Tess of the D'urbervilles

that was not for poor me. But I am sick at heart, not only

for old times, but for the present. Think--think how it do

hurt my heart not to see you ever--ever! Ah, if I could

only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day

as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you

to show pity to your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is

the word they use, since I wish to be truthful). Perhaps I

am what they say. But I do not value my good looks; I only

like to have them because they belong to you, my dear, and

that there may be at least one thing about me worth your

having. So much have I felt this, that when I met with

annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my face in a

bandage as long as people would believe in it. O Angel, I

tell you all this not from vanity--you will certainly know

I do not--but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to

you? I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will

not do. It cannot be that I shall yield one inch, yet I am

in terror as to what an accident might lead to, and I so

defenceless on account of my first error. I cannot say more

about this--it makes me too miserable. But if I break down

by falling into some fearful snare, my last state will be

worse than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me

come at once, or at once come to me!

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your

servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be

near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here,

and I don't like to see the rooks and starlings in the

field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to

see them with me. I long for only one thing in heaven or

earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear! Come

to me--come to me, and save me from what threatens me!--

Your faithful heartbroken

TESS

XLIX

The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet

Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and

the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial

aid by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to

Tess the human world seemed so different (though it was much the

same). It was purely for security that she had been requested by

Angel to send her communications through his father, whom he kept

pretty well informed of his changing addresses in the country he

had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy heart.

"Now," said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope,

"if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next

month, as he told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his

plans; for I believe it to be from his wife." He breathed deeply at

the thought of her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent

on to Angel.

"Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely," murmured Mrs Clare.

"To my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used. You should

have sent him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith and given

him the same chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out

of it under proper influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders

after all. Church or no Church, it would have been fairer to him."

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her

husband's peace in respect to their sons. And she did not vent this

often; for she was as considerate as she was devout, and knew that

his mind too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this matter.

Only too often had she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs

for Angel with prayers. But the uncompromising Evangelical did not

even now hold that he would have been justified in giving his son,

an unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had given to the

two others, when it was possible, if not probable, that those very

advantages might have been used to decry the doctrines which he had

made it his life's mission and desire to propagate, and the mission

of his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a pedestal

under the feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt

the unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike

inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.

Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned

over this treatment of him as Abraham might have mourned over the

doomed Isaac while they went up the hill together. His silent

self-generated regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which

his wife rendered audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never

been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with

agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated

him and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken

place. At first they had supposed it must be something of the nature

of a serious aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally

alluded to the intention of coming home to fetch her; from which

expressions they hoped the division might not owe its origin to

anything so hopelessly permanent as that. He had told them that she

was with her relatives, and in their doubts they had decided not to

intrude into a situation which they knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were gazing at this

time on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which

was bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent

towards the coast. His experiences of this strange land had been

sad. The severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after

his arrival had never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost

decided to relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as

the bare possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change

of view a secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country

in his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had

suffered, died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English

farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child

would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause

to dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the

babe therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and

again trudge on.

Angel's original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a

northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this

place in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English

agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape

from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.

What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than

its pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism,

he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He

thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more

pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of

a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and

impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among

things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began

to oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He

could no longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say

that was in spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time

with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt

herself at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances

or her feelings. He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as

to her motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus

her silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really said

if he had understood!--that she adhered with literal exactness to

orders which he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural

fearlessness she asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in

every respect the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the

country, another man rode beside him. Angel's companion was also an

Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part

of the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and

they spoke of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that

curious tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant

lands, to entrust to strangers details of their lives which they

would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man

as they rode along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more

peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the

social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the

irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial

curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;

thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she

would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away

from her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm. Angel's companion

was struck down with fever, and died by the week's end. Clare waited

a few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew

absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his

death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the

philosophers. His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.

His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had persistently

elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in

that civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem.

Surely then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact

state, which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at

least open to correction when the result was due to treachery. A

remorse struck into him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled

in his memory, came back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved him,

and she had replied in the affirmative. Did she love him more than

Tess did? No, she had replied; Tess would lay down her life for him,

and she herself could do no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding.

How her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words

as if they were a god's! And during the terrible evening over the

hearth, when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her

face had looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize

that his love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical

things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always

a cynic and live; and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing

them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general

principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone

over the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her;

there is no doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they

love or have loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are

tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out

of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the

temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards

yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The historic interest of her family--that masterful line of

d'Urbervilles--whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his

sentiments now. Why had he not known the difference between the

political value and the imaginative value of these things? In

the latter aspect her d'Urberville descent was a fact of great

dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient

to the dreamer, to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a

fact that would soon be forgotten--that bit of distinction in poor

Tess's blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary

link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So

does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances. In recalling her face

again and again, he thought now that he could see therein a flash of

the dignity which must have graced her grand-dames; and the vision

sent that _aura_ through his veins which he had formerly felt, and

which left behind it a sense of sickness.

Despite her not-inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as

Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning

of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's devoted

outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father;

though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in

reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would come in response

to the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it

was that the facts of her life which had led to the parting had

not changed--could never change; and that, if her presence had not

attenuated them, her absence could not. Nevertheless she addressed

her mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him

best if he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she

had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she

had inquired more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads

among those the country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby

Seedling, who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby

remembered that, amongst the snatches of melody in which they had

indulged at the dairyman's, to induce the cows to let down their

milk, Clare had seemed to like "Cupid's Gardens", "I have parks, I

have hounds", and "The break o' the day"; and had seemed not to care

for "The Tailor's Breeches" and "Such a beauty I did grow", excellent

ditties as they were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised

them privately at odd moments, especially "The break o' the day":

Arise, arise, arise!

And pick your love a posy,

All o' the sweetest flowers

That in the garden grow.

The turtle doves and sma' birds

In every bough a-building,

So early in the May-time

At the break o' the day!

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these

ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this

cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the

thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and

the simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of

the aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to

know how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that

Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the

end of her term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which

made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as

usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of

the family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess.

Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure

with the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin,

girlish creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the

girl said "Tess!"

"What--is it 'Liza-Lu?" asked Tess, in startled accents. Her sister,

whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had

sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which

as yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning.

Her thin legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her

growing, and her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and

inexperience.

"Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess," said Lu, with

unemotional gravity, "a-trying to find 'ee; and I'm very tired."

"What is the matter at home?"

"Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she's dying, and as

father is not very well neither, and says 'tis wrong for a man of

such a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring

work, we don't know what to do."

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking

'Liza-Lu to come in and sit down. When she had done so, and 'Liza-Lu

was having some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that

she should go home. Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the

sixth of April, but as the interval thereto was not a long one she

resolved to run the risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her sister

was too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess

ran down to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had

happened, and begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer.

Returning, she got Lu a supper, and after that, having tucked the

younger into her own bed, packed up as many of her belongings as

would go into a withy basket, and started, directing Lu to follow

her next morning.

L

She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck

ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the steely stars. In lonely

districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless

pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along

by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but

marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of

her mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after

mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about

midnight looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade

which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side

she was born. Having already traversed about five miles on the

upland, she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her

journey would be finished. The winding road downwards became just

visible to her under the wan starlight as she followed it, and

soon she paced a soil so contrasting with that above it that the

difference was perceptible to the tread and to the smell. It was the

heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which

turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions linger longest on

these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it

seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near

being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its

presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had

been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies that "whickered"

at you as you passed;--the place teemed with beliefs in them still,

and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in

response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul

heard but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld

relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness

beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and

undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour

on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on

Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had

threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a

club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced

with her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet. In the

direction of her mother's house she saw a light. It came from the

bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at

her. As soon as she could discern the outline of the house--newly

thatched with her money--it had all its old effect upon Tess's

imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the

slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of

brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her

personal character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to

her regard; it meant the illness of her mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room

was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came

to the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no

better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a

breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother's chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a

curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than

a year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying

herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in

his chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually

bright. He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what

it was.

