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                         Tess of the d'Urbervilles

                               A Pure Woman

                           Faithfully Presented
                              By Thomas Hardy



Transcribed by Steve Menyhert (phred sit.sps.mot.com)
Proofread by Meredith Ricker <[e-mail]> and
         and John Hamm <[e-mail]>



Contents

Phase the First:    The Maiden, I-XI

Phase the Second:   Maiden No More, XII-XV

Phase the Third:    The Rally, XVI-XXIV

Phase the Fourth:   The Consequence, XXV-XXXIV

Phase the Fifth:    The Woman Pays, XXXV-XLIV

Phase the Sixth:    The Convert, XLV-LII

Phase the Seventh:  Fulfillment, LIII-LIX





Phase the First: The Maiden



I


On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged
man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of
Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or
Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were
rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which
inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.
He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation
of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything
in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his
arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being
quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in
taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly
parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed
a wandering tune.

"Good night t'ee," said the man with the basket.

"Good night, Sir John," said the parson.

The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted,
and turned round.

"Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day
on this road about this time, and I said "Good night,"
and you made reply 'GOOD NIGHT, SIR JOHN,' as now."

"I did," said the parson.

"And once before that--near a month ago."

"I may have."

"Then what might your meaning be in calling me
'Sir John' these different times, when I be plain Jack
Durbeyfield, the haggler?"

The parson rode a step or two nearer.

"It was only my whim," he said; and, after a moment's
hesitation: "It was on account of a discovery I made
some little time ago, whilst I was hunting up pedigrees
for the new county history.  I am Parson Tringham, the
antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane.  Don't you really know,
Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of
the ancient and knightly family of the d'Urbervilles,
who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d'Urberville,
that renowned knight who came from Normandy with
William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey
Roll?"

"Never heard it before, sir!"

"Well it's true.  Throw up your chin a moment, so that
I may catch the profile of your face better.  Yes,
that's the d'Urberville nose and chin--a little
debased.  Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights
who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in
his conquest of Glamorganshire.  Branches of your
family held manors over all this part of England; their
names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King
Stephen.  In the reign of King John one of them was
rich enough to give a manor to the Knights
Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second's time your
forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend
the great Council there.  You declined a little in
Oliver Cromwell's time, but to no serious extent, and
in Charles the Second's reign you were made Knights of
the Royal Oak for your loyalty.  Aye, there have been
generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood
were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it practically
was in old times, when men were knighted from father to
son, you would be Sir John now."

"Ye don't say so!"

"In short," concluded the parson, decisively smacking
his leg with his switch, "there's hardly such another
family in England."

"Daze my eyes, and isn't there?" said Durbeyfield.
"And here have I been knocking about, year after year,
from pillar to post, as if I was no more than the
commonest feller in the parish....And how long hev this
news about me been knowed, Pa'son Tringham?"

The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware,
it had quite died out of knowledge, and could hardly be
said to be known at all. His own investigations had
begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having
been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the
d'Urberville family, he had observed Durbeyfield's name
on his waggon, and had thereupon been led to make
inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had
no doubt on the subject.

"At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a
useless piece of information," said he.  "However, our
impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
I thought you might perhaps know something of it all the
while."

"Well, I have heard once or twice, 'tis true, that my
family had seen better days afore they came to
Blackmoor.  But I took no notice o't, thinking it to
mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep
only one. I've got a wold silver spoon, and a wold
graven seal at home, too; but, Lord, what's a spoon and
seal? ... And to think that I and these noble
d'Urbervilles were one flesh all the time.  'Twas said
that my gr't-granfer had secrets, and didn't care to
talk of where he came from.... And where do we raise
our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so bold; I mean,
where do we d'Urbervilles live?"

"You don't live anywhere. You are extinct--as a county
family."

"That's bad."

"Yes--what the mendacious family chronicles call
extinct in the male line--that is, gone down--gone
under."

"Then where do we lie?"

"At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in
your vaults, with your effigies under Purbeck-marble
canopies."

"And where be our family mansions and estates?"

"You haven't any."

"Oh?  No lands neither?"

"None; though you once had 'em in abundance, as I said,
for you family consisted of numerous branches. In this
county there was a seat of yours at Kingsbere, and
another at Sherton, and another in Millpond, and
another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge."

"And shall we ever come into our own again?"

"Ah--that I can't tell!"

"And what had I better do about it, sir?" asked
Durbeyfield, after a pause.

"Oh--nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the
thought of 'how are the mighty fallen.'  It is a fact
of some interest to the local historian and
genealogist, nothing more.  There are several families
among the cottagers of this county of almost equal
lustre. Good night."

"But you'll turn back and have a quart of beer wi' me
on the strength o't, Pa'son Tringham?  There's a very
pretty brew in tap at The Pure Drop--though, to be
sure, not so good as at Rolliver's."

"No, thank you--not this evening, Durbeyfield.  You've
had enough already."  Concluding thus the parson rode
on his way, with doubts as to his discretion in
retailing this curious bit of lore.

When he was gone Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a
profound reverie, and then sat down upon the grassy
bank by the roadside, depositing his basket before him.
In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance,
walking in the same direction as that which had been
pursued by Durbeyfield.  The latter, on seeing him,
held up his hand, and the lad quickened his pace and
came near.

"Boy, take up that basket! I want 'ee to go on an
errand for me."

The lath-like stripling frowned. "Who be you, then,
John Durbeyfield, to order me about and call me 'boy?'
You know my name as well as I know yours!"

"Do you, do you?  That's the secret--that's the secret!
Now obey my orders, and take the message I'm going to
charge 'ee wi'.... Well, Fred, I don't mind telling you
that the secret is that I'm one of a noble race--it has
been just found out by me this present afternoon, P.M."
And as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining
from his sitting position, luxuriously stretched
himself out upon the bank among the daisies.

The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his
length from crown to toe.

"Sir John d'Urberville--that's who I am," continued the
prostrate man.  "That is if knights were
baronets--which they be. "Tis recorded in history all
about me.  Dost know of such a place, lad, as
Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?"

"Ees, I've been there to Greenhill Fair."

"Well, under the church of that city there lie--"

"'Tisn't a city, the place I mean; leastwise 'twaddn'
when I was there--'twas a little one-eyed, blinking
sort o'place."

"Never you mind the place, boy, that's not the question
before us. Under the church of that there parish lie my
ancestors--hundreds of 'em--in coats of mail and
jewels, in gr't lead coffins weighing tons and tons.
There's not a man in the county o' South-Wessex that's
got grander and nobler skillentons in his family than
I."

"Oh?"

"Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and
when you've come to The Pure Drop Inn, tell 'em to send
a horse and carriage to me immed'ately, to carry me
hwome.  And in the bottom o' the carriage they be to
put a noggin o' rum in a small bottle, and chalk it up
to my account.  And when you've done that goo on to my
house with the basket, and tell my wife to put away
that washing, because she needn't finish it, and wait
till I come hwome, as I've news to tell her."

As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put
his hand in his pocket, and produced a shilling, one of
the chronically few that he possessed.

"Here's for your labour, lad."

This made a difference in the young man's estimate of
the position.

"Yes, Sir John. Thank 'ee.  Anything else I can do for
'ee, Sir John?"

"Tell 'em at hwome that I should like for
supper,--well, lamb's fry if they can get it; and if
they can't, black-pot; and if they can't get that, well
chitterlings will do."

"Yes, Sir John."

The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes
of a brass band were heard from the direction of the
village.

"What's that?" said Durbeyfield.  "Not on account o' I?"

"'Tis the women's club-walking, Sir John.  Why, your
da'ter is one o' the members."

"To be sure--I'd quite forgot it in my thoughts of
greater things! Well, vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and
order that carriage, and maybe I'll drive round and
inspect the club."

The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the
grass and daisies in the evening sun. Not a soul passed
that way for a long while, and the faint notes of the
band were the only human sounds audible within the rim
of blue hills.



II


The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern
undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or
Blackmoor aforesaid, and engirdled and secluded region,
for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey
from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing
it from the summits of the hills that surround
it--except perhaps during the droughts of summer.  An
unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt
to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous,
and miry ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which
the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,
is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that
embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow,
Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.
The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding
northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs
and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of
these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to
behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country
differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through.  Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes
down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed
character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the
hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.
Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed
upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are
mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their
hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads
overspreading the paler green of the grass.  The
atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with
azure that what artists call the middle distance
partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is
of the deepest ultramarine.  Arable lands are few and
limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor
hills and dales within the major.  Such is the Vale of
Blackmoor.

The district is of historic, no less than of
topographical interest.  The Vale was known in former
times as the Forest of White Hart, from a curious
legend of King Henry III's reign, in which the killing
by a certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white
hart which the king had run down and spared, was made
the occasion of a heavy fine.  In those days, and till
comparatively recent times, the country was densely
wooded.  Even now, traces of its earlier condition are
to be found in the old oak copses and irregular belts
of timber that yet survive upon its slopes, and the
hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its
pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of
their shades remain.  Many, however, linger only in a
metamorphosed or disguised form.  The May-Day dance,
for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon
under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or
"club-walking," as it was there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants
of Marlott, though its real interest was not observed
by the participators in the ceremony.  Its singularity
lay less in the retention of a custom of walking in
procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the
members being solely women.  In men's clubs such
celebrations were, though expiring, less uncommon; but
either the natural shyness of the softer sex, or a
sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives, had
denuded such women's clubs as remained (if any other
did) or this their glory and consummation.  The club of
Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia.
It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as
benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it
walked still.

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns--a gay
survival from Old Style days, when cheerfulness and
May-time were synonyms--days before the habit of
taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous
average.  Their first exhibition of themselves was in a
processional march of two and two round the parish.
Ideal and real clashed slightly as the sun lit up their
figures against the green hedges and creeper-laced
house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white
garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some
approached pure blanching; some had a bluish pallor;
some worn by the older characters (which had possibly
lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a
cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.

In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every
woman and girl carried in her right hand a peeled
willow wand, and in her left a bunch of white flowers.
The peeling of the former, and the selection of the
latter, had been an operation of personal care.

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in
the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces,
scourged by time and trouble, having almost a
grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a
jaunty situation.  In a true view, perhaps, there was
more to be gathered and told of each anxious and
experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh
when she should say, "I have no pleasure in them," than
of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed
over here for those under whose bodices the life
throbbed quick and warm.

The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the
band,and their heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the
sunshine every tone of gold, and black, and brown.
Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose,
others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had
all.  A difficulty of arranging their lips in this
crude exposure to public scrutiny, an inability to
balance their heads, and to dissociate
self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in
them, and showed that they were genuine country girls,
unaccustomed to many eyes.

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the
sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to
bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at
least some remote and distant hope which, though
perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes
will. They they were all cheerful, and many of them
merry.

They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning
out of the high road to pass through a wicket-gate into
the meadows, when one of the women said--

"The Load-a-Lord!  Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there
isn't thy father riding hwome in a carriage!"

A young member of the band turned her head at the
exclamation. She was a fine and handsome girl--not
handsomer than some others, possibly--but her mobile
peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to
colour and shape.  She wore a red ribbon in her hair,
and was the only one of the white company who could
boast of such a pronounced adornment.  As she looked
round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the road in a
chaise belonging to the The Pure Drop, driven by a
frizzle-headed brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves
rolled above her elbows.  This was the cheerful servant
of that establishment, who, in her part of factotum,
turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning
back, and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving
his hand above his head, and singing in a slow
recitative--

"I've-got-a-gr't-family-vault-at-Kingsbere--and
knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!"

The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess--
in whom a slow heat seemed to rise at the sense that her
father was making himself foolish in their eyes.

"He's tired, that's all," she said hastily, "and he has
got a lift home, because our own horse has to rest
today."

"Bless thy simplicity, Tess," said her companions.
"He's got his market-nitch. Haw-haw!"

"Look here; I won't walk another inch with you, if you
say any jokes about him!" Tess cried, and the colour
upon her cheeks spread over her face and neck.  In a
moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped to
the ground.  Perceiving that they had really pained her
they said no more, and order again prevailed.  Tess's
pride would not allow her to turn her head again, to
learn what her father's meaning was, if he had any; and
thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure
where there was to be dancing on the green.  By the
time the spot was reached she has recovered her
equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her wand and
talked as usual.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere
vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.  The
dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the
village school: the characteristic intonation of that
dialect for this district being the voicing
approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as
rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech.
The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was
native had hardly as yet settled into its definite
shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the
middle of her top one upward, when they closed together
after a word.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still.
As she walked along today, for all her bouncing handsome
womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year
in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes;
and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her
mouth now and then.

Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this.  A small
minority, mainly strangers, would look long at her in
casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by
her freshness, and wonder if they would ever see her
again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and
picturesque country girl, and no more.

Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his
triumphal chariot under the conduct of the ostleress,
and the club having entered the allotted space, dancing
began.  As there were no men in the company the girls
danced at first with each other, but when the hour for
the close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants
of the village, together with other idlers and
pedestrians, gathered round the spot, and appeared
inclined to negotiate for a partner.

Among these on-lookers were three young men of a
superior class, carrying small knapsacks strapped to
their shoulders, and stout sticks in their hands.
Their general likeness to each other, and their
consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they
might be, what in fact they were, brothers.  The eldest
wore the white tie, high waistcoat, and thin-brimmed
hat of the regulation curate; the second was the normal
undergraduate; the appearance of the third and youngest
would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him;
there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes
and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found
the entrance to his professional groove.  That he was a
desultory tentative student of something and everything
might only have been predicted of him.

These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they
were spending their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour
through the Vale of Blackmoor, their course being
southwesterly from the town of Shaston on the
north-east.
dh
They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired
as to the meaning of the dance and the white-frocked
maids.  The two elder of the brothers were plainly not
intending to linger more than a moment, but the
spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male
partners seemed to amuse the third, and make him in no
hurry to move on.  He unstrapped his knapsack, put it,
with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the gate.

"What are you going to do, Angel?" asked the eldest.

"I am inclined to go and have a fling with them.  Why
not all of us--just for a minute or two--it will not
detain us long?"

"No--no; nonsense!" said the first.  "Dancing in public
with a troop of country hoydens--suppose we should be
seen!  Come along, or it will be dark before we get to
Stourcastle, and there's no place we can sleep at
nearer than that; besides, we must get through another
chapter of A COUNTERBLAST TO AGNOSTICISM before we turn
in, now I have taken the trouble to bring the book."

"All right--I'll overtake you and Cuthbert in five
minutes; don't stop; I give my word that I will,
Felix."

The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on,
taking their brother's knapsack to relieve him in
following, and the youngest entered the field.

"This is a thousand pities," he said gallantly, to two
or three of the girls nearest him, as soon as there was
a pause in the dance. "Where are your partners, my
dears?"

"They've not left off work yet," answered one of the
boldest. "They'll be here by and by.  Till then, will
you be one, sir?"

"Certainly.  But what's one among so many!"

"Better than none. 'Tis melancholy work facing and
footing it to one of your own sort, and no clipsing and
colling at all.  Now, pick and choose."

"'Ssh--don't be so for'ard!" said a shyer girl.

The young man, thus invited, clanged them over, and
attempted some discrimination; but, as the group were
all so new to him, he could not very well exercise it.
He took almost the first that came to hand, which was
not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen
to be Tess Durbeyfield.  Pedigree, ancestral skeletons,
monumental record, the d'Urberville lineaments, did not
help Tess in her life's battle as yet, even to the
extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the
heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman
blood unaided by Victorian lucre.

The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has
not been handed down; but she was envied by all as the
first who enjoyed the luxury of a masculine partner
that evening.  Yet such was the force of example that
the village young men, who had not hastened to enter
the gate while no intruder was in the way, now dropped
in quickly, and soon the couples became leavened with
rustic youth to a marked extent, till at length the
plainest woman in the club was no longer compelled to
foot it on the masculine side of the figure.

The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said
that he must leave--he had been forgetting himself--
he had to join his companions.  As he fell out of the
dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose own
large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect
of reproach that he had not chosen her.  He, too, was
sorry then that, owing to her backwardness, he had not
observed her; and with that in his mind he left the
pasture.

On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run
down the lane westward, and had soon passed the hollow
and mounted the next rise.  He had not yet overtaken
his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and looked
back. He could see the white figures of the girls in
the green enclosure whirling about as they had whirled
when he was among them.  They seemed to have quite
forgotten him already.

All of them, except, perhaps, one.  This white shape
stood apart by the hedge alone.  From her position he
knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not
danced.  Trifling as the matter was, he yet
instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight.
He wished that he had asked her; he wished that he had
inquired her name.  She was so modest, so expressive,
she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he
felt he had acted stupidly.

However, it could not be helped, and turning, and
bending himself to a rapid walk, he dismissed the
subject from his mind.



