Chapter X.

Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add

that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final

proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s

character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was

disputed more than anything else in the book. _Melius fuerat non

scibere._ But there it stands.

The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November,

1891.

T.H.

_March_ 1912.

Phase the First:

The Maiden

I

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking

homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale

of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were

rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat

to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if

in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything

in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of

his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where

his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly

parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering

tune.

“Good night t’ee,” said the man with the basket.

“Good night, Sir John,” said the parson.

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

“Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road

about this time, and I said ‘Good night,’ and you made reply ‘_Good

night, Sir John_,’ as now.”

“I did,” said the parson.

“And once before that—near a month ago.”

“I may have.”

“Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these

different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?”

The parson rode a step or two nearer.

“It was only my whim,” he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: “It

was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was

hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham,

the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield,

that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly

family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan

d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William

the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?”

“Never heard it before, sir!”

“Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the

profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and

chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who

assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of

Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part

of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King

Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give

a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time

your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great

Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to

no serious extent, and in Charles the Second’s reign you were made

Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been

generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary,

like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were

knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now.”

“Ye don’t say so!”

“In short,” concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his

switch, “there’s hardly such another family in England.”

“Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?” said Durbeyfield. “And here have I

been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was

no more than the commonest feller in the parish.... And how long hev

this news about me been knowed, Pa’son Tringham?”

The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died

out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own

investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having

been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the d’Urberville family, he

had observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been

led to make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had no

doubt on the subject.

“At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of

information,” said he. “However, our impulses are too strong for our

judgement sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of it

all the while.”

“Well, I have heard once or twice, ’tis true, that my family had seen

better days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o’t,

thinking it to mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep

only one. I’ve got a wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home,

too; but, Lord, what’s a spoon and seal?... And to think that I and

these noble d’Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. ’Twas said that

my gr’t-granfer had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came

from.... And where do we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so

bold; I mean, where do we d’Urbervilles live?”

“You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county family.”

“That’s bad.”

“Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male

line—that is, gone down—gone under.”

“Then where do we lie?”

“At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with

your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies.”

“And where be our family mansions and estates?”

“You haven’t any.”

“Oh? No lands neither?”

“None; though you once had ’em in abundance, as I said, for your family

consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a seat of

yours at Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another in Millpond,

and another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge.”

“And shall we ever come into our own again?”

“Ah—that I can’t tell!”

“And what had I better do about it, sir?” asked Durbeyfield, after a

pause.

“Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how

are the mighty fallen.’ It is a fact of some interest to the local

historian and genealogist, nothing more. There are several families

among the cottagers of this county of almost equal lustre. Good night.”

“But you’ll turn back and have a quart of beer wi’ me on the strength

o’t, Pa’son Tringham? There’s a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure

Drop—though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver’s.”

“No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You’ve had enough

already.” Concluding thus, the parson rode on his way, with doubts as

to his discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore.

When he was gone, Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound reverie,

and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his

basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance,

walking in the same direction as that which had been pursued by

Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand, and the lad

quickened his pace and came near.

“Boy, take up that basket! I want ’ee to go on an errand for me.”

The lath-like stripling frowned. “Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield,

to order me about and call me ‘boy’? You know my name as well as I know

yours!”

“Do you, do you? That’s the secret—that’s the secret! Now obey my

orders, and take the message I’m going to charge ’ee wi’... Well, Fred,

I don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble

race—it has been just found out by me this present afternoon, p.m.” And

as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from his sitting

position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank among the

daisies.

The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from

crown to toe.

“Sir John d’Urberville—that’s who I am,” continued the prostrate man.

“That is if knights were baronets—which they be. ’Tis recorded in

history all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad, as

Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?”

“Ees. I’ve been there to Greenhill Fair.”

“Well, under the church of that city there lie—”

“’Tisn’t a city, the place I mean; leastwise ’twaddn’ when I was

there—’twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.”

“Never you mind the place, boy, that’s not the question before us.

Under the church of that there parish lie my ancestors—hundreds of

’em—in coats of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and

tons. There’s not a man in the county o’ South-Wessex that’s got

grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I.”

“Oh?”

“Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you’ve come

to The Pure Drop Inn, tell ’em to send a horse and carriage to me

immed’ately, to carry me hwome. And in the bottom o’ the carriage they

be to put a noggin o’ rum in a small bottle, and chalk it up to my

account. And when you’ve done that goo on to my house with the basket,

and tell my wife to put away that washing, because she needn’t finish

it, and wait till I come hwome, as I’ve news to tell her.”

As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in his

pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that he

possessed.

“Here’s for your labour, lad.”

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

“Yes, Sir John. Thank ’ee. Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?”

“Tell ’em at hwome that I should like for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if

they can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and if they can’t get

that, well chitterlings will do.”

“Yes, Sir John.”

The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass band

were heard from the direction of the village.

“What’s that?” said Durbeyfield. “Not on account o’ I?”

“’Tis the women’s club-walking, Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’

the members.”

“To be sure—I’d quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well,

vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I’ll

drive round and inspect the club.”

The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and daisies

in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long while, and

the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within

the rim of blue hills.

II

The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the

beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and

secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or

landscape-painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the

summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the

droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather

is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry

ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are

never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the

bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,

Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The

traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of

miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge

of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold,

extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from

that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the

sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character

to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the

atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be

constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere

paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a

network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the

grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with

azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that

hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable

lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a

broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales

within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.

The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest.

The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from a

curious legend of King Henry III’s reign, in which the killing by a

certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had

run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In those

days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was densely

wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in

the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon

its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its

pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.

Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The

May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under

notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was

there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott,

though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the

ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of

walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the

members being solely women. In men’s clubs such celebrations were,

though expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of the

softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives, had

denuded such women’s clubs as remained (if any other did) of this their

glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the

local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as

benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from Old

Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms—days before

the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous

average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional

march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly

as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and

creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white

garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure

blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters

(which had possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a

cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.

In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl

carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a bunch

of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the

latter, had been an operation of personal care.

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their

silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble,

having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a

jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be

gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the

years were drawing nigh when she should say, “I have no pleasure in

them,” than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over

here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm.

The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their

heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold,

and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose,

others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty

of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an

inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness

from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were

genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes.

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had

a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some

affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which,

though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They

were all cheerful, and many of them merry.

They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the high

road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of the

women said—

“The Load-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn’t thy father

riding hwome in a carriage!”

A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was

a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but

her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to

colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only

one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced

adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the

road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop, driven by a frizzle-headed

brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was

the cheerful servant of that establishment, who, in her part of

factotum, turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning back,

and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving his hand above his

head, and singing in a slow recitative—

“I’ve-got-a-gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere—and

knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!”

The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in whom a slow heat

seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself foolish

in their eyes.

“He’s tired, that’s all,” she said hastily, “and he has got a lift

home, because our own horse has to rest to-day.”

“Bless thy simplicity, Tess,” said her companions. “He’s got his

market-nitch. Haw-haw!”

“Look here; I won’t walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes

about him!” Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over her

face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped

to the ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no

more, and order again prevailed. Tess’s pride would not allow her to

turn her head again, to learn what her father’s meaning was, if he had

any; and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where

there was to be dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached

she had recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her

wand and talked as usual.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion

untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some

extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of

that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered

by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in

human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was

native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower

lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they

closed together after a word.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along

to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes

see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her

eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now

and then.

Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority, mainly

strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow

momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever

see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque

country girl, and no more.

Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal

chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having entered

the allotted space, dancing began. As there were no men in the company,

the girls danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the

close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village,

together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round the spot,

and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.

Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class,

carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks

in their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and their

consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they might be, what

in fact they were, brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high

waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the second

was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and youngest

would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an

uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he

had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That

he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might

only have been predicted of him.

These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending

their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor,

their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the

north-east.

They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning

of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers

were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the

spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners seemed to

amuse the third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his

knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the

gate.

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

“I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of us—just

for a minute or two—it will not detain us long?”

“No—no; nonsense!” said the first. “Dancing in public with a troop of

country hoydens—suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be

dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there’s no place we can sleep at

nearer than that; besides, we must get through another chapter of _A

Counterblast to Agnosticism_ before we turn in, now I have taken the

trouble to bring the book.”

“All right—I’ll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don’t stop;

I give my word that I will, Felix.”

The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their

brother’s knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest

entered the field.

“This is a thousand pities,” he said gallantly, to two or three of the

girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance. “Where

are your partners, my dears?”

“They’ve not left off work yet,” answered one of the boldest. “They’ll

be here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?”

“Certainly. But what’s one among so many!”

“Better than none. ’Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one of

your own sort, and no clipsing and colling at all. Now, pick and

choose.”

“’Ssh—don’t be so for’ard!” said a shyer girl.

The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some

discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not

very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand,

which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be

Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the

d’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet,

even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the

heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by

Victorian lucre.

The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed

down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of

a masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of example

that the village young men, who had not hastened to enter the gate

while no intruder was in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the

couples became leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till at

length the plainest woman in the club was no longer compelled to foot

it on the masculine side of the figure.

The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must

leave—he had been forgetting himself—he had to join his companions. As

he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose

own large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach

that he had not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her

backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in his mind he

left the pasture.

On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane

westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He

had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and

looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green

enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them.

They seemed to have quite forgotten him already.

All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the

hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with

whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet

instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that

he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so

modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown

that he felt he had acted stupidly.

However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a

rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.

III

As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident

from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long

time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did

not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till

the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure

on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her

would-be partner in the affirmative.

She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a

certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she

enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining

when she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains,

and the agreeable distresses” of those girls who had been wooed and

won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and

wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no

more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd

appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her

anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the

dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the

parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she

had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well.

They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house,

occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to

which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous

gallopade, the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—

I saw her lie do′-own in yon′-der green gro′-ove;

Come, love!′ and I'll tell′ you where!′

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a

moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place

of the melody.

“God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry mouth!

And thy Cubit’s thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!”

After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and

the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened

the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the scene.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses

with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the

field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling

movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the

stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a

step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill

self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in

these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left

her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,

lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day

before—Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white

frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt

on the damping grass—which had been wrung up and ironed by her mother’s

own hands.

As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the

other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest

child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under

the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor, that they were

worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each

swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s

shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with

all the spring that was left in her after a long day’s seething in the

suds.

Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched

itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the

matron’s elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs

Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened

with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune.

No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s

mother caught up its notation in a week.

There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the

freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable

that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part

her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

“I’ll rock the cradle for ’ee, mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or

I’ll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had

finished long ago.”

Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her

single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her

thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance

whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in

postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than

usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the

maternal look which the girl could not understand.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said, as soon as the last note

had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s

more’n that, I want to tell ’ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess

enough, my poppet, when th’st know!” (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke

the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the

National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages:

the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to

persons of quality.)

“Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.

“Ay!”

“Had it anything to do with father’s making such a mommet of himself in

thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ’er? I felt inclined to sink into

the ground with shame!”

“That wer all a part of the larry! We’ve been found to be the greatest

gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver

Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and

vaults, and crests, and ’scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In

Saint Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real

name being d’Urberville!... Don’t that make your bosom plim? ’Twas on

this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not because he’d

been drinking, as people supposed.”

“I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?”

“O yes! ’Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a

mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as

soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome from

Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”

“Where is father now?” asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to

see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it

seems. It is fat round his heart, ’a says. There, it is like this.”

Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to

the shape of the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer.

“‘At the present moment,’ he says to your father, ‘your heart is

enclosed all round there, and all round there; this space is still

open,’ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so,’”—Mrs Durbeyfield closed

her fingers into a circle complete—“‘off you will go like a shadder, Mr

Durbeyfield,’ ’a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten

months, or ten days.’”

Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud

so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!

“But where _is_ father?” she asked again.

Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now don’t you be bursting out

angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the

pa’son’s news—that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do

want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load of

beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start

shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long.”

“Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to her

eyes. “O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you

as well agreed as he, mother!”

Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart a

cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about,

and to her mother’s face.

“No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting

for ’ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him.”

“I’ll go.”

“O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”

Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant.

Mrs Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slily upon a

chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason

for which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

“And take the _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ to the outhouse,” Joan

continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.

The _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ was an old thick volume, which lay on a

table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached

the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.

This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs

Durbeyfield’s still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing

children. To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or

two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during

the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came

over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a

metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene

contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed

body and soul. The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed

rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents

of daily life were not without humorousness and jollity in their aspect

there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her

now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her

eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal

presentation as lover.

Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the

outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch.

A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her

mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all night,

and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between

the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore,

dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her

trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely

Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily

understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages

were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could

have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She

guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not

divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however, she

busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in

company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister

Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “’Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones

being put to bed. There was an interval of four years and more between

Tess and the next of the family, the two who had filled the gap having

died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude

when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came

two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the

baby, who had just completed his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely

dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their

pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If

the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,

disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these

half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with

them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished

for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard

conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of

Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose

philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his

song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s

holy plan.”

It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked

out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village

was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere:

she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to

perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a

journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this

late hour celebrating his ancient blood.

“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you

bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’

father and mother.”

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the

night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,

woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have

been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

“I must go myself,” she said.

’Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on

her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty

progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when

one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.

IV

Rolliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken

village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could

legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for

consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide

and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so

as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their

cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the

dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and wished they could have a

restful seat inside.

Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the

same wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.

In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained

with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs

Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all

seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott,

and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to the The

Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the further part of the

dispersed village, render its accommodation practically unavailable for

dwellers at this end; but the far more serious question, the quality of

the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink

with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the other landlord

in a wide house.

A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded

sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a

couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another

rested on the oak-carved “cwoffer”; two on the wash-stand; another on

the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The stage

of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one

wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their

personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and

its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl

hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the

brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the

carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent

pillars of Solomon’s temple.

Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from

Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in

deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers

knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked

staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light

above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party assembled

in the bedroom.

“—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at

my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as

glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the

stairs. “Oh, ’tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I

thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder of

the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming

absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here

and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,

and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”

“I’ve something to tell ’ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand

projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?”

She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane,

went on with his recitative.

“Hush! Don’t ’ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in

case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my

licends.”

“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs

Durbeyfield.

“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”

“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ’tis

well to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped

her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve

been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady

out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of

d’Urberville.”

“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.

She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she

said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”

“There _is_ a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield.

“Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a

junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”

While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in

their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and

was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.

“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued

Mrs Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two

branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”

“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the

bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with

her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”

“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away, and

play on the stairs till father and mother be ready!... Well, Tess ought

to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the

lady—Tess would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman

marrying her. In short, I know it.”

“How?”

“I tried her fate in the _Fortune-Teller_, and it brought out that very

thing!... You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is

as sumple as a duchess’.”

“What says the maid herself to going?”

“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation

yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and

she won’t say nay to going.”

“Tess is queer.”

“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import

reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the

Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks

had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in

store.

“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed

her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly

boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t

get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar

meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were

heard crossing the room below.

“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking

at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she

kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was

Tess.

Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of

place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable

medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from

Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their

seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs

Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my

licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs

Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth

of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a

Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but

the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty

sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently

unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were

marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to

Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on

nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so

comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced

excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield,

their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they

approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting

suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his

soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—

“I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”

“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only

family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and

Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as

you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I

was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”

“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your nater ’tis my belief you’ve

disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens

outright at one time.”

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her

own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—“I am afraid

father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so

early.”

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

It was eleven o’clock before the family were all in bed, and two

o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives

if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before

the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a

distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon

being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the

large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great

eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

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

information.

“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already.

Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em

till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be

thrown on our hands.”

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller,

perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee

yesterday,” she presently suggested.

“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And

letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I

think _I_ could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was

aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made

to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.

Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a

lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already

laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less

rickety than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the

lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that

hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at

rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock of

candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the

load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first

during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal

of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they could, they

made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and

their own conversation, the real morning being far from come. Abraham,

as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),

began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects

against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing

from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.

When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent

under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher,

on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh

the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its

earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for

some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham

grew reflective.

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

“Yes, Abraham.”

“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”

“Not particular glad.”

“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”

“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.

“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”

“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that

into your head?”

“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find

father. There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother

said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of

marrying a gentleman.”

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.

Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for

audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant

back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the

stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in

serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life. He asked how

far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of

them. But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed

his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess

were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to

buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as

Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family,

filled Tess with impatience.

“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

“Yes.”

“All like ours?”

“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the

apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few

blighted.”

“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”

“A blighted one.”

