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Chapter XXVI It was not till the evening, after family
prayers, that Angel found opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while
kneeling behind his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of
the room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the attainment of his position
as a farmer on an extensive scale—either in England or in the Colonies.
His father then told him that, as he had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up
to Cambridge, he had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the purchase
or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel himself unduly slighted.
"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no doubt stand far superior
to your brothers in a few years." This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part
led Angel onward to the other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then
six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming business he would require eyes
in the back of his head to see to all matters—some one would be necessary to superintend the
domestic labours of his establishment whilst he was afield.
Would it not be well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel put the question—
"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty hard-working farmer?"
"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in your goings-out and
your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters little.
Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and neighbour, Dr Chant—"
"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good butter, make immense
cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers
in an emergency, and estimate the value of sheep and calves?"
"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable."
Mr Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before. "I was going to add,"
he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you will not find one more to your true advantage,
and certainly not more to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour Chant's daughter
had lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table—altar,
as I was shocked to hear her call it one day—with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions.
But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as I, says that can be cured.
It is a mere girlish outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."
"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you think that a young
woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant, but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical
accomplishments, understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself, would
suit me infinitely better?" His father persisted in his conviction that
a knowledge of a farmer's wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and
the impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to advance the cause
of his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that fate or Providence had thrown
in his way a woman who possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist, and
was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had attached
herself to the sound Low Church School of his father; but she would probably be open
to conviction on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted,
receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in personal appearance,
exceptionally beautiful. "Is she of a family such as you would care
to marry into—a lady, in short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into
the study during the conversation. "She is not what in common parlance is called
a lady," said Angel, unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless—in feeling
and nature." "Mercy Chant is of a very good family."
"Pooh!—what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly. "How is family to avail
the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have, and shall have to do?"
"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm," returned
his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the life I am going
to lead?—while as to her reading, I can take that in hand.
She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her. She's brim full of poetry—actualized
poetry, if I may use the expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write...
And she is an unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus, and
species you desire to propagate." "O Angel, you are mocking!"
"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you will tolerate any social
shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel that I may do worse than choose her."
Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never
dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing
it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs
essentially naturalistic. In their sad doubts as to whether their son
had himself any right whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr
and Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that she at least was
sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of the pair must have arisen by an act of
Providence; for Angel never would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice.
They said finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would not object
to see her. Angel therefore refrained from declaring more
particulars now. He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were,
there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people, which it
would require some tact to overcome. For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and
though their daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference to their
lives, in the probability of her living far away from them, he wished for affection's
sake not to wound their sentiment in the most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess's life as if they were
vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess; her
soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar,
and certainly not for her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence required
no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him.
He held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion and impulse
on which domestic happiness depends. It was probable that, in the lapse of ages,
improved systems of moral and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up to the present
day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm
of those lives which had been brought under its influence.
This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been extended
from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how much less
was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the
good and wise woman of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise and
the foolish, of the same stratum or class. It was the morning of his departure.
His brothers had already left the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north,
whence one was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy.
Angel might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays.
He would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the most appreciative humanist,
the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was alienation
in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been
prepared for him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured
to mention Tess. His mother made him sandwiches, and his father
accompanied him, on his own mare, a little way along the road.
Having fairly well advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as they
jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's account of his parish difficulties,
and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations
of the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.
"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to recount experiences which
would show the absurdity of that idea. He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers
of which he had been the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart squire named d'Urberville,
living some forty miles off, in the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?" asked his son.
"That curiously historic worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"
"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared
sixty or eighty years ago—at least, I believe so.
This seems to be a new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly
line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd to hear you express interest
in old families. I thought you set less store by them even
than I." "You misapprehend me, father; you often do,"
said Angel with a little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue
of their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically, dramatically, and even
historically, I am tenderly attached to them." This distinction, though by no means a subtle
one, was yet too subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had been
about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior so-called d'Urberville,
the young man developed the most culpable passions, though he had a blind mother, whose
condition should have made him know better. A knowledge of his career having come to the
ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country preaching missionary sermons,
he boldly took occasion to speak to the delinquent on his spiritual state.
Though he was a stranger, occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required
of thee!" The young man much resented this directness
of attack, and in the war of words which followed when they met he did not scruple publicly
to insult Mr Clare, without respect for his gray hairs.
Angel flushed with distress. "Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you
would not expose yourself to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"
"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of self-abnegation.
"The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor, foolish young man.
Do you suppose his incensed words could give me any pain, or even his blows?
'Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we
are made as the filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this day.'
Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly true at this present hour."
"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"
"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad
state of intoxication." "No!"
"A dozen times, my boy. What then?
I have saved them from the guilt of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they
have lived to thank me, and praise God." "May this young man do the same!" said Angel
fervently. "But I fear otherwise, from what you say."
"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray for him, though on
this side of the grave we shall probably never meet again.
But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in his heart as a good
seed some day." Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine
as a child; and though the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist.
Perhaps he revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that, in the question
of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once thought of inquiring whether she were
well provided or penniless. The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the position of poor parsons
for the term of their activities; yet Angel admired it none the less.
Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was nearer to his father
on the human side than was either of his brethren.
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.
XXVIII Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently
daunt Clare. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative
often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough
for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception
to the dallyings of coyness. That she had already permitted him to make
love to her he read as an additional assurance, not fully trowing that in the fields and pastures
to "sigh gratis" is by no means deemed waste; love-making being here more often accepted
inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake than in the carking, anxious homes of the
ambitious, where a girl's craving for an establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion
as an end. "Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive
way?" he asked her in the course of a few days.
She started. "Don't ask me.
I told you why—partly. I am not good enough—not worthy enough."
"How? Not fine lady enough?"
"Yes—something like that," murmured she. "Your friends would scorn me."
"Indeed, you mistake them—my father and mother.
As for my brothers, I don't care—" He clasped his fingers behind her back to
keep her from slipping away. "Now—you did not mean it, sweet?—I am
sure you did not! You have made me so restless that I cannot
read, or play, or do anything. I am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know—to
hear from your own warm lips—that you will some day be mine—any time you may choose;
but some day?" She could only shake her head and look away
from him. Clare regarded her attentively, conned the
characters of her face as if they had been hieroglyphics.
The denial seemed real. "Then I ought not to hold you in this way—ought
I? I have no right to you—no right to seek
out where you are, or walk with you! Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?"
"How can you ask?" she said, with continued self-suppression.
"I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you repulse me?"
"I don't repulse you. I like you to—tell me you love me; and you
may always tell me so as you go about with me—and never offend me."
"But you will not accept me as a husband?" "Ah—that's different—it is for your good,
indeed, my dearest! O, believe me, it is only for your sake!
I don't like to give myself the great happiness o' promising to be yours in that way—because—because
I am SURE I ought not to do it." "But you will make me happy!"
"Ah—you think so, but you don't know!" At such times as this, apprehending the grounds
of her refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would say
that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile—which was certainly true, her
natural quickness and her admiration for him having led her to pick up his vocabulary,
his accent, and fragments of his knowledge, to a surprising extent.
After these tender contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the remotest
cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room, if at a leisure interval,
and mourn silently, not a minute after an apparently phlegmatic negative.
The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the side of his—two ardent
hearts against one poor little conscience— that she tried to fortify her resolution by
every means in her power. She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind.
On no account could she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her
husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her conscience had
decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not to be overruled now.
"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said.
"It was only forty miles off—why hasn't it reached here?
Somebody must know!" Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad countenances of her
chamber companions that they regarded her not only as the favourite, but as the chosen;
but they could see for themselves that she did not put herself in his way.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so distinctly twisted
of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain.
At the next cheese-making the pair were again left alone together.
The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed
latterly to have acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they walked
so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the dairyman left them
to themselves. They were breaking up the masses of curd before
putting them into the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling
bread on a large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield's
hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was filling the vats
with his handful, suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers.
Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein
of her soft arm. Although the early September weather was sultry,
her arm, from her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a new-gathered
mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such a sheaf of susceptibilities
that her pulse was accelerated by the touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the
cool arms flushed hot. Then, as though her heart had said, "Is coyness
longer necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman, as between man and man," she lifted
her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her lip rose in a tender half-smile.
"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said. "Because you love me very much!"
"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty." "Not AGAIN!"
She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under her own desire.
"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I CANNOT think why you are so tantalizing. Why do you disappoint
me so? You seem almost like a coquette, upon my life
you do—a coquette of the first urban water! They blow hot and blow cold, just as you do,
and it is the very last sort of thing to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothays. ...
