about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and

I have two hands to feed and clothe me." She was ashamed of herself

for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a

sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no

foundation in Nature.

XLII

It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon

the highway. But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at

hand, and Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the

birds' silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her

the relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she

could once rise high enough to despise opinion. But that she could

not do so long as it was held by Clare.

She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several

young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks.

Somehow she felt hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband

also might say these same things to her even yet? She was bound to

take care of herself on the chance of it, and keep off these casual

lovers. To this end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her

appearance. As soon as she got out of the village she entered a

thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which

she had never put on even at the dairy--never since she had worked

among the stubble at Marlott. She also, by a felicitous thought,

took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face under

her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as if

she were suffering from toothache. Then with her little scissors,

by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her

eyebrows off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration, she

went on her uneven way.

"What a mommet of a maid!" said the next man who met her to a

companion.

Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she heard him.

"But I don't care!" she said. "O no--I don't care! I'll always be

ugly now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care

of me. My husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any

more; but I love him just the same, and hate all other men, and like

to make 'em think scornfully of me!"

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a

fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a

red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough

wrapper, and buff-leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire

has become faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of

sunbeams, and the stress of winds. There is no sign of young passion

in her now--

The maiden's mouth is cold

. . .

Fold over simple fold

Binding her head.

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a

thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of

a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust

and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of

love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty,

directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her

but little. Her object being a winter's occupation and a winter's

home, there was no time to lose. Her experience of short hirings

had been such that she was determined to accept no more.

Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place

whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of

as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of

tempting. First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment,

and, as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied

next for the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry

tendance that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and course

pursuits which she liked least--work on arable land: work of such

roughness, indeed, as she would never have deliberately voluteered

for.

Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land

or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli--as if Cybele the

Many-breasted were supinely extended there--which stretched between

the valley of her birth and the valley of her love.

Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown

white and dusty within a few hours after rain. There were few trees,

or none, those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly

plashed down with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural

enemies of tree, bush, and brake. In the middle distance ahead of

her she could see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout,

and they seemed friendly. They had a low and unassuming aspect from

this upland, though as approached on the other side from Blackmoor

in her childhood they were as lofty bastions against the sky.

Southerly, at many miles' distance, and over the hills and ridges

coastward, she could discern a surface like polished steel: it was

the English Channel at a point far out towards France.

Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village.

She had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian's

sojourn. There seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to

come. The stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the

kind of labour in demand here was of the roughest kind; but it was

time to rest from searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly

as it began to rain. At the entrance to the village was a cottage

whose gable jutted into the road, and before applying for a lodging

she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening close in.

"Who would think I was Mrs Angel Clare!" she said.

The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that

immediately within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of

which came through the bricks. She warmed her hands upon them, and

also put her cheek--red and moist with the drizzle--against their

comforting surface. The wall seemed to be the only friend she had.

She had so little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there

all night.

Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage--gathered together after

their day's labour--talking to each other within, and the rattle of

their supper-plates was also audible. But in the village-street she

had seen no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the

approach of one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold,

wore the print gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess

instinctively thought it might be Marian, and when she came near

enough to be distinguishable in the gloom, surely enough it was

she. Marian was even stouter and redder in the face than formerly,

and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any previous period of her

existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew the acquaintance in

such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive, and she responded

readily to Marian's greeting.

Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved

by the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition

than at first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.

"Tess--Mrs Clare--the dear wife of dear he! And is it really so bad

as this, my child? Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way?

Anybody been beating 'ee? Not HE?"

"No, no, no! I merely did it not to be clipsed or colled, Marian."

She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest such wild

thoughts.

"And you've got no collar on" (Tess had been accustomed to wear a

little white collar at the dairy).

"I know it, Marian."

"You've lost it travelling."

"I've not lost it. The truth is, I don't care anything about my

looks; and so I didn't put it on."

"And you don't wear your wedding-ring?"

"Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on a ribbon.

I don't wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am

married at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life."

Marian paused.

"But you BE a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly fair that you

should live like this!"

"O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy."

"Well, well. HE married you--and you can be unhappy!"

"Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands--from

their own."

"You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's none. So it

must be something outside ye both."

"Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking

questions? My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my

allowance, so that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time.

Do not call me Mrs Clare, but Tess, as before. Do they want a hand

here?"

"O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to come. 'Tis a

starve-acre place. Corn and swedes are all they grow. Though I be

here myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such as you to come."

"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."

"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink. Lord, that's

the only comfort I've got now! If you engage, you'll be set

swede-hacking. That's what I be doing; but you won't like it."

"O--anything! Will you speak for me?"

"You will do better by speaking for yourself."

"Very well. Now, Marian, remember--nothing about HIM if I get the

place. I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt."

Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain

than Tess, promised anything she asked.

"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come with me you

would know at once. I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis

because he's away, I know. You couldn't be unhappy if he were here,

even if he gie'd ye no money--even if he used you like a drudge."

"That's true; I could not!"

They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse, which was

almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight;

there was not, at this season, a green pasture--nothing but fallow

and turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to

unrelieved levels.

Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of

workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her.

The farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who

represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on

her agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was

seldom offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks

which women could perform as readily as men.

Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do

at present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at

whose gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence

that she had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter

at any rate.

That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in

case a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she

did not tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have

brought reproach upon him.

XLIII

There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash

farm as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was

Marian herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of

village, the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by

itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord

(in other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry, the

village of free- or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village,

farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with

physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel

Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was

a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground

of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets--the outcrop of

siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose

white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half

of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the

business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the

root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.

Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole

field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without

features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse

of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white

vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper

and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face

looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the

white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls

crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical

regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian "wroppers"--

sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their

gowns from blowing about--scant skirts revealing boots that reached

high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The

pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads

would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of

the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect

they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice

of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible

to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and

Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not

work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a

situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but

raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them

like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not

known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of

dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common

talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of

rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then

at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light

diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum

of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They

were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived

and loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of

land where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to

all, emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with

Marian of the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband;

but the irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into

reciprocating Marian's remarks. And thus, as has been said, though

the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces,

and their wrappers clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all

this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

"You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o' Froom Valley

from here when 'tis fine," said Marian.

"Ah! Can you?" said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will

to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian's

will had a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as

the afternoon wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which

she invited Tess to drink. Tess's unassisted power of dreaming,

however, being enough for her sublimation at present, she declined

except the merest sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

"I've got used to it," she said, "and can't leave it off now. 'Tis

my only comfort--You see I lost him: you didn't; and you can do

without it perhaps."

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by the dignity

of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian's

differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in

the afternoon rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was

swede-trimming, in which process they sliced off the earth and the

fibres with a bill-hook before storing the roots for future use. At

this occupation they could shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if

it rained; but if it was frosty even their thick leather gloves could

not prevent the frozen masses they handled from biting their fingers.

