part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know how’t have been

discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman himself by blood,

with family skillentons in their own vaults to this day, but done out

of his property in the time o’ the Romans. However, Sir John, as we

call ’n now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could, and stood

treat to everybody in the parish; and John’s wife sung songs at The

Pure Drop till past eleven o’clock.”

Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide to

go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She asked

the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his house for a

while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage,

and went on to the village alone by a back lane.

At sight of her father’s chimney she asked herself how she could

possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were calmly

supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man,

who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was,

friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself, with no

better place to go to in the world.

She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the garden-hedge she

was met by a girl who knew her—one of the two or three with whom she

had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how

Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted

with—

“But where’s thy gentleman, Tess?”

Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,

leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus

made her way to the house.

As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the back

door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the

doorstep in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this without

observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her.

The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old

quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was

about to plunge her arms in anew.

“Why—Tess!—my chil’—I thought you was married!—married really and truly

this time—we sent the cider—”

“Yes, mother; so I am.”

“Going to be?”

“No—I am married.”

“Married! Then where’s thy husband?”

“Oh, he’s gone away for a time.”

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

“Yes, Tuesday, mother.”

“And now ’tis on’y Saturday, and he gone away?”

“Yes, he’s gone.”

“What’s the meaning o’ that? ’Nation seize such husbands as you seem to

get, say I!”

“Mother!” Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the

matron’s bosom, and burst into sobs. “I don’t know how to tell ’ee,

mother! You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him.

But I did tell him—I couldn’t help it—and he went away!”

“O you little fool—you little fool!” burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,

splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. “My good God! that ever I

should ha’ lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!”

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having

relaxed at last.

“I know it—I know—I know!” she gasped through her sobs. “But, O my

mother, I could not help it! He was so good—and I felt the wickedness

of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If—if—it were to be

done again—I should do the same. I could not—I dared not—so sin—against

him!”

“But you sinned enough to marry him first!”

“Yes, yes; that’s where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get

rid o’ me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if

you knew—if you could only half know how I loved him—how anxious I was

to have him—and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my

wish to be fair to him!”

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a helpless

thing, into a chair.

“Well, well; what’s done can’t be undone! I’m sure I don’t know why

children o’ my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than

other people’s—not to know better than to blab such a thing as that,

when he couldn’t ha’ found it out till too late!” Here Mrs Durbeyfield

began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied. “What

your father will say I don’t know,” she continued; “for he’s been

talking about the wedding up at Rolliver’s and The Pure Drop every day

since, and about his family getting back to their rightful position

through you—poor silly man!—and now you’ve made this mess of it! The

Lord-a-Lord!”

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess’s father was heard approaching

at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately, and Mrs

Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess

keeping out of sight for the present. After her first burst of

disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess’s

original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in

the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them irrespective of

desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a

lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been

shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for

two younger children. There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on

there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live hen.

He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second

horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen had been

carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show people that

he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the

table at Rolliver’s for more than an hour.

“We’ve just had up a story about—” Durbeyfield began, and thereupon

related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn

about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married

into a clerical family. “They was formerly styled ