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Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays



XXXV


Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and
secondary explanations were done.  Tess's voice
throughout had hardly risen higher than its opening
tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind,
and she had not wept.

But the complexion even of external things seemed to
suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed.
The fire in the grate looked impish--demoniacally
funny, as if it did not care in the least about her
strait.  The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not
care.  The light from the water-bottle was merely
engaged in a chromatic problem.  All material objects
around announced their irresponsibility with terrible
iteration.  And yet nothing had changed since the
moments when he had been kissing her; or rather,
nothing in the substance of things.  But the essence of
things had changed.

When she ceased the auricular impressions from their
previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the
corner of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes
from a time of supremely purblind foolishness.

Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the
fire; the intelligence had not even yet got to the
bottom of him. After stirring the embers he rose to his
feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted
itself now.  His face had withered.  In the
strenuousness of his concentration he treadled fitfully
on the floor.  He could not, by any contrivance, think
closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague
movement.  When he spoke it was in the most inadequate,
commonplace voice of the many varied tones she had
heard from him.

"Tess!"

"Yes, dearest."

"Am I to believe this?  From your manner I am to take
it as true.  O you cannot be out of your mind!  You
ought to be!  Yet you are not. ... My wife, my
Tess--nothing in you warrants such a supposition as
that?"

"I am not out of my mind," she said.

"And yet----"  He looked vacantly at her, to resume
with dazed senses: "Why didn't you tell me before?
Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a way--but I hindered
you, I remember!"

These and other of his words were nothing but the
perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths
remained paralyzed.  He turned away, and bent over a
chair.  Tess followed him to the middle of the room
where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes
that did not weep. Presently she slid down upon her
knees beside his foot, and from this position she
crouched in a heap.

"In the name of our love, forgive me!" she whispered
with a dry mouth.  "I have forgiven you for the same!"

And, as he did not answer, she said again----

"Forgive me as you are forgiven!  I forgive YOU,
Angel."

"You--yes, you do."

"But you do not forgive me?"

"O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case!  You
were one person; now you are another.  My God--how can
forgiveness meet such a grotesque--prestidigitation as
that!"

He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly
broke into horrible laughter--as unnatural and ghastly
as a laugh in hell.

"Don't--don't! It kills me quite, that!" she shrieked.
"O have mercy upon me--have mercy!"

He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.

"Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?" she
cried out.  "Do you know what this is to me?"

He shook his head.

"I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you
happy!  I have thought what joy it will be to do it,
what an unworthy wife I shall be if I do not!  That's
what I have felt, Angel!"

"I know that."

"I thought, Angel, that you loved me--me, my very self!
If it is I you do love, O how can it be that you look
and speak so?  It frightens me! Having begun to love
you, I love you for ever--in all changes, in all
disgraces, because you are yourself.  I ask no more.
Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me?"

"I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you."

"But who?"

"Another woman in your shape."

She perceived in his words the realization of her own
apprehensive foreboding in former times.  He looked
upon her as a species of imposter; a guilty woman in
the guise of an innocent one.  Terror was upon her
white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and
her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.
The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her
that she staggered; and he stepped forward, thinking
she was going to fall.

"Sit down, sit down," he said gently.  "You are ill;
and it is natural that you should be."

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that
strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as
to make his flesh creep.

"I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?"
she asked helplessly.  "It is not me, but another woman
like me that he loved, he says."

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself
as one who was ill-used.  Her eyes filled as she
regarded her position further; she turned round and
burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on
her of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble
to him only less than the woe of the disclosure itself.
He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence
of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of
weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

"Angel," she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the
insane, dry voice of terror having left her now.
"Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to live
together?"

"I have not been able to think what we can do."

"I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel,
because I have no right to!  I shall not write to
mother and sisters to say we be married, as I said I
would do; and I shan't finish the good-hussif' I cut
out and meant to make while we were in lodgings."

"Shan't you?"

"No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and
if you go away from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if
you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why,
unless you tell me I may."

"And if I order you to do anything?"

"I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it
is to lie down and die."

"You are very good.  But it strikes me that there is a
want of harmony between your present mood of
self-sacrifice and your past mood of
self-preservation."

These were the first words of antagonism.  To fling
elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like
flinging them at a dog or cat.  The charms of their
subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only
received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger
ruled.  She remained mute, not knowing that he was
smothering his affection for her.  She hardly observed
that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
large that it magnified the pores of the skin over
which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.
Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total
change that her confession had wrought in his life, in
his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately
to advance among the new conditions in which he stood.
Some consequent action was necessary; yet what?

"Tess," he said, as gently as he could speak, "I cannot
stay--in this room--just now. I will walk out a little
way."

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine
that he had poured out for their supper--one for her,
one for him--remained on the table untasted.  This was
what their AGAPE had come to.  At tea, two or three
hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of
affection, drunk from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had
been pulled to, roused Tess from her stupor.  He was
gone; she could not stay.  Hastily flinging her cloak
around her she opened the door and followed, putting
out the candles as if she were never coming back.  The
rain was over and the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked
slowly and without purpose.  His form beside her light
gray figure looked black, sinister, and forbidding, and
she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of which
she had been momentarily so proud.  Clare turned at
hearing her footsteps, but his recognition of her
presence seemed to make no difference to him, and he
went on over the five yawning arches of the great
bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of
water, and rain having been enough to charge them, but
not enough to wash them away.  Across these minute
pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as
she passed; she would not have known they were shining
overhead if she had not seen them there--the vastest
things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled today was in the
same valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down
the river; and the surroundings being open she kept
easily in sight of him.  Away from the house the road
wound through the meads, and along these she followed
Clare without any attempt to come up with him or to
attract him, but with dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up
alongside him, and still he said nothing.  The cruelty
of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment,
and it was mighty in Clare now.  The outdoor air had
apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on
impulse; she knew that he saw her without
irradiation--in all her bareness; that Time was
chanting his satiric psalm at her then----


Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall
  hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be
  pain.


He was still intently thinking, and her companionship
had now insufficient power to break or divert the
strain of thought.  What a weak thing her presence must
have become to him!  She could not help addressing
Clare.

"What have I done--what HAVE I done!  I have not told
of anything that interferes with or belies my love for
you.  You don't think I planned it, do you?  It is in
your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is not
in me.  O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful
woman you think me!"

"H'm--well.  Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same.
No, not the same.  But do not make me reproach you.  I
have sworn that I will not; and I will do everything to
avoid it."

But she went on pleading in her distraction; and
perhaps said things that would have been better left to
silence.

"Angel!--Angel!  I was a child--a child when it
happened!  I knew nothing of men."

"You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit."

"Then will you not forgive me?"

"I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all."

"And love me?"

To this question he did not answer.

"O Angel--my mother says that it sometimes happens
so!--she knows several cases where they were worse than
I, and the husband has not minded it much--has got over
it at least. And yet the woman had not loved him as I
do you!"

"Don't, Tess; don't argue.  Different societies,
different manners.  You almost make me say you are an
unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been
initiated into the proportions of social things.  You
don't know what you say."

"I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!"

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.

"So much the worse for you.  I think that parson who
unearthed your pedigree would have done better if he
had held his tongue.  I cannot help associating your
decline as a family with this other fact--of your want
of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills,
decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle
for despising you more by informing me of your descent!
Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature;
there were you, the belated seedling of an effete
aristocracy!"

"Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's
family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman
Billett's. And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters,
were once the De Bayeux family.  You find such as I
everywhere; 'tis a feature of our county, and I can't
help it."

"So much the worse for the county."

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in
their particulars; he did not love her as he had loved
her hitherto, and to all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence.  It was said
afterwards that a cottager of Wellbridge, who went out
late that night for a doctor, met two lovers in the
pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one
behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the
glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to
denote that they were anxious and sad. Returning later,
he passed them again in the same field, progressing
just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of
the cheerless night as before.  It was only on account
of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the
illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the
curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long
while after.

During the interval of the cottager's going and coming,
she had said to her husband----

"I don't see how I can help being the cause of much
misery to you all your life.  The river is down there.
I can put an end to myself in it.  I am not afraid."

"I don't wish to add murder to my other follies," he
said.

"I will leave something to show that I did it
myself--on account of my shame.  They will not blame
you then."

"Don't speak so absurdly--I wish not to hear it.  It is
nonsense to have such thoughts in this kind of case,
which is rather one for satirical laughter than for
tragedy.  You don't in the least understand the quality
of the mishap.  It would be viewed in the light of a
joke by nine-tenths of the world if it were known.
Please oblige me by returning to the house, and going
to bed."

"I will," said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the
well-known ruins of the Cistercian abbey behind the
mill, the latter having, in centuries past, been
attached to the monastic establishment.  The mill still
worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey
had perished, creeds being transient.  One continually
sees the ministration of the temporary outlasting the
ministration of the eternal.  Their walk having been
circuitous they were still not far from the house, and
in obeying his direction she only had to reach the
large stone bridge across the main river, and follow
the road for a few yards.  When she got back everything
remained as she had left it, the fire being still
burning.  She did not stay downstairs for more than a
minute, but proceeded to her chamber, whither the
luggage had been taken.  Here she sat down on the edge
of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began
to undress.  In removing the light towards the bedstead
its rays fell upon the tester of white dimity;
something was hanging beneath it, and she lifted the
candle to see what it was.  A bough of mistletoe.
Angel had put it there; she knew that in an instant.
This was the explanation of that mysterious parcel
which it had been so difficult to pack and bring; whose
contents he would not explain to her, saying that time
would soon show her the purpose thereof.  In his zest
and his gaiety he had hung it there.  How foolish and
inopportune that mistletoe looked now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to
hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise
whatever, she lay down dully.  When sorrow ceases to be
speculative sleep sees her opportunity.  Among so many
happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which
welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess
forgot existence, surrounded by the aromatic stillness
of the chamber that had once, possibly, been the
bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to
the house.  Entering softly to the sitting-room he
obtained a light, and with the manner of one who had
considered his course he spread his rugs upon the old
horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped
it to a sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept
shoeless upstairs, and listened at the door of her
apartment.  Her measured breathing told that she was
sleeping profoundly.

"Thank God!" murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious
of a pang of bitterness at the thought--approximately
true, though not wholly so--that having shifted the
burden of her life to his shoulders she was now
reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced
round to her door again.  In the act he caught sight of
one of the d'Urberville dames, whose portrait was
immediately over the entrance to Tess's bedchamber.  In
the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant.
Sinister design lurked in the woman's features, a
concentrated purpose of revenge on the other sex--so it
seemed to him then.  The Caroline bodice of the
portrait was low--precisely as Tess's had been when he
tucked it in to show the necklace; and again he
experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance
between them.

The check was sufficient.  He resumed his retreat and
descended.

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed
mouth indexing his powers of self-control; his face
wearing still that terrible sterile expression which
had spread thereon since her disclosure.  It was the
face of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet
who found no advantage in his enfranchisement.  He was
simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human
experience, the unexpectedness of things.  Nothing so
pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible
all the long while that he had adored her, up to an
hour ago; but

       The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her
heart was not indexed in the honest freshness of her
face; but Tess had no advocate to set him right.  Could
it be possible, he continued, that eyes which as they
gazed never expressed any divergence from what the
tongue was telling, were yet ever seeing another world
behind her ostensible one, discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and
extinguished the light.  The night came in, and took up
its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night
which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was
now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow
up the happiness of a thousand other people with as
little disturbance or change of mien.



XXXVI


Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and
furtive, as though associated with crime.  The
fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the
spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full
glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her
vacated seat and his own; the other articles of
furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to
help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done?
From above there was no sound; but in a few minutes
there came a knock at the door.  He remembered that it
would be the neighbouring cottager's wife, who was to
minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be
extremely awkward just now, and, being already dressed,
he opened the window and informed her that they could
manage to shift for themselves that morning.  She had a
milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the
door.  When the dame had gone away he searched in the
back quarters of the house for fuel, and speedily lit a
fire.  There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so
on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid,
his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile
in domestic preparations.  The smoke of the kindled
wood rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed
column; local people who were passing by saw it, and
thought of the newly-married couple, and envied their
happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the
foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice----

"Breakfast is ready!"

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the
morning air.  When, after a short space, he came back
she was already in the sitting-room mechanically
readjusting the breakfast things.  As she was fully
attired, and the interval since his calling her had
been but two or three minutes, she must have been
dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her.  Her
hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back
of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks--
a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of
white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she
had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long
time without any fire.  The marked civility of Clare's
tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for
the moment, with a new glimmer of hope.  But it soon
died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former
fires.  To the hot sorrow of the previous night had
succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could
kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness.  At last she came up to him,
looking in his sharply-defined face as one who had no
consciousness that her own formed a visible object also.

"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her
fingers lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly
believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once
her lover.  Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still
showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears
had left glistening traces thereon; and the usually
ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her cheek.
Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of
her mental grief the life beat so brokenly, that a
little further pull upon it would cause real illness,
dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure.  Nature, in her fantastic
trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's
countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.

"Tess!  Say it is not true!  No, it is not true!"

"It is true."

"Every word?"

"Every word."

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly
have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one,
and have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid
denial. However, she only repeated----

"It is true."

"Is he living?" Angel then asked.

"The baby died."

"But the man?"

"He is alive."

A last despair passed over Clare's face.

"Is he in England?"

"Yes."

He took a few vague steps.

"My position--is this," he said abruptly.  "I thought--
any man would have thought--that by giving up
all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with
fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure
rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink
cheeks; but----However, I am no man to reproach you,
and I will not."

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder
had not been needed.  Therein lay just the distress of
it; she saw that he had lost all round.

"Angel--I should not have let it go on to marriage with
you if I had not known that, after all, there was a
last way out of it for you; though I hoped you would
never----"

Her voice grew husky.

"A last way?"

"I mean, to get rid of me.  You CAN get rid of me."

"How?"

"By divorcing me."

"Good heavens--how can you be so simple!  How can I
divorce you?"

"Can't you--now I have told you?  I thought my
confession would give you grounds for that."

"O Tess--you are too, too--childish--unformed--crude,
I suppose!  I don't know what you are.  You don't
understand the law--you don't understand!"

"What--you cannot?"

"Indeed I cannot."

A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's
face.

"I thought--I thought," she whispered.  "O, now I see
how wicked I seem to you!  Believe me--believe me, on
my soul, I never thought but that you could!  I hoped
you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that
you could cast me off if you were determined, and
didn't love me at--at--all!"

"You were mistaken," he said.

"O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last
night!  But I hadn't the courage.  That's just like
me!"

"The courage to do what?"

As she did not answer he took her by the hand.

"What were you thinking of doing?" he inquired.

"Of putting an end to myself."

"When?"

She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his.
"Last night," she answered.

"Where?"

"Under your mistletoe."

"My good----!  How?" he asked sternly.

"I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!" she
said, shrinking.  "It was with the cord of my box.  But
I could not--do the last thing!  I was afraid that it
might cause a scandal to your name."

The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from
her, and not volunteered, shook him perceptibly.  But
he still held her, and, letting his glance fall from
her face downwards, he said,  "Now, listen to this.
You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing!
How could you!  You will promise me as your husband to
attempt that no more."

"I am ready to promise.  I saw how wicked it was."

"Wicked!  The idea was unworthy of you beyond
description."

"But, Angel," she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm
unconcern upon him, "it was thought of entirely on your
account--to set you free without the scandal of the
divorce that I thought you would have to get.  I should
never have dreamt of doing it on mine.  However, to do
it with my own hand is too good for me, after all.
It is you, my ruined husband, who ought to strike the
blow.  I think I should love you more, if that were
possible, if you could bring yourself to do it, since
there's no other way of escape for 'ee.  I feel I am so
utterly worthless!  So very greatly in the way!"

"Ssh!"

"Well, since you say no, I won't.  I have no wish
opposed to yours."

He knew this to be true enough.  Since the desperation
of the night her activities had dropped to zero, and
there was no further rashness to be feared.

Tess tried to busy herself again over the
breakfast-table with more or less success, and they sat
down both on the same side, so that their glances did
not meet.  There was at first something awkward in
hearing each other eat and drink, but this could not be
escaped; moreover, the amount of eating done was small
on both sides.  Breakfast over he rose, and telling her
the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went
off to the miller's in a mechanical pursuance of the
plan of studying that business, which had been his only
practical reason for coming here.

When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and
presently saw his form crossing the great stone bridge
which conducted to the mill premises.  He sank behind
it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared.  Then,
without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room,
and began clearing the table and setting it in order.

The charwoman soon came.  Her presence was at first a
strain upon Tess, but afterwards an alleviation.  At
half-past twelve she left her assistant alone in the
kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room, waited for
the reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge.

About one he showed himself.  Her face flushed,
although he was a quarter of a mile off.  She ran to
the kitchen to get the dinner served by the time he
should enter.  He went first to the room where they had
washed their hands together the day before, and as he
entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the
dishes as if by his own motion.

"How punctual!" he said.

"Yes.  I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.

The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had
been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the
methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery,
which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on
modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have
been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks
in the adjoining conventual buildings--now a heap of
ruins.  He left the house again in the course of an
hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself
through the evening with his papers.  She feared she
was in the way, and, when the old woman was gone,
retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as
well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work
like this," he said.  "You are not my servant; you are
my wife."

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat.  "I may
think myself that--indeed?" she murmured, in piteous
raillery. "You mean in name!  Well, I don't want to be
anything more."

"You MAY think so, Tess!  You are.  What do you mean?"

"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her
accents. "I thought I--because I am not respectable,
I mean.  I told you I thought I was not respectable
enough long ago--and on that account I didn't want to
marry you, only--only you urged me!"

She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him.  It
would almost have won round any man but Angel Clare.
Within the remote depths of his constitution, so gentle
and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden
a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft
loam, which turned the edge of everything that
attempted to traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance
of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess.
Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than
radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he
ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in
this with many impressionable natures, who remain
sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually
despise.  He waited till her sobbing ceased.

"I wish half the women in England were as respectable
as you," he said, in an ebullition of bitterness
against womankind in general.  "It isn't a question of
respectability, but one of principle!"

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred
sort to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic
wave which warps direct souls with such persistence
when once their vision finds itself mocked by
appearances.  There was, it is true, underneath, a back
current of sympathy through which a woman of the world
might have conquered him.  But Tess did not think of
this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly
opened her mouth.  The firmness of her devotion to him
was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she
naturally was, nothing that he could say made her
unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked;
thought no evil of his treatment of her.  She might
just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned
to a self-seeking modern world.

This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely
as the preceding ones had been passed.  On one, and
only one, occasion did she--the formerly free and
independent Tess--venture to make any advances.  It
was on the third occasion of his starting after a meal
to go out to the flour-mill.  As he was leaving the
table he said "Goodbye," and she replied in the same
words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the way
of his.  He did not avail himself of the invitation,
saying, as he turned hastily aside----

"I shall be home punctually."

Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck.
Often enough had he tried to reach those lips against
her consent--often had he said gaily that her mouth
and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and
honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew
sustenance from them, and other follies of that sort.
But he did not care for them now.  He observed her
sudden shrinking, and said gently--

"You know, I have to think of a course.  It was
imperative that we should stay together a little while,
to avoid the scandal to you that would have resulted
from our immediate parting.  But you must see it is
only for form's sake."

"Yes," said Tess absently.

He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still,
and wished for a moment that he had responded yet more
kindly, and kissed her once at least.

Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in
the same house, truly; but more widely apart than
before they were lovers.  It was evident to her that he
was, as he had said, living with paralyzed activities,
in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure.  She
was awe-strikin to discover such determination under
such apparent flexibility. His consistency was, indeed,
too cruel.  She no longer expected forgiveness now.
More than once she thought of going away from him
during his absence at the mill; but she feared that
this, instead of benefiting him, might be the means of
hampering and humiliating him yet more if it should
become known.

Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily.  His thought
had been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with
thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by
thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating
flexuous domesticity.  He walked about saying to
himself, "What's to be done--what's to be done?" and
by chance she overheard him.  It caused her to break
the reserve about their future which had hitherto
prevailed.

"I suppose--you are not going to live with me--long,
are you, Angel?" she asked, the sunk corners of her
mouth betraying how purely mechanical were the means by
which she retained that expression of chastened calm
upon her face.

"I cannot" he said, "without despising myself, and what
is worse, perhaps, despising you.  I mean, of course,
cannot live with you in the ordinary sense.  At
present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you.  And,
let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my
difficulties.  How can we live together while that man
lives?--he being your husband in nature, and not I.
If he were dead it might be different.... Besides, that's
not all the difficulty; it lies in another
consideration--one bearing upon the future of other
people than ourselves.  Think of years to come, and
children being born to us, and this past matter getting
known--for it must get known.  There is not an
uttermost part of the earth but somebody comes from it
or goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of wretches
of our flesh and blood growing up under a taunt which
they will gradually get to feel the full force of with
their expanding years.  What an awakening for them!
What a prospect!  Can you honestly say 'Remain' after
contemplating this contingency?  Don't you think we had
better endure the ills we have than fly to others?"

Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping
as before.

"I cannot say 'Remain,'" she answered, "I cannot; I had
not thought so far."

Tess's feminine hope--shall we confess it?--had been so
obstinately recuperative as to revive in her
surreptitious visions of a domiciliary intimacy
continued long enough to break down his coldness even
against his judgement.  Though unsophisticated in the
usual sense, she was not incomplete; and it would have
denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not
instinctively known what an argument lies in
propinquity.  Nothing else would serve her, she knew,
if this failed.  It was wrong to hope in what was of
the nature of strategy, she said to herself: yet that
sort of hope she could not extinguish.  His last
representation had now been made, and it was, as she
said, a new view.  She had truly never thought so far
as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring
who would scorn her was one that brought deadly
convictions to an honest heart which was humanitarian
to its centre.  Sheer experience had already taught her
that, in some circumstances, there was one thing better
than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from
leading any life whatever.  Like all who have been
previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of
M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat,
"You shall be born," particularly if addressed to
potential issue of hers.

Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that,
till now, Tess had been hoodwinked by her love for
Clare into forgetting it might result in vitalizations
that would inflict upon others what she had bewailed as
misfortune to herself.

She therefore could not withstand his argument.  But
with the self-combating proclivity of the
supersensitive, an answer thereto arose in Clare's own
mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her
exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it
promisingly.  She might have added besides: "On an
Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to know or
care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?"
Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the
momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable.
And she may have been right.  The intuitive heart of
woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its
husband's, and even if these assumed reproaches were
not likely to be addressed to him or to his by
strangers, they might have reached his ears from his
own fastidious brain.

It was the third day of the estrangement.  Some might
risk the odd paradox that with more animalism he would
have been the nobler man. We do not say it.  Yet
Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault,
imaginative to impracticability.  With these natures,
corporal presence is something less appealing than
corporal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence
that conveniently drops the defects of the real.  She
found that her personality did not plead her cause so
forcibly as she had anticipated.  The figurative phrase
was true: she was another woman than the one who had
excited his desire.

"I have thought over what you say," she remarked to
him, moving her forefinger over the tablecloth, her
other hand, which bore the ring that mocked them both,
supporting her forehead.  "It is quite true all of it;
it must be.  You must go away from me."

"But what can you do?"'

"I can go home."

Clare had not thought of that.

"Are you sure?" he inquired.

"Quite sure.  We ought to part, and we may as well get
it past and done.  You once said that I was apt to win
men against their better judgement; and if I am
constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change
your plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and
afterwards your repentance and my sorrow will be
terrible."

"And you would like to go home?" he asked.

"I want to leave you, and go home."

"Then it shall be so."

Though she did not look up at him, she started.  There
was a difference between the proposition and the
covenant which she had felt only too quickly.

"I feared it would come to this," she murmured, her
countenance meekly fixed.  "I don't complain, Angel,
I--I think it best.  What you said has quite convinced
me.  Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we
should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you
might get angry with me for any ordinary matter, and
knowing what you do of my bygones you yourself might be
tempted to say words, and they might be overheard,
perhaps by my own children.  O, what only hurts me now
would torture and kill me then! I will go--tomorrow."

"And I shall not stay here.  Though I didn't like to
initiate it, I have seen that it was advisable we
should part--at least for a while, till I can better
see the shape that things have taken, and can write to
you."

Tess stole a glance at her husband.  He was pale, even
tremulous; but, as before, she was appalled by the
determination revealed in the depths of this gentle
being she had married--the will to subdue the grosser
to the subtler emotion, the substance to the
conception, the flesh to the spirit.  Propensities,
tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the
tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.

He may have observed her look, for he explained--

"I think of people more kindly when I am away from
them"; adding cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will
shake down together some day, for weariness; thousands
have done it!"

That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and
began to pack also.  Both knew that it was in their two
minds that they might part the next morning for ever,
despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures thrown over
their processing because they were of the sort to whom
any parting which has an air of finality is a torture.
He knew, and she knew, that, though the fascination
which each had exercised over the other--on her part
independently of accomplishments--would probably in
the first days of their separation be even more potent
than ever, time must attenuate that effect; the
practical arguments against accepting her as a
housemate might pronounce themselves more strongly in
the boreal light of a remoter view.  Moreover, when two
people are once parted--have abandoned a common
domicile and a common environment--new growths
insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place;
unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans
are forgotten.



XXXVII


Midnight came and passed silently, for there was
nothing to announce it in the Valley of the Froom.

Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in
the darkened farmhouse once the mansion of the
d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the upper chamber, heard
it and awoke.  It had come from the corner step of the
staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed.  She
saw the door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her
husband crossed the stream of moonlight with a
curiously careful tread.  He was in his shirt and
trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she
perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural
stare on vacancy.  When he reached the middle of the
room he stood still and murmured in tones of
indescribable sadness--

"Dead! dead! dead!"

Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force
Clare would occasionally walk in his sleep, and even
perform strange feats, such as he had done on the night
of their return from market just before their marriage,
when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the
man who had insulted her.  Tess saw that continued
mental distress had wrought him into that
somnambulistic state now.

Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her
heart, that, awake or asleep, he inspired her with no
sort of personal fear.  If he had entered with a pistol
in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust
in his protectiveness.

Clare came close, and bent over her. "Dead, dead,
dead!" he murmured.

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the
same gaze of unmeasurable woe he bent lower, enclosed
her in his arms, and rolled her in the sheet as in a
shroud.  Then lifting her from the bed with as much
respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried
her across the room, murmuring----

"My poor, poor Tess--my dearest, darling Tess!  So
sweet, so good, so true!"

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his
waking hours, were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn
and hungry heart.  If it had been to save her weary
life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put
an end to the position she found herself in.  Thus she
lay in absolute stillness, scarcely venturing to
breathe, and, wondering what he was going to do with
her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the landing.

"My wife--dead, dead!" he said.

He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her
against the banister.  Was he going to throw her down?
Self-solicitude was near extinction in her, and in the
knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow,
possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this
precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than
of terror.  If they could only fall together, and both
be dashed to pieces, how fit, how desirable.

However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of
the support of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her
lips--lips in the daytime scorned.  Then he clasped
her with a renewed firmness of hold, and descended the
staircase.  The creak of the loose stair did not awaken
him, and they reached the ground-floor safely.  Freeing
one of his hands from his grasp of her for a moment, he
slid back the door-bar and passed out, slightly
striking his stockinged toe against the edge of the
door.  But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room
for extension in the open air, he lifted her against
his shoulder, so that he could carry her with ease, the
absence of clothes taking much from his burden.  Thus
he bore her off the premises in the direction of the
river a few yards distant.

His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet
divined; and she found herself conjecturing on the
matter as a third person might have done.  So easefully
had she delivered her whole being up to him that it
pleased her to think he was regarding her as his
absolute possession, to dispose of as he should choose.
It was consoling, under the hovering terror of
tomorrow's separation, to feel that he really
recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast
her off, even if in that recognition he went so far as
to arrogate to himself the right of harming her.

Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of--that Sunday
morning when he had borne her along through the water
with the other dairymaids, who had loved him nearly as
much as she, if that were possible, which Tess could
hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her,
but proceeding several paces on the same side towards
the adjoining mill, at length stood still on the brink
of the river.

Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland,
frequently divided, serpentining in purposeless curves,
looping themselves around little islands that had no
name, returning and re-embodying themselves as a broad
main stream further on.  Opposite the spot to which he
had brought her was such a general confluence, and the
river was proportionately voluminous and deep.  Across
it was a narrow foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood
had washed the handrail away, leaving the bare plank
only, which, lying a few inches above the speeding
current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads;
and Tess had noticed from the window of the house in
the daytime young men walking across upon it as a feat
in balancing.  Her husband had possibly observed the
same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the plank,
and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.

Was he going to drown her? Probably he was.  The spot
was lonely, the river deep and wide enough to make such
a purpose easy of accomplishment.  He might drown her
if he would; it would be better than parting tomorrow
to lead severed lives.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing,
distorting, and splitting the moon's reflected face.
Spots of froth travelled past, and intercepted weeds
waved behind the piles.  If they could both fall
together into the current now, their arms would be so
tightly clasped together that they could not be saved;
they would go out of the world almost painlessly, and
there would be no more reproach to her, or to him for
marrying her.  His last half-hour with her would have
been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke
his daytime aversion would return, and this hour would
remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.

The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge
it, to make a movement that would have precipitated
them both into the gulf.  How she valued her own life
had been proved; but his--she had no right to tamper
with it.  He reached the other side with her in safety.

Here they were within a plantation which formed the
Abbey grounds, and taking a new hold of her he went
onward a few steps till they reached the ruined choir
of the Abbey-church.  Against the north wall was the
empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist
with a turn for grim humour was accustomed to stretch
himself.  In this Clare carefully laid Tess.  Having
kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as if
a greatly desired end were attained.  Clare then lay
down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell
into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained
motionless as a log.  The spurt of mental excitement
which had produced the effort was now over.

Tess sat up in the coffin.  The night, though dry and
mild for the season, was more than sufficiently cold to
make it dangerous for him to remain here long, in his
half-clothed state.  If he were left to himself he
would in all probability stay there till the morning,
and be chilled to certain death.  She had heard of such
deaths after sleep-walking.  But how could she dare to
awaken him, and let him know what he had been doing,
when it would mortify him to discover his folly in
respect of her?  Tess, however, stepping out of her
stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to
arouse him without being violent.  It was indispensable
to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the
sheet being but a poor protection.  Her excitement had
in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes'
adventure; but that beatific interval was over.

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and
accordingly she whispered in his ear, with as much
firmness and decision as she could summon----

"Let us walk on, darling," at the same time taking him
suggestively by the arm.  To her relief, he
unresistingly acquiesced; her words had apparently
thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward
seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she
had risen as a spirit, and was leading him to Heaven.
Thus she conducted him by the arm to the stone bridge
in front of their residence, crossing which they stood
at the manor-house door.  Tess's feet were quite bare,
and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone;
but Clare was in his woollen stockings, and appeared to
feel no discomfort.

There was no further difficulty.  She induced him to
lie down on his own sofa bed, and covered him up
warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood, to dry any
dampness out of him.  The noise of these attentions she
thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they
might.  But the exhaustion of his mind and body was
such that he remained undisturbed.

As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that
Angel knew little or nothing of how far she had been
concerned in the night's excursion, though, as regarded
himself, he may have been aware that he had not lain
still.  In truth, he had awakened that morning from a
sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few
moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking
himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion
of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.  But the realities
of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the other
subject.

He waited in expectancy to discern some mental
pointing; he knew that if any intention of his,
concluded over-night, did not vanish in the light of
morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of
pure reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling;
that it was so far, therefore, to be trusted.  He thus
beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to
separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct,
but denuded of the passionateness which had made it
scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a
skeleton, but none the less there.  Clare no longer
hesitated.


At breakfast, and while they were packing the few
remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the
night's effort so unmistakeably that Tess was on the
point of revealing all that had happened; but the
reflection that it would anger him, grieve him,
stultify him, to know that he had instinctively
manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense
did not approve; that his inclination had compromised
his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her.  It
was too much like laughing at a man when sober for his
erratic deeds during intoxication.

It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a
faint recollection of his tender vagary, and was
disinclined to allude to it from a conviction that she
would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it gave
her of appealing to him anew not to go.

He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest
town, and soon after breakfast it arrived.  She saw in
it the beginning of the end--the temporary end, at
least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the
incident of the night raised dreams of a possible
future with him.  The luggage was put on the top, and
the man drove them off, the miller and the old
waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their
precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to his
discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind
which he wished to investigate, a statement that was
true so far as it went.  Beyond this there was nothing
in the manner of their leaving to suggest a FIASCO, or
that they were not going together to visit friends.

Their route lay near the dairy from which they had
started with such solemn joy in each other a few days
back, and as Clare wished to wind up his business with
Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick a
call at the same time, unless she would excite
suspicion of their unhappy state.

To make the call as unobtrusive as possible they left
the carriage by the wicket leading down from the high
road to the dairy-house, and descended the track on
foot, side by side.  The withy-bed had been cut, and
they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare
had followed her when he pressed her to be his wife; to
the left the enclosure in which she had been fascinated
by his harp; and far away behind the cowstalls the mead
which had been the scene of their first embrace.  The
gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours
mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold.

Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came
forward, throwing into his face the kind of jocularity
deemed appropriate in Talbothays and its vicinity on
the re-appearance of the newly-married.  Then Mrs
Crick emerged from the house, and several others of
their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not
seem to be there.

Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly
humours, which affected her far otherwise than they
supposed.  In the tacit agreement of husband and wife
to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as
would have been ordinary.  And then, although she would
rather there had been no word spoken on the subject,
Tess had to hear in detail the story of Marian and
Retty.  The later had gone home to her father's and
Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere.
They feared she would come to no good.

To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and
bade all her favourite cows goodbye, touching each of
them with her hand, and as she and Clare stood side by
side at leaving, as if united body and soul, there
would have been something peculiarly sorry in their
aspect to one who should have seen it truly; two limbs
of one life, as they outwardly were, his arm touching
hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way, as
against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in
their adieux as "we", and yet sundered like the poles.
Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in
their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their
profession of unity, different from the natural shyness
of young couples, may have been apparent, for when they
were gone Mrs Crick said to her husband----

"How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and
how they stood like waxen images and talked as if they
were in a dream!  Didn't it strike 'ee that 'twas so?
Tess had always sommat strange in her, and she's not
now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing
man."

They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the
roads towards Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they
reached the Lane inn, where Clare dismissed the fly and
man.  They rested here a while, and entering the Vale
were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger
who did not know their relations.  At a midway point,
when Nuttlebury had been passed, and where there were
cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance and said to
Tess that if she meant to return to her mother's house
it was here that he would leave her.  As they could not
talk with freedom in the driver's presence he asked her
to accompany him for a few steps on foot along one of
the branch roads; she assented, and directing the man
to wait a few minutes they strolled away.

"Now, let us understand each other," he said gently.
"There is no anger between us, though there is that
which I cannot endure at present.  I will try to bring
myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go to
as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to
bear it--if it is desirable, possible--I will come to
you.  But until I come to you it will be better that
you should not try to come to me."

The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she
saw his view of her clearly enough; he could regard her
in no other light than that of one who had practised
gross deceit upon him.  Yet could a woman who had done
even what she had done deserve all this?  But she could
contest the point with him no further.  She simply
repeated after him his own words.

"Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?"

"Just so."

"May I write to you?"

"O yes--if you are ill, or want anything at all.
I hope that will not be the case; so that it may happen
that I write first to you."

"I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know
best what my punishment ought to be; only--only--don't
make it more than I can bear!"

That was all she said on the matter.  If Tess had been
artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept
hysterically, in that lonely lane, notwithstanding the
fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed, he
would probably not have withstood her.  But her mood of
long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she
herself was his best advocate.  Pride, too, entered
into her submission--which perhaps was a symptom of
that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in
the whole d'Urberville family--and the many effective
chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were
left untouched.

The remainder of their discourse was on practical
matters only.  He now handed her a packet containing a
fairly good sum of money, which he had obtained from
his bankers for the purpose.  The brilliants, the
interest in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only
(if he understood the wording of the will), he advised
her to let him send to a bank for safety; and to this
she readily agreed.

These things arranged he walked with Tess back to the
carriage, and handed her in.  The coachman was paid and
told where to drive her.  Taking next his own bag and
umbrella--the sole articles he had brought with him
hitherwards--he bade her goodbye; and they parted there
and then.

The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched
it go with an unpremeditated hope that Tess would look
out of the window for one moment.  But that she never
thought of doing, would not have ventured to do, lying
in a half-dead faint inside.  Thus he beheld her
recede, and in the anguish of his heart quoted a line
from a poet, with peculiar emendations of his own--

    God's NOT in his heaven: all's WRONG with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he
turned to go his own way, and hardly knew that he loved
her still.



XXXVIII


As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the
landscape of her youth began to open around her, Tess
aroused herself from her stupor.  Her first thought was
how would she be able to face her parents?

She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the
highway to the village.  It was thrown open by a
stranger, not by the old man who had kept it for many
years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably
left on New Year's Day, the date when such changes were
made.  Having received no intelligence lately from her
home, she asked the turnpike-keeper for news.

"Oh--nothing, miss," he answered.  "Marlott is Marlott
still. Folks have died and that.  John Durbeyfield,
too, hev had a daughter married this week to a
gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house, you know;
they was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that
high standing that John's own folk was not considered
well-be-doing enough to have any part in it, the
bridegroom seeming not to know how't have been
discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman
himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own
vaults to this day, but done out of his property in the
time o' the Romans.  However, Sir John, as we call 'n
now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could, and
stood treat to everybody in the parish; and John's wife
sung songs at The Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock."

Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could
not decide to go home publicly in the fly with her
luggage and belongings.  She asked the turnpike-keeper
if she might deposit her things at his house for a
while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed
her carriage, and went on to the village alone by a
back lane.

At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how
she could possibly enter the house?  Inside that
cottage her relations were calmly supposing her far
away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man,
who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while
here she was, friendless, creeping up to the old door
quite by herself, with no better place to go to in the
world.

She did not reach the house unobserved.  Just by the
garden-hedge she was met by a girl who knew her--one
of the two or three with whom she had been intimate at
school.  After making a few inquiries as to how Tess
came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look,
interrupted with--

"But where's thy gentleman, Tess?"

Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on
business, and, leaving her interlocutor, clambered over
the garden-hedge, and thus made her way to the house.

As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother
singing by the back door, coming in sight of which she
perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the doorstep in the act of
wringing a sheet. Having performed this without
observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter
followed her.

The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same
old quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the
sheet aside, was about to plunge her arms in anew.

"Why--Tess!--my chil'--I thought you was
married!--married really and truly this time--we sent
the cider----"

"Yes, mother; so I am."

"Going to be?"

"No--I am married."

"Married!  Then where's thy husband?"

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

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

"Yes, Tuesday, mother."

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

"Yes, he's gone."

"What's the meaning o' that?  'Nation seize such
husbands as you seem to get, say I!"

"Mother!" Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid
her face upon the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs.
"I don't know how to tell 'ee, mother!  You said to me,
and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him.  But I did
tell him--I couldn't help it--and he went away!"

"O you little fool--you little fool!" burst out Mrs
Durbeyfield, splashing Tess and herself in her
agitation. "My good God! that ever I should ha' lived
to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many
days having relaxed at last.

"I know it--I know--I know!" she gasped through her
sobs. "But, O my mother, I could not help it!  He was
so good--and I felt the wickedness of trying to blind
him as to what had happened!  If--if--it were to be
done again--I should do the same.  I could not--I dared
not--so sin--against him!"

"But you sinned enough to marry him first!"

"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie!  But I
thought he could get rid o' me by law if he were
determined not to overlook it.  And O, if you knew--if
you could only half know how I loved him--how anxious I
was to have him--and how wrung I was between caring so
much for him and my wish to be fair to him!"

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and
sank a helpless thing into a chair.

"Well, well; what's done can't be undone!  I'm sure I
don't know why children o' my bringing forth should all
be bigger simpletons than other people's--not to know
better than to blab such a thing as that, when he
couldn't ha' found it out till too late!"  Here Mrs
Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as
a mother to be pitied.  "What your father will say I
don't know," she continued; "for he's been talking
about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop
every day since, and about his family getting back to
their rightful position through you--poor silly
man!--and now you've made this mess of it!  The
Lord-a-Lord!"

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was
heard approaching at that moment.  He did not, however,
enter immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she
would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping
out of sight for the present.  After her first burst of
disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had
taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken
a wet holiday or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing
which had come upon them irrespective of desert or
folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with;
not a lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the
beds had been shifted, and new arrangements made.  Her
old bed had been adapted for two younger children.
There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of
what went on there.  Presently her father entered,
apparently carrying in a live hen.  He was a
foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his
second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his
arm.  The hen had been carried about this morning as it
was often carried, to show people that he was in his
work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the
table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

"We've just had up a story about----" Durbeyfield
began, and thereupon related in detail to his wife a
discussion which had arisen at the inn about the
clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having
married into a clerical family. "They was formerly
styled 'sir', like my own ancestry," he said, "though
nowadays their true style, strictly speaking, is
'clerk' only."  As Tess had wished that no great
publicity should be given to the event, he had
mentioned no particulars.  He hoped she would remove
that prohibition soon.  He proposed that the couple
should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville, as
uncorrupted.  It was better than her husbands's.  He
asked if any letter had come from her that day.

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

When at length the collapse was explained to him a
sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield,
overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.
Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy
sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the
minds of others.

"To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!" said
Sir John.  "And I with a family vault under that there
church of Kingsbere as big as Squire Jollard's
ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and
sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any
recorded in history.  And now to be sure what they
fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop will say to me!
How they'll squint and glane, and say, 'This is yer
mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the
true level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!'
I feel this is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to
myself, title and all--I can bear it no longer! ... But
she can make him keep her if he's married her?"

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

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

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear
to hear more.  The perception that her word could be
doubted even here, in her own parental house, set her
mind against the spot as nothing else could have done.
How unexpected were the attacks of destiny!  And if her
father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and
acquaintance doubt her much?  O, she could not live
long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed
herself here, at the end of which time she received a
short note from Clare, informing her that he had gone
to the North of England to look at a farm.  In her
craving for the lustre of her true position as his
wife, and to hide from her parents the vast extent of
the division between them, she made use of this letter
as her reason for again departing, leaving them under
the impression that she was setting out to join him.
Still further to screen her husband from any imputation
on unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty
pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to
her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel Clare
could well afford it, saying that it was a slight
return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought
upon them in years past.  With this assertion of her
dignity she bade them farewell; and after that there
were lively doing in the Durbeyfield household for some
time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother
saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which
had arisen between the young husband and wife had
adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they
could not live apart from each other.



XXXIX


It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found
himself descending the hill which led to the well-known
parsonage of his father.  With his downward course the
tower of the church rose into the evening sky in a
manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living
person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him,
still less to expect him.  He was arriving like a
ghost, and the sound of his own footsteps was almost an
encumbrance to be got rid of.

The picture of life had changed for him.  Before this
time he had known it but speculatively; now he thought
he knew it as a practical man; though perhaps he did
not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before him
no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but
in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz
Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory
beyond description.  After mechanically attempting to
pursue his agricultural plans as though nothing unusual
had happened, in the manner recommended by the great
and wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of
those great and wise men had ever gone so far outside
themselves as to test the feasibility of their counsel.
"This is the chief thing: be not perturbed," said the
Pagan moralist.  That was just Clare's own opinion.
But he was perturbed.  "Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid," said the Nazarene.  Clare
chimed in cordially; but his heart was troubled all the
same.  How he would have liked to confront those two
great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as
fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them to tell him
their method!

His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference
till at length he fancied he was looking on his own
existence with the passive interest of an outsider.

He was embittered by the conviction that all this
desolation had been brought about by the accident of
her being a d'Urberville.  When he found that Tess came
of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the new
tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he
not stoically abandoned her, in fidelity to his
principles?  This was what he had got by apostasy, and
his punishment was deserved.

Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety
increased. He wondered if he had treated her unfairly.
He ate without knowing that he ate, and drank without
tasting.  As the hours dropped past, as the motive of
each act in the long series of bygone days presented
itself to his view, he perceived how intimately the
notion of having Tess as a dear possession was mixed up
with all his schemes and words and ways.

In going hither and thither he observed in the
outskirts of a small town a red-and-blue placard
setting forth the great advantages of the Empire of
Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist.
Land was offered there on exceptionally advantageous
terms.  Brazil somewhat attracted him as a new idea.
Tess could eventually join him there, and perhaps in
that country of contrasting scenes and notions and
habits the conventions would not be so operative which
made life with her seem impracticable to him here.
In brief he was strongly inclined to try Brazil,
especially as the season for going thither was just at
hand.

With this view he was returning to Emminster to
disclose his plan to his parents, and to make the best
explanation he could make of arriving without Tess,
short of revealing what had actually separated them.
As he reached the door the new moon shone upon his
face, just as the old one had done in the small hours
of that morning when he had carried his wife in his
arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks;
but his face was thinner now.

Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit,
and his arrival stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage
as the dive of the kingfisher stirs a quiet pool.  His
father and mother were both in the drawing-room, but
neither of his brothers was now at home.  Angel
entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.

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

"She is at her mother's--temporarily.  I have come home
rather in a hurry because I've decided to go to
Brazil."

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

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

But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a
Papistical land could no displace for long Mr and Mrs
Clare's natural interest in their son's marriage.

"We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that
it had taken place," said Mrs Clare, "and your father
sent your godmother's gift to her, as you know.  Of
course it was best that none of us should be present,
especially as you preferred to marry her from the
dairy, and not at her home, wherever that may be.  It
would have embarrassed you, and given us no pleasure.
Your bothers felt that very strongly. Now it is done we
do not complain, particularly if she suits you for the
business you have chosen to follow instead of the
ministry of the Gospel. ... Yet I wish I could have
seen her first, Angel, or have known a little more
about her.  We sent her no present of our own, not
knowing what would best give her pleasure, but you must
suppose it only delayed. Angel, there is no irritation
in my mind or your father's against you for this
marriage; but we have thought it much better to reserve
our liking for your wife till we could see her.  And
now you have not brought her.  It seems strange. What
had happened?"

He replied that it had been thought best by them that
she should to go her parents' home for the present,
whilst he came there.

"I don't mind telling you, dear mother," he said, "that
I always meant to keep her away from this house till I
should feel she could some with credit to you.  But
this idea of Brazil is quite a recent one.  If I do go
it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my
first journey.  She will remain at her mother's till I
come back."

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

He was afraid they would not.  His original plan had
been, as he had said, to refrain from bringing her
there for some little while--not to wound their
prejudices--feelings--in any way; and for other reasons
he had adhered to it.  He would have to visit home in
the course of a year, if he went out at once; and it
would be possible for them to see her before he started
a second time--with her.

A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare
made further exposition of his plans.  His mother's
disappointment at not seeing the bride still remained
with her.  Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess had
infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she
had almost fancied that a good thing could come out of
Nazareth--a charming woman out of Talbothays Dairy.
She watched her son as he ate.

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

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

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

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

"I can see her quite distinctly.  You said the other
day that she was fine in figure; roundly built; had
deep red lips like Cupid's bow; dark eyelashes and
brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's cable; and
large eyes violety-bluey-blackish."

"I did, mother."

"I quite see her.  And living in such seclusion she
naturally had scarce ever seen any young man from the
world without till she saw you."

"Scarcely."

"You were her first love?"

"Of course."

"There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed,
robust girls of the farm.  Certainly I could have
wished--well, since my son is to be an agriculturist,
it is perhaps but proper that his wife should have been
accustomed to an outdoor life."

His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came
for the chapter from the Bible which was always read
before evening prayers, the Vicar observed to Mrs
Clare----

"I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more
appropriate to read the thirty-first of Proverbs than
the chapter which we should have had in the usual
course of our reading?"

"Yes, certainly," said Mrs Clare.  "The words of King
Lemuel" (she could cite chapter and verse as well as
her husband). "My dear son, your father has decided to
read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a virtuous
wife.  We shall not need to be reminded to apply the
words to the absent one.  May Heaven shield her in all
her ways!"

A lump rose in Clare's throat.  The portable lectern
was taken out from the corner and set in the middle of
the fireplace, the two old servants came in, and
Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse of the
aforesaid chapter----

"'Who can find a virtuous woman?  for her price is far
above rubies.  She riseth while it is yet night, and
giveth meat to her household.  She girdeth her loins
with strength and strengtheneth her arms.  She
perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle
goeth not out by night.  She looketh well to the ways
of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband
also, and he praiseth her.  Many daughters have done
virtuously, but thou excellest them all.'"

When prayers were over, his mother said----

"I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter
your dear father read applied, in some of its
particulars, to the woman you have chosen.  The perfect
woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not
a fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head
and her heart for the good of others. 'Her children
arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he
praiseth her.  Many daughters have done virtuously, but
she excelleth them all.'  Well, I wish I could have
seen her, Angel.  Since she is pure and chaste she
would have been refined enough for me."

Clare could bear this no longer.  His eyes were full of
tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead.  He bade
a quick goodnight to these sincere and simple souls
whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the
flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts; only as
something vague and external to themselves.  He went to
his own chamber.

His mother followed him, and tapped at his door.
Clare opened it to discover her standing without, with
anxious eyes.

"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you
do away so soon?  I am quite sure you are not
yourself."

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

"About her?  Now, my son, I know it that--I know it is
about her!  Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?"

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

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

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger
on the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet
as seemed to agitate her son.

"She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had
sent him to eternal hell there and then he would have
told that lie.

"Then never mind the rest.  After all, there are few
purer things in nature then an unsullied country maid.
Any crudeness of manner which may offend your more
educated sense at first, will, I am sure, disappear
under the influence or your companionship and tuition."
Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home
to Clare the secondary perception that he had utterly
wrecked his career by this marriage, which had not been
among his early thoughts after the disclosure.  True,
on his own account he cared very little about his
career; but he had wished to make it at least a
respectable one on account of his parents and brothers.
And now as he looked into the candle its flame dumbly
expressed to him that it was made to shine on sensible
people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a
dupe and a failure.

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments
incensed with his poor wife for causing a situation in
which he was obliged to practise deception on his
parents.  He almost talked to her in his anger, as if
she had been in the room.  And then her cooing voice,
plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the
velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he
could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was
thinking how great and good her husband was.  But over
them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade
which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his
own limitations. With all his attempted independence of
judgement this advanced and well-meaning young man, a
sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was
yet the slave to custom and conventionality when
surprised back into her early teachings.  No prophet
had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell
himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as
deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other
woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral
value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by
tendency.  Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on
such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness
without shade; while vague figures afar off are
honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues
of their stains.  In considering what Tess was not, he
overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective
can be more than the entire.



XL


At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured
to take a hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment
with that country's soil, notwithstanding the
discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who had
emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve
months.  After breakfast Clare went into the little
town to wind up such trifling matters as he was
concerned with there, and to get from the local bank
all the money he possessed.  On his way back he
encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose
walls she seemed to be a sort of emanation.  She was
carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such
was her view of life that events which produced
heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon
her--an enviable result, although, in the opinion of
Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural
sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and
observed what an excellent and promising scheme it
seemed to be.

"Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial
sense, no doubt," he replied.  "But, my dear Mercy, it
snaps the continuity of existence.  Perhaps a cloister
would be preferable."

"A cloister!  O, Angel Clare!"

"Well?"

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

"And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation.  Thou
are in a parlous state, Angel Clare."

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

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the
demoniacal moods in which a man does despite to his
true principles, called her close to him, and
fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox
ideas he could think of.  His momentary laughter at the
horror which appeared on her fair face ceased when it
merged in pain and anxiety for his welfare.

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

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended,
and Clare re-entered the Vicarage.  With the local
banker he deposited the jewels till happier days should
arise.  He also paid into the bank thirty pounds--to be
sent to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and
wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to
inform her of what he had done.  This amount, with the
sum he had already placed in her hands--about fifty
pounds--he hoped would be amply sufficient for her
wants just at present, particularly as in an emergency
she had been directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into
communication with her by informing them of her
address; and, being unaware of what had really happened
to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother
suggested that he should do so.  During the day he left
the parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to
get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it
was necessary for him to call at the Wellbridge
farmhouse, in which he had spent with Tess the first
three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having
to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had
occupied, and two or three small articles fetched away
that they had left behind.  It was under this roof that
the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had
stretched its gloom over him.  Yet when he had unlocked
the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the
memory which returned first upon him was that of their
happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh
sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first
meal together, the chatting by the fire with joined
hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment
of his visit, and Clare was in the rooms alone for some
time. Inwardly swollen with a renewal of sentiment that
he had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs to her
chamber, which had never been his.  The bed was smooth
as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of
leaving.  The mistletoe hung under the tester just as
he had placed it.  Having been there three or four
weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and berries
were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed it into
the grate.  Standing there he for the first time
doubted whether his course in this conjecture had been
a wise, much less a generous, one.  But had he not been
cruelly blinded?  In the incoherent multitude of his
emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed.  "O
Tess!  If you had only told me sooner, I would have
forgiven you!" he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below he rose and went to the top of
the stairs.  At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman
standing, and on her turning up her face recognized the
pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

"Mr Clare," she said, "I've called to see you and Mrs
Clare, and to inquire if ye be well.  I thought you
might be back here again."

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who
had not yet guessed his; an honest girl who loved
him--one who would have made as good, or nearly as
good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess.

"I am here alone," he said; "we are not living here
now." Explaining why he had come, he asked, "Which way
are you going home, Izz?"

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

"Why is that?"

Izz looked down.

"It was so dismal there that I left!  I am staying out
this way."  She pointed in a contrary direction, the
direction in which he was journeying.

"Well--are you going there now?  I can take you if you
wish for a lift." Her olive complexion grew richer in
hue.

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

He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for
his rent and the few other items which had to be
considered by reason of the sudden abandonment of the
lodgings.  On Clare's return to his horse and gig Izz
jumped up beside him.

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

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

"She is not going at present--say for a year or so.
I am going out to reconnoitre--to see what life there
is like."

They sped along eastward for some considerable
distance, Izz making no observation.

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

"She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her
last; and so thin and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in
a decline. Nobody will ever fall in love wi' her any
more," said Izz absently.

"And Marian?"

Izz lowered her voice.

"Marian drinks."

"Indeed!"

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

"And you!"

"I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline.  But--I am
no great things at singing afore breakfast now!"

"How is that?  Do you remember how neatly you used to
turn ''Twas down in Cupid's Gardens' and 'The Tailor's
Breeches' at morning milking?"

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

"Why was that falling-off?"

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

"Izz!--how weak of you--for such as I!" he said, and
fell into reverie.  "Then--suppose I had asked YOU to
marry me?"

"If you had I should have said 'Yes', and you would
have married a woman who loved 'ee!"

"Really!"

"Down to the ground!" she whispered vehemently.  "O my
God! did you never guess it till now!" By-and-by they
reached a branch road to a village.

"I must get down. I live out there," said Izz abruptly,
never having spoken since her avowal.

Clare slowed the horse.  He was incensed against his
fate, bitterly disposed towards social ordinances; for
they had cooped him up in a corner, out of which there
was no legitimate pathway.  Why not be revenged on
society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,
instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in
this ensnaring manner?

"I am going to Brazil alone, Izz," said he.  "I have
separated from my wife for personal, not voyaging,
reason.  I may never live with her again.  I may not be
able to love you; but--will you go with me instead of
her?"

"You truly wish me to go?"

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

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

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

"It means that I shall live with you for the time you
are over there--that's good enough for me."

"Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now.  But
I ought to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in
the eyes of civilization--Western civilization, that is
to say."

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

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

He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles,
without showing any signs of affection.

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

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

"More than Tess?"

She shook her head.

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

"How's that?"

"Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! ...
She would have laid down her life for 'ee.  I could do
no more."

Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would
fain have spoken perversely at such a moment, but the
fascination exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's
character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these
straightforward words from such an unexpected
unimpeachable quarter.  In his throat was something as
if a sob had solidified there.  His ear repeated, "SHE
WOULD HAVE LAID DOWN HER LIFE FOR 'EE.  I COULD DO NO
MORE!"