Still Tess hoped. She had a conviction that sooner or later the

magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient

of Clare's character would lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped

flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely

obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or

Froom was know to stretch, even though they might not be able to see

it; and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the

old times they had spent out there.

"Ah," said Marian, "how I should like another or two of our old set

to come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here

afield, and talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o'

the old things we used to know, and make it all come back a'most, in

seeming!" Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the

visions returned. "I'll write to Izz Huett," she said. "She's

biding at home doing nothing now, I know, and I'll tell her we be

here, and ask her to come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now."

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard

of this plan for importing old Talbothays' joys was two or three days

later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,

and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy

and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning

the few lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if

they had put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig

was covered with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the

night, giving it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or

tree forming a staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray

of the sky and horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds

and walls where none had ever been observed till brought out into

visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of

white worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and

gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost,

when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive

silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures

with tragical eyes--eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal

horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human

being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could

endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of

snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded

by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and

retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered.

These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of

all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no

account. The traveller's ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with

dumb impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not

value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland--the trivial

movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers

so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as

food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.

There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not

of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows

ache, penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the

body less than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the

night the snow came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with

the warm gable that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside

it, awoke in the night, and heard above the thatch noises which

seemed to signify that the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium

of all the winds. When she lit her lamp to get up in the morning

she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement,

forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had

also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor,

on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about. Without, the

storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as

yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by

the time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp,

Marian arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the

women at reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon,

therefore, as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn

to a disordered medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped

themselves up in their thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats

round their necks and across their chests, and started for the barn.

The snow had followed the birds from the polar basin as a white

pillar of a cloud, and individual flakes could not be seen. The

blast smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears,

carrying the snow so that it licked the land but did not deepen on

it. They trudged onwards with slanted bodies through the flossy

fields, keeping as well as they could in the shelter of hedges,

which, however, acted as strainers rather than screens. The air,

afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it,

twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos

of things. But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such

weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

"Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming," said

Marian. "Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from

the North Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having

scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his

pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all--in

fact, it rather does it good."

"You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian," said Tess severely.

"Well, but--surely you care for'n! Do you?"

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced

in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,

putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

"Well, well, I know you do. But 'pon my body, it is a rum life for

a married couple! There--I won't say another word! Well, as for

the weather, it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is

fearful hard work--worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because

I'm stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can't think why maister

should have set 'ee at it."

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long

structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was

carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the

evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for

the women to draw from during the day.

"Why, here's Izz!" said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from

her mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the

distance so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before

the snow began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed

with her mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she

had been afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a

neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start

remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the

Queen of Diamonds--those who had tried to fight with her in the

midnight quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her,

and possibly had none, for they had been under the influence of

liquor on that occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there

as here. They did all kinds of men's work by preference, including

well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any sense of

fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the

other three with some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the

press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam,

under which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the

beam being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the

sheaves diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors

upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls

pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the

presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian

and Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.

Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer

rode up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to

Tess, and remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had

not turned at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round,

when she perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge

from whom she had taken flight on the high-road because of his

allusion to her history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,

when he said, "So you be the young woman who took my civility in such

ill part? Be drowned if I didn't think you might be as soon as I

heard of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better

of me the first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second

time on the road, when you bolted; but now I think I've got the

better you." He concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a

clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She

could read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she

had nothing to fear from her employer's gallantry; it was rather the

tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare's treatment of him.

Upon the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave

enough to endure it.

"You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose? Some women are such

fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there's nothing

like a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o' young wenches'

heads; and you've signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you

going to beg my pardon?"

"I think you ought to beg mine."

"Very well--as you like. But we'll see which is master here. Be

they all the sheaves you've done to-day?"

"Yes, sir."

"'Tis a very poor show. Just see what they've done over there"

(pointing to the two stalwart women). "The rest, too, have done

better than you."

"They've all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it

made no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid

for what we do."

"Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared."

"I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as

the others will do."

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could

not have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than

gallantry. When two o'clock arrived the professional reed-drawers

tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,

tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have

done likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up

by longer hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her.

Looking out at the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, "Now,

we've got it all to ourselves." And so at last the conversation

turned to their old experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the

incidents of their affection for Angel Clare.

"Izz and Marian," said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was

extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: "I

can't join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you

will see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for

the present, he is my husband."

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls

who had loved Clare. "He was a very splendid lover, no doubt," she

said; "but I don't think he is a too fond husband to go away from you

so soon."

"He had to go--he was obliged to go, to see about the land over

there!" pleaded Tess.

"He might have tided 'ee over the winter."

"Ah--that's owing to an accident--a misunderstanding; and we won't

argue it," Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. "Perhaps

there's a good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like

some husbands, without telling me; and I can always find out where

he is."

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they

went on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering

it under their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks,

nothing sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the

crunch of the hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon

the heap of wheat-ears at her feet.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!" cried Marian. "It wants

harder flesh than yours for this work."

Just then the farmer entered. "Oh, that's how you get on when I am

away," he said to her.

"But it is my own loss," she pleaded. "Not yours."

"I want it finished," he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and

went out at the other door.

"Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear," said Marian. "I've worked here

before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up

your number."

"I don't like to let you do that. I'm taller than you, too."

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile,

and reclined on a heap of pull-tails--the refuse after the straight

straw had been drawn--thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her

succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening

the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work.

She lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of

the straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of

bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the

murmur of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing

the subject already broached, but their voices were so low that she

could not catch the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious

to know what they were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt

better, she got up and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles

the previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen

again at five o'clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor

and her stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms

without suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she

felt better, to finish the day without her, and make equal division

of the number of sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great

door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case

every afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel

in a romantic vein.

"I should not have thought it of him--never!" she said in a dreamy

tone. "And I loved him so! I didn't mind his having YOU. But this

about Izz is too bad!"

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger

with the bill-hook.

"Is it about my husband?" she stammered.

"Well, yes. Izz said, 'Don't 'ee tell her'; but I am sure I can't

help it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off

to Brazil with him."

Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves

straightened. "And did Izz refuse to go?" she asked.

"I don't know. Anyhow he changed his mind."

"Pooh--then he didn't mean it! 'Twas just a man's jest!"

"Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station."

"He didn't take her!"

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory

symptoms, burst out crying.

"There!" said Marian. "Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!"

"No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living

on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead

to! I ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not

go to him, but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I liked.

I won't dally like this any longer! I have been very wrong and

neglectful in leaving everything to be done by him!"

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no

longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered

into the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began

impetuously writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she

could not finish it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on

which she wore it next her heart, and retained it on her finger all

night, as if to fortify herself in the sensation that she was really

the wife of this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz

should go with him abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing

that, how could she write entreaties to him, or show that she cared

for him any more?