“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were

so many more of ’em!”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that _really_, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much

impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it

have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and

wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t

have been always washing, and never getting finished.”

“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be

made rich by marrying a gentleman?”

“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”

Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful

in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon

herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and allow

Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of

nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall,

and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.

Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous

movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess

fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the

hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges

became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional

heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul,

conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.

Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see

the vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting

herself in her mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,

laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything

grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed.

A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into

which she, too, had fallen.

They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,

and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had

ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of

“Hoi there!”

The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining

in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had

happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the

way.

In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.

The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The

morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these

lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and

unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the

breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his

life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the

road.

In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with

the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the

crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood

firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in

a heap.

By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and

unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,

seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man

returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.

“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the

mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with your

load. I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting

daylight, and you have nothing to fear.”

He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The

atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,

arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess

showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was

already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose

a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside,

still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking

scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.

“’Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle.

“No excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,

Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole

disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed!”

When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized

on his young face.

“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself. “To

think that I was such a fool!”

“’Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,

Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.

In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At

length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the

driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man

from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed

to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on

towards Casterbridge.

The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot

of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning;

but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the

road, though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that

was left of Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly

hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the

setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles to Marlott.

Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she

could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of

her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not

lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for

her negligence.

But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a

less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving

family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it

would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances

there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl

from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she

blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a

very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,

Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we

d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for

cat’s meat. Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his

lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”

He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the

garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.

When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the

horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children following in

funeral train. Abraham and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged

their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the walls; and when

Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave. The bread-winner

had been taken away from them; what would they do?

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

Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried

anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she

regarded herself in the light of a murderess.

V

The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the horse, became

disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not penury, loomed in the

distance. Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted

fellow; he had good strength to work at times; but the times could not

be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having

been unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not

particularly persistent when they did so coincide.

Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents into this

quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of

it; and then her mother broached her scheme.

“We must take the ups wi’ the downs, Tess,” said she; “and never could

your high blood have been found out at a more called-for moment. You

must try your friends. Do ye know that there is a very rich Mrs

d’Urberville living on the outskirts o’ The Chase, who must be our

relation? You must go to her and claim kin, and ask for some help in

our trouble.”

“I shouldn’t care to do that,” says Tess. “If there is such a lady,

’twould be enough for us if she were friendly—not to expect her to give

us help.”

“You could win her round to do anything, my dear. Besides, perhaps

there’s more in it than you know of. I’ve heard what I’ve heard,

good-now.”

The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to be more

deferential than she might otherwise have been to the maternal wish;

but she could not understand why her mother should find such

satisfaction in contemplating an enterprise of, to her, such doubtful

profit. Her mother might have made inquiries, and have discovered that

this Mrs d’Urberville was a lady of unequalled virtues and charity. But

Tess’s pride made the part of poor relation one of particular distaste

to her.

“I’d rather try to get work,” she murmured.

“Durbeyfield, you can settle it,” said his wife, turning to where he

sat in the background. “If you say she ought to go, she will go.”

“I don’t like my children going and making themselves beholden to

strange kin,” murmured he. “I’m the head of the noblest branch o’ the

family, and I ought to live up to it.”

His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than her own objections

to going. “Well, as I killed the horse, mother,” she said mournfully,

“I suppose I ought to do something. I don’t mind going and seeing her,

but you must leave it to me about asking for help. And don’t go

thinking about her making a match for me—it is silly.”

“Very well said, Tess!” observed her father sententiously.

“Who said I had such a thought?” asked Joan.

“I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I’ll go.”

Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town called Shaston, and

there took advantage of a van which twice in the week ran from Shaston

eastward to Chaseborough, passing near Trantridge, the parish in which

the vague and mysterious Mrs d’Urberville had her residence.

Tess Durbeyfield’s route on this memorable morning lay amid the

north-eastern undulations of the Vale in which she had been born, and

in which her life had unfolded. The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the

world, and its inhabitants the races thereof. From the gates and stiles

of Marlott she had looked down its length in the wondering days of

infancy, and what had been mystery to her then was not much less than

mystery to her now. She had seen daily from her chamber-window towers,

villages, faint white mansions; above all, the town of Shaston standing

majestically on its height; its windows shining like lamps in the

evening sun. She had hardly ever visited the place, only a small tract

even of the Vale and its environs being known to her by close

inspection. Much less had she been far outside the valley. Every

contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her

relatives’ faces; but for what lay beyond, her judgment was dependent

on the teaching of the village school, where she had held a leading

place at the time of her leaving, a year or two before this date.

In those early days she had been much loved by others of her own sex

and age, and had used to be seen about the village as one of three—all

nearly of the same year—walking home from school side by side; Tess the

middle one—in a pink print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern,

worn over a stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a

nondescript tertiary—marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight

stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the knees, torn by

kneeling in the roads and banks in search of vegetable and mineral

treasures; her then earth-coloured hair hanging like pot-hooks; the

arms of the two outside girls resting round the waist of Tess; her arms

on the shoulders of the two supporters.

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite

a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many

little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and

provide for them. Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child:

Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest,

to her own long family of waiters on Providence.

However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and to

help them as much as possible she used, as soon as she left school, to

lend a hand at haymaking or harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by

preference, at milking or butter-making processes, which she had learnt

when her father had owned cows; and being deft-fingered it was a kind

of work in which she excelled.

Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more of the family

burdens, and that Tess should be the representative of the Durbeyfields

at the d’Urberville mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance

it must be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting their fairest

side outward.

She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and ascended on foot a

hill in the direction of the district known as The Chase, on the

borders of which, as she had been informed, Mrs d’Urberville’s seat,

The Slopes, would be found. It was not a manorial home in the ordinary

sense, with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom

the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his family by hook

or by crook. It was more, far more; a country-house built for enjoyment

pure and simple, with not an acre of troublesome land attached to it

beyond what was required for residential purposes, and for a little

fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a bailiff.

The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its eaves in dense

evergreens. Tess thought this was the mansion itself till, passing

through the side wicket with some trepidation, and onward to a point at

which the drive took a turn, the house proper stood in full view. It

was of recent erection—indeed almost new—and of the same rich red

colour that formed such a contrast with the evergreens of the lodge.

Far behind the corner of the house—which rose like a geranium bloom

against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape

of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few

remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein

Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous

yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when

they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however,

though visible from The Slopes, was outside the immediate boundaries of

the estate.

Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and well kept;

acres of glass-houses stretched down the inclines to the copses at

their feet. Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from

the Mint. The stables, partly screened by Austrian pines and evergreen

oaks, and fitted with every late appliance, were as dignified as

Chapels-of-Ease. On the extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent, its

door being towards her.

Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a half-alarmed attitude, on

the edge of the gravel sweep. Her feet had brought her onward to this

point before she had quite realized where she was; and now all was

contrary to her expectation.

“I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!” she said, in

her artlessness. She wished that she had not fallen in so readily with

her mother’s plans for “claiming kin,” and had endeavoured to gain

assistance nearer home.

The d’Urbervilles—or Stoke-d’Urbervilles, as they at first called

themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find

in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had

spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the

only really lineal representative of the old d’Urberville family

existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew

very well, that the Stoke-d’Urbervilles were no more d’Urbervilles of

the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must be admitted that this

family formed a very good stock whereon to regraft a name which sadly

wanted such renovation.

When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his fortune as an

honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North, he decided to

settle as a county man in the South of England, out of hail of his

business district; and in doing this he felt the necessity of

recommencing with a name that would not too readily identify him with

the smart tradesman of the past, and that would be less commonplace

than the original bald, stark words. Conning for an hour in the British

Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct, half-extinct, obscured,

and ruined families appertaining to the quarter of England in which he

proposed to settle, he considered that _d’Urberville_ looked and

sounded as well as any of them: and d’Urberville accordingly was

annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally. Yet he was

not an extravagant-minded man in this, and in constructing his family

tree on the new basis was duly reasonable in framing his

inter-marriages and aristocratic links, never inserting a single title

above a rank of strict moderation.

Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents were naturally in

ignorance—much to their discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of

such annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that, though to be

well-favoured might be the gift of fortune, a family name came by

nature.

Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make his plunge,

hardly knowing whether to retreat or to persevere, when a figure came

forth from the dark triangular door of the tent. It was that of a tall

young man, smoking.

He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips, badly moulded,

though red and smooth, above which was a well-groomed black moustache

with curled points, though his age could not be more than three- or

four-and-twenty. Despite the touches of barbarism in his contours,

there was a singular force in the gentleman’s face, and in his bold

rolling eye.

“Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?” said he, coming forward. And

perceiving that she stood quite confounded: “Never mind me. I am Mr

d’Urberville. Have you come to see me or my mother?”

This embodiment of a d’Urberville and a namesake differed even more

from what Tess had expected than the house and grounds had differed.

She had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all

the d’Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories

representing in hieroglyphic the centuries of her family’s and

England’s history. But she screwed herself up to the work in hand,

since she could not get out of it, and answered—

“I came to see your mother, sir.”

“I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid,” replied the present

representative of the spurious house; for this was Mr Alec, the only

son of the lately deceased gentleman. “Cannot I answer your purpose?

What is the business you wish to see her about?”

“It isn’t business—it is—I can hardly say what!”

“Pleasure?”

“Oh no. Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem—”

Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong

that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at

being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the

attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

“It is so very foolish,” she stammered; “I fear I can’t tell you!”

“Never mind; I like foolish things. Try again, my dear,” said he

kindly.

“Mother asked me to come,” Tess continued; “and, indeed, I was in the

mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like

this. I came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you.”

“Ho! Poor relations?”

“Yes.”

“Stokes?”

“No; d’Urbervilles.”

“Ay, ay; I mean d’Urbervilles.”

“Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs

that we are d’Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold we are,—and—and we have an

old seal, marked with a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over

him. And we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a

little ladle, and marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that

mother uses it to stir the pea-soup.”

“A castle argent is certainly my crest,” said he blandly. “And my arms

a lion rampant.”

“And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to you—as we’ve

lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the oldest branch o’ the

family.”

“Very kind of your mother, I’m sure. And I, for one, don’t regret her

step.” Alec looked at Tess as he spoke, in a way that made her blush a

little. “And so, my pretty girl, you’ve come on a friendly visit to us,

as relations?”

“I suppose I have,” faltered Tess, looking uncomfortable again.

“Well—there’s no harm in it. Where do you live? What are you?”

She gave him brief particulars; and responding to further inquiries

told him that she was intending to go back by the same carrier who had

brought her.

“It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge Cross. Supposing

we walk round the grounds to pass the time, my pretty Coz?”

Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible; but the young man

was pressing, and she consented to accompany him. He conducted her

about the lawns, and flower-beds, and conservatories; and thence to the

fruit-garden and greenhouses, where he asked her if she liked

strawberries.

“Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.”

“They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of the

fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently,

selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety, he

stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.

“No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her

lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”

“Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips

and took it in.

They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus, Tess eating in a

half-pleased, half-reluctant state whatever d’Urberville offered her.

When she could consume no more of the strawberries he filled her little

basket with them; and then the two passed round to the rose-trees,

whence he gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom. She

obeyed like one in a dream, and when she could affix no more he himself

tucked a bud or two into her hat, and heaped her basket with others in

the prodigality of his bounty. At last, looking at his watch, he said,

“Now, by the time you have had something to eat, it will be time for

you to leave, if you want to catch the carrier to Shaston. Come here,

and I’ll see what grub I can find.”

Stoke d’Urberville took her back to the lawn and into the tent, where

he left her, soon reappearing with a basket of light luncheon, which he

put before her himself. It was evidently the gentleman’s wish not to be

disturbed in this pleasant _tête-à-tête_ by the servantry.

“Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all, sir.”

He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of

smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as

she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind

the blue narcotic haze was potentially the “tragic mischief” of her

drama—one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her

young life. She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just

now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet

themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of

growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She

had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it

denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had

said that it was a fault which time would cure.

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

rising.

“And what do they call you?” he asked, as he accompanied her along the

drive till they were out of sight of the house.

“Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott.”

“And you say your people have lost their horse?”

“I—killed him!” she answered, her eyes filling with tears as she gave

particulars of Prince’s death. “And I don’t know what to do for father

on account of it!”

“I must think if I cannot do something. My mother must find a berth for

you. But, Tess, no nonsense about ‘d’Urberville’;—‘Durbeyfield’ only,

you know—quite another name.”

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

For a moment—only for a moment—when they were in the turning of the

drive, between the tall rhododendrons and conifers, before the lodge

became visible, he inclined his face towards her as if—but, no: he

thought better of it, and let her go.

Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might

have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the

wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all

respects—as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to

him who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind,

she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call

seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the

hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature

at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a

body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome,

outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human

progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a

closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us

round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even

conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions,

it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other

at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently

about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.

Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks,

catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.

When d’Urberville got back to the tent he sat down astride on a chair,

reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his face. Then he broke into a loud

laugh.

“Well, I’m damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what a crumby

girl!”

VI

Tess went down the hill to Trantridge Cross, and inattentively waited

to take her seat in the van returning from Chaseborough to Shaston. She

did not know what the other occupants said to her as she entered,

though she answered them; and when they had started anew she rode along

with an inward and not an outward eye.

One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more pointedly than any

had spoken before: “Why, you be quite a posy! And such roses in early

June!”

Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their surprised

vision: roses at her breasts; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries

in her basket to the brim. She blushed, and said confusedly that the

flowers had been given to her. When the passengers were not looking she

stealthily removed the more prominent blooms from her hat and placed

them in the basket, where she covered them with her handkerchief. Then

she fell to reflecting again, and in looking downwards a thorn of the

rose remaining in her breast accidentally pricked her chin. Like all

the cottagers in Blackmoor Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and

prefigurative superstitions; she thought this an ill omen—the first she

had noticed that day.

The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there were several miles

of pedestrian descent from that mountain-town into the vale to Marlott.

Her mother had advised her to stay here for the night, at the house of

a cottage-woman they knew, if she should feel too tired to come on; and

this Tess did, not descending to her home till the following afternoon.

When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from her mother’s

triumphant manner that something had occurred in the interim.

“Oh yes; I know all about it! I told ’ee it would be all right, and now

’tis proved!”

“Since I’ve been away? What has?” said Tess rather wearily.

Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch approval, and went

on banteringly: “So you’ve brought ’em round!”

“How do you know, mother?”

“I’ve had a letter.”

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

“They say—Mrs d’Urberville says—that she wants you to look after a

little fowl-farm which is her hobby. But this is only her artful way of

getting ’ee there without raising your hopes. She’s going to own ’ee as

kin—that’s the meaning o’t.”

“But I didn’t see her.”

“You zid somebody, I suppose?”

“I saw her son.”

“And did he own ’ee?”

“Well—he called me Coz.”

“An’ I knew it! Jacky—he called her Coz!” cried Joan to her husband.

“Well, he spoke to his mother, of course, and she do want ’ee there.”

“But I don’t know that I am apt at tending fowls,” said the dubious

Tess.

“Then I don’t know who is apt. You’ve be’n born in the business, and

brought up in it. They that be born in a business always know more

about it than any ’prentice. Besides, that’s only just a show of

something for you to do, that you midn’t feel beholden.”

“I don’t altogether think I ought to go,” said Tess thoughtfully. “Who

wrote the letter? Will you let me look at it?”

“Mrs d’Urberville wrote it. Here it is.”

The letter was in the third person, and briefly informed Mrs

Durbeyfield that her daughter’s services would be useful to that lady

in the management of her poultry-farm, that a comfortable room would be

provided for her if she could come, and that the wages would be on a

liberal scale if they liked her.

“Oh—that’s all!” said Tess.

“You couldn’t expect her to throw her arms round ’ee, an’ to kiss and

to coll ’ee all at once.”

Tess looked out of the window.

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

“But why?”

“I’d rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don’t quite know why.”

A week afterwards she came in one evening from an unavailing search for

some light occupation in the immediate neighbourhood. Her idea had been

to get together sufficient money during the summer to purchase another

horse. Hardly had she crossed the threshold before one of the children

danced across the room, saying, “The gentleman’s been here!”

Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from every inch of her

person. Mrs d’Urberville’s son had called on horseback, having been

riding by chance in the direction of Marlott. He had wished to know,

finally, in the name of his mother, if Tess could really come to manage

the old lady’s fowl-farm or not; the lad who had hitherto superintended

the birds having proved untrustworthy. “Mr d’Urberville says you must

be a good girl if you are at all as you appear; he knows you must be

worth your weight in gold. He is very much interested in ’ee—truth to

tell.”

Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that she had won such

high opinion from a stranger when, in her own esteem, she had sunk so

low.