"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the
horse's head suddenly.  "I don't know what I've been
saying!  I will now drive you back to where your lane
branches off."

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

Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead
as she saw what she had done.

"Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an
absent one?  O, Izz, don't spoil it by regret!"

She stilled herself by degrees.

"Very well, sir.  Perhaps I didn't know what I was
saying, either, wh--when I agreed to go!  I wish--what
cannot be!"

"Because I have a loving wife already."

"Yes, yes!  You have!"

They reached the corner of the lane which they had
passed half an hour earlier, and she hopped down.

"Izz--please, please forget my momentary levity!" he
cried. "It was so ill-considered, so ill-advised!"

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

He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the
wounded cry conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was
inexpressible, leapt down and took her hand.

"Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow?  You don't
know what I've had to bear!"

She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further
bitterness to mar their adieux.

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

"Now, Izz," he said, while she stood beside him there,
forcing himself to the mentor's part he was far from
feeling; "I want you to tell Marian when you see her
that she is to be a good woman, and not to give way to
folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more
worthy men than I in the world, that for my sake she is
to act wisely and well--remember the words--wisely and
well--for my sake. I send this message to them as a
dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them
again.  And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest
words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards
folly and treachery.  Women may be bad, but they are
not so bad as men in these things!  On that one account
I can never forget you.  Be always the good and sincere
girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as a
worthless lover, but a faithful friend.  Promise."

She gave the promise.

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

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the
lane, and Clare was out of sight, than she flung
herself down on the bank in a fit of racking anguish;
and it was with a strained unnatural face that she
entered her mother's cottage late that night.  Nobody
ever was told how Izz spent the dark hours that
intervened between Angel Clare's parting from her and
her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was
wrought to aching thoughts and quivering lips.  But his
sorrow was not for Izz.  That evening he was within a
feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road to the
nearest station, and driving across that elevated
dorsal line of South Wessex which divided him from his
Tess's home.  It was neither a contempt for her nature,
nor the probable state of her heart, which deterred
him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as
corroborated by Izz's admission, the facts had not
changed.  If he was right at first, he was right now.
And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked
tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a
stronger, more sustained force than had played upon him
this afternoon.  He could soon come back to her.  He
took the train that night for London, and five days
after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the
port of embarkation.



XLI


From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us
press on to an October day, more than eight months
subsequent to the parting of Clare and Tess.  We
discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a
bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see
her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her
own porterage, as at an earlier time when she was no
bride; instead of the ample means that were projected
by her husband for her comfort through this
probationary period, she can produce only a flattened
purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got
through the spring and summer without any great stress
upon her physical powers, the time being mainly spent
in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work near
Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally
remote from her native place and from Talbothays.  She
preferred this to living on his allowance.  Mentally
she remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the
mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.
Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that
other season, in the presence of the tender lover who
had confronted her there--he who, the moment she had
grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a
shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to
lessen, for she had not met with a second regular
engagement as at Talbothays, but had done duty as a
supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now
beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to
the stubble to find plenty of further occupation, and
this continued till harvest was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her
of Clare's allowance, after deducting the other half of
the fifty as a contribution to her parents for the
trouble and expense to which she had put them, she had
as yet spent but little.  But there now followed an
unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she
was obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go.  Angel had put them
into her hand, had obtained them bright and new from
his bank for her; his touch had consecrated them to
souvenirs of himself--they appeared to have had as yet
no other history than such as was created by his and
her own experiences--and to disperse them was like
giving away relics.  But she had to do it, and one by
one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address
from time to time, but she concealed her circumstances.
When her money had almost gone a letter from her mother
reached her. Joan stated that they were in dreadful
difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the
thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but
this could not be done because the previous thatching
had never been paid for.  New rafters and a new ceiling
upstairs also were required, which, with the previous
bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As her
husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned
by this time, could she not send them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately
from Angel's bankers, and, the case being so
deplorable, as soon as the sum was received she sent
the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she was
obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a
nominal sum for the whole inclement season at hand.
When the last pound had gone, a remark of Angel's that
whenever she required further resources she was to
apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step the more
reluctant was she to take it.  The same delicacy,
pride, false shame, whatever it may be called, on
Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered
her owning to his that she was in want after the fair
allowance he had left her.  They probably despised her
already; how much more they would despise her in the
character of a mendicant!  The consequence was that by
no effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring
herself to let him know her state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's
parents might, she thought, lessen with the lapse of
time; but with her own the reverse obtained.  On her
leaving their house after the short visit subsequent to
her marriage they were under the impression that she
was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that
time to the present she had done nothing to disturb
their belief that she was awaiting his return in
comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil
would result in a short stay only, after which he would
come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to
join him; in any case that they would soon present a
united front to their families and the world.  This
hope she still fostered.  To let her parents know that
she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had
relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a
living, after the ECLAT of a marriage which was to
nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too
much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind.  Where
Clare had deposited them she did not know, and it
mattered little, if it were true that she could only
use and not sell them.  Even were they absolutely hers
it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal
title to them which was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free
from trial.  At this moment he was lying ill of fever
in the clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been
drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other
hardships, in common with all the English farmers and
farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded
into going thither by the promises of the Brazilian
Government, and by the baseless assumption that those
frames which, ploughing and sowing on English uplands,
had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had
been born, could resist equally well all the weathers
by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return.  Thus it happened that when the last of
Tess's sovereigns had been spent she was unprovided
with others to take their place, while on account of
the season she found it increasingly difficult to get
employment.  Not being aware of the rarity of
intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any
sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor
occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of
means and social sophistication, and of manners other
than rural.  From that direction of gentility Black
Care had come.  Society might be better than she
supposed from her slight experience of it.  But she had
no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances
was to avoid its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in
which she had served as supernumerary milkmaid during
the spring and summer required no further aid.  Room
would probably have been made for her at Talbothays,
if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her
life had been there she could not go back.  The
anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return
might bring reproach upon her idolized husband.  She
could not have borne their pity, and their whispered
remarks to one another upon her strange situation;
though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her
circumstances by every individual there, so long as her
story had remained isolated in the mind of each.  It
was the interchange of ideas about her that made her
sensitiveness wince.  Tess could not account for this
distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre
of the county, to which she had been recommended by a
wandering letter which had reached her from Marian.
Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from
her husband--probably through Izz Huett--and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in
trouble, had hastened to notify to her former friend
that she herself had gone to this upland spot after
leaving the dairy, and would like to see her there,
where there was room for other hands, if it was really
true that she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining
her husband's forgiveness began to leave her; and there
was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the
unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on--
disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past
at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no
thought to accidents or contingencies which might make
a quick discovery of her whereabouts by others of
importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the
least was the attention she excited by her appearance,
a certain bearing of distinction, which she had caught
from Clare, being superadded to her natural
attractiveness.  Whilst the clothes lasted which had
been prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of
interest caused her no inconvenience, but as soon as
she was compelled to don the wrapper of a fieldwoman,
rude words were addressed to her more than once; but
nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a
particular November afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to
the upland farm for which she was now bound, because,
for one thing, it was nearer to the home of her
husband's father; and to hover about that region
unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to
call at the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure.  But
having once decided to try the higher and drier levels,
she pressed back eastward, marching afoot towards the
village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the
night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid
shortening of the days, dusk came upon her before she
was aware.  She had reached the top of a hill down
which the lane stretched its serpentine length in
glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back,
and in a few moments she was overtaken by a man.
He stepped up alongside Tess and said--

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

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face,
though the landscape was nearly dark.  The man turned
and stared hard at her.

"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at
Trantridge awhile--young Squire d'Urberville's friend?
I was there at that time, though I don't live there
now."

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel
had knocked down at the inn for addressing her
coarsely.  A spasm of anguish shot through her, and she
returned him no answer.

"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in
the town was true, though your fancy-man was so up
about it--hey, my sly one?  You ought to beg my pardon
for that blow of his, considering."

Still no answer came from Tess.  There seemed only one
escape for her hunted soul.  She suddenly took to her
heels with the speed of the wind, and, without looking
behind her, ran along the road till she came to a gate
which opened directly into a plantation.  Into this she
plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in
its shade to be safe against any possibility of
discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some
holly bushes which grew among the deciduous trees was
dense enough to keep off draughts.  She scraped
together the dead leaves till she had formed them into
a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle.
Into this Tess crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied
she heard strange noises, but persuaded herself that
they were caused by the breeze.  She thought of her
husband in some vague warm clime on the other side of
the globe, while she was here in the cold.  Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world?
Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted life,
said, "All is vanity."  She repeated the words
mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most
inadequate thought for modern days.  Solomon had
thought as far as that more than two thousand years
ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers,
had got much further.  If all were only vanity, who
would mind it?  All was, alas, worse than
vanity--injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The
wife of Angel Clare put her hand in her brow, and felt
its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible
under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a
time would come when that bone would be bare.  "I wish
it were now," she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new
strange sound among the leaves.  It might be the wind;
yet there was scarcely any wind.  Sometimes it was a
palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it was a
sort of gasp or gurgle.  Soon she was certain that the
noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more
so when, originating in the boughs overhead, they were
followed by the fall of a heavy body upon the ground.
Had she been ensconced here under other and more
pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed; but,
outside humanity, she had at present no fear.

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

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's
active hours had grown strong she crept from under her
hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly.  Then she
perceived what had been going on to disturb her.  The
plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at
this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward,
outside the hedge being arable ground.  Under the trees
several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled
with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a
wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating
quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of
them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose
tortures had ended during the night by the inability of
nature to bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this.  The birds
had been driven down into this corner the day before by
some shooting-party; and while those that had dropped
dead under the shot, or had died before nightfall, had
been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen
among the thick boughs, where they had maintained their
position till they grew weaker with loss of blood in
the night-time, when they had fallen one by one as she
had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in
girlhood, looking over hedges, or peeping through
bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred,
a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.  She had been told
that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they
were not like this all the year round, but were, in
fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of
autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the
Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their
purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless
feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial
means solely to gratify these propensities--at once so
unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker
fellows in Nature's teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred
sufferers as much as for herself, Tess's first thought
was to put the still living birds out of their torture,
and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks
of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where
she had found them till the game-keepers should
come--as they probably would come--to look for them a
second time.

"Poor darlings--to suppose myself the most miserable
being on earth in the sight o' such misery as yours!"
she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the
birds tenderly.  "And not a twinge of bodily pain about
me!  I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I
have two hands to feed and clothe me."  She was ashamed
of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing
more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an
arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in
Nature.



XLII


It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging
cautiously upon the highway.  But there was no need for
caution; not a soul was at hand, and Tess went onward
with fortitude, her recollection of the birds' silent
endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her
the relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of
her own, if she could once rise high enough to despise
opinion.  But that she could not do so long as it was
held by Clare.

She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn,
where several young men were troublesomely
complimentary to her good looks.  Somehow she felt
hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband also
might say these same things to her even yet?  She was
bound to take care of herself on the chance of it, and
keep off these casual lovers.  To this end Tess
resolved to run no further risks from her appearance.
As soon as she got out of the village she entered a
thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest
field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the
dairy--never since she had worked among the stubble at
Marlott.  She also, by a felicitous thought, took a
handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face
under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks
and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache.
Then with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket
looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off,
and thus insured against aggressive admiration she went
on her uneven way.

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

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

"But I don't care!" she said.  "O no--I don't care!
I'll always be ugly now, because Angel is not here, and
I have nobody to take care of me.  My husband that was
is gone away, and never will love me any more; but I
love him just the same, and hate all other men, and
like to make 'em think scornfully of me!"

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the
landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter
guise; a gray serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff
skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and
buff-leather gloves.  Every thread of that old attire
has become faded and thin under the stroke of
raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and the stress of
winds.  There is no sign of young passion in her
now----


     The maiden's mouth is cold
     . . . . . . . .
     Fold over simple fold
     Binding her head.


Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have
roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost
inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which
had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and
ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the
fragility of love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the
honesty, directness, and impartiality of elemental
enmity disconcerting her but little.  Her object being
a winter's occupation and a winter's home, there was no
time to lose. Her experience of short hirings had been
such that she was determined to accept no more.

Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the
direction of the place whence Marian had written to
her, which she determined to make use of as a last
shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse
of tempting.  First she inquired for the lighter kinds
of employment, and, as acceptance in any variety of
these grew hopeless, applied next for the less light,
till, beginning with the dairy and poultry tendance
that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and
course pursuits which she liked least--work on arable
land: work of such roughness, indeed, as she would
never have deliberately voluteered for.

Towards the second evening she reached the irregular
chalk table-land or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular
tumuli--as if Cybele the Many-breasted were supinely
extended there--which stretched between the valley of
her birth and the valley of her love.

Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads
were blown white and dusty within a few hours after
rain.  There were few trees, or none, those that would
have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed down
with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural
enemies of tree, bush, and brake.  In the middle
distance ahead of her she could see the summits of
Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout, and they seemed
friendly.  They had a low and unassuming aspect from
this upland, though as approached on the other side
from Blackmoor in her childhood they were as lofty
bastions against the sky.  Southerly, at many miles'
distance, and over the hills and ridges coastward, she
could discern a surface like polished steel: it was the
English Channel at a point far out towards France.

Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of
a village.  She had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash,
the place of Marian's sojourn.  There seemed to be no
help for it; hither she was doomed to come.  The
stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the
kind of labour in demand here was of the roughest kind;
but it was time to rest from searching, and she
resolved to stay, particularly as it began to rain.
At the entrance to the village was a cottage whose gable
jutted into the road, and before applying for a lodging
she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening
close in.

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

The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she
found that immediately within the gable was the cottage
fireplace, the heat of which came through the bricks.
She warmed her hands upon them, and also put her
cheek--red and moist with the drizzle--against their
comforting surface.  The wall seemed to be the only
friend she had.  She had so little wish to leave it
that she could have stayed there all night.

Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage--gathered
together after their day's labour--talking to each
other within, and the rattle of their supper-plates was
also audible.  But in the village-street she had seen
no soul as yet.  The solitude was at last broken by the
approach of one feminine figure, who, though the
evening was cold, wore the print gown and the
tilt-bonnet of summer time.  Tess instinctively thought
it might be Marian, and when she came near enough to be
distinguishable in the gloom surely enough it was she.
Marian was even stouter and redder in the face than
formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire.  At any
previous period of her existence Tess would hardly have
cared to renew the acquaintance in such conditions; but
her loneliness was excessive, and she responded readily
to Marian's greeting.

Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but
seemed much moved by the fact that Tess should still
continue in no better condition than at first; though
she had dimly heard of the separation.

"Tess--Mrs Clare--the dear wife of dear he!  And is it
really so bad as this, my child?  Why is your cwomely
face tied up in such a way?  Anybody been beating 'ee?
Not HE?"

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

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

"And you've got no collar on" (Tess had been accustomed
to wear a little white collar at the dairy).

"I know it, Marian."

"You've lost it travelling."

"I've not lost it.  The truth is, I don't care anything
about my looks; and so I didn't put it on."

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

"Yes, I do; but not in public.  I wear it round my neck
on a ribbon.  I don't wish people to think who I am by
marriage, or that I am married at all; it would be so
awkward while I lead my present life."

Marian paused.

"But you BE a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly
fair that you should live like this!"

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

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

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

"You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's
none. So it must be something outside ye both."

"Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn
without asking questions?  My husband has gone abroad,
and somehow I have overrun my allowance, so that I have
to fall back upon my old work for a time.  Do not call
me Mrs Clare, but Tess, as before.  Do they want a hand
here?"

"O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to
come. "Tis a starve-acre place.  Corn and swedes are
all they grow. Though I be here myself, I feel 'tis a
pity for such as you to come."

"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."

"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink.
Lord, that's the only comfort I've got now!  If you
engage, you'll be set swede-hacking.  That's what I be
doing; but you won't like it."

"O--anything!  Will you speak for me?"

"You will do better by speaking for yourself."

"Very well.  Now, Marian, remember--nothing about HIM,
if I get the place.  I don't wish to bring his name
down to the dirt."

Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of
coarser grain than Tess, promised anything she asked.

"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come
with me you would know at once.  I be real sorry that
you are not happy; but 'tis because he's away, I know.
You couldn't be unhappy if he were here, even if he
gie'd ye no money--even if used you like a drudge."

"That's true; I could not!"

They walked on together, and soon reached the
farmhouse, which was almost sublime in its dreariness.
There was not a tree within sight; there was not, at
this season, a green pasture--nothing but fallow and
turnips everywhere; in large fields divided by hedges
plashed to unrelieved levels.

Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the
group of workfolk had received their wages, and then
Marian introduced her.  The farmer himself, it
appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who
represented him this evening, made no objection to
hiring Tess, on her agreeing to remain till Old
Lady-Day.  Female field-labour was seldom offered now,
and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which
women could perform as readily as men.

Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for
Tess to do at present than to get a lodging, and she
found one in the house at whose gable-wall she had
warmed herself.  It was a poor subsistence that she had
ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter
at any rate.

That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new
address, in case a letter should arrive at Marlott from
her husband.  But she did not tell them of the
sorriness of her situation: it might have brought
reproach upon him.



XLIII


There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of
Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place.  The single
fat thing on the soil was Marian herself; and she was
an importation.  Of the three classes of village, the
village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by
itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or
by its lord (in other words, the village of a resident
squires's tenantry, the village of free or
copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village, farmed
with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the
third.

But Tess set to work.  Patience, that blending of moral
courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a
minor feature in Mrs Angel Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set
hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres, in one
patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above
stony lanchets or lynchets--the outcrop of siliceous
veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of
loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic
shapes.  The upper half of each turnip had been eaten
off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the
two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might
be eaten also.  Every leaf of the vegetable having
already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a
desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as
if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse
of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same
likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the
lineaments gone.  So these two upper and nether visages
confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face
looking up at the white face, without anything standing
between them but the two girls crawling over the
surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a
mechanical regularity; their forms standing enshrouded
in Hessian "wroppers"--sleeved brown pinafores, tied
behind to the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing
about--scant skirts revealing boots that reached high
up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with
gauntlets.  The pensive character which the curtained
hood lent to their bent heads would have reminded the
observer of some early Italian conception of the two
Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the
forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking
of the justice or injustice of their lot.  Even in such
a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a
dream.  In the afternoon the rain came on again, and
Marian said that they need not work any more.  But if
they did not work they would not be paid; so they
worked on.  It was so high a situation, this field,
that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along
horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them
like glass splinters till they were wet through.  Tess
had not known till now what was really meant by that.
There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is
called being wet through in common talk.  But to stand
working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of
rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips
and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to
work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that
the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of
stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be
supposed.  They were both young, and they were talking
of the time when they lived and loved together at
Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land where
summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to
all, emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have
conversed with Marian of the man who was legally, if
not actually, her husband; but the irresistible
fascination of the subject betrayed her into
reciprocating Marian's remarks.  And thus, as has been
said, though the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped
smartly into their faces, and their wrappers clung
about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this
afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic
Talbothays.

"You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o'
Froom Valley from here when 'tis fine," said Marian.

"Ah!  Can you?" said Tess, awake to the new value of
this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the
inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will
against enjoyment.  Marian's will had a method of
assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the
afternoon wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag,
from which she invited Tess to drink.  Tess's
unassisted power of dreaming, however, being enough for
her sublimation at present, she declined except the
merest sip, and then Marian took a pull from the
spirits.

"I've got used to it," she said, "and can't leave it
off now.  'Tis my only comfort----You see I lost him:
you didn't; and you can do without it perhaps."

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld
by the dignity of being Angel's wife, in the letter at
least, she accepted Marian's differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and
in the afternoon rains.  When it was not swede-grubbing
it was swede-trimming, in which process they sliced off
the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook before
storing the roots for future use.  At this occupation
they could shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if
it rained; but if it was frosty even their thick
leather gloves could not prevent the frozen masses they
handled from biting their fingers.  Still Tess hoped.
She had a conviction that sooner or later the
magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief
ingredient of Clare's character would lead him to
rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the
queer-shaped flints aforesaid, and shriek with
laughter, Tess remaining severely obtuse.  They often
looked across the country to where the Var or Froom was
know to stretch, even though they might not be able to
see it; and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray
mist, imagined the old times they had spent out there.

"Ah," said Marian, "how I should like another or two of
our old set to come here!  Then we could bring up
Talbothays every day here afield, and talk of he, and
of what nice times we had there, and o' the old things
we used to know, and make it all come back a'most, in
seeming!"  Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew
vague as the visions returned. "I'll write to Izz
Huett," she said.  "She's biding at home doing nothing
now, I know, and I'll tell her we be here, and ask her
to come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now."

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the
next she heard of this plan for importing old
Talbothays' joys was two or three days later, when
Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her
inquiry, and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years.  It came on
in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a
chess-player.  One morning the few lonely trees and
the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had put
off a vegetable for an animal integument.  Every twig
was covered with a white nap as of fur grown from the
rind during the night, giving it four times its usual
stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a staring
sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky
and horizon.  Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds
and walls where none had ever been observed till
brought out into visibility by the crystallizing
atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from
salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of
dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North
Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of
Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical
eyes--eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal
horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude
such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling
temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld
the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by
the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by
the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous
distortions; and retained the expression of feature
that such scenes had engendered.  These nameless birds
came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had
seen which humanity would never see, they brought no
account.  The traveller's ambition to tell was not
theirs, and, with dumb impassivity, they dismissed
experiences which they did not value for the immediate
incidents of this homely upland--the trivial movements
of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their
hackers so as to uncover something or other that these
visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this
open country.  There came a moisture which was not of
rain, and a cold which was not of frost.  It chilled
the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,
penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of
the body less than its core.  They knew that it meant
snow, and in the night the snow came. Tess, who
continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable
that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside
it, awoke in the night, and heard above the thatch
noises which seemed to signify that the roof had turned
itself into a gymnasium of all the winds.  When she lit
her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the
snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming
a white cone of the finest powder against the inside,
and had also come down the chimney, so that it lay
sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left
tracks when she moved about.  Without, the storm drove
so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as
yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the
swedes; and by the time she had finished breakfast
beside the solitary little lamp, Marian arrived to tell
her that they were to join the rest of the women at
reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed.
As soon, therefore, as the uniform cloak of darkness
without began to turn to a disordered medley of grays,
they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their
thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round
their necks and across their chests, and started for
the barn.  The snow had followed the birds from the
polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and
individual flakes could not be seen.  The blast smelt
of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears,
carrying the snow so that it licked the land but did
not deepen on it.  They trudged onwards with slanted
bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as
they could in the shelter of hedges, which, however,
acted as strainers rather than screens.  The air,
afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that
infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically,
suggesting an achromatic chaos of things.  But both the
young women were fairly cheerful; such weather on a dry
upland is not in itself dispiriting.

"Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was
coming," said Marian.  "Depend upon't, they keep just
in front o't all the way from the North Star.  Your
husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching
weather all this time.  Lord, if he could only see his
pretty wife now!  Not that this weather hurts your
beauty at all--in fact, it rather does it good."

"You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian," said Tess
severely.

"Well, but--surely you care for'n!  Do you?"

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes,
impulsively faced in the direction in which she
imagined South America to lie, and, putting up her
lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

"Well, well, I know you do.  But 'pon my body, it is a
rum life for a married couple!  There--I won't say
another word! Well, as for the weather, it won't hurt
us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is fearful hard
work--worse than swede-hacking.  I can stand it because
I'm stout; but you be slimmer than I.  I can't think
why maister should have set 'ee at it."

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it.  One end of
the long structure was full of corn; the middle was
where the reed-drawing was carried on, and there had
already been placed in the reed-press the evening
before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient
for the women to draw from during the day.

"Why, here's Izz!" said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward.  She had walked all
the way from her mother's home on the previous
afternoon, and, not deeming the distance so great, had
been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow
began, and sleeping at the alehouse.  The farmer had
agreed with her mother at market to take her on if she
came today, and she had been afraid to disappoint him
by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two
women from a neighbouring village; two Amazonian
sisters, whom Tess with a start remembered as Dark Car
the Queen of Spades and her junior the Queen of
Diamonds--those who had tried to fight with her in the
midnight quarrel at Trantridge.  They showed no
recognition of her, and possibly had none, for they had
been under the influence of liquor on that occasion,
and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They
did all kinds of men's work of preference, including
well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating,
without any sense of fatigue.  Noted reed-drawers were
they too, and looked round upon the other three with
some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves all set to work in a row in
front of the press, an erection formed of two posts
connected by a cross-beam, under which the sheaves to
be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam being
pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the
sheaves diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the
barndoors upwards from the snow instead of downwards
from the sky.  The girls pulled handful after handful
from the press; but by reason of the presence of the
strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and
Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished
to do.  Presently they heard the muffled tread of a
horse, and the farmer rode up to the barndoor.  When he
had dismounted he came close to Tess, and remained
looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not
turned at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look
round, when she perceived that her employer was the
native of Trantridge from whom she had taken flight on
the high-road because of his allusion to her history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the
pile outside, when he said, "So you be the young woman
who took my civility in such ill part?  Be drowned if I
didn't think you might be as soon as I heard of your
being hired!  Well, you thought you had got the better
of me the first time at the inn with your fancy-man,
and the second time on the road, when you bolted; but
now I think I've got the better you."  He concluded
with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer like a bird
caught in a clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to
pull the straw.  She could read character sufficiently
well to know by this time that she had nothing to fear
from her employer's gallantry; it was rather the
tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare's
treatment of him.  Upon the whole she preferred that
sentiment in man and felt brave enough to endure it.

"You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose?  Some
women are such fools, to take every look as serious
earnest.  But there's nothing like a winter afield for
taking that nonsense out o' young wenches' heads; and
you've signed and agreed till Lady-Day.  Now, are you
going to beg my pardon?"

"I think you ought to beg mine."

"Very well--as you like.  But we'll see which is master
here. Be they all the sheaves you've done today?"

"Yes, sir."

"'Tis a very poor show.  Just see what they've done
over there" (pointing to the two stalwart women).
"The rest, too, have done better than you."

"They've all practised it before, and I have not.  And
I thought it made no difference to you as it is task
work, and we are only paid for what we do."

"Oh, but it does.  I want the barn cleared."

"I am going to work all the afternoon instead of
leaving at two as the others will do."

He looked sullenly at her and went away.  Tess felt
that she could not have come to a much worse place; but
anything was better than gallantry.  When two o'clock
arrived the professional reed-drawers tossed off the
last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,
tied their last sheaves, and went away.  Marian and Izz
would have done likewise, but on hearing that Tess
meant to stay, to make up by longer hours for her lack
of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at the
snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, "Now, we've
got it all to ourselves."  And so at last the
conversation turned to their old experiences at the
dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their affection
for Angel Clare.

"Izz and Marian," said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity
which was extremely touching, seeing how very little of
a wife she was: "I can't join in talk with you now, as
I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will see that I
cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for
the present, he is my husband."

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all
the four girls who had loved Clare.  "He was a very
splendid lover, no doubt," she said; "but I don't think
he is a too fond husband to go away from you so soon."

"He had to go--he was obliged to go, to see about the
land over there!" pleaded Tess.

"He might have tided 'ee over the winter."

"Ah--that's owing to an accident--a misunderstanding;
and we won't argue it," Tess answered, with tearfulness
in her words.  "Perhaps there's a good deal to be said
for him!  He did not go away, like some husbands,
without telling me; and I can always find out where he
is."

After this they continued for some long time in a
reverie, as they went on seizing the ears of corn,
drawing out the straw, gathering it under their arms,
and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing
sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the
crunch of the hook.  Then Tess suddenly flagged, and
sank down upon the heap of wheat-ears at her feet.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!" cried
Marian.  "It wants harder flesh than yours for this
work."

Just then the farmer entered.  "Oh, that's how you get
on when I am away," he said to her.

"But it is my own loss," she pleaded.  "Not yours."

"I want it finished," he said doggedly, as he crossed
the barn and went out at the other door.

"Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear," said Marian.
"I've worked here before.  Now you go and lie down
there, and Izz and I will make up your number."

"I don't like to let you do that.  I'm taller than you,
too."

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie
down awhile, and reclined on a heap of pull-tails--the
refuse after the straight straw had been drawn--thrown
up at the further side of the barn.  Her succumbing had
been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening
the subject of her separation from her husband as to
the hard work.  She lay in a state of percipience
without volition, and the rustle of the straw and the
cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of
bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these
noises, the murmur of their voices.  She felt certain
that they were continuing the subject already broached,
but their voices were so low that she could not catch
the words.  At last Tess grew more and more anxious to
know what they were saying, and, persuading herself
that she felt better, she got up and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down.  She had walked more than a
dozen miles the previous evening, had gone to bed at
midnight, and had risen again at five o'clock.  Marian
alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her stoutness
of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without
suffering.  Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as
she felt better, to finish the day without her, and
make equal division of the number of sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared
through the great door into the snowy track to her
lodging.  Marian, as was the case every afternoon at
this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a
romantic vein.

"I should not have thought it of him--never!" she said
in a dreamy tone.  "And I loved him so!  I didn't mind
his having YOU.  But this about Izz is too bad!"

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed
cutting off a finger with the bill-hook.

"Is it about my husband?" she stammered.

"Well, yes.  Izz said, 'Don't 'ee tell her'; but I am
sure I can't help it!  It was what he wanted Izz to do.
He wanted her to go off to Brazil with him."

Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and
its curves straightened.  "And did Izz refuse to go?"
she asked.

"I don't know.  Anyhow he changed his mind."

"Pooh--then he didn't mean it!  'Twas just a man's
jest!"

"Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the
station."

"He didn't take her!"

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any
premonitory symptoms, burst out crying.

"There!" said Marian.  "Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!"

"No.  It is a very good thing that you have done!  I
have been living on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and
have not seen what it may lead to! I ought to have sent
him a letter oftener.  He said I could not go to him,
but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I
liked.  I won't dally like this any longer!  I have
been very wrong and neglectful in leaving everything to
be done by him!"

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could
see to work no longer.  When Tess had reached home that
evening, and had entered into the privacy of her little
white-washed chamber, she began impetuously writing a
letter to Clare. But falling into doubt she could not
finish it.  Afterwards she took the ring from the
ribbon on which she wore it next her heart, and
retained it on her finger all night, as if to fortify
herself in the sensation that she was really the wife
of this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that
Izz should go with him abroad, so shortly after he had
left her.  Knowing that, how could she write entreaties
to him, or show that she cared for him any more?



XLIV


By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led
anew in the direction which they had taken more than
once of late--to the distant Emminster Vicarage.  It
was through her husband's parents that she had been
charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and
to write to them direct if in difficulty.  But that
sense of her having morally no claim upon him had
always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these
notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as
to her own parents since her marriage, she was
virtually non-existent.  This self-effacement in both
directions had been quite in consonance with her
independent character of desiring nothing by way of
favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair
consideration of her deserts.  She had set herself to
stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive such
merely technical claims upon a strange family as had
been established for her by the flimsy fact of a member
of that family, in a season of impulse, writing his
name in a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale
there was a limit to her powers of renunciation.  Why
had her husband not written to her?  He had distinctly
implied that he would at least let her know of the
locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent
a line to notify his address.  Was he really
indifferent?  But was he ill?  Was it for her to make
some advance?  Surely she might summon the courage of
solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and
express her grief at his silence.  If Angel's father
were the good man she had heard him represented to be,
he would be able to enter into her heart-starved
situation.  Her social hardships she could conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power;
Sunday was the only possible opportunity.
Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the cretaceous
tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it
would be necessary to walk.  And the distance being
fifteen miles each way she would have to allow herself
a long day for the undertaking by rising early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been
followed by a hard black frost, she took advantage of
the state of the roads to try the experiment.  At four
o'clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs and
stepped out into the starlight.  The weather was still
favourable, the ground ringing under her feet like an
anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion,
knowing that the journey concerned her husband.  Their
lodgings were in a cottage a little further along the
lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her departure,
and argued that she should dress up in her very
prettiest guise to captivate the hearts of her
parents-in-law; though she, knowing of the austere and
Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was indifferent,
and even doubtful.  A year had now elapsed since her
sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient
draperies from the wreck of her then full wardrobe to
clothe her very charmingly as a simple country girl
with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray
woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the
pink skin of her face and neck, and a black velvet
jacket and hat.

"'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee
now--you do look a real beauty!" said Izz Huett,
regarding Tess as she stood on the threshold between
the steely starlight without the yellow candlelight
within.  Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of
herself to the situation; she could not be--no woman
with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could
be--antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence
which she exercised over those of her own sex being of
a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously
overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite
and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush
there, they let her go; and she was absorbed into the
pearly air of the fore-dawn.  They heard her footsteps
tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her full
pace.  Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though
without any particular respect for her own virtue, felt
glad that she had been prevented wronging her friend
when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had
married Tess, and only a few days less than a year that
he had been absent from her.  Still, to start on a
brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry
clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these
chalky hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no
doubt that her dream at starting was to win the heart
of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that
lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the
truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment
below which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now
lying misty and still in the dawn.  Instead of the
colourless air of the uplands the atmosphere down there
was a deep blue.  Instead of the great enclosures of a
hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to toil
there were little fields below her of less than
half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from
this height like the meshes of a net.  Here the
landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom
Valley, it was always green.  Yet is was in that vale
that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love
it as formerly.  Beauty to her, as to all who have
felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing
symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right she steered steadily
westward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at
right-angles the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to
Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy,
with the dell between them called "The Devil's
Kitchen".  Still following the elevated way she reached
Cross-in-Hand, where the stone pillar stands desolate
and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or murder,
or both.  Three miles further she cut across the
straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane;
leaving which as soon as she reached it she dipped down
a hill by a transverse lane into the small town or
village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the
distance.  She made a halt here, and breakfasted a
second time, heartily enough--not at the Sow-and-Acorn,
for she avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more
gentle country, by way of Benvill Lane.  But as the
mileage lessened between her and the spot of her
pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her
enterprise loom out more formidably.  She saw her
purpose in such staring lines, and the landscape so
faintly, that she was sometimes in danger of losing her
way.  However, about noon she paused by a gate on the
edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage
lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that
moment the Vicar and his congregation were gathered,
had a severe look in her eyes.  She wished that she had
somehow contrived to come on a week-day.  Such a good
man might be prejudiced against a woman who had chosen
Sunday, never realizing the necessities of her case.
But it was incumbent upon her to go on now.  She took
off the thick boots in which she had walked thus far,
put on her pretty thin ones of patent leather, and,
stuffing the former into the hedge by the gatepost
where she might readily find them again, descended the
hill; the freshness of colour she had derived from the
keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew near
the parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but
nothing favoured her.  The scrubs on the Vicarage lawn
rustled uncomfortably in the frosty breeze; she could
not feel by any stretch of imagination, dressed to her
highest as she was, that the house was the residence of
near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or
emotion, divided her from them: in pains, pleasures,
thoughts, birth, death, and after-death, they were the
same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the
swing-gate, and rang the door-bell.  The thing was
done; there could be no retreat.  No; the thing was not
done.  Nobody answered to her ringing.  The effort had
be risen to and made again.  She rang a second time,
and the agitation of the act, coupled with her
weariness after the fifteen miles' walk, led her
support herself while she waited by resting her hand on
her hip, and her elbow against the wall of the porch.
The wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become
wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its
neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves.  A
piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some
meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road
without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly
away; and a few straws kept it company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came.
Then she walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and
passed through.  And though she looked dubiously at the
house-front as if inclined to return, it was with a
breath of relied that she closed the gate.  A feeling
haunted her that she might have been recognized (though
how she could not tell), and orders been given not to
admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner.  She had done all she
could do; but determined not to escape present
trepidation at the expense of future distress, she
walked back again quite past the house, looking up at
all the windows.

Ah--the explanation was that they were all at church,
every one.  She remembered her husband saying that his
father always insisted upon the household, servants
included, going to morning-service, and, as a
consequence, eating cold food when they came home.  It
was, therefore, only necessary to wait till the service
was over.  She would not make herself conspicuous by
waiting on the spot, and she started to get past the
church into the lane.  But as she reached the
churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess
found herself in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a
congregation of small country-townsfolk walking home at
its leisure can look at a woman out of the common whom
it perceives to be a stranger.  She quickened her pace,
and ascended the the road by which she had come, to
find a retreat between its hedges till the Vicar's
family should have lunched, and it might be convenient
for them to receive her.  She soon distanced the
churchgoers, except two youngish men, who, linked
arm-in-arm, were beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged
in earnest discourse, and, with the natural quickness
of a woman in her situation, did not fail to recognize
in those noises the quality of her husband's tones.
The pedestrians were his two brothers.  Forgetting all
her plans, Tess's one dread was lest they should
overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before
she was prepared to confront them; for though she felt
that they could not identify her she instinctively
dreaded their scrutiny.  The more briskly they walked
the more briskly walked she.  They were plainly bent
upon taking a short quick stroll before going indoors
to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled
with sitting through a long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill--a
ladylike young woman, somewhat interesting, though,
perhaps, a trifle GUINDEE and prudish.  Tess had nearly
overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law
brought them so nearly behind her back that she could
hear every word of their conversation.  They said
nothing, however, which particularly interested her
till, observing the young lady still further in front,
one of them remarked, "There is Mercy Chant.  Let us
overtake her."

Tess knew the name.  It was the woman who had been
destined for Angel's life-companion by his and her
parents, and whom he probably would have married but
for her intrusive self. She would have know as much
without previous information if she had waited a
moment, for one of the brothers proceeded to say:
"Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel!  I never see that nice girl
without more and more regretting his precipitancy in
throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she
may be.  It is a queer business, apparently.  Whether
she has joined him yet or not I don't know; but she had
not done so some months ago when I heard from him."

"I can't say.  He never tells me anything nowadays.
His ill-considered marriage seems to have completed
that estrangement from me which was begun by his
extraordinary opinions."

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could
not outwalk them without exciting notice.  At last they
outsped her altogether, and passed her by.  The young
lady still further ahead heard their footsteps and
turned.  Then there was a greeting and a shaking of
hands, and the three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and,
evidently intending this point to be the limit of their
promenade, slackened pace and turned all three aside to
the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that
time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it.
During their discourse one of the clerical brothers
probed the hedge carefully with his umbrella, and
dragged something to light.

"Here's a pair of old boots," he said.  "Thrown away,
I suppose, by some tramp or other."

"Some imposter who wished to come into the town
barefoot, perhaps, and so excite our sympathies," said
Miss Chant. "Yes, it must have been, for they are
excellent walking-boots--by no means worn out.  What a
wicked thing to do!  I'll carry them home for some poor
person."

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them,
picked them up for her with the crook of his stick; and
Tess's boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen
of her woollen veil, till, presently looking back, she
perceived that the church party had left the gate with
her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk.  Tears,
blinding tears, were running down her face.  She knew
that it was all sentiment, all baseless impressibility,
which had caused her to read the scene as her own
condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it;
she could not contravene in her own defenceless person
all those untoward omens.  It was impossible to think
of returning to the Vicarage.  Angel's wife felt almost
as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned
thing by those--to her--superfine clerics. Innocently
as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat
unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not
the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less
starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the
gift of charity.  As she again though of her dusty
boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the
quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt how
hopeless life was for their owner.

"Ah!" she said, still sighing in pity of herself, "THEY
didn't know that I wore those over the roughest part of
the road to save these pretty ones HE bought for
me--no--they did not know it!  And they didn't think
that HE chose the colour o' my pretty frock--no--how
could they?  If they had known perhaps they would not
have cared, for they don't care much for him, poor
thing!"

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional
standard of judgement had caused her all these latter
sorrows; and she went her way without knowing that the
greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss
of courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons.  Her present
condition was precisely one which would have enlisted
the sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare.  Their hearts
went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when
the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among
mankind failed to win their interest or regard.  In
jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that
a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and
Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have
recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this
moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their
love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by
which she had come not altogether full of hope, but
full of a conviction that a crisis in her life was
approaching.  No crisis, apparently, had supervened;
and there was nothing left for her to do but to
continue upon that starve-acre farm till she could
again summon courage to face the Vicarage.  She did,
indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw up
her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world
see that she could at least exhibit a face such as
Mercy Chant could not show.  But it was done with a
sorry shake of the head. "It is nothing--it is
nothing!" she said.  "Nobody loves it; nobody sees it.
Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!"

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march.
It had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency.
Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to
grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by
milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or
eighth mile, she descended the steep long hill below
which lay the village or townlet of Evershead, where in
the morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting
expectations.  The cottage by the church, in which she
again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the
village, and while the woman fetched her some milk from
the pantry, Tess, looking down the street, perceived
that the place seemed quite deserted.

"The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?"
she said.

"No, my dear," said the old woman.  "'Tis too soon for
that; the bells hain't strook out yet.  They be all
gone to hear the preaching in yonder barn.  A ranter
preaches there between the services--an excellent,
fiery, Christian man, they say.  But, Lord, I don't go
to hear'n!  What comes in the regular way over the
pulpit is hot enough for I."

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps
echoing against the houses as though it were a place of
the dead.  Nearing the central part her echoes were
intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not
far off the road, she guessed these to be the
utterances of the preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air
that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was
on the closed side of the barn.  The sermon, as might
be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on
justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of
St Paul.  This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was
delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner
entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a
dialectician.  Although Tess had not heard the
beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had
been from its constant iteration----

"O FOOLISH GALATIANS, WHO HATH BEWITCHED YOU, THAT YE
SHOULD NOT OBEY THE TRUTH, BEFORE WHOSE EYES JESUS
CHRIST HATH BEEN EVIDENTLY SET FORTH, CRUCIFIED AMONG
YOU?"

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood
listening behind, in finding that the preacher's
doctrine was a vehement form of the view of Angel's
father, and her interest intensified when the speaker
began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he
had come by those views. He had, he said, been the
greatest of sinners.  He had scoffed; he had wantonly
associated with the reckless and the lewd.  But a day
of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had
been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain
clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but
whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and had
remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had
worked this change in him, and made him what they saw
him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been
the voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was
precisely that of Alec d'Urberville.  Her face fixed in
painful suspense, she came round to the front of the
barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed
directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this
side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays
stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the
preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from
the northern breeze.  The listeners were entirely
villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen
carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable
occasion.  But her attention was given to the central
figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the
people and the door.  The three o'clock sun shone full
upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that
her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining
ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words
distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed.


END OF PHASE THE FIFTH





Phase the Sixth: The Convert



XLV


Till this moment she had never seen or heard from
d'Urberville since her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all
moments calculated to permit its impact with the least
emotional shock.  But such was unreasoning memory that,
though he stood there openly and palpably a converted
man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a
fear overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she
neither retreated nor advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when
she saw it last, and to behold it now! ... There was
the same handsome unpleasantness of mien, but now he
wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable
moustache having disappeared; and his dress was
half-clerical, a modification which had changed his
expression sufficiently to abstract the dandyism from
his features, and to hinder for a second her belief in
his identity.

To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly
BIZARRERIE, a grim incongruity, in the march of these
solemn words of Scripture out of such a mouth.  This
too familiar intonation, less than four years earlier,
had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent
purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony
of the contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration.  The
former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to
lines of devotional passion.  The lip-shapes that had
meant seductiveness were now made to express
supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday
could be translated as riotousness was evangelized
today into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism
had become fanaticism; Paganism Paulinism; the bold
rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old
time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy
of a theolatry that was almost ferocious.  Those black
angularities which his face had used to put on when his
wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the
incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning
again to his wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain.  They had
been diverted from their hereditary connotation to
signify impressions for which Nature did not intend
them.  Strange that their very elevation was a
misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so?  She would admit the ungenerous
sentiment no longer.  D'Urberville was not the first
wicked man who had turned away from his wickedness to
save his soul alive, and why should she deem it
unnatural in him?  It was but the usage of thought
which had been jarred in her at hearing good new words
in bad old notes.  The greater the sinner the greater
the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into
Christian history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and
without strict definiteness.  As soon as the nerveless
pause of her surprise would allow her to stir, her
impulse was to pass on out of his sight.  He had
obviously not discerned her yet in her position against
the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her.
The effect upon her old lover was electric, far
stronger than the effect of his presence upon her.
His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence, seemed to
go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the
words that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not
as long as she faced him. His eyes, after their first
glance upon her face, hung confusedly in every other
direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap
every few seconds.  This paralysis lasted, however, but
a short time; for Tess's energies returned with the
atrophy of his, and she walked as fast as she was able
past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect it appalled her, this
change in their relative platforms.  He who had wrought
her undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while
she remained unregenerate.  And, as in the legend, it
had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly
appeared upon his alter, whereby the fire of the priest
had been well nigh extinguished.

She went on without turning her head.  Her back seemed
to be endowed with a sensitiveness to ocular
beams--even her clothing--so alive was she to a fancied
gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside
of that barn.  All the way along to this point her
heart had been heavy with an inactive sorrow; now there
was a change in the quality of its trouble.  That
hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time
displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable
past which still engirdled her.  It intensified her
consciousness of error to a practical despair; the
break of continuity between her earlier and present
existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all,
taken place. Bygones would never be complete bygones
till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed she recrossed the northern part of
Long-Ash Lane at right angles, and presently saw before
her the road ascending whitely to the upland along
whose margin the remainder of her journey lay.  Its dry
pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a
single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional
brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity
here and there.  While slowly breasting this ascent
Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and
turning she saw approaching that well-known form--so
strangely accoutred as the Methodist--the one personage
in all the world she wished not to encounter alone on
this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or
elusion, and she yielded as calmly as she could to the
necessity of letting him overtake her.  She saw that he
was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by the
feelings within him.

"Tess!" he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

"Tess!" he repeated.  "It is I--Alec d'Urberville."

She then looked back at him, and he came up.

"I see it is," she answered coldly.

"Well--is that all?  Yet I deserve no more!  Of
course," he added, with a slight laugh, "there is
something of the ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me
like this.  But--I must put up with that. ... I heard
you had gone away, nobody knew where.  Tess, you wonder
why I have followed you?"

"I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all
my heart!"

"Yes--you may well say it," he returned grimly, as they
moved onward together, she with unwilling tread.  "But
don't mistake me; I beg this because you may have been
led to do so in noticing--if you did notice it--how
your sudden appearance unnerved me down there.  It was
but a momentary faltering; and considering what you
have been to me, it was natural enough.  But will
helped me through it--though perhaps you think me a
humbug for saying it--and immediately afterwards I felt
that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty
and desire to save from the wrath to come--sneer if you
like--the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was
that person.  I have come with that sole purpose in
view--nothing more."

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of
rejoinder: "Have you saved yourself?  Charity begins at
home, they say."

"I have done nothing!" said he indifferently.
"Heaven, as I have been telling my hearers, has done all.
No amount of contempt that you can pour upon me, Tess,
will equal what I have poured upon myself--the old Adam
of my former years! Well, it is a strange story;
believe it or not; but I can tell you the means by
which my conversion was brought about, and I hope you
will be interested enough at least to listen. Have you
ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster--you
must have done do?--old Mr Clare; one of the most
earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left
in the Church; not so intense as the extreme wind of
Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot,
but quite an exception among the Established clergy,
the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the true
doctrines by their sophistries, till they are but the
shadow of what they were. I only differ from him on the
question of Church and State--the interpretation of
the text, 'Come out from among them and be ye separate,
saith the Lord'--that's all. He is one who, I firmly
believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls
in this country than any other man you can name. You
have heard of him?"

"I have," she said.

"He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach
on behalf of some missionary society; and I, wretched
fellow that I was, insulted him when, in his
disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show
me the way.  He did not resent my conduct, he simply
said that some day I should receive the first-fruits of
the Spirit--that those who came to scoff sometimes
remained to pray.  There was a strange magic in his
words.  They sank into my mind.  But the loss of my
mother hit me most; and by degrees I was brought to see
daylight.  Since then my one desire has been to hand on
the true view to others, and that is what I was trying
to do today; though it is only lately that I have
preached hereabout.  The first months of my ministry
have been spent in the North of England among
strangers, where I preferred to make my earliest clumsy
attempts, so as to acquire courage before undergoing
that severest of all tests of one's sincerity,
addressing those who have known one, and have been
one's companions in the days of darkness.  If you could
only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at
yourself, I am sure----"

"Don't go on with it!" she cried passionately, as she
turned away from him to a stile by the wayside, on
which she bent herself.  "I can't believe in such
sudden things!  I feel indignant with you for talking
to me like this, when you know--when you know what harm
you've done me!  You, and those like you, take your
fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as
me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine
thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of
securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
Out upon such--I don't believe in you--I hate it!"

"Tess," he insisted; "don't speak so!  It came to me
like a jolly new idea!  And you don't believe me?  What
don't you believe?"

"Your conversion.  Your scheme of religion."

"Why?"

She dropped her voice.  "Because a better man than you
does not believe in such."

"What a woman's reason!  Who is this better man?"

"I cannot tell you."

"Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words
seeming ready to spring out at a moment's notice, "God
forbid that I should say I am a good man--and you know
I don't say any such thing.  I am new to goodness,
truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes."

"Yes," she replied sadly.  "But I cannot believe in
your conversion to a new spirit.  Such flashes as you
feel, Alec, I fear don't last!"

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she
had been leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes,
falling casually upon the familiar countenance and
form, remained contemplating her.  The inferior man was
quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor
even entirely subdued.

"Don't look at me like that!" he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and
mien, instantly withdrew the large dark gaze of her
eyes, stammering with a flush, "I beg your pardon!"
And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment
which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting
the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed
her she was somehow doing wrong.

"No, no!  Don't beg my pardon.  But since you wear a
veil to hide your good looks, why don't you keep it
down?"

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, "It was
mostly to keep off the wind."

"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went
on; "but it is better that I should not look too often
on you. It might be dangerous."

"Ssh!" said Tess.

"Well, women's faces have had too much power over me
already for me not to fear them!  An evangelist has
nothing to do with such as they; and it reminds me of
the old times that I would forget!"

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual
remark now and then as they rambled onward, Tess
inwardly wondering how far he was going with her, and
not liking to send him back by positive mandate.
Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found
painted thereon in red or blue letters some text of
Scripture, and she asked him if he knew who had been at
the pains to blazon these announcements.  He told her
that the man was employed by himself and others who
were working with him in that district, to paint these
reminders that no means might be left untried which
might move the hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called
"Cross-in-Hand." Of all spots on the bleached and
desolate upland this was the most forlorn.  It was so
far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape
by artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of
beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone.  The place
took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a
strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any
local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.
Differing accounts were given of its history and
purport.  Some authorities stated that a devotional
cross had once formed the complete erection thereon, of
which the present relic was but the stump; others that
the stone as it stood was entire, and that it had been
fixed there to mark a boundary or place of meeting.
Anyhow, whatever the origin of the relic, there was and
is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in
the scene amid which it stands; something tending to
impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.

"I think I must leave you now," he remarked, as they
drew near to this spot.  "I have to preach at
Abbot's-Cernel at six this evening, and my way lies
across to the right from here.  And you upset me
somewhat too, Tessy--I cannot, will not, say why.
I must go away and get strength. ... How is it that you
speak so fluently now?  Who has taught you such good
English?"

"I have learnt things in my troubles," she said
evasively.

"What troubles have you had?"

She told him of the first one--the only one that
related to him.

D'Urberville was struck mute.  "I knew nothing of this
till now!" he next murmured.  "Why didn't you write to
me when you felt your trouble coming on?"

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding:
"Well--you will see me again."

"No," she answered.  "Do not again come near me!"
"I will think.  But before we part come here."
He stepped up to the pillar.  "This was once a Holy Cross.
Relics are not in my creed; but I fear you at moments--far
more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my
fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear
that you will never tempt me--by your charms or ways."

"Good God--how can you ask what is so unnecessary!
All that is furthest from my thought!"

"Yes--but swear it."

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity;
placed her hand upon the stone and swore.

"I am sorry you are not a believer," he continued;
"that some unbeliever should have got hold of you and
unsettled your mind.  But no more now.  At home at
least I can pray for you; and I will; and who knows
what may not happen?  I'm off. Goodbye!"

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge, and without
letting his eyes again rest upon her leapt over, and
struck out across the down in the direction of
Abbot's-Cernel.  As he walked his pace showed
perturbation, and by-and-by, as if instigated by a
former thought, he drew from his pocket a small book,
between the leaves of which was folded a letter, worn
and soiled, as from much re-reading.  D'Urberville
opened the letter.  It was dated several months before
this time, and was signed by Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned
joy at d'Urberville's conversion, and thanked him for
his kindness in communicating with the parson on the
subject.  It expressed Mr Clare's warm assurance of
forgiveness for d'Urberville's former conduct, and his
interest in the young man's plans for the future.  He,
Mr Clare, would much have liked to see d'Urberville in
the Church to whose ministry he had devoted so many
years of his own life, and would have helped him to
enter a theological college to that end; but since his
correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on
account of the delay it would have entailed, he was not
the man to insist upon its paramount importance.  Every
man must work as he could best work, and in the method
towards which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed
to quiz himself cynically. He also read some passages
from memoranda as he walked till his face assumed a
calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer
troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by
which lay her nearest way home.  Within the distance of
a mile she met a solitary shepherd.

"What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?"
she asked of him.  "Was it ever a Holy Cross?"

"Cross--no; 'twer not a cross!  "Tis a thing of
ill-omen, Miss.  It was put up in wuld times by the
relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by
nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung.  The
bones lie underneath.  They say he sold his soul to the
devil, and that he walks at times."

She felt the PETIT MORT at this unexpectedly gruesome
information, and left the solitary man behind her.  It
was dusk when she drew near to Flintcomb-Ash, and in
the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she approached a
girl and her lover without their observing her.  They
were talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned
voice of the young woman, in response to the warmer
accents of the man, spread into the chilly air as the
one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a
stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded.
For a moment the voices cheered the heart of Tess, till
she reasoned that this interview had its origin, on one
side or the other, in the same attraction which had
been the prelude to her own tribulation.  When she came
close the girl turned serenely and recognized her, the
young man walking off in embarrassment.  The woman was
Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess's excursion
immediately superseded her own proceedings.  Tess did
not explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was
a girl of tact, began to speak of her own little
affair, a phase of which Tess had just witnessed.

"He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes
come and help at Talbothays," she explained
indifferently.  "He actually inquired and found out
that I had come here, and has followed me.  He says
he's been in love wi' me these two years.  But I've
hardly answered him."



XLVI


Several days had passed since her futile journey, and
Tess was afield.  The dry winter wind still blew, but a
screen of thatched hurdles erected in the eye of the
blast kept its force away from her.  On the sheltered
side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue
hue of new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise
subdued scene.  Opposite its front was a long mound or
"grave", in which the roots had been preserved since
early winter.  Tess was standing at the uncovered end,
chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from
each root, and throwing it after the operation into the
slicer.  A man was turning the handle of the machine,
and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes, the
fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by
the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish of
the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in
Tess's leather-gloved hand.

The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness,
apparent where the swedes had been pulled, was
beginning to be striped in wales of darker brown,
gradually broadening to ribands.  Along the edge of
each of these something crept upon ten legs, moving
without haste and without rest up and down the whole
length of the field; it was two horses and a man, the
plough going between them, turning up the cleared
ground for a spring sowing.

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of
things. Then, far beyond the ploughing-teams, a black
speck was seen.  It had come from the corner of a
fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up
the incline, towards the swede-cutters.  From the
proportions of a mere point it advanced to the shape of
a ninepin, and was soon perceived to be a man in black,
arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash.  The man
at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes,
continually observed the comer, but Tess, who was
occupied, did not perceived him till her companion
directed her attention to his approach.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was
one in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented
what had once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville.
Not being hot at his preaching there was less
enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the
grinder seemed to embarrass him.  A pale distress was
already on Tess's face, and she pulled her curtained
hood further over it.