"I'm thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this

part of England," he said, "asking them to subscribe to a fund to

maintain me. I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical,

and proper thing to do. They spend lots o' money in keeping up old

ruins, and finding the bones o' things, and such like; and living

remains must be more interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed

of me. Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what there

is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa'son

Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had

grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved

by her remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she

turned her attention to external things. It was now the season for

planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers

had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the

allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her

dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed

potatoes,--that last lapse of the improvident. At the earliest

moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few

days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's

persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot

which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the

village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where

she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.

Violent motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high,

dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,

and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the

day had ended. Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended

indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead

weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather

favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours

till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that

divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare

of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the

allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under

the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks

of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become

illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one

another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall

by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over

for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting

done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was

on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork,

its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods

in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke

of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the

brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and

presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached

by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of

the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The

women further back wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces,

were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at

moments they caught a flash from the flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the

boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower

sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright

as almost to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were

appearing elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels

occasionally rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;

and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring

in it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the

hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and

shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,

which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of

summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the

soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess

stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce

now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long

time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long

smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and

whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.

She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging

brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it

swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all

the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her.

Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not

been there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know

him as any one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her

absences having been so long and frequent of late years. By-and-by

he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as

distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On

going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she

found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up,

and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his

appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the

most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that

chilled her as to its bearing. D'Urberville emitted a low, long

laugh.

"If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like

Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined

head.

"What do you say?" she weakly asked.

"A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I

am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior

animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton's when I was

theological. Some of it goes--

"'Empress, the way is ready, and not long,

Beyond a row of myrtles...

... If thou accept

My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.'

'Lead then,' said Eve.

"And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing

that you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think

so badly of me."

"I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don't think of you in

that way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you

affront me. What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?"

"Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock, which I

saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I

mightn't be noticed. I come to protest against your working like

this."

"But I like doing it--it is for my father."

"Your engagement at the other place is ended?"

"Yes."

"Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?"

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

"O--I don't know!" she said bitterly. "I have no husband!"

"It is quite true--in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and

I have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.

When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there

for you."

"O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all! I cannot take

it from you! I don't like--it is not right!"

"It IS right!" he cried lightly. "I am not going to see a woman whom

I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to

help her."

"But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about--about--not

about living at all!"

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon

the fork-handle and upon the clods.

"About the children--your brothers and sisters," he resumed. "I've

been thinking of them."

Tess's heart quivered--he was touching her in a weak place. He had

divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone

out to those children with an affection that was passionate.

"If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for

them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?"

"He can with my assistance. He must!"

"And with mine."

"No, sir!"

"How damned foolish this is!" burst out d'Urberville. "Why, he

thinks we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!"

"He don't. I've undeceived him."

"The more fool you!"

D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he

pulled off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling

it up and pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;

she wondered if he had gone back to her father's house; and taking

the fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

"O, Tessy--what do you think! 'Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there's a

lot of folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they

think father is dead!"

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its

sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,

beholding the effect produced upon her, she said--

"What, Tess, shan't we talk to father never no more?"

"But father was only a little bit ill!" exclaimed Tess distractedly.

'Liza-Lu came up.

"He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother

said there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in."

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was

out of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even

more than it sounded. Her father's life had a value apart from his

personal achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It

was the last of the three lives for whose duration the house and

premises were held under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the

tenant-farmer for his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage

accommodation. Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of in villages

almost as much as little freeholders, because of their independence

of manner, and when a lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them

the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of

the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely

enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were

now. So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and

persist in everything under the sky.

LI

At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world

was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular

date of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor

service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to

be now carried out. The labourers--or "work-folk", as they used to

call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from

without--who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to

the new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.

When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about

Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the

home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire

for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger

families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an

advantage. The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the

family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became

it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village

life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A

depopulation was also going on. The village had formerly contained,

side by side with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and

better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the former--the class

to which Tess's father and mother had belonged--and including the

carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with

nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people

who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of

their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or copyholders, or

occasionally, small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell

in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly

pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.

Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked

upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of

others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who had

formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the

depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the

large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as

"the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns", being

really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this manner

considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house which remained

standing was required by the agriculturist for his work-people. Ever

since the occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow over

Tess's life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited)

had been tacitly looked on as one which would have to go when their

lease ended, if only in the interests of morality. It was, indeed,

quite true that the household had not been shining examples either of

temperance, soberness, or chastity. The father, and even the mother,

had got drunk at times, the younger children seldom had gone to

church, and the eldest daughter had made queer unions. By some means

the village had to be kept pure. So on this, the first Lady-Day

on which the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy,

was required for a carter with a large family; and Widow Joan,

her daughters Tess and 'Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham, and the younger

children had to go elsewhere.

On the evening preceding their removal it was getting dark betimes by

reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the sky. As it was the last

night they would spend in the village which had been their home and

birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to

bid some friends goodbye, and Tess was keeping house till they should

return.

She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement,

where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of

glass. Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long

ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies

ever came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement.

Tess was reflecting on the position of the household, in which she

perceived her own evil influence. Had she not come home, her mother

and the children might probably have been allowed to stay on as

weekly tenants. But she had been observed almost immediately on her

return by some people of scrupulous character and great influence:

they had seen her idling in the churchyard, restoring as well as she

could with a little trowel a baby's obliterated grave. By this means

they had found that she was living here again; her mother was scolded

for "harbouring" her; sharp retorts had ensued from Joan, who had

independently offered to leave at once; she had been taken at her

word; and here was the result.

"I ought never to have come home," said Tess to herself, bitterly.

She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at first took

note of a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw riding down the

street. Possibly it was owing to her face being near to the pane

that he saw her so quickly, and directed his horse so close to the

cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the narrow border for

plants growing under the wall. It was not till he touched the window

with his riding-crop that she observed him. The rain had nearly

ceased, and she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.

"Didn't you see me?" asked d'Urberville.

"I was not attending," she said. "I heard you, I believe, though I

fancied it was a carriage and horses. I was in a sort of dream."

"Ah! you heard the d'Urberville Coach, perhaps. You know the legend,

I suppose?"

"No. My--somebody was going to tell it me once, but didn't."

"If you are a genuine d'Urberville I ought not to tell you either,

I suppose. As for me, I'm a sham one, so it doesn't matter. It is

rather dismal. It is that this sound of a non-existent coach can

only be heard by one of d'Urberville blood, and it is held to be

of ill-omen to the one who hears it. It has to do with a murder,

committed by one of the family, centuries ago."

"Now you have begun it, finish it."

"Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted some

beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was

carrying her off, and in the struggle he killed her--or she killed

him--I forget which. Such is one version of the tale... I see that

your tubs and buckets are packed. Going away, aren't you?"

"Yes, to-morrow--Old Lady Day."

"I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems so sudden.

Why is it?"

"Father's was the last life on the property, and when that dropped we

had no further right to stay. Though we might, perhaps, have stayed

as weekly tenants--if it had not been for me."

"What about you?"

"I am not a--proper woman."

D'Urberville's face flushed.

"What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty souls

be burnt to cinders!" he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment.

"That's why you are going, is it? Turned out?"

"We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we should have to go

soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are

better chances."

"Where are you going to?"

"Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about

father's people that she will go there."

"But your mother's family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little

hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at

Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother's

death; but there's the house, as you know it, and the garden. It

can be whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite

comfortably; and I will put the children to a good school. Really

I ought to do something for you!"

"But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!" she declared.

