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CHAPTER XXVII
An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish mid-day atmosphere
brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a mile or two west of Talbothays,
whence he again looked into that green
trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.
Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial soil below, the
atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the summer fruits, the mists,
the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast
pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very bees and
butterflies drowsy.
Clare was now so familiar with the spot that he knew the individual cows by their
names when, a long distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads.
It was with a sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in his student-days;
and, much as he loved his parents, he could
not help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of home-life,
affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on
the humours of English rural societies
being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.
Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.
The denizens were all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung
like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed there for that
purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening milking.
Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of the house to the back quarters,
where he listened for a moment.
Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down; the
grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further distance.
The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces
hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.
He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the clock struck
three.
Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with the stroke, Clare heard the creaking
of the floor-boards above, and then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.
It was Tess's, who in another moment came down before his eyes.
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a
snake's.
She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see
its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her
eyelids hung heavy over their pupils.
The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her.
It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the
most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in
the presentation.
Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before the remainder
of her face was well awake.
With an oddly compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O Mr
Clare! How you frightened me--I--"
There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed relations which his
declaration had introduced; but the full sense of the matter rose up in her face
when she encountered Clare's tender look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.
"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his face to
her flushed cheek.
"Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me any more.
I have hastened back so soon because of you!"
Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they stood upon the
red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the window upon his back, as
he held her tightly to his breast; upon her
inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm, and her neck,
and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down in her clothes she
was warm as a sunned cat.
At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his
plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of
blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.
"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to help me to-day.
Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is not well, and the others are
gone out somewhere, and won't be home till milking."
As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the stairs.
"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.
"So I can help Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time." Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very
thoroughly skimmed that afternoon.
Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as having light and shade
and position, but no particular outline.
Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her hand
trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to flinch under
it like a plant in too burning a sun.
Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running her forefinger
round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it in nature's way; for the
unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came convenient now.
"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently.
"I wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been
thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.
I shall soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife
a woman who knows all about the management of farms.
Will you be that woman, Tessy?"
He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an impulse of which his
head would disapprove. She turned quite careworn.
She had bowed to the inevitable result of proximity, the necessity of loving him; but
she had not calculated upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put
before her without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.
With pain that was like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.
"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"
The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and she bowed her
face in her grief.
"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more greedily close.
"Do you say no? Surely you love me?"
"O yes, yes!
And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the world," returned the sweet and
honest voice of the distressed girl. "But I CANNOT marry you!"
"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to marry some one
else!" "No, no!"
"Then why do you refuse me?"
"I don't want to marry! I have not thought of doing it.
I cannot! I only want to love you."
"But why?"
Driven to subterfuge, she stammered-- "Your father is a parson, and your mother
wouldn' like you to marry such as me. She will want you to marry a lady."
"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.
That was partly why I went home." "I feel I cannot--never, never!" she
echoed. "Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my
Pretty?"
"Yes--I did not expect it." "If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I
will give you time," he said. "It was very abrupt to come home and speak
to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while." She again took up the shining skimmer, held
it beneath the pump, and began anew.
But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream with
the delicate dexterity required, try as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into
the milk, sometimes in the air.
She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring tears drawn forth
by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear advocate, she could never explain.
"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.
Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began talking in a more
general way:
You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered people
alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining
Evangelical school.
Tessy, are you an Evangelical?" "I don't know."
"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High, they tell
me."
Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every week,
seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard him at all.
"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do," she remarked
as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow to me."
She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his father could not
object to her on religious grounds, even though she did not know whether her
principles were High, Low or Broad.
He himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently
imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology, and
Pantheistic as to essence.
Confused or otherwise, to disturb them was his last desire:
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse A life that leads melodious days.
He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but he gladly
conformed to it now.
He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode of life, of his
zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the undulations disappeared from her
skimming; as she finished one lead after
another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the milk.
"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she ventured to observe,
anxious to keep away from the subject of herself.
"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his troubles and
difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me.
He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a different
way of thinking from himself, and I don't like to hear of such humiliations to a man
of his age, the more particularly as I
don't think earnestness does any good when carried so far.
He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite recently.
He went as the deputy of some missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of
Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
with a lax young cynic he met with
somewhere about there--son of some landowner up that way--and who has a mother
afflicted with blindness.
My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there was quite
a disturbance.
It was very foolish of my father, I must say, to intrude his conversation upon a
stranger when the probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.
But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season; and,
of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely vicious, but among the
easy-going, who hate being bothered.
He says he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly; but I
wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and would leave such pigs
to their wallowing."
Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but she no longer
showed any tremulousness.
Clare's revived thoughts of his father prevented his noticing her particularly;
and so they went on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids
returned, and took their pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new
milk. As Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows
he said to her softly--
"And my question, Tessy?" "O no--no!" replied she with grave
hopelessness, as one who had heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to
Alec d'Urberville.
"It CAN'T be!" She went out towards the mead, joining the
other milkmaids with a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
constraint.
All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in the farther mead,
the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened
motion of women accustomed to unlimited
space--in which they abandoned themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave.
It seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate
from unconstrained Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.