XLIV

By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the

direction which they had taken more than once of late--to the distant

Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband's parents that she

had been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to

write to them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having

morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse

to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore,

as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually

non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had been quite

in consonance with her independent character of desiring nothing

by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair

consideration of her deserts. She had set herself to stand or fall

by her qualities, and to waive such merely technical claims upon a

strange family as had been established for her by the flimsy fact of

a member of that family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in

a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale, there was a

limit to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written

to her? He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her

know of the locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a

line to notify his address. Was he really indifferent? But was he

ill? Was it for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon

the courage of solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and

express her grief at his silence. If Angel's father were the good

man she had heard him represented to be, he would be able to enter

into her heart-starved situation. Her social hardships she could

conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was

the only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle

of the cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as

yet, it would be necessary to walk. And the distance being fifteen

miles each way she would have to allow herself a long day for the

undertaking by rising early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by

a hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to

try the experiment. At four o'clock that Sunday morning she came

downstairs and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still

favourable, the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that

the journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage

a little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess

in her departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very

prettiest guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though

she, knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare,

was indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now elapsed since

her sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from

the wreck of her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as

a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft

gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of

her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

"'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now--you do look

a real beauty!" said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on

the threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow

candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of

herself to the situation; she could not be--no woman with a heart

bigger than a hazel-nut could be--antagonistic to Tess in her

presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex

being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering

the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let

her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn.

They heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out

to her full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without

any particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had

been prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and

only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her.

Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a

dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky

hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream

at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole

history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the

truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which

stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still

in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the

atmosphere down there was a deep blue. Instead of the great

enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to

toil, there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen

acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes

of a net. Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in

Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her

sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty

to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what

the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing

above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from

Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and

High-Stoy, with the dell between them called "The Devil's Kitchen".

Still following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where

the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a

miracle, or murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the

straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which

as soon as she reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane

into the small town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway

over the distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second

time, heartily enough--not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided

inns, but at a cottage by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by

way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the

spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her

enterprise loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such

staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes

in danger of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a

gate on the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage

lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the

Vicar and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in

her eyes. She wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a

week-day. Such a good man might be prejudiced against a woman who

had chosen Sunday, never realizing the necessities of her case.

But it was incumbent upon her to go on now. She took off the thick

boots in which she had walked thus far, put on her pretty thin ones

of patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge by the

gatepost where she might readily find them again, descended the hill;

the freshness of colour she had derived from the keen air thinning

away in spite of her as she drew near the parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing

favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably

in the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of

imagination, dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was

the residence of near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature

or emotion, divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts,

birth, death, and after-death, they were the same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang

the door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No;

the thing was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort

had to be risen to and made again. She rang a second time, and the

agitation of the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen

miles' walk, led her support herself while she waited by resting her

hand on her hip, and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The

wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray,

each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir

of her nerves. A piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some

meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate;

too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it

company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she

walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And

though she looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to

return, it was with a breath of relied that she closed the gate. A

feeling haunted her that she might have been recognized (though how

she could not tell), and orders been given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but

determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future

distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at

all the windows.

Ah--the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She

remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon

the household, servants included, going to morning-service, and,

as a consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was,

therefore, only necessary to wait till the service was over. She

would not make herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she

started to get past the church into the lane. But as she reached the

churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess found herself

in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of

small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a

woman out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She

quickened her pace, and ascended the the road by which she had come,

to find a retreat between its hedges till the Vicar's family should

have lunched, and it might be convenient for them to receive her.

She soon distanced the churchgoers, except two youngish men, who,

linked arm-in-arm, were beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest

discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her

situation, did not fail to recognize in those noises the quality

of her husband's tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers.

Forgetting all her plans, Tess's one dread was lest they should

overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before she was

prepared to confront them; for though she felt that they could not

identify her, she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny. The more

briskly they walked, the more briskly walked she. They were plainly

bent upon taking a short quick stroll before going indoors to lunch

or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled with sitting through a

long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill--a ladylike young

woman, somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle _guindйe_

and prudish. Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her

brothers-in-law brought them so nearly behind her back that she could

hear every word of their conversation. They said nothing, however,

which particularly interested her till, observing the young lady

still further in front, one of them remarked, "There is Mercy Chant.

Let us overtake her."

Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for

Angel's life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably

would have married but for her intrusive self. She would have known

as much without previous information if she had waited a moment, for

one of the brothers proceeded to say: "Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel!

I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting his

precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever

she may be. It is a queer business, apparently. Whether she has

joined him yet or not I don't know; but she had not done so some

months ago when I heard from him."

"I can't say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His

ill-considered marriage seems to have completed that estrangement

from me which was begun by his extraordinary opinions."

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk

them without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether,

and passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their

footsteps and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of

hands, and the three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending

this point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and

turned all three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour

before that time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it.

During their discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge

carefully with his umbrella, and dragged something to light.

"Here's a pair of old boots," he said. "Thrown away, I suppose, by

some tramp or other."

"Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps,

and so excite our sympathies," said Miss Chant. "Yes, it must have

been, for they are excellent walking-boots--by no means worn out.

What a wicked thing to do! I'll carry them home for some poor

person."

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for

her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen

veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church

party had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were

running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all

baseless impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as

her own condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she

could not contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward

omens. It was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage.

Angel's wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like

a scorned thing by those--to her--superfine clerics. Innocently

as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that

she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his

narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to

the full the gift of charity. As she again thought of her dusty

boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which

they had been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their

owner.

"Ah!" she said, still sighing in pity of herself, "THEY didn't know

that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these

pretty ones HE bought for me--no--they did not know it! And they

didn't think that HE chose the colour o' my pretty frock--no--how

could they? If they had known perhaps they would not have cared,

for they don't care much for him, poor thing!"

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of

judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her

way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this

feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her

estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was

precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and

Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme

cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among

mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at

Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for

the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation

might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this

moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come

not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis

in her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened;

and there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that

starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the

Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to

throw up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see

that she could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could

not show. But it was done with a sorry shake of the head. "It is

nothing--it is nothing!" she said. "Nobody loves it; nobody sees it.

Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!"

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no

sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length

of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and

paused by milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she

descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet

of Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such

contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she

again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and

while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking

down the street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.

"The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?" she said.

"No, my dear," said the old woman. "'Tis too soon for that; the

bells hain't strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching

in yonder barn. A ranter preaches there between the services--an

excellent, fiery, Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don't go to

hear'n! What comes in the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough

for I."

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against

the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the

central part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing

the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances

of the preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could

soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of

the barn. The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest

antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the

theology of St Paul. This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered

with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he

had plainly no skill as a dialectician. Although Tess had not heard

the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from

its constant iteration--

"O foolish galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye

should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ

hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?"

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in

finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the view

of Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker

began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by

those views. He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had

scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd.