"And we can wait there--"

"Wait--what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here,

Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in mind the _grounds_ of

your separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with

you. Now, though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even

if you won't believe it. Come to this cottage of mine. We'll get

up a regular colony of fowls, and your mother can attend to them

excellently; and the children can go to school."

Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said--

"How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may

change--and then--we should be--my mother would be--homeless

again."

"O no--no. I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if

necessary. Think it over."

Tess shook her head. But d'Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen

him so determined; he would not take a negative.

"Please just tell your mother," he said, in emphatic tones. "It is

her business to judge--not yours. I shall get the house swept out

and whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by

the evening, so that you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall

expect you."

Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with complicated

emotion. She could not look up at d'Urberville.

"I owe you something for the past, you know," he resumed. "And you

cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad--"

"I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the

practice which went with it!"

"I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. To-morrow I

shall expect to hear your mother's goods unloading... Give me your

hand on it now--dear, beautiful Tess!"

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put

his hand in at the half-open casement. With stormy eyes she pulled

the stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the

casement and the stone mullion.

"Damnation--you are very cruel!" he said, snatching out his arm.

"No, no!--I know you didn't do it on purpose. Well I shall expect

you, or your mother and children at least."

"I shall not come--I have plenty of money!" she cried.

"Where?"

"At my father-in-law's, if I ask for it."

"IF you ask for it. But you won't, Tess; I know you; you'll never

ask for it--you'll starve first!"

With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he

met the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the

brethren.

"You go to the devil!" said d'Urberville.

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious

sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the

rush of hot tears thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had,

like others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had! She had

never before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never

in her life--she could swear it from the bottom of her soul--had

she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had

come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of

inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand,

and scribbled the following lines:

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do

not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully,

and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I

did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged

me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget

you. It is all injustice I have received at your

hands!

T.

She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with

her epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the

window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How

could he give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was

no new event to alter his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two

biggest of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the

four smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to

eleven, all in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling

their own little subjects. Tess at length joined them, without

lighting a candle.

"This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house

where we were born," she said quickly. "We ought to think of it,

oughtn't we?"

They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they

were ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had

conjured up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in

the idea of a new place. Tess changed the subject.

"Sing to me, dears," she said.

"What shall we sing?"

"Anything you know; I don't mind."

There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one little

tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third

and a fourth chimed in unison, with words they had learnt at the

Sunday-school--

Here we suffer grief and pain,

Here we meet to part again;

In Heaven we part no more.

The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had

long ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it,

felt that further thought was not required. With features strained

hard to enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the centre

of the flickering fire, the notes of the youngest straying over into

the pauses of the rest.

Tess turned from them, and went to the window again. Darkness had

now fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to

peer into the gloom. It was really to hide her tears. If she could

only believe what the children were singing; if she were only sure,

how different all would now be; how confidently she would leave them

to Providence and their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it

behoved her to do something; to be their Providence; for to Tess,

as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the

poet's lines--

Not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal

compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to

justify, and at best could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall

'Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield's pattens clicked up to the

door, and Tess opened it.

"I see the tracks of a horse outside the window," said Joan. "Hev

somebody called?"

"No," said Tess.

The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured--

"Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!"

"He didn't call," said Tess. "He spoke to me in passing."

"Who was the gentleman?" asked the mother. "Your husband?"

"No. He'll never, never come," answered Tess in stony hopelessness.

"Then who was it?"

"Oh, you needn't ask. You've seen him before, and so have I."

"Ah! What did he say?" said Joan curiously.

"I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at Kingsbere

to-morrow--every word."

It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a

physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her

more and more.

LII

During the small hours of the next morning, while it was still dark,

dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their

night's rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till

daylight--noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of

the month as the voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same.

They were the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of

the empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating

families; for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required

his services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination.

That this might be accomplished within the day was the explanation

of the reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of

the carters being to reach the door of the outgoing households by

six o'clock, when the loading of their movables at once began.

But to Tess and her mother's household no such anxious farmer sent

his team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers;

they were not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire

a waggon at their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that

morning, to find that though the weather was windy and louring, it

did not rain, and that the waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a

spectre which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp

bedding, damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.

Her mother, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger

children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light,

and the "house-ridding" was taken in hand.

It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two

assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in

position, a circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which

Joan Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through the

journey. After loading there was a long delay before the horses were

brought, these having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at

length, about two o'clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot

swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and family

at the top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent injury to its

works, the head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of the

waggon, struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the

next eldest girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.

They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous

evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well,

though, in their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible

to such a family, harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except

themselves. Soon the equipage began to ascend to higher ground,

and the wind grew keener with the change of level and soil.

The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many

other waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was

built on a wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to

the rural labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the

arrangement was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles,

and finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood

importantly in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its

erect and natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they

were bound to carry reverently.

Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping

at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield

menagerie also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.

During the halt Tess's eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which

was ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine

section of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also

drawn up at a little distance from the same inn. She followed one of

the mug's journeys upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands

whose owner she well knew. Tess went towards the waggon.

"Marian and Izz!" she cried to the girls, for it was they, sitting

with the moving family at whose house they had lodged. "Are you

house-ridding to-day, like everybody else?"

They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for them at

Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost without notice,

leaving Groby to prosecute them if he chose. They told Tess their

destination, and Tess told them hers.

Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. "Do you know that

the gentleman who follows 'ee--you'll guess who I mean--came to ask

for 'ee at Flintcomb after you had gone? We didn't tell'n where you

was, knowing you wouldn't wish to see him."

"Ah--but I did see him!" Tess murmured. "He found me."

"And do he know where you be going?"

"I think so."

"Husband come back?"

"No."

She bade her acquaintance goodbye--for the respective carters had now

come out from the inn--and the two waggons resumed their journey in

opposite directions; the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the

ploughman's family with whom they had thrown in their lot, being

brightly painted, and drawn by three powerful horses with shining

brass ornaments on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs

Durbeyfield and her family rode was a creaking erection that would

scarcely bear the weight of the superincumbent load; one which had

known no paint since it was made, and drawn by two horses only.

The contrast well marked the difference between being fetched by a

thriving farmer and conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one's

coming.

The distance was great--too great for a day's journey--and it was

with the utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they

had started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they

turned the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland

called Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe

themselves Tess looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of

them, was the half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere,

where lay those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to

painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which

could be considered the d'Urbervilles' home, since they had resided

there for full five hundred years.

A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards them, and

when he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he quickened his

steps.

"You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?" he said to

Tess's mother, who had descended to walk the remainder of the way.

She nodded. "Though widow of the late Sir John d'Urberville, poor

nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and returning to the domain of

his forefathers."

"Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs Durbeyfield,

I am sent to tell 'ee that the rooms you wanted be let. We didn't

know that you was coming till we got your letter this morning--when

'twas too late. But no doubt you can get other lodgings somewhere."

The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become ash-pale at

his intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly at fault. "What

shall we do now, Tess?" she said bitterly. "Here's a welcome to

your ancestors' lands! However, let's try further."

They moved on into the town, and tried with all their might, Tess

remaining with the waggon to take care of the children whilst her

mother and 'Liza-Lu made inquiries. At the last return of Joan to

the vehicle, an hour later, when her search for accommodation had

still been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the goods must be

unloaded, as the horses were half-dead, and he was bound to return

part of the way at least that night.

"Very well--unload it here," said Joan recklessly. "I'll get shelter

somewhere."

The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a spot screened

from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon hauled down the poor

heap of household goods. This done, she paid him, reducing herself

to almost her last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them,

only too glad to get out of further dealings with such a family. It

was a dry night, and he guessed that they would come to no harm.

Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight

of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and

kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze,

upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they

had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of

which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to

the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never

made. Round about were deparked hills and slopes--now cut up

into little paddocks--and the green foundations that showed where

the d'Urberville mansion once had stood; also an outlying stretch

of Egdon Heath that had always belonged to the estate. Hard by,

the aisle of the church called the d'Urberville Aisle looked on

imperturbably.