And yet, dearest," he quickly added, observing now the remark had cut her, "I know you to
be the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived. So how can I suppose you a flirt?
Tess, why don't you like the idea of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?"
"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it; because—it isn't
true!" The stress now getting beyond endurance, her
lip quivered, and she was obliged to go away. Clare was so pained and perplexed that he
ran after and caught her in the passage. "Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately
clasping her, in forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you won't belong to
anybody but me!" "I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed.
"And I will give you a complete answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my
experiences—all about myself—all!" "Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any
number." He expressed assent in loving satire, looking
into her face. "My Tess, no doubt, almost as many experiences
as that wild convolvulus out there on the garden hedge, that opened itself this morning
for the first time. Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more
about not being worthy of me." "I will try—not!
And I'll give you my reasons to-morrow—next week."
"Say on Sunday?" "Yes, on Sunday."
At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in the thicket of
pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where she could be quite unseen.
Here Tess flung herself down upon the rustling undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed,
and remained crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy, which her
fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.
In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of
her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with nature in revolt
against her scrupulousness. Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the
altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to *** ripe pleasure before the iron teeth
of pain could have time to shut upon her: that was what love counselled; and in almost
a terror of ecstasy Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement,
wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere isolation, love's counsel
would prevail. The afternoon advanced, and still she remained
among the willows. She heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands;
the "waow-waow!" which accompanied the getting together of the cows. But she did not go to
the milking. They would see her agitation; and the dairyman,
thinking the cause to be love alone, would good-naturedly tease her; and that harassment
could not be borne. Her lover must have guessed her overwrought
state, and invented some excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls given.
At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with the aspect of a great forge
in the heavens; and presently a monstrous pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand.
The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became
spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it.
She went in and upstairs without a light. It was now Wednesday.
Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully at her from a distance, but intruded in no
way upon her. The indoor milkmaids, Marian and the rest,
seemed to guess that something definite was afoot, for they did not force any remarks
upon her in the bedchamber. Friday passed; Saturday.
To-morrow was the day. "I shall give way—I shall say yes—I shall
let myself marry him—I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to
the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep.
"I can't bear to let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill
him when he knows! O my heart—O—O—O!"
XXIX "Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o'
this morning?" said Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling
gaze round upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye think?"
One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not guess, because she knew
already. "Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted
'***'s-bird of a feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman."
"Not Jack Dollop? A villain—to think o' that!" said a milker.
The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for it was the name of the
lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had afterwards been so roughly used by the
young woman's mother in the butter-churn. "And had he married the valiant matron's daughter,
as he promised?" asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was reading
at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs Crick, in her sense of his
gentility. "Not he, sir.
Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As I say, 'tis a widow-woman, and she had money,
it seems—fifty poun' a year or so; and that was all he was after.
They were married in a great hurry; and then she told him that by marrying she had lost
her fifty poun' a year. Just fancy the state o' my gentleman's mind
at that news! Never such a cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since! Serves
him well beright. But onluckily the poor woman gets the worst
o't." "Well, the silly body should have told en
sooner that the ghost of her first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.
"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively. "Still, you can see exactly how 'twas.
She wanted a home, and didn't like to run the risk of losing him.
Don't ye think that was something like it, maidens?"
He glanced towards the row of girls. "She ought to ha' told him just before they
went to church, when he could hardly have backed out," exclaimed Marian.
"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz. "She must have seen what he was after, and
should ha' refused him," cried Retty spasmodically. "And what do you say, my dear?" asked the
dairyman of Tess. "I think she ought—to have told him the
true state of things—or else refused him—I don't know," replied Tess, the bread-and-butter
choking her. "Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said
Beck Knibbs, a married helper from one of the cottages.
"All's fair in love and war. I'd ha' married en just as she did, and if
he'd said two words to me about not telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about
my first chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the rolling-pin—a
scram little feller like he! Any woman could do it."
The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry smile, for form's
sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was tragedy to her;
and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose from table, and, with an impression
that Clare would soon follow her, went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one
side of the irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main stream
of the Var. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher
up the river, and masses of them were floating past her—moving islands of green crow-foot,
whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks of which weed had lodged against the
piles driven to keep the cows from crossing. Yes, there was the pain of it.
This question of a woman telling her story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but
amusement to others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully, alighting beside her feet.
"My wife—soon!" "No, no; I cannot.
For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say no!"
"Tess!" "Still I say no!" she repeated.
Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the moment after speaking,
beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted
with their hair loose on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending church,
a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads against the cows.)
If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he would have kissed her; it had evidently been his
intention; but her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart.
Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage
by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure
of blandishment which he might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid
him. He released her momentarily-imprisoned waist,
and withheld the kiss. It all turned on that release.
What had given her strength to refuse him this time was solely the tale of the widow
told by the dairyman; and that would have been overcome in another moment.
But Angel said no more; his face was perplexed; he went away.
Day after day they met—somewhat less constantly than before; and thus two or three weeks went
by. The end of September drew near, and she could
see in his eye that he might ask her again. His plan of procedure was different now—as
though he had made up his mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth startled
by the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of her manner when
the subject was under discussion countenanced the idea.
So he played a more coaxing game; and while never going beyond words, or attempting the
renewal of caresses, he did his utmost orally. In this way Clare persistently wooed her in
undertones like that of the purling milk—at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings,
at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs—as no milkmaid was
ever wooed before by such a man. Tess knew that she must break down.
Neither a religious sense of a certain moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious
wish for candour could hold out against it much longer.
She loved him so passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though
untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary guidance.
And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can never be his wife," the words were
vain. A proof of her weakness lay in the very utterance
of what calm strength would not have taken the trouble to formulate.
Every sound of his voice beginning on the old subject stirred her with a terrifying
bliss, and she coveted the recantation she feared.
His manner was—what man's is not?—so much that of one who would love and cherish and
defend her under any conditions, changes, charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened
as she basked in it. The season meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though
it was still fine, the days were much shorter. The dairy had again worked by morning candlelight
for a long time; and a fresh renewal of Clare's pleading occurred one morning between three
and four. She had run up in her bedgown to his door
to call him as usual; then had gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes
was walking to the head of the stairs with the candle in her hand.
At the same moment he came down his steps from above in his shirt-sleeves and put his
arm across the stairway. "Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he
said peremptorily. "It is a fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer.
You MUST tell me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house.
My door was ajar just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go.
You don't know. Well?
Is it to be yes at last?" "I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too
early to take me to task!" she pouted. "You need not call me Flirt.
'Tis cruel and untrue. Wait till by and by.
Please wait till by and by! I will really think seriously about it between
now and then. Let me go downstairs!"
She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle sideways, she tried
to smile away the seriousness of her words. "Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare."
"Angel." "Angel dearest—why not?"
"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?" "It would only mean that you love me, even
if you cannot marry me; and you were so good as to own that long ago."
"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I MUST," she murmured, looking at her candle, a roguish
curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding her suspense.
Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her promise; but somehow,
as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon
her head till there should be leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done, he
broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one moment.
She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at him or saying another word.
The other maids were already down, and the subject was not pursued.
Except Marian, they all looked wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the sad yellow
rays which the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals of the
dawn without. When skimming was done—which, as the milk
diminished with the approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by day—Retty and
the rest went out. The lovers followed them.
"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?" he musingly observed
to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping before him through the frigid pallor of opening
day. "Not so very different, I think," she said.
"Why do you think that?" "There are very few women's lives that are
not—tremulous," Tess replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her.
"There's more in those three than you think." "What is in them?"
"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make—perhaps would make—a properer wife
than I. And perhaps they love you as well as I—almost."
"O, Tessy!" There were signs that it was an exquisite
relief to her to hear the impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let
generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she had not the power
to attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were joined by a milker from one of the
cottages, and no more was said on that which concerned them so deeply.
But Tess knew that this day would decide it. In the afternoon several of the dairyman's
household and assistants went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy,
where many of the cows were milked without being driven home.
The supply was getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary milkers
of the lush green season had been dismissed. The work progressed leisurely.
Each pailful was poured into tall cans that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been
brought upon the scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away. Dairyman Crick,
who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming miraculously white against a leaden evening
sky, suddenly looked at his heavy watch. "Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said.
"Begad! We shan't be soon enough with this milk at
the station, if we don't mind. There's no time to-day to take it home and
mix it with the bulk afore sending off. It must go to station straight from here.
Who'll drive it across?" Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was
none of his business, asking Tess to accompany him.
The evening, though sunless, had been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come
out with her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed for
a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her
scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her.
She assented by relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and mounted
the spring-waggon beside Clare.
*** In the diminishing daylight they went along
the level roadway through the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed
in the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon Heath.
On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tips appeared like
battlemented towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that they did not begin
talking for a long while, the silence being broken only by the clucking of the milk in
the tall cans behind them. The lane they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had remained
on the boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung in heavy
clusters. Every now and then Angel would fling the lash
of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give it to his companion.
The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down herald-drops of rain, and
the stagnant air of the day changed into a fitful breeze which played about their faces.
The quick-silvery glaze on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light
they changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a rasp.
But that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her countenance, a natural carnation slightly
embrowned by the season, had deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops;
and her hair, which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual, caused to tumble down
from its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was made clammy by the
moisture, till it hardly was better than seaweed. "I ought not to have come, I suppose," she
murmured, looking at the sky. "I am sorry for the rain," said he.
"But how glad I am to have you here!" Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind
the liquid gauze. The evening grew darker, and the roads being
crossed by gates, it was not safe to drive faster than at a walking pace.
The air was rather chill. "I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing
upon your arms and shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle
won't hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think
that the rain might be helping me." She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped
round them both a large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off
the milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well
as herself, Clare's hands being occupied. "Now we are all right again.
Ah—no we are not! It runs down into my neck a little, and it
must still more into yours. That's better. Your arms are like wet marble,
Tess. Wipe them in the cloth.
Now, if you stay quiet, you will not get another drop.
Well, dear—about that question of mine—that long-standing question?"
The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of the horse's hoofs on
the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in the cans behind them.
"Do you remember what you said?" "I do," she replied.
"Before we get home, mind." "I'll try."
He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course passed and left behind.
"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old place—one of the several
seats which belonged to an ancient Norman family formerly of great influence in this
county, the d'Urbervilles. I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them.
There is something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it was fierce,
domineering, feudal renown." "Yes," said Tess.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand at which a feeble light
was beginning to assert its presence, a spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam
at intervals upon the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between
their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler
to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew
its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial.
They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a little railway station;
a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy
and mankind than the celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast.
The cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter from a neighbouring
holly tree. Then there was the hissing of a train, which
drew up almost silently upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can
into the truck. The light of the engine flashed for a second
upon Tess Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree.
No object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated
girl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a
friendly leopard at pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet
drooping on her brow. She mounted again beside her lover, with a
mute obedience characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had wrapped
themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they plunged back into the now thick
night. Tess was so receptive that the few minutes
of contact with the whirl of material progress lingered in her thought.
"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won't they?" she asked.
"Strange people that we have never seen." "Yes—I suppose they will.
Though not as we send it. When its strength has been lowered, so that
it may not get up into their heads." "Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and
centurions, ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."
"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions." "Who don't know anything of us, and where
it comes from; or think how we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that
it might reach 'em in time?" "We did not drive entirely on account of these
precious Londoners; we drove a little on our own—on account of that anxious matter which
you will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put it in this way.
You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I mean. Does it not?"
"You know as well as I. O yes—yes!"
"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?" "My only reason was on account of you—on
account of a question. I have something to tell you—"
"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly convenience also?"
"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience.
But my life before I came here—I want—" "Well, it is for my convenience as well as
my happiness. If I have a very large farm, either English
or colonial, you will be invaluable as a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest
mansion in the country. So please—please, dear Tessy, disabuse your
mind of the feeling that you will stand in my way."
"But my history. I want you to know it—you must let me tell
you—you will not like me so well!" "Tell it if you wish to, dearest.
This precious history then. Yes, I was born at so and so, Anno Domini—"
"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words as a help, lightly as they were
spoken. "And I grew up there. And I was in the Sixth
Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness, and should make a good
teacher, so it was settled that I should be one.
But there was trouble in my family; father was not very industrious, and he drank a little."
"Yes, yes. Poor child!
Nothing new." He pressed her more closely to his side.
"And then—there is something very unusual about it—about me.
I—I was—" Tess's breath quickened.
"Yes, dearest. Never mind."
"I—I—am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville—a descendant of the same family as those that
owned the old house we passed. And—we are all gone to nothing!"
"A d'Urberville!—Indeed! And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?"
"Yes," she answered faintly. "Well—why should I love you less after knowing
this?" "I was told by the dairyman that you hated
old families." He laughed.
"Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic principle of blood
before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we ought to respect are
those spiritual ones of the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity.
But I am extremely interested in this news—you can have no idea how interested I am!
Are you not interested yourself in being one of that well-known line?"
"No. I have thought it sad—especially since coming
here, and knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to my father's
people. But other hills and field belonged to Retty's
people, and perhaps others to Marian's, so that I don't value it particularly."
"Yes—it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil were once owners of it,
and I sometimes wonder that a certain school of politicians don't make capital of the circumstance;
but they don't seem to know it... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance
of your name to d'Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption.
And this was the carking secret!" She had not told.
At the last moment her courage had failed her; she feared his blame for not telling
him sooner; and her instinct of self-preservation was stronger than her candour.
"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should have been glad to know you to be
descended exclusively from the long-suffering, dumb, unrecorded rank and file of the English
nation, and not from the self-seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense
of the rest. But I am corrupted away from that by my affection
for you, Tess (he laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise.
For your own sake I rejoice in your descent. Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this fact
of your extraction may make an appreciable difference to its acceptance of you as my
wife, after I have made you the well-read woman that I mean to make you.
My mother too, poor soul, will think so much better of you on account of it.
Tess, you must spell your name correctly—d'Urberville—from this very day."
"I like the other way rather best." "But you MUST, dearest!
Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom millionaires would jump at such a possession!
By the bye, there's one of that kidney who has taken the name—where have I heard of
him?—Up in the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think.
Why, he is the very man who had that rumpus with my father I told you of.
What an odd coincidence!" "Angel, I think I would rather not take the
name! It is unlucky, perhaps!"
She was agitated. "Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I
have you. Take my name, and so you will escape yours!
The secret is out, so why should you any longer refuse me?"
"If it is SURE to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you feel that you do wish
to marry me, VERY, VERY much—" "I do, dearest, of course!"
"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly able to keep alive
without me, whatever my offences, that would make me feel I ought to say I will."
"You will—you do say it, I know! You will be mine for ever and ever."
He clasped her close and kissed her. "Yes!"
She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so violent that it seemed
to rend her. Tess was not a hysterical girl by any means,
and he was surprised. "Why do you cry, dearest?"
"I can't tell—quite!—I am so glad to think—of being yours, and making you happy!"
"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!"
"I mean—I cry because I have broken down in my vow!
I said I would die unmarried!" "But, if you love me you would like me to
be your husband?" "Yes, yes, yes!
But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!" "Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that
you are very much excited, and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very complimentary.
How came you to wish that if you care for me?
Do you care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way."
"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a distraction of tenderness.
"Will this prove it more?" She clasped his neck, and for the first time
Clare learnt what an impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved
with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.
"There—now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.
"Yes. I never really doubted—never, never!" So they drove on through the gloom, forming
one bundle inside the sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them. She had consented.
She might as well have agreed at first. The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation,
that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless
weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.
"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my doing that?"
"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know how
very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how wrong it would be
in me to object. Where does she live?"
"At the same place—Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."
"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer—" "Yes; at that dance on the green; but you
would not dance with me. O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"
XXXI Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter
to her mother the very next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.
DEAR TESS,—
J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well,
as they leave me at Present, thank God for it.
Dear
Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are going really
to be married soon. But with respect to your question,
Tess, J say between ourselves, quite private but very
strong, that on no account do you say a word of your
Bygone Trouble to him. J did not tell everything
to your Father, he being so Proud on account of his
Respectability, which, perhaps, your Intended is
the same. Many a woman—some of the Highest in the
Land—have had a Trouble in their time; and why should
you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs?
No
girl would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long
ago, and not your Fault at all. J shall answer the
same if you ask me fifty times. Besides, you must bear
in mind that, knowing it to be your Childish Nature to
tell all that's in your heart—so simple!—J made you
promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having
your Welfare in my Mind; and you most solemnly did
promise it going from this Door. J have not named
either that Question or your coming marriage to your
Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple
Man.
Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send
you a Hogshead of Cyder for you Wedding, knowing there
is not much in your parts, and thin Sour Stuff what
there is. So no more at present, and with kind love
to your Young Man.—From your affectte. Mother,
J. DURBEYFIELD "O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.
She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's
elastic spirit. Her mother did not see life as Tess saw it.
That haunting episode of bygone days was to her mother but a passing accident.
But perhaps her mother was right as to the course to be followed, whatever she might
be in her reasons. Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for
her adored one's happiness: silence it should be.
Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had any shadow of right to
control her action, Tess grew calmer. The responsibility was shifted, and her heart
was lighter than it had been for weeks. The days of declining autumn which followed
her assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a season through which she lived in
spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period of her life.
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare.
To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide,
philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his
person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect
that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained
her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she
saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion.
He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at
him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.
She dismissed the past—trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal that is
smouldering and dangerous. She had not known that men could be so disinterested,
chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he.
Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed;
but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was
singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright
than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially
inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could jealously
guard the loved one against his very self. This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight
experiences had been so infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation
against the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.
They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her honest faith she did not disguise her
desire to be with him. The sum of her instincts on this matter, if
clearly stated, would have been that the elusive quality of her sex which attracts men in general
might be distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it must in its very
nature carry with it a suspicion of art. The country custom of unreserved comradeship
out of doors during betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no strangeness;
though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw how normal a thing she, in common
with all the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful
afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling
tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back
again. They were never out of the sound of some purling
weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal
as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape.
They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there
was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward
so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of
them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted
against the sloping sides of the vale. Men were at work here and there—for it was
the season for "taking up" the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the
winter irrigation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The shovelfuls
of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide as the whole valley,
were an essence of soils, pounded champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized
to extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the mead, and of the
cattle grazing there. Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist
in sight of these watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance,
though actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the labourers,
wore the look of a wary animal the while. "You are not ashamed of owning me as yours
before them!" she said gladly. "O no!"
"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that you are walking about like
this with me, a milkmaid—" "The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen."
"They might feel it a hurt to their dignity." "My dear girl—a d'Urberville hurt the dignity
of a Clare! It is a grand card to play—that of your
belonging to such a family, and I am reserving it for a grand effect when we are married,
and have the proofs of your descent from Parson Tringham.
Apart from that, my future is to be totally foreign to my family—it will not affect
even the surface of their lives. We shall leave this part of England—perhaps
England itself—and what does it matter how people regard us here?
You will like going, will you not?" She could answer no more than a bare affirmative,
so great was the emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with
him as his own familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears like a
babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in his, and thus they went
on, to a place where the reflected sun glared up from the river, under a bridge, with a
molten-metallic glow that dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the bridge.
They stood still, whereupon little furred and feathered heads popped up from the smooth
surface of the water; but, finding that the disturbing presences had paused, and not passed
by, they disappeared again. Upon this river-brink they lingered till the
fog began to close round them—which was very early in the evening at this time of
the year—settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it rested like crystals, and on his
brows and hair. They walked later on Sundays, when it was
quite dark. Some of the dairy-people, who were also out
of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches,
ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed;
noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her
heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occasional little laugh
upon which her soul seemed to ride—the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves
and has won from all other women—unlike anything else in nature.
They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not quite alighted.
Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as
a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy
spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care,
shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light,
but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance.
She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness
were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching,
one or the other, a little every day. One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to
sit indoors keeping house, all the other occupants of the domicile being away.
As they talked she looked thoughtfully up at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.
"I am not worthy of you—no, I am not!" she burst out, jumping up from her low stool as
though appalled at his homage, and the fulness of her own joy thereat.
Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was only the smaller part
of it, said— "I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess!
Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions,
but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and
lovely, and of good report—as you are, my Tess."
She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had that string of excellences made
her young heart ache in church of late years, and how strange that he should have cited
them now. "Why didn't you stay and love me when I—was
sixteen; living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green?
O, why didn't you, why didn't you!" she said, impetuously clasping her hands.
Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly enough, what a creature
of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her
happiness entirely on him. "Ah—why didn't I stay!" he said.
"That is just what I feel. If I had only known!
But you must not be so bitter in your regret—why should you be?"
With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged hastily—
"I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have now.
Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done—I should have had so much longer
happiness!" It was no mature woman with a long dark vista
of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and
twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe.
To calm herself the more completely, she rose from her little stool and left the room, overturning
the stool with her skirts as she went. He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown
from a bundle of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and
hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she was herself again.
"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?" he said, good-humouredly, as
he spread a cushion for her on the stool, and seated himself in the settle beside her.
"I wanted to ask you something, and just then you ran away."
"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured. She suddenly approached him, and put a hand
upon each of his arms. "No, Angel, I am not really so—by nature,
I mean!" The more particularly to assure him that she
was not, she placed herself close to him in the settle, and allowed her head to find a
resting-place against Clare's shoulder. "What did you want to ask me—I am sure I
will answer it," she continued humbly. "Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry
me, and hence there follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day be?'"
"I like living like this." "But I must think of starting in business
on my own hook with the new year, or a little later.
And before I get involved in the multifarious details of my new position, I should like
to have secured my partner." "But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite
practically, wouldn't it be best not to marry till after all that?—Though I can't bear
the thought o' your going away and leaving me here!"
"Of course you cannot—and it is not best in this case.
I want you to help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be?
Why not a fortnight from now?" "No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so
many things to think of first." "But—"
He drew her gently nearer to him. The reality of marriage was startling when
it loomed so near. Before discussion of the question had proceeded
further there walked round the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment
Mr Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.
Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her face flushed and
her eyes shone in the firelight. "I knew how it would be if I sat so close
to him!" she cried, with vexation. "I said to myself, they are sure to come and
catch us! But I wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might ha' seemed as if I was
almost!" "Well—if so be you hadn't told us, I am
sure we shouldn't ha' noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,"
replied the dairyman. He continued to his wife, with the stolid
mien of a man who understood nothing of the emotions relating to matrimony—"Now, Christianer,
that shows that folks should never fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain't.
O no, I should never ha' thought a word of where she was a sitting to, if she hadn't
told me—not I." "We are going to be married soon," said Clare,
with improvised phlegm. "Ah—and be ye!
Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir. I've thought you mid do such a thing for some
time. She's too good for a dairymaid—I said so
the very first day I zid her—and a prize for any man; and what's more, a wonderful
woman for a gentleman-farmer's wife; he won't be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at his
side." Somehow Tess disappeared.
She had been even more struck with the look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed
by Crick's blunt praise. After supper, when she reached her bedroom,
they were all present. A light was burning, and each damsel was sitting
up whitely in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.
But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood. They could scarcely
feel as a loss what they had never expected to have.
Their condition was objective, contemplative. "He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty,
never taking eyes off Tess. "How her face do show it!"
"You BE going to marry him?" asked Marian. "Yes," said Tess.
"When?" "Some day."
They thought that this was evasiveness only. "YES—going to MARRY him—a gentleman!"
repeated Izz Huett. And by a sort of fascination the three girls,
one after another, crept out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess.
Retty put her hands upon Tess's shoulders, as if to realize her friend's corporeality
after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms round her waist, all looking into
her face. "How it do seem!
Almost more than I can think of!" said Izz Huett.
Marian kissed Tess. "Yes," she murmured as she withdrew her lips.
"Was that because of love for her, or because other lips have touched there by now?" continued
Izz drily to Marian. "I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply.
"I was on'y feeling all the strangeness o't—that she is to be his wife, and nobody else. I
don't say nay to it, nor either of us, because we did not think of it—only loved him.
Still, nobody else is to marry'n in the world—no fine lady, nobody in silks and satins; but
she who do live like we." "Are you sure you don't dislike me for it?"
said Tess in a low voice. They hung about her in their white nightgowns
before replying, as if they considered their answer might lie in her look.
"I don't know—I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle.
"I want to hate 'ee; but I cannot!" "That's how I feel," echoed Izz and Marian.
"I can't hate her. Somehow she hinders me!" "He ought to marry one of you," murmured Tess.
"Why?" "You are all better than I."
"We better than you?" said the girls in a low, slow whisper.
"No, no, dear Tess!" "You are!" she contradicted impetuously.
And suddenly tearing away from their clinging arms she burst into a hysterical fit of tears,
bowing herself on the chest of drawers and repeating incessantly, "O yes, yes, yes!"
Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.
"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried. "I think I ought to make him even now!
You would be better for him than—I don't know what I'm saying!
O! O!"
They went up to her and clasped her round, but still her sobs tore her.
"Get some water," said Marian, "She's upset by us, poor thing, poor thing!"
They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where they kissed her warmly.
"You are best for'n," said Marian. "More ladylike, and a better scholar than
we, especially since he had taught 'ee so much.
But even you ought to be proud. You BE proud, I'm sure!"
"Yes, I am," she said; "and I am ashamed at so breaking down."