III


As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge
the incident from her consideration.  She had no spirit
to dance again for a long time, though she might have
had plenty of partners; but ah! they did not speak so
nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not
till the rays of the sun had absorbed the young
stranger's retreating figure on the hill that she shook
off her temporary sadness and answered her would-be
partner in the affirmative.

She remained with her comrades till dusk, and
participated with a certain zest in the dancing;
though, being heart-whole as yet, she enjoyed treading
a measure purely for its own sake; little divining when
she saw "the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the
pleasing pains, and the agreeable distresses" of those
girls who had been wooed and won, what she herself was
capable of in that kind.  The struggles and wrangles of
the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to
her--no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of
her father's odd appearance and manner returned upon
the girl's mind to make her anxious, and wondering what
had become of him she dropped away from the dancers and
bent her steps towards the end of the village at which
the parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds
than those she had quitted became audible to her;
sounds that she knew well--so well. They were a
regular series of thumpings from the interior of the
house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle
upon a stone floor, to which movement a feminine voice
kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade, the
favourite ditty of "The Spotted Cow"--

   I saw her lie do'--own in yon'--der green gro'--ove;
        Come, love!' and I'll tell' you where!'

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease
simultaneously for a moment, and an explanation at
highest vocal pitch would take the place of the melody.

"God bless thy diment eyes!  And thy waxen cheeks!  And
thy cherry mouth!  And thy Cubit's thighs!  And every
bit o' thy blessed body!"

After this invocation the rocking and the singing would
recommence, and the "Spotted Cow" proceed as before.
So matters stood when Tess opened the door, and paused
upon the mat within it surveying the scene.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the
girl's senses with an unspeakable dreariness. From the
holiday gaieties of the field--the white gowns, the
nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling movements on
the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger--to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled
spectacle, what a step!  Besides the jar of contrast
there came to her a chill self-reproach that she had
not returned sooner, to help her mother in these
domesticities, instead of indulging herself
out-of-doors.

There stood her mother amid the group of children, as
Tess had left her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub,
which had now, as always, lingered on to the end of the
week. Out of that tub had come the day before--Tess
felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse--the very
white frock upon her back which she had so carelessly
greened about the skirt on the damping grass--which had
been wrung up and ironed by her mother's own hands.

As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot
beside the tub, the other being engaged in the
aforesaid business of rocking her youngest child.
The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years,
under the weight of so many children, on that flagstone
floor, that they were worn nearly flat, in consequence
of which a huge jerk accompanied each swing of the cot,
flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver's
shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod
the rocker with all the spring that was left in her
after a long day's seething in the suds.

Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the
candle-flame stretched itself tall, and began jigging
up and down; the water dribbled from the matron's
elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the
verse, Mrs Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the
while.  Even now, when burdened with a young family,
Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune.  No
ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world
but Tess's mother caught up its notation in a week.

There still faintly beamed from the woman's features
something of the freshness, and even the prettiness,
of her youth; rendering it probable that the personal
charms which Tess could boast of were in main part her
mother's gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

"I'll rock the cradle for 'ee, mother," said the
daughter gently. "Or I'll take off my best frock and
help you wring up?  I thought you had finished long
ago."

Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the
housework to her single-handed efforts for so long;
indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her thereon at any time,
feeling but slightly the lack of Tess's assistance
whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of
her labours lay in postponing them.  Tonight, however,
she was even in a blither mood than usual.  There was a
dreaminess, a pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the
maternal look which the girl could not understand.

"Well, I'm glad you've come," her mother said, as soon
as the last note had passed out of her, "I want to go
and fetch your father; but what's more'n that, I want
to tell 'ee what have happened. Y'll be fess enough, my
poppet, when th'st know!"  (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually
spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the
Sixth Standard in the National School under a
London-trained mistress, spoke two languages: the
dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad
and to persons of quality.)

"Since I've been away?" Tess asked.

"Ay!"

"Had it anything to do with father's making such a
mommet of himself in thik carriage this afternoon?
Why did 'er?  I felt inclined to sink into the ground
with shame!"

"That wer all a part of the larry! We've been found to
be the greatest gentlefolk in the whole
county--reaching all back long before Oliver Grumble's
time--to the days of the Pagan Turks--with monuments,
and vaults, and crests, and "scutcheons, and the Lord
knows what all.  In Saint Charles's days we was made
Knights o' the Royal Oak, our real name being
d'Urberville! ... Don't that make your bosom plim?
'Twas on this account that your father rode home in the
vlee; not because he'd been drinking, as people
supposed."

"I'm glad of that.  Will it do us any good, mother?"

"O yes!  'Tis thoughted that great things may come o't.
No doubt a mampus of volk of our own rank will be down
here in their carriages as soon as 'tis known.  Your
father learnt it on his way hwome from Shaston, and he
has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter."

"Where is father now?" asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of
answer: "He called to see the doctor today in Shaston.
It is not consumption at all, it seems.  It is fat
round his heart, 'a says.  There, it is like this."
Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb
and forefinger to the shape of the letter C, and used
the other forefinger as a pointer, "'At the present
moment,' he says to your father, 'your heart is
enclosed all round there, and all round there; this
space is still open,' 'a says. 'As soon as it do meet,
so,'"--Mrs Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle
complete--"'off you will go like a shadder,
Mr Durbeyfield,' 'a says.  'You mid last ten years; you
mid go off in ten months, or ten days.'"

Tess looked alarmed.  Her father possibly to go behind
the eternal cloud so soon, notwithstanding this sudden
greatness!

"But where IS father?" she asked again.

Her mother put on a deprecating look.  "Now don't you
be bursting out angry!  The poor man--he felt so rafted
after his uplifting by the pa'son's news--that he went
up to Rolliver's half an hour ago. He do want to get up
his strength for his journey tomorrow with that load of
beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He'll
have to start shortly after twelve tonight, as the
distance is so long."

"Get up his strength!" said Tess impetuously, the tears
welling to her eyes.  "O my God!  Go to a public-house
to get up his strength! And you as well agreed as he, mother!"

Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room,
and to impart a cowed look to the furniture, and
candle, and children playing about, and to her mother's
face.

"No," said the latter touchily, "I be not agreed.
I have been waiting for 'ee to bide and keep house while
I go fetch him."

"I'll go."

"O no, Tess.  You see, it would be no use."

Tess did not expostulate.  She knew what her mother's
objection meant.  Mrs Durbeyfield's jacket and bonnet
were already hanging slily upon a chair by her side, in
readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason for
which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

"And take the COMPLEAT FORTUNE-TELLER to the outhouse,"
Joan continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning
the garments.

The COMPLEAT FORTUNE-TELLER was an old thick volume,
which lay on a table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing
that the margins had reached the edge of the type.
Tess took it up, and her mother started.

This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn
was one of Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in
the muck and muddle of rearing children.  To discover
him at Rolliver's, to sit there for an hour or two by
his side and dismiss all thought and care of the
children during the interval, made her happy.  A sort
of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then.
Troubles and other realities took on themselves a
meta-physical impalpability, sinking to mere mental
phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood
as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.
The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed
rather bright and desirable appurtenances than
otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not without
humorousness and jollity in their aspect there.  She
felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by
her now wedded husband in the same spot during his
wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects of character,
and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as
lover.

Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went
first to the outhouse with the fortune-telling book,
and stuffed it into the thatch.  A curious fetichistic
fear of this grimy volume on the part of her mother
prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all
night, and hither it was brought back whenever it had
been consulted.  Between the mother, with her
fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore,
dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the
daughter, with her trained National teachings and
Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code,
there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily
understood.  When they were together the Jacobean and
the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the
mother could have wished to ascertain from the book on
this particular day.  She guessed the recent ancestral
discovery to bear upon it, but did not divine that it
solely concerned herself.  Dismissing this, however,
she busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried
during the daytime, in company with her nine-year-old
brother Abraham, and her sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve
and a half, call "'Liza-Lu," the youngest ones being
put to bed.  There was an interval of four years and
more between Tess and the next of the family, the two
who had filled the gap having died in their infancy,
and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude when she
was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to
Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a
boy of three, and then the baby, who had just completed
his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the
Durbeyfield ship--entirely dependent on the judgement
of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasures,
their necessities, their health, even their existence.
If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail
into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease,
degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen
little captives under hatches compelled to sail with
them--six helpless creatures, who had never been asked
if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they
wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved
in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield.  Some
people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and
trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his
authority for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."

It grew later, and neither father nor mother
reappeared.  Tess looked out of the door, and took a
mental journey through Marlott. The village was
shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out
everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher
and the extended hand.

Her mother's fetching simply meant one more to fetch.
Tess began to perceive that a man in indifferent
health, who proposed to start on a journey before one
in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this late
hour celebrating his ancient blood.

"Abraham," she said to her little brother, "do you put
on your hat--you bain't afraid?--and go up to
Rolliver's, and see what has gone wi' father and
mother."

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the
door, and the night swallowed him up.  Half an hour
passed yet again; neither man, woman, nor child
returned.  Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

"I must go myself," she said.

'Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all
in, started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or
street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out
before inches of land had value, and when one-handed
clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.



IV


Rolliver's inn, the single alehouse at this end of the
long and broken village, could only boast of an
off-licence; hence, as nobody could legally drink on
the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for
consumers was strictly limited to a little board about
six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden
palings by pieces of wire, so as to form a ledge.  On
this board thirsty strangers deposited their cups as
they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs
on the dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and
wished they could have a restful seat inside.

Thus the strangers.  But there were also local
customers who felt the same wish; and where there's a
will there's a way.

In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was
thickly curtained with a great woollen shawl lately
discarded by the landlady Mrs Rolliver, were gathered
on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking
beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of
Marlott, and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did
the distance to the The Pure Drop, the fully-licensed
tavern at the further part of the dispersed village,
render its accommodation practically unavailable for
dwellers at this end; but the far more serious
question, the quality of the liquor, confirmed the
prevalent opinion that it was better to drink with
Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the
other landlord in a wide house.

A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room
afforded sitting-space for several persons gathered
round three of its sides; a couple more men had
elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another
rested on the oak-carved "cwoffer"; two on the
wash-stand; another on the stool; and thus all were,
somehow, seated at their ease.  The stage of mental
comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one
wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and
spread their personalities warmly through the room.
In this process the chamber and its furniture grew more
and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl hanging at
the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry;
the brass handles of the chest of drawers were as
golden knockers; and the carved bedposts seemed to have
some kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon's
temple.

Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after
parting from Tess, opened the front door, crossed the
downstairs room, which was in deep gloom, and then
unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers knew
the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the
crooked staircase was a slower process, and her face,
as it rose into the light above the last stair,
encountered the gaze of all the party assembled in the
bedroom.

"----Being a few private friends I've asked in to keep
up club-walking at my own expense," the landlady
exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as glibly as a
child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over
the stairs. "Oh, 'tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield--Lard--how
you frightened me!--I thought it might be some gaffer
sent by Gover'ment."

Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by
the remainder of the conclave, and turned to where her
husband sat.  He was humming absently to himself, in a
low tone: "I be as good as some folks here and there!
I've got a great family vault at Kingsbere-
sub-Greenhill, and finer skillentons than any man in
Wessex!"

"I've something to tell 'ee that's come into my head
about that--a grand projick!" whispered his cheerful
wife.  "Here, John, don't 'ee see me?"  She nudged him,
while he, looking through her as through a window-pane,
went on with his recitative.

"Hush! Don't 'ee sing so loud, my good man," said the
landlady; "in case any member of the Gover'ment should
be passing, and take away my licends."

"He's told 'ee what's happened to us, I suppose?" asked
Mrs Durbeyfield.

"Yes--in a way. D'ye think there's any money hanging by
it?"

"Ah, that's the secret," said Joan Durbeyfield sagely.
"However, 'tis well to be kin to a coach, even if you
don't ride in 'en."  She dropped her public voice, and
continued in a low tone to her husband: "I've been
thinking since you brought the news that there's a
great rich lady out by Trantridge, on the edge o' The
Chase, of the name of d'Urberville."

"Hey--what's that?" said Sir John.

She repeated the information. "That lady must be our
relation," she said. "And my projick is to send Tess to
claim kin."

"There IS a lady of the name, now you mention it," said
Durbeyfield.  "Pa'son Tringham didn't think of that.
But she's nothing beside we--a junior branch of us, no
doubt, hailing long since King Norman's day."

While this question was being discussed neither of the
pair noticed, in their preoccupation, that little
Abraham had crept into the room, and was awaiting an
opportunity of asking them to return.

"She is rich, and she'd be sure to take notice o' the
maid," continued Mrs Durbeyfield; "and 'twill be a very
good thing.  I don't see why two branches o' one family
should not be on visiting terms."

"Yes; and we'll all claim kin!" said Abraham brightly
from under the bedstead.  "And we'll all go and see her
when Tess has gone to live with her; and we'll ride in
her coach and wear black clothes!"

"How do you come here, child?  What nonsense be ye
talking!  Go away, and play on the stairs till father
and mother be ready! ... Well, Tess ought to go to this
other member of our family.  She'd be sure to win the
lady--Tess would; and likely enough 'twould lead to
some noble gentleman marrying her.  In short, I know it."

"How?"

"I tried her fate in the FORTUNE-TELLER, and it brought
out that very thing! ... You should ha' seen how pretty
she looked today; her skin is as sumple as a
duchess's."

"What says the maid herself to going?"

"I've not asked her.  She don't know there is any such
lady-relation yet.  But it would certainly put her in
the way of a grand marriage, and she won't say nay to
going."

"Tess is queer."

"But she's tractable at bottom.  Leave her to me."

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient
of its import reached the understandings of those
around to suggest to them that the Durbeyfields had
weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks
had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had
fine prospects in store.

"Tess is a fine figure o' fun, as I said to myself
today when I zeed her vamping round parish with the
rest," observed one of the elderly boozers in an
undertone.  "But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she
don't get green malt in floor."  It was a local phrase
which had a peculiar meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other
footsteps were heard crossing the room below.

"----Being a few private friends asked in tonight to
keep up club-walking at my own expense."  The landlady
had rapidly re-used the formula she kept on hand for
intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was
Tess.

Even to her mother's gaze the girl's young features
looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours
which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled
middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from
Tess's dark eyes needed to make her father and mother
rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and
descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver's caution
following their footsteps.

"No noise, please, if ye'll be so good, my dears; or I
mid lose my licends, and be summons'd, and I don't know
what all!  'Night t'ye!"

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her
father, and Mrs Durbeyfield the other.  He had, in
truth, drunk very little--not a fourth of the quantity
which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a
Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings of
genuflections; but the weakness of Sir John's
constitution made mountains of his petty sins in this
kind.  On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently
unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as
if they were marching to London, and at another as if
they were marching to Bath--which produced a comical
effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal
homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite
so comic after all.  The two women valiantly disguised
these forced excursions and countermarches as well as
they could from Durbeyfield their cause, and from
Abraham, and from themselves; and so they approached by
degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting
suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if
to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his
present residence--

"I've got a fam--ily vault at Kingsbere!"

"Hush--don't be so silly, Jacky," said his wife.
"Yours is not the only family that was of 'count in
wold days.  Look at the Anktells, and Horseys, and the
Tringhams themselves--gone to seed a'most as much as
you--though you was bigger folks then they, that's
true. Thank God, I was never of no family, and have
nothing to be ashamed of in that way!"

"Don't you be so sure o' that. From you nater 'tis my
belief you've disgraced yourselves more than any o' us,
and was kings and queens outright at one time."

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more
prominent in her own mind at the moment than thoughts
of her ancestry--"I am afraid father won't be able to
take the journey with the beehives tomorrow so early."

"I? I shall be all right in an hour or two," said
Durbeyfield.


It was eleven o'clock before the family were all in
bed, and two o'clock next morning was the latest hour
for starting with the beehives if they were to be
delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before the
Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad
roads over a distance of between twenty and thirty
miles, and the horse and waggon being of the slowest.
At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the large
bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and
sisters slept.

"The poor man can't go," she said to her eldest
daughter, whose great eyes had opened the moment her
mother's hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between
a dream and this information.

"But somebody must go," she replied.  "It is late for
the hives already. Swarming will soon be over for the
year; and it we put off taking 'em till next week's
market the call for 'em will be past, and they'll be
thrown on our hands."

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency.  "Some
young feller, perhaps, would go?  One of them who were
so much after dancing with 'ee yesterday," she
presently suggested.

"O no--I wouldn't have it for the world!" declared Tess
proudly. "And letting everybody know the reason--such a
thing to be ashamed of! I think I could go if Abraham
could go with me to kip me company."