But a day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been

brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he

had at first grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into

his heart, and had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they

had worked this change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice,

which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec

d'Urberville. Her face fixed in painful suspense, she came round

to the front of the barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun

beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side;

one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over

the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly

sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were entirely

villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the

red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion. But her attention

was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn,

facing the people and the door. The three o'clock sun shone full

upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer

confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she

had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact

indeed.

END OF PHASE THE FIFTH

Phase the Sixth: The Convert

XLV

Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d'Urberville since

her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated

to permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was

unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a

converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear

overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated

nor advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,

and to behold it now! ... There was the same handsome unpleasantness

of mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the

sable moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical,

a modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to

abstract the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second

her belief in his identity.

To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_,

a grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture

out of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four

years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent

purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the

contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of

sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion.

The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to

express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be

translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour

of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism,

Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in

the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a

theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which

his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did

duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon

turning again to his wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted

from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which

Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a

misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no

longer. D'Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned

away from his wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she

deem it unnatural in him? It was but the usage of thought which had

been jarred in her at hearing good new words in bad old notes. The

greater the sinner, the greater the saint; it was not necessary to

dive far into Christian history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict

definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would

allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He

had obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect

upon her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his

presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,

seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the

words that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she

faced him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung

confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came back in a

desperate leap every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however,

but a short time; for Tess's energies returned with the atrophy of

his, and she walked as fast as she was able past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their

relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the

side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the

legend, it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared

upon his altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh

extinguished.

She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed

with a sensitiveness to ocular beams--even her clothing--so alive

was she to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the

outside of that barn. All the way along to this point her heart

had been heavy with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in

the quality of its trouble. That hunger for affection too long

withheld was for the time displaced by an almost physical sense

of an implacable past which still engirdled her. It intensified

her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of

continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had

hoped for, had not, after all, taken place. Bygones would never be

complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at

right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely

to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay.

Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single

figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings

which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting

this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and

turning she saw approaching that well-known form--so strangely

accoutred as the Methodist--the one personage in all the world she

wished not to encounter alone on this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she

yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him

overtake her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his

walk than by the feelings within him.

"Tess!" he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

"Tess!" he repeated. "It is I--Alec d'Urberville."

She then looked back at him, and he came up.

"I see it is," she answered coldly.

"Well--is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course," he added,

with a slight laugh, "there is something of the ridiculous to your

eyes in seeing me like this. But--I must put up with that. ... I

heard you had gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I

have followed you?"

"I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!"

"Yes--you may well say it," he returned grimly, as they moved onward

together, she with unwilling tread. "But don't mistake me; I beg

this because you may have been led to do so in noticing--if you did

notice it--how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was

but a momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me,

it was natural enough. But will helped me through it--though perhaps

you think me a humbug for saying it--and immediately afterwards I

felt that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire

to save from the wrath to come--sneer if you like--the woman whom I

had so grievously wronged was that person. I have come with that

sole purpose in view--nothing more."

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: "Have

you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say."

"_I_ have done nothing!" said he indifferently. "Heaven, as I have

been telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that

you can pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon

myself--the old Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange

story; believe it or not; but I can tell you the means by which my

conversion was brought about, and I hope you will be interested

enough at least to listen. Have you ever heard the name of the

parson of Emminster--you must have done do?--old Mr Clare; one of the

most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left in the

Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of Christian believers

with which I have thrown in my lot, but quite an exception among the

Established clergy, the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the

true doctrines by their sophistries, till they are but the shadow of

what they were. I only differ from him on the question of Church and

State--the interpretation of the text, 'Come out from among them and

be ye separate, saith the Lord'--that's all. He is one who, I firmly

believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls in this

country than any other man you can name. You have heard of him?"

"I have," she said.

"He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of

some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted

him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and

show me the way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that

some day I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit--that those

who came to scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange

magic in his words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of my

mother hit me most; and by degrees I was brought to see daylight.

Since then my one desire has been to hand on the true view to others,

and that is what I was trying to do to-day; though it is only lately

that I have preached hereabout. The first months of my ministry have

been spent in the North of England among strangers, where I preferred

to make my earliest clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before

undergoing that severest of all tests of one's sincerity, addressing

those who have known one, and have been one's companions in the days

of darkness. If you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a

good slap at yourself, I am sure--"

"Don't go on with it!" she cried passionately, as she turned away

from him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. "I

can't believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for

talking to me like this, when you know--when you know what harm

you've done me! You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure

on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with

sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of

that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming

converted! Out upon such--I don't believe in you--I hate it!"

"Tess," he insisted; "don't speak so! It came to me like a jolly new

idea! And you don't believe me? What don't you believe?"

"Your conversion. Your scheme of religion."

"Why?"

She dropped her voice. "Because a better man than you does not

believe in such."

"What a woman's reason! Who is this better man?"

"I cannot tell you."

"Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to

spring out at a moment's notice, "God forbid that I should say I am

a good man--and you know I don't say any such thing. I am new to

goodness, truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes."

"Yes," she replied sadly. "But I cannot believe in your conversion

to a new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don't last!"

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been

leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon

the familiar countenance and form, remained contemplating her. The

inferior man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted,

nor even entirely subdued.

"Don't look at me like that!" he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien,

instantly withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with

a flush, "I beg your pardon!" And there was revived in her the

wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in

inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her

she was somehow doing wrong.

"No, no! Don't beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide

your good looks, why don't you keep it down?"

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, "It was mostly to keep off

the wind."

"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went on; "but

it is better that I should not look too often on you. It might be

dangerous."

"Ssh!" said Tess.

"Well, women's faces have had too much power over me already for me

not to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they;

and it reminds me of the old times that I would forget!"

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and

then as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was

going with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate.

Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted

thereon in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she

asked him if he knew who had been at the pains to blazon these

announcements. He told her that the man was employed by himself and

others who were working with him in that district, to paint these

reminders that no means might be left untried which might move the

hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called "Cross-in-Hand." Of all

spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn.

It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by

artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative

beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar

which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown

in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.

Differing accounts were given of its history and purport. Some

authorities stated that a devotional cross had once formed the

complete erection thereon, of which the present relic was but the

stump; others that the stone as it stood was entire, and that it had

been fixed there to mark a boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow,

whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something

sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it

stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.

"I think I must leave you now," he remarked, as they drew near to

this spot. "I have to preach at Abbot's-Cernel at six this evening,

and my way lies across to the right from here. And you upset me

somewhat too, Tessy--I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and

get strength. ... How is it that you speak so fluently now? Who has

taught you such good English?"

"I have learnt things in my troubles," she said evasively.

"What troubles have you had?"

She told him of the first one--the only one that related to him.

D'Urberville was struck mute. "I knew nothing of this till now!"

he next murmured. "Why didn't you write to me when you felt your

trouble coming on?"

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: "Well--you

will see me again."

"No," she answered. "Do not again come near me!"

"I will think. But before we part come here." He stepped up to the

pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but

I fear you at moments--far more than you need fear me at present; and

to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that

you will never tempt me--by your charms or ways."