D'Urberville came up and said quietly----

"I want to speak to you, Tess."

"You have refused my last request, not to come near
me!" said she.

"Yes, but I have a good reason."

"Well, tell it."

"It is more serious than you may think."

He glanced round to see if he were overheard.  They
were at some distance from the man who turned the
slicer, and the movement of the machine, too,
sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other
ears.  D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess
from the labourer, turning his back to the latter.

"It is this," he continued, with capricious
compunction.  "In thinking of your soul and mine when
we last met, I neglected to inquire as to your worldly
condition.  You were well dressed, and I did not think
of it.  But I see now that it is hard--harder than it
used to be when I--knew you--harder than you deserve.
Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to me!"

She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as,
with bent head, her face completely screened by the
hood, she resumed her trimming of the swedes.  By going
on with her work she felt better able to keep him
outside her emotions.

"Tess," he added, with a sigh of discontent,--"yours
was the very worst case I ever was concerned in!  I had
no idea of what had resulted till you told me.  Scamp
that I was to foul that innocent life!  The whole blame
was mine--the whole unconventional business of our time
at Trantridge.  You, too, the real blood of which I am
but the base imitation, what a blind young thing you
were as to possibilities!  I say in all earnestness
that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls
in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that
the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a
good one or the result of simple indifference."

Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one
globular root and taking up another with automatic
regularity, the pensive contour of the mere fieldwoman
alone marking her.

"But it is not that I came to say," d'Urberville went
on. "My circumstances are these.  I have lost my mother
since you were at Trantridge, and the place is my own.
But I intend to sell it, and devote myself to
missionary work in Africa.  A devil of a poor hand I
shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want
to ask you is, will you put it in my power to do my
duty--to make the only reparation I can make for the
trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go
with me? ... I have already obtained this precious
document.  It was my old mother's dying wish."

He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a
slight fumbling of embarrassment.

"What is it?" said she.

"A marriage licence."

"O no, sir--no!" she said quickly, starting back.

"You will not?  Why is that?"

And as he asked the question a disappointment which was
not entirely the disappointment of thwarted duty
crossed d'Urberville's face.  It was unmistakably a
symptom that something of his old passion for her had
been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

"Surely," he began again, in more impetuous tones, and
then looked round at the labourer who turned the
slicer.

Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended
there. Informing the man that a gentleman had come to
see her, with whom she wished to walk a little way, she
moved off with d'Urberville across the zebra-striped
field.  When they reached the first newly-ploughed
section he held out his hand to help her over it; but
she stepped forward on the summits of the earth-rolls
as if she did not see him.

"You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a
self-respecting man?" he repeated, as soon as they were
over the furrows.

"I cannot."

"But why?"

"You know I have no affection for you."

"But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps--as
soon as you really could forgive me?"

"Never!"

"Why so positive?"

"I love somebody else."

The words seemed to astonish him.

"You do?" he cried.  "Somebody else?  But has not a
sense of what is morally right and proper any weight
with you?"

"No, no, no--don't say that!"

"Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only
a passing feeling which you will overcome----"

"No--no."

"Yes, yes!  Why not?"

"I cannot tell you."

"You must in honour!"

"Well then ... I have married him."

"Ah!" he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at
her.

"I did not wish to tell--I did not mean to!" she
pleaded. "It is a secret here, or at any rate but dimly
known.  So will you, PLEASE will you, keep from
questioning me?  You must remember that we are now
strangers."

"Strangers--are we?  Strangers!"

For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face;
but he determinedly chastened it down.

"Is that man your husband?" he asked mechanically,
denoting by a sign the labourer who turned the machine.

"That man!" she said proudly.  "I should think not!"

"Who, then?"

"Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!" she begged,
and flashed her appeal to him from her upturned face
and lash-shadowed eyes.

D'Urberville was disturbed.

"But I only asked for your sake!" he retorted hotly.
"Angels of heaven!--God forgive me for such an
expression--I came here, I swear, as I thought for your
good.  Tess--don't look at me so--I cannot stand your
looks!  There never were such eyes, surely, before
Christianity or since!  There--I won't lose my head;
I dare not.  I own that the sight of you had waked up my
love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished with
all such feelings.  But I thought that our marriage
might be a sanctification for us both.  'The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband', I said
to myself.  But my plan is dashed from me; and I must
bear the disappointment!"

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

"Married.  Married! ... Well, that being so," he added,
quite calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves
and putting them in his pocket; "that being prevented,
I should like to do some good to you and your husband,
whoever he may be. There are many questions that I am
tempted to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in
opposition to your wishes. Though, if I could know your
husband, I might more easily benefit him and you.
Is he on this farm?"

"No," she murmured.  "He is far away."

"Far away?  From YOU?  What sort of husband can he be?"

"O, do not speak against him!  It was through you!  He
found out----"

"Ah, is it so! ... That's sad, Tess!"

"Yes."

"But to stay away from you--to leave you to work like
this!"

"He does not leave me to work!" she cried, springing to
the defence of the absent one with all her fervour.
"He don't know it!  It is by my own arrangement."

"Then, does he write?"

"I--I cannot tell you.  There are things which are
private to ourselves."

"Of course that means that he does not.  You are a
deserted wife, my fair Tess----"

In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the
buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough
leather fingers which did not express the life or shape
of those within.

"You must not--you must not!" she cried fearfully,
slipping her hand from the glove as from a pocket, and
leaving it in his grasp.  "O, will you go away--for the
sake of me and my husband--go, in the name of your own
Christianity!"

"Yes, yes; I will," he said abruptly, and thrusting the
glove back to her he turned to leave.  Facing round,
however, he said, "Tess, as God is my judge, I meant no
humbug in taking your hand!"

A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which
they had not noticed in their preoccupation, ceased
close behind them; and a voice reached her ear:

"What the devil are you doing away from your work at
this time o' day?"

Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the
distance, and had inquisitively ridden across, to learn
what was their business in his field.

"Don't speak like that to her!" said d'Urberville, his
face blackening with something that was not
Christianity.

"Indeed, Mister!  And what mid Methodist pa'sons have
to do with she?"

"Who is the fellow?" asked d'Urberville, turning to
Tess.

She went close up to him.

"Go--I do beg you!" she said.

"What!  And leave you to that tyrant?  I can see in his
face what a churl he is."

"He won't hurt me.  HE'S not in love with me.  I can
leave at Lady-Day."

"Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose.
But--well, goodbye!"

Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant,
having reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued
his reprimand, which Tess took with the greatest
coolness, that sort of attack being independent of sex.
To have as a master this man of stone, who would have
cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after
her former experiences.  She silently walked back
towards the summit of the field that was the scene of
her labour, so absorbed in the interview which had just
taken place that she was hardly aware that the nose of
Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders.

"If so be you make an agreement to work for me till
Lady-Day, I'll see that you carry it out," he growled.
"'Od rot the women--now 'tis one thing, and then 'tis
another.  But I'll put up with it no longer!"

Knowing very well that he did not harass the other
women of the farm as he harassed her out of spite for
the flooring he had once received, she did for one
moment picture what might have been the result if she
had been free to accept the offer just made her of
being the monied Alec's wife.  It would have lifted her
completely out of subjection, not only to her present
oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to
despise her.  "But no, no!" she said breathlessly; "I
could not have married him now!  He is so unpleasant to
me."

That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare,
concealing from him her hardships, and assuring him of
her undying affection.  Any one who had been in a
position to read between the lines would have seen that
at the back of her great love was some monstrous
fear--almost a desperation--as to some secret
contingencies which were not disclosed.  But again she
did not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go
with him, and perhaps he did not care for her at all.
She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would
ever reach Angel's hands.

After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily
enough, and brought on the day which was of great
import to agriculturists--the day of the Candlemas
Fair.  It was at this fair that new engagements were
entered into for the twelve months following the
ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the farming population
who thought of changing their places duly attended at
the county-town where the fair was held.  Nearly all
the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended flight,
and early in the morning there was a general exodus in
the direction of the town, which lay at a distance of
from ten to a dozen miles over hilly country.  Though
Tess also meant to leave at the quarter-day she was one
of the few who did not go to the fair, having a
vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to
render another outdoor engagement unnecessary.

It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness
for the time, and one would almost have thought that
winter was over. She had hardly finished her dinner
when d'Urberville's figure darkened the window of the
cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to
herself today.

Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the
door, and she could hardly in reason run away.
D'Urberville's knock, his walk up to the door, had some
indescribable quality of difference from his air when
she last saw him.  They seemed to be acts of which the
doer was ashamed.  She thought that she would not open
the door; but, as there was no sense in that either,
she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped back
quickly.  He came in, saw her, and flung himself down
into a chair before speaking.

"Tess--I couldn't help it!" he began desperately, as he
wiped his heated face, which had also a superimposed
flush of excitement. "I felt that I must call at least
to ask how you are.  I assure you I had not been
thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now
I cannot get rid of your image, try how I may!  It is
hard that a good woman should do harm to a bad man; yet
so it is.  If you would only pray for me, Tess!"

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost
pitiable, and yet Tess did not pity him.

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am
forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the
world would alter His plans on my account?"

"You really think that?"

"Yes.  I have been cured of the presumption of thinking
otherwise."

"Cured?  By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

"Ah--your husband--your husband!  How strange it seems!
I remember you hinted something of the sort the other
day.  What do you really believe in these matters,
Tess?" he asked.  "You seem to have no
religion--perhaps owing to me."

"But I have.  Though I don't believe in anything
supernatural."

D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

"Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?"

"A good deal of it."

"H'm--and yet I've felt so sure about it," he said
uneasily.

"I believe in the SPIRIT of the Sermon on the Mount,
and so did my dear husband....But I don't believe-----"

Here she gave her negations.

"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your
dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he
rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or
reasoning on your own part. That's just like you women.
Your mind is enslaved to his."

"Ah, because he knew everything!" said she, with a
triumphant simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the
most perfect man could hardly have deserved, much less
her husband.

"Yes, but you should not take negative opinions
wholesale from another person like that.  A pretty
fellow he must be to teach you such scepticism!"

"He never forced my judgement!  He would never argue on
the subject with me!  But I looked at it in this way;
what he believed, after inquiring deep into doctrines,
was much more likely to be right than what I might
believe, who hadn't looked into doctrines at all."

"What used he to say?  He must have said something?"

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter
of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not
comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless
polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as
it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of
thinking aloud with her at his side.  In delivering it
she gave also Clare's accent and manner with
reverential faithfulness.

"Say that again," asked d'Urberville, who had listened
with the greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville
thoughtfully murmured the words after her.

"Anything else?" he presently asked.

"He said at another time something like this"; and she
gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled
in many a work of the pedigree ranging from the
DICTIONNAIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE to Huxley's ESSAYS.

"Ah--ha!  How do you remember them?"

"I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't
wish me to; and I managed to coax him to tell me a few
of his thoughts. I can't say I quite understand that
one; but I know it is right."

"H'm.  Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't
know yourself!"

He fell into thought. "And so I threw in my spiritual
lot with his," she resumed.  "I didn't wish it to be
different.  What's good enough for him is good enough
for me."

"Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?"

"No--I never told him--if I am an infidel."

"Well--you are better off today that I am, Tess, after
all!  You don't believe that you ought to preach my
doctrine, and, therefore, do no despite to your
conscience in abstaining.  I do believe I ought to
preach it, but like the devils I believe and tremble,
for I suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to
my passion for you."

"How?"

"Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to
see you today!  But I started from home to go to
Casterbridge Fair, where I have undertaken to preach
the Word from a waggon at half-past two this afternoon,
and where all the brethren are expecting me this
minute.  Here's the announcement."

He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was
printed the day, hour, and place of meeting, at which
he, d'Urberville, would preach the Gospel as aforesaid.

"But how can you get there?" said Tess, looking at the
clock.

"I cannot get there!  I have come here."

"What, you have really arranged to preach, and----"

"I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be
there--by reason of my burning desire to see a woman
whom I once despised!--No, by my word and truth, I
never despised you; if I had I should not love you now!
Why I did not despise you was on account of your being
unsmirched in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from
me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the
situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there
was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no
contempt, and you are she.  But you may well despise me
now!  I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I
find I still serve in the groves! Ha! ha!"

"O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean?  What have I
done!"

"Done?" he said, with a soulless sneer in the word.
"Nothing intentionally.  But you have been the
means--the innocent means--of my backsliding, as they
call it.  I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those
'servants of corruption' who, 'after they have escaped
the pollutions of the world, are again entangled
therein and overcome'--whose latter end is worse than
their beginning?" He laid his hand on her shoulder.
"Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social
salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly
shaking her, as if she were a child.  "And why then
have you tempted me?  I was firm as a man could be till
I saw those eyes and that mouth again--surely there
never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!"  His
voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black
eyes.  "You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of
Babylon--I could not resist you as soon as I met you
again!"

"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess,
recoiling.

"I know it--I repeat that I do not blame you.  But the
fact remains.  When I saw you ill-used on the farm that
day I was nearly mad to think that I had no legal right
to protect you--that I could not have it; whilst he
who has it seemed to neglect you utterly!"

"Don't speak against him--he is absent!" she cried in
much excitement.  "Treat him honourably--he has never
wronged you!  O leave his wife before any scandal
spreads that may do harm to his honest name!"

"I will--I will," he said, like a man awakening from a
luring dream.  "I have broken my engagement to preach
to those poor drunken boobies at the fair--it is the
first time I have played such a practical joke.  A
month ago I should have been horrified at such a
possibility.  I'll go away--to swear--and--ah, can I!
to keep away."  Then, suddenly: "One clasp, Tessy--one!
Only for old friendship-----"

"I am without defence. Alec!  A good man's honour is in
my keeping--think--be ashamed!"

"Pooh!  Well, yes--yes!"

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his
weakness. His eyes were equally barren of worldly and
religious faith.  The corpses of those old fitful
passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his
face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come
together as in a resurrection.  He went out
indeterminately.

Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of
his engagement today was the simple backsliding of a
believer, Tess's words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had
made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so
after he had left her.  He moved on in silence, as if
his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of
possibility that his position was untenable.  Reason
had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion,
which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in
search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by
his mother's death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of
his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to
stagnation.  He said to himself, as he pondered again
and again over the crystallized phrases that she had
handed on to him, "That clever fellow little thought
that, by telling her those things, he might be paving
my way back to her!"



XLVII


It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at
Flintcomb-Ash farm. The dawn of the March morning is
singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show
where the eastern horizon lies.  Against the twilight
rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood
forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the
wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of
operations only a rustling denoted that others had
preceded them; to which, as the light increased, there
were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the
summit.  They were busily "unhaling" the rick, that is,
stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down
the sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and
Tess, with the other women-workers, in their
whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering,
Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on the
spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the
end of the day.  Close under the eaves of the stack,
and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the
women had come to serve--a timber-framed construction,
with straps and wheels appertaining--the
threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a
despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and
nerves. A little way off there was another indistinct
figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that
spoke of strength very much in reserve.  The long
chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth
which radiated from the spot, explained without the
necessity of much daylight that here was the engine
which was to act as the PRIMUM MOBILE of this little
world.  By the engine stood a dark motionless being, a
sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of
trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the
engineman.  The isolation of his manner and colour lent
him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had
strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region
of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had
nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its
aborigines.

What he looked he felt.  He was in the agricultural
world, but not of it.  He served fire and smoke; these
denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather,
frost, and sun.  He travelled with his engine from farm
to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam
threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.
He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts
being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron
charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and
caring for them not at all: holding only strictly
necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some
ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his
will in the service of his Plutonic master.  The long
strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to
the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line
between agriculture and him.

While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic
beside his portable repository of force, round whose
hot blackness the morning air quivered.  He had nothing
to do with preparatory labour.  His fire was waiting
incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few
seconds he could make the long strap move at an
invisible velocity.  Beyond its extent the environment
might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the same to
him.  If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what
he called himself, he replied shortly, "an engineer."

The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then
took their places, the women mounted, and the work
began.  Farmer Groby--or, as they called him, "he"--had
arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on
the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed
it, her business being to untie every sheaf of corn
handed on to her by Izz Huett, who stood next, but on
the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and spread
it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every
grain in one moment.  They were soon in full progress,
after a preparatory hitch or two, which rejoiced the
hearts of those who hated machinery.  The work sped on
till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for
half an hour; and on starting again after the meal the
whole supplementary strength of the farm was thrown
into the labour of constructing the straw-rick, which
began to grow beside the stack of corn.  A hasty lunch
was eaten as they stood, without leaving their
positions, and then another couple of hours brought
them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheel
continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the
thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near
the revolving wire-cage.

The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past
days when they had been accustomed to thresh with
flails on the oaken barn-door; when everything, even
to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to
their thinking, though slow, produced better results.
Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the
perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could
not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words.
It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so
severely, and began to make her wish that she had never
some to Flintcomb-Ash.  The women on the
corn-rick--Marian, who was one of them, in
particular--could stop to drink ale or cold tea from
the flagon now and then, or to exchange a few gossiping
remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the
fragments of straw and husk from their clothing; but
for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never
stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she,
who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could
not stop either, unless Marian changed places with her,
which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of
Groby's objections that she was too slow-handed for a
feeder.

For some probably economical reason it was usually a
woman who was chosen for this particular duty, and
Groby gave as his motive in selecting Tess that she was
one of those who best combined strength with quickness
in untying, and both with staying power, and this may
have been true.  The hum of the thresher, which
prevented speech, increased to a raving whenever the
supply of corn fell short of the regular quantity.  As
Tess and the man who fed could never turn their heads
she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a
person had come silently into the field by the gate,
and had been standing under a second rick watching the
scene, and Tess in particular.  He was dressed in a
tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay
walking-cane.

"Who is that?" said Izz Huett to Marian.  She had at
first addressed the inquiry to Tess, but the latter
could not hear it.

"Somebody's fancy-man, I s'pose," said Marian
laconically.

"I'll lay a guinea he's after Tess."

"O no.  'Tis a ranter pa'son who's been sniffing after
her lately; not a dandy like this."

"Well--this is the same man."

"The same man as the preacher?  But he's quite
different!"

"He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher,
and hev cut off his whiskers; but he's the same man for
all that."

"D'ye really think so?  Then I'll tell her," said
Marian.

"Don't.  She'll see him soon enough, good-now."

"Well. I don't think it at all right for him to join
his preaching to courting a married woman, even though
her husband mid be abroad, and she, in a sense, a
widow."

"Oh--he can do her no harm," said Izz drily.  "Her mind
can no more be heaved from that one place where it do
bide than a stooded waggon from the hole he's in.  Lord
love 'ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching, nor the
seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when
'twould be better for her that she should be weaned."

Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon
Tess left her post, her knees trembling so wretchedly
with the shaking of the machine that she could scarcely
walk.

"You ought to het a quart o' drink into 'ee, as I've
done," said Marian.  "You wouldn't look so white then.
Why, souls above us, your face is as if you'd been
hagrode!"

It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess
was so tired, her discovery of her visitor's presence
might have the bad effect of taking away her appetite;
and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend by
a ladder on the further side of the stack when the
gentleman came forward and looked up.

Tess uttered a short little "Oh!"  And a moment after
she said, quickly, "I shall eat my dinner here--right
on the rick."

Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages,
they all did this; but as there was rather a keen wind
going today, Marian and the rest descended, and sat
under the straw-stack.  The newcomer was, indeed, Alec
d'Urberville, the late Evangelist, despite his changed
attire and aspect.  It was obvious at a glance that the
original WELTLUST had come back; that he had restored
himself, as nearly as a man could do who had grown
three or four years older, to the old jaunty, slapdash
guise under which Tess had first known her admirer, and
cousin so-called.  Having decided to remain where she
was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight of
the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by, she
heard footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after
Alec appeared upon the stack--now an oblong and level
platform of sheaves.  He strode across them, and sat
down opposite of her without a word.

Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of
thick pancake which she had brought with her.  The
other workfolk were by this time all gathered under the
rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable
retreat.

"I am here again, as you see," said d'Urberville.

"Why do you trouble me so!" she cried, reproach
flashing from her very finger-ends.

"I trouble YOU?  I think I may ask, why do you trouble
me?"

"Sure, I don't trouble you any-when!"

"You say you don't?  But you do!  You haunt me.  Those
very eyes that you turned upon my with such a bitter
flash a moment ago, they come to me just as you showed
them then, in the night and in the day!  Tess, ever
since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as
if my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong
puritanical stream, had suddenly found a way open in
the direction of you, and had all at once gushed
through.  The religious channel is left dry forthwith;
and it is you who have done it!"

She gazed in silence.

"What--you have given up your preaching entirely?" she
asked.  She had gathered from Angel sufficient of the
incredulity of modern thought to despise flash
enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was somewhat appalled.

In affected severity d'Urberville continued--

"Entirely.  I have broken every engagement since that
afternoon I was to address the drunkards at
Casterbridge Fair.  The deuce only knows what I am
thought of by the brethren.  Ah-ha!  The brethren! No
doubt they pray for me--weep for me; for they are kind
people in their way.  But what do I care?  How could I
go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in
it?--it would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind!
Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus and
Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they
might learn not to blaspheme.  What a grand revenge you
have taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you.
Four years after, you find me a Christian enthusiast;
you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete
perdition!  But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you,
this is only my way of talking, and you must not look
so horribly concerned.  Of course you have done nothing
except retain your pretty face and shapely figure.
I saw it on the rick before you saw me--that tight
pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet--you
field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish
to keep out of danger." He regarded her silently for a
few moments, and with a short cynical laugh resumed:
"I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I
thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face,
he would have let go the plough for her sake as I do!"

Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all
her fluency failed her, and without heeding he added:

"Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good
as any other, after all.  But to speak seriously.
Tess."  D'Urberville rose and came nearer, reclining
sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon his elbow.
"Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what you
said that HE said.  I have come to the conclusion that
there does seem rather a want of common-sense in these
threadbare old propositions; how I could have been so
fired by poor Parson Clare's enthusiasm, and have gone
so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make
out! As for what you said last time, on the strength of
your wonderful husband's intelligence--whose name you
have never told me--about having what they call an
ethical system without any dogma, I don't see my way to
that at all."

"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and
purity at least, if you can't have--what do you call
it--dogma."

"O no!  I'm a different sort of fellow from that!  If
there's nobody to say, 'Do this, and it will be a good
thing for you after you are dead; do that, and if will
be a bad thing for you,' I can't warm up.  Hang it, I
am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and
passions if there's nobody to be responsible to; and if
I were you, my dear, I wouldn't either!"

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in
his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which
in the primitive days of mankind had been quite
distinct.  But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her
absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of
emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on.
"Well, never mind," he resumed.  "Here I am, my love,
as in the old times!"

"Not as then--never as then--'tis different!" she
entreated.  "And there was never warmth with me!
O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has
brought you to speak to me like this!"

"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be
upon your sweet head!  Your husband little thought how
his teaching would recoil upon him!  Ha-ha--I'm awfully
glad you have made an apostate of me all the same!
Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity
you too.  For all your closeness, I see you are in a
bad way--neglected by one who ought to cherish you."

She could not get her morsels of food down her throat;
her lips were dry, and she was ready to choke.  The
voices and laughs of the workfolk eating and drinking
under the rick came to her as if they were a quarter of
a mile off.

"It is cruelty to me!" she said.  "How--how can you
treat me to this talk, if you care ever so little for
me?"

"True, true," he said, wincing a little.  "I did not
come to reproach you for my deeds.  I came Tess, to say
that I don't like you to be working like this, and I
have come on purpose for you. You say you have a
husband who is not I.  Well, perhaps you have; but I've
never seen him, and you've not told me his name; and
altogether he seems rather a mythological personage.
However, even if you have one, I think I am nearer to
you than he is.  I, at any rate, try to help you out of
trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face!
The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to
read come back to me.  Don't you know them, Tess?--'And
she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not
overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not
find him; then shall she say, I will go and return to
my first husband; for then was it better with me than
now!' ... Tess, my trap is waiting just under the hill,
and--darling mine, not his!--you know the rest."

Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while
he spoke; but she did not answer.

"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he
continued, stretching his arm towards her waist; "you
should be willing to share it, and leave that mule you
call husband for ever."

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to
eat her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the
slightest warning she passionately swung the glove by
the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and
thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the
mouth.  Fancy might have regarded the act as the
recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors
were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his
reclining position.  A scarlet oozing appeared where
her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began
dropping from his mouth upon the straw.  But he soon
controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from
his pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now,
punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with
the hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its
captor twists its neck.  "Whip me, crush me; you need
not mind those people under the rick!  I shall not cry
out.  Once victim, always victim--that's the law!"

"O no, no, Tess," he said blandly.  "I can make full
allowance for this.  Yet you most unjustly forget one
thing, that I would have married you if you had not put
it out of my power to do so.  Did I not ask you flatly
to be my wife--hey?  Answer me."

"You did."

"And you cannot be.  But remember one thing!"  His
voice hardened as his temper got the better of him with
the recollection of his sincerity in asking her and her
present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her side
and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook under
his grasp.  "Remember, my lady, I was your master once!
I will be your master again.  If you are any man's wife
you are mine!"

The threshers now began to stir below.

"So much for our quarrel," he said, letting her go.
"Now I shall leave you, and shall come again for your
answer during the afternoon.  You don't know me yet!
But I know you."

She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned.
D'Urberville retreated over the sheaves, and descended
the ladder, while the workers below rose and stretched
their arms, and shook down the beer they had drunk.
Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the
renewed rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position
by the buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf
after sheaf in endless succession.



XLVIII


In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick
was to be finished that night, since there was a moon
by which they could see to work, and the man with the
engine was engaged for another farm on the morrow.
Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded
with even less intermission than usual.

It was not till "nammet"-time, about three o-clock,
that Tess raised her eyes and gave a momentary glance
round.  She felt but little surprise at seeing that
Alec d'Urberville had come back, and was standing under
the hedge by the gate.  He had seen her lift her eyes,
and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a
kiss.  It meant that their quarrel was over.  Tess
looked down again, and carefully abstained from gazing
in that direction.

Thus the afternoon dragged on.  The wheat-rick shrank
lower, and the straw-rick grew higher, and the
corn-sacks were carted away. At six o'clock the
wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground.
But the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed
countless still, notwithstanding the enormous numbers
that had been gulped down by the insatiable swallower,
fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young hands
the greater part of them had passed.  And the immense
stack of straw where in the morning there had been
nothing, appeared as the FAECES of the same buzzing red
glutton.  From the west sky a wrathful shine--all that
wild March could afford in the way of sunset--had burst
forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and
sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a
coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the
women, which clung to them like dull flames.

A panting ache ran through the rick.  The man who fed
was weary, and Tess could see that the red nape of his
neck was encrusted with dirt and husks.  She still
stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face
coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet
embrowned by it.  She was the only woman whose place
was upon the machine so as to be shaken bodily by its
spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated
her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing
duties with her as they had done. The incessant
quivering, in which every fibre of her frame
participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie
in which her arms worked on independently of her
consciousness.  She hardly knew where she was, and did
not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her hair
was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow
cadaverous and saucer-eyed.  Whenever Tess lifted her
head she beheld always the great upgrown straw-stack,
with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the gray
north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a
Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed
straw ascended, a yellow river running uphill, and
spouting out on the top of the rick.

She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene,
observing her from some point or other, though she
could not say where. There was an excuse for his
remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its
final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men
unconnected with the threshing sometimes dropped in for
that performance--sporting characters of all
descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious pipes,
roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour's work before the layer of
live rats at the base of the stack would be reached;
and as the evening light in the direction of the
Giant's Hill by Abbot's-Cernel dissolved away, the
white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon
that lay towards Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the
other side.  For the last hour or two Marian had felt
uneasy about Tess, whom she could not get near enough
to speak to, the other women having kept up their
strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done without
it through traditionary dread, owing to its results at
her home in childhood.  But Tess still kept going: if
she could not fill her part she would have to leave;
and this contingency, which she would have regarded
with equanimity and even with relief a month or two
earlier, had become a terror since d'Urberville had
begun to hover round her.