“It is very good of him to think that,” she murmured; “and if I was

quite sure how it would be living there, I would go any-when.”

“He is a mighty handsome man!”

“I don’t think so,” said Tess coldly.

“Well, there’s your chance, whether or no; and I’m sure he wears a

beautiful diamond ring!”

“Yes,” said little Abraham, brightly, from the window-bench; “and I

seed it! and it did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers.

Mother, why did our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his

mistarshers?”

“Hark at that child!” cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with parenthetic

admiration.

“Perhaps to show his diamond ring,” murmured Sir John, dreamily, from

his chair.

“I’ll think it over,” said Tess, leaving the room.

“Well, she’s made a conquest o’ the younger branch of us, straight

off,” continued the matron to her husband, “and she’s a fool if she

don’t follow it up.”

“I don’t quite like my children going away from home,” said the

haggler. “As the head of the family, the rest ought to come to me.”

“But do let her go, Jacky,” coaxed his poor witless wife. “He’s struck

wi’ her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He’ll marry her, most

likely, and make a lady of her; and then she’ll be what her forefathers

was.”

John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health, and this

supposition was pleasant to him.

“Well, perhaps that’s what young Mr d’Urberville means,” he admitted;

“and sure enough he mid have serious thoughts about improving his blood

by linking on to the old line. Tess, the little rogue! And have she

really paid ’em a visit to such an end as this?”

Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the gooseberry-bushes in

the garden, and over Prince’s grave. When she came in her mother

pursued her advantage.

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

“I wish I had seen Mrs d’Urberville,” said Tess.

“I think you mid as well settle it. Then you’ll see her soon enough.”

Her father coughed in his chair.

“I don’t know what to say!” answered the girl restlessly. “It is for

you to decide. I killed the old horse, and I suppose I ought to do

something to get ye a new one. But—but—I don’t quite like Mr

d’Urberville being there!”

The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being taken up by

their wealthy kinsfolk (which they imagined the other family to be) as

a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse, began to cry at

Tess’s reluctance, and teased and reproached her for hesitating.

“Tess won’t go-o-o and be made a la-a-dy of!—no, she says she

wo-o-on’t!” they wailed, with square mouths. “And we shan’t have a nice

new horse, and lots o’ golden money to buy fairlings! And Tess won’t

look pretty in her best cloze no mo-o-ore!”

Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way she had of making

her labours in the house seem heavier than they were by prolonging them

indefinitely, also weighed in the argument. Her father alone preserved

an attitude of neutrality.

“I will go,” said Tess at last.

Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the nuptial vision

conjured up by the girl’s consent.

“That’s right! For such a pretty maid as ’tis, this is a fine chance!”

Tess smiled crossly.

“I hope it is a chance for earning money. It is no other kind of

chance. You had better say nothing of that silly sort about parish.”

Mrs Durbeyfield did not promise. She was not quite sure that she did

not feel proud enough, after the visitor’s remarks, to say a good deal.

Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote, agreeing to be ready to

set out on any day on which she might be required. She was duly

informed that Mrs d’Urberville was glad of her decision, and that a

spring-cart should be sent to meet her and her luggage at the top of

the Vale on the day after the morrow, when she must hold herself

prepared to start. Mrs d’Urberville’s handwriting seemed rather

masculine.

“A cart?” murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly. “It might have been a

carriage for her own kin!”

Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless and abstracted,

going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of

acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not

be onerous. She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates

seemed to decide otherwise. Being mentally older than her mother she

did not regard Mrs Durbeyfield’s matrimonial hopes for her in a serious

aspect for a moment. The light-minded woman had been discovering good

matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth.

VII

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake before

dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute,

save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction

that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving

silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. She remained

upstairs packing till breakfast-time, and then came down in her

ordinary week-day clothes, her Sunday apparel being carefully folded in

her box.

Her mother expostulated. “You will never set out to see your folks

without dressing up more the dand than that?”

“But I am going to work!” said Tess.

“Well, yes,” said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private tone, “at first

there mid be a little pretence o’t.... But I think it will be wiser of

’ee to put your best side outward,” she added.

“Very well; I suppose you know best,” replied Tess with calm

abandonment.

And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan’s hands,

saying serenely—“Do what you like with me, mother.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this tractability. First she

fetched a great basin, and washed Tess’s hair with such thoroughness

that when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times.

She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than usual. Then she put upon

her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy

fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged _coiffure_, imparted to

her developing figure an amplitude which belied her age, and might

cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a

child.

“I declare there’s a hole in my stocking-heel!” said Tess.

“Never mind holes in your stockings—they don’t speak! When I was a

maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha’ found me in

heels.”

Her mother’s pride in the girl’s appearance led her to step back, like

a painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.

“You must zee yourself!” she cried. “It is much better than you was

t’other day.”

As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a very small

portion of Tess’s person at one time, Mrs Durbeyfield hung a black

cloak outside the casement, and so made a large reflector of the panes,

as it is the wont of bedecking cottagers to do. After this she went

downstairs to her husband, who was sitting in the lower room.

“I’ll tell ’ee what ’tis, Durbeyfield,” said she exultingly; “he’ll

never have the heart not to love her. But whatever you do, don’t zay

too much to Tess of his fancy for her, and this chance she has got. She

is such an odd maid that it mid zet her against him, or against going

there, even now. If all goes well, I shall certainly be for making some

return to pa’son at Stagfoot Lane for telling us—dear, good man!”

However, as the moment for the girl’s setting out drew nigh, when the

first excitement of the dressing had passed off, a slight misgiving

found place in Joan Durbeyfield’s mind. It prompted the matron to say

that she would walk a little way—as far as to the point where the

acclivity from the valley began its first steep ascent to the outer

world. At the top Tess was going to be met with the spring-cart sent by

the Stoke-d’Urbervilles, and her box had already been wheeled ahead

towards this summit by a lad with trucks, to be in readiness.

Seeing their mother put on her bonnet, the younger children clamoured

to go with her.

“I do want to walk a little-ways wi’ Sissy, now she’s going to marry

our gentleman-cousin, and wear fine cloze!”

“Now,” said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, “I’ll hear no more o’

that! Mother, how could you ever put such stuff into their heads?”

“Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and help get enough

money for a new horse,” said Mrs Durbeyfield pacifically.

“Goodbye, father,” said Tess, with a lumpy throat.

“Goodbye, my maid,” said Sir John, raising his head from his breast as

he suspended his nap, induced by a slight excess this morning in honour

of the occasion. “Well, I hope my young friend will like such a comely

sample of his own blood. And tell’n, Tess, that being sunk, quite, from

our former grandeur, I’ll sell him the title—yes, sell it—and at no

onreasonable figure.”

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

“Tell’n—I’ll take a thousand pound. Well, I’ll take less, when I come

to think o’t. He’ll adorn it better than a poor lammicken feller like

myself can. Tell’n he shall hae it for a hundred. But I won’t stand

upon trifles—tell’n he shall hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes,

twenty pound—that’s the lowest. Dammy, family honour is family honour,

and I won’t take a penny less!”

Tess’s eyes were too full and her voice too choked to utter the

sentiments that were in her. She turned quickly, and went out.

So the girls and their mother all walked together, a child on each side

of Tess, holding her hand and looking at her meditatively from time to

time, as at one who was about to do great things; her mother just

behind with the smallest; the group forming a picture of honest beauty

flanked by innocence, and backed by simple-souled vanity. They followed

the way till they reached the beginning of the ascent, on the crest of

which the vehicle from Trantridge was to receive her, this limit having

been fixed to save the horse the labour of the last slope. Far away

behind the first hills the cliff-like dwellings of Shaston broke the

line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in the elevated road which

skirted the ascent save the lad whom they had sent on before them,

sitting on the handle of the barrow that contained all Tess’s worldly

possessions.

“Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no doubt,” said Mrs

Durbeyfield. “Yes, I see it yonder!”

It had come—appearing suddenly from behind the forehead of the nearest

upland, and stopping beside the boy with the barrow. Her mother and the

children thereupon decided to go no farther, and bidding them a hasty

goodbye, Tess bent her steps up the hill.

They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart, on which her box

was already placed. But before she had quite reached it another vehicle

shot out from a clump of trees on the summit, came round the bend of

the road there, passed the luggage-cart, and halted beside Tess, who

looked up as if in great surprise.

Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the second vehicle was

not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or

dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of

three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a

dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth,

stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the

handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before

to get her answer about Tess.

Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child. Then she looked down,

then stared again. Could she be deceived as to the meaning of this?

“Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who’ll make Sissy a lady?” asked the

youngest child.

Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen standing still,

undecided, beside this turn-out, whose owner was talking to her. Her

seeming indecision was, in fact, more than indecision: it was

misgiving. She would have preferred the humble cart. The young man

dismounted, and appeared to urge her to ascend. She turned her face

down the hill to her relatives, and regarded the little group.

Something seemed to quicken her to a determination; possibly the

thought that she had killed Prince. She suddenly stepped up; he mounted

beside her, and immediately whipped on the horse. In a moment they had

passed the slow cart with the box, and disappeared behind the shoulder

of the hill.

Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a

drama was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears. The

youngest child said, “I wish poor, poor Tess wasn’t gone away to be a

lady!” and, lowering the corners of his lips, burst out crying. The new

point of view was infectious, and the next child did likewise, and then

the next, till the whole three of them wailed loud.

There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield’s eyes as she turned to go

home. But by the time she had got back to the village she was passively

trusting to the favour of accident. However, in bed that night she

sighed, and her husband asked her what was the matter.

“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was thinking that perhaps it

would ha’ been better if Tess had not gone.”

“Oughtn’t ye to have thought of that before?”

“Well, ’tis a chance for the maid—Still, if ’twere the doing again, I

wouldn’t let her go till I had found out whether the gentleman is

really a good-hearted young man and choice over her as his kinswoman.”

“Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha’ done that,” snored Sir John.

Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation somewhere: “Well,

as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with ’en, if she

plays her trump card aright. And if he don’t marry her afore he will

after. For that he’s all afire wi’ love for her any eye can see.”

“What’s her trump card? Her d’Urberville blood, you mean?”

“No, stupid; her face—as ’twas mine.”

VIII

Having mounted beside her, Alec d’Urberville drove rapidly along the

crest of the first hill, chatting compliments to Tess as they went, the

cart with her box being left far behind. Rising still, an immense

landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley

of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except

from her first brief visit to Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge

of an incline down which the road stretched in a long straight descent

of nearly a mile.

Ever since the accident with her father’s horse Tess Durbeyfield,

courageous as she naturally was, had been exceedingly timid on wheels;

the least irregularity of motion startled her. She began to get uneasy

at a certain recklessness in her conductor’s driving.

“You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?” she said with attempted

unconcern.

D’Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar with the tips of

his large white centre-teeth, and allowed his lips to smile slowly of

themselves.

“Why, Tess,” he answered, after another whiff or two, “it isn’t a brave

bouncing girl like you who asks that? Why, I always go down at full

gallop. There’s nothing like it for raising your spirits.”

“But perhaps you need not now?”

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “there are two to be reckoned with. It

is not me alone. Tib has to be considered, and she has a very queer

temper.”

“Who?”

“Why, this mare. I fancy she looked round at me in a very grim way just

then. Didn’t you notice it?”

“Don’t try to frighten me, sir,” said Tess stiffly.

“Well, I don’t. If any living man can manage this horse I can: I won’t

say any living man can do it—but if such has the power, I am he.”

“Why do you have such a horse?”

“Ah, well may you ask it! It was my fate, I suppose. Tib has killed one

chap; and just after I bought her she nearly killed me. And then, take

my word for it, I nearly killed her. But she’s touchy still, very

touchy; and one’s life is hardly safe behind her sometimes.”

They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident that the horse,

whether of her own will or of his (the latter being the more likely),

knew so well the reckless performance expected of her that she hardly

required a hint from behind.

Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top, the dog-cart

rocking right and left, its axis acquiring a slightly oblique set in

relation to the line of progress; the figure of the horse rising and

falling in undulations before them. Sometimes a wheel was off the

ground, it seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning

over the hedge, and flinty sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshone the

daylight. The aspect of the straight road enlarged with their advance,

the two banks dividing like a splitting stick; one rushing past at each

shoulder.

The wind blew through Tess’s white muslin to her very skin, and her

washed hair flew out behind. She was determined to show no open fear,

but she clutched d’Urberville’s rein-arm.

“Don’t touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do! Hold on round my

waist!”

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

“Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!” said she, her face on

fire.

“Tess—fie! that’s temper!” said d’Urberville.

“’Tis truth.”

“Well, you need not let go your hold of me so thanklessly the moment

you feel yourself out of danger.”

She had not considered what she had been doing; whether he were man or

woman, stick or stone, in her involuntary hold on him. Recovering her

reserve, she sat without replying, and thus they reached the summit of

another declivity.

“Now then, again!” said d’Urberville.

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

“But when people find themselves on one of the highest points in the

county, they must get down again,” he retorted.

He loosened rein, and away they went a second time. D’Urberville turned

his face to her as they rocked, and said, in playful raillery: “Now

then, put your arms round my waist again, as you did before, my

Beauty.”

“Never!” said Tess independently, holding on as well as she could

without touching him.

“Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips, Tess, or even on

that warmed cheek, and I’ll stop—on my honour, I will!”

Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still on her seat, at

which he urged the horse anew, and rocked her the more.

“Will nothing else do?” she cried at length, in desperation, her large

eyes staring at him like those of a wild animal. This dressing her up

so prettily by her mother had apparently been to lamentable purpose.

“Nothing, dear Tess,” he replied.

“Oh, I don’t know—very well; I don’t mind!” she panted miserably.

He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of imprinting the

desired salute, when, as if hardly yet aware of her own modesty, she

dodged aside. His arms being occupied with the reins there was left him

no power to prevent her manœuvre.

“Now, damn it—I’ll break both our necks!” swore her capriciously

passionate companion. “So you can go from your word like that, you

young witch, can you?”

“Very well,” said Tess, “I’ll not move since you be so determined! But

I—thought you would be kind to me, and protect me, as my kinsman!”

“Kinsman be hanged! Now!”

“But I don’t want anybody to kiss me, sir!” she implored, a big tear

beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling

in her attempts not to cry. “And I wouldn’t ha’ come if I had known!”

He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d’Urberville gave her the

kiss of mastery. No sooner had he done so than she flushed with shame,

took out her handkerchief, and wiped the spot on her cheek that had

been touched by his lips. His ardour was nettled at the sight, for the

act on her part had been unconsciously done.

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

Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed, she did not quite

comprehend the drift, unheeding the snub she had administered by her

instinctive rub upon her cheek. She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as

far as such a thing was physically possible. With a dim sense that he

was vexed she looked steadily ahead as they trotted on near Melbury

Down and Wingreen, till she saw, to her consternation, that there was

yet another descent to be undergone.

“You shall be made sorry for that!” he resumed, his injured tone still

remaining, as he flourished the whip anew. “Unless, that is, you agree

willingly to let me do it again, and no handkerchief.”

She sighed. “Very well, sir!” she said. “Oh—let me get my hat!”

At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into the road, their

present speed on the upland being by no means slow. D’Urberville pulled

up, and said he would get it for her, but Tess was down on the other

side.

She turned back and picked up the article.

“You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that’s possible,” he

said, contemplating her over the back of the vehicle. “Now then, up

again! What’s the matter?”

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

“No, sir,” she said, revealing the red and ivory of her mouth as her

eye lit in defiant triumph; “not again, if I know it!”

“What—you won’t get up beside me?”

“No; I shall walk.”

“’Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge.”

“I don’t care if ’tis dozens. Besides, the cart is behind.”

“You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on

purpose? I’ll swear you did!”

Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.

Then d’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he

could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to

drive back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge.

But he could not do this short of injuring her.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such wicked words!”

cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the hedge into which she had

scrambled. “I don’t like ’ee at all! I hate and detest you! I’ll go

back to mother, I will!”

D’Urberville’s bad temper cleared up at sight of hers; and he laughed

heartily.

“Well, I like you all the better,” he said. “Come, let there be peace.

I’ll never do it any more against your will. My life upon it now!”

Still Tess could not be induced to remount. She did not, however,

object to his keeping his gig alongside her; and in this manner, at a

slow pace, they advanced towards the village of Trantridge. From time

to time d’Urberville exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the sight

of the tramping he had driven her to undertake by his misdemeanour. She

might in truth have safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her

confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing

thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home.

Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to

childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could

she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme

for the rehabilitation of her family on such sentimental grounds?

A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared in view, and in

a snug nook to the right the poultry-farm and cottage of Tess’s

destination.