"Good God--how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is

furthest from my thought!"

"Yes--but swear it."

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand

upon the stone and swore.

"I am sorry you are not a believer," he continued; "that some

unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But

no more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and

who knows what may not happen? I'm off. Goodbye!"

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his

eyes again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down

in the direction of Abbot's-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed

perturbation, and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought,

he drew from his pocket a small book, between the leaves of which

was folded a letter, worn and soiled, as from much re-reading.

D'Urberville opened the letter. It was dated several months before

this time, and was signed by Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned joy at

d'Urberville's conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in

communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr

Clare's warm assurance of forgiveness for d'Urberville's former

conduct and his interest in the young man's plans for the future.

He, Mr Clare, would much have liked to see d'Urberville in the Church

to whose ministry he had devoted so many years of his own life, and

would have helped him to enter a theological college to that end; but

since his correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on account

of the delay it would have entailed, he was not the man to insist

upon its paramount importance. Every man must work as he could best

work, and in the method towards which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself

cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked

till his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no

longer troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her

nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary

shepherd.

"What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?" she asked of

him. "Was it ever a Holy Cross?"

"Cross--no; 'twer not a cross! 'Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It

was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was

tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung.

The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil,

and that he walks at times."

She felt the _petite mort_ at this unexpectedly gruesome information,

and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near

to Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she

approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They

were talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young

woman, in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the

chilly air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full

of a stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a

moment the voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that

this interview had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same

attraction which had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When

she came close, the girl turned serenely and recognized her, the

young man walking off in embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett,

whose interest in Tess's excursion immediately superseded her own

proceedings. Tess did not explain very clearly its results, and Izz,

who was a girl of tact, began to speak of her own little affair, a

phase of which Tess had just witnessed.

"He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at

Talbothays," she explained indifferently. "He actually inquired and

found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he's

been in love wi' me these two years. But I've hardly answered him."

XLVI

Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was

afield. The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched

hurdles erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her.

On the sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue

hue of new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene.

Opposite its front was a long mound or "grave", in which the roots

had been preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at the

uncovered end, chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth

from each root, and throwing it after the operation into the slicer.

A man was turning the handle of the machine, and from its trough

came the newly-cut swedes, the fresh smell of whose yellow chips

was accompanied by the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish

of the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in Tess's

leather-gloved hand.

The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where

the swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of

darker brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of

each of these something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste

and without rest up and down the whole length of the field; it was

two horses and a man, the plough going between them, turning up the

cleared ground for a spring sowing.

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far

beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from

the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was

up the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of

a mere point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon

perceived to be a man in black, arriving from the direction of

Flintcomb-Ash. The man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with

his eyes, continually observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied,

did not perceive him till her companion directed her attention to his

approach.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a

semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the

free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching

there was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the

grinder seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was already on

Tess's face, and she pulled her curtained hood further over it.

D'Urberville came up and said quietly--

"I want to speak to you, Tess."

"You have refused my last request, not to come near me!" said she.

"Yes, but I have a good reason."

"Well, tell it."

"It is more serious than you may think."

He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some

distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the

machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other

ears. D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the

labourer, turning his back to the latter.

"It is this," he continued, with capricious compunction. "In

thinking of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to

inquire as to your worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I

did not think of it. But I see now that it is hard--harder than it

used to be when I--knew you--harder than you deserve. Perhaps a good

deal of it is owning to me!"

She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent

head, her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her

trimming of the swedes. By going on with her work she felt better

able to keep him outside her emotions.

"Tess," he added, with a sigh of discontent,--"yours was the very

worst case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had

resulted till you told me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent

life! The whole blame was mine--the whole unconventional business

of our time at Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am

but the base imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to

possibilities! I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for

parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the

gins and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive

be a good one or the result of simple indifference."

Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root

and taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour

of the mere fieldwoman alone marking her.

"But it is not that I came to say," d'Urberville went on. "My

circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at

Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and

devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand

I shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask

you is, will you put it in my power to do my duty--to make the only

reparation I can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be

my wife, and go with me? ... I have already obtained this precious

document. It was my old mother's dying wish."

He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling

of embarrassment.

"What is it?" said she.

"A marriage licence."

"O no, sir--no!" she said quickly, starting back.

"You will not? Why is that?"

And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely

the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d'Urberville's face. It

was unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her

had been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

"Surely," he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked

round at the labourer who turned the slicer.

Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there.

Informing the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she

wished to walk a little way, she moved off with d'Urberville across

the zebra-striped field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed

section he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped

forward on the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.

"You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?" he

repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.

"I cannot."

"But why?"

"You know I have no affection for you."

"But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps--as soon as you

really could forgive me?"

"Never!"

"Why so positive?"

"I love somebody else."

The words seemed to astonish him.

"You do?" he cried. "Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is

morally right and proper any weight with you?"

"No, no, no--don't say that!"

"Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing

feeling which you will overcome--"

"No--no."

"Yes, yes! Why not?"

"I cannot tell you."

"You must in honour!"

"Well then ... I have married him."

"Ah!" he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at

her.

"I did not wish to tell--I did not mean to!" she pleaded. "It is a

secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, PLEASE

will you, keep from questioning me? You must remember that we are

now strangers."

"Strangers--are we? Strangers!"

For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he

determinedly chastened it down.

"Is that man your husband?" he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign

the labourer who turned the machine.

"That man!" she said proudly. "I should think not!"

"Who, then?"

"Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!" she begged, and flashed her

appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.

D'Urberville was disturbed.

"But I only asked for your sake!" he retorted hotly. "Angels of

heaven!--God forgive me for such an expression--I came here, I swear,

as I thought for your good. Tess--don't look at me so--I cannot

stand your looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before

Christianity or since! There--I won't lose my head; I dare not.

I own that the sight of you had waked up my love for you, which, I

believed, was extinguished with all such feelings. But I thought

that our marriage might be a sanctification for us both. 'The

unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving

wife is sanctified by the husband,' I said to myself. But my plan

is dashed from me; and I must bear the disappointment!"

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

"Married. Married! ... Well, that being so," he added, quite

calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves and putting them in

his pocket; "that being prevented, I should like to do some good to

you and your husband, whoever he may be. There are many questions

that I am tempted to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in

opposition to your wishes. Though, if I could know your husband, I

might more easily benefit him and you. Is he on this farm?"

"No," she murmured. "He is far away."

"Far away? From YOU? What sort of husband can he be?"

"O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out--"

"Ah, is it so! ... That's sad, Tess!"

"Yes."

"But to stay away from you--to leave you to work like this!"

"He does not leave me to work!" she cried, springing to the defence

of the absent one with all her fervour. "He don't know it! It is by

my own arrangement."

"Then, does he write?"

"I--I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to

ourselves."

"Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my

fair Tess--"

In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was

on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not

express the life or shape of those within.