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement.
Little Abraham was aroused from his deep sleep in a
corner of the same apartment, and made to put on his
clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the
twain, lighting a lantern, went out to the stable.
The rickety little waggon was already laden, and the girl
led out the horse Prince, only a degree less rickety
than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the
night, at the lantern, at their two figures, as if he
could not believe that at that hour, when every living
thing was intended to be in shelter and at rest, he was
called upon to go out and labour.  They put a stock of
candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the
off-side of the load, and directed the horse onward,
walking at his shoulder at first during the uphill
parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal of
so little vigour.  To cheer themselves as well as they
could, they made an artificial morning with the
lantern, some bread and butter, and their own
conversation, the real morning being far from come.
Abraham, as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a
sort of trance so far), began to talk of the strange
shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the
sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger
springing from a lair; of that which resembled a
giant's head.

When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle,
dumbly somnolent under its thick brown thatch, they
reached higher ground. Still higher, on their left, the
elevation called Bulbarrow or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the
highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky,
engirdled by its earthen trenches.  From hereabout the
long road was fairly level for some distance onward.
They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham grew
reflective.

"Tess!" he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.

"Yes, Abraham."

"Bain't you glad that we've become gentlefolk?"

"Not particular glad."

"But you be glad that you 'm going to marry a
gentleman?"

"What?" said Tess, lifting her face.

"That our great relation will help 'ee to marry a
gentleman."

"I?  Our great relation?  We have no such relation.
What has put that into your head?"

"I heard 'em talking about it up at Rolliver's when I
went to find father.  There's a rich lady of our family
out at Trantridge, and mother said that if you claimed
kin with the lady, she'd put 'ee in the way of marrying
a gentleman."

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a
pondering silence.  Abraham talked on, rather for the
pleasure of utterance than for audition, so that his
sister's abstraction was of no account.  He leant back
against the hives, and with upturned face made
observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were
beating amid the black hollows above, in serene
dissociation from these two wisps of human life.  He
asked how far away those twinklers were, and whether
God was on the other side of them.  But ever and anon
his childish prattle recurred to what impressed his
imagination even more deeply than the wonders of
creation. If Tess were made rich by marrying a
gentleman, would she have money enough to buy a
spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near
to her as Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated
the whole family, filled Tess with impatience.

"Never mind that now!" she exclaimed.

"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"

"Yes."

"All like ours?"

"I don't know; but I think so.  They sometimes seem to
be like the apples on our stubbard-tree.  Most of them
splendid and sound--a few blighted."

"Which do we live on--a splendid one or a blighted
one?"

"A blighted one."

"'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one,
when there were so many more of 'em!"

"Yes."

"Is it like that REALLY, Tess?" said Abraham, turning
to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare
information.  "How would it have been if we had pitched
on a sound one?"

"Well, father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about
as he does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go on
this journey; and mother wouldn't have been always
washing, and never getting finished."

"And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and
not have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?"

"O Aby, don't--don't talk of that any more!"

Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy.  Tess
was not skilful in the management of a horse, but she
thought that she could take upon herself the entire
conduct of the load for the present, and allow Abraham
to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a
sort of nest in front of the hives, in such a manner
that he could not fall, and, taking the reins into her
own hands, jogged on as before.

Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy
for superfluous movements of any sort.  With no longer
a companion to distract her, Tess fell more deeply into
reverie than ever, her back leaning against the hives.
The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and
hedges became attached to fantastic scenes outside
reality, and the occasional heave of the wind became
the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with
the universe in space, and with history in time.

Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she
seemed to see the vanity of her father's pride; the
gentlemanly suitor awaiting herself in her mother's
fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage, laughing at
her poverty, and her shrouded knightly ancestry.
Everything grew more and more extravagant, and she no
longer knew how time passed. A sudden jerk shook her in
her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into which she,
too, had fallen.

They were a long way further on than when she had lost
consciousness, and the waggon had stopped.  A hollow
groan, unlike anything she had ever heard in her life,
came from the front, followed by a shout of "Hoi
there!"

The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but
another was shining in her face--much brighter than her
own had been. Something terrible had happened.  The
harness was entangled with an object which blocked the way.

In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the
dreadful truth. The groan has proceeded from her
father's poor horse Prince. The morning mail-cart, with
its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes
like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her
slow and unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the
cart had entered the breast of the unhappy Prince like
a sword, and from the wound his life's blood was
spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the
road.

In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand
upon the hole, with the only result that she became
splashed from face to skirt with the crimson drops.
Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood
firm and motionless as long as he could; till he
suddenly sank down in a heap.

By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and
began dragging and unharnessing the hot form of Prince.
But he was already dead, and, seeing that nothing more
could be done immediately, the mail-cart man returned
to his own animal, which was uninjured.

"You was on the wrong side," he said.  "I am bound to
go on with the mail-bags, so that the best thing for
you to do is bide here with your load.  I'll send
somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting
daylight, and you have nothing to fear."

He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and
waited.  The atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook
themselves in the hedges, arose, and twittered; the
lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed
hers, still whiter.  The huge pool of blood in front of
her was already assuming the iridescence of
coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic
hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside still
and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest
looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that
had animated him.

"'Tis all my doing--all mine!" the girl cried, gazing
at the spectacle.  "No excuse for me--none.  What will
mother and father live on now? Aby, Aby!"  She shook
the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster.  "We can't go on with our load--Prince is
killed!"

When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years
were extemporized on his young face.

"Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on
to herself. "To think that I was such a fool!"

"'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound
one, isn't it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his
tears.

In silence they waited through an interval which seemed
endless. At length a sound, and an approaching object,
proved to them that the driver of the mail-car had been
as good as his word. A farmer's man from near
Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was
harnessed to the waggon of beehives in the place of
Prince, and the load taken on towards Casterbridge.

The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach
again the spot of the accident.  Prince had lain there
in the ditch since the morning; but the place of the
blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the road,
though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles.
All that was left of Prince was now hoisted into the
waggon he had formerly hauled, and with his hoofs in
the air, and his shoes shining in the setting sunlight,
he retracted the eight or nine miles to Marlott.

Tess had gone back earlier.  How to break the news was
more than she could think.  It was a relief to her
tongue to find from the faces of her parents that they
already knew of their loss, though this did not lessen
the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon
herself for her negligence.

But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered
the misfortune a less terrifying one to them than it
would have been to a thriving family, though in the
present case it meant ruin, and in the other it would
only have meant inconvenience.  In the Durbeyfield
countenances there was nothing of the red wrath that
would have burnt upon the girl from parents more
ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner
would give only a very few shillings for Prince's
carcase because of his decrepitude, Durbeyfield rose to
the occasion.

"No," said he stoically, "I won't sell his old body.
When we d'Urbervilles was knights in the land, we
didn't sell our chargers for cat's meat.  Let 'em keep
their shillings. He've served me well in his lifetime,
and I won't part from him now."

He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for
Prince in the garden than he had worked for months to
grow a crop for his family. When the hole was ready,
Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the horse
and dragged him up the path towards it, the children
following in funeral train.  Abraham and 'Liza-Lu
sobbed, Hope and Modest discharged their griefs in loud
blares which echoed from the walls; and when Prince was
tumbled in they gathered round the grave.  The
bread-winner had been taken away from them; what would
they do?

"Is he gone to heaven?" asked Abraham, between the
sobs.

Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the
children cried anew.  All except Tess.  Her face was
dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the
light of a murderess.



V


The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the
horse, became disorganized forthwith.  Distress, if not
penury, loomed in the distance.  Durbeyfield was what
was locally called a slack-twisted fellow; he had good
strength to work at times; but the times could not be
relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement;
and, having been unaccustomed to the regular toil of
the day-labourer, he was not particularly persistent
when they did so coincide.

Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents
into this quagmire, was silently wondering what she
could do to help them out of it; and then her mother
broached her scheme.

"We must take the ups wi' the downs, Tess," said she;
"and never could your high blood have been found out at
a more called-for moment.  You must try your friends.
Do ye know that there is a very rich Mrs d'Urberville
living on the outskirts o' The Chase, who must be our
relation?  You must go to her and claim kin, and ask
for some help in our trouble."

"I shouldn't care to do that," says Tess.  "If there is
such a lady, 'twould be enough for us if she were
friendly--not to expect her to give us help."

"You could win her round to do anything, my dear.
Besides, perhaps there's more in it than you know of.
I've heard what I've heard, good-now."

The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess
to be more deferential than she might otherwise have
been to the maternal wish; but she could not understand
why her mother should find such satisfaction in
contemplating an enterprise of, to her, such doubtful
profit. Her mother might have made inquiries, and have
discovered that this Mrs d'Urberville was a lady of
unequalled virtues and charity.  But Tess's pride made
the part of poor relation one of particular distaste to
her.

"I'd rather try to get work," she murmured.

"Durbeyfield, you can settle it," said his wife,
turning to where he sat in the background.  "If you say
she ought to go, she will go."

"I don't like my children going and making themselves
beholden to strange kin," murmured he.  "I'm the head
of the noblest branch o' the family, and I ought to
live up to it."

His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than
her own objections to going.  "Well, as I killed the
horse, mother," she said mournfully, "I suppose I ought
to do something. I don't mind going and seeing her, but
you must leave it to me about asking for help.  And
don't go thinking about her making a match for me--it
is silly." "Very well said, Tess!" observed her father
sententiously.

"Who said I had such a thought?" asked Joan.

"I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I'll go."

Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town
called Shaston, and there took advantage of a van which
twice in the week ran from Shaston eastward to
Chaseborough, passing near Trantridge, the parish in
which the vague and mysterious Mrs d'Urberville had her
residence.

Tess Durbeyfield's route on this memorable morning lay
amid the north-eastern undulations of the Vale in which
she had been born, and in which her life had unfolded.
The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its
inhabitants the races thereof.  From the gates and
stiles of Marlott she had looked down its length in the
wondering days of infancy, and what had been mystery to
her then was not much less than mystery to her now.
She had seen daily from her chamber-window towers,
villages, faint white mansions; above all the town of
Shaston standing majestically on its height; its
windows shining like lamps in the evening sun.  She had
hardly ever visited the place, only a small tract even
of the Vale and its environs being known to her by
close inspection.  Much less had she been far outside
the valley.  Every contour of the surrounding hills was
as personal to her as that of her relatives' faces; but
for what lay beyond her judgment was dependent on the
teaching of the village school, where she had held a
leading place at the time of her leaving, a year or two
before this date.

In those early days she had been much loved by others
of her own sex and age, and had used to be seen about
the village as one of three--all nearly of the same
year--walking home from school side by side; Tess the
middle one--in a pink print pinafore, of a finely
reticulated pattern, worn over a stuff frock that had
lost its original colour for a nondescript
tertiary--marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight
stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the
knees, torn by kneeling in the roads and banks in
search of vegetable and mineral treasures; her then
earth-coloured hair handing like pot-hooks; the arms of
the two outside girls resting round the waist of Tess;
her arms on the shoulders of the two supporters.

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood,
she felt quite a Malthusian towards her mother for
thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and
brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and
provide for them.  Her mother's intelligence was that
of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an
additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own
long family of waiters on Providence.  However, Tess
became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and
to help them as much as possible she used, as soon as
she left school, to lend a hand at haymaking or
harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by preference,
at milking or butter-making processes, which she had
learnt when her father had owned cows; and being
deft-fingered it was a kind of work in which she
excelled.

Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more
of thefamily burdens, and that Tess should be the
representative of the Durbeyfields at the d'Urberville
mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance it
must be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting
their fairest side outward.

She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and
ascended on foot a hill in the direction of the
district known as The Chase, on the borders of which,
as she had been informed, Mrs d'Urberville's seat, The
Slopes, would be found.  It was not a manorial home in
the ordinary sense, with fields, and pastures, and a
grumbling farmer, out of whom the owner had to squeeze
an income for himself and his family by hook or by
crook.  It was more, far more; a country-house built
for enjoyment pure and simple, with not an acre of
troublesome land attached to it beyond what was
required for residential purposes, and for a little
fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a
bailiff.

The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its
eaves in dense evergreens.  Tess thought this was the
mansion itself till, passing through the side wicket
with some trepidation, and onward to a point at which
the drive took a turn, the house proper stood in full
view.  It was of recent erection--indeed almost
new--and of the same rich red colour that formed such a
contrast with the evergreens of the lodge.  Far behind
the corner of the house--which rose like a geranium
bloom against the subdued colours around--stretched
the soft azure landscape of The Chase--a truly
venerable tract of forest land, one of the few
remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval
date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on
aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by
the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were
pollarded for bows.  All this sylvan antiquity,
however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside
the immediate boundaries of the estate.

Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving,
and well kept; acres of glass-houses stretched down the
inclines to the copses at their feet.  Everything
looked like money--like the last coin issued from the
Mint.  The stables, partly screened by Austrian pines
and evergreen oaks, and fitted with every late
appliance, were as dignified as Chapels-of-Ease.  On
the extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent, its door
being towards her.

Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a
half-alarmed attitude, on the edge of the gravel sweep.
Her feet had brought her onward to this point before
she had quite realized where she was; and now all was
contrary to her expectation.

"I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!"
she said, in her artlessness.  She wished that she had
not fallen in so readily with her mother's plans for
"claiming kin," and had endeavoured to gain assistance
nearer home.


The d'Urbervilles--or Stoke-d'Urbervilles, as they at
first called themselves--who owned all this, were a
somewhat unusual family to find in such an
old-fashioned part of the country.  Parson Tringham had
spoken truly when he said that our shambling John
Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative
of the old d'Urbervillefamily existing in the county,
or near it; he might have added, what he knew very
well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more
d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself.
Yet it must be admitted that this family formed a very
good stock whereon to regraft a name which sadly wanted
such renovation.

When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made
his fortune as an honest merchant (some said
money-lender) in the North, he decided to settle as a
county man in the South of England, out of hail of his
business district; and in doing this he felt the
necessity of recommencing with a name that would not
too readily identify him with the smart tradesman of
the past, and that would be less commonplace than the
original bald stark words. Conning for an hour in the
British Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct,
half-extinct, obscured, and ruined families
appertaining to the quarter of England in which he
proposed to settle, he considered that D'URBERVILLE
looked and sounded as well as any of them: and
d'Urberville accordingly was annexed to his own name
for himself and his heirs eternally.  Yet he was not an
extravagant-minded man in this, and in constructing his
family tree on the new basis was duly reasonable in
framing his inter-marriages and aristocratic links,
never inserting a single title above a rank of strict
moderation.

Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents
were naturally in ignorance--much to their
discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of such
annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that,
though to be well-favoured might be the gift of
fortune, a family name came by nature.

Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make
his plunge, hardly knowing whether to retreat or to
persevere, when a figure came forth from the dark
triangular door of the tent.  It was that of a tall
young man, smoking.

He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips,
badly moulded, though red and smooth, above which was a
well-groomed black moustache with curled points, though
his age could not be more than three-or
four-and-twenty.  Despite the touches of barbarism in
his contours, there was a singular force in the
gentleman's face, and in his bold rolling eye.

"Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?" said he,
coming forward. And perceiving that she stood quite
confounded: "Never mind me. I am Mr d'Urberville.
Have you come to see me or my mother?"

This embodiment of a d'Urberville and a namesake
differed even more from what Tess had expected than the
house and grounds had differed.  She had dreamed of an
aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all the
d'Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate
memories representing in hieroglyphic the centuries of
her family's and England's history.  But she screwed
herself up to the work in hand, since she could not get
out of it, and answered--

"I came to see your mother, sir."

"I am afraid you cannot see her--she is an invalid,"
replied thepresent representative of the spurious
house; for this was Mr Alec, the only son of the lately
deceased gentleman.  "Cannot I answer your purpose?
What is the business you wish to see her about?"

"It isn't business--it is--I can hardly say what!"

"Pleasure?"

"Oh no.  Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem---"

Tess's sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand
was now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him,
and her general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips
curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the
swarthy Alexander.

"It is so very foolish," she stammered; "I fear can't
tell you!"

"Never mind; I like foolish things.  Try again, my
dear," said he kindly.

"Mother asked me to come," Tess continued; "and,
indeed, I was in the mind to do so myself likewise.
But I did not think it would be like this.  I came,
sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you."

"Ho!  Poor relations?"

"Yes."

"Stokes?"

"No; d'Urbervilles."

"Ay, ay; I mean d'Urbervilles."

"Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have
several proofs that we are d'Urbervilles.  Antiquarians
hold we are,--and--and we have an old seal, marked with
a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over him.  And
we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like
a little ladle, and marked with the same castle.  But
it is so worn that mother uses it to stir the
pea-soup."

"A castle argent is certainly my crest," said he
blandly.  "And my arms a lion rampant."

"And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown
to you--as we've lost our horse by a bad accident, and
are the oldest branch o' the family."

"Very kind of your mother, I'm sure.  And I, for one,
don't regret her step."  Alec looked at Tess as he
spoke, in a way that made her blush a little.  "And so,
my pretty girl, you've come on a friendly visit to us,
as relations?"

"I suppose I have," faltered Tess, looking
uncomfortable again.

"Well--there's no harm in it.  Where do you live?
What are you?"

She gave him brief particulars; and responding to
further inquiries told him that she was intending to go
back by the same carrier who had brought her.