"Isn't your family vault your own freehold?" said Tess's mother, as

she returned from a reconnoitre of the church and graveyard. "Why,

of course 'tis, and that's where we will camp, girls, till the place

of your ancestors finds us a roof! Now, Tess and 'Liza and Abraham,

you help me. We'll make a nest for these children, and then we'll

have another look round."

Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour the old

four-post bedstead was dissociated from the heap of goods, and

erected under the south wall of the church, the part of the building

known as the d'Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay.

Over the tester of the bedstead was a beautiful traceried window, of

many lights, its date being the fifteenth century. It was called

the d'Urberville Window, and in the upper part could be discerned

heraldic emblems like those on Durbeyfield's old seal and spoon.

Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an excellent tent

of it, and put the smaller children inside. "If it comes to the

worst we can sleep there too, for one night," she said. "But let us

try further on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess,

what's the use of your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves

us like this!"

Accompanied by 'Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended the little

lane which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got

into the street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down.

"Ah--I'm looking for you!" he said, riding up to them. "This is

indeed a family gathering on the historic spot!"

It was Alec d'Urberville. "Where is Tess?" he asked.

Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily signified the

direction of the church, and went on, d'Urberville saying that he

would see them again, in case they should be still unsuccessful in

their search for shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had

gone, d'Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after came out on

foot.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead,

remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could

be done to make them comfortable just then, she walked about the

churchyard, now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall.

The door of the church was unfastened, and she entered it for the

first time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of

the family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were

canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced

and broken; their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes

remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders

that she had ever received that her people were socially extinct,

there was none so forcible as this spoliation.

She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that

this was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall

knights of whom her father had chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the

oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she

had not noticed it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but

for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close

to it she discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living

person; and the shock to her sense of not having been alone was so

violent that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting,

not, however, till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

"I saw you come in," he said smiling, "and got up there not to

interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with

these old fellows under us here? Listen."

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose

a hollow echo from below.

"That shook them a bit, I'll warrant!" he continued. "And you

thought I was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no.

The old order changeth. The little finger of the sham d'Urberville

can do more for you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath...

Now command me. What shall I do?"

"Go away!" she murmured.

"I will--I'll look for your mother," said he blandly. But in passing

her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be civil yet!"

When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the vaults, and

said--

"Why am I on the wrong side of this door!"

In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the

chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaan--

the Egypt of some other family who had left it only that morning.

But the girls did not for a long time think of where they were going.

Their talk was of Angel Clare and Tess, and Tess's persistent lover,

whose connection with her previous history they had partly heard and

partly guessed ere this.

"'Tisn't as though she had never known him afore," said Marian. "His

having won her once makes all the difference in the world. 'Twould

be a thousand pities if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can

never be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her,

and not try to mend this quarrel? If he could on'y know what straits

she's put to, and what's hovering round, he might come to take care

of his own."

"Could we let him know?"

They thought of this all the way to their destination; but the bustle

of re-establishment in their new place took up all their attention

then. But when they were settled, a month later, they heard of

Clare's approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more of

Tess. Upon that, agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet

honourably disposed to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they

shared, and a few lines were concocted between the two girls.

HONOUR'D SIR--

Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do

love you. For she is sore put to by an Enemy in the shape

of a Friend. Sir, there is one near her who ought to be

Away. A woman should not be try'd beyond her Strength,

and continual dropping will wear away a Stone--ay,

more--a Diamond.

FROM TWO WELL-WISHERS

This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever

heard him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which they

continued in a mood of emotional exaltation at their own generosity,

which made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the same

time.

END OF PHASE THE SIXTH

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment

LIII

It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were

burning under their green shades in the Vicar's study, but he had not

been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire

which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went

out again; sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the

drawing-room, then returning again to the front door.

It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still

light enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had

been sitting in the drawing-room, followed him hither.

"Plenty of time yet," said the Vicar. "He doesn't reach Chalk-Newton

till six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of

country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over

in a hurry by our old horse."

"But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear."

"Years ago."

Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only

waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.

At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old

pony-chaise appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight

therefrom a form which they affected to recognize, but would actually

have passed by in the street without identifying had he not got out

of their carriage at the particular moment when a particular person

was due.

Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her

husband came more slowly after her.

The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces

in the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because

they confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his

shape against the light.

"O, my boy, my boy--home again at last!" cried Mrs Clare, who cared

no more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused

all this separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman,

indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the

promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes

in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if

weighed against their happiness? As soon as they reached the room

where the candles were lighted she looked at his face.

"O, it is not Angel--not my son--the Angel who went away!" she cried

in all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure

from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had

experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his

first aversion to the mockery of events at home. You could see the

skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.

He matched Crivelli's dead _Christus_. His sunken eye-pits were of

morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows

and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his

face twenty years before their time.

"I was ill over there, you know," he said. "I am all right now."

As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give

way, and he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was

only a slight attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day's

journey, and the excitement of arrival.

"Has any letter come for me lately?" he asked. "I received the

last you sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay

through being inland; or I might have come sooner."

"It was from your wife, we supposed?"

"It was."

Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,

knowing he would start for home so soon.

He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbed to read

in Tess's handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried

scrawl to him.

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do

not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully,

and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I

did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged

me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget

you. It is all injustice I have received at your

hands!

T.

"It is quite true!" said Angel, throwing down the letter. "Perhaps

she will never be reconciled to me!"

"Don't, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the soil!" said

his mother.

"Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the soil. I wish

she were so in the sense you mean; but let me now explain to you what

I have never explained before, that her father is a descendant in the

male line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good many others

who lead obscure agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed

'sons of the soil.'"

He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling exceedingly

unwell, he remained in his room pondering. The circumstances amid

which he had left Tess were such that though, while on the south of

the Equator and just in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed

the easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms the moment

he chose to forgive her, now that he had arrived it was not so easy

as it had seemed. She was passionate, and her present letter,

showing that her estimate of him had changed under his delay--too

justly changed, he sadly owned,--made him ask himself if it would

be wise to confront her unannounced in the presence of her parents.

Supposing that her love had indeed turned to dislike during the last

weeks of separation, a sudden meeting might lead to bitter words.

Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess and her

family by sending a line to Marlott announcing his return, and his

hope that she was still living with them there, as he had arranged

for her to do when he left England. He despatched the inquiry that

very day, and before the week was out there came a short reply from

Mrs Durbeyfield which did not remove his embarrassment, for it bore

no address, though to his surprise it was not written from Marlott.

SIR,

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away

from me at present, and J am not sure when she will

return, but J will let you know as Soon as she do.

J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where she is

temperly biding. J should say that me and my Family

have left Marlott for some Time.--

Yours,

J. DURBEYFIELD

It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least

apparently well that her mother's stiff reticence as to her

whereabouts did not long distress him. They were all angry with him,

evidently. He would wait till Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of

Tess's return, which her letter implied to be soon. He deserved no

more. His had been a love "which alters when it alteration finds".

He had undergone some strange experiences in his absence; he had seen

the virtual Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in

a corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman taken and set in the

midst as one deserving to be stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being

made a queen; and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess

constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than

by the deed?

A day or two passed while he waited at his father's house for the

promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover

a little more strength. The strength showed signs of coming back,

but there was no sign of Joan's letter. Then he hunted up the

old letter sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess had written from

Flintcomb-Ash, and re-read it. The sentences touched him now as

much as when he had first perused them.