When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian whispered across to her—
"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told 'ee that we loved
him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not hate you, and could not hate you,
because you were his choice, and we never hoped to be chose by him."
They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging tears trickled down upon Tess's
pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a bursting heart, to tell all her history to
Angel Clare, despite her mother's command—to let him for whom she lived and breathed despise
her if he would, and her mother regard her as a fool, rather then preserve a silence
which might be deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow seemed a wrong to these.
XXXII This penitential mood kept her from naming
the wedding-day. The beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he
asked her at the most tempting times. But Tess's desire seemed to be for a perpetual
betrothal in which everything should remain as it was then.
The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early afternoons before milking
to idle there awhile, and the state of dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare hour
for idling. Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple
of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight
on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification,
wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them,
then passed out of its line, and were quite extinct.
In the presence of these things he would remind her that the date was still the question.
Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission invented by Mrs Crick
to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a journey to the farmhouse
on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton
to which they were relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought
great changes to the world of kine. Batches of the animals were sent away daily
to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their calves were born, after
which event, and as soon as the calf could walk, mother and offspring were driven back
to the dairy. In the interval which elapsed before the calves
were sold there was, of course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been
taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.
Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great gravel-cliff immediately over
the levels, where they stood still and listened. The water was now high in the streams, squirting
through the weirs, and tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all full; there
was no taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers were compelled to follow the permanent ways.
From the whole extent of the invisible vale came a multitudinous intonation; it forced
upon their fancy that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur was the vociferation
of its populace. "It seems like tens of thousands of them,"
said Tess; "holding public-meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching, quarrelling,
sobbing, groaning, praying, and cursing." Clare was not particularly heeding.
"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much assistance during the
winter months?" "No."
"The cows are going dry rapidly." "Yes.
Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the day before, making nearly twenty
in the straw already. Ah—is it that the farmer don't want my help
for the calving? O, I am not wanted here any more!
And I have tried so hard to—" "Crick didn't exactly say that he would no
longer require you. But, knowing what our relations were, he said
in the most good-natured and respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at
Christmas I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would do without you he
merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a time of year when he could do with
a very little female help. I am afraid I was sinner enough to feel rather
glad that he was in this way forcing your hand."
"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel.
Because 'tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis convenient."
"Well, it is convenient—you have admitted that."
He put his finger upon her cheek. "Ah!" he said.
"What?" "I feel the red rising up at her having been
caught! But why should I trifle so!
We will not trifle—life is too serious." "It is.
Perhaps I saw that before you did." She was seeing it then.
To decline to marry him after all—in obedience to her emotion of last night—and leave the
dairy, meant to go to some strange place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in request
now calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm where no divine being like Angel
Clare was. She hated the thought, and she hated more
the thought of going home. "So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued,
"since you will probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and
convenient that I should carry you off then as my property.
Besides, if you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you would know that we could
not go on like this for ever." "I wish we could.
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking
as much of me as you have done through the past summer-time!"
"I always shall." "O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden
fervour of faith in him. "Angel, I will fix the day when I will become
yours for always!" Thus at last it was arranged between them,
during that dark walk home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.
When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told—with injunctions of secrecy;
for each of the lovers was desirous that the marriage should be kept as private as possible.
The dairyman, though he had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about losing
her. What should he do about his skimming?
Who would make the ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies? Mrs
Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last come to an end, and said that
directly she set eyes on Tess she divined that she was to be the chosen one of somebody
who was no common outdoor man; Tess had looked so superior as she walked across the barton
on that afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good family she could have sworn.
In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as
she approached; but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination aided
by subsequent knowledge. Tess was now carried along upon the wings
of the hours, without the sense of a will. The word had been given; the number of the
day written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun
to admit the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more
extensively with natural phenomena than with their fellow-creatures; and she accordingly
drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic
of the frame of mind. But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly
to notify the wedding-day; really to again implore her advice.
It was a gentleman who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently considered.
A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with a light heart by a rougher man,
might not be received with the same feeling by him.
But this communication brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.
Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself and to Tess of the practical need
for their immediate marriage, there was in truth an element of precipitancy in the step,
as became apparent at a later date. He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather
ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him.
He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to an unintellectual bucolic
life, that such charms as he beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the
scenes. Unsophistication was a thing to talk of; but
he had not known how it really struck one until he came here.
Yet he was very far from seeing his future track clearly, and it might be a year or two
before he would be able to consider himself fairly started in life.
The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the
sense that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family.
"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait till you were quite settled
in your midland farm?" she once asked timidly. (A midland farm was the idea just then.)
"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere away from my protection
and sympathy." The reason was a good one, so far as it went.
His influence over her had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits,
his speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions.
And to leave her in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with him.
He wished to have her under his charge for another reason. His parents had naturally
desired to see her once at least before he carried her off to a distant settlement, English
or colonial; and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention, he
judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous
opening would be of some social assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying
ordeal—her presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.
Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill, having an idea that he might
combine the use of one with corn-growing. The proprietor of a large old water-mill at
Wellbridge—once the mill of an Abbey—had offered him the inspection of his time-honoured
mode of procedure, and a hand in the operations for a few days, whenever he should choose
to come. Clare paid a visit to the place, some few
miles distant, one day at this time, to inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in
the evening. She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge flour-mills.
And what had determined him? Less the opportunity of an insight into grinding
and bolting than the casual fact that lodgings were to be obtained in that very farmhouse
which, before its mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville family.
This was always how Clare settled practical questions; by a sentiment which had nothing
to do with them. They decided to go immediately after the wedding,
and remain for a fortnight, instead of journeying to towns and inns.
"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of London that I have heard
of," he said, "and by March or April we will pay a visit to my father and mother."
Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day, the incredible day,
on which she was to become his, loomed large in the near future.
The thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was the date.
His wife, she said to herself. Could it ever be?
Their two selves together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared by them; why not?
And yet why? One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from
church, and spoke privately to Tess. "You was not called home this morning."
"What?" "It should ha' been the first time of asking
to-day," she answered, looking quietly at Tess.
"You meant to be married New Year's Eve, deary?" The other returned a quick affirmative.
"And there must be three times of asking. And now there be only two Sundays left between."
Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be three.
Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there must be a week's postponement,
and that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover? She who had
been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.
A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned the omission of the banns to
Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron's privilege of speaking to Angel on the point.
"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare? The banns, I mean."
"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare. As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured
her: "Don't let them tease you about the banns.
A licence will be quieter for us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you.
So if you go to church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own name, if you wished
to." "I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said
proudly. But to know that things were in train was
an immense relief to Tess notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would
stand up and forbid the banns on the ground of her history.
How events were favouring her! "I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself.
"All this good fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill.
That's how Heaven mostly does. I wish I could have had common banns!"
But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her to
be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to buy a new one.
The question was set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by the arrival of some large packages
addressed to her. Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to shoes,
including a perfect morning costume, such as would well suit the simple wedding they
planned. He entered the house shortly after the arrival
of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing them.
A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in her eyes.
"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek upon his shoulder.
"Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My own love—how good, how kind!"
"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London—nothing more."
And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go upstairs, and take
her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not, to get the village sempstress to make
a few alterations. She did return upstairs, and put on the gown.
Alone, she stood for a moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire;
and then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic robe—
That never would become that wife
That had once done amiss, which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to
her as a child, so blithely and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to
the tune. Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe had betrayed
Queen Guinevere. Since she had been at the dairy she had not
once thought of the lines till now.
XXXIII Angel felt that he would like to spend a day
with her before the wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last jaunt in her company
while there were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day, in circumstances that would
never be repeated; with that other and greater day beaming close ahead of them.
During the preceding week, therefore, he suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town,
and they started together. Clare's life at the dairy had been that of
a recluse in respect the world of his own class.
For months he had never gone near a town, and, requiring no vehicle, had never kept
one, hiring the dairyman's cob or gig if he rode or drove.
They went in the gig that day. And then for the first time in their lives
they shopped as partners in one concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its loads a holly
and mistletoe, and the town was very full of strangers who had come in from all parts
of the country on account of the day. Tess paid the penalty of walking about with
happiness superadded to beauty on her countenance by being much stared at as she moved amid
them on his arm. In the evening they returned to the inn at
which they had put up, and Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse
and gig brought to the door. The general sitting-room was full of guests,
who were continually going in and out. As the door opened and shut each time for
the passage of these, the light within the parlour fell full upon Tess's face.
Two men came out and passed by her among the rest.
One of them had stared her up and down in surprise, and she fancied he was a Trantridge
man, though that village lay so many miles off that Trantridge folk were rarities here.