The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick
so low that people on the ground could talk to them.
To Tess's surprise Farmer Groby came up on the machine
to her, and said that if she desired to join her friend
he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would
send somebody else to take her place.  The "friend" was
d'Urberville, she knew, and also that this concession
had been granted in obedience to the request of that
friend, or enemy.  She shook her head and toiled on.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the
hunt began.  The creatures had crept downwards with the
subsidence of the rick till they were all together at
the bottom, and being now uncovered from their last
refuge they ran across the open ground in all
directions, a loud shriek from the by-this-time
half-tipsy Marian informing her companions that one of
the rats had invaded her person--a terror which the
rest of the women had guarded against by various
schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation.  The rat
was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs,
masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings,
and confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last
sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she
stepped from the machine to the ground.

Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching,
was promptly at her side.

"What--after all--my insulting slap, too!" said she in
an underbreath.  She was so utterly exhausted that she
had not strength to speak louder.

"I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at
anything you say or do," he answered, in the seductive
voice of the Trantridge time.  "How the little limbs
tremble!  You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you
are; and yet you need have done nothing since I
arrived.  How could you be so obstinate?  However, I
have told the farmer that he has no right to employ
women at steam-threshing.  It is not proper work for
them; and on all the better class of farms it has been
given up, as he knows very well.  I will walk with you
as far as your home."

"O yes," she answered with a jaded gait.  "Walk wi' me
if you will!  I do bear in mind that you came to marry
me before you knew o' my state.  Perhaps--perhaps you
are a little better and kinder than I have been
thinking you were.  Whatever is meant by kindness I am
grateful for; whatever is meant in any other way I am
angered at.  I cannot sense your meaning sometimes."

"If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I
can assist you.  And I will do it with much more regard
for your feelings than I formerly showed.  My religious
mania, or whatever it was, is over.  But I retain a
little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all
that's tender and strong between man and woman, trust
me!  I have enough and more than enough to put you out
of anxiety, both for yourself and your parents and
sisters.  I can make them all comfortable if you will
only show confidence in me."

"Have you seen 'em lately?" she quickly inquired.

"Yes.  They didn't know where you were.  It was only by
chance that I found you here."

The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess's fagged face
between the twigs of the garden-hedge as she paused
outside the cottage which was her temporary home,
d'Urberville pausing beside her.

"Don't mention my little brothers and sisters--don't
make me break down quite!" she said.  "If you want to
help them--God knows they need it--do it without
telling me.  But no, no!" she cried.  "I will take
nothing from you, either for them or for me!"

He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived
with the household, all was public indoors.  No sooner
had she herself entered, laved herself in a
washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than she
fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under
the wall, by the light of her own little lamp wrote in
a passionate mood--

MY OWN HUSBAND,--Let me call you so--I must--even if it
makes you angry to think of such an unworthy wife as I.
I must cry to you in my trouble--I have no one else!  I
am so exposed to temptation, Angel.  I fear to say who
it is, and I do not like to write about it at all.  But
I cling to you in a way you cannot think!  Can you not
come to me now, at once, before anything terrible
happens?  O, I know you cannot, because you are so far
away!  I think I must die if you do not come soon, or
tell me to come to you.  The punishment you have
measured out to me is deserved--I do know that--well
deserved--and you are right and just to be angry with
me.  But, Angel, please, please, not to be just--only a
little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and
come to me!  If you would come, I could die in your
arms!  I would be well content to do that if so be you
had forgiven me!

Angel, I live entirely for you.  I love you too much to
blame you for going away, and I know it was necessary
you should find a farm.  Do not think I shall say a
word of sting or bitterness. Only come back to me.  I
am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate!  I
do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one
little line, and say, "I AM COMING SOON," I will bide
on, Angel--O, so cheerfully!

It has been so much my religion ever since we were
married to be faithful to you in every thought and
look, that even when a man speaks a compliment to me
before I am aware, it seems wronging you.  Have you
never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when
we were at the dairy?  If you have, how can you keep
away from me?  I am the same women, Angel, as you fell
in love with; yes, the very same!--not the one you
disliked but never saw. What was the past to me as soon
as I met you?  It was a dead thing altogether.  I
became another woman, filled full of new life from you.
How could I be the early one?  Why do you not see this?
Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and
believe in yourself so far as to see that you were
strong enough to work this change in me, you would
perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could
trust you always to love me!  I ought to have known
that such as that was not for poor me.  But I am sick
at heart, not only for old times, but for the present.
Think--think how it do hurt my heart not to see you
ever--ever!  Ah, if I could only make your dear heart
ache one little minute of each day as mine does every
day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to
your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel
(handsome is the word they use, since I wish to be
truthful).  Perhaps I am what they say.  But I do not
value my good looks; I only like to have them because
they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at
least one thing about me worth your having.  So much
have I felt this, that when I met with annoyance on
account of the same I tied up my face in a bandage as
long as people would believe in it.  O Angel, I tell
you all this not from vanity--you will certainly know I
do not--but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me will you let me come to
you?  I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do what I
will not do.  It cannot be that I shall yield one inch,
yet I am in terror as to what an accident might lead
to, and I so defenceless on account of my first error.
I cannot say more about this--it makes me too
miserable.  But if I break down by falling into some
fearful snare, my last state will be worse than my
first.  O God, I cannot think of it!  Let me come at
once, or at once come to me!

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your
servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could
only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of
you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not
here, and I don't like to see the rooks and starlings
in the field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you
who used to see them with me.  I long for only one
thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet
you, my own dear!  Come to me--come to me, and save me
from what threatens me!--Your faithful heartbroken

TESS



XLIX


The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of
the quiet Vicarage to the westward, in that valley
where the air is so soft and the soil so rich that the
effort of growth requires but superficial aid by
comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where
to Tess the human world seemed so different (though it
was much the same).  It was purely for security that
she had been requested by Angel to send her
communications through his father, whom he kept pretty
well informed of his changing addresses in the country
he had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy heart.

"Now," said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read
the envelope, "if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a
visit home at the end of next month, as he told us that
he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his plans; for
I believe it to be from his wife."  He breathed deeply
at the thought of her; and the letter was redirected to
be promptly sent on to Angel.

"Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely," murmured
Mrs Clare.  "To my dying day I shall feel that he had
been ill-used. You should have sent him to Cambridge in
spite of his want of faith, and given him the same
chance as the other boys had.  He would have grown out
of it under proper influence, and perhaps would have
taken Orders after all.  Church or no Church, it would
have been fairer to him."

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever
disturbed her husband's peace in respect to their sons.
And she did not vent this often; for she was as
considerate as she was devout, and knew that his mind
too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this
matter.  Only too often had she heard him lying awake
at night, stifling sighs for Angel with prayers.  But
the uncompromising Evangelical did not even now hold
that he would have been justified in giving his son, an
unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had
given to the two others, when it was possible, if not
probable, that those very advantages might have been
used to decry the doctrines which he had made it his
life's mission and desire to propagate, and the mission
of his ordained sons likewise.  To put with one hand a
pedestal under the feet of the two faithful ones, and
with the other to exalt the unfaithful by the same
artificial means, he deemed to be alike inconsistent
with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.
Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in
secret mourned over this treatment of him as Abraham
might have mourned over the doomed Isaac while they
went up the hill together.  His silent self-generated
regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which his
wife rendered audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage.  If
Angel had never been destined for a farmer he would
never have been thrown with agricultural girls.  They
did not distinctly know what had separated him and his
wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken
place.  At first they had supposed it must be something
of the nature of a serious aversion.  But in his later
letters he occasionally alluded to the intention of
coming home to fetch her; from which expressions they
hoped the division might not owe its origin to anything
so hopelessly permanent as that.  He had told them that
she was with her relatives, and in their doubts they
had decided not to intrude into a situation which they
knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were
gazing at this time on a limitless expanse of country
from the back of a mule which was bearing him from the
interior of the South-American Continent towards the
coast.  His experiences of this strange land had been
sad.  The severe illness from which he had suffered
shortly after his arrival had never wholly left him,
and he had by degrees almost decided to relinquish his
hope of farming here, though, as long as the bare
possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this
change of view a secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out
to the country in his wake, dazzled by representations
of easy independence, had suffered, died, and wasted
away.  He would see mothers from English farms trudging
along with their infants in their arms, when the child
would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother
would pause to dig a hole in the loose earth with her
bare hands, would bury the babe therein with the same
natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and again trudge
on.

Angel's original intention had not been emigration to
Brazil but a northern or eastern farm in his own
country.  He had come to this place in a fit of
desperation, the Brazil movement among the English
agriculturists having by chance coincided with his
desire to escape from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a
dozen years. What arrested him now as of value in life
was less its beauty than its pathos.  Having long
discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began
to discredit the old appraisements of morality.  He
thought they wanted readjusting.  Who was the moral
man?  Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman?
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in
its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its
true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty
judgement began to oppress him.  Did he reject her
eternally, or did he not?  He could no longer say that
he would always reject her, and not to say that was in
spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point
of time with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was
before she had felt herself at liberty to trouble him
with a word about her circumstances or her feelings.
He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to
her motives in withholding intelligence he did not
inquire.  Thus her silence of docility was
misinterpreted.  How much it really said if he had
understood!--that she adhered with literal exactness
to orders which he had given and forgotten; that
despite her natural fearlessness she asserted no
rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect
the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the
interior of the country, another man rode beside him.
Angel's companion was also an Englishman, bent on the
same errand, though he came from another part of the
island.  They were both in a state of mental
depression, and they spoke of home affairs.  Confidence
begat confidence.  With that curious tendency evinced
by men, more especially when in distant lands, to
entrust to strangers details of their lives which they
would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted
to this man as they rode along the sorrowful facts of
his marriage. The stranger had sojourned in many more
lands and among many more peoples than Angel; to his
cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social norm,
so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole
terrestrial curve.  He viewed the matter in quite a
different light from Angel; thought that what Tess had
been was of no importance beside what she would be, and
plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away
from her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm.
Angel's companion was struck down with fever, and died
by the week's end. Clare waited a few hours to bury
him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of
whom he knew absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace
name, were sublimed by his death, and influenced Clare
more than all the reasoned ethics of the philosophers.
His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.
His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood.  He had
persistently elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense
of Christianity; yet in that civilization an illegal
surrender was not certain disesteem.  Surely then he
might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact
state, which he had inherited with the creed of
mysticism, as at least open to correction when the
result was due to treachery.  A remorse struck into
him.  The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in
his memory, came back to him.  He had asked Izz if she
loved him, and she had replied in the affirmative.  Did
she love him more than Tess did?  No, she had replied;
Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself
could do no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of
the wedding. How her eyes had lingered upon him; how
she had hung upon his words as if they were a god's!
And during the terrible evening over the hearth, when
her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful
her face had looked by the rays of the fire, in her
inability to realize that his love and protection could
possibly be withdrawn.

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.
Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but
no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew
them.  The mistake of expressing them had arisen from
his allowing himself to be influenced by general
principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and
husbands have gone over the ground before today.
Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it.
Men are too often harsh with women they love or have
loved; women with men.  And yet these harshnesses are
tenderness itself when compared with the universal
harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the
position towards the temperament, of the means towards
the aims, of today towards yesterday, of hereafter
towards today.

The historic interest of her family--that masterful
line of d'Urbervilles--whom he had despised as a spent
force, touched his sentiments now.  Why had he not
known the difference between the political value and
the imaginative value of these things? In the latter
aspect her d'Urberville descent was a fact of great
dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most
useful ingredient to the dreamer, to the moralizer on
declines and falls.  It was a fact that would soon be
forgotten--that bit of distinction in poor Tess's blood
and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary
link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at
Kingsbere.  So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own
romances.  In recalling her face again and again, he
thought now that he could see therein a flash of the
dignity which must have graced her grand-dames; and the
vision sent that AURA through his veins which he had
formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of
sickness.

Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in
such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her
fellows.  Was not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim
better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's
devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded
to him by his father; though owing to his distance
inland it was to be a long time in reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would
come in response to the entreaty was alternately great
and small.  What lessened it was that the facts of her
life which had led to the parting had not
changed--could never change; and that, if her presence
had not attenuated them, her absence could not.
Nevertheless she addressed her mind to the tender
question of what she could do to please him best if he
should arrive.  Sighs were expended on the wish that
she had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his
harp, that she had inquired more curiously of him which
were his favourite ballads among those the country-
girls sang.  She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling,
who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance
Amby remembered that, amongst the snatches of melody in
which they had indulged at the dairyman's, to induce
the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed to
like "Cupid's Gardens", "I have parks, I have hounds",
and "The break o' the day"; and had seemed not to care
for "The Tailor's Breeches" and "Such a beauty I did
grow", excellent ditties as they were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire.
She practised them privately at odd moments, especially
"The break o' the day":

     Arise, arise, arise!
     And pick your love a posy,
     All o' the sweetest flowers
     That in the garden grow.
     The turtle doves and sma' birds
     In every bough a-building,
     So early in the May-time
     At the break o' the day!

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her
singing these ditties, whenever she worked apart from
the rest of the girls in this cold dry time; the tears
running down her cheeks all the while at the thought
that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her,
and the simple silly words of the songs resounding in
painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she
seemed not to know how the season was advancing; that
the days had lengthened, that Lady-Day was at hand, and
would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the end of her
term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come something
happened which made Tess think of far different
matters.  She was at her lodging as usual one evening,
sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the
family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired
for Tess.  Through the doorway she saw against the
declining light a figure with the height of a woman and
the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish creature
whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the
girl said "Tess!"

"What--is it 'Liza-Lu?" asked Tess, in startled
accents.  Her sister, whom a little over a year ago she
had left at home as a child, had sprung up by a sudden
shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as yet
Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the
meaning.  Her thin legs, visible below her once long
frock now short by her growing, and her uncomfortable
hands and arms, revealed her youth and inexperience.

"Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess," said
Lu, with unemotional gravity, "a-trying to find 'ee;
and I'm very tired."

"What is the matter at home?"

"Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she's
dying, and as father is not very well neither, and says
'tis wrong for a man of such a high family as his to
slave and drave at common labouring work, we don't know
what to do."

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of
asking 'Liza-Lu to come in and sit down.  When she had
done so, and 'Liza-Lu was having some tea, she came to
a decision.  It was imperative that she should go home.
Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth
of April, but as the interval thereto was not a long
one she resolved to run the risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but
her sister was too tired to undertake such a distance
till the morrow.  Tess ran down to where Marian and Izz
lived, informed them of what had happened, and begged
them to make the best of her case to the farmer.
Returning, she got Lu a supper, and after that, having
tucked the younger into her own bed, packed up as many
of her belongings as would go into a withy basket, and
started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.



L


She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the
clock struck ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the
steely stars. In lone districts night is a protection
rather than a danger to a noiseless pedestrian, and
knowing this Tess pursued the nearest course along
by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the
day-time; but marauders were wanting now, and spectral
fears were driven out of her mind by thoughts of her
mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile, ascending
and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about
midnight looked from that height into the abyss of
chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the
vale on whose further side she was born. Having already
traversed about five miles on the upland she had now
some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey
would be finished.  The winding road downwards became
just visible to her under the wan starlight as she
followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting
with that above it that the difference was perceptible
to the tread and to the smell.  It was the heavy clay
land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which
turnpike-roads had never penetrated.  Superstitions
linger longest on these heavy soils.  Having once been
forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert
something of its old character, the far and the near
being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the
most of its presence.  The harts that had been hunted
here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked, the
green-spangled fairies that "whickered" at you as you
passed;--the place teemed with beliefs in them still,
and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign
creaked in response to the greeting of her footsteps,
which not a human soul heard but herself.  Under the
thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld relaxed tendons
and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath
coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and
undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for
renewed labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink
nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of
lanes she had threaded, and entered Marlott, passing
the field in which as a club-girl, she had first seen
Angel Clare, when he had not danced with her; the sense
of disappointment remained with her yet.  In the
direction of her mother's house she saw a light.
It came from the bedroom window, and a branch waved in
front of it and made it wink at her.  As soon as she
could discern the outline of the house--newly thatched
with her money--it had all its old effect upon Tess's
imagination.  Part of her body and life it ever seemed
to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its
gables, the broken courses of brick which topped the
chimney, all had something in common with her personal
character.  A stupefaction had come into these
features, to her regard; it meant the illness of her
mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the
lower room was vacant, but the neighbour who was
sitting up with her mother came to the top of the
stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess
prepared herself a breakfast, and then took her place
as nurse in her mother's chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children,
they had all a curiously elongated look; although she
had been away little more than a year their growth was
astounding; and the necessity of applying herself heart
and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind,
and he sat in his chair as usual.  But the day after
her arrival he was unusually bright.  He had a rational
scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.

"I'm thinking of sending round to all the old
antiqueerians in this part of England," he said,
"asking them to subscribe to a fund to maintain me.
I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical, and
proper thing to do.  They spend lots o' money in
keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o' things,
and such like; and living remains must be more
interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed of me.
Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what
there is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of
him!  If Pa'son Tringham, who discovered me, had lived,
he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till
she had grappled with pressing matters in hand, which
seemed little improved by her remittances.  When indoor
necessities had been eased she turned her attention to
external things.  It was now the season for planting
and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the
villagers had already received their spring tillage;
but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields
were behindhand.  She found, to her dismay, that this
was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,----that last lapse of the improvident.
At the earliest moment she obtained what others she could
procure, and in a few days her father was well enough
to see to the garden, under Tess's persuasive efforts:
while she herself undertook the allotment-plot which
they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of
the village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick
chamber, where she was not now required by reason of
her mother's improvement.  Violent motion relieved
thought.  The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open
enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired
labour of the day had ended.  Digging began usually at
six o'clock, and extended indefinitely into the dusk or
moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were
burning on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring
their combustion.

One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with
their neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote
flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots.  As
soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the
couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up
the allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and
disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the
wind.  When a fire glowed, banks of smoke, blown level
along the ground, would themselves become illuminated
to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which
was a wall by day and a light by night, could be
understood.

As evening thickened some of the gardening men and
women gave over for the night, but the greater number
remained to get their planting done, Tess being among
them, though she sent her sister home.  It was on one
of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her
fork, its four shining prongs resounding against the
stones and dry clods in little clicks.  Sometimes she
was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then
it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the
brassy glare from the heap.  She was oddly dressed
tonight, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her
attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a
short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole
being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one.  The
women further back wore white aprons, which, with their
pale faces, were all that could be seen of them in the
gloom, except when at moments they caught a flash from
the flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which
formed the boundary of the field rose against the pale
opalescence of the lower sky.  Above, Jupiter hung like
a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost to throw a
shade.  A few small nondescript stars were appearing
elsewhere.  In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
occasionally rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it
was not late; and though the air was fresh and keen
there was a whisper of spring in it that cheered the
workers on.  Something in the place, the hours, the
crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there.
Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a
fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a
tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions.  The eyes of
all were on the soil as its turned surface was revealed
by the fires.  Hence as Tess stirred the clods and sang
her foolish little songs with scarce now a hope that
Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time
notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a
long smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same
plot as herself, and whom she supposed her father had
sent there to advance the work.  She became more
conscious of him when the direction of his digging
brought him closer.  Sometimes the smoke divided them;
then it swerved, and the two were visible to each other
but divided from all the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he
speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to
recollect that he had not been there when it was broad
daylight, and that she did not know him as any one of
the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her
absences having been so long and frequent of late
years.  By-and-by he dug so close to her that the
fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel
prongs of his fork as from her own.  On going up to the
fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found
that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared
up, and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness
of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was
now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the
labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as
to its bearing.  D'Urberville emitted a low long laugh.

"If I were inclined to joke I should say, How much this
seems like Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking
at her with an inclined head.

"What do you say?" she weakly asked.

"A jester might say this is just like Paradise.  You
are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you
in the disguise of an inferior animal.  I used to be
quite up in that scene of Milton's when I was
theological. Some of it goes----

     "Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
     Beyond a row of myrtles....
     ... If thou accept
     My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon."
     "Lead then," said Eve.

And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you
as a thing that you might have supposed or said quite
untruly, because you think so badly of me."

"I never said you were Satan, or thought it.  I don't
think of you in that way at all.  My thoughts of you
are quite cold, except when you affront me.  What, did
you come digging here entirely because of me?"

"Entirely.  To see you; nothing more.  The smockfrock,
which I saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an
afterthought, that I mightn't be noticed.  I come to
protest against your working like this."

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

"Your engagement at the other place is ended?"

"Yes."

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

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

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

"It is quite true--in the sense you mean.  But you have
a friend, and I have determined that you shall be
comfortable in suite of yourself.  When you get down to
your house you will see what I have sent there for
you."

"O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all!
I cannot take it from you!  I don't like--it is not
right!"

"It IS right!" he cried lightly.  "I am not going to
see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for
you, in trouble without trying to help her."

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

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears
dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.

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

Tess's heart quivered--he was touching her in a weak
place.  He had divined her chief anxiety.  Since
returning home her soul had gone out to those children
with an affection that was passionate.

"If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do
something for them; since your father will not be able
to do much, I suppose?"

"He can with my assistance.  He must!"

"And with mine."

"No, sir!" "How damned foolish this is!" burst out
d'Urberville.  "Why, he thinks we are the same family;
and will be quite satisfied!"

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

"The more fool you!"

D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge,
where he pulled off the long smockfrock which had
disguised him; and rolling it up and pushing it into
the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she
felt restless; she wondered if he had gone back to her
father's house; and taking the fork in her hand
proceeded homewards.

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

"O, Tessy--what do you think!  'Liza-Lu is a-crying,
and there's a lot of folk in the house, and mother is a
good deal better, but they think father is dead!"

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as
yet its sadness; and stood looking at Tess with
round-eyed importance, till, beholding the effect
produced upon her, she said--

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

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

'Liza-Lu came up.

"He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there
for mother said there was no chance for him, because
his heart was growed in."

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the
dying one was out of danger, and the indisposed one was
dead.  The news meant even more than it sounded.  Her
father's life had a value apart from his personal
achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much.
It was the last of the three lives for whose duration
the house and premises were held under a lease; and it
had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for his
regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage
accommodation.  Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of
in villages almost as much as little freeholders,
because of their independence of manner, and when a
lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw
descending upon them the destiny which, no doubt, when
they were among the Olympians of the county, they had
caused to descend many a time, and severely enough,
upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves
were not.  So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of
change--alternate and persist in everything under the
sky.



LI


At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the
agricultural world was in a fever of mobility such as
only occurs at that particular date of the year.  It is
a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service
during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are
to be now carried out.  The labourers--or "work-folk",
as they used to call themselves immemorially till the
other word was introduced from without--who wish to
remain no longer in old places are removing to the new
farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the
increase here.  When Tess's mother was a child the
majority of the field-folk about Marlott had remained
all their lives on one farm, which had been the home
also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly
the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high
pitch.  With the younger families it was a pleasant
excitement which might possibly be an advantage.  The
Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the
family who saw it from a distance, till by residence
there it became it turn their Egypt also; and so they
changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible
in village life did not originate entirely in the
agricultural unrest.  A depopulation was also going on.
The village had formerly contained, side by side with
the argicultural labourers, an interesting and
better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the
former--the class to which Tess's father and mother had
belonged--and including the carpenter, the smith, the
shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript
workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people who
owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact
of their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or
copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders.  But
as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again let
to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not
absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.
Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land
were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of
some starved the trade of others, who were thus obliged
to follow.  These families, who had formed the backbone
of the village life in the past who were the
depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek
refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously
designated by statisticians as "the tendency of the
rural population towards the large towns", being really
the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by
machinery.

The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in
this manner considerably curtailed by demolitions,
every house which remained standing was required by the
agriculturist for his work-people. Ever since the
occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow
over Tess's life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent
was not credited) had been tacitly looked on as one
which would have to go when their lease ended, if only
in the interests of morality.  It was, indeed, quite
true that the household had not been shining examples
either of temperance, soberness, or chastity.  The
father, and even the mother, had got drunk at times,
the younger children seldom had gone to church, and the
eldest daughter had made queer unions.  By some means
the village had to be kept pure.  So on this, the first
Lady-Day on which the Durbeyfields were expellable, the
house, being roomy, was required for a carter with a
large family; and Widow Joan, her daughters Tess and
'Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham and the younger children, had
to go elsewhere.

On the evening preceding their removal it was getting
dark betimes by reason of a drizzling rain which
blurred the sky.  As it was the last night they would
spend in the village which had been their home and
birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham had
gone out to bid some friends goodbye, and Tess was
keeping house till they should return.

She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to
the casement, where an outer pane of rain-water was
sliding down the inner pane of glass.  Her eyes rested
on the web of a spider, probably starved long ago,
which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no
flies ever came, and shivered in the slight draught
through the casement.  Tess was reflecting on the
position of the household, in which she perceived her
own evil influence.  Had she not come home her mother
and the children might probably have been allowed to
stay on as weekly tenants. But she had been observed
almost immediately on her return by some people of
scrupulous character and great influence: they had seen
her idling in the churchyard, restoring as well as she
could with a little trowel a baby's obliterated grave.
By this means they had found that she was living here
again; her mother was scolded for "harbouring" her;
sharp retorts had ensued from Joan, who had
independently offered to leave at once; she had been
taken at her word; and here was the result.

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

She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly
at first took note of a man in a white mackintosh whom
she saw riding down the street.  Possibly it was owing
to her face being near to the pane that he saw her so
quickly, and directed his horse so close to the
cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the
narrow border for plants growing under the wall.  It
was not till he touched the window with his riding-crop
that she observed him.  The rain had nearly ceased, and
she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.

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

"I was not attending," she said.  "I heard you, I
believe, though I fancied it was a carriage and horses.
I was in a sort of dream."

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

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

"If you are a genuine d'Urberville I ought not to tell
you either, I suppose.  As for me, I'm a sham one, so
it doesn't matter.  It is rather dismal. It is that
this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard
by one of d'Urberville blood, and it is held to be of
ill-omen to the one who hears it.  It has to do with a
murder, committed by one of the family, centuries ago."

"Now you have begun it, finish it."

"Very well.  One of the family is said to have abducted
some beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the
coach in which he was carrying her off, and in the
struggle he killed her--or she killed him--I forget
which.  Such is one version of the tale.... I see that
your tubs and buckets are packed.  Going away, aren't
you?"

"Yes, tomorrow--Old Lady Day."

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

"Father's was the last life on the property, and when
that dropped we had no further right to stay.  Though
we might, perhaps, have stayed as weekly tenants--if it
had not been for me."

"What about you?"

"I am not a--proper woman."

D'Urberville's face flushed.

"What a blasted shame!  Miserable snobs!  May their
dirty souls be burnt to cinders!" he exclaimed in tones
of ironic resentment. "That's why you are going, is it?
Turned out?"

"We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we
should have to go soon, it was best to go now everybody
was moving because there are better chances."

"Where are you going to?"

"Kingsbere.  We have taken rooms there.  Mother is so
foolish about father's people that she will go there."

"But your mother's family are not fit for lodgings, and
in a little hole of a town like that.  Now why not come
to my garden-house at Trantridge?  There are hardly
any poultry now, since my mother's death; but there's
the house, as you know it, and the garden.  It can be
whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there
quite comfortably; and I will put the children to a
good school.  Really I ought to do something for you!"

"But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!" she
declared. "And we can wait there----"

"Wait--what for?  For that nice husband, no doubt.  Now
look here, Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in
mind the GROUNDS of your separation, I am quite
positive he will never make it up with you.  Now,
though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even
if you won't believe it.  Come to this cottage of mine.
We'll get up a regular colony of fowls, and your mother
can attend to them excellently; and the children can go
to school."

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

"How do I know that you would do all this?  Your views
may change--and then--we should be--my mother would
be--homeless again."

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

Tess shook her head.  But d'Urberville persisted; she
had seldom seen him so determined; he would not take a
negative.

"Please just tell your mother," he said, in emphatic
tones.  "It is her business to judge--not yours.  I
shall get the house swept out and whitened tomorrow
morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the
evening, so that you can come straight there.  Now
mind, I shall expect you."