IX

The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed as supervisor,

purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its headquarters in an old

thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that had once been a garden,

but was now a trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun with

ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to the

aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely given over to

the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the

place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty

copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard. The

descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their

family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so

much of their forefathers’ money, and had been in their possession for

several generations before the d’Urbervilles came and built here, was

indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville as

soon as the property fell into hand according to law. “’Twas good

enough for Christians in grandfather’s time,” they said.

The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now

resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops

occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate

agriculturists. The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now

filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while

out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully

shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.

The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and

could only be entered through a door.

When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in

altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas

as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened

and a servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from the

manor-house.

“Mrs d’Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving

that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old

lady, and blind.”

“Blind!” said Tess.

Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape itself

she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful of

the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had

likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and

imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of

its chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures—feathers floating

within view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.

In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with

her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a

white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a

large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has

decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly

let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long

sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered

charges—one sitting on each arm.

“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs

d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. “I hope you will be kind to

them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where

are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he?

He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena

too—yes, they are a little frightened—aren’t you, dears? But they will

soon get used to you.”

While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in

obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap,

and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks,

their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her

touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a

single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their crops, and

knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face

enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her mind.

The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the

yard, and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens had

been submitted to the old woman—Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas,

Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then—her

perception of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the

bird upon her knees.

It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d’Urberville was the

bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the

maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up. At

the end of the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling

and twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”

“Whistle, Ma’am?”

“Yes, whistle tunes.”

Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the

accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel

company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.

“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it

very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as

I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way.

Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin to-morrow, or

they will go back in their piping. They have been neglected these

several days.”

“Mr d’Urberville whistled to ’em this morning, ma’am,” said Elizabeth.

“He! Pooh!”

The old lady’s face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made no

further reply.

Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and the

birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl’s surprise at Mrs

d’Urberville’s manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the

house she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware that

the old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship. She

gathered that no great affection flowed between the blind woman and her

son. But in that, too, she was mistaken. Mrs d’Urberville was not the

first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be

bitterly fond.

In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined

to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the

sun shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious

to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to

ascertain her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone

within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously

screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected practice. She found her

former ability to have degenerated to the production of a hollow rush

of wind through the lips, and no clear note at all.

She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she could

have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till she became

aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall

no less then the cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing

from the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not

set eyes on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of

the gardener’s cottage where she had lodgings.

“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful

thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess (‘Cousin’ had a faint

ring of mockery). I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting

like _Im_-patience on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth

to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing,

and never being able to produce a note. Why, you are quite cross

because you can’t do it.”

“I may be cross, but I didn’t swear.”

“Ah! I understand why you are trying—those bullies! My mother wants you

to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if

attending to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work for

any girl. I would flatly refuse, if I were you.”

“But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by to-morrow

morning.”

“Does she? Well then—I’ll give you a lesson or two.”

“Oh no, you won’t!” said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.

“Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See—I’ll stand on this side of

the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite

safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There

’tis—so.”

He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O take

those lips away.” But the allusion was lost upon Tess.

“Now try,” said d’Urberville.

She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural severity.

But he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of him, she did

put up her lips as directed for producing a clear note; laughing

distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation that she had

laughed.

He encouraged her with “Try again!”

Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she

tried—ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound. The

momentary pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes enlarged,

and she involuntarily smiled in his face.

“That’s it! Now I have started you—you’ll go on beautifully. There—I

said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such temptation as

never before fell to mortal man, I’ll keep my word.... Tess, do you

think my mother a queer old soul?”

“I don’t know much of her yet, sir.”

“You’ll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her

bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be

quite in favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If you

meet with any difficulties and want help here, don’t go to the bailiff,

come to me.”

It was in the economy of this _régime_ that Tess Durbeyfield had

undertaken to fill a place. Her first day’s experiences were fairly

typical of those which followed through many succeeding days. A

familiarity with Alec d’Urberville’s presence—which that young man

carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly

calling her his cousin when they were alone—removed much of her

original shyness of him, without, however, implanting any feeling which

could engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she was more

pliable under his hands than a mere companionship would have made her,

owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through that

lady’s comparative helplessness, upon him.

She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s

room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for

she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those

songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she

practised in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning.

Unrestrained by the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put

her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the

attentive listeners.

Mrs d’Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy

damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment, where

they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little white spots

on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window

where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought

she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not present, and

turning round the girl had an impression that the toes of a pair of

boots were visible below the fringe of the curtains. Thereupon her

whistling became so disjointed that the listener, if such there were,

must have discovered her suspicion of his presence. She searched the

curtains every morning after that, but never found anybody within them.

Alec d’Urberville had evidently thought better of his freak to terrify

her by an ambush of that kind.

X

Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own

code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about

Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit

who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more

abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms

around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smock-frocked

arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into

calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller

provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from

savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.

The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday

night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two

or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next

morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the

curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the

once-independent inns.

For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But under

pressure from matrons not much older than herself—for a field-man’s

wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage was early

here—Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience of the

journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected, the

hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her monotonous

attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again and again.

Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the momentary

threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her some sly

regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though

sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she always

searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection of their

companionship homeward.

This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in

September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims

from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account.

Tess’s occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades

reached the town long before her. It was a fine September evening, just

before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike

lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more

solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it.

Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.

She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till

she had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk. Her

limited marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to

look about for some of the Trantridge cottagers.

At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of

them had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house of

a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm. He

lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find

her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr d’Urberville standing at a

street corner.

“What—my Beauty? You here so late?” he said.

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

“I’ll see you again,” said he over her shoulder as she went on down the

back lane.

Approaching the hay-trussers, she could hear the fiddled notes of a

reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing

was audible—an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a

rule the stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she

could see straight through the house into the garden at the back as far

as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock,

she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence

the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door

there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at

first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she

perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the

outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the

doorway into the wide night of the garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up

and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls

arising from their being overshoe in “scroff”—that is to say, the

powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the

stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that

involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty _débris_ of peat and

hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and

forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles

feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which

the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed

as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned

more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs

clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of

Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.

At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze

no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into

the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could

Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus

madly!

Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall;

and one of them recognized her.

“The maids don’t think it respectable to dance at The Flower-de-Luce,”

he explained. “They don’t like to let everybody see which be their

fancy-men. Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints

begin to get greased. So we come here and send out for liquor.”

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

“Now—a’most directly. This is all but the last jig.”

She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in the

mind of starting. But others would not, and another dance was formed.

This surely would end it, thought Tess. But it merged in yet another.

She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was

necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the roads were dotted

with roving characters of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful

of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown. Had she been near

Marlott she would have had less dread.

“Don’t ye be nervous, my dear good soul,” expostulated, between his

coughs, a young man with a wet face and his straw hat so far back upon

his head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint. “What’s

yer hurry? To-morrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in

church-time. Now, have a turn with me?”

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The

movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar

of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of

the bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the

panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to

previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory

choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and

by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that

the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the

universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you

from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen, and

lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable to check its progress,

came toppling over the obstacle. An inner cloud of dust rose around the

prostrate figures amid the general one of the room, in which a

twitching entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.

“You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” burst

in female accents from the human heap—those of the unhappy partner of

the man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to be

his recently married wife, in which assortment there was nothing

unusual at Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded

couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to

avoid making odd lots of the single people between whom there might be

a warm understanding.

A loud laugh from behind Tess’s back, in the shade of the garden,

united with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the

red coal of a cigar: Alec d’Urberville was standing there alone. He

beckoned to her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.

“Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?”

She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her

trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever since he saw her to have

their company home, because the road at night was strange to her. “But

it seems they will never leave off, and I really think I will wait no

longer.”

“Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to

The Flower-de-Luce, and I’ll hire a trap, and drive you home with me.”

Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original mistrust

of him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with

the work-folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but

would not trouble him. “I have said that I will wait for ’em, and they

will expect me to now.”

“Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself... Then I shall not

hurry... My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!”

He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them had

perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a

consideration of how the time was flying. As soon as he had re-lit a

cigar and walked away the Trantridge people began to collect themselves

from amid those who had come in from other farms, and prepared to leave

in a body. Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour

later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were

straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards their homes.

It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night

by the light of the moon.

Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this

one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing

staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too

freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their

gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till

lately a favourite of d’Urberville’s; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the

Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already tumbled

down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to

the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They

followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a

supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts,

themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the

parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were

as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars

were as ardent as they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in

her father’s house that the discovery of their condition spoilt the

pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she

stuck to the party, for reasons above given.

In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now

their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a

difficulty in opening it, they closed up together.

This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a

wicker-basket containing her mother’s groceries, her own draperies, and

other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had

placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it

rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.

“Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?” said one

of the group suddenly.

All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back

of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance

below her waist, like a Chinaman’s queue.

“’Tis her hair falling down,” said another.

No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from

her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays

of the moon.

“’Tis treacle,” said an observant matron.

Treacle it was. Car’s poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet

stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was

what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of

surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the

vessel containing the syrup had been smashed within.

By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary

appearance of Car’s back, which irritated the dark queen into getting

rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and

independently of the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into

the field they were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her

back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could by

spinning horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over it upon

her elbows.

The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested

on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the

spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this

wild moment could not help joining in with the rest.

It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark queen

hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other

work-people than a long-smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to

madness. She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her

dislike.

“How darest th’ laugh at me, hussy!” she cried.

“I couldn’t really help it when t’others did,” apologized Tess, still

tittering.

“Ah, th’st think th’ beest everybody, dostn’t, because th’ beest first

favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I’m as

good as two of such! Look here—here’s at ’ee!”

To Tess’s horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her

gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only

too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders,

and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and

beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the

faultless rotundities of a lusty country-girl. She closed her fists and

squared up at Tess.

“Indeed, then, I shall not fight!” said the latter majestically; “and

if I had known you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down

as to come with such a whorage as this is!”

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation

from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from

the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to

d’Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the

latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in,

with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show

but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess

unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by

defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase

the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of

the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away

from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the

better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all

now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a

horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that

screened the road, and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.

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

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not

require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had

ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over

towards her. “Jump up behind me,” he whispered, “and we’ll get shot of

the screaming cats in a jiffy!”

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis.

At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such

proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times

before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to

do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular

juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be

transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she

abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon

his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The pair were

speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious

revellers became aware of what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside

the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all

with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was

diminishing into silence on the road.

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

“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.

“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on

the arm of her fond husband.

“Heu-heu-heu!” laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she

explained laconically: “Out of the frying-pan into the fire!”

Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could

scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as

they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s

head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the

glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or

her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar

unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified

it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the

irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the

night’s mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of

Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.

XI

The twain cantered along for some time without speech, Tess as she

clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects

dubious. She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he

sometimes rose, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was

precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow

the animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.

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

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

“And are you?”

She did not reply.

“Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?”

“I suppose—because I don’t love you.”

“You are quite sure?”

“I am angry with you sometimes!”

“Ah, I half feared as much.” Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that

confession. He knew that anything was better then frigidity. “Why

haven’t you told me when I have made you angry?”

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

“I haven’t offended you often by love-making?”

“You have sometimes.”

“How many times?”

“You know as well as I—too many times.”

“Every time I have tried?”

She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance,

till a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the

evening, became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the

moonlight in suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air.

Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness,

she did not perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which

the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her

conductor had not taken the Trantridge track.

She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o’clock every

morning of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on

this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough,

waited three hours for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her

impatience to start them preventing either; she had then walked a mile

of the way home, and had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till,

with the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one o’clock.

Only once, however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that

moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.

D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups,

turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to

support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden

impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push

from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only

just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful

one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.

“That is devilish unkind!” he said. “I mean no harm—only to keep you

from falling.”

She pondered suspiciously, till, thinking that this might after all be

true, she relented, and said quite humbly, “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God!”

he burst out, “what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chit like you?

For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded

me, and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!”

“I’ll leave you to-morrow, sir.”

“No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show

your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us

two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I

love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are.

Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?”

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her

seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, “I don’t know—I wish—how can I

say yes or no when—”

He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired, and

Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they sidled slowly onward till

it struck her they had been advancing for an unconscionable time—far

longer than was usually occupied by the short journey from

Chaseborough, even at this walking pace, and that they were no longer

on hard road, but in a mere trackway.

“Why, where be we?” she exclaimed.

“Passing by a wood.”

“A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?”

“A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a lovely night,

and why should we not prolong our ride a little?”

“How could you be so treacherous!” said Tess, between archness and real

dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by

one, though at the risk of slipping off herself. “Just when I’ve been

putting such trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I

thought I had wronged you by that push! Please set me down, and let me

walk home.”

“You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were clear. We are

miles away from Trantridge, if I must tell you, and in this growing fog

you might wander for hours among these trees.”

“Never mind that,” she coaxed. “Put me down, I beg you. I don’t mind

where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!”

“Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought you here to

this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself responsible for your

safe-conduct home, whatever you may yourself feel about it. As to your

getting to Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible; for,

to tell the truth, dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises

everything, I don’t quite know where we are myself. Now, if you will

promise to wait beside the horse while I walk through the bushes till I

come to some road or house, and ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I’ll

deposit you here willingly. When I come back I’ll give you full

directions, and if you insist upon walking you may; or you may ride—at

your pleasure.”

She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side, though not

till he had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down on the other side.

“I suppose I must hold the horse?” said she.

“Oh no; it’s not necessary,” replied Alec, patting the panting

creature. “He’s had enough of it for to-night.”

He turned the horse’s head into the bushes, hitched him on to a bough,

and made a sort of couch or nest for her in the deep mass of dead

leaves.

“Now, you sit there,” he said. “The leaves have not got damp as yet.

Just give an eye to the horse—it will be quite sufficient.”

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said, “By the bye,

Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him.”

“Somebody? You!”

D’Urberville nodded.

“O how very good of you that is!” she exclaimed, with a painful sense

of the awkwardness of having to thank him just then.

“And the children have some toys.”

“I didn’t know—you ever sent them anything!” she murmured, much moved.

“I almost wish you had not—yes, I almost wish it!”

“Why, dear?”

“It—hampers me so.”

“Tessy—don’t you love me ever so little now?”

“I’m grateful,” she reluctantly admitted. “But I fear I do not—” The

sudden vision of his passion for herself as a factor in this result so

distressed her that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following

with another, she wept outright.

“Don’t cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait till I come.”

She passively sat down amid the leaves he had heaped, and shivered

slightly. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“Not very—a little.”

He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as into down. “You

have only that puffy muslin dress on—how’s that?”

“It’s my best summer one. ’Twas very warm when I started, and I didn’t

know I was going to ride, and that it would be night.”

“Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see.” He pulled off a light

overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly. “That’s

it—now you’ll feel warmer,” he continued. “Now, my pretty, rest there;

I shall soon be back again.”

Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he plunged into the

webs of vapour which by this time formed veils between the trees. She

could hear the rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining

slope, till his movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird,

and finally died away. With the setting of the moon the pale light

lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the

leaves where he had left her.

In the meantime Alec d’Urberville had pushed on up the slope to clear

his genuine doubt as to the quarter of The Chase they were in. He had,

in fact, ridden quite at random for over an hour, taking any turning

that came to hand in order to prolong companionship with her, and

giving far more attention to Tess’s moonlit person than to any wayside

object. A little rest for the jaded animal being desirable, he did not

hasten his search for landmarks. A clamber over the hill into the

adjoining vale brought him to the fence of a highway whose contours he

recognized, which settled the question of their whereabouts.

D’Urberville thereupon turned back; but by this time the moon had quite

gone down, and partly on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in

thick darkness, although morning was not far off. He was obliged to

advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs, and

discovered that to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at

first entirely beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and round, he at

length heard a slight movement of the horse close at hand; and the

sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.

“Tess!” said d’Urberville.

There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see

absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which

represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves.

Everything else was blackness alike. D’Urberville stooped; and heard a

gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath

warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers.

She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the

primaeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle

roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping

rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian

angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that

other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he

was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be

awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as

gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been

traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often

the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the

wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have

failed to explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the

possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe.

Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors rollicking home

from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards

peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the

fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities,

it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend

the matter.

As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying

among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be.” There lay the

pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s

personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from

her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.

End of Phase the First

Phase the Second:

Maiden No More

XII

The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she lugged them

along like a person who did not find her especial burden in material

things. Occasionally she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some

gate or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon her full

round arm, went steadily on again.