"A comely maid that," said the other. "True, comely enough.
But unless I make a great mistake—" And he negatived the remainder of the definition
forthwith. Clare had just returned from the stable-yard,
and, confronting the man on the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of
Tess. The insult to her stung him to the quick,
and before he had considered anything at all he struck the man on the chin with the full
force of his fist, sending him staggering backwards into the passage.
The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare, stepping outside the
door, put himself in a posture of defence. But his opponent began to think better of
the matter. He looked anew at Tess as he passed her, and
said to Clare— "I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake.
I thought she was another woman, forty miles from here."
Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was, moreover, to blame for leaving
her standing in an inn-passage, did what he usually did in such cases, gave the man five
shillings to plaster the blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a pacific good
night. As soon as Clare had taken the reins from
the ostler, and the young couple had driven off, the two men went in the other direction.
"And was it a mistake?" said the second one. "Not a bit of it.
But I didn't want to hurt the gentleman's feelings—not I."
In the meantime the lovers were driving onward. "Could we put off our wedding till a little
later?" Tess asked in a dry dull voice. "I mean if we wished?"
"No, my love. Calm yourself.
Do you mean that the fellow may have time to summon me for assault?" he asked good-humouredly.
"No—I only meant—if it should have to be put off."
What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss such fancies from
her mind, which she obediently did as well as she could.
But she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she thought, "We shall go away,
a very long distance, hundreds of miles from these parts, and such as this can never happen
again, and no ghost of the past reach there." They parted tenderly that night on the landing,
and Clare ascended to his attic. Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites,
lest the few remaining days should not afford sufficient time.
While she sat she heard a noise in Angel's room overhead, a sound of thumping and struggling.
Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her anxiety lest Clare should be ill she
ran up and knocked at his door, and asked him what was the matter.
"Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within. "I am so sorry I disturbed you!
But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and dreamt that I was fighting
that fellow again who insulted you, and the noise you heard was my pummelling away with
my fists at my portmanteau, which I pulled out to-day for packing.
I am occasionally liable to these freaks in my sleep. Go to bed and think of it no more."
This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her indecision.
Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not; but there was another way.
She sat down and wrote on the four pages of a note-sheet a succinct narrative of those
events of three or four years ago, put it into an envelope, and directed it to Clare.
Then, lest the flesh should again be weak, she crept upstairs without any shoes and slipped
the note under his door. Her night was a broken one, as it well might
be, and she listened for the first faint noise overhead.
It came, as usual; he descended, as usual. She descended.
He met her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed her. Surely it was as warmly as ever!
He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought.
But he said not a word to her about her revelation, even when they were alone.
Could he have had it? Unless he began the subject she felt that
she could say nothing. So the day passed, and it was evident that
whatever he thought he meant to keep to himself. Yet he was frank and affectionate as before.
Could it be that her doubts were childish? that he forgave her; that he loved her for
what she was, just as she was, and smiled at her disquiet as at a foolish nightmare?
Had he really received her note? She glanced into his room, and could see nothing
of it. It might be that he forgave her.
But even if he had not received it she had a sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely
would forgive her. Every morning and night he was the same, and
thus New Year's Eve broke—the wedding day. The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having
through the whole of this last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something
of the position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her own.
When they arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were surprised to see what effects had
been produced in the large kitchen for their glory since they had last beheld it.
At some unnatural hour of the morning the dairyman had caused the yawning chimney-corner
to be whitened, and the brick hearth reddened, and a blazing yellow damask blower to be hung
across the arch in place of the old grimy blue cotton one with a black sprig pattern
which had formerly done duty there. This renovated aspect of what was the focus
indeed of the room on a full winter morning threw a smiling demeanour over the whole apartment.
"I was determined to do summat in honour o't", said the dairyman. "And as you wouldn't hear
of my gieing a rattling good randy wi' fiddles and bass-viols complete, as we should ha'
done in old times, this was all I could think o' as a noiseless thing."
Tess's friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have been present at the
ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact nobody was invited from Marlott.
As for Angel's family, he had written and duly informed them of the time, and assured
them that he would be glad to see one at least of them there for the day if he would like
to come. His brothers had not replied at all, seeming
to be indignant with him; while his father and mother had written a rather sad letter,
deploring his precipitancy in rushing into marriage, but making the best of the matter
by saying that, though a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law they could have expected,
their son had arrived at an age which he might be supposed to be the best judge.
This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would have done had he
been without the grand card with which he meant to surprise them ere long.
To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as a d'Urberville and a lady, he had felt to
be temerarious and risky; hence he had concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized
with worldly ways by a few months' travel and reading with him, he could take her on
a visit to his parents and impart the knowledge while triumphantly producing her as worthy
of such an ancient line. It was a pretty lover's dream, if no more.
Perhaps Tess's lineage had more value for himself than for anybody in the world beside.
Her perception that Angel's bearing towards her still remained in no whit altered by her
own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful if he could have received it.
She rose from breakfast before he had finished, and hastened upstairs.
It had occurred to her to look once more into the *** gaunt room which had been Clare's
den, or rather eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood at the open door of the
apartment, regarding and pondering. She stooped to the threshold of the doorway,
where she had pushed in the note two or three days earlier in such excitement.
The carpet reached close to the sill, and under the edge of the carpet she discerned
the faint white margin of the envelope containing her letter to him, which he obviously had
never seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it beneath the carpet as well as beneath
the door. With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the
letter. There it was—sealed up, just as it had left her hands.
The mountain had not yet been removed. She could not let him read it now, the house
being in full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room she destroyed the letter there.
She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious. The incident of the
misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it prevented a confession; but she knew in her
conscience that it need not; there was still time.
Yet everything was in a stir; there was coming and going; all had to dress, the dairyman
and Mrs Crick having been asked to accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate
talk was well-nigh impossible. The only minute Tess could get to be alone
with Clare was when they met upon the landing. "I am so anxious to talk to you—I want to
confess all my faults and blunders!" she said with attempted lightness.
"No, no—we can't have faults talked of—you must be deemed perfect to-day at least, my
Sweet!" he cried. "We shall have plenty of time, hereafter,
I hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at the same time."
"But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you could not say—"
"Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say, as soon as we are settled
in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my faults then.
But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent matter for a dull time."
"Then you don't wish me to, dearest?" "I do not, Tessy, really."
The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this. Those words of his
seemed to reassure her on further reflection. She was whirled onward through the next couple
of critical hours by the mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further
meditation. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make
herself his, to call him her lord, her own—then, if necessary, to die—had at last lifted
her up from her plodding reflective pathway. In dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud
of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive, particularly as it was winter.
A closed carriage was ordered from a roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever
since the old days of post-chaise travelling. It had stout wheel-spokes, and heavy felloes
a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole like a battering-ram.
The postilion was a venerable "boy" of sixty—a martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive
exposure in youth, counter-acted by strong liquors—who had stood at inn-doors doing
nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed since he had no longer been
required to ride professionally, as if expecting the old times to come back again.
He had a permanent running wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the constant
bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the many years that he had been in regular
employ at the King's Arms, Casterbridge. Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure,
and behind this decayed conductor, the _partie carrée_ took their seats—the bride and
bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel would have liked one at least of his
brothers to be present as groomsman, but their silence after his gentle hint to that effect
by letter had signified that they did not care to come.
They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be expected to countenance it.
Perhaps it was as well that they could not be present. They were not worldly young fellows,
but fraternizing with dairy-folk would have struck unpleasantly upon their biased niceness,
apart from their views of the match. Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew
nothing of this, did not see anything, did not know the road they were taking to the
church. She knew that Angel was close to her; all
the rest was a luminous mist. She was a sort of celestial person, who owed
her being to poetry—one of those classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to
her about when they took their walks together. The marriage being by licence there were only
a dozen or so of people in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced
no more effect upon her. They were at stellar distances from her present
world. In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore
her faith to him the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy. At a pause in the
service, while they were kneeling together, she unconsciously inclined herself towards
him, so that her shoulder touched his arm; she had been frightened by a passing thought,
and the movement had been automatic, to assure herself that he was really there, and to fortify
her belief that his fidelity would be proof against all things.
Clare knew that she loved him—every curve of her form showed that— but he did not
know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single-mindedness, its meekness; what
long-suffering it guaranteed, what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.
As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their rests, and a modest peal
of three notes broke forth—that limited amount of expression having been deemed sufficient
by the church builders for the joys of such a small parish.
Passing by the tower with her husband on the path to the gate she could feel the vibrant
air humming round them from the louvred belfry in the circle of sound, and it matched the
highly-charged mental atmosphere in which she was living.