Tess again shook her head; her throat swelling with
complicated emotion.  She could not look up at
d'Urberville.

"I owe you something for the past, you know," he
resumed.  "And you cured me, too, of that craze; so I
am glad----"

"I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had
kept the practice which went with it!"

"I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a
little.  Tomorrow I shall expect to hear your mother's
goods unloading.... Give me your hand on it now--dear,
beautiful Tess!"

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a
murmur, and put his hand in at the half-open casement.
With stormy eyes she pulled the stay-bar quickly, and,
in doing so, caught his arm between the casement and
the stone mullion.

"Damnation--you are very cruel!" he said, snatching out
his arm. "No, no!--I know you didn't do it on purpose.
Well I shall expect you, or your mother and children at
least."

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

"Where?"

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

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

With these words he rode off.  Just at the corner of
the street he met the man with the paint-pot, who asked
him if he had deserted the brethren.

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

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden
rebellious sense of injustice caused the region of her
eyes to swell with the rush of hot tears thither.  Her
husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like others, dealt
out hard measure to her, surely he had!  She had never
before admitted such a thought; but he had surely!
Never in her life--she could swear it from the bottom
of her soul--had she ever intended to do wrong; yet
these hard judgements had come.  Whatever her sins,
they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence,
and why should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that
came to hand, and scribbled the following lines:


O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
not deserve it.  I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you!  You know that I
did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
me?  You are cruel, cruel indeed!  I will try to forget
you.  It is all injustice I have received at your
hands!                        T


She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him
with her epistle, and then again took her listless
place inside the window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write
tenderly.  How could he give way to entreaty?  The
facts had not changed: there was no new event to alter
his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room.
The two biggest of the younger children had gone out
with their mother; the four smallest, their ages
ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all in
black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling
their own little subjects.  Tess at length joined them,
without lighting a candle.

"This is the last night that we shall sleep here,
dears, in the house where we were born," she said
quickly.  "We ought to think of it, oughtn't we?"

They all became silent; with the impressibility of
their age they were ready to burst into tears at the
picture of finality she had conjured up, though all the
day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of a
new place.  Tess changed the subject.

"Sing to me, dears," she said.

"What shall we sing?"

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

There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, by
one little tentative note; then a second voice
strengthened it, and a third and a fourth chimed in in
unison, with words they had learnt at the
Sunday-school----

     Here we suffer grief and pain,
     Here we meet to part again;
       In Heaven we part no more.

The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of
persons who had long ago settled the question, and
there being no mistake about it, felt that further
thought was not required.  With features strained hard
to enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the
centre of the flickering fire, the notes of the
youngest straying over into the pauses of the rest.

Tess turned from them, and went to the window again.
Darkness had now fallen without, but she put her face
to the pane as though to peer into the gloom.  It was
really to hide her tears.  If she could only believe
what the children were singing; if she were only sure,
how different all would now be; how confidently she
would leave them to Providence and their future
kingdom!  But, in default of that, it behoved her to do
something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to
not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire
in the poet's lines----

                      Not in utter nakedness
     But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of
degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness
nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best
could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her
mother with tall 'Liza-Lu and Abraham.  Mrs
Durbeyfield's pattens clicked up to the door, and Tess
opened it.

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

"No," said Tess.

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

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

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

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

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

"Then who was it?"

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

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

"I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at
Kingsbere tomorrow--every word."

It was not her husband, she had said.  Yet a
consciousness that in a physical sense this man alone
was her husband seemed to weigh on her more and more.



LII


During the small hours of the next morning, while it
was still dark, dwellers near the highways were
conscious of a disturbance of their night's rest by
rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till
daylight--noises as certain to recur in this particular
first week of the month as the voice of the cuckoo in
the third week of the same.  They were the
preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of
the empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the
migrating families; for it was always by the vehicle of
the farmer who required his services that the hired man
was conveyed to his destination.  That this might be
accomplished within the day was the explanation of the
reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim
of the carters being to reach the door of the outgoing
households by six o'clock, when the loading of their
movables at once began.

But to Tess and her mother's household no such anxious
farmer sent his team.  They were only women; they were
not regular labourers; they were not particularly
required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at
their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the
window that morning, to find that though the weather
was windy and louring, it did not rain, and that the
waggon had come.  A wet Lady-Day was a spectre which
removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp
bedding, damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train
of ills.

Her mother, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but
the younger children were let sleep on.  The four
breakfasted by the thin light, and the "house-ridding"
was taken in hand.

It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly
neighbour or two assisting.  When the large articles of
furniture had been packed in position a circular nest
was made of the beds and bedding, in which Joan
Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through
the journey.  After loading there was a long delay
before the horses were brought, these having been
unharnessed during the ridding; but at length, about
two o'clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot
swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield
and family at the top, the matron having in her lap, to
prevent injury to its works, the head of the clock,
which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon, struck
one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones.  Tess and the
next eldest girl walked alongside till they were out of
the village.

They had called on a few neighbours that morning and
the previous evening, and some came to see them off,
all wishing them well, though, in their secret hearts,
hardly expecting welfare possible to such a family,
harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except
themselves.  Soon the equipage began to ascend to
higher ground, and the wind grew keener with the change
of level and soil.

The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield
waggon met many other waggons with families on the
summit of the load, which was built on a wellnigh
unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the
rural labourer as the hexagon to the bee.  The
groundwork of the arrangement was the family dresser,
which, with its shining handles, and finger-marks, and
domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly in
front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect
and natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant
that they were bound to carry reverently.

Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some
were stopping at the doors of wayside inns; where, in
due time, the Durbeyfield menagerie also drew up to
bait horses and refresh the travellers.

During the halt Tess's eyes fell upon a three-pint blue
mug, which was ascending and descending through the air
to and from the feminine section of a household,
sitting on the summit of a load that had also drawn up
at a little distance from the same inn.  She followed
one of the mug's journeys upward, and perceived it to
be clasped by hands whose owner she well knew. Tess
went towards the waggon.

"Marian and Izz!" she cried to the girls, for it was
they, sitting with the moving family at whose house
they had lodged. "Are you house-ridding today, like
everybody else?"

They were, they said.  It had been too rough a life for
them at Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost
without notice, leaving Groby to prosecute them if he
chose.  They told Tess their destination, and Tess told
them hers.

Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice.
"Do you know that the gentleman who follows 'ee--you'll
guess who I mean--came to ask for 'ee at Flintcomb
after you had gone?  We didn't tell'n where you was,
knowing you wouldn't wish to see him."

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

"And do he know where you be going?"

"I think so."

"Husband come back?"

"No."

She bade her acquaintance goodbye--for the respective
carters had now come out from the inn--and the two
waggons resumed their journey in opposite directions;
the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the
ploughman's family with whom they had thrown in their
lot, being brightly painted, and drawn by three
powerful horses with shining brass ornaments on their
harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield and
her family rode was a creaking erection that would
scarcely bear the weight of the superincumbent load;
one which had known no paint since it was made, and
drawn by two horses only.  The contrast well marked the
difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer
and conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one's
coming.

The distance was great--too great for a day's
journey--and it was with the utmost difficulty that the
horses performed it.  Though they had started so early
it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned the
flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland
called Greenhill.  While the horses stood to stale and
breathe themselves Tess looked around.  Under the hill,
and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of
their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors
of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness:
Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which
could be considered the d'Urbervilles' home, since they
had resided there for full five hundred years. A man
could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards
them, and when he beheld the nature of their
waggon-load he quickened his steps.

"You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?"
he said to Tess's mother, who had descended to walk the
remainder of the way.

She nodded.  "Though widow of the late Sir John
d'Urberville, poor nobleman, if I cared for my rights;
and returning to the domain of his forefathers."

"Oh?  Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be
Mrs Durbeyfield, I am sent to tell 'ee that the rooms
you wanted be let.  We didn't know that you was coming
till we got your letter this morning--when 'twas too
late.  But no doubt you can get other lodgings
somewhere."

The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become
ash-pale at his intelligence.  Her mother looked
hopelessly at fault. "What shall we do now, Tess?" she
said bitterly.  "Here's a welcome to your ancestors'
lands!  However, let's try further."

They moved on into the town, and tried with all their
might, Tess remaining with the waggon to take care of
the children whilst her mother and 'Liza-Lu made
inquiries.  At the last return of Joan to the vehicle,
an hour later, when her search for accommodation had
still been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the
goods must be unloaded, as the horses were half-dead,
and he was bound to return part of the way at least
that night.

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

The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a
spot screened from view, and the driver, nothing loth,
soon hauled down the poor heap of household goods.
This done she paid him, reducing herself to almost her
last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them,
only too glad to get out of further dealings with such
a family.  It was a dry night, and he guessed that they
would come to no harm.

Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture.  The
cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously
upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried
herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles
of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all
been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case,
all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor
articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless
exposure for which they were never made.  Round about
were deparked hills and slopes--now cut up into little
paddocks--and the green foundations that showed where
the d'Urberville mansion once had stood; also an
outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always
belonged to the estate.  Hard by, the aisle of the
church called the d'Urberville Aisle looked on
imperturbably.

"Isn't your family vault your own freehold?" said
Tess's mother, as she returned from a reconnoitre of
the church and graveyard. "Why, of course 'tis, and
that's where we will camp, girls, till the place of
your ancestors finds us a roof!  Now, Tess and 'Liza
and Abraham, you help me.  We'll make a nest for these
children, and then we'll have another look round."

Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an
hour the old four-post bedstead was dissociated from
the heap of goods, and erected under the south wall of
the church, the part of the building know as the
d'Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay.
Over the tester of the bedstead was a beautiful
traceried window, of many lights, its date being the
fifteenth century.  It was called the d'Urberville
Window, and in the upper part could be discerned
heraldic emblems like those on Durbeyfield's old seal
and spoon.

Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an
excellent tent of it, and put the smaller children
inside.  "If it comes to the worst we can sleep there
too, for one night," she said.  "But let us try further
on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess,
what's the use of your playing at marrying gentlemen,
if it leaves us like this!"

Accompanied by 'Liza-Lu and the boy she again ascended
the little lane which secluded the church from the
townlet.  As soon as they got into the street they
beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down.  "Ah--
I'm looking for you!" he said, riding up to them.
"This is indeed a family gathering on the historic spot!"

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

Personally Joan had no liking for Alec.  She cursorily
signified the direction of the church, and went on,
d'Urberville saying that he would see them again, in
case they should be still unsuccessful in their search
for shelter, of which he had just heard.  When they had
gone d'Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after
came out on foot.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the
bedstead, remained talking with them awhile, till,
seeing that no more could be done to make them
comfortable just then, she walked about the churchyard,
now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of
nightfall.  The door of the church was unfastened, and
she entered it for the first time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were
the tombs of the family, covering in their dates
several centuries.  They were canopied, alter-shaped,
and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken;
their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes
remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff.  Of all the
reminders that she had ever received that her people
were socially extinct there was none so forcible as
this spoliation.

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

     OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she
knew that this was the door of her ancestral sepulchre,
and that the tall knights of whom her father had
chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an
altertomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a
recumbent figure.  In the dusk she had not noticed it
before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an
odd fancy that the effigy moved.  As soon as she drew
close to it she discovered all in a moment that the
figure was a living person; and the shock to her sense
of not having been alone was so violent that she was
quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not,
however, till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in
the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

"I saw you come in," he said smiling, "and got up there
not to interrupt your meditations.  A family gathering,
is it not, with these old fellows under us here?
Listen."

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor;
whereupon there arose a hollow echo from below.

"That shook them a bit, I'll warrant!" he continued.
"And you thought I was the mere stone reproduction of
one of them.  But no.  The old order changeth.  The
little finger of the sham d'Urberville can do more for
you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath....
Now command me.  What shall I do?"

"Go away!" she murmured.

"I will--I'll look for your mother," said he blandly.
But in passing her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be
civil yet!"

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

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



In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed
onward with the chattels of the ploughman in the
direction of their land of Canaan--the Egypt of some
other family who had left it only that morning.  But
the girls did not for a long time think of where they
were going.  Their talk was of Angel Clare and Tess,
and Tess's persistent lover, whose connection with her
previous history they had partly heard and partly
guessed ere this.

"'Tisn't as though she had never known him afore," said
Marian. "His having won her once makes all the
difference in the world. 'Twould be a thousand pities
if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can never
be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to
her, and not try to mend this quarrel?  If he could
on'y know what straits she's put to, and what's
hovering round, he might come to take care of his own."

"Could we let him know?"

They thought of this all the way to their destination;
but the bustle of re-establishment in their new place
took up all their attention then.  But when they were
settled, a month later, they heard of Clare's
approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more
of Tess.  Upon that, agitated anew by their attachment
to him, yet honourably disposed to her, Marian uncorked
the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few lines were
concocted between the two girls.


HONOUR'D SIR--Look to your Wife if you do love her as
much as she do love you.  For she is sore put to by an
Enemy in the shape of a Friend.  Sir, there is one near
her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be try'd
beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear
away a Stone--ay, more--a Diamond.
FROM TWO WELL-WISHERS


This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place
they had ever heard him to be connected with, Emminster
Vicarage; after which they continued in a mood of
emotional exaltation at their own generosity, which
made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the
same time.


END OF PHASE THE SIXTH





Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment



LIII


It was evening at Emminster Vicarage.  The two
customary candles were burning under their green shades
in the Vicar's study, but he had not been sitting
there.  Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire
which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the
spring, and went out again; sometimes pausing at the
front door, going on to the drawing-room, then
returning again to the front door.

It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside,
there was still light enough without to see with
distinctness.  Mrs Clare, who had been sitting in the
drawing-room, followed him hither.

"Plenty of time yet," said the Vicar.  "He doesn't
reach Chalk-Newton till six, even if the train should
be punctual, and ten miles of country-road, five of
them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in a
hurry by our old horse."

"But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear."

"Years ago."

Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that
this was only waste of breath, the one essential being
simply to wait.

At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the
old pony-chaise appeared indeed outside the railings.
They saw alight therefrom a form which they affected to
recognize, but would actually have passed by in the
street without identifying had he not got out of their
carriage at the particular moment when a particular
person was due.

Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door,
and her husband came more slowly after her.

The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their
anxious faces in the doorway and the gleam of the west
in their spectacles because they confronted the last
rays of day; but they could only see his shape against
the light.

"O, my boy, my boy--home again at last!" cried Mrs
Clare, who cared no more at that moment for the stains
of heterodoxy which has caused all this separation than
for the dust upon his clothes.  What woman, indeed,
among the most faithful adherents of the truth,
believes the promises and threats of the Word in the
sense in which she believes in her own children, or
would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed
against their happiness?  As soon as they reached the
room where the candles were lighted she looked at his
face.

"O, it is not Angel--not my son--the Angel who went
away!" she cried in all the irony of sorrow, as she
turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was
that figure from its former contours by worry and the
bad season that Clare had experienced, in the climate
to which he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion
to the mockery of events at home.  You could see the
skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind
the skeleton.  He matched Crivelli's dead CHRISTUS.
His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue, and the light
in his eyes had waned.  The angular hollows and lines
of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in
his face twenty years before their time.

"I was ill over there, you know," he said.  "I am all
right now."

As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs
seemed to give way, and he suddenly sat down to save
himself from falling.  It was only a slight attack of
faintness, resulting from the tedious day's journey,
and the excitement of arrival.

"Has any letter come for me lately?" he asked.
"I received the last you sent on by the merest chance,
and after considerable delay through being inland;
or I might have come sooner."

"It was from your wife, we supposed?"

"It was."

Only one other had recently come.  They had not sent it
on to him, knowing he would start for home so soon.

He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much
disturbed to read in Tess's handwriting the sentiments
expressed in her last hurried scrawl to him.


O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel!  I do
not deserve it.  I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you!  You know that I
did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
me?  You are cruel, cruel indeed!  I will try to forget
you.  It is all injustice I have received at your
hands.  --  T


"It is quite true!" said Angel, throwing down the
letter. "Perhaps she will never be reconciled to me!"

"Don't, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the
soil!" said his mother.

"Child of the soil!  Well, we all are children of the
soil.  I wish she were so in the sense you mean; but
let me now explain to you what I have never explained
before, that her father is a descendant in the male
line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good
many others who lead obscure agricultural lives in our
villages, and are dubbed 'sons of the soil.'"

He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling
exceedingly unwell, he remained in his room pondering.
The circumstances amid which he had left Tess were such
that though, while on the south of the Equator and just
in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the
easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms
the moment he chose to forgive her, now that he had
arrived it was not so easy as it had seemed.  She was
passionate, and her present letter, showing that her
estimate of him had changed under his delay--too justly
changed, he sadly owned,--made him ask himself if it
would be wise to confront her unannounced in the
presence of her parents.  Supposing that her love had
indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of
separation, a sudden meeting might lead to bitter
words.

Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare
Tess and her family by sending a line to Marlott
announcing his return, and his hope that she was still
living with them there, as he had arranged for her to
do when he left England.  He despatched the inquiry
that very day, and before the week was out there came a
short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield which did not remove
his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though to
his surprise it was not written from Marlott.


SIR

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away
from me at present, and J am not sure when she will
return, but J will let you know as Soon as she do.
J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where she is
temperly biding.  J should say that me and my Family
have left Marlott for some Time.----

Yours, J. DURBEYFIELD


It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at
least apparently well that her mother's stiff reticence
as to her whereabouts did not long distress him.  They
were all angry with him, evidently.  He would wait till
Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess's return,
which her letter implied to be soon.  He deserved no
more.  His had been a love "which alters when it
alteration finds".  He had undergone some strange
experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual
Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia
in a corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman
taken and set in the midst as one deserving to be
stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen;
and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess
constructively rather than biographically, by the will
rather than by the deed?

A day or two passed while he waited at his father's
house for the promised second note from Joan
Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a little more
strength.  The strength showed signs of coming back,
but there was no sign of Joan's letter.  Then he hunted
up the old letter sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess
had written from Flintcomb-Ash, and re-read it.  The
sentences touched him now as much as when he had first
perused them.


I must cry to you in my trouble--I have no one else....
I think I must die if you do not come soon, or tell me
to come to you.... Please, please, not to be just--only
a little kind to me! ... If you would come, I could die
in your arms! I would be well content to do that if so
be you had forgiven me! ... If you will send me one
little line and say, "I AM COMING SOON," I will bide
on, Angel--O so cheerfully! ... Think how it do hurt my
heart not to see you ever--ever!  Ah, if I could only
make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day
as mine does every day and all day long.  It might lead
you to show pity to your poor lonely one....I would be
content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if
I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near
you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.
... I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or
under the earth, to meet you, my own dear!  Come to
me--come to me, and save me from what threatens me.


Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her
more recent and severer regard of him; but would go and
find her immediately.  He asked his father if she had
applied for any money during his absence.  His father
returned a negative, and then for the first time it
occurred to Angel that her pride had stood in her way,
and that she had suffered privation.  From his remarks
his parents now gathered the real reason of the
separation; and their Christianity was such that,
reprobates being their especial care, the tenderness
towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity, even her
poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited by
her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles
for his journey he glanced over a poor plain missive
also lately come to hand--the one from Marian and Izz
Huett, beginning----

"HONOUR'D SIR----Look to your Wife if you do love her
as much as she do love you," and signed, "FROM TWO
WELL-WISHERS."



LIV


In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house,
whence his mother watched his thin figure as it
disappeared into the street.  He had declined to borrow
his father's old mare, well knowing of its necessity to
the household.  He went to the inn, where he hired a
trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing.  In
a very few minutes after he was driving up the hill out
of the town which, three or four months earlier in the
year, Tess had descended with such hopes and ascended
with such shattered purposes.

Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and
trees purple with buds; but he was looking at other
things, and only recalled himself to the scene
sufficiently to enable him to keep the way.  In
something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted
the south of the King's Hintock estates and ascended to
the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand, the unholy
stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec
d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the
strange oath that she would never wilfully tempt him
again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the
preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the banks,
young green nettles of the present spring growing from
their roots.

Thence he went along the verge of the upland
overhanging the other Hintocks, and, turning to the
right, plunged into the bracing calcareous region of
Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had written
to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to
be the place of sojourn referred to by her mother.
Here, of course, he did not find her; and what added to
his depression was the discovery that no "Mrs Clare"
had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by the
farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough
by her Christian name.  His name she had obviously
never used during their separation, and her dignified
sense of their total severance was shown not much less
by this abstention than by the hardships she had chosen
to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time)
rather than apply to his father for more funds.

From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had
gone, without due notice, to the home of her parents on
the other side of Blackmoor, and it therefore became
necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield.  She had told him
she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously
reticent as to her actual address, and the only course
was to go to Marlott and inquire for it.  The farmer
who had been so churlish with Tess was quite
smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man
to drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in
being sent back to Emminster; for the limit of a day's
journey with that horse was reached.

Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle
for a further distance than to the outskirts of the
Vale, and, sending it back with the man who had driven
him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered on foot
the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's
birth.  It was as yet too early in the year for much
colour to appear in the gardens and foliage; the
so-called spring was but winter overlaid with a thin
coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his
expectations.

The house in which Tess had passed the years of her
childhood was now inhabited by another family who had
never known her.  The new residents were in the garden,
taking as much interest in their own doings as if the
homestead had never passed its primal time in
conjunction with the histories of others, beside which
the histories of these were but as a tale told by an
idiot.  They walked about the garden paths with
thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost,
bringing their actions at every moment in jarring
collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as
though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit
intenser in story than now.  Even the spring birds sang
over their heads as if they thought there was nobody
missing in particular.

On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even
the name of their predecessors was a failing memory,
Clare learned that John Durbeyfield was dead; that his
widow and children had left Marlott, declaring that
they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of
doing so had gone on to another place they mentioned.
By this time Clare abhorred the house for ceasing to
contain Tess, and hastened away from its hated presence
without once looking back.

His way was by the field in which he had first beheld
her at the dance.  It was as bad as the house--even
worse.  He passed on through the churchyard, where,
amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a somewhat
superior design to the rest.  The inscription ran thus:


  In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d'Urberville, of
  the once powerful family of that Name, and Direct
  Descendant through an illustrious Line from Sir Pagan
  d'Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror. Died
  March 10th, 18--
             HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.


Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare
standing there, and drew nigh.  "Ah, sir, now that's a
man who didn't want to lie here, but wished to be
carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be."

"And why didn't they respect his wish?"

"Oh--no money.  Bless your soul, sir, why--there,
I wouldn't wish to say it everywhere, but--even this
headstone, for all the flourish wrote upon en, is not
paid for."

"Ah, who put it up?"

The man told the name of a mason in the village, and,
on leaving the churchyard, Clare called at the mason's
house. He found that the statement was true, and paid
the bill. This done he turned in the direction of the
migrants.

The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt
such a strong desire for isolation that at first he
would neither hire a conveyance nor go to a circuitous
line of railway by which he might eventually reach the
place.  At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but
the way was such that he did not enter Joan's place
till about seven o'clock in the evening, having
traversed a distance of over twenty miles since leaving
Marlott. The village being small he had little
difficulty in finding Mrs Durbeyfield's tenement, which
was a house in a walled garden, remote from the main
road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old
furniture as best she could.  It was plain that for
some reason or other she had not wished him to visit
her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an
intrusion.  She came to the door herself, and the light
from the evening sky fell upon her face.

This was the first time that Clare had ever met her,
but he was too preoccupied to observe more than that
she was still a handsome woman, in the garb of a
respectable widow.  He was obliged to explain that he
was Tess's husband, and his object in coming there, and
he did it awkwardly enough.  "I want to see her at
once," he added.  "You said you would write to me
again, but you have not done so."

"Because she've not come home," said Joan.

"Do you know if she is well?"

"I don't.  But you ought to, sir," said she.

"I admit it.  Where is she staying?"

From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed
her embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of
her cheek.

"I--don't know exactly where she is staying," she
answered. "She was--but----"

"Where was she?"

"Well, she is not there now."

In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger
children had by this time crept to the door, where,
pulling at his mother's skirts, the youngest
murmured----

"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"

"He has married her," Joan whispered.  "Go inside."

Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked----

"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her?
If not, of course----"

"I don't think she would."

"Are you sure?"

"I am sure she wouldn't."

He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's
tender letter.

"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately.
"I know her better than you do."

"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known
her."

"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in
kindness to a lonely wretched man!" Tess's mother again
restlessly swept her cheek with her vertical hand, and
seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is a low
voice----

"She is at Sandbourne."

"Ah--where there?  Sandbourne has become a large place,
they say."

"I don't know more particularly than I have said--
Sandbourne.  For myself, I was never there."

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and
he pressed her no further.

"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.

"No, sir," she replied.  "We are fairly well provided
for."

Without entering the house Clare turned away.  There
was a station three miles ahead, and paying off his
coachman, he walked thither.  The last train to
Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare on its
wheels.



LV


At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at
one of the hotels and telegraphed his address to his
father immediately on his arrival, he walked out into
the streets of Sandbourne.  It was too late to call on
or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed
his purpose till the morning.  But he could not retire
to rest just yet.

This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and
its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines,
its promenades, and its covered gardens, was, to Angel
Clare, like a fairy place suddenly created by the
stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.
An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste
was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny
piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this
pleasure city had chosen to spring up.  Within the
space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity
of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an
undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been
turned there since the days of the Caesars.  Yet the
exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd;
and had drawn hither Tess.

By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding
way of this new world in an old one, and could discern
between the trees and against the stars the lofty
roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
fanciful residences of which the place was composed.
It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean
lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now
by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.

The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it
murmured, and he thought it was the pines; the pines
murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought
they were the sea.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young
wife, amidst all this wealth and fashion?  The more he
pondered the more was he puzzled.  Were there any cows
to milk here?  There certainly were no fields to till.
She was most probably engaged to do something in one of
these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at
the chamber-windows and their lights going out one by
one; and wondered which of them might be hers.

Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o'clock
he entered and went to bed.   Before putting out his
light he re-read Tess's impassioned letter.  Sleep,
however, he could not--so near her, yet so far from
her--and he continually lifted the window-blind and
regarded the backs of the opposite houses, and wondered
behind which of the sashes she reposed at that moment.

He might almost as well have sat up all night.  In the
morning he arose at seven, and shortly after went out,
taking the direction of the chief post-office.  At the
door he met an intelligent postman coming out with
letters for the morning delivery.

"Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?" asked Angel.
The postman shook his head.

Then, remembering that she would have been likely to
continue the use of her maiden name, Clare said----

"Of a Miss Durbeyfield?"

"Durbeyfield?"

This also was strange to the postman addressed.

"There's visitors coming and going every day, as you
know, sir," he said; "and without the name of the house
'tis impossible to find 'em."

One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the
name was repeated to him.

"I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name
of d'Urberville at The Herons," said the second.

"That's it!" cried Clare, pleased to think that she has
reverted to the real pronunciation.  "What place is The
Herons?"

"A stylish lodging-house.  'Tis all lodging-houses
here, bless 'ee."

Clare received directions how to find the house, and
hastened thither, arriving with the milkman.  The
Herons, though an ordinary villa, stood in its own
grounds, and was certainly the last place in which one
would have expected to find lodgings, so private was
its appearance.  If poor Tess was a servant here, as he
feared, she would go to the back-door to that milkman,
and he was inclined to go thither also.  However, in
his doubts he turned to the front, and rang.

The hour being early the landlady herself opened the
door. Clare inquired for Teresa d'Urberville or
Durbeyfield.

"Mrs d'Urberville?"

"Yes."

Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt
glad, even though she had not adopted his name.

"Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to
see her?"

"It is rather early.  What name shall I give, sir?"

"Angel."

"Mr Angel?"

"No; Angel.  It is my Christian name.  She'll
understand."

"I'll see if she is awake."