... I must cry to you in my trouble--I have no one

else! ... I think I must die if you do not come

soon, or tell me to come to you... please, please,

not to be just--only a little kind to me ... If

you would come, I could die in your arms! I would

be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven

me! ... if you will send me one little line, and say,

"I am coming soon," I will bide on, Angel--O, so

cheerfully! ... think how it do hurt my heart not to

see you ever--ever! Ah, if I could only make your

dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine

does every day and all day long, it might lead you to

show pity to your poor lonely one. ... I would be

content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant,

if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be

near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you

as mine. ... I long for only one thing in heaven

or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own

dear! Come to me--come to me, and save me from what

threatens me!

Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent

and severer regard of him, but would go and find her immediately. He

asked his father if she had applied for any money during his absence.

His father returned a negative, and then for the first time it

occurred to Angel that her pride had stood in her way, and that she

had suffered privation. From his remarks his parents now gathered

the real reason of the separation; and their Christianity was such

that, reprobates being their especial care, the tenderness towards

Tess which her blood, her simplicity, even her poverty, had not

engendered, was instantly excited by her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey

he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand--the

one from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning--

"Honour'd Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do

love you," and signed, "From Two Well-Wishers."

LIV

In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his

mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street.

He had declined to borrow his father's old mare, well knowing of

its necessity to the household. He went to the inn, where he hired

a trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing. In a very few

minutes after, he was driving up the hill out of the town which,

three or four months earlier in the year, Tess had descended with

such hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.

Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple

with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled

himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In

something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of

the King's Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of

Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by

Alec d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange

oath that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and

blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly

in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from

their roots.

Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other

Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing

calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had

written to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to be

the place of sojourn referred to by her mother. Here, of course, he

did not find her; and what added to his depression was the discovery

that no "Mrs Clare" had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by

the farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by her

Christian name. His name she had obviously never used during their

separation, and her dignified sense of their total severance was

shown not much less by this abstention than by the hardships she had

chosen to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time) rather

than apply to his father for more funds.

From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due

notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor,

and it therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had

told him she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent

as to her actual address, and the only course was to go to Marlott

and inquire for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with Tess

was quite smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man to

drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in being sent back

to Emminster; for the limit of a day's journey with that horse was

reached.

Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle for a further

distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with

the man who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered

on foot the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's birth.

It was as yet too early in the year for much colour to appear in the

gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter overlaid

with a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his

expectations.

The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was

now inhabited by another family who had never known her. The new

residents were in the garden, taking as much interest in their own

doings as if the homestead had never passed its primal time in

conjunction with the histories of others, beside which the histories

of these were but as a tale told by an idiot. They walked about the

garden paths with thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost,

bringing their actions at every moment in jarring collision with the

dim ghosts behind them, talking as though the time when Tess lived

there were not one whit intenser in story than now. Even the spring

birds sang over their heads as if they thought there was nobody

missing in particular.

On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of

their predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John

Durbeyfield was dead; that his widow and children had left Marlott,

declaring that they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of

doing so had gone on to another place they mentioned. By this time

Clare abhorred the house for ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened

away from its hated presence without once looking back.

His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her at the

dance. It was as bad as the house--even worse. He passed on through

the churchyard, where, amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a

somewhat superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:

In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d'Urberville, of

the once powerful family of that Name, and Direct

Descendant through an illustrious Line from Sir Pagan

d'Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror. Died

March 10th, 18--

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.

Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there,

and drew nigh. "Ah, sir, now that's a man who didn't want to lie

here, but wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be."

"And why didn't they respect his wish?"

"Oh--no money. Bless your soul, sir, why--there, I wouldn't wish to

say it everywhere, but--even this headstone, for all the flourish

wrote upon en, is not paid for."

"Ah, who put it up?"

The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on leaving the

churchyard, Clare called at the mason's house. He found that the

statement was true, and paid the bill. This done, he turned in the

direction of the migrants.

The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such a strong

desire for isolation that at first he would neither hire a conveyance

nor go to a circuitous line of railway by which he might eventually

reach the place. At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but

the way was such that he did not enter Joan's place till about seven

o'clock in the evening, having traversed a distance of over twenty

miles since leaving Marlott.

The village being small he had little difficulty in finding Mrs

Durbeyfield's tenement, which was a house in a walled garden,

remote from the main road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old

furniture as best she could. It was plain that for some reason or

other she had not wished him to visit her, and he felt his call to

be somewhat of an intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the

light from the evening sky fell upon her face.

This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but he was too

preoccupied to observe more than that she was still a handsome woman,

in the garb of a respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that

he was Tess's husband, and his object in coming there, and he did it

awkwardly enough. "I want to see her at once," he added. "You said

you would write to me again, but you have not done so."

"Because she've not come home," said Joan.

"Do you know if she is well?"

"I don't. But you ought to, sir," said she.

"I admit it. Where is she staying?"

From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her

embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.

"I--don't know exactly where she is staying," she answered. "She

was--but--"

"Where was she?"

"Well, she is not there now."

In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by

this time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother's skirts,

the youngest murmured--

"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"

"He has married her," Joan whispered. "Go inside."

Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked--

"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of

course--"

"I don't think she would."

"Are you sure?"

"I am sure she wouldn't."

He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's tender letter.

"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately. "I know her better

than you do."

"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known her."

"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely

wretched man!" Tess's mother again restlessly swept her cheek with

her vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is

a low voice--

"She is at Sandbourne."

"Ah--where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say."

"I don't know more particularly than I have said--Sandbourne. For

myself, I was never there."

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her

no further.

"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.

"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided for."

Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station

three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither.

The last train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare

on its wheels.

LV

At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the

hotels and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his

arrival, he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too

late to call on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed

his purpose till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just

yet.

This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western

stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its

covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly

created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.

An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at

hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a

glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.

Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity

of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British

trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the

Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's

gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.

By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way of this new

world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against

the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the

numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It

was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on

the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more

imposing than it was.

The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he

thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same

tones, and he thought they were the sea.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst

all this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered, the more was he

puzzled. Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were

no fields to till. She was most probably engaged to do something in

one of these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at the

chamber-windows and their lights going out one by one, and wondered

which of them might be hers.

Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o'clock he entered

and went to bed. Before putting out his light he re-read Tess's

impassioned letter. Sleep, however, he could not--so near her, yet

so far from her--and he continually lifted the window-blind and

regarded the backs of the opposite houses, and wondered behind which

of the sashes she reposed at that moment.

He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the morning he

arose at seven, and shortly after went out, taking the direction of

the chief post-office. At the door he met an intelligent postman

coming out with letters for the morning delivery.

"Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?" asked Angel. The postman

shook his head.

Then, remembering that she would have been likely to continue the use

of her maiden name, Clare said--

"Of a Miss Durbeyfield?"

"Durbeyfield?"

This also was strange to the postman addressed.

"There's visitors coming and going every day, as you know, sir," he

said; "and without the name of the house 'tis impossible to find

'em."

One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the name was

repeated to him.

"I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name of d'Urberville

at The Herons," said the second.

"That's it!" cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to

the real pronunciation. "What place is The Herons?"

"A stylish lodging-house. 'Tis all lodging-houses here, bless 'ee."

Clare received directions how to find the house, and hastened

thither, arriving with the milkman. The Herons, though an ordinary

villa, stood in its own grounds, and was certainly the last place

in which one would have expected to find lodgings, so private was

its appearance. If poor Tess was a servant here, as he feared, she

would go to the back-door to that milkman, and he was inclined to go

thither also. However, in his doubts he turned to the front, and

rang.

The hour being early, the landlady herself opened the door. Clare

inquired for Teresa d'Urberville or Durbeyfield.

"Mrs d'Urberville?"

"Yes."

Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad, even though

she had not adopted his name.

"Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to see her?"

"It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?"

"Angel."

"Mr Angel?"

"No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She'll understand."

"I'll see if she is awake."