This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation not her own, like the angel
whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till the sound of the church bells had died away, and
the emotions of the wedding-service had calmed down.
Her eyes could dwell upon details more clearly now, and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed
their own gig to be sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple, she observed
the build and character of that conveyance for the first time.
Sitting in silence she regarded it long. "I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy," said
Clare. "Yes," she answered, putting her hand to her
brow. "I tremble at many things.
It is all so serious, Angel. Among other things I seem to have seen this
carriage before, to be very well acquainted with it.
It is very odd—I must have seen it in a dream."
"Oh—you have heard the legend of the d'Urberville Coach—that well-known superstition of this
county about your family when they were very popular here; and this lumbering old thing
reminds you of it." "I have never heard of it to my knowledge,"
said she. "What is the legend—may I know it?"
"Well—I would rather not tell it in detail just now.
A certain d'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a dreadful crime
in his family coach; and since that time members of the family see or hear the old coach whenever—But
I'll tell you another day—it is rather gloomy. Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been
brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable caravan."
"I don't remember hearing it before," she murmured.
"Is it when we are going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it when
we have committed a crime?" "Now, Tess!"
He silenced her by a kiss. By the time they reached home she was contrite
and spiritless. She was Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she
any moral right to the name? Was she not more truly Mrs Alexander d'Urberville?
Could intensity of love justify what might be considered in upright souls as culpable
reticence? She knew not what was expected of women in
such cases; and she had no counsellor. However, when she found herself alone in her
room for a few minutes—the last day this on which she was ever to enter it—she knelt
down and prayed. She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband
who really had her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she
herself almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion expressed
by Friar Laurence: "These violent delights have violent ends."
It might be too desperate for human conditions—too rank, to wild, too deadly.
"O my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there alone; "for she you love is not my real
self, but one in my image; the one I might have been!"
Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided to fulfil the plan of going
for a few days to the lodgings in the old farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he
meant to reside during his investigation of flour processes.
At two o'clock there was nothing left to do but to start.
All the servantry of the dairy were standing in the red-brick entry to see them go out,
the dairyman and his wife following to the door.
Tess saw her three chamber-mates in a row against the wall, pensively inclining their
heads. She had much questioned if they would appear
at the parting moment; but there they were, stoical and staunch to the last.
She knew why the delicate Retty looked so fragile, and Izz so tragically sorrowful,
and Marian so blank; and she forgot her own *** shadow for a moment in contemplating
theirs. She impulsively whispered to him—
"Will you kiss 'em all, once, poor things, for the first and last time?"
Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality—which was all that
it was to him—and as he passed them he kissed them in succession where they stood, saying
"Goodbye" to each as he did so. When they reached the door Tess femininely glanced back
to discern the effect of that kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her glance, as there
might have been. If there had it would have disappeared when
she saw how moved the girls all were. The kiss had obviously done harm by awakening
feelings they were trying to subdue. Of all this Clare was unconscious.
Passing on to the wicket-gate he shook hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed
his last thanks to them for their attentions; after which there was a moment of silence
before they had moved off. It was interrupted by the crowing of a ***.
The white one with the rose comb had come and settled on the palings in front of the
house, within a few yards of them, and his notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling
away like echoes down a valley of rocks. "Oh?" said Mrs Crick.
"An afternoon crow!" Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding
it open. "That's bad," one murmured to the other, not
thinking that the words could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.
The *** crew again—straight towards Clare. "Well!" said the dairyman.
"I don't like to hear him!" said Tess to her husband.
"Tell the man to drive on. Goodbye, goodbye!"
The *** crew again. "Hoosh!
Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!" said the dairyman with some irritation, turning
to the bird and driving him away. And to his wife as they went indoors: "Now,
to think o' that just to-day! I've not heard his crow of an afternoon all
the year afore." "It only means a change in the weather," said
she; "not what you think: 'tis impossible!"
XXXIV They drove by the level road along the valley
to a distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to
the left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half its name.
Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings, whose exterior
features are so well known to all travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of
a fine manorial residence, and the property and seat of a d'Urberville, but since its
partial demolition a farmhouse. "Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!"
said Clare as he handed her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it was too
near a satire. On entering they found that, though they had
only engaged a couple of rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their proposed presence
during the coming days to pay a New Year's visit to some friends, leaving a woman from
a neighbouring cottage to minister to their few wants.
The absoluteness of possession pleased them, and they realized it as the first moment of
their experience under their own exclusive roof-tree.
But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his bride.
When the carriage was gone they ascended the stairs to wash their hands, the charwoman
showing the way. On the landing Tess stopped and started.
"What's the matter?" said he. "Those horrid women!" she answered with a
smile. "How they frightened me."
He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built into the masonry.
As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these paintings represent women of middle
age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten.
The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless
treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other suggesting arrogance
to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.
"Whose portraits are those?" asked Clare of the charwoman.
"I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the d'Urberville family, the ancient
lords of this manor," she said, "Owing to their being builded into the wall they can't
be moved away." The unpleasantness of the matter was that,
in addition to their effect upon Tess, her fine features were unquestionably traceable
in these exaggerated forms. He said nothing of this, however, and, regretting
that he had gone out of his way to choose the house for their bridal time, went on into
the adjoining room. The place having been rather hastily prepared
for them, they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.
"Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up. "They are very much mixed."
"They are all yours," said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer than she was.
He had not been displeased with her thoughtfulness on such an occasion; it was what every sensible
woman would show: but Tess knew that she had been thoughtful to excess, and struggled against
it. The sun was so low on that short last afternoon
of the year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched
across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her.
They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first common meal
alone. Such was their childishness, or rather his,
that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to
brush crumbs from her lips with his own. He wondered a little that she did not enter
into these frivolities with his own zest. Looking at her silently for a long time; "She
is a dear dear Tess," he thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of
a difficult passage. "Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly
and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and
fortune? I think not.
I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself.
What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become.
What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her,
or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!"
They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage, which the dairyman had promised
to send before it grew dark. But evening began to close in, and the luggage
did not arrive, and they had brought nothing more than they stood in.
With the departure of the sun the calm mood of the winter day changed.
Out of doors there began noises as of silk smartly rubbed; the restful dead leaves of
the preceding autumn were stirred to irritated resurrection, and whirled about unwillingly,
and tapped against the shutters. It soon began to rain.
"That *** knew the weather was going to change," said Clare.
The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for the night, but she had placed candles
upon the table, and now they lit them. Each candle-flame drew towards the fireplace.
"These old houses are so draughty," continued Angel, looking at the flames, and at the grease
guttering down the sides. "I wonder where that luggage is.
We haven't even a brush and comb." "I don't know," she answered, absent-minded.
"Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening—not at all as you used to be.
Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled you.
I am sorry I brought you here. I wonder if you really love me, after all?"
He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent; but she was surcharged with
emotion, and winced like a wounded animal. Though she tried not to shed tears, she could
not help showing one or two. "I did not mean it!" said he, sorry.
"You are worried at not having your things, I know.
I cannot think why old Jonathan has not come with them.
Why, it is seven o'clock? Ah, there he is!"
A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody else to answer it, Clare went out.
He returned to the room with a small package in his hand.
"It is not Jonathan, after all," he said. "How vexing!" said Tess.
The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who had arrived at Talbothays from Emminster
Vicarage immediately after the departure of the married couple, and had followed them
hither, being under injunction to deliver it into nobody's hands but theirs.
Clare brought it to the light. It was less than a foot long, sewed up in
canvas, sealed in red wax with his father's seal, and directed in his father's hand to
"Mrs Angel Clare." "It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess,"
said he, handing it to her. "How thoughtful they are!"
Tess looked a little flustered as she took it.
"I think I would rather have you open it, dearest," said she, turning over the parcel.
"I don't like to break those great seals; they look so serious.
Please open it for me!" He undid the parcel.
Inside was a case of morocco leather, on the top of which lay a note and a key.
The note was for Clare, in the following words:
MY DEAR SON—
Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your
godmother, Mrs Pitney, when you were a lad, she—vain,
kind woman that she was—left to me a portion of the
contents of her jewel-case in trust for your wife, if
you should ever have one, as a mark of her affection
for you and whomsoever you should choose. This trust
I have fulfilled, and the diamonds have been locked up
at my banker's ever since. Though I feel it to be a
somewhat incongruous act in the circumstances, I am, as
you will see, bound to hand over the articles to the
woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime will now
rightly belong, and they are therefore promptly sent.
They become, I believe, heirlooms, strictly speaking,
according to the terms of your godmother's will.