"It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge
Cross. Supposing we walk round the grounds to pass the
time, my pretty Coz?"

Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible;
but the young man was pressing, and she consented to
accompany him.  He conducted her about the lawns, and
flower-beds, and conservatories; and thence to the
fruit-garden and greenhouses, where he asked her if she
liked strawberries.

"Yes," said Tess, "when they come."

"They are already here."  D'Urberville began gathering
specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to
her as he stooped; and, presently, selecting a
specially fine product of the "British Queen" variety,
he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.

"No--no!" she said quickly, putting her fingers between
his hand and her lips.  "I would rather take it in my
own hand."

"Nonsense!" he insisted; and in a slight distress she
parted her lips and took it in.

They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus,
Tess eating in a half-pleased, half-reluctant state
whatever d'Urberville offered her.  When she could
consume no more of the strawberries he filled her
little basket with them; and then the two passed round
to the rose trees, whence he gathered blossoms and gave
her to put in her bosom.  She obeyed like one in a
dream, and when she could affix no more he himself
tucked a bud or two into her hat, and heaped her basket
with others in the prodigality of his bounty. At last,
looking at his watch, he said, "Now, by the time you
have had something to eat, it will be time for you to
leave, if you want to catch the carrier to Shaston.
Come here, and I'll see what grub I can find."

Stoke d'Urberville took her back to the lawn and into
the tent, where he left her, soon reappearing with a
basket of light luncheon, which he put before her
himself.  It was evidently the gentleman's wish not to
be disturbed in this pleasant TETE-A-TETE by the
servantry.

"Do you mind my smoking?" he asked.

"Oh, not at all, sir."

He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through
the skeins of smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess
Durbeyfield did not divine, as she innocently looked
down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind the
blue narcotic haze was potentially the "tragic
mischief" of her drama--one who stood fair to be the
blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life.  She
had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just
now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's
eyes to rivet themselves upon her.  It was a luxuriance
of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear
more of a woman than she really was.  She had inherited
the feature from her mother without the quality it
denoted.  It had troubled her mind occasionally, till
her companions had said that it was a fault which time
would cure.

She soon had finished her lunch.  "Now I am going home,
sir," she said, rising.

"And what do they call you?" he asked, as he
accompanied her along the drive till they were out of
sight of the house.

"Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott."

"And you say your people have lost their horse?"

"I--killed him!" she answered, her eyes filling with
tears as she gave particulars of Prince's death.  "And
I don't know what to do for father on account of it!"

"I must think if I cannot do something.  My mother must
find a berth for you.  But, Tess, no nonsense about
'd'Urberville';--'Durbeyfield' only, you know--quite
another name."

"I wish for no better, sir," said she with something of
dignity.

For a moment--only for a moment--when they were in the
turning of the drive, between the tall rhododendrons
and conifers, before the lodge became visible, he
inclined his face towards her as if--but, no: he
thought better of it, and let her go.

Thus the thing began.  Had she perceived this meeting's
import she might have asked why she was doomed to be
seen and coveted that day by the wrong man, and not by
some other man, the right and desired one in all
respects--as nearly as humanity can supply the right
and desired; yet to him who amongst her acquaintance
might have approximated to this kind, she was but a
transient impression, half forgotten.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of
things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to
love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.  Nature
does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a
time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply
"Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the
hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.  We
may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human
progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a
finer intuition, a close interaction of the social
machinery than that which now jolts us round and along;
but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even
conceived as possible.  Enough that in the present
case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a
perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect
moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently
about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the
late time came.  Out of which maladroit delay sprang
anxieties,disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and
passing-strange destinies.

When d'Urberville got back to the tent he sat down
astride on a chair reflecting, with a pleased gleam in
his face.  Then he broke into a loud laugh.

"Well, I'm damned!  What a funny thing!  Ha-ha-ha!
And what a crumby girl!"



VI


Tess went down the hill to Trantridge Cross, and
inattentively waited to take her seat in the van
returning from Chaseborough to Shaston.  She did not
know what the other occupants said to her as she
entered, though she answered them; and when they had
started anew she rode along with an inward and not an
outward eye.

One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more
pointedly than any had spoken before: "Why, you be
quite a posy!  And such roses in early June!"

Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to
their surprised vision: roses at her breasts; roses in
her hat; roses and strawberries in her basket to the
brim.  She blushed, and said confusedly that the
flowers had been given to her.  When the passengers
were not looking she stealthily removed the more
prominent blooms from her hat and placed them in
basket, where she covered them with her handkerchief.
Then she fell to reflecting again, and in looking
downwards a thorn of the rose remaining in her breast
accidentally pricked her chin. Like all the cottagers
in Blackmoor Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and
prefigurative superstitions; she thought this an ill
omen--the first she had noticed that day.

The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there
were several miles of pedestrian descent from that
mountain-town into the vale of Marlott.  Her mother had
advised her to stay here for the night, at the house of
a cottage-woman they knew, if she should feel too tired
to come on; and this Tess did, not descending to her
home till the following afternoon.

When she entered the house she perceived in a moment
from her mother's triumphant manner that something had
occurred in the interim.

"Oh yes; I know all about it!  I told 'ee it would be
all right, and now 'tis proved!"

"Since I've been away?  What has?" said Tess rather
wearily.

Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch
approval, and went on banteringly: "So you've brought
'em round!"

"How do you know, mother?"

"I've had a letter."

Tess then remembered that there would have been time
for this.

"They say--Mrs d'Urberville says--that she wants you to
look after a little fowl-farm which is her hobby.  But
this is only her artful way of getting 'ee there
without raising your hopes.  She's going to own 'ee as
kin--that's the meaning o't."

"But I didn't see her."

"You zid somebody, I suppose?"

"I saw her son."

"And did he own 'ee?"

"Well--he called me Coz."

"An' I knew it!  Jacky--he called her Coz!" cried Joan
to her husband.  "Well, he spoke to his mother, of
course, and she do want 'ee there."

"But I don't know that I am apt at tending fowls," said
the dubious Tess.

"Then I don't know who is apt.  You've be'n born in the
business, and brought up in it.  They that be born in a
business always know more about it than any 'prentice.
Besides, that's only just a show of something for you
to do, that you midn't feel beholden."

"I don't altogether think I ought to go," said Tess
thoughtfully. "Who wrote the letter?  Will you let me
look at it?"

"Mrs d'Urberville wrote it.  Here it is."

The letter was in the third person, and briefly
informed Mrs Durbeyfield that her daughter's services
would be useful to that lady in the management of her
poultry-farm, that a comfortable room would be provided
for her if she could come, and that the wages would be
on a liberal scale if they liked her.

"Oh--that's all!" said Tess.

"You couldn't expect her to throw her arms round 'ee,
an' to kiss and to coll 'ee all at once."

Tess looked out of the window.

"I would rather stay here with father and you," she said.

"But why?"

"I'd rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don't
quite know why."

A week afterwards she came in one evening from an
unavailing search for some light occupation in the
immediate neighbourhood.  Her idea had been to get
together sufficient money during the summer to purchase
another horse.  Hardly had she crossed the threshold
before one of the children danced across the room,
saying, "The gentleman's been here!"

Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from
every inch of her person.  Mrs d'Urberville's son had
called on horseback, having been riding by chance in
the direction of Marlott.  He had wished to know,
finally, in the name of his mother, if Tess could
really come to manage the old lady's fowl-farm or not;
the lad who had hitherto superintended the birds having
proved untrustworthy. "Mr d'Urberville says you must be
a good girl if you are at all as you appear; he knows
you must be worth your weight in gold.  He is very much
interested in 'ee--truth to tell."

Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that
she had won such high opinion from a stranger when, in
her own esteem, she had sunk so low.

"It is very good of him to think that," she murmured;
"and if I was quite sure how it would be living there,
I would go any-when."

"He is a mighty handsome man!"

"I don't think so," said Tess coldly.

"Well, there's your chance, whether or no; and I'm sure
he wears a beautiful diamond ring!"

"Yes," said little Abraham, brightly, from the
window-bench; "and I seed it! and it did twinkle when
he put his hand up to his mistarshers.  Mother, why did
our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his
mistarshers?"

"Hark at that child!" cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with
parenthetic admiration.

"Perhaps to show his diamond ring," murmured Sir John,
dreamily, from his chair.

"I'll think it over," said Tess, leaving the room.

"Well, she's made a conquest o' the younger branch of
us, straight off," continued the matron to her husband,
"and she's a fool if she don't follow it up."

"I don't quite like my children going away from home,"
said the haggler.  "As the head of the family, the rest
ought to come to me."

"But do let her go, Jacky," coaxed his poor witless
wife.  "He's struck wi' her--you can see that. He
called her Coz!  He'll marry her, most likely, and make
a lady of her; and then she'll be what her forefathers
was."

John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or
health, and this supposition was pleasant to him.

"Well, perhaps, that's what young Mr d'Urberville
means," he admitted; "and sure enough he mid have
serious thoughts about improving his blood by linking
on to the old line.  Tess, the little rogue!  And have
she really paid 'em a visit to such an end as this?"

Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the
gooseberry-bushes in the garden, and over Prince's
grave.  When she came in her mother pursued her
advantage.

"Well, what be you going to do?" she asked.

"I wish I had seen Mrs d'Urberville," said Tess.

"I think you mid as well settle it. Then you'll see her
soon enough."

Her father coughed in his chair.

"I don't know what to say!" answered the girl
restlessly.  "It is for you to decide.  I killed the
old horse, and I suppose I ought to do something to get
ye a new one.  But--but--I don't quite like Mr
d'Urberville being there!"

The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess
being taken up by their wealthy kinsfolk (which they
imagined the other family to be) as a species of
dolorifuge after the death of the horse, began to cry
at Tess's reluctance, and teased and reproached her for
hesitating.

"Tess won't go--o--o and be made a la--a--dy of!--no,
she says she wo--o--on't!" they wailed, with square
mouths.  "And we shan't have a nice new horse, and lots
o' golden money to buy fairlings!  And Tess won't look
pretty in her best cloze no mo--o--ore!"

Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way
she had of making her labours in the house seem heavier
than they were by prolonging them indefinitely, also
weighed in the argument.  Her father alone preserved an
attitude of neutrality.

"I will go," said Tess at last.

Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the
nuptial Vision conjured up by the girl's consent.

"That's right!  For such a pretty maid as 'tis, this is
a fine chance!"

Tess smiled crossly.

"I hope it is a chance for earning money.  It is no
other kind of chance.  You had better say nothing of
that silly sort about parish." Mrs Durbeyfield did not
promise.  She was not quite sure that she did not feel
proud enough, after the visitor's remarks, to say a
good deal.

Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote,
agreeing to be ready to set out on any day on which she
might be required.  She was duly informed that Mrs
d'Urberville was glad of her decision, and that a
spring-cart should be sent to meet her and her luggage
at the top of the Vale on the day after the morrow,
when she must hold herself prepared to start.  Mrs
d'Urberville's handwriting seemed rather masculine.

"A cart?" murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly.
"It might have been a carriage for her own kin!"

Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless
and abstracted, going about her business with some
self-assurance in the thought of acquiring another
horse for her father by an occupation which would not
be onerous.  She had hoped to be a teacher at the
school, but the fates seemed to decide otherwise. Being
mentally older than her mother she did not regard Mrs
Durbeyfield's matrimonial hopes for her in a serious
aspect for a moment.  The light-minded woman had been
discovering good matches for her daughter almost from
the year of her birth.



VII


On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was
awake before dawn--at the marginal minute of the dark
when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic
bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he
at least knows the correct time of day, the rest
preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is
mistaken. She remained upstairs packing till
breakfast-time, and then came down in her ordinary
week-day clothes, her Sunday apparel being carefully
folded in her box.

Her mother expostulated. "You will never set out to see
your folks without dressing up more the dand than
that?"

"But I am going to work!" said Tess.

"Well, yes," said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private
tone, "at first there mid be a little pretence o't....
But I think it will be wiser of 'ee to put your best
side outward," she added.

"Very well; I suppose you know best," replied Tess with
calm abandonment.

And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in
Joan's hands, saying serenely--"Do what you like with
me, mother."

Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this
tractability.  First she fetched a great basin, and
washed Tess's hair with such thoroughness that when
dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other
times.  She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than
usual. Then she put upon her the white frock that Tess
had worn at the club-walking, the airy fulness of
which, supplementing her enlarged COIFFURE, imparted to
her developing figure an amplitude which belied her
age, and might cause her to be estimated as a woman
when she was not much more than a child.

"I declare there's a hole in my stocking-heel!" said
Tess.

"Never mind holes in your stockings--they don't speak!
When I was a maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the
devil might ha' found me in heels."

Her mother's pride in the girl's appearance led her to
step back, like a painter from his easel, and survey
her work as a whole.

"You must zee yourself!" she cried.  "It is much better
than you was t'other day."

As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a
very small portion of Tess's person at one time, Mrs
Durbeyfield hung a black cloak outside the casement,
and so made a large reflector of the panes, as it is
the wont of bedecking cottagers to do.  After this she
went downstairs to her husband, who was sitting in the
lower room.

"I'll tell 'ee what 'tis, Durbeyfield," said she
exultingly; "he'll never have the heart not to love
her.  But whatever you do, don't zay too much to Tess
of his fancy for her, and this chance she has got. She
is such an odd maid that it mid zet her against him, or
against going there, even now.  If all goes well, I
shall certainly be for making some return to pa'son at
Stagfoot Lane for telling us--dear, good man!"

However, as the moment for the girl's setting out drew
nigh, when the first excitement of the dressing had
passed off, a slight misgiving found place in Joan
Durbeyfield's mind.  It prompted the matron to say that
she would walk a little way--as far as to the point
where the acclivity from the valley began its first
steep ascent to the outer world.  At the top Tess was
going to be met with the spring-cart sent by the
Stoke-d'Urbervilles, and her box had already been
wheeled ahead towards this summit by a lad with trucks,
to be in readiness.

Seeing their mother put on her bonnet the younger
children clamoured to go with her.

"I do want to walk a little-ways wi' Sissy, now she's
going to marry our gentleman-cousin, and wear fine
cloze!"

"Now," said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, "I'll
hear no more o' that!  Mother, how could you ever put
such stuff into their heads?"

"Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and
help get enough money for a new horse," said Mrs
Durbeyfield pacifically.

"Goodbye, father," said Tess, with a lumpy throat.

"Goodbye, my maid," said Sir John, raising his head
from his breast as he suspended his nap, induced by a
slight excess this morning in honour of the occasion.
"Well, I hope my young friend will like such a comely
sample of his own blood.  And tell'n, Tess, that being
sunk, quite, from our former grandeur, I'll sell him
the title--yes, sell it--and at no onreasonable
figure."

"Not for less than a thousand pound!" cried Lady
Durbeyfield.

"Tell'n--I'll take a thousand pound.  Well, I'll take
less, when I come to think o't.  He'll adorn it better
than a poor lammicken feller like myself can.  Tell'n
he shall hae it for a hundred.  But I won't stand upon
trifles--tell'n he shall hae it for fifty--for twenty
pound!  Yes, twenty pound--that's the lowest.  Dammy,
family honour is family honour, and I won't take a
penny less!"

Tess's eyes were too full and her voice too choked to
utter the sentiments that were in her.  She turned
quickly, and went out.


So the girls and their mother all walked together,
a child on each side of Tess, holding her hand, and
looking at her meditatively from time to time, as at
one who was about to do great things; her mother just
behind with the smallest; the group forming a picture
of honest beauty flanked by innocence, and backed by
simple-souled vanity.  They followed the way till they
reached the beginning of the ascent, on the crest of
which the vehicle from Trantridge was to receive her,
this limit having been fixed to save the horse the
labour of the last slope.  Far away behind the first
hills the cliff-like dwellings of Shaston broke the
line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in the elevated
road which skirted the ascent save the lad whom they
had sent on before them, sitting on the handle of the
barrow that contained all Tess's worldly possessions.

"Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no
doubt," said Mrs Durbeyfield.  "Yes, I see it yonder!"

It had come--appearing suddenly from behind the
forehead of the nearest upland, and stopping beside the
boy with the barrow.  Her mother and the children
thereupon decided to go no farther, and bidding them a
hasty goodbye Tess bent her steps up the hill.

They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart,
on which her box was already placed.  But before she
had quite reached it another vehicle shot out from a
clump of trees on the summit, came round the bend of
the road there, passed the luggage-cart, and halted
beside Tess, who looked up as if in great surprise.

Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the
second vehicle was not a humble conveyance like the
first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly
varnished and equipped.  The driver was a young man of
three-or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his
teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of
the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and
brown driving-gloves--in short, he was the handsome,
horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two
before to get her answer about Tess.

Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child.  Then
she looked down, then stared again.  Could she be
deceived as to the meaning of this?

"Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who'll make Sissy a
lady?" asked the youngest child.

Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen
standing still, undecided, beside this turn-out, whose
owner was talking to her. Her seeming indecision was,
in fact, more than indecision: it was misgiving.  She
would have preferred the humble cart.  The young man
dismounted, and appeared to urge her to ascend.  She
turned her face down the hill to her relatives, and
regarded the little group. Something seemed to quicken
her to a determination; possibly the thought that she
had killed Prince.  She suddenly stepped up; he mounted
beside her, and immediately whipped on the horse.  In a
moment they had passed the slow cart with the box, and
disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.

Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the
matter as a drama was at an end, the little ones' eyes
filled with tears. The youngest child said, "I wish
poor, poor Tess wasn't gone away to be a lady!" and,
lowering the corners of his lips, burst out crying.
The new point of view was infectious, and the next
child did likewise, and then the next, till the whole
three of them wailed loud.

There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield's eyes as she
turned to go home.  But by the time she had got back to
the village she was passively trusting to the favour of
accident. However, in bed that night she sighed, and
her husband asked her what was the matter.

"Oh, I don't know exactly," she said.  "I was thinking
that perhaps it would ha' been better if Tess had not
gone."

"Oughtn't ye to have thought of that before?"

"Well, 'tis a chance for the maid ---- Still, if 'twere
the doing again, I wouldn't let her go till I had found
out whether the gentleman is really a good-hearted
young man and choice over her as his kinswoman."

"Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha' done that," snored Sir
John.

Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation
somewhere: "Well, as one of the genuine stock, she
ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump
card aright.  And if he don't marry her afore he will
after.  For that he's all afire wi' love for her any
eye can see."

"What's her trump card?  Her d'Urberville blood, you
mean?"

"No, stupid; her face--as 'twas mine."



VIII


Having mounted beside her, Alec d'Urberville drove
rapidly along the crest of the first hill, chatting
compliments to Tess as they went, the cart with her box
being left far behind.  Rising still, an immense
landscape stretched around them on every side; behind,
the green valley of her birth, before, a gray country
of which she knew nothing except from her first brief
visit to Trantridge.  Thus they reached the verge of an
incline down which the road stretched in a long
straight descent of nearly a mile.

Ever since the accident with her father's horse Tess
Durbeyfield, courageous as she naturally was, had been
exceedingly timid on wheels; the least irregularity of
motion startled her.  She began to get uneasy at a
certain recklessness in her conductor's driving.

"You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?" she said with
attempted unconcern.

D'Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar
with the tips of his large white centre-teeth, and
allowed his lips to smile slowly of themselves.

"Why, Tess," he answered, after another whiff or two,
"it isn't a brave bouncing girl like you who asks that?
Why, I always go down at full gallop.  There's nothing
like it for raising your spirits."

"But perhaps you need not now?"

"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "there are two to be
reckoned with.  It is not me alone.  Tib had to be
considered, and she has a very queer temper."

"Who?"

"Why, this mare.  I fancy she looked round at me in a
very grim way just then.  Didn't you notice it?"

"Don't try to frighten me, sir," said Tess stiffly.

"Well, I don't.  If any living man can manage this
horse I can: I won't say any living man can do it--but
if such has the power, I am he."

"Why do you have such a horse?"

"Ah, well may you ask it!  It was my fate, I suppose.
Tib has killed one chap; and just after I bought her
she nearly killed me. And then, take my word for it,
I nearly killed her.  But she's touchy still, very
touchy; and one's life is hardly safe behind her
sometimes."

They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident
that the horse, whether of her own will or of his (the
latter being the more likely), knew so well the
reckless performance expected of her that she hardly
required a hint from behind.

Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top,
the dog-cart rocking right and left, its axis acquiring
a slightly oblique set in relation to the line of
progress; the figure of the horse rising and falling in
undulations before them.  Sometimes a wheel was off the
ground, it seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone
was sent spinning over the hedge, and flinty sparks
from the horse's hoofs outshone the daylight.  The
aspect of the straight road enlarged with their
advance, the two banks dividing like a splitting stick;
one rushing past at each shoulder.

The wind blew through Tess's white muslin to her very
skin, and her washed hair flew out behind.  She was
determined to show no open fear, but she clutched
d'Urberville's rein-arm.

"Don't touch my arm!  We shall be thrown out if you do!
Hold on round my waist!"

She grasped his waist, and so they reached the bottom.

"Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!" said she,
her face on fire.

"Tess--fie! that's temper!" said d'Urberville.

"'Tis truth."

"Well, you need not let go your hold of me so
thanklessly the moment you feel yourself our of
danger."

She had not considered what she had been doing; whether
he were man or woman, stick or stone, in her
involuntary hold on him. Recovering her reserve she sat
without replying, and thus they reached the summit of
another declivity.

"Now then, again!" said d'Urberville.

"No, no!" said Tess.  "Show more sense, do, please."

"But when people find themselves on one of the highest
points in the county, they must get down again," he
retorted.

He loosened rein, and away they went a second time.
D'Urberville turned his face to her as they rocked, and
said, in playful raillery: "Now then, put your arms
round my waist again, as you did before, my Beauty."

"Never!" said Tess independently, holding on as well as
she could without touching him.

"Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips,
Tess, or even on that warmed cheek, and I'll stop--on
my honour, I will!"

Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still
on her seat, at which he urged the horse anew, and
rocked her the more.

"Will nothing else do?" she cried at length, in
desperation, her large eyes staring at him like those
of a wild animal.  This dressing her up so prettily by
her mother had apparently been to lamentable purpose.

"Nothing, dear Tess," he replied.

"Oh, I don't know--very well; I don't mind!" she panted
miserably.

He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of
imprinting the desired salute, when, as if hardly yet
aware of her own modesty, she dodged aside.  His arms
being occupied with the reins there was left him no
power to prevent her manoeuvre.

"Now, damn it--I'll break both our necks!" swore her
capriciously passionate companion.  "So you can go from
your word like that, you young witch, can you?"

"Very well," said Tess, "I'll not more since you be so
determined! But I--thought you would be kind to me, and
protect me, as my kinsman!"

"Kinsman be hanged!  Now!"

"But I don't want anybody to kiss me, sir!" she
implored, a big tear beginning to roll down her face,
and the corners of her mouth trembling in her attempts
not to cry.  "And I wouldn't ha' come if I had known!"

He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d'Urberville
gave her the kiss of mastery.  No sooner had he done so
than she flushed with shame, took out her handkerchief,
and wiped the spot on her cheek that had been touched
by his lips.  His ardour was nettled at the sight, for
the act on her part had been unconsciously done.

"You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!" said the
young man.

Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed,
she did not quite comprehend the drift, unheeding the
snub she had administered by her instinctive rub upon
her cheek.  She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as far
as such a thing was physically possible.  With a dim
sense that he was vexed she looked steadily ahead as
they trotted on near Melbury Down and Wingreen, till
she saw, to her consternation, that there was yet
another descent to be undergone.

"You shall be made sorry for that!" he resumed, his
injured tone still remaining, as he flourished the whip
anew.  "Unless, that is, you agree willingly to let me
do it again, and no handkerchief."

She sighed. "Very well, sir!" she said.  "Oh--let me
get my hat!"

At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into
the road, their present speed on the upland being by no
means slow. D'Urberville pulled up, and said he would
get it for her, but Tess was down on the other side.

She turned back and picked up the article.

"You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that's
possible," he said, contemplating her over the back of
the vehicle.  "Now then, up again!  What's the matter?"

The hat was in place and tied, but Tess had not stepped
forward.

"No, sir," she said, revealing the red and ivory of her
mouth as her eye lit in defiant triumph; "not again, if
I know it!"

"What--you won't get up beside me?"

"No; I shall walk."

"'Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge."

"I don't care if 'tis dozens.  Besides, the cart is
behind."

"You artful hussy!  Now, tell me--didn't you make that
hat blow off on purpose?  I'll swear you did!"

Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.

Then d'Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called
her everything he could think of for the trick.
Turning the horse suddenly he tried to drive back upon
her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge.
But he could not do this short of injuring her.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such
wicked words!" cried Tess with spirit, from the top of
the hedge into which she had scrambled.  "I don't like
'ee at all!  I hate and detest you! I'll go back to
mother, I will!"

D'Urberville's bad temper cleared up at sight of hers;
and he laughed heartily.

"Well, I like you all the better," he said.  "Come, let
there be peace.  I'll never do it any more against your
will.  My life upon it now!"

Still Tess could not be induced to remount.  She did
not, however, object to his keeping his gig alongside
her; and in this manner, at a slow pace, they advanced
towards the village of Trantridge.  From time to time
d'Urberville exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the
sight of the tramping he had driven her to undertake by
his misdemeanour.  She might in truth have safely
trusted him now; but he had forfeited her confidence
for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing
thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser
to return home.  Her resolve, however, had been taken,
and it seemed vacillating even to childishness to
abandon it now, unless for graver reasons.  How could
she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert
the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family
on such sentimental grounds?

A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared
in view, and in a snug nook to the right the
poultry-farm and cottage of Tess' destination.



IX


The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed
as supervisor, purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend,
made its headquarters in an old thatched cottage
standing in an enclosure that had once been a garden,
but was now a trampled and sanded square.  The house
was overrun with ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the
boughs of the parasite to the aspect of a ruined tower.
The lower rooms were entirely given over to the birds,
who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though
the place had been built by themselves, and not by
certain dusty copyholders who now lay east and west in
the churchyard.  The descendants of these bygone owners
felt it almost as a slight to their family when the
house which had so much of their affection, had cost so
much of their forefathers' money, and had been in their
possession for several generations before the
d'Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently
turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d'Urberville as
soon as the property fell into hand according to law.
"'Twas good enough for Christians in grandfather's
time," they said.

The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their
nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent
chicks.  Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where
formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists.
The chimney-corner and once blazing hearth was now
filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid
their eggs; while out of doors the plots that each
succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his
spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.

The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by
a wall, and could only be entered through a door.

When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next
morning in altering and improving the arrangements,
according to her skilled ideas as the daughter of a
professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened and a
servant in white cap and apron entered.  She had come
from the manor-house.

"Mrs d'Urberville wants the fowls as usual," she said;
but perceiving that Tess did not quite understand, she
explained, "Mis'ess is a old lady, and blind."

"Blind!" said Tess.

Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time
to shape itself she took, under her companion's
direction, two of the most beautiful of the Hamburghs
in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had
likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which,
though ornate and imposing, showed traces everywhere on
this side that some occupant of its chambers could bend
to the love of dumb creatures--feathers floating within
view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.

In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an
armchair with her back to the light, was the owner and
mistress of the estate, a white-haired woman of not
more than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap.
She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight
has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven
after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant
mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind.
Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered
charges--one sitting on each arm.

"Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my
birds?" said Mrs d'Urberville, recognizing a new
footstep.  "I hope you will be kind to them.  My
bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well,
where are they?  Ah, this is Strut!  But he is hardly
so lively today, is he?  He is alarmed at being handled
by a stranger, I suppose.  And Phena too--yes, they are
a little frightened--aren't you, dears?  But they will
soon get used to you."

While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other
maid, in obedience to her gestures, had placed the
fowls severally in her lap, and she had felt them over
from head to tail, examining their beaks, their combs,
the manes of the cocks, their winds, and their claws.
Her touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment,
and to discover if a single feather were crippled or
draggled.  She handled their crops, and knew what they
had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face
enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in
her mind.

The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly
returned to the yard, and the process was repeated till
all the pet cocks and hens had been submitted to the
old woman--Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas,
Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just
then--her perception of each visitor being seldom at
fault as she received the bird upon her knees.

It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs
d'Urberville was the bishop, the fowls the young people
presented, and herself and the maid-servant the parson
and curate of the parish bringing them up.  At the end
of the ceremony Mrs d'Urberville abruptly asked Tess,
wrinkling and twitching her face into undulations,
"Can you whistle?"

"Whistle, Ma'am?"

"Yes, whistled tunes."

Tess could whistle like most other country girls,
though the accomplishment was one which she did not
care to profess in genteel company.  However, she
blandly admitted that such was the fact.

"Then you will have to practise it every day.  I had a
lad who did it very well, but he has left.  I want you
to whistle to my bullfinches; as I cannot see them I
like to hear them, and we teach 'em airs that way.
Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth.  You must
begin tomorrow, or they will go back in their piping.
They have been neglected these several days."

"Mr d'Urberville whistled to 'em this morning, ma'am,"
said Elizabeth.

"He! Pooh!"

The old lady's face creased into furrows of repugnance,
and she made no further reply.

Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman
terminated, and the birds were taken back to their
quarters.  The girl's surprise at Mrs d'Urberville's
manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the
house she had expected no more.  But she was far from
being aware that the old lady had never heard a word of
the so-called kinship.  She gathered that no great
affection flowed between the blind woman and her son.
But in that, too, she was mistaken.  Mrs d'Urberville
was not the first mother compelled to love her
offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.


In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day
before, Tess inclined to the freedom and novelty of her
new position in the morning when the sun shone, now
that she was once installed there; and she was curious
to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of
her, so as to ascertain her chance of retaining her
post. As soon as she was alone within the walled garden
she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously screwed
up her mouth for the long-neglected practice.  She
found her former ability to have generated to the
production of a hollow rush of wind through the lips,
and no clear note at all.

She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering
how she could have so grown out of the art which had
come by nature, till she became aware of a movement
among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall no
less then the cottage.  Looking that way she beheld a
form springing from the coping to the plot.  It was
Alec d'Urberville, whom she had not set eyes on since
he had conducted her the day before to the door of the
gardener's cottage where she had lodgings.

"Upon my honour!" cried he, "there was never before
such a beautiful thing in Nature or Art as you look,
'Cousin' Tess ('Cousin' had a faint ring of mockery).
I have been watching you from over the wall--sitting
like IM-patience on a monument, and pouting up that
pretty red mouth to whistling shape, and whooing and
whooing, and privately swearing, and never being able
to produce a note.  Why, you are quite cross because
you can't do it."

"I may be cross, but I didn't swear."

"Ah!  I understand why you are trying--those bullies!
My mother wants you to carry on their musical
education.  How selfish of her! As if attending to
these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work
for any girl.  I would flatly refuse, if I were you."

"But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be
ready by tomorrow morning."

"Does she?  Well then--I'll give you a lesson or two."

"Oh no, you won't!" said Tess, withdrawing towards the
door.

"Nonsense; I don't want to touch you.  See--I'll stand
on this side of the wire-netting, and you can keep on
the other; so you may feel quite safe.  Now, look here;
you screw up your lips too harshly. There 'tis--so."

He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line
of "Take, O take those lips away."  But the allusion
was lost upon Tess.

"Now try," said d'Urberville.

She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a
sculptural severity.  But he persisted in his demand,
and at last, to get rid of him, she did put up her lips
as directed for producing a clear note; laughing
distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation
that she had laughed.

He encouraged her with "Try again!"

Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time;
and she tried--ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a
real round sound. The momentary pleasure of success got
the better of her; her eyes enlarged, and she
involuntarily smiled in his face.

"That's it!  Now I have started you--you'll go on
beautifully. There--I said I would not come near you;
and, in spite of such temptation as never before fell
to mortal man, I'll keep my word. ... Tess, do you
think my mother a queer old soul?"

"I don't know much of her yet, sir."

"You'll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to
whistle to her bullfinches.  I am rather out of her
books just now, but you will be quite in favour if you
treat her live-stock well. Good morning.  If you meet
with any difficulties and want help here, don't go to
the bailiff, come to me."


It was in the economy of this REGIME that Tess
Durbeyfield had undertaken to fill a place.  Her first
day's experiences were fairly typical of those which
followed through many succeeding days.  A familiarity
with Alec d'Urberville's presence--which that young man
carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by
jestingly calling her his cousin when they were
alone--removed much of her original shyness of him,
without, however, implanting any feeling which could
engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she
was more pliable under his hands than a mere
companionship would have made her, owing to her
unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through
that lady's comparative helplessness, upon him.

She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs
d'Urberville's room was no such onerous business when
she had regained the art, for she had caught from her
musical mother numerous airs that suited those
songsters admirably.  A far more satisfactory time than
when she practised in the garden was this whistling by
the cages each morning.  Unrestrained by the young
man's presence she threw up her mouth, put her lips
near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the
attentive listeners.

Mrs d'Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead
hung with heavy damask curtains, and the bullfinches
occupied the same apartment, where they flitted about
freely at certain hours, and made little white spots on
the furniture and upholstery.  Once while Tess was at
the window where the cages were ranged, giving her
lesson as usual, she thought she heard a rustling
behind the bed.  The old lady was not present, and
turning round the girl had an impression that the toes
of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of the
curtains.  Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed
that the listener, if such there were, must have
discovered her suspicion of his presence.  She searched
the curtains every morning after that, but never found
anybody within them.  Alec d'Urberville had evidently
thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush
of that kind.