It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess

Durbeyfield’s arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to

the night ride in The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak, and

the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the

ridge towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale wherein

she had of late been a stranger—which she would have to climb over to

reach her birthplace. The ascent was gradual on this side, and the soil

and scenery differed much from those within Blakemore Vale. Even the

character and accent of the two peoples had shades of difference,

despite the amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so that,

though less than twenty miles from the place of her sojourn at

Trantridge, her native village had seemed a far-away spot. The

field-folk shut in there traded northward and westward, travelled,

courted, and married northward and westward, thought northward and

westward; those on this side mainly directed their energies and

attention to the east and south.

The incline was the same down which d’Urberville had driven her so

wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the remainder of its length

without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over

the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist. It was always

beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess to-day, for

since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses

where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally

changed for her by the lesson. Verily another girl than the simple one

she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here,

and turned to look behind her. She could not bear to look forward into

the Vale.

Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had just laboured

up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside which walked a man, who held

up his hand to attract her attention.

She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative repose, and in

a few minutes man and horse stopped beside her.

“Why did you slip away by stealth like this?” said d’Urberville, with

upbraiding breathlessness; “on a Sunday morning, too, when people were

all in bed! I only discovered it by accident, and I have been driving

like the deuce to overtake you. Just look at the mare. Why go off like

this? You know that nobody wished to hinder your going. And how

unnecessary it has been for you to toil along on foot, and encumber

yourself with this heavy load! I have followed like a madman, simply to

drive you the rest of the distance, if you won’t come back.”

“I shan’t come back,” said she.

“I thought you wouldn’t—I said so! Well, then, put up your basket, and

let me help you on.”

She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the dog-cart, and

stepped up, and they sat side by side. She had no fear of him now, and

in the cause of her confidence her sorrow lay.

D’Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey was continued

with broken unemotional conversation on the commonplace objects by the

wayside. He had quite forgotten his struggle to kiss her when, in the

early summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along the same

road. But she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet, replying to his

remarks in monosyllables. After some miles they came in view of the

clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott stood. It was only

then that her still face showed the least emotion, a tear or two

beginning to trickle down.

“What are you crying for?” he coldly asked.

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

“Well—we must all be born somewhere.”

“I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!”

“Pooh! Well, if you didn’t wish to come to Trantridge why did you

come?”

She did not reply.

“You didn’t come for love of me, that I’ll swear.”

“’Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o’ you, if I had ever

sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and

hate myself for my weakness as I do now!... My eyes were dazed by you

for a little, and that was all.”

He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed—

“I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late.”

“That’s what every woman says.”

“How can you dare to use such words!” she cried, turning impetuously

upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to

see more some day) awoke in her. “My God! I could knock you out of the

gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some

women may feel?”

“Very well,” he said, laughing; “I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong—I

admit it.” He dropped into some little bitterness as he continued:

“Only you needn’t be so everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am

ready to pay to the uttermost farthing. You know you need not work in

the fields or the dairies again. You know you may clothe yourself with

the best, instead of in the bald plain way you have lately affected, as

if you couldn’t get a ribbon more than you earn.”

Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn, as a rule, in

her large and impulsive nature.

“I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will not—I

cannot! I _should_ be your creature to go on doing that, and I won’t!”

“One would think you were a princess from your manner, in addition to a

true and original d’Urberville—ha! ha! Well, Tess, dear, I can say no

more. I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad,

and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. But, upon

my lost soul, I won’t be bad towards you again, Tess. And if certain

circumstances should arise—you understand—in which you are in the least

need, the least difficulty, send me one line, and you shall have by

return whatever you require. I may not be at Trantridge—I am going to

London for a time—I can’t stand the old woman. But all letters will be

forwarded.”

She said that she did not wish him to drive her further, and they

stopped just under the clump of trees. D’Urberville alighted, and

lifted her down bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles on

the ground beside her. She bowed to him slightly, her eye just

lingering in his; and then she turned to take the parcels for

departure.

Alec d’Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her, and said—

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

“If you wish,” she answered indifferently. “See how you’ve mastered

me!”

She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained

like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek—half

perfunctorily, half as if zest had not yet quite died out. Her eyes

vaguely rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was

given, as though she were nearly unconscious of what he did.

“Now the other side, for old acquaintance’ sake.”

She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might turn at the

request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he kissed the other side, his

lips touching cheeks that were damp and smoothly chill as the skin of

the mushrooms in the fields around.

“You don’t give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never willingly do

that—you’ll never love me, I fear.”

“I have said so, often. It is true. I have never really and truly loved

you, and I think I never can.” She added mournfully, “Perhaps, of all

things, a lie on this thing would do the most good to me now; but I

have honour enough left, little as ’tis, not to tell that lie. If I did

love you, I may have the best o’ causes for letting you know it. But I

don’t.”

He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather

oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility.

“Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess. I have no reason for

flattering you now, and I can say plainly that you need not be so sad.

You can hold your own for beauty against any woman of these parts,

gentle or simple; I say it to you as a practical man and well-wisher.

If you are wise you will show it to the world more than you do before

it fades... And yet, Tess, will you come back to me! Upon my soul, I

don’t like to let you go like this!”

“Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I ought to have

seen sooner; and I won’t come.”

“Then good morning, my four months’ cousin—good-bye!”

He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone between the tall

red-berried hedges.

Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the crooked lane.

It was still early, and though the sun’s lower limb was just free of

the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than

the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her

sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.

As she walked, however, some footsteps approached behind her, the

footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was

close at her heels and had said “Good morning” before she had been long

aware of his propinquity. He appeared to be an artisan of some sort,

and carried a tin pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a

business-like manner if he should take her basket, which she permitted

him to do, walking beside him.

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

“Yes,” said Tess.

“When most people are at rest from their week’s work.”

She also assented to this.

“Though I do more real work to-day than all the week besides.”

“Do you?”

“All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday for the glory

of God. That’s more real than the other—hey? I have a little to do here

at this stile.” The man turned, as he spoke, to an opening at the

roadside leading into a pasture. “If you’ll wait a moment,” he added,

“I shall not be long.”

As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and she waited,

observing him. He set down her basket and the tin pot, and stirring the

paint with the brush that was in it began painting large square letters

on the middle board of the three composing the stile, placing a comma

after each word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well

home to the reader’s heart—

THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.

2 Pet. ii. 3.

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses,

the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these

staring vermilion words shone forth. They seemed to shout themselves

out and make the atmosphere ring. Some people might have cried “Alas,

poor Theology!” at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a

creed which had served mankind well in its time. But the words entered

Tess with accusatory horror. It was as if this man had known her recent

history; yet he was a total stranger.

Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she mechanically

resumed her walk beside him.

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

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

“But,” said she tremulously, “suppose your sin was not of your own

seeking?”

He shook his head.

“I cannot split hairs on that burning query,” he said. “I have walked

hundreds of miles this past summer, painting these texes on every wall,

gate, and stile the length and breadth of this district. I leave their

application to the hearts of the people who read ’em.”

“I think they are horrible,” said Tess. “Crushing! Killing!”

“That’s what they are meant to be!” he replied in a trade voice. “But

you should read my hottest ones—them I kips for slums and seaports.

They’d make ye wriggle! Not but what this is a very good tex for rural

districts.... Ah—there’s a nice bit of blank wall up by that barn

standing to waste. I must put one there—one that it will be good for

dangerous young females like yerself to heed. Will ye wait, missy?”

“No,” said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A little way

forward she turned her head. The old gray wall began to advertise a

similar fiery lettering to the first, with a strange and unwonted mien,

as if distressed at duties it had never before been called upon to

perform. It was with a sudden flush that she read and realized what was

to be the inscription he was now halfway through—

THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT—

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

“If you want to ask for edification on these things of moment, there’s

a very earnest good man going to preach a charity-sermon to-day in the

parish you are going to—Mr Clare of Emminster. I’m not of his

persuasion now, but he’s a good man, and he’ll expound as well as any

parson I know. ’Twas he began the work in me.”

But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her walk, her eyes

fixed on the ground. “Pooh—I don’t believe God said such things!” she

murmured contemptuously when her flush had died away.

A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father’s chimney, the

sight of which made her heart ache. The aspect of the interior, when

she reached it, made her heart ache more. Her mother, who had just come

downstairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she was

kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle. The young

children were still above, as was also her father, it being Sunday

morning, when he felt justified in lying an additional half-hour.

“Well!—my dear Tess!” exclaimed her surprised mother, jumping up and

kissing the girl. “How be ye? I didn’t see you till you was in upon me!

Have you come home to be married?”

“No, I have not come for that, mother.”

“Then for a holiday?”

“Yes—for a holiday; for a long holiday,” said Tess.

“What, isn’t your cousin going to do the handsome thing?”

“He’s not my cousin, and he’s not going to marry me.”

Her mother eyed her narrowly.

“Come, you have not told me all,” she said.

Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan’s neck, and

told.

“And yet th’st not got him to marry ’ee!” reiterated her mother. “Any

woman would have done it but you, after that!”

“Perhaps any woman would except me.”

“It would have been something like a story to come back with, if you

had!” continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of vexation.

“After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here, who

would have expected it to end like this! Why didn’t ye think of doing

some good for your family instead o’ thinking only of yourself? See how

I’ve got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with his heart

clogged like a dripping-pan. I did hope for something to come out o’

this! To see what a pretty pair you and he made that day when you drove

away together four months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we

thought, because we were his kin. But if he’s not, it must have been

done because of his love for ’ee. And yet you’ve not got him to marry!”

Get Alec d’Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry _her_! On

matrimony he had never once said a word. And what if he had? How a

convulsive snatching at social salvation might have impelled her to

answer him she could not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew

her present feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the

circumstances, unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as

she had said, was what made her detest herself. She had never wholly

cared for him; she did not at all care for him now. She had dreaded

him, winced before him, succumbed to adroit advantages he took of her

helplessness; then, temporarily blinded by his ardent manners, had been

stirred to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly despised and

disliked him, and had run away. That was all. Hate him she did not

quite; but he was dust and ashes to her, and even for her name’s sake

she scarcely wished to marry him.

“You ought to have been more careful if you didn’t mean to get him to

make you his wife!”

“O mother, my mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately

upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be

expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago.

Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you

warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read

novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’

learning in that way, and you did not help me!”

Her mother was subdued.

“I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead to,

you would be hontish wi’ him and lose your chance,” she murmured,

wiping her eyes with her apron. “Well, we must make the best of it, I

suppose. ’Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!”

XIII

The event of Tess Durbeyfield’s return from the manor of her bogus

kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a

space of a square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of

Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see

her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became

visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they

supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.

For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr

d’Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not

altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and

heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of

Trantridge, lent Tess’s supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far

higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

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

back was turned—

“How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe

it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him.”

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the

corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard

them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter. But her

mother heard, and Joan’s simple vanity, having been denied the hope of

a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation

of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though

such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter’s

reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her

responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to

tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above

all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess’s spirits

also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their

excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she

moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all her

young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries

with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in

the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far

was she from being, in the words of Robert South, “in love with her own

ruin,” that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came

back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary

pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning’s dawn, when it was no longer

Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were

gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children

breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return,

and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony

highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy.

Her depression was then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in

a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself

so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked

to hear the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in

the Morning Hymn. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited

from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over

her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,

and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the

chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the

lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on

end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in

rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads

as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked

around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be

chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”—but she did not

know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She

thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like

was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences

of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had

never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his

personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service

proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each other. She

knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that

she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her

retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of

thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and

successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost

everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it

was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She

knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the

light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of

day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute

mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes

attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the

shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold

accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so

unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with

the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an

integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would

intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her

own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a

psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight

airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of

the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the

expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some

vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of

her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of

convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a

sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins

by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of

harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping

birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,

or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a

figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the

while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.

Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been

made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the

environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

XIV

It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked

by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces

within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried

away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,

demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His

present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,

explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a

saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a

golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in

the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with

interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,

throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers,

and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not

already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms

of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by

Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving

Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been brought to the

field on the previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The

paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight,

imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been “opened”; that is to say, a lane a few feet

wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference

of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the

lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck

the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying

sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from

the lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest

field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the

grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three

horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the

gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant

on the seat of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole

wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it

passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came up on the

other side of the field at the same equable pace; the glistening brass

star in the forehead of the fore horse first catching the eye as it

rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the

whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each

circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the

morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards

as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge,

and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert

shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled

together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat

fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every

one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,

each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active

binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men

in print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather

straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and

bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as if they

were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of

binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she

becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object

set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality

afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost

her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated

herself with it.

The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton

bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to

prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing

a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,

another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine; and

others, older, in the brown-rough “wropper” or over-all—the

old-established and most appropriate dress of the field-woman, which

the young ones were abandoning. This morning the eye returns

involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most

flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled

so far over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she

binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two

of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of her bonnet.

Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she never

courts it, though the other women often gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last

finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left

palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,

gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing her

left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side,

holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She brings the

ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it,

beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit

of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet

and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine

smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron,

or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a

handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging

tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall

against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips

thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d’Urberville, somewhat changed—the

same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as

a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she

was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake

outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of the year in

the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she could do

within the house being so remunerative for the time as harvesting in

the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess’s,

the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at

the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end

against those of the rest, till a shock, or “stitch” as it was here

called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as

before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might

have noticed that every now and then Tess’s glance flitted wistfully to

the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the

verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages ranging

from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the hill.

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

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its

corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first

sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes.

Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working, took their

provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to,

the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She

sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from

her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin

cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of

ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But she did not accept

his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called up the big girl,

her sister, and took the baby of her, who, glad to be relieved of the

burden, went away to the next shock and joined the other children

playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement,

and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling

the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the

other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with

absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no

longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk,

and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright in

her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy

indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to

violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave

off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely

combined passionateness with contempt.

“She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and

say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,” observed

the woman in the red petticoat.

“She’ll soon leave off saying that,” replied the one in buff. “Lord,

’tis wonderful what a body can get used to o’ that sort in time!”

“A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon.

There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase;

and it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along.”

“Well, a little more, or a little less, ’twas a thousand pities that it

should have happened to she, of all others. But ’tis always the

comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?” The

speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as

plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy

to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her

flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor

grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred

others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises—shade

behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom; an

almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character

inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the

fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing

and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that

lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She

felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet

independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it

was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over

them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and

she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just

as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as

ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,

nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the

thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an

illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a

structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind

besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no

more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable

the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes

herself unhappy.” If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to

take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be

this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it very well.” Moreover, alone in a

desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her?

Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover

herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as

the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to

despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure

therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional

aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself

up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields,

harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had

borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at

times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs,

and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed

and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having

quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and

take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again,

and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the

tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were

continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then

they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a

broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards,

its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten

Tuscan saint. Tess’s female companions sang songs, and showed

themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors,

though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few

verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood

and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises and

compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a social

warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage

in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still farther away

from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she became

almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on

the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home

it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill

since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender

and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.

The baby’s offence against society in coming into the world was

forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul’s desire was to continue that

offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew

clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the

flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.

And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which

transcended that of the child’s simple loss. Her baby had not been

baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the

consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,

burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she

was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the

histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn

therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it

had a very different colour. Her darling was about to die, and no

salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might

send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her

father’s sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and

his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility

most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze at

Rolliver’s Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he declared,

prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had become

more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door and put the

key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired

also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the

night found that the baby was still worse. It was obviously

dying—quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the

solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and

malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the

child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom

for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing

it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the

oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other quaint and

curious details of torment sometimes taught the young in this Christian

country. The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination

in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp

with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.

The infant’s breathing grew more difficult, and the mother’s mental

tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with

kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about

the room.

“O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried.

“Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the

child!”

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent

supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

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

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have

shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to a

second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young

sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling out

the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured some

water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands

together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children, scarcely

awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and

larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a

child’s child—so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to

endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with

the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next sister held the

Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the

parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long

white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight

down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle

abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which

sunlight might have revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and

the weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring

effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing

of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal.

The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red,

awaited her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their

physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become active.

The most impressed of them said:

“Be you really going to christen him, Tess?”

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

“What’s his name going to be?”

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the

book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal

service, and now she pronounced it:

“SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and

of the Holy Ghost.”

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

“Say ‘Amen,’ children.”

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, “Amen!”

Tess went on:

“We receive this child”—and so forth—“and do sign him with the sign of

the Cross.”

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense

cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary

sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the

devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.

She duly went on with the Lord’s Prayer, the children lisping it after

her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their

voices to clerk’s pitch, they again piped into silence, “Amen!”