He was shown into the front room--the dining-room--and looked out

through the spring curtains at the little lawn, and the rhododendrons

and other shrubs upon it. Obviously her position was by no means so

bad as he had feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow

have claimed and sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her

for one moment. Soon his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the

stairs, at which his heart thumped so painfully that he could hardly

stand firm. "Dear me! what will she think of me, so altered as I

am!" he said to himself; and the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold--not at all as he had expected to

see her--bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty

was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She

was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white,

embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same

hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered

cable of dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the

back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder--the evident

result of haste.

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side;

for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the

doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast

between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.

"Tess!" he said huskily, "can you forgive me for going away? Can't

you--come to me? How do you get to be--like this?"

"It is too late," said she, her voice sounding hard through the room,

her eyes shining unnaturally.

"I did not think rightly of you--I did not see you as you were!" he

continued to plead. "I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!"

"Too late, too late!" she said, waving her hand in the impatience of

a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. "Don't

come close to me, Angel! No--you must not. Keep away."

"But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled

down by illness? You are not so fickle--I am come on purpose for

you--my mother and father will welcome you now!"

"Yes--O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late."

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move

away, but cannot. "Don't you know all--don't you know it? Yet how

do you come here if you do not know?"

"I inquired here and there, and I found the way."

"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones suddenly

resuming their old fluty pathos. "But you did not come! And I wrote

to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come

any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me,

and to mother, and to all of us after father's death. He--"

"I don't understand."

"He has won me back to him."

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged

like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands,

which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued--

"He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie--that you

would not come again; and you HAVE come! These clothes are what he's

put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me! But--will you go

away, Angel, please, and never come any more?"

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with

a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to

shelter them from reality.

"Ah--it is my fault!" said Clare.

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But

he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear

to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to

recognize the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like a

corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living

will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face

grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment,

and a minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking

along he did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner

of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually

curious turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman,

by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon

Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and

apart from possible lodgers' pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of

Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville, as

she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time and

manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which had been stifled

down as useless save in its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering

the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed

door of her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could

hear fragments of the conversation--if conversation it could be

called--between those two wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend

the stairs to the first floor, and the departure of Clare, and the

closing of the front door behind him. Then the door of the room

above was shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her

apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew

that she would not emerge again for some time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of

the front room--a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately

behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common

manner. This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks's best apartments,

had been taken by the week by the d'Urbervilles. The back room was

now in silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable,

continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a

soul bound to some Ixionian wheel--

"O--O--O!"

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again--

"O--O--O!"

The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the

room inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the

breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a

chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her

posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped

over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of

her night-gown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless

feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded upon the carpet.

It was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair.

Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom--

"What's the matter?"

She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a soliloquy

rather than an exclamation, and a dirge rather than a soliloquy.

Mrs Brooks could only catch a portion:

"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... and I did not

know it! ... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... you

did not stop using it--no--you did not stop! My little sisters and

brothers and my mother's needs--they were the things you moved me

by ... and you said my husband would never come back--never; and you

taunted me, and said what a simpleton I was to expect him! ... And

at last I believed you and gave way! ... And then he came back!

Now he is gone. Gone a second time, and I have lost him now

for ever ... and he will not love me the littlest bit ever any

more--only hate me! ... O yes, I have lost him now--again because

of--you!" In writhing, with her head on the chair, she turned her

face towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it,

and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth upon

them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet tags

to her cheeks. She continued: "And he is dying--he looks as if he

is dying! ... And my sin will kill him and not kill me! ... O, you

have torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in

pity not to make me be again! ... My own true husband will never,

never--O God--I can't bear this!--I cannot!"

There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle;

she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks, thinking that the speaker

was coming to rush out of the door, hastily retreated down the

stairs.

She need not have done so, however, for the door of the sitting-room

was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it unsafe to watch on the

landing again, and entered her own parlour below.

She could hear nothing through the floor, although she listened

intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to finish her interrupted

breakfast. Coming up presently to the front room on the ground floor

she took up some sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she

might take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to

discover what was the matter if possible. Overhead, as she sat, she

could now hear the floorboards slightly creak, as if some one were

walking about, and presently the movement was explained by the rustle

of garments against the banisters, the opening and the closing of

the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the gate on her way

into the street. She was fully dressed now in the walking costume

of a well-to-do young lady in which she had arrived, with the sole

addition that over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.

Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of farewell, temporary

or otherwise, between her tenants at the door above. They might have

quarrelled, or Mr d'Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not

an early riser.

She went into the back room, which was more especially her own

apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady lodger did not

return, nor did the gentleman ring his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on

the delay, and on what probable relation the visitor who had called

so early bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant back

in her chair.

As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they

were arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she

had never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer

when she first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm

of her hand, and then she could perceive that it was red. The oblong

white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the

appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.

Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon the table,

and touched the spot in the ceiling with her fingers. It was damp,

and she fancied that it was a blood stain.

Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and went upstairs,

intending to enter the room overhead, which was the bedchamber at

the back of the drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now

become, she could not bring herself to attempt the handle. She

listened. The dead silence within was broken only by a regular beat.

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door, and ran into

the street. A man she knew, one of the workmen employed at an

adjoining villa, was passing by, and she begged him to come in and go

upstairs with her; she feared something had happened to one of her

lodgers. The workman assented, and followed her to the landing.

She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back for him

to pass in, entering herself behind him. The room was empty; the

breakfast--a substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham--lay

spread upon the table untouched, as when she had taken it up,

excepting that the carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to

go through the folding-doors into the adjoining room.

He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost

instantly with a rigid face. "My good God, the gentleman in bed is

dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife--a lot of blood had run

down upon the floor!"

The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately been so

quiet resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the

rest. The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched

the heart of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as

if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the blow. In a

quarter of an hour the news that a gentleman who was a temporary

visitor to the town had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every

street and villa of the popular watering-place.

LVII

Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along the way by which

he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast,

staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously

till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his

dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him,

and went out.

At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him--a few

words from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his

address, and informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to

and been accepted by Mercy Chant.

Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the station;

reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an

hour and more. He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of

an hour felt that he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and

numbed, he had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a

town which had been the scene of such an experience, and turned to

walk to the first station onward, and let the train pick him up

there.

The highway that he followed was open, and at a little distance

dipped into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge

to edge. He had traversed the greater part of this depression, and

was climbing the western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he

unconsciously looked back. Why he did so he could not say, but

something seemed to impel him to the act. The tape-like surface of

the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he

gazed a moving spot intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.

It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a dim sense that

somebody was trying to overtake him.

The form descending the incline was a woman's, yet so entirely was

his mind blinded to the idea of his wife's following him that even

when she came nearer he did not recognize her under the totally

changed attire in which he now beheld her. It was not till she was

quite close that he could believe her to be Tess.

"I saw you--turn away from the station--just before I got there--and

I have been following you all this way!"

She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle, that he

did not ask her a single question, but seizing her hand, and pulling

it within his arm, he led her along. To avoid meeting any possible

wayfarers he left the high road and took a footpath under some

fir-trees. When they were deep among the moaning boughs he stopped

and looked at her inquiringly.

"Angel," she said, as if waiting for this, "do you know what I have

been running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!"

A pitiful white smile lit her face as she spoke.

"What!" said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she

was in some delirium.

"I have done it--I don't know how," she continued. "Still, I owed it

to you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him

on the mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap

he set for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me.

He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any

more. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it,

don't you? You believe it? You didn't come back to me, and I was

obliged to go back to him. Why did you go away--why did you--when I

loved you so? I can't think why you did it. But I don't blame you;

only, Angel, will you forgive me my sin against you, now I have

killed him? I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to

forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a shining light

that I should get you back that way. I could not bear the loss of

you any longer--you don't know how entirely I was unable to bear your

not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I

have killed him!"