X


Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution,
often its own code of morality.  The levity of some of
the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked,
and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who
ruled The Slopes in that vicinity.  The place had also
a more abiding defect; it drank hard.  The staple
conversation on the farms around was on the uselessness
of saving money; and smockfrocked arithmeticians,
leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into
calculations of great nicety to prove that parish
relief was a fuller provision for a man in his old age
than any which could result from savings out of their
wages during a whole lifetime.

The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going
every Saturday night, when work was done, to
Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two or three miles
distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next
morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic
effects of the curious compounds sold to them as beer
by the monopolizers of the once independent inns.

For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly
pilgrimages. But under pressure from matrons not much
older than herself--for a field-man's wages being as
high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage was early
here--Tess at length consented to go.  Her first
experience of the journey afforded her more enjoyment
than she had expected, the hilariousness of the others
being quite contagious after her monotonous attention
to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again and
again.  Being graceful and interesting, standing
moreover on the momentary threshold of womanhood, her
appearance drew down upon her some sly regards from
loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though
sometimes her journey to the town was made
independently, she always searched for her fellows at
nightfall, to have the protection of their
companionship homeward.

This had gone on for a month or two when there came a
Saturday in September, on which a fair and a market
coincided; and the pilgrims from Trantridge sought
double delights at the inns on that account. Tess's
occupations made her late in setting out, so that her
comrades reached the town long before her.  It was a
fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow
lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines, and
the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from
more solid objects, except the innumerable winged
insects that dance in it.  Through this low-lit
mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.

She did not discover the coincidence of the market with
the fair till she had reached the place, by which time
it was close upon dusk.  Her limited marketing was soon
completed; and then as usual she began to look about
for some of the Trantridge cottagers.

At first she could not find them, and she was informed
that most of them had gone to what they called a
private little jig at the house of a hay-trusser and
peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm.  He
lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in
trying to find her course thither her eyes fell upon
Mr d'Urberville standing at a street corner.

"What--my Beauty? You here so late?" he said.

She told him that she was simply waiting for company
homeward.

"I'll see you again," said he over her shoulder as she
went on down the back lane.

Approaching the hay-trussers she could hear the fiddled
notes of a reel proceeding from some building in the
rear; but no sound of dancing was audible--an
exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a
rule the stamping drowned the music.  The front door
being open she could see straight through the house
into the garden at the back as far as the shades of
night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock
she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the
outhouse whence the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from
the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist
of yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be
illuminated smoke.  But on drawing nearer she perceived
that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the
outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the
outline of the doorway into the wide night of the
garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct
forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance,
the silence of their footfalls arising from their being
overshoe in "scroff"--that is to say, the powdery
residuum from the storage of peat and other products,
the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created
the nebulosity that involved the scene.  Through this
floating, fusty DEBRIS of peat and hay, mixed with the
perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming
together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted
fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast
to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out.
They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they
coughed.  Of the rushing couples there could barely be
discerned more than the high lights--the indistinctness
shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs--a multiplicity
of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis
attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.

At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for
air, and the haze no longer veiling their features, the
demigods resolved themselves into the homely
personalities of her own next-door neighbours.
Could Trantridge in two or three short hours have
metamorphosed itself thus madly!

Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and
hay-trusses by the wall; and one of them recognized
her.

"The maids don't think it respectable to dance at The
Flower-de-Luce," he explained.  "They don't like to
let everybody see which be their fancy-men.  Besides,
the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints
begin to get greased.  So we come here and send out for
liquor."

"But when be any of you going home?" asked Tess with
some anxiety.

"Now--a'most directly.  This is all but the last jig."

She waited.  The reel drew to a close, and some of the
party were in the mind of starting.  But others would
not, and another dance was formed.  This surely would
end it, thought Tess.  But it merged in yet another.
She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so
long, it was necessary to wait longer; on account of
the fair the roads were dotted with roving characters
of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful of
measurable dangers, she feared the unknown.  Had she
been near Marlott she would have had less dread.

"Don't ye be nervous, my dear good soul," expostulated,
between his coughs, a young man with a wet face, and
his straw hat so far back upon his head that the brim
encircled it like the nimbus of a saint.  "What's yer
hurry? Tomorrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep
it off in church-time.  Now, have a turn with me?"

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to
dance here. The movement grew more passionate: the
fiddlers behind the luminous pillar of cloud now and
then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of the
bridge or with the back of the bow.  But it did not
matter; the panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination
were to stick to previous ones.  Changing partners
simply meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet
been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by
this time every couple had been suitable matched.  It
was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which
emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but
an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from
spinning where you wanted to spin.

Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple
had fallen, and lay in a mixed heap.  The next couple,
unable to check its progress, came toppling over the
obstacle.  An inner cloud of dust rose around the
prostrate figures amid the general one of the room, in
which a twitching entanglement of arms and legs was
discernible.

"You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you
get home!" burst in female accents from the human
heap--those of the unhappy partner of the man whose
clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to
be his recently married wife, in which assortment there
was nothing unusual at Trantridge as long as any
affection remained between wedded couples; and, indeed,
it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to avoid
making odd lots of the single people between whom there
might be a warm understanding.

A loud laugh from behind Tess's back, in the shade of
the garden, united with the titter within the room.
She looked round, and saw the red coal of a cigar: Alec
d'Urberville was standing there alone.  He beckoned to
her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.

"Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?"

She was so tired after her long day and her walk that
she confided her trouble to him--that she had been
waiting ever since he saw her to have their company
home, because the road at night was strange to her.
"But it seems they will never leave off, and I really
think I will wait no longer."

"Certainly do not.  I have only a saddle-horse here
today; but come to The Flower-de-Luce, and I'll hire a
trap, and drive you home with me."

Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her
original mistrust of him, and, despite their tardiness,
she preferred to walk home with the work-folk.  So she
answered that she was much obliged to him, but would
not trouble him.  "I have said that I will wait for
'em, and they will expect me to now."

"Very well, Miss Independence.  Please yourself....
Then I shall not hurry.... My good Lord, what a kick-up
they are having there!"

He had not put himself forward into the light, but some
of them had perceived him, and his presence led to a
slight pause and a consideration of how the time was
flying.  As soon as he had re-lit a cigar and walked
away the Trantridge people began to collect themselves
from amid those who had come in from other farms, and
prepared to leave in a body.  Their bundles and baskets
were gathered up, and half an hour later, when the
clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were
straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards
their homes.


It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made
whiter tonight by the light of the moon.

Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock,
sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the
fresh night air was producing staggerings and
serpentine courses among then men who had partaken too
freely; some of the more careless women also were
wandering in their gait--to wit, a dark virago, Car
Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite
of d'Urberville's; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the
Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had
already tumbled down.  Yet however terrestrial and
lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured
eye, to themselves the case was different.  They
followed the road with a sensation that they were
soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of
original and profound thoughts, themselves and
surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the
parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each
other.  They were as sublime as the moon and stars
above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as
they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences
of this kind in her father's house, that the discovery
of their condition spoilt the pleasure she was
beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she
stuck to the party, for reasons above given.

In the open highway they had progressed in scattered
order; but now their route was through a field-gate,
and the foremost finding a difficulty in opening it
they closed up together.

This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades,
who carried a wicker-basket containing her mother's
groceries, her own draperies, and other purchases for
the week.  The basket being large and heavy, Car had
placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of
her head, where it rode on in jeopardized balance as
she walked with arms akimbo.

"Well--whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car
Darch?" said one of the group suddenly.

All looked at Car.  Her gown was a light cotton print,
and from the back of her head a kind of rope could be
seen descending to some distance below her waist, like
a Chinaman's queue.

"'Tis her hair falling down," said another.

No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of
something oozing from her basket, and it glistened like
a slimy snake in the cold still rays of the moon.

"'Tis treacle," said an observant matron.

Treacle it was.  Car's poor old grandmother had a
weakness for the sweet stuff.  Honey she had in plenty
out of her own hives, but treacle was what her soul
desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of
surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl
found that the vessel containing the syrup had been
smashed within.

By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at
the extraordinary appearance of Car's back, which
irritated the dark queen into getting rid of the
disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and
independently of the help of the scoffers.  She rushed
excitedly into the field they were about to cross, and
flinging herself flat on her back upon the grass, began
to wipe her gown as well as she could by spinning
horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over
it upon her elbows.

The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to
the posts, rested on their staves, in the weakness
engendered by their convulsions at the spectacle of
Car.  Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at
this wild moment could not help joining in with the
rest.

It was a misfortune--in more ways than one.  No sooner
did the dark queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess
among those of the other work-people than a long
smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to madness.
She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of
her dislike.

"How darest th' laugh at me, hussy!" she cried.

"I couldn't really help it when t'others did,"
apologized Tess, still tittering.

"Ah, th'st think th' beest everybody, dostn't, because
th' beest first favourite with He just now!  But stop a
bit, my lady, stop a bit!  I'm as good as two of such!
Look here--here's at 'ee!"

To Tess's horror the dark queen began stripping off the
bodice of her gown--which for the added reason of its
ridiculed condition she was only too glad to be free
of--till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and
arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as
luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in
their possession of the faultless rotundities of a
lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up
at Tess.

"Indeed, then, I shall not fight!" said the latter
majestically; "and if I had know you was of that sort,
I wouldn't have so let myself down as to come with such
a whorage as this is!"

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent
of vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess's
unlucky head, particularly from the Queen of Diamonds,
who having stood in the relations to d'Urberville that
Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter
against the common enemy.  Several other women also
chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have
been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking
evening they had passed.  Thereupon, finding Tess
unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to
make peace by defending her; but the result of that
attempt was directly to increase the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed.  She no longer minded
the loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour;
her one object was to get away from the whole crew as
soon as possible.  She knew well enough that the better
among them would repent of their passion next day.
They were all now inside the field, and she was edging
back to rush off alone when a horseman emerged almost
silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the
road, and Alec d'Urberville looked round upon them.

"What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?" he
asked.

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in
truth, he did not require any.  Having heard their
voices while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly
forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate.
He bent over towards her.  "Jump up behind me," he
whispered, "and we'll get shot of the screaming cats in
a jiffy!"

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense
of the crisis.  At almost any other moment of her life
she would have refused such proffered aid and company,
as she had refused them several times before; and now
the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to
do otherwise.  But coming as the invitation did at the
particular juncture when fear and indignation at these
adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the
foot into a triumph over them, she abandoned herself to
her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon his
instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him.  The
pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the
time that the contentious revellers became aware of
what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and
stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married,
staggering young woman--all with a gaze of fixity in
the direction in which the horse's tramp was
diminishing into silence on the road.

"What be ye looking at?" asked a man who had not
observed the incident.

"Ho-ho-ho!" laughed dark Car.

"Hee-hee-hee!" laughed the tippling bride, as she
steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.

"Heu-heu-heu!" laughed dark Car's mother, stroking her
moustache as she explained laconically: "Out of the
frying-pan into the fire!"

Then these children of the open air, whom even excess
of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook
themselves to the field-path; and as they went there
moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one's
head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon's
rays upon the glistening sheet of dew.  Each pedestrian
could see no halo but his or her own, which never
deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar
unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and
persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions
seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the
fumes of their breathing a component of the night's
mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the
moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle
with the spirit of wine.



XI


The twain cantered along for some time without speech,
Tess as she clung to him still panting in her triumph,
yet in other respects dubious.  She had perceived that
the horse was not the spirited one he sometimes rose,
and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was
precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She
begged him to slow the animal to a walk which Alec
accordingly did.

"Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?" he said by and
by.

"Yes!" said she.  "I am sure I ought to be much obliged
to you."

"And are you?"

She did not reply.

"Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?"

"I suppose--because I don't love you."

"You are quite sure?"

"I am angry with you sometimes!"

"Ah, I half feared as much."  Nevertheless, Alec did
not object to that confession.  He knew that anything
was better then frigidity. "Why haven't you told me
when I have made you angry?"

"You know very well why.  Because I cannot help myself
here."

"I haven't offended you often by love-making?"

"You have sometimes."

"How many times?"

"You know as well as I--too many times."

"Every time I have tried?"

She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a
considerable distance, till a faint luminous fog, which
had hung in the hollows all the evening, became general
and enveloped them.  It seemed to hold the moonlight in
suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear
air.  Whether on this account, or from
absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness, she did not
perceive that they had long ago passed the point at
which the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway,
and that her conductor had not taken the Trantridge
track.

She was inexpressibly weary.  She had risen at five
o'clock every morning of that week, had been on foot
the whole of each day, and on this evening had in
addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough, waited
three hours for her neighbours without eating or
drinking, her impatience to start them preventing
either; she had then walked a mile of the way home, and
had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till, with
the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one
o'clock.  Only once, however, was she overcome by
actual drowsiness.  In that moment of oblivion her head
sank gently against him.

D'Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from
the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and
enclosed her waist with his arm to support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one
of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was
liable she gave him a little push from her.  In his
ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only
just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse,
though a powerful one, being fortunately the quietest
he rode.

"That is devilish unkind!" he said.  "I mean no
harm--only to keep you from falling."

She pondered suspiciously; till, thinking that this
might after all be true, she relented, and said quite
humbly, "I beg your pardon, sir."

"I won't pardon you unless you show some confidence in
me.  Good God!" he burst out, "what am I, to be
repulsed so by a mere chit like you?  For near three
mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded
me, and snubbed me; and I won't stand it!"

"I"ll leave you tomorrow, sir."

"No, you will not leave me tomorrow!  Will you, I ask
once more, show your belief in me by letting me clasp
you with my arm?  Come, between us two and nobody else,
now.  We know each other well; and you know that I love
you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world,
which you are.  Mayn't I treat you as a lover?"

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing
uneasily on her seat, looked far ahead, and murmured,
"I don't know--I wish--how can I say yes or no when--"

He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as
he desired, and Tess expressed no further negative.
Thus they sidled slowly onward till it struck her they
had been advancing for an unconscionable time--far
longer than was usually occupied by the short journey
from Chaseborough, even at this walking pace, and that
they were no longer on hard road, but in a mere
trackway.

"Why, where be we?" she exclaimed.

"Passing by a wood."

"A wood--what wood?  Surely we are quite out of the
road?"

"A bit of The Chase--the oldest wood in England.  It is
a lovely night, and why should we not prolong our ride
a little?"

"How could you be so treacherous!" said Tess, between
archness and real dismay, and getting rid of his arm by
pulling open his fingers one by one, though at the risk
of slipping off herself.  "Just when I've been putting
such trust in you, and obliging you to please you,
because I thought I had wronged you by that push!
Please set me down, and let me walk home."

"You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were
clear.  We are miles away from Trantridge, if I must
tell you, and in this growing fog you might wander for
hours among these trees."

"Never mind that," she coaxed.  "Put me down, I beg
you. I don't mind where it is; only let me get down,
sir, please!"

"Very well, then, I will--on one condition.  Having
brought you here to this out-of-the-way place, I feel
myself responsible for your safe-conduct home, whatever
you may yourself feel about it.  As to your getting to
Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible;
for, to tell the truth, dear, owing to this fog, which
so disguises everything, I don't quite know where we
are myself. Now, if you will promise to wait beside the
horse while I walk through the bushes till I come to
some road or house, and ascertain exactly our
whereabouts, I'll deposit you here willingly.  When I
come back I'll give you full directions, and if you
insist upon walking you may; or you may ride--at your
pleasure."

She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near
side, though not till he had stolen a cursory kiss.
He sprang down on the other side.

"I suppose I must hold the horse?" said she.

"Oh no; it's not necessary," replied Alec, patting the
panting creature.  "He's had enough of it for tonight."

He turned the horse's head into the bushes, hitched him
on to a bough, and made a sort of couch or nest for her
in the deep mass of dead leaves.

"Now, you sit there," he said.  "The leaves have not
got damp as yet.  Just give an eye to the horse--it
will be quite sufficient."

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning,
said, "By the bye, Tess, your father has a new cob
today.  Somebody gave it to him."

"Somebody?  You!"

D'Urberville nodded.

"O how very good of you that is!" she exclaimed, with a
painful sense of the awkwardness of having to thank him
just then.

"And the children have some toys."

"I didn't know--you ever sent them anything!" she
murmured, much moved.  "I almost wish you had not--yes,
I almost with it!"

"Why, dear?"

"It--hampers me so."

"Tessy--don't you love me ever so little now?"

"I'm grateful," she reluctantly admitted.  "But I fear
I do not---"  The sudden vision of his passion for
herself as a factor in this result so distressed her
that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following
with another, she wept outright.

"Don't cry, dear, dear one!  Now sit down here, and
wait till I come."  She passively sat down amid the
leaves he had heaped, and shivered slightly.  "Are you
cold?" he asked.

"Not very--a little."

He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as
into down. "You have only that puffy muslin dress
on--how's that?"

"It's my best summer one.  'Twas very warm when I
started, and I didn't know I was going to ride, and
that it would be night."