He was shown into the front room--the dining-room--and
looked out through the spring curtains at the little
lawn, and the rhododendrons and other shrubs upon it.
Obviously her position was by no means so bad as he had
feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow
have claimed and sold the jewels to attain it.  He did
not blame her for one moment.  Soon his sharpened ear
detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his heart
thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm.
"Dear me! what will she think of me, so altered as I
am!" he said to himself; and the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold--not at all as he had
expected to see her--bewilderingly otherwise, indeed.
Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened,
rendered more obvious by her attire.  She was loosely
wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white,
embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore
slippers of the same hue.  Her neck rose out of a frill
of down, and her well-remembered cable of dark-brown
hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of
her head and partly hanging on her shoulder--the
evident result of haste.

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to
his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still
in the opening of the doorway.  Mere yellow skeleton
that he was now he felt the contrast between them, and
thought his appearance distasteful to her.

"Tess!" he said huskily, "can you forgive me for going
away? Can't you--come to me?  How do you get to
be--like this?"

"It is too late," said she, her voice sounding hard
through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally.

"I did not think rightly of you--I did not see you as
you were!" he continued to plead.  "I have learnt to
since, dearest Tessy mine!"

"Too late, too late!" she said, waving her hand in the
impatience of a person whose tortures cause every
instant to seem an hour.  "Don't come close to me,
Angel!  No--you must not.  Keep away."

"But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have
been so pulled down by illness?  You are not so
fickle--I am come on purpose for you--my mother and
father will welcome you now!"

"Yes--O, yes, yes!  But I say, I say it is too late."

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who
tries to move away, but cannot.  "Don't you know
all--don't you know it?  Yet how do you come here if
you do not know?"

"I inquired here and there, and I found the way."

"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones
suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos.  "But you did
not come!  And I wrote to you, and you did not come!
He kept on saying you would never come any more, and
that I was a foolish woman.  He was very kind to me,
and to mother, and to all of us after father's death.
He----"

"I don't understand."

"He has won me back to him."

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her
meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his
glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy,
were now white and more delicate.

She continued----

"He is upstairs.  I hate him now, because he told me a
lie--that you would not come again; and you HAVE come!
These clothes are what he's put upon me: I didn't care
what he did wi' me!  But--will you go away, Angel,
please, and never come any more?"

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of
their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see.  Both
seemed to implore something to shelter them from
reality.

"Ah--it is my fault!" said Clare.

But he could not get on.  Speech was as inexpressive as
silence.  But he had a vague consciousness of one
thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that
his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize
the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like
a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated
from its living will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone.
His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood
concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after
he found himself in the street, walking along he did
not know whither.



LVI


Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The
Herons, and owner of all the handsome furniture, was
not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long
and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon
Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own
sake, and apart from possible lodgers' pockets.
Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her
well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville, as she
deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of
time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity
which had been stifled down as useless save in its
bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway,
without entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who
stood within the partly-closed door of her own
sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear
fragments of the conversation--if conversation it could
be called--between those two wretched souls.  She heard
Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the
departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door
behind him.  Then the door of the room above was shut,
and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her
apartment.  As the young lady was not fully dressed,
Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for
some time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood
at the door of the front room--a drawing-room,
connected with the room immediately behind it (which
was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.
This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks's best
apartments, had been taken by the week by the
d'Urbervilles.  The back room was now in silence; but
from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one
syllable, continually repeated in a low note of
moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some
Ixionian wheel----

"O--O--O!"

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again----

"O--O--O!"

The landlady looked through the keyhole.  Only a small
space of the room inside was visible, but within that
space came a corner of the breakfast table, which was
already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside.
Over the seat of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her
posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands
were clasped over her head, the skirts of her
dressing-gown and the embroidery of her night-gown
flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless
feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded
upon the carpet.  It was from her lips that came the
murmur of unspeakable despair.

Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom----

"What's a matter?"

She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a
soliloquy rather than an exclamation, and a dirge
rather than a soliloquy.  Mrs Brooks could only catch a
portion:

"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ...
and I did not know it! ... And you had used your cruel
persuasion upon me ... you did not stop using
it--no--you did not stop! My little sisters and
brothers and my mother's needs--they were the things
you moved me by ... and you said my husband would never
come back--never; and you taunted me, and said what a
simpleton I was to expect him! ... And at last I
believed you and gave way! ... And then he came back!
Now he is gone.  Gone a second time, and I have lost
him now for ever ... and he will not love me the
littlest bit ever any more--only hate me! ... O yes,
I have lost him now--again because of--you!" In writhing,
with her head on the chair, she turned her face towards
the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it;
and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her
teeth upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed
eyes stuck in wet tags to her cheeks.  She continued:
"And he is dying--he looks as if he is dying! ... And
my sin will kill him and not kill me! ... O, you have
torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed
you in pity not to make me be again! ... My own true
husband will never, never--O God--I can't bear this!--
I cannot!"

There were more and sharper words from the man; then a
sudden rustle; she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks,
thinking that the speaker was coming to rush out of the
door, hastily retreated down the stairs.

She need not have done so, however, for the door of the
sitting-room was not opened.  But Mrs Brooks felt it
unsafe to watch on the landing again, and entered her
own parlour below.

She could hear nothing through the floor, although she
listened intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to
finish her interrupted breakfast.  Coming up presently
to the front room on the ground floor she took up some
sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might
take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself,
to discover what was the matter if possible.  Overhead,
as she sat, she could now hear the floorboards slightly
creak, as if some one were walking about, and presently
the movement was explained by the rustle of garments
against the banisters, the opening and the closing of
the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the
gate on her way into the street.  She was fully dressed
now in the walking costume of a well-to-do young lady
in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that
over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.

Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of
farewell, temporary or otherwise, between her tenants
at the door above.  They might have quarrelled, or Mr
d'Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an
early riser.

She went into the back room which was more especially
her own apartment, and continued her sewing there.  The
lady lodger did not return, nor did the gentleman ring
his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the delay, and on what
probable relation the visitor who had called so early
bore to the couple upstairs.  In reflecting she leant
back in her chair.

As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the
ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle
of its white surface which she had never noticed there
before.  It was about the size of a wafer when she
first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the
palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it
was red.  The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet
blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace
of hearts.

Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving.  She got
upon the table, and touched the spot in the ceiling
with her fingers. It was damp, and she fancied that it
was a blood stain.

Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and
went upstairs, intending to enter the room overhead,
which was the bedchamber at the back of the
drawing-room.  But, nerveless woman as she had now
become, she could not bring herself to attempt the
handle.  She listened.  The dead silence within was
broken only by a regular beat.

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door,
and ran into the street.  A man she knew, one of the
workmen employed at an adjoining villa, was passing by,
and she begged him to come in and go upstairs with her;
she feared something had happened to one of her
lodgers.  The workman assented, and followed her to the
landing.

She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back
for him to pass in, entering herself behind him.  The
room was empty; the breakfast--a substantial repast of
coffee, eggs, and a cold ham--lay spread upon the table
untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that
the carving-knife was missing.  She asked the man to go
through the folding-doors into the adjoining room.

He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came
back almost instantly with a rigid face.  "My good God,
the gentleman in bed is dead!  I think he has been hurt
with a knife--a lot of blood had run down upon the
floor!"

The alarm was soon given, and the house which had
lately been so quiet resounded with the tramp of many
footsteps, a surgeon among the rest.  The wound was
small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart
of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead,
as if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the
blow.  In a quarter of an hour the news that a
gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had
been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street
and villa of the popular watering-place.



LVII


Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along
the way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel,
sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness.
He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a
sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which he took
his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had
brought with him, and went out.

At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to
him--a few words from his mother, stating that they
were glad to know his address, and informing him that
his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted
by Mercy Chant.

Clare crumpled up the paper, and followed the route to
the station; reaching it, he found that there would be
no train leaving for an hour and more.  He sat down to
wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour felt that
he could wait there no longer.  Broken in heart and
numbed, he had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to
get out of a town which had been the scene of such an
experience, and turned to walk to the first station
onward, and let the train pick him up there.

The highway that he followed was open, and at a little
distance dipped into a valley, across which it could be
seen running from edge to edge.  He had traversed the
greater part of this depression, and was climbing the
western acclivity, when, pausing for breath, he
unconsciously looked back.  Why he did so he could not
say, but something seemed to impel him to the act.  The
tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as
far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot
intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.

It was a human figure running.  Clare waited, with a
dim sense that somebody was trying to overtake him.

The form descending the incline was a woman's, yet so
entirely was his mind blinded to the idea of his wife's
following him that even when she came nearer he did not
recognize her under the totally changed attire in which
he now beheld her.  It was not till she was quite close
that he could believe her to be Tess.

"I saw you--turn away from the station--just before I
got there--and I have been following you all this way!"

She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every
muscle, that he did not ask her a single question, but
seizing her hand, and pulling it within his arm, he led
her along.  To avoid meeting any possible wayfarers he
left the high road, and took a footpath under some
fir-trees.  When they were deep among the moaning
boughs he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.

"Angel," she said, as if waiting for this, "do you know
what I have been running after you for?  To tell you
that I have killed him!" A pitiful white smile lit her
face as she spoke.

"What!" said he, thinking from the strangeness of her
manner that she was in some delirium.

"I have done it--I don't know how," she continued.
"Still, I owed it to you, and to myself, Angel.  I
feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my
glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set
for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through
me.  He has come between us and ruined us, and now he
can never do it any more.  I never loved him at all,
Angel, as I loved you.  You know it, don't you?  You
believe it?  You didn't come back to me, and I was
obliged to go back to him.  Why did you go away--why
did you--when I loved you so?  I can't think why you
did it.  But I don't blame you; only, Angel, will you
forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him?
I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to
forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a
shining light that I should get you back that way.  I
could not bear the loss of you any longer--you don't
know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving
me!  Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do,
now I have killed him!"

"I do love you, Tess--O, I do--it is all come back!"
he said, tightening his arms round her with fervid
pressure. "But how do you mean--you have killed him?"

"I mean that I have," she murmured in a reverie.

"What, bodily?  Is he dead?"

"Yes.  He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly
taunted me; and called you by a foul name; and then I
did it.  My heart could not bear it.  He had nagged me
about you before. And then I dressed myself and came
away to find you."

By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had
faintly attempted, at least, what she said she had
done; and his horror at her impulse was mixed with
amazement at the strength of her affection for himself,
and at the strangeness of its quality, which had
apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether.
Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct she seemed
at last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon
his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what
obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to
this aberration--if it were an aberration.  There
momentarily flashed through his mind that the family
tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen
because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these
things.  As well as his confused and excited ideas
could reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad
grief of which she spoke her mind had lost its balance,
and plunged her into this abyss.

It was very terrible if true; if a temporary
hallucination, sad.  But, anyhow, here was this
deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond woman,
clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be
anything to her but a protector.  He saw that for him
to be otherwise was not, in her mind, within the region
of the possible.  Tenderness was absolutely dominant in
Clare at last.  He kissed her endlessly with his white
lips, and held her hand, and said--

"I will not desert you!  I will protect you by every
means in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have
done or not have done!"

They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her
head every now and then to look at him.  Worn and
unhandsome as he had become, it was plain that she did
not discern the least fault in his appearance.  To her
he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally
and mentally.  He was still her Antinous, her Apollo
even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to
her affectionate regard on this day no less than when
she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the
one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had
believed in her as pure!

With an instinct as to possibilities he did not now, as
he had intended, make for the first station beyond the
town, but plunged still farther under the firs, which
here abounded for miles.  Each clasping the other round
the waist they promenaded over the dry bed of
fir-needles, thrown into a vague intoxicating
atmosphere at the consciousness of being together at
last, with no living soul between them; ignoring that
there was a corpse.  Thus they proceeded for several
miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her,
and said, timidly----

"Are we going anywhere in particular?"

"I don't know, dearest.  Why?"

"I don't know."

"Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it
is evening find lodgings somewhere or other--in a
lonely cottage, perhaps.  Can you walk well, Tessy?"

"O yes!  I could walk for ever and ever with your arm
round me!"

Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do.  Thereupon
they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and
following obscure paths tending more or less northward.
But there was an unpractical vagueness in their
movements throughout the day; neither one of them
seemed to consider any question of effectual escape,
disguise, or long concealment.  Their every idea was
temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two
children.

At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess
would have entered it with him to get something to eat,
but he persuaded her to remain among the trees and
bushes of this half-woodland, half-moorland part of the
country, till he should come back.  Her clothes were of
recent fashion; even the ivory-handled parasol that she
carried was of a shape unknown in the retired spot to
which they had now wandered; and the cut of such
articles would have attracted attention in the settle
of a tavern.  He soon returned, with food enough for
half-a-dozen people and two bottles of wine--enough to
last them for a day or more, should any emergency
arise.

They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their
meal. Between one and two o'clock they packed up the
remainder and went on again.

"I feel strong enough to walk any distance," said she.

"I think we may as well steer in a general way towards
the interior of the country, where we can hide for a
time, and are less likely to be looked for than
anywhere near the coast," Clare remarked.  "Later on,
when they have forgotten us, we can make for some
port."

She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him
more tightly, and straight inland they went.  Though
the season was an English May the weather was serenely
bright, and during the afternoon it was quite warm.
Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath
had taken them into the depths of the New Forest, and
towards evening, turning the corner of a lane, they
perceived behind a brook and bridge a large board on
which was painted in white letters, "This desirable
Mansion to be Let Furnished"; particulars following,
with directions to apply to some London agents. Passing
through the gate they could see the house, an old brick
building of regular design and large accommodation.

"I know it," said Clare.  "It is Bramshurst Court.  You
can see that it is shut up, and grass is growing on the
drive."

"Some of the windows are open," said Tess.

"Just to air the rooms, I suppose."

"All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our
heads!"

"You are getting tired, my Tess!" he said.  "We'll stop
soon." And kissing her sad mouth he again led her
onwards.

He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a
dozen or fifteen miles, and it became necessary to
consider what they should do for rest.  They looked
from afar at isolated cottages and little inns, and
were inclined to approach one of the latter, when their
hearts failed them, and they sheered off.  At length
their gait dragged, and they stood still.

"Could we sleep under the trees?" she asked.

He thought the season insufficiently advanced.

"I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,"
he said.  "Let us go back towards it again."

They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour
before they stood without the entrance-gate as earlier.
He then requested her to stay where she was, whilst he
went to see who was within.

She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and
Clare crept towards the house.  His absence lasted some
considerable time, and when he returned Tess was wildly
anxious, not for herself, but for him.  He had found
out from a boy that there was only an old woman in
charge as caretaker, and she only came there on fine
days, from the hamlet near, to open and shut the
windows.  She would come to shut them at sunset.
"Now, we can get in through one of the lower windows,
and rest there," said he.

Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main
front, whose shuttered windows, like sightless
eyeballs, excluded the possibility of watchers.  The
door was reached a few steps further, and one of the
windows beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and
pulled Tess in after him.

Except the hall the rooms were all in darkness, and
they ascended the staircase.  Up here also the shutters
were tightly closed, the ventilation being
perfunctorily done, for this day at least, by opening
the hall-window in front and an upper window behind.
Clare unlatched the door of a large chamber, felt his
way across it, and parted the shutters to the width of
two or three inches.  A shaft of dazzling sunlight
glanced into the room, revealing heavy, old-fashioned
furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous
four-post bedstead, along the head of which were carved
running figures, apparently Atalanta's race.

"Rest at last!" said he, setting down his bag and the
parcel of viands.

They remained in great quietness till the caretaker
should have come to shut the windows: as a precaution,
putting themselves in total darkness by barring the
shutters as before, lest the woman should open the door
of their chamber for any casual reason.  Between six
and seven o'clock she came, but did not approach the
wing they were in.  They heard her close the windows,
fasten them, lock the door, and go away.  Then Clare
again stole a chink of light from the window, and they
shared another meal, till by-and-by they were enveloped
in the shades of night which they had no candle to
disperse.



LVIII


The night was strangely solemn and still.  In the small
hours she whispered to him the whole story of how he
had walked in his sleep with her in his arms across the
Froom stream, at the imminent risk of both their lives,
and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined
abbey.  He had never known of that till now.

"Why didn't you tell me next day?" he said.  "It might
have prevented much misunderstanding and woe."

"Don't think of what's past!" said she.  "I am not
going to think outside of now.  Why should we!  Who
knows what tomorrow has in store?"

But it apparently had no sorrow.  The morning was wet
and foggy, and Clare, rightly informed that the
caretaker only opened the windows on fine days,
ventured to creep out of their chamber, and explore the
house, leaving Tess asleep. There was no food on the
premises, but there was water, and he took advantage of
the fog to emerge from the mansion, and fetch tea,
bread, and butter from a shop in a little place two
miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and spirit-lamp,
that they might get fire without smoke.  His re-entry
awoke her; and they breakfasted on what he had brought.

They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day
passed, and the night following, and the next, and
next; till, almost without their being aware, five days
had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a sight or
sound of a human being disturbing their peacefulness,
such as it was.  The changes of the weather were their
only events, the birds of the New Forest their only
company.  By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of
any incident of the past subsequent to their
wedding-day.  The gloomy intervening time seemed to
sink into chaos, over which the present and prior times
closed as if it never had been.  Whenever he suggested
that they should leave their shelter, and go forwards
towards Southampton or London, she showed a strange
unwillingness to move.

"Why should we put an end to all that's sweet and
lovely!" she deprecated.  "What must come will come."
And, looking through the shutter-chink: "All is trouble
outside there; inside here content."

He peeped out also.  It was quite true; within was
affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the
inexorable.

"And--and," she said, pressing her cheek against his,
"I fear that what you think of me now may not last.
I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me.
I would rather not.  I would rather be dead and buried
when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it
may never be known to me that you despised me."

"I cannot ever despise you."

"I also hope that.  But considering what my life had
been I cannot see why any man should, sooner or later,
be able to help despising me....  How wickedly mad I
was!  Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly or
a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to
make me cry."

They remained yet another day.  In the night the dull
sky cleared, and the result was that the old caretaker
at the cottage awoke early.  The brilliant sunrise made
her unusually brisk; she decided to open the contiguous
mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a
day.  Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened
the lower rooms before six o'clock, she ascended to the
bedchambers, and was about to turn the handle of the
one wherein they lay.  At that moment she fancied she
could hear the breathing of persons within.  Her
slippers and her antiquity had rendered her progress a
noiseless one so far, and she made for instant retreat;
then, deeming that her hearing might have deceived her,
she turned anew to the door and softly tried the
handle.  The lock was out of order, but a piece of
furniture had been moved forward on the inside, which
prevented her opening the door more than an inch or
two.  A stream of morning light through the
shutter-chink fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped
in profound slumber, Tess's lips being parted like a
half-opened flower near his cheek. The caretaker was so
struck with their innocent appearance, and with the
elegance of Tess's gown hanging across a chair, her
silk stockings beside it, the pretty parasol, and the
other habits in which she had arrived because she had
none else, that her first indignation at the effrontery
of tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary
sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it
seemed.  She closed the door, and withdrew as softly as
she had come, to go and consult with her neighbours on
the odd discovery.

Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal
when Tess woke, and then Clare.  Both had a sense that
something had disturbed them, though they could not say
what; and the uneasy feeling which it engendered grew
stronger.  As soon as he was dressed he narrowly
scanned the lawn through the two or three inches of
shutter-chink.

"I think we will leave at once," said he.  "It is a
fine day. And I cannot help fancying somebody is about
the house.  At any rate, the woman will be sure to come
today."

She passively assented, and putting the room in order
they took up the few articles that belonged to them,
and departed noiselessly.  When they had got into the
Forest she turned to take a last look at the house.

"Ah, happy house--goodbye!" she said.  "My life can
only be a question of a few weeks.  Why should we not
have stayed there?"

"Don't say it, Tess!  We shall soon get out of this
district altogether.  We'll continue our course as
we've begun it, and keep straight north.  Nobody will
think of looking for us there.  We shall be looked for
at the Wessex ports if we are sought at all.  When we
are in the north we will get to a port and away."

Having thus persuaded her the plan was pursued, and
they kept a bee-line northward.  Their long repose at
the manor-house lent them walking power now; and
towards mid-day they found that they were approaching
the steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in
their way.  He decided to rest her in a clump of trees
during the afternoon, and push onward under cover of
darkness.  At dusk Clare purchased food as usual, and
their night march began, the boundary between Upper and
Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o'clock.

To walk across country without much regard to roads was
not new to Tess, and she showed her old agility in the
performance.  The intercepting city, ancient
Melchester, they were obliged to pass through in order
to take advantage of the town bridge for crossing a
large river that obstructed them.  It was about
midnight when they went along the deserted streets,
lighted fitfully by the few lamps, keeping off the
pavement that it might not echo their footsteps.  The
graceful pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on
their left hand, but it was lost upon them now.  Once
out of the town they followed the turnpike-road, which
after a few miles plunged across an open plain.

Though the sky was dense with cloud a diffused light
from some fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a
little. But the moon had now sunk, the clouds seemed to
settle almost on their heads, and the night grew as
dark as a cave. However, they found their way along,
keeping as much on the turf as possible that their
tread might not resound, which it was easy to do, there
being no hedge or fence of any kind.  All around was
open loneliness and black solitude, over which a stiff
breeze blew.

They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles
further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some
vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the
grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.

"What monstrous place is this?" said Angel.

"It hums," said she.  "Hearken!"

He listened.  The wind, playing upon the edifice,
produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic
one-stringed harp.  No other sound came from it, and
lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare
felt the vertical surface of the structure.  It seemed
to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding.
Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had
come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar;
by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar
one adjoining.  At an indefinite height overhead
something made the black sky blacker, which had the
semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars
horizontally.  They carefully entered beneath and
between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but
they seemed to be still out of doors.  The place was
roofless.  Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel,
perplexed, said----

"What can it be?"

Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like
pillar, square and uncompromising as the first; beyond
it another and another.  The place was all doors and
pillars, some connected above by continuous
architraves.

"A very Temple of the Winds," he said.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a
trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming
a causeway wide enough for a carriage and it was soon
obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped
upon the grassy expanse of the plain.  The couple
advanced further into this pavilion of the night till
they stood in its midst.

"It is Stonehenge!" said Clare.

"The heathen temple, you mean?"

"Yes.  Older than the centuries; older than the
d'Urbervilles!  Well, what shall we do, darling?
We may find shelter further on."

But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon
an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was
sheltered from the wind by a pillar.  Owing to the
action of the sun during the preceding day the stone
was warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough
and chill grass around, which had damped her skirts and
shoes.

"I don't want to go any further, Angel," she said,
stretching out her hand for his.  "Can't we bide here?"

"I fear not.  This spot is visible for miles by day,
although it does not seem so now."

"One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts,
now I think of it.  And you used to say at Talbothays
that I was a heathen.  So now I am at home."

He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his
lips upon hers.

"Sleepy are you, dear?  I think you are lying on an
altar."

"I like very much to be here," she murmured.  "It is so
solemn and lonely--after my great happiness--with
nothing but the sky above my face.  it seems as if
there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish
there were not--except 'Liza-Lu."

Clare though she might as well rest here till it should
get a little lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon
her, and sat down by her side.

"Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over
'Liza-Lu for my sake?" she asked, when they had
listened a long time to the wind among the pillars.

"I will."

"She is so good and simple and pure.  O, Angel--I wish
you would marry her if you lose me, as you will do
shortly.  O, if you would!"

"If I lose you I lose all!  And she is my
sister-in-law."

"That's nothing, dearest.  People marry sister-laws
continually about Marlott; and 'Liza-Lu is so gentle
and sweet, and she is growing so beautiful.  O, I could
share you with her willingly when we are spirits!  If
you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her
up for your own self! ...  She had all the best of me
without the bad of me; and if she were to become yours
it would almost seem as if death had not divided us....
Well, I have said it.  I won't mention it again."

She ceased, and he fell into thought.  In the far
north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level
streak of light.  The uniform concavity of black cloud
was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at
the earth's edge the coming day, against which the
towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly
defined.

"Did they sacrifice to God here?" asked she.

"No," said he.

"Who to?"

"I believe to the sun.  That lofty stone set away by
itself is in the direction of the sun, which will
presently rise behind it."

"This reminds me, dear," she said.  "You remember you
never would interfere with any belief of mine before we
were married?  But I knew your mind all the same, and I
thought as you thought--not from any reasons of my own,
but because you thought so.  Tell me now, Angel, do you
think we shall meet again after we are dead?  I want to
know."

He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.

"O, Angel--I fear that means no!" said she, with a
suppressed sob.  "And I wanted so to see you again--
so much, so much!  What--not even you and I, Angel,
who love each other so well?"

Like a greater than himself, to the critical question
at the critical time he did not answer; and they were
again silent. In a minute or two her breathing became
more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she
fell asleep.  The band of silver paleness along the
east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great
Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous
landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity,
and hesitation which is usual just before day. The
eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly
against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone
beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.
Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering
little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay
still.  At the same time something seemed to move on
the verge of the dip eastward--a mere dot.  It was the
head of a man approaching them from the hollow beyond
the Sun-stone.  Clare wished they had gone onward, but
in the circumstances decided to remain quiet.  The
figure came straight towards the circle of pillars in
which they were.

He heard something behind him, the brush of feet.
Turning, he saw over the prostrate columns another
figure; then before he was aware, another was at hand
on the right, under a trilithon, and another on the
left.  The dawn shone full on the front of the man
westward, and Clare could discern from this that he was
tall, and walked as if trained.  They all closed in
with evident purpose.  Her story then was true!
Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon,
loose stone, means of escape, anything.  By this time
the nearest man was upon him.

"It is no use, sir," he said.  "There are sixteen of us
on the Plain, and the whole country is reared."

"Let her finish her sleep!" he implored in a whisper of
the men as they gathered round.

When they saw where she lay, which they had not done
till then, they showed no objection, and stood watching
her, as still as the pillars around.  He went to the
stone and bent over her, holding one poor little hand;
her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a
lesser creature than a woman.  All waited in the
growing light, their faces and hands as if they were
silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the
stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a mass of
shade.  Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon
her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and
waking her.

"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up.  "Have they
come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he said.  "They have come."

"It is as it should be," she murmured.  "Angel, I am
almost glad--yes, glad!  This happiness could not have
lasted.  It was too much.  I have had enough; and now I
shall not live for you to despise me!"

She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither
of the men having moved.

"I am ready," she said quietly.



LIX


The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime
capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave
downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July
morning.  The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses
had almost dried off for the season their integument of
lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the
sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the
mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the
bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in
progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned
market-day.

From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every
Wintoncestrian knows, ascends a long and regular
incline of the exact length of a measured mile, leaving
the houses gradually behind.  Up this road from the
precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly,
as if unconscious of the trying ascent--unconscious
through preoccupation and not through buoyancy.  They
had emerged upon this road through a narrow barred
wicket in a high wall a little lower down. They seemed
anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and of
their kind, and this road appeared to offer the
quickest means of doing so.  Though they were young
they walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the
sun's rays smiled on pitilessly.

One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall
budding creature--half girl, half woman--a
spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but
with the same beautiful eyes--Clare's sister-in-law,
'Liza-Lu.  Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk to
half their natural size.  They moved on hand in hand,
and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads
being that of Giotto's "Two Apostles".

When they had nearly reached the top of the great West
Hill the clocks in the town struck eight.  Each gave a
start at the notes, and, walking onward yet a few
steps, they reached the first milestone, standing
whitely on the green margin of the grass, and backed by
the down, which here was open to the road.  They
entered upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that
seemed to overrule their will, suddenly stood still,
turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside the
stone.

The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited.
In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left,
its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric
drawing--among them the broad cathedral tower, with
its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and
nave, the spires of St Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of
the College, and, more to the right, the tower and
gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the
pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.  Behind
the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's
Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the
horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging
above it.

Against these far stretches of country rose, in front
of the other city edifices, a large red-brick building,
with level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows
bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by
its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the
Gothic erections.  It was somewhat disguised from the
road in passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it
was visible enough up here.  The wicket from which the
pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this
structure.  From the middle of the building an ugly
flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east
horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its shady side
and against the light, it seemed the one blot on the
city's beauty.  Yet it was with this blot, and not with
the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed.
Their eyes were riveted on it.  A few minutes after the
hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff,
and extended itself upon the breeze.  It was a black flag.

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals,
in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in
their tombs unknowing.  The two speechless gazers bent
themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and
remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the
flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had
strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.