The
precise words of the clause that refers to this matter
are enclosed. "I do remember," said Clare; "but I had quite
forgotten." Unlocking the case, they found it to contain
a necklace, with pendant, bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other small ornaments.
Tess seemed afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes sparkled for a moment as much
as the stones when Clare spread out the set. "Are they mine?" she asked incredulously.
"They are, certainly," said he. He looked into the fire.
He remembered how, when he was a lad of fifteen, his godmother, the Squire's wife—the only
rich person with whom he had ever come in contact—had pinned her faith to his success;
had prophesied a wondrous career for him. There had seemed nothing at all out of keeping
with such a conjectured career in the storing up of these showy ornaments for his wife and
the wives of her descendants. They gleamed somewhat ironically now.
"Yet why?" he asked himself. It was but a question of vanity throughout;
and if that were admitted into one side of the equation it should be admitted into the
other. His wife was a d'Urberville: whom could they
become better than her? Suddenly he said with enthusiasm—
"Tess, put them on—put them on!" And he turned from the fire to help her.
But as if by magic she had already donned them—necklace, ear-rings, bracelets, and
all. "But the gown isn't right, Tess," said Clare.
"It ought to be a low one for a set of brilliants like that."
"Ought it?" said Tess. "Yes," said he.
He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her bodice, so as to make it roughly
approximate to the cut for evening wear; and when she had done this, and the pendant to
the necklace hung isolated amid the whiteness of her throat, as it was designed to do, he
stepped back to survey her. "My heavens," said Clare, "how beautiful you
are!" As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine
birds; a peasant girl but very moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her
simple condition and attire will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a woman of
fashion with the aids that Art can render; while the beauty of the midnight crush would
often cut but a sorry figure if placed inside the field-woman's wrapper upon a monotonous
acreage of turnips on a dull day. He had never till now estimated the artistic
excellence of Tess's limbs and features. "If you were only to appear in a ball-room!"
he said. "But no—no, dearest; I think I love you
best in the wing-bonnet and cotton-frock—yes, better than in this, well as you support these
dignities." Tess's sense of her striking appearance had
given her a flush of excitement, which was yet not happiness.
"I'll take them off," she said, "in case Jonathan should see me. They are not fit for me, are
they? They must be sold, I suppose?"
"Let them stay a few minutes longer. Sell them?
Never. It would be a breach of faith." Influenced by a second thought she readily
obeyed. She had something to tell, and there might
be help in these. She sat down with the jewels upon her; and
they again indulged in conjectures as to where Jonathan could possibly be with their baggage.
The ale they had poured out for his consumption when he came had gone flat with long standing.
Shortly after this they began supper, which was already laid on a side-table.
Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which
bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a
moment. It had been caused by the opening of the outer
door. A heavy step was now heard in the passage,
and Angel went out. "I couldn' make nobody hear at all by knocking,"
apologized Jonathan Kail, for it was he at last; "and as't was raining out I opened the
door. I've brought the things, sir."
"I am very glad to see them. But you are very late."
"Well, yes, sir." There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail's
tone which had not been there in the day, and lines of concern were ploughed upon his
forehead in addition to the lines of years. He continued—
"We've all been gallied at the dairy at what might ha' been a most terrible affliction
since you and your Mis'ess—so to name her now—left us this a'ternoon.
Perhaps you ha'nt forgot the ***'s afternoon crow?"
"Dear me;—what—" "Well, some says it do mane one thing, and
some another; but what's happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown
herself." "No! Really!
Why, she bade us goodbye with the rest—" "Yes.
Well, sir, when you and your Mis'ess—so to name what she lawful is—when you two
drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on their bonnets and went out; and as there
is not much doing now, being New Year's Eve, and folks mops and brooms from what's inside
'em, nobody took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had
summut to drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they seemed to
have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads as if for home, and Marian going on to the
next village, where there's another public-house. Nothing more was zeed or heard o' Retty till
the waterman, on his way home, noticed something by the Great Pool; 'twas her bonnet and shawl
packed up. In the water he found her.
He and another man brought her home, thinking a' was dead; but she fetched round by degrees."
Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy tale, went to shut
the door between the passage and the ante-room to the inner parlour where she was; but his
wife, flinging a shawl round her, had come to the outer room and was listening to the
man's narrative, her eyes resting absently on the luggage and the drops of rain glistening
upon it. "And, more than this, there's Marian; she's
been found dead drunk by the withy-bed—a girl who hev never been known to touch anything
before except shilling ale; though, to be sure, 'a was always a good trencher-woman,
as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had all gone out
o' their minds!" "And Izz?" asked Tess.
"Izz is about house as usual; but 'a do say 'a can guess how it happened; and she seems
to be very low in mind about it, poor maid, as well she mid be.
And so you see, sir, as all this happened just when we was packing your few traps and
your Mis'ess's night-rail and dressing things into the cart, why, it belated me."
"Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs,
and drink a cup of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be wanted?"
Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire, looking wistfully into
it. She heard Jonathan Kail's heavy footsteps
up and down the stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and heard him express his thanks
for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the gratuity he received.
Jonathan's footsteps then died from the door, and his cart creaked away.
Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and coming in to where she
sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks between his hands from behind.
He expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the toilet-gear that she had been so anxious
about, but as she did not rise he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on
the supper-table being too thin and glimmering to interfere with its glow.
"I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls," he said.
"Still, don't let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid, you know."
"Without the least cause," said Tess. "While they who have cause to be, hide it,
and pretend they are not." This incident had turned the scale for her.
They were simple and innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen;
they had deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved worse—yet she was the chosen
one. It was wicked of her to take all without paying.
She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would tell, there and then.
This final determination she came to when she looked into the fire, he holding her hand.
A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back of the fireplace
with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and the old brass tongs that would not meet.
The underside of the mantel-shelf was flushed with the high-coloured light, and the legs
of the table nearest the fire. Tess's face and neck reflected the same warmth,
which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a constellation of white, red,
and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation.
"Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about telling our faults?" he
asked abruptly, finding that she still remained immovable.
"We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well have done so.
But for me it was no light promise. I want to make a confession to you, Love."
This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of a Providential
interposition. "You have to confess something?" she said
quickly, and even with gladness and relief. "You did not expect it?
Ah—you thought too highly of me. Now listen.
Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me, and not to be indignant with me
for not telling you before, as perhaps I ought to have done."
How strange it was! He seemed to be her double.
She did not speak, and Clare went on— "I did not mention it because I was afraid
of endangering my chance of you, darling, the great prize of my life—my Fellowship
I call you. My brother's Fellowship was won at his college,
mine at Talbothays Dairy. Well, I would not risk it.
I was going to tell you a month ago—at the time you agreed to be mine, but I could not;
I thought it might frighten you away from me.
I put it off; then I thought I would tell you yesterday, to give you a chance at least
of escaping me. But I did not.
And I did not this morning, when you proposed our confessing our faults on the landing—the
sinner that I was! But I must, now I see you sitting there so
solemnly. I wonder if you will forgive me?"
"O yes! I am sure that—"
"Well, I hope so. But wait a minute.
You don't know. To begin at the beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that
I am one of the eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in good morals,
Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men, and
it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter the Church.
I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to it, and hated impurity, as
I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of plenary inspiration,
one must heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: 'Be thou an example—in word, in
conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.'
It is the only safeguard for us poor human beings.
'_Integer vitae_,' says a Roman poet, who is strange company for St Paul—
"The man of upright life, from frailties free,
Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow. "Well, a certain place is paved with good
intentions, and having felt all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred
in me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell."
He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been made when, tossed
about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a cork on the waves, he plunged into
eight-and-forty hours' dissipation with a stranger.
"Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly," he continued.
"I would have no more to say to her, and I came home.
I have never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with
perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling this.
Do you forgive me?" She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.
"Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too painful as it is for the occasion—and talk
of something lighter." "O, Angel—I am almost glad—because now
YOU can forgive ME! I have not made my confession.
I have a confession, too—remember, I said so."
"Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one."
"Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours, or more so."
"It can hardly be more serious, dearest." "It cannot—O no, it cannot!"
She jumped up joyfully at the hope. "No, it cannot be more serious, certainly," she cried,
"because 'tis just the same! I will tell you now."
She sat down again. Their hands were still joined.
The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste.
Imagination might have beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his
face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the
delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose upon the
wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on
her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's; and pressing her forehead against his temple
she entered on her story of her acquaintance with Alec d'Urberville and its results, murmuring
the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.
END OF PHASE THE FOURTH
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, the 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 to-day
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 *** 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-stricken 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—to-morrow."
"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 proceeding 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. End of Chapter XXXVI