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of

the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the

thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the

stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her

speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her. The

ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a

glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each

cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils

shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and more

reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look

like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and awful—a

divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow’s campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was doomed

to be of limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps for himself, considering

his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and

servant breathed his last, and when the other children awoke they cried

bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained

with her in the infant’s loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her

terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well

founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence

would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not

value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity—either for herself or

for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that

bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law; a

waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew

not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the

cottage interior was the universe, the week’s weather climate, new-born

babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were

doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.

Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a

new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk, and

stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The

enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met him

coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not mind

speaking freely.

“I should like to ask you something, sir.”

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the

baby’s illness and the extemporized ordinance. “And now, sir,” she

added earnestly, “can you tell me this—will it be just the same for him

as if you had baptized him?”

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he

should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his

customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity

of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect

his nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left in him after ten

years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual scepticism. The

man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the

man.

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

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

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby’s illness, he had

conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite,

and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess’s father

and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its

irregular administration.

“Ah—that’s another matter,” he said.

“Another matter—why?” asked Tess, rather warmly.

“Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I must

not—for certain reasons.”

“Just for once, sir!”

“Really I must not.”

“O sir!” She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

“Then I don’t like you!” she burst out, “and I’ll never come to your

church no more!”

“Don’t talk so rashly.”

“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t?... Will it be

just the same? Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as

you yourself to me myself—poor me!”

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed

himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman’s power to

tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—

“It will be just the same.”

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s

shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at

the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby

corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all

unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the

conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings,

however, Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of

string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head

of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without

being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a

little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the

outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words

“Keelwell’s Marmalade”? The eye of maternal affection did not see them

in its vision of higher things.

XV

“By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long

wandering.” Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further

travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess

Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she

had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she had vigorously moved under

the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the

world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it

had not been in Tess’s power—nor is it in anybody’s power—to feel the

whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.

She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with Saint

Augustine: “Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast

permitted.”

She remained at her father’s house during the winter months, plucking

fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters

and brothers out of some finery which d’Urberville had given her, and

she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would

often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to

be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of

the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its

dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby’s birth and

death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by

incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one

afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was

yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her

own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which

lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign

or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely

there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly

encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought

that some time in the future those who had known her would say: “It is

the ——th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died”; and there would be

nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed

to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the

place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy

at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She

became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair

and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences

of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the

world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal

education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known,

was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she

could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the

collapse of her family’s attempt to “claim kin”—and, through her, even

closer union—with the rich d’Urbervilles. At least she could not be

comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her keen

consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life

still warm within her; she might be happy in some nook which had no

memories. To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to

annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask

herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The

recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied

to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.

A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was

almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals,

and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter

reached her from a former friend of her mother’s, to whom she had

addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she had never seen—that a

skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles to the

southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the

summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was

probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so

small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical

degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville

air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the

dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess’s feeling on

this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the

subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new

place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her

forefathers’ country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her

mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for

which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former estates

of the d’Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her granddames

and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and

think not only that d’Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that

the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as

silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might

come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her

rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth,

surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope,

and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

End of Phase the Second

Phase the Third:

The Rally

XVI

On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three

years after the return from Trantridge—silent, reconstructive years for

Tess Durbeyfield—she left her home for the second time.

Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she

started in a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through

which it was necessary to pass on her journey, now in a direction

almost opposite to that of her first adventuring. On the curve of the

nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her father’s

house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as

heretofore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their

consciousness, although she would be far off, and they deprived of her

smile. In a few days the children would engage in their games as

merrily as ever, without the sense of any gap left by her departure.

This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the

best; were she to remain they would probably gain less good by her

precepts than harm by her example.

She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction

of highways, where she could await a carrier’s van that ran to the

south-west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of

country had never yet struck across it. While waiting, however, there

came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately in the

direction that she wished to pursue. Though he was a stranger to her

she accepted his offer of a seat beside him, ignoring that its motive

was a mere tribute to her countenance. He was going to Weatherbury, and

by accompanying him thither she could walk the remainder of the

distance instead of travelling in the van by way of Casterbridge.

Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than

to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the

farmer recommended her. Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to

reach the wide upland of heath dividing this district from the

low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was

the aim and end of her day’s pilgrimage.

Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she

felt akin to the landscape. Not so very far to the left of her she

could discern a dark patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed her

in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere—in the

church of which parish the bones of her ancestors—her useless

ancestors—lay entombed.

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance

they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she

retain but the old seal and spoon. “Pooh—I have as much of mother as

father in me!” she said. “All my prettiness comes from her, and she was

only a dairymaid.”

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when

she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated,

the distance being actually but a few miles. It was two hours, owing to

sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit commanding the

long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in

which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more

profusely, if less delicately, than at her home—the verdant plain so

well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies,

Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at

Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now. The world was drawn to

a larger pattern here. The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of

ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of cattle formed

tribes hereabout; there only families. These myriads of cows stretching

under her eyes from the far east to the far west outnumbered any she

had ever seen at one glance before. The green lea was speckled as

thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers.

The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight,

which the white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost

dazzling, even at the distant elevation on which she stood.

The bird’s-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful,

perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more

cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale,

and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing,

ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these

renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor. Those were

slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the

incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were

clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the

shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all

day long. There the water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the

sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon

her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the

sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded

along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every

breeze, and in every bird’s note seemed to lurk a joy.

Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually

fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts

were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and

tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her

more perfect beauty accorded with her less elevated mood; her more

intense mood with her less perfect beauty. It was her best face

physically that was now set against the south wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure

somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest,

had at length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young woman of

twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it

was impossible that any event should have left upon her an impression

that was not in time capable of transmutation.

And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher

and higher. She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till,

recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often wandered over of a

Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge, she

chanted: “O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the

Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ... Beasts and Cattle ... Children of Men

... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever!”

She suddenly stopped and murmured: “But perhaps I don’t quite know the

Lord as yet.”

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance

in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms

and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the

Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized

religion taught their race at later date. However, Tess found at least

approximate expression for her feelings in the old _Benedicite_ that

she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough. Such high contentment

with such a slight initial performance as that of having started

towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield

temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did

nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content with

immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for laborious

effort towards such petty social advancement as could alone be effected

by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful d’Urbervilles

were now.

There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother’s unexpended

family, as well as the natural energy of Tess’s years, rekindled after

the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let the truth

be told—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain

their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While

there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to

the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life,

descended the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her

pilgrimage.

The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival vales

now showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from the

heights around; to read aright the valley before her it was necessary

to descend into its midst. When Tess had accomplished this feat she

found herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which stretched to

the east and west as far as the eye could reach.

The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to

the vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and

attenuated, lay serpentining along through the midst of its former

spoils.

Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed

expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of

indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than

that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far

had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which, after

descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck erect,

looking at her.

Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and

repeated call—“Waow! waow! waow!”

From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by

contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was

not the expression of the valley’s consciousness that beautiful Tess

had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time—half-past

four o’clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically

waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the

background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they

walked. Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by

the open gate through which they had entered before her. Long thatched

sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid

green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a

glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone

years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its

profundity. Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting

herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a

circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved

pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row,

threw their shadows accurately inwards upon the wall. Thus it threw

shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much

care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty

on a palace wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian

shapes on marble _façades_ long ago, or the outline of Alexander,

Caesar, and the Pharaohs.

They were the less restful cows that were stalled. Those that would

stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,

where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now—all prime

milchers, such as were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always

within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads

supplied at this prime season of the year. Those of them that were

spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy, and

the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something of

military display. Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as sandbags,

the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy’s crock; and as each

animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed forth and fell in

drops to the ground.

XVII

The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of

the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids

walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep their

shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her

three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against

the cow, and looked musingly along the animal’s flank at Tess as she

approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat

on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose long white “pinner” was

somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose

jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect—the

master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a

working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the

seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,

being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:

Dairyman Dick

All the week:

On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.

Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it

happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand—for the days were

busy ones now—and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother and

the rest of the family—(though this as a matter of form merely, for in

reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield’s existence till

apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).

“Oh—ay, as a lad I knowed your part o’ the country very well,” he said

terminatively. “Though I’ve never been there since. And a aged woman of

ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago, told

me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came

originally from these parts, and that ’twere a old ancient race that

had all but perished off the earth—though the new generations didn’t

know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old woman’s ramblings, not

I.”

“Oh no—it is nothing,” said Tess.

Then the talk was of business only.

“You can milk ’em clean, my maidy? I don’t want my cows going azew at

this time o’ year.”

She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down. She

had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown

delicate.

“Quite sure you can stand it? ’Tis comfortable enough here for rough

folk; but we don’t live in a cowcumber frame.”

She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness

seemed to win him over.

“Well, I suppose you’ll want a dish o’ tay, or victuals of some sort,

hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if ’twas I, I

should be as dry as a kex wi’ travelling so far.”

“I’ll begin milking now, to get my hand in,” said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment—to the

surprise—indeed, slight contempt—of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it

had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

“Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so,” he said indifferently, while

holding up the pail that she sipped from. “’Tis what I hain’t touched

for years—not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead.

You can try your hand upon she,” he pursued, nodding to the nearest

cow. “Not but what she do milk rather hard. We’ve hard ones and we’ve

easy ones, like other folks. However, you’ll find out that soon

enough.”

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her

stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the

pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation

for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she

was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men

operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier

natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred milchers

under Crick’s management, all told; and of the herd the master-dairyman

milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These

were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being

more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to

their treatment, lest, from indifference, they should not milk them

fully; nor to the maids, lest they should fail in the same way for lack

of finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the cows would

“go azew”—that is, dry up. It was not the loss for the moment that made

slack milking so serious, but that with the decline of demand there

came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in

the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets

into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other

of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only

movements were those of the milkers’ hands up and down, and the swing

of the cows’ tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast

flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley—a level

landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt,

differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed

now.

“To my thinking,” said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had

just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and

the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his

vicinity, “to my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk to-day as

usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll

not be worth going under by midsummer.”

“’Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,” said Jonathan Kail.

“I’ve noticed such things afore.”

“To be sure. It may be so. I didn’t think o’t.”

“I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,” said a

dairymaid.

“Well, as to going up into their horns,” replied Dairyman Crick

dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical

possibilities, “I couldn’t say; I certainly could not. But as nott cows

will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to

it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott

cows give less milk in a year than horned?”

“I don’t!” interposed the milkmaid, “Why do they?”

“Because there bain’t so many of ’em,” said the dairyman. “Howsomever,

these gam’sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we

must lift up a stave or two—that’s the only cure for’t.”

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to

the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and

the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely

business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the

result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement

during the song’s continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or

fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to

go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around

him, one of the male milkers said—

“I wish singing on the stoop didn’t use up so much of a man’s wind! You

should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best.”

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to

the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of “Why?” came

as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been

spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto

perceived.

“Oh yes; there’s nothing like a fiddle,” said the dairyman. “Though I

do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows—at least that’s

my experience. Once there was an old aged man over at Mellstock—William

Dewy by name—one of the family that used to do a good deal of business

as tranters over there—Jonathan, do ye mind?—I knowed the man by sight

as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of speaking. Well, this

man was a coming home along from a wedding, where he had been playing

his fiddle, one fine moonlight night, and for shortness’ sake he took a

cut across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was out to

grass. The bull seed William, and took after him, horns aground, begad;

and though William runned his best, and hadn’t _much_ drink in him

(considering ’twas a wedding, and the folks well off), he found he’d

never reach the fence and get over in time to save himself. Well, as a

last thought, he pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a

jig, turning to the bull, and backing towards the corner. The bull

softened down, and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who

fiddled on and on; till a sort of a smile stole over the bull’s face.

But no sooner did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge

than the bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the

seat of William’s breeches. Well, William had to turn about and play

on, willy-nilly; and ’twas only three o’clock in the world, and ’a

knowed that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and

tired that ’a didn’t know what to do. When he had scraped till about

four o’clock he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and

he said to himself, ‘There’s only this last tune between me and eternal

welfare! Heaven save me, or I’m a done man.’ Well, then he called to

mind how he’d seen the cattle kneel o’ Christmas Eves in the dead o’

night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to play

a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the ’Tivity Hymm, just as at

Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the bull on his

bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if ’twere the true ’Tivity

night and hour. As soon as his horned friend were down, William turned,

clinked off like a long-dog, and jumped safe over hedge, before the

praying bull had got on his feet again to take after him. William used

to say that he’d seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never

such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had

been played upon, and ’twas not Christmas Eve. Yes, William Dewy, that

was the man’s name; and I can tell you to a foot where’s he a-lying in

Mellstock Churchyard at this very moment—just between the second

yew-tree and the north aisle.”

“It’s a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when faith

was a living thing!”

The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice behind

the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference, no notice was

taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply

scepticism as to his tale.

“Well, ’tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well.”

“Oh yes; I have no doubt of it,” said the person behind the dun cow.

Tess’s attention was thus attracted to the dairyman’s interlocutor, of

whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his head

so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not understand

why he should be addressed as “sir” even by the dairyman himself. But

no explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long enough

to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as

if he could not get on.

“Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle,” said the dairyman. “’Tis knack,

not strength, that does it.”

“So I find,” said the other, standing up at last and stretching his

arms. “I think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers

ache.”

Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white

pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his

boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his

local livery. Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad,

differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the

discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such vicissitudes

had Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could not

remember where she had met him; and then it flashed upon her that he

was the pedestrian who had joined in the club-dance at Marlott—the

passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with

others but not with her, and slightingly left her, and gone on his way

with his friends.

The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident

anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest, recognizing

her also, he should by some means discover her story. But it passed

away when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She saw by degrees

that since their first and only encounter his mobile face had grown

more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man’s shapely moustache and

beard—the latter of the palest straw colour where it began upon his

cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther from its root. Under his

linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and

gaiters, and a starched white shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody

could have guessed what he was. He might with equal probability have

been an eccentric landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but

a novice at dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he

had spent upon the milking of one cow.

Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the

newcomer, “How pretty she is!” with something of real generosity and

admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify the

assertion—which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness

being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the

milking was finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where Mrs

Crick, the dairyman’s wife—who was too respectable to go out milking

herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in warm weather because the

dairymaids wore prints—was giving an eye to the leads and things.

Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house

besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw

nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on the

story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the evening

being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber. It was a

large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the

sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same

apartment. They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather

older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell

asleep immediately.

But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wakeful

than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various

particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered. The

girl’s whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess’s drowsy

mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they

floated.

“Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that plays the

harp—never says much to us. He is a pa’son’s son, and is too much taken

up wi’ his own thoughts to notice girls. He is the dairyman’s

pupil—learning farming in all its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming

at another place, and he’s now mastering dairy-work.... Yes, he is

quite the gentleman-born. His father is the Reverend Mr Clare at

Emminster—a good many miles from here.”

“Oh—I have heard of him,” said her companion, now awake. “A very

earnest clergyman, is he not?”

“Yes—that he is—the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say—the last of

the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for all about here be what they

call High. All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa’sons too.”

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr Clare

was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep

again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the smell of

the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured dripping of

the whey from the wrings downstairs.

XVIII

Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,

but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes,

and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a

man’s, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and

then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,

something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard,

marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern

about his material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he

was one who might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end

of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months’

pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being to

acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a

view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as

circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step

in the young man’s career which had been anticipated neither by himself

nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,

married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly

brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his

father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of

these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only

son who had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one

of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an

academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance,

on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home,

a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to

the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to

contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat

and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

“Why has this been sent to my house?” he asked peremptorily, holding up

the volume.

“It was ordered, sir.”

“Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.”

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

“Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,” he said. “It was ordered by Mr

Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.”

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and

dejected, and called Angel into his study.

“Look into this book, my boy,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

“I ordered it,” said Angel simply.

“What for?”

“To read.”

“How can you think of reading it?”

“How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,

or even religious, work published.”

“Yes—moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!—and for _you_, who

intend to be a minister of the Gospel!”

“Since you have alluded to the matter, father,” said the son, with

anxious thought upon his face, “I should like to say, once for all,

that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not

conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall

always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for

whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be

ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to

liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.”

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar

that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was

stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to enter

the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The

University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of

fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely

religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is now

elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and

out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:

one who could

Indeed opine

That the Eternal and Divine

Did, eighteen centuries ago

In very truth...

Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

“No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),

taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’ as required by the

Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state

of affairs,” said Angel. “My whole instinct in matters of religion is

towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the Hebrews,

‘the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are

made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

“What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting

ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used

for the honour and glory of God?” his father repeated.

“Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.”