"I do love you, Tess--O, I do--it is all come back!" he said,

tightening his arms round her with fervid pressure. "But how do you

mean--you have killed him?"

"I mean that I have," she murmured in a reverie.

"What, bodily? Is he dead?"

"Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and

called you by a foul name; and then I did it. My heart could not

bear it. He had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed

myself and came away to find you."

By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted,

at least, what she said she had done; and his horror at her impulse

was mixed with amazement at the strength of her affection for

himself, and at the strangeness of its quality, which had apparently

extinguished her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the

gravity of her conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked

at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and

wondered what obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to

this aberration--if it were an aberration. There momentarily flashed

through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder

might have arisen because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do

these things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could

reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad grief of which she

spoke, her mind had lost its balance, and plunged her into this

abyss.

It was very terrible if true; if a temporary hallucination, sad. But,

anyhow, here was this deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond

woman, clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be anything

to her but a protector. He saw that for him to be otherwise was

not, in her mind, within the region of the possible. Tenderness was

absolutely dominant in Clare at last. He kissed her endlessly with

his white lips, and held her hand, and said--

"I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my

power, dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done!"

They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her head every now

and then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome as he had become, it

was plain that she did not discern the least fault in his appearance.

To her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and

mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly

face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on

this day no less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the

face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had

believed in her as pure!

With an instinct as to possibilities, he did not now, as he had

intended, make for the first station beyond the town, but plunged

still farther under the firs, which here abounded for miles. Each

clasping the other round the waist they promenaded over the dry bed

of fir-needles, thrown into a vague intoxicating atmosphere at the

consciousness of being together at last, with no living soul between

them; ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for

several miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her, and

said, timidly--

"Are we going anywhere in particular?"

"I don't know, dearest. Why?"

"I don't know."

"Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is evening find

lodgings somewhere or other--in a lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you

walk well, Tessy?"

"O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm round me!"

Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they

quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure

paths tending more or less northward. But there was an unpractical

vagueness in their movements throughout the day; neither one of them

seemed to consider any question of effectual escape, disguise, or

long concealment. Their every idea was temporary and unforefending,

like the plans of two children.

At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess would have

entered it with him to get something to eat, but he persuaded

her to remain among the trees and bushes of this half-woodland,

half-moorland part of the country till he should come back. Her

clothes were of recent fashion; even the ivory-handled parasol that

she carried was of a shape unknown in the retired spot to which they

had now wandered; and the cut of such articles would have attracted

attention in the settle of a tavern. He soon returned, with food

enough for half-a-dozen people and two bottles of wine--enough to

last them for a day or more, should any emergency arise.

They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their meal. Between

one and two o'clock they packed up the remainder and went on again.

"I feel strong enough to walk any distance," said she.

"I think we may as well steer in a general way towards the interior

of the country, where we can hide for a time, and are less likely to

be looked for than anywhere near the coast," Clare remarked. "Later

on, when they have forgotten us, we can make for some port."

She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him more tightly,

and straight inland they went. Though the season was an English May,

the weather was serenely bright, and during the afternoon it was

quite warm. Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath

had taken them into the depths of the New Forest, and towards

evening, turning the corner of a lane, they perceived behind a brook

and bridge a large board on which was painted in white letters, "This

desirable Mansion to be Let Furnished"; particulars following, with

directions to apply to some London agents. Passing through the gate

they could see the house, an old brick building of regular design and

large accommodation.

"I know it," said Clare. "It is Bramshurst Court. You can see that

it is shut up, and grass is growing on the drive."

"Some of the windows are open," said Tess.

"Just to air the rooms, I suppose."

"All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our heads!"

"You are getting tired, my Tess!" he said. "We'll stop soon." And

kissing her sad mouth, he again led her onwards.

He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a dozen or

fifteen miles, and it became necessary to consider what they should

do for rest. They looked from afar at isolated cottages and little

inns, and were inclined to approach one of the latter, when their

hearts failed them, and they sheered off. At length their gait

dragged, and they stood still.

"Could we sleep under the trees?" she asked.

He thought the season insufficiently advanced.

"I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed," he said.

"Let us go back towards it again."

They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour before they stood

without the entrance-gate as earlier. He then requested her to stay

where she was, whilst he went to see who was within.

She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and Clare crept

towards the house. His absence lasted some considerable time, and

when he returned Tess was wildly anxious, not for herself, but for

him. He had found out from a boy that there was only an old woman in

charge as caretaker, and she only came there on fine days, from the

hamlet near, to open and shut the windows. She would come to shut

them at sunset. "Now, we can get in through one of the lower

windows, and rest there," said he.

Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main front, whose

shuttered windows, like sightless eyeballs, excluded the possibility

of watchers. The door was reached a few steps further, and one of

the windows beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and pulled Tess

in after him.

Except the hall, the rooms were all in darkness, and they ascended

the staircase. Up here also the shutters were tightly closed,

the ventilation being perfunctorily done, for this day at least,

by opening the hall-window in front and an upper window behind.

Clare unlatched the door of a large chamber, felt his way across

it, and parted the shutters to the width of two or three inches.

A shaft of dazzling sunlight glanced into the room, revealing heavy,

old-fashioned furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous

four-post bedstead, along the head of which were carved running

figures, apparently Atalanta's race.

"Rest at last!" said he, setting down his bag and the parcel of

viands.

They remained in great quietness till the caretaker should have come

to shut the windows: as a precaution, putting themselves in total

darkness by barring the shutters as before, lest the woman should

open the door of their chamber for any casual reason. Between six

and seven o'clock she came, but did not approach the wing they

were in. They heard her close the windows, fasten them, lock the

door, and go away. Then Clare again stole a chink of light from

the window, and they shared another meal, till by-and-by they

were enveloped in the shades of night which they had no candle to

disperse.

LVIII

The night was strangely solemn and still. In the small hours she

whispered to him the whole story of how he had walked in his sleep

with her in his arms across the Froom stream, at the imminent risk of

both their lives, and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined

abbey. He had never known of that till now.

"Why didn't you tell me next day?" he said. "It might have prevented

much misunderstanding and woe."

"Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think

outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in

store?"

But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet and foggy, and

Clare, rightly informed that the caretaker only opened the windows

on fine days, ventured to creep out of their chamber and explore the

house, leaving Tess asleep. There was no food on the premises, but

there was water, and he took advantage of the fog to emerge from the

mansion and fetch tea, bread, and butter from a shop in a little

place two miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and spirit-lamp,

that they might get fire without smoke. His re-entry awoke her; and

they breakfasted on what he had brought.

They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day passed, and the

night following, and the next, and next; till, almost without their

being aware, five days had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a

sight or sound of a human being disturbing their peacefulness, such

as it was. The changes of the weather were their only events, the

birds of the New Forest their only company. By tacit consent they

hardly once spoke of any incident of the past subsequent to their

wedding-day. The gloomy intervening time seemed to sink into chaos,

over which the present and prior times closed as if it never had

been. Whenever he suggested that they should leave their shelter,

and go forwards towards Southampton or London, she showed a strange

unwillingness to move.

"Why should we put an end to all that's sweet and lovely!" she

deprecated. "What must come will come." And, looking through the

shutter-chink: "All is trouble outside there; inside here content."

He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union,

error forgiven: outside was the inexorable.

"And--and," she said, pressing her cheek against his, "I fear that

what you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your

present feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead

and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may

never be known to me that you despised me."

"I cannot ever despise you."

"I also hope that. But considering what my life has been, I cannot

see why any man should, sooner or later, be able to help despising

me.... How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I never could bear to

hurt a fly or a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to

make me cry."

They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky cleared,

and the result was that the old caretaker at the cottage awoke early.