"You must not--you must not!" she cried fearfully, slipping her hand

from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. "O,

will you go away--for the sake of me and my husband--go, in the name

of your own Christianity!"

"Yes, yes; I will," he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to

her he turned to leave. Facing round, however, he said, "Tess, as

God is my judge, I meant no humbug in taking your hand!"

A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not

noticed in their preoccupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice

reached her ear:

"What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o'

day?"

Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had

inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his

field.

"Don't speak like that to her!" said d'Urberville, his face

blackening with something that was not Christianity.

"Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa'sons have to do with

she?"

"Who is the fellow?" asked d'Urberville, turning to Tess.

She went close up to him.

"Go--I do beg you!" she said.

"What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his face what a

churl he is."

"He won't hurt me. HE'S not in love with me. I can leave at

Lady-Day."

"Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But--well, goodbye!"

Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having

reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which

Tess took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being

independent of sex. To have as a master this man of stone, who would

have cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former

experiences. She silently walked back towards the summit of the

field that was the scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview

which had just taken place that she was hardly aware that the nose of

Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders.

"If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I'll

see that you carry it out," he growled. "'Od rot the women--now

'tis one thing, and then 'tis another. But I'll put up with it no

longer!"

Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the

farm as he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once

received, she did for one moment picture what might have been the

result if she had been free to accept the offer just made her of

being the monied Alec's wife. It would have lifted her completely

out of subjection, not only to her present oppressive employer, but

to a whole world who seemed to despise her. "But no, no!" she said

breathlessly; "I could not have married him now! He is so unpleasant

to me."

That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing

from him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection.

Any one who had been in a position to read between the lines would

have seen that at the back of her great love was some monstrous

fear--almost a desperation--as to some secret contingencies which

were not disclosed. But again she did not finish her effusion; he

had asked Izz to go with him, and perhaps he did not care for her at

all. She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would ever

reach Angel's hands.

After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and

brought on the day which was of great import to agriculturists--the

day of the Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements

were entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing

Lady-Day, and those of the farming population who thought of changing

their places duly attended at the county-town where the fair was

held. Nearly all the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended

flight, and early in the morning there was a general exodus in the

direction of the town, which lay at a distance of from ten to a dozen

miles over hilly country. Though Tess also meant to leave at the

quarter-day, she was one of the few who did not go to the fair,

having a vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to render

another outdoor engagement unnecessary.

It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time,

and one would almost have thought that winter was over. She had

hardly finished her dinner when d'Urberville's figure darkened the

window of the cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to

herself to-day.

Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she

could hardly in reason run away. D'Urberville's knock, his walk up

to the door, had some indescribable quality of difference from his

air when she last saw him. They seemed to be acts of which the doer

was ashamed. She thought that she would not open the door; but, as

there was no sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the

latch stepped back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself

down into a chair before speaking.

"Tess--I couldn't help it!" he began desperately, as he wiped his

heated face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. "I

felt that I must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I

had not been thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I

cannot get rid of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good

woman should do harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only

pray for me, Tess!"

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet

Tess did not pity him.

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe

that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my

account?"

"You really think that?"

"Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise."

"Cured? By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

"Ah--your husband--your husband! How strange it seems! I remember

you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really

believe in these matters, Tess?" he asked. "You seem to have no

religion--perhaps owing to me."

"But I have. Though I don't believe in anything supernatural."

D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

"Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?"

"A good deal of it."

"H'm--and yet I've felt so sure about it," he said uneasily.

"I believe in the SPIRIT of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my

dear husband... But I don't believe--"

Here she gave her negations.

"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your dear husband

believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the

least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That's just like you

women. Your mind is enslaved to his."

"Ah, because he knew everything!" said she, with a triumphant

simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could

hardly have deserved, much less her husband.

"Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from

another person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to teach you

such scepticism!"

"He never forced my judgement! He would never argue on the subject

with me! But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after

inquiring deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than

what I might believe, who hadn't looked into doctrines at all."

"What used he to say? He must have said something?"

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel

Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she

recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him

use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of

thinking aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also

Clare's accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.

"Say that again," asked d'Urberville, who had listened with the

greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville thoughtfully murmured the

words after her.

"Anything else?" he presently asked.

"He said at another time something like this"; and she gave another,

which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the

pedigree ranging from the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ to Huxley's

_Essays_.

"Ah--ha! How do you remember them?"

"I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't wish me to;

and I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts. I can't

say I quite understand that one; but I know it is right."

"H'm. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't know

yourself!"

He fell into thought.

"And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his," she resumed. "I

didn't wish it to be different. What's good enough for him is good

enough for me."

"Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?"

"No--I never told him--if I am an infidel."

"Well--you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after all! You

don't believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore,

do no despite to your conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought

to preach it, but, like the devils, I believe and tremble, for I

suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you."

"How?"

"Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to see you

to-day! But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where

I have undertaken to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two

this afternoon, and where all the brethren are expecting me this

minute. Here's the announcement."

He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day,

hour, and place of meeting, at which he, d'Urberville, would preach

the Gospel as aforesaid.

"But how can you get there?" said Tess, looking at the clock.

"I cannot get there! I have come here."

"What, you have really arranged to preach, and--"

"I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there--by reason of my

burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised!--No, by my word

and truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now!

Why I did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in

spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely

when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so

there was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt,

and you are she. But you may well despise me now! I thought I

worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still serve in the groves!

Ha! ha!"

"O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean? What have I done!"

"Done?" he said, with a soulless sneer in the word. "Nothing

intentionally. But you have been the means--the innocent means--of

my backsliding, as they call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of

those 'servants of corruption' who, 'after they have escaped the

pollutions of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome'--

whose latter end is worse than their beginning?" He laid his hand on

her shoulder. "Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social

salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly shaking her, as

if she were a child. "And why then have you tempted me? I was firm

as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again--surely

there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!" His voice sank,

and a hot archness shot from his own black eyes. "You temptress,

Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon--I could not resist you as

soon as I met you again!"

"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess, recoiling.

"I know it--I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact remains.

When I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to

think that I had no legal right to protect you--that I could not have

it; whilst he who has it seems to neglect you utterly!"

"Don't speak against him--he is absent!" she cried in much

excitement. "Treat him honourably--he has never wronged you! O

leave his wife before any scandal spreads that may do harm to his

honest name!"

"I will--I will," he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream.

"I have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies

at the fair--it is the first time I have played such a practical

joke. A month ago I should have been horrified at such a

possibility. I'll go away--to swear--and--ah, can I! to keep away."

Then, suddenly: "One clasp, Tessy--one! Only for old friendship--"

"I am without defence. Alec! A good man's honour is in my keeping--

think--be ashamed!"

"Pooh! Well, yes--yes!"

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His

eyes were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses

of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines

of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come

together as in a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.

Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement

to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess's words, as

echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and

continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as

if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility

that his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with

his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a

careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed

by his mother's death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm

served to chill its effervescence to stagnation. He said to himself,

as he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she

had handed on to him, "That clever fellow little thought that, by

telling her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!"