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like

his brothers. But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a

stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so

rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to

the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and

wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his

father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this

uniform plan of education for the three young men.

“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last. “I feel that I have

no right to go there in the circumstances.”

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing

themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,

undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable

indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions

of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the “good old family”

(to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him

unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a

balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see

what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or

business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a

woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly

the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an

unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,

and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by

following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual

one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years;

and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a

Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the

right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at

home—farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the

business by a careful apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would

probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued

even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a

student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he

could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the

dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft,

and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it

as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be

heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone

to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind

which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely

sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming

upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter

humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some

day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals

downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his

wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed a lively assembly;

for though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the

family at meals. The longer Clare resided here the less objection had

he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them

in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their

companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his

imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy

known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days’ residence. At close

quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare’s

intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with

whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level

member of the dairyman’s household seemed at the outset an undignified

proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared

retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after day,

the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle.

Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of

monotonousness. His host and his host’s household, his men and his

maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate

themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal’s was

brought home to him: “_A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il

y a plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de

différence entre les hommes_.” The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased

to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied

fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference;

some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright

even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely

Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian—into men who had private views

of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn

each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each

other’s foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own

individual way the road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and

for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic

melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline

of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he

could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for

a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it

desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and

humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which

he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and

evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,

waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate

things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire

acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs

Crick’s orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their

table, it was Angel Clare’s custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner

during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged

flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned window

opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of

cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read

there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between Clare and the window

was the table at which his companions sat, their munching profiles

rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house

door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to

the brim with the morning’s milk. At the further end the great churn

could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving power

being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse

walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess’s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly

reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by

post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so

little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of

neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general

impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his

music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his

head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled to the

hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting

on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling,

and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks

dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with soot, which

quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an

accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his

phantasmal orchestra till he thought: “What a fluty voice one of those

milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one.”

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his

presence in the room was almost forgotten.

“I don’t know about ghosts,” she was saying; “but I do know that our

souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.”

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with

serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were

breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a

gallows.

“What—really now? And is it so, maidy?” he said.

“A very easy way to feel ’em go,” continued Tess, “is to lie on the

grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by

fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and

hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at

all.”

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

“Now that’s a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o’ the miles I’ve

vamped o’ starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or

trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least

notion o’ that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch

above my shirt-collar.”

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the

dairyman’s pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was

only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and

having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace

imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

“What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!” he

said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,

something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He

concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A

casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and

he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was

sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty

milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

XIX

In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without

fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular

pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse

to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being

unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick’s rule to insist on breaking down these

partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in

the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed

in a difficulty. The maids’ private aims, however, were the reverse of

the dairyman’s rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or

ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the operation on

their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a

preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become

delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had

subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she

would have been glad to meet the milchers’ views in this respect. Out

of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular—Dumpling,

Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who,

though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to

her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the

fingers. Knowing, however, the dairyman’s wish, she endeavoured

conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, excepting the

very hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly

chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she

felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The

dairyman’s pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late,

and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she rested

against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

“Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!” she said, blushing; and in making

the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in

spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip

remaining severely still.

“Well, it makes no difference,” said he. “You will always be here to

milk them.”

“Do you think so? I _hope_ I shall! But I don’t _know_.”

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her

grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her

meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were

somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when

the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her

regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his

considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such

delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed

endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction

between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything

within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive

entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the

strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,

constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as

now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that

of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were

poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a

fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up

towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess

her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left

uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass

which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds

emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues

formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went

stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering

cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot,

staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off

upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the

apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite

near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she

had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now

without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of

the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through

her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his

notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the

garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling

weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the

waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the

western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by

accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive

melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great skill; and she

waited, thinking another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he had

desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess,

her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones

reaching her, though he was some distance off.

“What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?” said he. “Are you afraid?”

“Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now when the

apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green.”

“But you have your indoor fears—eh?”

“Well—yes, sir.”

“What of?”

“I couldn’t quite say.”

“The milk turning sour?”

“No.”

“Life in general?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather

serious, don’t you think so?”

“It is—now you put it that way.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t have expected a young girl like you to see

it so just yet. How is it you do?”

She maintained a hesitating silence.

“Come, Tess, tell me in confidence.”

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and

replied shyly—

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if

they had. And the river says,—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’

And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first

of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and

smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and

cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’

... But _you_, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all

such horrid fancies away!”

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid had

just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of

her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her

own native phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard

training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the

age—the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less when he

reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part

but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by

words in _logy_ and _ism_, of sensations which men and women have

vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so

young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not

guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is

as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess’s passing corporeal

blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family

and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a

mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good

reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended

into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz—as she

herself had felt two or three years ago—“My soul chooseth strangling

and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway.”

It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that

was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright’s yard, he was

studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was

obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a rich and

prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.

He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a

monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his

men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem

unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young

man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a

clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were

respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge

of each other’s character and mood without attempting to pry into each

other’s history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her

nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed

life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather

than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every

discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance

between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean

altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all

further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned

something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was

gathering the buds called “lords and ladies” from the bank while he

spoke.

“Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Oh, ’tis only—about my own self,” she said, with a frail laugh of

sadness, fitfully beginning to peel “a lady” meanwhile. “Just a sense

of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted

for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and

seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I’m like the poor Queen

of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me.”

“Bless my soul, don’t go troubling about that! Why,” he said with some

enthusiasm, “I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to

anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like

to take up—”

“It is a lady again,” interrupted she, holding out the bud she had

peeled.

“What?”

“I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to

peel them.”

“Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any

course of study—history, for example?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I

know already.”

“Why not?”

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row

only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just

like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad,

that’s all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past

doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your

coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.”

“What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?”

“I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the

unjust alike,” she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. “But

that’s what books will not tell me.”

“Tess, fie for such bitterness!” Of course he spoke with a conventional

sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to

himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and

lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have

caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and

ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her

lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek,

lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully

peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it

and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an

ebullition of displeasure with herself for her _niaiseries_, and with a

quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good

opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to

forget, so unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family

with that of the knightly d’Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was,

disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr

Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her

sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies

if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere

Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no

spurious d’Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at

Trantridge, but true d’Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly

sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking

the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families

when they had lost all their money and land.

“Mr Clare,” said the dairyman emphatically, “is one of the most

rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family;

and if there’s one thing that he do hate more than another ’tis the

notion of what’s called a’ old family. He says that it stands to reason

that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can’t

have anything left in ’em now. There’s the Billets and the Drenkhards

and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who

used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy ’em all

up now for an old song a’most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you

know, is one of the Paridelles—the old family that used to own lots o’

the lands out by King’s Hintock, now owned by the Earl o’ Wessex, afore

even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke

quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll

never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in

Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength

for more deeds!’ A boy came here t’other day asking for a job, and said

his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he’d never

heard that ’a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he

supposed his folks hadn’t been ’stablished long enough. ‘Ah! you’re the

very boy I want!’ says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi’en;

‘I’ve great hopes of you;’ and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can’t

stomach old families!”

After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion poor Tess was glad

that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even

though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and

become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it

seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville

vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight

afforded into Clare’s character suggested to her that it was largely

owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest

in his eyes.

XX

The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers,

leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures,

took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their

place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long

stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked

out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably,

placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all

positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness

ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin to cramp

natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too

little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing

aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other,

ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of

it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as

surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,

possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,

physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The

sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its

sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare

also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love;

where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,

awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me?

What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?”

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy,

warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of

persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied

with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s

regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of

womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that

strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet

or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.

Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,

which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some

one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an

alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon

discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the

alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No

sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room

and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to Angel’s, calling

him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that

Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The

remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn

on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the

day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the

twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the

twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent,

and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to

get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons

up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did

not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was

generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light

which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of

isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of

the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of

disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he

knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed

in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the

boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are

usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest

were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together

to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection

hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst

all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was

the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a

sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were

merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do

so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face,

though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She

was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole

sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,

and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because

she did not understand them.

“Call me Tess,” she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply

feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer

bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.

Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters,

out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of

the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing

in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads

round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of

puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and

apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in

detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass

were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands

of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew.

From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had

rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they

found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized

them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.

Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk

them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a

white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.

Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the

wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the

mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from

the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair,

like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these

dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal

beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she

was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own

against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s voice, lecturing the

non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old

Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if

the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d

swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and

that’s saying a good deal.”

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common

with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from

the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable

preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its

return journey when the table had been cleared.

XXI

There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The

churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come. Whenever this

happened the dairy was paralyzed. Squish, squash echoed the milk in the

great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle,

Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare,

Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at

the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on

moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation. Even the melancholy

horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair at

each walk round.

“’Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle’s son in Egdon—years!”

said the dairyman bitterly. “And he was nothing to what his father had

been. I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I _don’t_

believe in en; though ’a do cast folks’ waters very true. But I shall

have to go to ’n if he’s alive. O yes, I shall have to go to ’n, if

this sort of thing continnys!”

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman’s desperation.

“Conjuror Fall, t’other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call

‘Wide-O’, was a very good man when I was a boy,” said Jonathan Kail.

“But he’s rotten as touchwood by now.”

“My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and

a clever man a’ were, so I’ve heard grandf’er say,” continued Mr Crick.

“But there’s no such genuine folk about nowadays!”

Mrs Crick’s mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

“Perhaps somebody in the house is in love,” she said tentatively. “I’ve

heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it. Why, Crick—that

maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn’t come

then—”

“Ah yes, yes!—but that isn’t the rights o’t. It had nothing to do with

the love-making. I can mind all about it—’twas the damage to the

churn.”

He turned to Clare.

“Jack Dollop, a ’hore’s-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one

time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her as

he had deceived many afore. But he had another sort o’ woman to reckon

wi’ this time, and it was not the girl herself. One Holy Thursday of

all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now, only there was

no churning in hand, when we zid the girl’s mother coming up to the

door, wi’ a great brass-mounted umbrella in her hand that would ha’

felled an ox, and saying ‘Do Jack Dollop work here?—because I want him!

I have a big bone to pick with he, I can assure ’n!’ And some way

behind her mother walked Jack’s young woman, crying bitterly into her

handkercher. ‘O Lard, here’s a time!’ said Jack, looking out o’ winder

at ’em. ‘She’ll murder me! Where shall I get—where shall I—? Don’t tell

her where I be!’ And with that he scrambled into the churn through the

trap-door, and shut himself inside, just as the young woman’s mother

busted into the milk-house. ‘The villain—where is he?’ says she. ‘I’ll

claw his face for’n, let me only catch him!’ Well, she hunted about

everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying a’most

stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid—or young woman

rather—standing at the door crying her eyes out. I shall never forget

it, never! ’Twould have melted a marble stone! But she couldn’t find

him nowhere at all.”

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the

listeners.

Dairyman Crick’s stories often seemed to be ended when they were not

really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of

finality; though old friends knew better. The narrator went on—

“Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could

never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.

Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by

handpower then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop about

inside. ‘O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!’ says he, popping out his

head. ‘I shall be churned into a pummy!’ (He was a cowardly chap in his

heart, as such men mostly be). ‘Not till ye make amends for ravaging

her virgin innocence!’ says the old woman. ‘Stop the churn you old

witch!’ screams he. ‘You call me old witch, do ye, you deceiver!’ says

she, ‘when ye ought to ha’ been calling me mother-law these last five

months!’ And on went the churn, and Jack’s bones rattled round again.

Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at last ’a promised to make

it right wi’ her. ‘Yes—I’ll be as good as my word!’ he said. And so it

ended that day.”

While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a quick

movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess, pale-faced,

had gone to the door.

“How warm ’tis to-day!” she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the

reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door for

her, saying with tender raillery—

“Why, maidy” (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet

name), “the prettiest milker I’ve got in my dairy; you mustn’t get so

fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we shall be

finely put to for want of ’ee by dog-days, shan’t we, Mr Clare?”

“I was faint—and—I think I am better out o’ doors,” she said

mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment

changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

“’Tis coming!” cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called off

from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she remained

much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking was done she

did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out of doors,

wandering along she knew not whither. She was wretched—O so wretched—at

the perception that to her companions the dairyman’s story had been

rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but herself

seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how

cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience. The evening sun

was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a

solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the

river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend

whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the

household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before

milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess usually

accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was the first

to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the other girls

came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished

sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she dozed again, but

she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly turned her eyes towards

them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were

standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,

the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and

the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with

deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round

one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were

auburn.

“Don’t push! You can see as well as I,” said Retty, the auburn-haired

and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window.

“’Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty

Priddle,” said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. “His thoughts be

of other cheeks than thine!”

Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

“There he is again!” cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair

and keenly cut lips.

“You needn’t say anything, Izz,” answered Retty. “For I zid you kissing

his shade.”

_”What_ did you see her doing?” asked Marian.

“Why—he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the

shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was

standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and

kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn’t.”

“O Izz Huett!” said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett’s cheek.

“Well, there was no harm in it,” she declared, with attempted coolness.

“And if I be in love wi’en, so is Retty, too; and so be you, Marian,

come to that.”

Marian’s full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

“I!” she said. “What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear eyes—dear

face—dear Mr Clare!”

“There—you’ve owned it!”

“So have you—so have we all,” said Marian, with the dry frankness of

complete indifference to opinion. “It is silly to pretend otherwise

amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would

just marry ’n to-morrow!”

“So would I—and more,” murmured Izz Huett.

“And I too,” whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

“We can’t all marry him,” said Izz.

“We shan’t, either of us; which is worse still,” said the eldest.

“There he is again!”

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

“Why?” asked Retty quickly.

“Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best,” said Marian, lowering her

voice. “I have watched him every day, and have found it out.”

There was a reflective silence.

“But she don’t care anything for ’n?” at length breathed Retty.

“Well—I sometimes think that too.”

“But how silly all this is!” said Izz Huett impatiently. “Of course he

won’t marry any one of us, or Tess either—a gentleman’s son, who’s

going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us

to come wi’en as farm-hands at so much a year!”

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian’s plump figure sighed

biggest of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too. Tears came into the

eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest—the last bud of

the Paridelles, so important in the county annals. They watched

silently a little longer, their three faces still close together as

before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But the unconscious

Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more; and, the shades

beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds. In a few minutes they

heard him ascend the ladder to his own room. Marian was soon snoring,

but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for a long time. Retty Priddle

cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This

conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to

swallow that day. Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her

breast. For that matter she knew herself to have the preference. Being

more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except

Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest

ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare’s heart

against these her candid friends. But the grave question was, ought she

to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for

either of them, in a serious sense; but there was, or had been, a

chance of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy for her,

and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed here. Such

unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs

Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be

the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand

acres of Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to

reap. A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him. But

whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could

never conscientiously allow any man to marry her now, and who had

religiously determined that she never would be tempted to do so, draw

off Mr Clare’s attention from other women, for the brief happiness of

sunning herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?

XXII

They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking

were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.

Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He had received

a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter had a

twang.

“And begad, so ’t have!” said the dairyman, who held in his left hand a

wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. “Yes—taste for

yourself!”

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,

also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and

last of all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.

There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize

the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to

which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed—

“’Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn’t a blade left in that mead!”

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a

few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by,

spoilt the butter in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized the

taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

“We must overhaul that mead,” he resumed; “this mustn’t continny!”

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out

together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very

microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it

seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass before

them. However, they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing

to the importance of the search; the dairyman at the upper end with Mr

Clare, who had volunteered to help; then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and

Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and the married dairywomen—Beck

Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances,

consumptive from the winter damps of the water-meads—who lived in their

respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of the

field, returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they

should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture but would have

fallen under the eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious

business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being

discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb’s pungency that

probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season the

whole dairy’s produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did,

they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row—automatic, noiseless;

and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might well

have been excused for massing them as “Hodge”. As they crept along,

stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected

from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish,

moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the

strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with

the rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not, of course,

by accident that he walked next to Tess.

“Well, how are you?” he murmured.

“Very well, thank you, sir,” she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only

half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a little

superfluous. But they got no further in speech just then. They crept

and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his

elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the dairyman, who came next,

could stand it no longer.

“Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back open

and shut!” he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an

excruciated look till quite upright. “And you, maidy Tess, you wasn’t

well a day or two ago—this will make your head ache finely! Don’t do

any more, if you feel fainty; leave the rest to finish it.”

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr Clare also stepped

out of line, and began privateering about for the weed. When she found

him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night before

made her the first to speak.