"Nights grow chilly in September.  Let me see."  He
pulled off a light overcoat that he had worn, and put
it round her tenderly. "That's it--now you'll feel
warmer," he continued.  "Now, my pretty, rest there; I
shall soon be back again."

Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he
plunged into the webs of vapour which by this time
formed veils between the trees.  She could hear the
rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining
slope, till his movements were no louder than the
hopping of a bird, and finally died away.  With the
setting of the moon the pale light lessened, and Tess
became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the
leaves where he had left her.

In the meantime Alec d'Urberville had pushed on up the
slope to clear his genuine doubt as to the quarter of
The Chase they were in.  He had, in fact, ridden quite
at random for over an hour, taking any turning that
came to hand in order to prolong companionship with
her, and giving far more attention to Tess's moonlit
person than to any wayside object.  A little rest for
the jaded animal being desirable, he did not hasten his
search for landmarks.  A clamber over the hill into the
adjoining vale brought him to the fence of a highway
whose contours he recognized, which settled the
question of their whereabouts.  D'Urberville thereupon
turned back; but by this time the moon had quite gone
down, and partly on account of the fog The Chase was
wrapped in thick darkness, although morning was not far
off.  He was obliged to advance with outstretched hands
to avoid contact with the boughs, and discovered that
to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at
first entirely beyond him.  Roaming up and down, round
and round, he at length heard a slight movement of the
horse close at hand; and the sleeve of his overcoat
unexpectedly caught his foot.

"Tess!" said d'Urberville.

There was no answer.  The obscurity was now so great
that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale
nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white
muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves.
Everything else was blackness alike.  D'Urberville
stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing.  He
knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face,
and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers.
She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there
lingered tears.

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around.  Above
them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in
which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last
nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and
hares.  But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian
angel? where was the providence of her simple faith?
Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical
Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or
he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be
awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue,
sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as
yet, there should have been traced such a coarse
pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the
coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the
woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of
analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our
sense of order.  One may, indeed, admit the possibility
of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe.
Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's mailed ancestors
rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure
even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their
time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon
the children may be a morality good enough for
divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and
it therefore does not mend the matter.

As Tess's own people down in those retreats are never
tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic
way: "It was to be." There lay the pity of it.  An
immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine's
personality thereafter from that previous self of hers
who stepped from her mother's door to try her fortune
at Trantridge poultry-farm.


END OF PHASE THE FIRST





Phase the Second: Maiden No More



XII


The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she
lugged them along like a person who did not find her
especial burden in material things.  Occasionally she
stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some gate or
post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon
her full round arm, went steadily on again.

It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four
months after Tess Durbeyfield's arrival at Trantridge,
and some few weeks subsequent to the night ride in The
Chase.  The time was not long past daybreak, and the
yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back
lighted the ridge towards which her face was set--the
barrier of the vale wherein she had of late been a
stranger--which she would have to climb over to reach
her birthplace.  The ascent was gradual on this side,
and the soil and scenery differed much from those
within Blackmore Vale.  Even the character and accent
of the two peoples had shades of difference, despite
the amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so
that, though less than twenty miles from the place of
her sojourn at Trantridge, her native village had
seemed a far-away spot.  The field-folk shut in there
traded northward and westward, travelled, courted, and
married northward and westward, thought northward and
westward; those on this side mainly directed their
energies and attention to the east and south.

The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had
driven her so wildly on that day in June.  Tess went up
the remainder of its length without stopping, and on
reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the
familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist.
It was always beautiful from here; it was terribly
beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell
upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where
the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been
totally changed for her by the lesson.  Verily another
girl than the simple one she had been at home was she
who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and turned to
look behind her. She could not bear to look forward
into the Vale.

Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had
just laboured up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside
which walked a man, who held up his hand to attract her
attention.

She obeyed the signal to wait for him with
unspeculative repose, and in a few minutes man and
horse stopped beside her.

"Why did you slip away by stealth like this?" said
d'Urberville, with upbraiding breathlessness; "on a
Sunday morning, too, when people were all in bed!  I
only discovered it by accident, and I have been driving
like the deuce to overtake you.  Just look at the mare.
Why go off like this?  You know that nobody wished to
hinder your going.  And how unnecessary it has been for
you to toil along on foot, and encumber yourself with
this heavy load!  I have followed like a madman, simply
to drive you the rest of the distance, if you won't
come back."

"I shan't come back," said she.

"I thought you wouldn't--I said so!  Well, then, put up
your basket, and let me help you on."

She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the
dog-cart, and stepped up, and they sat side by side.
She had no fear of him now, and in the cause of her
confidence her sorrow lay.

D'Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey
was continued with broken unemotional conversation on
the commonplace objects by the wayside.  He had quite
forgotten his struggle to kiss her when, in the early
summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along
the same road.  But she had not, and she sat now, like
a puppet, replying to his remarks in monosyllables.
After some miles they came in view of the clump of
trees beyond which the village of Marlott stood.
It was only then that her still face showed the least
emotion, a tear or two beginning to trickle down.

"What are you crying for?" he coldly asked.

"I was only thinking that I was born over there,"
murmured Tess.

"Well--we must all be born somewhere."

"I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else!"

"Pooh!  Well, if you didn't wish to come to Trantridge
why did you come?"

She did not reply.

"You didn't come for love of me, that I'll swear."

"'Tis quite true.  If I had gone for love o' you, if I
had ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I
should not so loathe and hate myself for my weakness as
I do now! ... My eyes were dazed by you for a little,
and that was all."

He shrugged his shoulders.  She resumed--

"I didn't understand your meaning till it was too
late."

"That"s what every woman says."

"How can you dare to use such words!" she cried,
turning impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the
latent spirit (of which he was to see more some day)
awoke in her.  "My God!  I could knock you out of the
gig!  Did it never strike your mind that what every
woman says some women may feel?"

"Very well," he said, laughing; "I am sorry to wound
you.  I did wrong--I admit it."  He dropped into some
little bitterness as he continued: "Only you needn't be
so everlastingly flinging it in my face.  I am ready to
pay to the uttermost farthing.  You know you need not
work in the fields or the dairies again.  You know you
may clothe yourself with the best, instead of in the
bald plain way you have lately affected, as if you
couldn't get a ribbon more than you earn."

Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn,
as a rule, in her large and impulsive nature.

"I have said I will not take anything more from you,
and I will not--I cannot!  I SHOULD be your creature to
go on doing that, and I won't!"

"One would think you were a princess from your manner,
in addition to a true and original d'Urberville--ha!
ha!  Well, Tess, dear, I can say no more.  I suppose I
am a bad fellow--a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and
I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all
probability.  But, upon my lost soul, I won't be bad
towards you again, Tess.  And if certain circumstances
should arise--you understand--in which you are in the
least need, the least difficulty, send me one line, and
you shall have by return whatever you require.  I may
not be at Trantridge--I am going to London for a
time--I can't stand the old woman.  But all letters
will be forwarded."

She said that she did not wish him to drive her
further, and they stopped just under the clump of
trees.  D'Urberville alighted, and lifted her down
bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles on
the ground beside her.  She bowed to him slightly, her
eye just lingering in his; and then she turned to take
the parcels for departure.

Alec d'Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her,
and said--

"You are not going to turn away like that, dear!
Come!"

"If you wish," she answered indifferently.  "See how
you've mastered me!"

She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his,
and remained like a marble term while he imprinted a
kiss upon her cheek--half perfunctorily, half as if
zest had not yet quite died out.  Her eyes vaguely
rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the
kiss was given, as though she were nearly unconscious
of what he did.

"Now the other side, for old acquaintance' sake."

She turned her head in the same passive way, as one
might turn at the request of a sketcher or hairdresser,
and he kissed the other side, his lips touching cheeks
that were damp and smoothly chill as the skin of the
mushrooms in the fields around.

"You don't give me your mouth and kiss me back.  You
never willingly do that--you'll never love me, I fear."

"I have said so, often.  It is true.  I have never
really and truly loved you, and I think I never can."
She added mournfully, "Perhaps, of all things, a lie on
this thing would do the most good to me now; but I have
honour enough left, little as 'tis, not to tell that
lie.  If I did love you I may have the best o' causes
for letting you know it. But I don't."

He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were
getting rather oppressive to his heart, or to his
conscience, or to his gentility.

"Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess.  I have no
reason for flattering you now, and I can say plainly
that you need not be so sad.  You can hold your own for
beauty against any woman of these parts, gentle or
simple; I say it to you as a practical man and
well-wisher.  If you are wise you will show it to the
world more than you do before it fades.... And yet,
Tess, will you come back to me!  Upon my soul I don't
like to let you go like this!"

"Never, never!  I made up my mind as soon as I
saw--what I ought to have seen sooner; and I won't
come."

"Then good morning, my four months' cousin--goodbye!"

He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone
between the tall red-berried hedges.

Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the
crooked lane. It was still early, and though the sun's
lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays,
ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the
touch as yet.  There was not a human soul near. Sad
October and her sadder self seemed the only two
existences haunting that lane.

As she walked, however, some footsteps approached
behind her, the footsteps of a man; and owing to the
briskness of his advance he was close at her heels and
had said "Good morning" before she had been long aware
of his propinquity.  He appeared to be an artisan of
some sort, and carried a tin pot of red paint in his
hand. He asked in a business-like manner if he should
take her basket, which she permitted him to do, walking
beside him.

"It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!" he said
cheerfully.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When most people are at rest from their week's work."
She also assented to this.

"Though I do more real work today than all the week
besides."

"Do you?"

"All the week I work for the glory of man, and on
Sunday for the glory of God. That's more real than the
other--hey?  I have a little to do here at this stile."
The man turned as he spoke to an opening at the
roadside leading into a pasture.  "If you'll wait a
moment," he added, "I shall not be long."

As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise;
and she waited, observing him.  He set down her basket
and the tin pot, and stirring the paint with the brush
that was in it began painting large square letters on
the middle board of the three composing the stile,
placing a comma after each word, as if to give pause
while that word was driven well home to the reader's
heart--

   THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
                      2 Pet. ii. 3.

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying
tints of the copses, the blue air of the horizon and
the lichened stileboards, these staring vermilion words
shone forth.  They seemed to shout themselves out and
make the atmosphere ring.  Some people might have cried
"Alas, poor Theology!" at the hideous defacement--the
last grotesque phase of a creed which had served
mankind well in its time.  But the words entered Tess
with accusatory horror.  It was as if this man had
known her recent history; yet he was a total stranger.

Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and
she mechanically resumed her walk beside him.

"Do you believe what you paint?" she asked in low
tones.

"Believe that tex?  Do I believe in my own existence!"

"But," said she tremulously, "suppose your sin was not
of your own seeking?"

He shook his head.

"I cannot split hairs on that burning query," he said.
"I have walked hundreds of miles this past summer,
painting these texes on every wall, gate, and stile the
length and breadth of this district.  I leave their
application to the hearts of the people who read 'em."

"I think they are horrible," said Tess.  "Crushing!
killing!"

"That's what they are meant to be!" he replied in a
trade voice. "But you should read my hottest ones--them
I kips for slums and seaports.  They'd make ye wriggle!
Not but what this is a very good tex for rural
districts. ... Ah--there's a nice bit of blank wall up
by that barn standing to waste.  I must put one
there--one that it will be good for dangerous young
females like yerself to heed.  Will ye wait, missy?"

"No," said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on.
A little way forward she turned her head.  The old gray
wall began to advertise a similar fiery lettering to
the first, with a strange and unwonted mien, as if
distressed at duties it had never before been called
upon to perform.  It was with a sudden flush that she
read and realized what was to be the inscription he was
now halfway through--

   THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT--

Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush,
and shouted--

"If you want to ask for edification on these things of
moment, there's a very earnest good man going to preach
a charity-sermon today in the parish you are going
to--Mr Clare of Emminster.  I'm not of his persuasion
now, but he's a good man, and he'll expound as well as
any parson I know.  'Twas he began the work in me."

But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her
walk, her eyes fixed on the ground.  "Pooh--I don't
believe God said such things!" she murmured
contemptuously when her flush had died away.

A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father's
chimney, the sight of which made her heart ache.  The
aspect of the interior, when she reached it, made her
heart ache more.  Her mother, who had just come down
stairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where
she was kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast
kettle. The young children were still above, as was
also her father, it being Sunday morning, when he felt
justified in lying an additional half-hour.

"Well!--my dear Tess!" exclaimed her surprised mother,
jumping up and kissing the girl. "How be ye?  I didn't
see you till you was in upon me!  Have you come home to
be married?"

"No, I have not come for that, mother."

"Then for a holiday?"

"Yes--for a holiday; for a long holiday," said Tess.

"What, isn't your cousin going to do the handsome
thing?"

"He's not my cousin, and he's not going to marry me."

Her mother eyed her narrowly.

"Come, you have not told me all," she said.

Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon
Joan's neck, and told.

"And yet th'st not got him to marry 'ee!" reiterated
her mother. "Any woman would have done it but you,
after that!"

"Perhaps any woman would except me."

"It would have been something like a story to come back
with, if you had!" continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to
burst into tears of vexation.  "After all the talk
about you and him which has reached us here, who would
have expected it to end like this!  Why didn't ye think
of doing some good for your family instead o' thinking
only of yourself?  See how I've got to teave and slave,
and your poor weak father with his heart clogged like a
dripping-pan.  I did hope for something to come out o'
this!  To see what a pretty pair you and he made that
day when you drove away together four months ago!  See
what he has given us--all, as we thought, because we
were his kin.  But if he's not, it must have been done
because of his love for 'ee.  And yet you've not got
him to marry!"

Get Alec d'Urberville in the mind to marry her!  He
marry HER!  On matrimony he had never once said a word.
And what if he had?  How a convulsive snatching at
social salvation might have impelled her to answer him
she could not say.  But her poor foolish mother little
knew her present feeling towards this man.  Perhaps it
was unusual in the circumstances, unlucky,
unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as she had
said, was what made her detest herself. She had never
wholly cared for him, she did not at all care for him
now.  She had dreaded him, winced before him, succumbed
to adroit advantages he took of her helplessness; then,
temporarily blinded by his ardent manners, had been
stirred to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly
despised and disliked him, and had run away. That was
all.  Hate him she did not quite; but he was dust and
ashes to her, and even for her name's sake she scarcely
wished to marry him.

"You ought to have been more careful if you didn't mean
to get him to make you his wife!"

"O mother, my mother!" cried the agonized girl, turning
passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would
break. "How could I be expected to know?  I was a child
when I left this house four months ago.  Why didn't you
tell me there was danger in men-folk?  Why didn't you
warn me?  Ladies know what to fend hands against,
because they read novels that tell them of these
tricks; but I never had the chance o' learning in that
way, and you did not help me!"

Her mother was subdued.

"I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what
they might lead to, you would be hontish wi' him and
lose your chance," she murmured, wiping her eyes with
her apron.  "Well, we must make the best of it, I
suppose.  'Tis nater, after all, and what do please
God!"



XIII


The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor
of her bogus kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be
not too large a word for a space of a square mile.  In
the afternoon several young girls of Marlott, former
schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see
her, arriving dressed in their best starched and
ironed, as became visitors to a person who had made a
transcendent conquest (as they supposed), and sat round
the room looking at her with great curiosity. For the
fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr
d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a
gentleman not altogether local, whose reputation as a
reckless gallant and heartbreaker was beginning to
spread beyond the immediate boundaries of Trantridge,
lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a
far higher fascination that it would have exercised if
unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones
whispered when her back was turned--

"How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her
off!  I believe it cost an immense deal, and that it
was a gift from him."