XLVII

It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The

dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is

nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight

rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly

here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a

rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the

light increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two

men on the summit. They were busily "unhaling" the rick, that

is, stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down the

sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and Tess, with the

other women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting

and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on

the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the end of

the day. Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely

visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve--a

timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining--

the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a

despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black,

with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve.

The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which

radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much

daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum

mobile_ of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless

being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance,

with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The

isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a

creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness

of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had

nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of

it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served

vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine

from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam

threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in

a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon

himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes

around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly

necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom

compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his

Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of

his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line

between agriculture and him.

While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his

portable repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning

air quivered. He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His

fire was waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in

a few seconds he could make the long strap move at an invisible

velocity. Beyond its extent the environment might be corn, straw,

or chaos; it was all the same to him. If any of the autochthonous

idlers asked him what he called himself, he replied shortly, "an

engineer."

The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their

places, the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby--or, as

they called him, "he"--had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess

was placed on the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed

it, her business being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her

by Izz Huett, who stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder

could seize it and spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked

out every grain in one moment.

They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two,

which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work

sped on till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for half

an hour; and on starting again after the meal the whole supplementary

strength of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the

straw-rick, which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty

lunch was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions, and

then another couple of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the

inexorable wheel continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the

thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near the revolving

wire-cage.

The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days

when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken

barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by

hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better

results. Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the

perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten

their duties by the exchange of many words. It was the ceaselessness

of the work which tried her so severely, and began to make her

wish that she had never some to Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the

corn-rick--Marian, who was one of them, in particular--could stop to

drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now and then, or to exchange

a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the

fragments of straw and husk from their clothing; but for Tess there

was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the man who fed

it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied

sheaves, could not stop either, unless Marian changed places with

her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby's

objections that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.

For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was

chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in

selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength

with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may

have been true. The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech,

increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the

regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their

heads she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had

come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under

a second rick watching the scene and Tess in particular. He was

dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay

walking-cane.

"Who is that?" said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed

the inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.

"Somebody's fancy-man, I s'pose," said Marian laconically.

"I'll lay a guinea he's after Tess."

"O no. 'Tis a ranter pa'son who's been sniffing after her lately;

not a dandy like this."

"Well--this is the same man."

"The same man as the preacher? But he's quite different!"

"He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off

his whiskers; but he's the same man for all that."

"D'ye really think so? Then I'll tell her," said Marian.

"Don't. She'll see him soon enough, good-now."

"Well, I don't think it at all right for him to join his preaching to

courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and

she, in a sense, a widow."

"Oh--he can do her no harm," said Izz drily. "Her mind can no more

be heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon

from the hole he's in. Lord love 'ee, neither court-paying, nor

preaching, nor the seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when

'twould be better for her that she should be weaned."

Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her

post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the

machine that she could scarcely walk.

"You ought to het a quart o' drink into 'ee, as I've done," said

Marian. "You wouldn't look so white then. Why, souls above us,

your face is as if you'd been hagrode!"

It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired,

her discovery of her visitor's presence might have the bad effect of

taking away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess

to descend by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the

gentleman came forward and looked up.

Tess uttered a short little "Oh!" And a moment after she said,

quickly, "I shall eat my dinner here--right on the rick."

Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did

this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and

the rest descended, and sat under the straw-stack.

The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d'Urberville, the late Evangelist,

despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance

that the original _Weltlust_ had come back; that he had restored

himself, as nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four

years older, to the old jaunty, slapdash guise under which Tess

had first known her admirer, and cousin so-called. Having decided

to remain where she was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of

sight of the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by, she heard

footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after Alec appeared upon the

stack--now an oblong and level platform of sheaves. He strode across

them, and sat down opposite of her without a word.

Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake

which she had brought with her. The other workfolk were by this

time all gathered under the rick, where the loose straw formed a

comfortable retreat.

"I am here again, as you see," said d'Urberville.

"Why do you trouble me so!" she cried, reproach flashing from her

very finger-ends.

"I trouble YOU? I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?"

"Sure, I don't trouble you any-when!"

"You say you don't? But you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that

you turned upon my with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come

to me just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day!

Tess, ever since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if

my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream,

had suddenly found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at

once gushed through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith;

and it is you who have done it!"

She gazed in silence.

"What--you have given up your preaching entirely?" she asked. She

had gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modern

thought to despise flash enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was

somewhat appalled.

In affected severity d'Urberville continued--

"Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was

to address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows

what I am thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No

doubt they pray for me--weep for me; for they are kind people in

their way. But what do I care? How could I go on with the thing

when I had lost my faith in it?--it would have been hypocrisy of

the basest kind! Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus and

Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they might learn

not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge you have taken! I saw you

innocent, and I deceived you. Four years after, you find me a

Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete

perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you, this is only

my way of talking, and you must not look so horribly concerned.

Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty face and

shapely figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me--that tight

pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet--you field-girls

should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger."

He regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical

laugh resumed: "I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy

I thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would

have let go the plough for her sake as I do!"

Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency

failed her, and without heeding he added:

"Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other,

after all. But to speak seriously, Tess." D'Urberville rose and

came nearer, reclining sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon

his elbow. "Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what

you said that HE said. I have come to the conclusion that there

does seem rather a want of common-sense in these threadbare old

propositions; how I could have been so fired by poor Parson Clare's

enthusiasm, and have gone so madly to work, transcending even him, I

cannot make out! As for what you said last time, on the strength of

your wonderful husband's intelligence--whose name you have never told

me--about having what they call an ethical system without any dogma,

I don't see my way to that at all."

"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at

least, if you can't have--what do you call it--dogma."

"O no! I'm a different sort of fellow from that! If there's nobody

to say, 'Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are

dead; do that, and if will be a bad thing for you,' I can't warm up.

Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions

if there's nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear,

I wouldn't either!"

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull

brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days

of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare's

reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a

vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on.

"Well, never mind," he resumed. "Here I am, my love, as in the old

times!"

"Not as then--never as then--'tis different!" she entreated. "And

there was never warmth with me! O why didn't you keep your faith,

if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!"

"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet

head! Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon

him! Ha-ha--I'm awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the

same! Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too.

For all your closeness, I see you are in a bad way--neglected by one

who ought to cherish you."

She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips

were dry, and she was ready to choke. The voices and laughs of the

workfolk eating and drinking under the rick came to her as if they

were a quarter of a mile off.

"It is cruelty to me!" she said. "How--how can you treat me to this

talk, if you care ever so little for me?"

"True, true," he said, wincing a little. "I did not come to reproach

you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say that I don't like you to be

working like this, and I have come on purpose for you. You say you

have a husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I've never

seen him, and you've not told me his name; and altogether he seems

rather a mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I

think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you

out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words

of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me.