“Don’t they look pretty?” she said.

“Who?”

“Izzy Huett and Retty.”

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a good

farmer’s wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure her

own wretched charms.

“Pretty? Well, yes—they are pretty girls—fresh looking. I have often

thought so.”

“Though, poor dears, prettiness won’t last long!”

“O no, unfortunately.”

“They are excellent dairywomen.”

“Yes: though not better than you.”

“They skim better than I.”

“Do they?”

Clare remained observing them—not without their observing him.

“She is colouring up,” continued Tess heroically.

“Who?”

“Retty Priddle.”

“Oh! Why it that?”

“Because you are looking at her.”

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further

and cry, “Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and not

a lady; and don’t think of marrying me!” She followed Dairyman Crick,

and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him—never

allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if

their juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three

every chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that

Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and

her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of

either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she

deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by

him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the

opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple

hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping on her

pilgrimage.

XXIII

The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the

atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the

dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell

frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and

hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers had

gone home. Tess and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly,

the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which

lay some three or four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now

been two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed

down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but

this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the deluge,

and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along

the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls

reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the rain

had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards.

This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they would

have clicked through it in their high pattens and boots quite

unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun’s-day, when flesh went

forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting business with

spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their white stockings

and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac gowns, on which every

mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward impediment. They

could hear the church-bell calling—as yet nearly a mile off.

“Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!” said

Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had climbed,

and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of creeping along

its slope till they were past the pool.

“We can’t get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else

going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!”

said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

“And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the

people staring round,” said Marian, “that I hardly cool down again till

we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees.”

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the

bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along

the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic parson’s

son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading

boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a

thistle-spud to finish him off. “He’s not going to church,” said

Marian.

“No—I wish he was!” murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive

controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches

and chapels on fine summer days. This morning, moreover, he had gone

out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or

not. On his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though

they had been so occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to

notice him. He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it

would quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim

idea of how he could help them—one of them in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light

summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a

roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming

close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable

flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the

transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess,

the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed laughter at

their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long

boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

“Are you trying to get to church?” he said to Marian, who was in front,

including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

“Yes, sir; and ’tis getting late; and my colour do come up so—”

“I’ll carry you through the pool—every Jill of you.”

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

“I think you can’t, sir,” said Marian.

“It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense—you are

not too heavy! I’d carry you all four together. Now, Marian, attend,”

he continued, “and put your arms round my shoulders, so. Now! Hold on.

That’s well done.”

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and

Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,

looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers. They

disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing footsteps

and the top ribbon of Marian’s bonnet told where they were. In a few

minutes he reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.

“Here he comes,” she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were

dry with emotion. “And I have to put my arms round his neck and look

into his face as Marian did.”

“There’s nothing in that,” said Tess quickly.

“There’s a time for everything,” continued Izz, unheeding. “A time to

embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now going

to be mine.”

“Fie—it is Scripture, Izz!”

“Yes,” said Izz, “I’ve always a’ ear at church for pretty verses.”

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a

commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She quietly and

dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically marched

off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time Retty’s

throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the

red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at Tess. His

lips could not have pronounced more plainly, “It will soon be you and

I.” Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not help it.

There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most

troublesome of Clare’s burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal, a

dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered. Izz

had ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,

and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a

group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was

now her turn. She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at the

proximity of Mr Clare’s breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her

companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of betraying

her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

“I may be able to clim’ along the bank perhaps—I can clim’ better than

they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!”

“No, no, Tess,” said he quickly. And almost before she was aware, she

was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

“Three Leahs to get one Rachel,” he whispered.

“They are better women than I,” she replied, magnanimously sticking to

her resolve.

“Not to me,” said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

“I hope I am not too heavy?” she said timidly.

“O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating

billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the

froth.”

“It is very pretty—if I seem like that to you.”

“Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour

entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?”

“No.”

“I did not expect such an event to-day.”

“Nor I... The water came up so sudden.”

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to, the

state of breathing belied. Clare stood still and inclinced his face

towards hers.

“O Tessy!” he exclaimed.

The girl’s cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his

eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly

taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no further with

it. No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and

suspension at this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly,

to make the remainder of the distance as long as possible; but at last

they came to the bend, and the rest of their progress was in full view

of the other three. The dry land was reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him, and

she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade them

farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence by

saying—

“No—in all truth; we have no chance against her!” She looked joylessly

at Tess.

“What do you mean?” asked the latter.

“He likes ’ee best—the very best! We could see it as he brought ’ee. He

would have kissed ’ee, if you had encouraged him to do it, ever so

little.”

“No, no,” said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and yet

there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous young

souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism

is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was

to be.

Tess’s heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that

she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing

that the others had also lost their hearts to him. There is contagion

in this sentiment, especially among women. And yet that same hungry

nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the natural result

had followed.

“I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!” she

declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running down).

“I can’t help this, my dear! I don’t think marrying is in his mind at

all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him, as I should

refuse any man.”

“Oh! would you? Why?” said wondering Retty.

“It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite on one side, I

don’t think he will choose either of you.”

“I have never expected it—thought of it!” moaned Retty. “But O! I wish

I was dead!”

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned

to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

“We be friends with her again,” she said to them. “She thinks no more

of his choosing her than we do.”

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

“I don’t seem to care what I do now,” said Marian, whose mood was

turned to its lowest bass. “I was going to marry a dairyman at

Stickleford, who’s asked me twice; but—my soul—I would put an end to

myself rather’n be his wife now! Why don’t ye speak, Izz?”

“To confess, then,” murmured Izz, “I made sure to-day that he was going

to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast, hoping

and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don’t like biding

here at Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome.”

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless

passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness

of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which

they had neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day had

fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and

the torture was almost more than they could endure. The differences

which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this

passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. There was

so much frankness and so little jealousy because there was no hope.

Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude

herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself airs,

in the idea of outshining the others. The full recognition of the

futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its

purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything

to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking

nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist,

ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them a

resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid expectation of

winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring

dripped monotonously downstairs.

“B’ you awake, Tess?” whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett’s voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian

suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed—

“So be we!”

“I wonder what she is like—the lady they say his family have looked out

for him!”

“I wonder,” said Izz.

“Some lady looked out for him?” gasped Tess, starting. “I have never

heard o’ that!”

“O yes—’tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his

family; a Doctor of Divinity’s daughter near his father’s parish of

Emminster; he don’t much care for her, they say. But he is sure to

marry her.”

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up

wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They

pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the

wedding preparations, of the bride’s happiness, of her dress and veil,

of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen upon

themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus they

talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that

there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare’s attentions to

her. It was a passing summer love of her face, for love’s own temporary

sake—nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that

she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who

knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful

than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the

homelier ones whom he ignored.

XXIV

Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a

season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of

fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not

grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by

their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came

in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state

of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the

spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy

scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in

a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures,

but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses

purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he

burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent

Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the

dairyman’s spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the

pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands

of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows

jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the

gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up

from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation

without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and thrushes

crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner of

quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were

lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted places, on

the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids’ hands.

Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still

more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without

driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed

the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the

diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still

for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand

apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them

being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess’s hands above those of

any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow,

Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she

would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and

with her stool at arm’s length, and the pail against her knee, went

round to where they stood. Soon the sound of Old Pretty’s milk fizzing

into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to

go round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had

strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads

into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger

ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield’s habit,

her temple pressing the milcher’s flank, her eyes fixed on the far end

of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking

Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side, it

shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and

upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun

background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat

under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was

remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet

unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty’s tail and Tess’s

pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as

if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal

about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it

was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking

he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin

and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on

the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that

little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting,

infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and

teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old

Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover,

might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it

was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the

sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could

reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted

him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_ over his flesh,

a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and

actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic

sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not

show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like fixity

disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the

rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it

was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the

sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell

back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and,

leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went

quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her,

clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace

with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her

lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank

upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic

cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he

checked himself, for tender conscience’ sake.

“Forgive me, Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did

not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted

to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!”

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two

people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should

have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

“She is angry—she doesn’t know what we mean—she’ll kick over the milk!”

exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned

with the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with

herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still

encircling her. Tess’s eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

“Why do you cry, my darling?” he said.

“O—I don’t know!” she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became

agitated and tried to withdraw.

“Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last,” said he, with a

curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart

had outrun his judgement. “That I—love you dearly and truly I need not

say. But I—it shall go no further now—it distresses you—I am as

surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your

defencelessness—been too quick and unreflecting, will you?”

“N’—I can’t tell.”

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking

of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into

one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few

minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly

sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in

the interval since Crick’s last view of them something had occurred

which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures;

something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have

despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn

and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities.

A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s outlook was to

have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.

End of Phase the Third

Phase the Fourth:

The Consequence

XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who

had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark

unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the

barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime

temperature into the noctambulist’s face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think

of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept apart.

She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the

novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted

him—palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He could hardly

realize their true relations to each other as yet, and what their

mutual bearing should be before third parties thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary

existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed

through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as

from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world

without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman—

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,

How curious you are to me!—

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold, the

absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the engrossing

world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here,

in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had

volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up

elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the yard

each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house, so

humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained

sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance

to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the

landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables breathed

forth “Stay!” The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the

creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so

far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks,

mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.

Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid’s.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the

obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held

partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides Angel

have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external

displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The

impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than

the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life was to

be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a

conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss;

but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who

endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of

the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended

to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to

her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the

particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single

opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic

First Cause—her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look

upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to

caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with

the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her—so fervid and

so impressionable as she was under her reserve—in order that it might

not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop

what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall

into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and, having

arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided

to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which they would be

mutually engaged. As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach her.

He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible to

sound them upon this. In less than five months his term here would have

ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other farms he

would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in a position to

start on his own account. Would not a farmer want a wife, and should a

farmer’s wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who understood

farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned to him by the

silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some

maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

“O no,” said Dairyman Crick. “Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster to

spend a few days wi’ his kinsfolk.”

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the morning

went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither

girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. “He’s getting on

towards the end of his time wi’ me,” added the dairyman, with a phlegm

which unconsciously was brutal; “and so I suppose he is beginning to

see about his plans elsewhere.”

“How much longer is he to bide here?” asked Izz Huett, the only one of

the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the question.

The others waited for the dairyman’s answer as if their lives hung upon

it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian with heat

added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at the meads.

“Well, I can’t mind the exact day without looking at my

memorandum-book,” replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.

“And even that may be altered a bit. He’ll bide to get a little

practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain. He’ll hang

on till the end of the year I should say.”

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society—of “pleasure

girdled about with pain”. After that the blackness of unutterable

night.

At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow

lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of his

father’s Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could, a little

basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of mead, sent

by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The white lane

stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they were staring

into next year, and not at the lane. He loved her; ought he to marry

her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say?

What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would

depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the

temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only,

with no substratum of everlastingness.

His father’s hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of red

stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into view

beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate. Casting a

glance in the direction of the church before entering his home, he

beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of ages between

twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of some other one,

who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat older than the

school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and highly-starched cambric

morning-gown, with a couple of books in her hand.

Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he

hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go and

speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering

reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him. The

young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his father’s

neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents’ quiet hope that he might

wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism and Bible-classes, and was

plainly going to hold a class now. Clare’s mind flew to the

impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var Vale, their rosy faces

court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one the most impassioned of

them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot over

to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother and

father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour, before

they should have gone out to their parish duties. He was a little late,

and they had already sat down to the morning meal. The group at the

table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he entered. They were his

father and mother, his brother the Reverend Felix—curate at a town in

the adjoining county, home for the inside of a fortnight—and his other

brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the classical scholar, and Fellow and

Dean of his College, down from Cambridge for the long vacation. His

mother appeared in a cap and silver spectacles, and his father looked

what in fact he was—an earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in

years about sixty-five, his pale face lined with thought and purpose.

Over their heads hung the picture of Angel’s sister, the eldest of the

family, sixteen years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone

out to Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty

years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual

descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an

Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic

simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his

mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no

further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those

of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other

hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration

for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in

dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying

them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as

he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and

Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his

intelligence—less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of

determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite

amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had

cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He despised the

Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent

through the whole category—which in a way he might have been. One thing

he certainly was—sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush

womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale,

his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either

by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time

Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of

irritation, that it might have resulted far better for mankind if

Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and

not Palestine; and his father’s grief was of that blank description

which could not realize that there might lurk a thousandth part of a

truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition.

He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after. But the

kindness of his heart was such that he never resented anything for

long, and welcomed his son to-day with a smile which was as candidly

sweet as a child’s.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as

formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that

he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he

had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly

foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations—still

unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal

paradise, a nadiral hell—were as foreign to his own as if they had been

the dreams of people on another planet. Latterly he had seen only Life,

felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped,

uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to

check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence

from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a difference in

his manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He

was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the

muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much

information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar

had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young

man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that

he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship

with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,

well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre,

such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a

systematic tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it

was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single

eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they

wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they

wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular

variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned

they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed

him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio’s Holy Families were

admired, they admired Correggio’s Holy Families; when he was decried in

favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal

objection.

If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their

growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert

all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of

the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly

recognized that there were a few unimportant score of millions of

outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men

nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with

and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their

visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more

recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less

self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a

contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was

less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own

teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,

though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel’s former feeling revived in

him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither

saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many

men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their

opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the

complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in

which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference

between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said

in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from

what the outer world was thinking.

“I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,” Felix

was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked

through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity. “And,

therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do entreat you to

endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals.

Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high thinking may

go with plain living, nevertheless.”

“Of course it may,” said Angel. “Was it not proved nineteen hundred

years ago—if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you

think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral

ideals?”

“Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation—it

may be fancy only—that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp.

Hasn’t it struck you, Cuthbert?”

“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know;

each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to

intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better

leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.”

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at

which their father’s and mother’s morning work in the parish usually

concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing

to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though

the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that

their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now an

outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the

dairyman’s somewhat coarsely-laden table. But neither of the old people

had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting

that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in

coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they,

somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their

own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands was

deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs Crick’s

black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they did

them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother to

appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did himself.

“Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy,” observed

Clare’s mother. “But I am sure you will not mind doing without them as

I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I

suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick’s kind present to the

children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his

attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great

pleasure to them; so we did.”

“Of course,” said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

“I found the mead so extremely alcoholic,” continued his mother, “that

it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or

brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet.”

“We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,” added his father.

“But what shall I tell the dairyman’s wife?” said Angel.

“The truth, of course,” said his father.

“I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings very

much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly

I return.”

“You cannot, if we did not,” Mr Clare answered lucidly.

“Ah—no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple.”

“A what?” said Cuthbert and Felix both.

“Oh—’tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,” replied Angel,

blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if

wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.

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—alter, 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 finger-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 how 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 snatch 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 ’hore’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.

XXX

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 fields 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 queer 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 dogging 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 cock. 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 cock 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 cock 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 cock 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 cock’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 murder to my other follies,” he said.

“I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on account of my

shame. They will not blame you then.”

“Don’t speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have

such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical

laughter than for tragedy. You don’t in the least understand the

quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by

nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by

returning to the house, and going to bed.”

“I will,” said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of

the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries

past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still

worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished,

creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the

temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having

been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying

his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the

main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back,

everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning.

She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to

her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down on

the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to

undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon

the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she

lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had

put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of

that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and

bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time

would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he

had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked

now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that

he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.

When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among

so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which

welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,

surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,

possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.

Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the

manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the

old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a

sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and

listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that

she was sleeping profoundly.

“Thank God!” murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of

bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that

having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now

reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door

again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d’Urberville dames,

whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bedchamber.

In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister

design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of

revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice

of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it

in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing

sensation of a resemblance between them.

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

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his

powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible sterile

expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the

face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave, yet who found no

advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing

contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.

Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all

the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but

The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not

indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate

to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which

as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was

telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,

discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the

light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and

indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness,

and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the

happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or

change of mien.

XXXVI

Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though

associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct

embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of

untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the

other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able

to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above

there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the

door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager’s wife,

who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward

just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed

her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She

had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.

When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the

house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,

butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast

laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in

domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the

chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were

passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied

their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the

stairs, called in a conventional voice—

“Breakfast is ready!”

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.

When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the

sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was

fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two

or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he

went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at

the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale

blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face

appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the

bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare’s

tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a

new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the

hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as

if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any