The brilliant sunrise made her unusually brisk; she decided to open

the contiguous mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such

a day. Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower

rooms before six o'clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was

about to turn the handle of the one wherein they lay. At that moment

she fancied she could hear the breathing of persons within. Her

slippers and her antiquity had rendered her progress a noiseless one

so far, and she made for instant retreat; then, deeming that her

hearing might have deceived her, she turned anew to the door and

softly tried the handle. The lock was out of order, but a piece of

furniture had been moved forward on the inside, which prevented her

opening the door more than an inch or two. A stream of morning light

through the shutter-chink fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped in

profound slumber, Tess's lips being parted like a half-opened flower

near his cheek. The caretaker was so struck with their innocent

appearance, and with the elegance of Tess's gown hanging across a

chair, her silk stockings beside it, the pretty parasol, and the

other habits in which she had arrived because she had none else, that

her first indignation at the effrontery of tramps and vagabonds gave

way to a momentary sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it

seemed. She closed the door, and withdrew as softly as she had come,

to go and consult with her neighbours on the odd discovery.

Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal when Tess

woke, and then Clare. Both had a sense that something had disturbed

them, though they could not say what; and the uneasy feeling which

it engendered grew stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly

scanned the lawn through the two or three inches of shutter-chink.

"I think we will leave at once," said he. "It is a fine day. And I

cannot help fancying somebody is about the house. At any rate, the

woman will be sure to come to-day."

She passively assented, and putting the room in order, they took up

the few articles that belonged to them, and departed noiselessly.

When they had got into the Forest she turned to take a last look at

the house.

"Ah, happy house--goodbye!" she said. "My life can only be a

question of a few weeks. Why should we not have stayed there?"

"Don't say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this district

altogether. We'll continue our course as we've begun it, and keep

straight north. Nobody will think of looking for us there. We shall

be looked for at the Wessex ports if we are sought at all. When we

are in the north we will get to a port and away."

Having thus persuaded her, the plan was pursued, and they kept a

bee-line northward. Their long repose at the manor-house lent them

walking power now; and towards mid-day they found that they were

approaching the steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in

their way. He decided to rest her in a clump of trees during the

afternoon, and push onward under cover of darkness. At dusk Clare

purchased food as usual, and their night march began, the boundary

between Upper and Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o'clock.

To walk across country without much regard to roads was not new

to Tess, and she showed her old agility in the performance. The

intercepting city, ancient Melchester, they were obliged to pass

through in order to take advantage of the town bridge for crossing a

large river that obstructed them. It was about midnight when they

went along the deserted streets, lighted fitfully by the few lamps,

keeping off the pavement that it might not echo their footsteps.

The graceful pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on their left

hand, but it was lost upon them now. Once out of the town they

followed the turnpike-road, which after a few miles plunged across an

open plain.

Though the sky was dense with cloud, a diffused light from some

fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a little. But the moon

had now sunk, the clouds seemed to settle almost on their heads, and

the night grew as dark as a cave. However, they found their way

along, keeping as much on the turf as possible that their tread might

not resound, which it was easy to do, there being no hedge or fence

of any kind. All around was open loneliness and black solitude, over

which a stiff breeze blew.

They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when

on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in

his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck

themselves against it.

"What monstrous place is this?" said Angel.

"It hums," said she. "Hearken!"

He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming

tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other

sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or

two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to

be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers

onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal

rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a

similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something

made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast

architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered

beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they

seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew

her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said--

"What can it be?"

Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square

and uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The

place was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous

architraves.

"A very Temple of the Winds," he said.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others

were prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway wide enough for a

carriage; and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of

monoliths grouped upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple

advanced further into this pavilion of the night till they stood in

its midst.

"It is Stonehenge!" said Clare.

"The heathen temple, you mean?"

"Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d'Urbervilles! Well,

what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on."

But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong

slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a

pillar. Owing to the action of the sun during the preceding day, the

stone was warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough and chill

grass around, which had damped her skirts and shoes.

"I don't want to go any further, Angel," she said, stretching out her

hand for his. "Can't we bide here?"

"I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day, although it does

not seem so now."

"One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of

it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now

I am at home."

He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his lips upon

hers.

"Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an altar."

"I like very much to be here," she murmured. "It is so solemn and

lonely--after my great happiness--with nothing but the sky above my

face. It seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two;

and I wish there were not--except 'Liza-Lu."

Clare though she might as well rest here till it should get a little

lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon her, and sat down by her

side.

"Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over 'Liza-Lu for

my sake?" she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind

among the pillars.

"I will."

"She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel--I wish you would

marry her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O, if you would!"

"If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law."

"That's nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws continually about

Marlott; and 'Liza-Lu is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing

so beautiful. O, I could share you with her willingly when we are

spirits! If you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her

up for your own self! ... She had all the best of me without the bad

of me; and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if

death had not divided us... Well, I have said it. I won't mention

it again."

She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far north-east sky he

could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform

concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot,

letting in at the earth's edge the coming day, against which the

towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

"Did they sacrifice to God here?" asked she.

"No," said he.

"Who to?"

"I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the

direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it."

"This reminds me, dear," she said. "You remember you never would

interfere with any belief of mine before we were married? But I knew

your mind all the same, and I thought as you thought--not from any

reasons of my own, but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel,

do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know."

He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.

"O, Angel--I fear that means no!" said she, with a suppressed sob.

"And I wanted so to see you again--so much, so much! What--not even

you and I, Angel, who love each other so well?"

Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical

time he did not answer; and they were again silent. In a minute or

two her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed,

and she fell asleep. The band of silver paleness along the east

horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark

and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of

reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day.

The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against

the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the

Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and

the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay

still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the

dip eastward--a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them

from the hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone

onward, but in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure

came straight towards the circle of pillars in which they were.

He heard something behind him, the brush of feet. Turning, he saw

over the prostrate columns another figure; then before he was aware,

another was at hand on the right, under a trilithon, and another on

the left. The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and

Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if

trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story then

was true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon,

loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest

man was upon him.

"It is no use, sir," he said. "There are sixteen of us on the Plain,

and the whole country is reared."

"Let her finish her sleep!" he implored in a whisper of the men as

they gathered round.

When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they

showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars

around. He went to the stone and bent over her, holding one poor

little hand; her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a

lesser creature than a woman. All waited in the growing light, their

faces and hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their

figures dark, the stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a

mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her

unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her.

"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come."

"It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad--yes,

glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I

have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!"

She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men

having moved.

"I am ready," she said quietly.

LIX

The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital

of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the

brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and

freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument

of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping

High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediжval cross, and from

the mediжval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping

was in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.

From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian

knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a

measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road

from the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly,

as if unconscious of the trying ascent--unconscious through

preoccupation and not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this

road through a narrow, barred wicket in a high wall a little lower

down. They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and

of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the quickest means

of doing so. Though they were young, they walked with bowed heads,

which gait of grief the sun's rays smiled on pitilessly.

One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding

creature--half girl, half woman--a spiritualized image of Tess,

slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes--Clare's

sister-in-law, 'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk

to half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand, and never

spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto's

"Two Apostles".

When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the

clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes,

and, walking onward yet a few steps, they reached the first

milestone, standing whitely on the green margin of the grass, and

backed by the down, which here was open to the road. They entered

upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that seemed to overrule their

will, suddenly stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense

beside the stone.

The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley

beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings

showing as in an isometric drawing--among them the broad cathedral

tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave,

the spires of St Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of the College, and,

more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice,

where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.

Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's Hill;

further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost

in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.

Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other

city edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs,

and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole

contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities

of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in

passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up

here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the

wall of this structure. From the middle of the building an ugly

flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and

viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it

seemed the one blot on the city's beauty. Yet it was with this blot,

and not with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes

were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck

something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the

breeze. It was a black flag.

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean

phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights

and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless

gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and

remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued

to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined

hands again, and went on.

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