Don't you know them, Tess?--'And she shall follow after her lover,

but she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall

not find him; then shall she say, I will go and return to my first

husband; for then was it better with me than now!' ... Tess, my trap

is waiting just under the hill, and--darling mine, not his!--you know

the rest."

Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but

she did not answer.

"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he continued, stretching

his arm towards her waist; "you should be willing to share it, and

leave that mule you call husband for ever."

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her

skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she

passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face.

It was heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the

mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of

a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec

fiercely started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing

appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began

dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon controlled

himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped

his bleeding lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now, punish me!" she

said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the

sparrow's gaze before its captor twists its neck. "Whip me, crush

me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry

out. Once victim, always victim--that's the law!"

"O no, no, Tess," he said blandly. "I can make full allowance for

this. Yet you most unjustly forget one thing, that I would have

married you if you had not put it out of my power to do so. Did I

not ask you flatly to be my wife--hey? Answer me."

"You did."

"And you cannot be. But remember one thing!" His voice hardened

as his temper got the better of him with the recollection of his

sincerity in asking her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped

across to her side and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook

under his grasp. "Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will

be your master again. If you are any man's wife you are mine!"

The threshers now began to stir below.

"So much for our quarrel," he said, letting her go. "Now I shall

leave you, and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon.

You don't know me yet! But I know you."

She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned. D'Urberville

retreated over the sheaves, and descended the ladder, while the

workers below rose and stretched their arms, and shook down the beer

they had drunk. Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid

the renewed rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the

buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless

succession.

XLVIII

In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick was to be

finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see

to work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on

the morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded

with even less intermission than usual.

It was not till "nammet"-time, about three o-clock, that Tess raised

her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little

surprise at seeing that Alec d'Urberville had come back, and was

standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her

eyes, and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss.

It meant that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and

carefully abstained from gazing in that direction.

Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the

straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six

o'clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But

the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,

notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by

the insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two

young hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense

stack of straw where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared

as the faeces of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky

a wrathful shine--all that wild March could afford in the way of

sunset--had burst forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and

sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light,

as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like

dull flames.

A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and

Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt

and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring

face coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it.

She was the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be

shaken bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now

separated her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing

duties with her as they had done. The incessant quivering, in

which every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a

stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently of her

consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and did not hear Izz

Huett tell her from below that her hair was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and

saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the

great upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it,

against the gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator

like a Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw

ascended, a yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top

of the rick.

She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene, observing

her from some point or other, though she could not say where. There

was an excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew

near its final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men

unconnected with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that

performance--sporting characters of all descriptions, gents with

terriers and facetious pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour's work before the layer of live rats at

the base of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in

the direction of the Giant's Hill by Abbot's-Cernel dissolved away,

the white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon that lay

towards Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the

last hour or two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could

not get near enough to speak to, the other women having kept up their

strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done without it through

traditionary dread, owing to its results at her home in childhood.

But Tess still kept going: if she could not fill her part she would

have to leave; and this contingency, which she would have regarded

with equanimity and even with relief a month or two earlier, had

become a terror since d'Urberville had begun to hover round her.

The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so low that

people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess's surprise Farmer

Groby came up on the machine to her, and said that if she desired to

join her friend he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would

send somebody else to take her place. The "friend" was d'Urberville,

she knew, and also that this concession had been granted in obedience

to the request of that friend, or enemy. She shook her head and

toiled on.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began.

The creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick

till they were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered

from their last refuge, they ran across the open ground in all

directions, a loud shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian

informing her companions that one of the rats had invaded her

person--a terror which the rest of the women had guarded against by

various schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat was

at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs, masculine shouts,

feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and confusion as of Pandemonium,

Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased,

and she stepped from the machine to the ground.

Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching, was promptly

at her side.

"What--after all--my insulting slap, too!" said she in an

underbreath. She was so utterly exhausted that she had not strength

to speak louder.

"I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything you say or

do," he answered, in the seductive voice of the Trantridge time.

"How the little limbs tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you

know you are; and yet you need have done nothing since I arrived.

How could you be so obstinate? However, I have told the farmer that

he has no right to employ women at steam-threshing. It is not proper

work for them; and on all the better class of farms it has been given

up, as he knows very well. I will walk with you as far as your

home."

"O yes," she answered with a jaded gait. "Walk wi' me if you will!

I do bear in mind that you came to marry me before you knew o' my

state. Perhaps--perhaps you are a little better and kinder than I

have been thinking you were. Whatever is meant as kindness I am

grateful for; whatever is meant in any other way I am angered at.

I cannot sense your meaning sometimes."

"If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist

you. And I will do it with much more regard for your feelings than

I formerly showed. My religious mania, or whatever it was, is over.

But I retain a little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by

all that's tender and strong between man and woman, trust me! I

have enough and more than enough to put you out of anxiety, both

for yourself and your parents and sisters. I can make them all

comfortable if you will only show confidence in me."

"Have you seen 'em lately?" she quickly inquired.

"Yes. They didn't know where you were. It was only by chance that I

found you here."

The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess's fagged face between the twigs

of the garden-hedge as she paused outside the cottage which was her

temporary home, d'Urberville pausing beside her.

"Don't mention my little brothers and sisters--don't make me break

down quite!" she said. "If you want to help them--God knows they

need it--do it without telling me. But no, no!" she cried. "I will

take nothing from you, either for them or for me!"

He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived with the

household, all was public indoors. No sooner had she herself

entered, laved herself in a washing-tub, and shared supper with the

family than she fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under

the wall, by the light of her own little lamp wrote in a passionate

mood--

MY OWN HUSBAND,--

Let me call you so--I must--even if it makes you angry to

think of such an unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you

in my trouble--I have no one else! I am so exposed to

temptation, Angel. I fear to say who it is, and I do not

like to write about it at all. But I cling to you in a way

you cannot think! Can you not come to me now, at once,

before anything terrible happens? O, I know you cannot,

because you are so far away! I think I must die if you do

not come soon, or tell me to come to you. The punishment

you have measured out to me is deserved--I do know that--

well deserved--and you are right and just to be angry with

me. But, Angel, please, please, not to be just--only a

little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and come to

me! If you would come, I could die in your arms! I would

be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me!

Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to

blame you for going away, and I know it was necessary you

should find a farm. Do not think I shall say a word of

sting or bitterness. Only come back to me. I am desolate

without you, my darling, O, so desolate! I do not mind

having to work: but if you will send me one little line,

and say, "I am coming soon," I will bide on, Angel--O, so

cheerfully!

It has been so much my religion ever since we were married

to be faithful to you in every thought and look, that even

when a man speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it

seems wronging you. Have you never felt one little bit of

what you used to feel when we were at the dairy? If you

have, how can you keep away from me? I am the same women,

Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very same!--not

the one you disliked but never saw. What was the past to me

as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I

became another woman, filled full of new life from you. How

could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear,

if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe

in yourself so far as to see that you were strong enough to

work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to

come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust

you always to love me! I ought to have known that such as