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from
the corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries.
If she had heard them, she might soon have set her
friends right on the matter.  But her mother heard, and
Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the hope of a
dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon
the sensation of a dashing flirtation.  Upon the whole
she felt gratified, even though such a limited and
evanescent triumph should involve her daughter's
reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the
warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she
invited her visitors to stay to tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured
innuendoes, above all, their flashes and flickerings of
envy, revived Tess's spirits also; and, as the evening
wore on, she caught the infection of their excitement,
and grew almost gay.  The marble hardness left her
face, she moved with something of her old bounding
step, and flushed in all her young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to
their inquiries with a manner of superiority, as if
recognizing that her experiences in the field of
courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so
far was she from being, in the words of Robert South,
"in love with her own ruin," that the illusion was
transient as lightning; cold reason came back to mock
her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her
momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to
reserved listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it
was no longer Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes;
and the laughing visitors were gone, and she awoke
alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children
breathing softly around her.  In place of the
excitement of her return, and the interest it had
inspired, she saw before her a long and stony highway
which she had to tread, without aid, and with little
sympathy. Her depression was then terrible, and she
could have hidden herself in a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently
to show herself so far as was necessary to get to
church one Sunday morning. She liked to hear the
chanting--such as it was--and the old Psalms, and to
join in the Morning Hymn.  That innate love of melody,
which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother,
gave the simplest music a power over her which could
well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for
reasons of her own, and to escape the gallantries of
the young men, she set out before the chiming began,
and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the
lumber, where only old men and women came, and where
the bier stood on end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited
themselves in rows before her, rested three-quarters of
a minute on their foreheads as if they were praying,
though they were not; then sat up, and looked around.
When the chants came on one of her favourites happened
to be chosen among the rest--the old double chant
"Langdon"--but she did not know what it was called,
though she would much have liked to know. She thought,
without exactly wording the thought, how strange and
godlike was a composer's power, who from the grave
could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone
had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard
of his name, and never would have a clue to his
personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again
as the service proceeded; and at last observing her
they whispered to each other.  She knew what their
whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that
she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children
formed her retreat more continually than ever.  Here,
under her few square yards of thatch, she watched
winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and
successive moons at their full.  So close kept she that
at length almost everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after
dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she
seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a
hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light
and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the
constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize
each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.  It is
then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated
to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of
the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun
mankind--or rather that cold accretion called the
world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so
unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was
of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous
and stealthy figure became an integral part of the
scene.  At times her whimsical fancy would intensify
natural processes around her till they seemed a part of
her own story.  Rather they became a part of it; for
the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what
they seemed they were.  The midnight airs and gusts,
moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of
the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach.
A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her
weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom
she could not class definitely as the God of her
childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization,
based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and
voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken
creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral hobgoblins
by which she was terrified without reason.  It was they
that were out of harmony with the actual world, not
she.  Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges,
watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or
standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon
herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts
of Innocence.  But all the while she was making a
distinction where there was no difference.  Feeling
herself in antagonism she was quite in accord.  She had
been made to break an accepted social law, but no law
know to the environment in which she fancied herself
such an anomaly.



XIV


It was a hazy sunrise in August.  The denser nocturnal
vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and
shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and
coverts, where they waited till they should be dried
away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious
sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine
pronoun for its adequate expression. His present
aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.
One could feel that a saner religion had never
prevailed under the sky.  The luminary was a
golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon
an earth that was brimming with interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of
cottage shutters, throwing stripes like red-hot pokers
upon cupboards, chests of drawers, and other furniture
within; and awakening harvesters who were not already
astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were
two broad arms of painted wood, which rose from the
margin of yellow cornfield hard by Marlott village.
They, with two others below, formed the revolving
Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
brought to the field on the previous evening to be
ready for operations this day.  The paint with which
they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight,
imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid
fire.

The field had already been "opened"; that is to say,
a lane a few feet wide had been hand-cut through the
wheat along the whole circumference of the field for
the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women,
had come down the lane just at the hour when the
shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge
midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying
sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn.  They
disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts
which flanked the nearest field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the
love-making of the grasshopper.  The machine had begun,
and a moving concatenation of three horses and the
aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the
gate, a driver sitting  upon one of the hauling horses,
and an attendant on the seat of the implement.  Along
one side of the field the whole wain went, the arms of
the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it passed
down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came
up on the other side of the field at the same equable
pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the
fore horse first catching the eye as it rose into view
over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the
whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew
wider with each circuit, and the standing corn was
reduced to smaller area as the morning wore on.
Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards
as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of
their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later
in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and
more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together,
friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright
wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper,
and they were every one put to death by the sticks and
stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in
little heaps, each heap being of the quantity for a
sheaf; and upon these the active binders in the rear
laid their hands--mainly women, but some of them men in
print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists
by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons
behind, which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at
every movement of each wearer, as if they were a pair
of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of
this company of binders, by reason of the charm which
is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel
of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down
therein as at ordinary times.  A field-man is a
personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the
field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the
essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself
with it.

The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly
young--wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping
curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent
their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one
wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as
the arms of the reaping-machine; and others, older, in
the brown-rough "wropper" or over-all--the
old-established and most appropriate dress of the
field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning.
This morning the eye returns involuntarily to the girl
in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most flexuous
and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is
pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be
guessed from a stray twine or two of dark brown hair
which extends below the curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps
one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she
never courts it, though the other women often gaze
around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony.  From
the sheaf last finished she draws a handful of ears,
patting their tips with her left palm to bring them
even.  Then stooping low she moves forward, gathering
the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right
on the other side, holding the corn in an embrace like
that of a lover. She brings the ends of the bond
together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it,
beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
breeze.  A bit of her naked arm is visible between the
buff leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her
gown; and as the day wears on its feminine smoothness
becomes scarified by the stubble, and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her
disarranged apron, or to pull her bonnet straight.
Then one can see the oval face of a handsome young
woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging
tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way
anything they fall against.  The cheeks are paler, the
teeth more regular, the red lips thinner than is usual
in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville,
somewhat changed--the same, but not the same; at the
present stage of her existence living as a stranger and
an alien here, though it was no strange land that she
was in.  After a long seclusion she had come to a
resolve to undertake outdoor work in her native
village, the busiest season of the year in the
agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she
could do within the house being so remunerative for the
time as harvesting in the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less
similar to Tess's, the whole bevy of them drawing
together like dancers in a quadrille at the completion
of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end
against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as
it was here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work
proceeded as before.  As the hour of eleven drew near a
person watching her might have noticed that every now
and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully to the brow of
the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.  On
the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children,
of ages ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the
stubbly convexity of the hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did
not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular
shawl, its corners draggling on the stubble, carried in
her arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll, but
proved to be an infant in long clothes.  Another
brought some lunch.  The harvesters ceased working,
took their provisions, and sat down against one of the
shocks.  Here they fell to, the men plying a stone jar
freely, and passing round a cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend
her labours. She sat down at the end of the shock, her
face turned somewhat away from her companions.  When
she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin cap
and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held
the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to
drink. But she did not accept his offer.  As soon as
her lunch was spread she called up the big girl her
sister, and took the baby off her, who, glad to be
relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there.  Tess, with a
curiously stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a
still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began
suckling the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their
faces towards the other end of the field, some of them
beginning to smoke; one, with absent-minded fondness,
regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield
a stream.  All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat
it upright in her lap, and looking into the far
distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was
almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to
violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she
could never leave off, the child crying at the
vehemence of an onset which strangely combined
passionateness with contempt.

"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend
to hate en, and say she wishes the baby and her too
were in the churchyard," observed the woman in the red
petticoat.

"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in
buff. "Lord, 'tis wonderful what a body can get used to
o' that sort in time!"

"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming
o't, I reckon.  There were they that heard a sobbing
one night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha' gone
hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along."

"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a
thousand pities that it should have happened to she, of
all others.  But 'tis always the comeliest!  The plain
ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?"  The speaker
turned to one of the group who certainly was not
ill-defined as plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for
even an enemy to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as
she sat there, with her flower-like mouth and large
tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor grey nor
violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their
irises--shade behind shade--tint beyond tint--around
pupils that had no bottom; an almost standard woman,
but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought
her into the fields this week for the first time during
many months.  After wearing and wasting her palpitating
heart with every engine of regret that lonely
inexperience could devise, commonsense had illuminated
her.  She felt that she would do well to be useful
again--to taste anew sweet independence at any price.
The past was past; whatever it had been it was no more
at hand.  Whatever its consequences, time would close
over them; they would all in a few years be as if they
had never been, and she herself grassed down and
forgotten.  Meanwhile the trees were just as green as
before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now
as ever.  The familiar surroundings had not darkened
because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so
profoundly--the thought of the world's concern at her
situation--was founded on an illusion.  She was not an
existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of
sensations, to anybody but herself.  To all humankind
besides Tess was only a passing thought.  Even to
friends she was no more than a frequently passing
thought.  If she made herself miserable the livelong
night and day it was only this much to them--"Ah, she
makes herself unhappy."  If she tried to be cheerful,
to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight,
the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to
them--"Ah, she bears it very well."  Moreover, alone in
a desert island would she have been wretched at what
had happened to her?  Not greatly. If she could have
been but just created, to discover herself as a
spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as
the parent of a nameless child, would the position have
caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it
calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery
had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not
by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her
to dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done,
and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being
greatly in demand just then.  This was why she had
borne herself with dignity, and had looked people
calmly in the face at times, even when holding the baby
in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and
stretched their limbs, and extinguished their pipes.
The horses, which had been unharnessed and fed, were
again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having
quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her
dress, put on the buff gloves again, and stooped anew
to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the
tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the
morning were continued, Tess staying on till dusk with
the body of harvesters. Then they all rode home in one
of the largest wagons, in the company of a broad
tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf
halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint.  Tess's female
companions sang songs, and showed themselves very
sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors,
though they could not refrain from mischievously
throwing in a few verses of the ballad about the maid
who went to the merry green wood and came back a
changed state.  There are counterpoises and
compensations in life; and the event which had made of
her a social warning had also for the moment made her
the most interesting personage in the village to many.
Their friendliness won her still farther away from
herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she
became almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a
fresh one arose on the natural side of her which knew
no social law.  When she reached home it was to learn
to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill
since the afternoon.  Some such collapse had been
probable, so tender and puny was its frame; but the
event came as a shock nevertheless.

The baby's offence against society in coming into the
world was forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's
desire was to continue that offence by preserving the
life of the child.  However, it soon grew clear that
the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of
the flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst
misgiving had conjectured.  And when she had discovered
this she was plunged into a misery which transcended
that of the child's simple loss.  Her baby had not been
baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted
passively the consideration that if she should have to
burn for what she had done, burn she must, and there
was an end of it.  Like all village girls she was well
grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew
the inferences to be drawn therefrom.  But when the
same question arose with regard to the baby, it had a
very different colour.  Her darling was about to die,
and no salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and
asked if she might send for the parson.  The moment
happened to be one at which her father's sense of the
antique nobility of his family was highest, and his
sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon
that nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned
from his weekly booze at Rolliver's Inn.  No parson
should come inside his door, he declared, prying into
his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had
become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked
the door and put the key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond
measure, Tess retired also.  She was continually waking
as she lay, and in the middle of the night found that
the baby was still worse.  It was obviously
dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less
surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed.  The
clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when
fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant
possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.  She thought of
the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell,
as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of
legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his
three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating
the oven on baking days; to which picture she added
many other quaint and curious details of torment
sometimes taught the young in this Christian country.
The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her
imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the
bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.

The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the
mother's mental tension increased.  It was useless to
devour the little thing with kisses; she could stay in
bed no longer, and walked feverishly about the room.

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor
baby!" she cried.  "Heap as much anger as you want to
upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured
incoherent supplications for a long while, till she
suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved!  Perhaps it will be
just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face
might have shone in the gloom surrounding her.  She lit
a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under
the wall, where she awoke her young sisters and
brothers, all of whom occupied the same room.  Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it,
she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel
around, putting their hands together with fingers
exactly vertical.  While the children, scarcely awake,
awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the
baby from her bed--a child's child--so immature as
scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its
producer with the maternal title.  Tess then stood
erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin, the
next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as
the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus
the girl set about baptizing her child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she
stood in her long white nightgown, a thick cable of
twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her
waist.  The kindly dimness of the weak candle
abstracted from her form and features the little
blemishes which sunlight might have revealed--the
stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of
her eyes--her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring
effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a
touch of dignity which was almost regal.  The little
ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and
red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour
would not allow to become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a
phrase in the book of Genesis came into her head as she
proceeded with the baptismal service, and now she
pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and
the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say 'Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him
with the sign of the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently
drew an immense cross upon the baby with her
forefinger, continuing with the customary sentences as
to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and
the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end.  She duly went on with the Lord's
Prayer, the children lisping it after her in a thin
gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their
voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped into silence,
"Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in
the efficacy of the sacrament, poured forth from the
bottom of her heart the thanksgiving that follows,
uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her
heart was in her speech, and which will never be
forgotten by those who knew her.  The ecstasy of faith
almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing
irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of
each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted
in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond.  The children
gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no
longer had a will for questioning. She did not look
like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering,
and awful--a divine personage with whom they had
nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the
devil was doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily
perhaps for himself, considering his beginnings.  In
the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and
servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have
another pretty baby.  The calmness which had possessed
Tess since the christening remained with her in the
infant's loss.  In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat
exaggerated; whether well founded or not she had no
uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence would not
ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did
not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive
creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who
respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal
Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not
that such things as years and centuries ever were; to
whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's
weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and
the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal,
wondered if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a
Christian burial for the child. Nobody could tell this
but the parson of the parish, and he was a new-comer,
and did not know her.  She went to his house after
dusk, and stood by the gate, but could not summon
courage to go in.  The enterprise would have been
abandoned if she had not by accident met him coming
homeward as she turned away.  In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told
the story of the baby's illness and the extemporized
ordinance.  "And now, sir," she added earnestly, "can
you tell me this--will it be just the same for him as
if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding
that a job he should have been called in for had been
unskilfully botched by his customers among themselves,
he was disposed to say no.  Yet the dignity of the
girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to
affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had
left in him after ten years of endeavour to graft
technical belief on actual scepticism.  The man and the
ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to
the man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked
quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's
illness, he had conscientiously gone to the house after
nightfall to perform the rite, and, unaware that the
refusal to admit him had come from Tess's father and
not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.

"Ah--that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were
concerned.  But I must not--for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!"  She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never
come to your church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't?
... Will it be just the same?  Don't for God's sake
speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me
myself--poor me!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict
notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects
it is beyond a layman's power to tell, though not to
excuse.  Somewhat moved, he said in this case also--

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an
ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night,
and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling
and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner
of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and
where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards,
suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are
laid.  In spite of the untoward surroundings, however,
Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a
piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she
stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when
she could enter the churchyard without being seen,
putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in
a little jar of water to keep them alive.  What matter
was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere
observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"?
The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its
vision of higher things.



XV


"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a
short way by a long wandering."  Not seldom that long
wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use
is our experience to us then?  Tess Durbeyfield's
experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she
had learned what to do; but who would now accept her
doing?

If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had
vigorously moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic
texts and phrases known to her and to the world in
general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.
But it had not been in Tess's power--nor is it in
anybody's power--to feel the whole truth of golden
opinions while it is possible to profit by them.
She--and how many more--might have ironically said to
God with Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a
better course than Thou hast permitted."

She remained at her father's house during the winter
months, plucking fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese,
or making clothes for her sisters and brothers out of
some finery which d'Urberville had given her, and she
had put by with contempt.  Apply to him she would not.
But she would often clasp her hands behind her head and
muse when she was supposed to be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in
the revolution of the year; the disastrous night of her
undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of The
Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth and death;
also her own birthday; and every other day
individualized by incidents in which she had taken some
share.  She suddenly thought one afternoon, when
looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was
yet another date, of greater importance to her than
those; that of her own death, when all these charms
would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen
among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or
sound when she annually passed over it; but not the
less surely there. When was it?  Why did she not feel
the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold
relation?  She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some
time in the future those who had known her would say:
"It is the--th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield
died"; and there would be nothing singular to their
minds in the statement.  Of that day, doomed to be her
terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know
the place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to
complex woman.  Symbols of reflectiveness passed into
her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her
voice.  Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent.  She
became what would have been called a fine creature; her
aspect was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman
whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two
had quite failed to demoralize.  But for the world's
opinion those experiences would have been simply a
liberal education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never
generally known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott.  But
it became evident to her that she could never be really
comfortable again in a place which had seen the
collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"--
and, through her, even closer union--with the rich
d'Urbervilles. At least she could not be comfortable
there till long years should have obliterated her keen
consciousness of it.  Yet even now Tess felt the pulse
of hopeful like still warm within her; she might be
happy in some nook which had no memories.  To escape
the past and all that appertained thereto was to
annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get
away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she
would ask herself.  She might prove it false if she
could veil bygones.  The recuperative power which
pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to
maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for
a new departure.  A particularly fine spring came
round, and the stir of germination was almost audible
in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild
animals, and made her passionate to go.  At last, one
day in early May, a letter reached her from a former
friend of her mother's, to whom she had addressed
inquiries long before--a person whom she had never
seen--that a skilful milkmaid was required at a
dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the
dairyman would be glad to have her for the summer
months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished;
but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement
and repute having been so small.  To persons of limited
spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as
counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms. On one
point she was resolved: there should be no more
d'Urberville air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her
new life.  She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing
more.  Her mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so
well, though no words had passed between them on the
subject, that she never alluded to the knightly
ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the
interests of the new place to her was the accidental
virtues of its lying near her forefathers' country (for
they were not Blakemore men, though her mother was
Blakemore to the bone).  The dairy called Talbothays,
for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some
of the former estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the
great family vaults of her granddames and their
powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them,
and think not only that d'Urberville, like Babylon, had
fallen, but that the individual innocence of a humble
descendant could lapse as silently.  All the while she
wondered if any strange good thing might come of her
being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her
rose  automatically as the sap in the twigs.  It was
unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary
check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible
instinct towards self-delight.


END OF PHASE THE SECOND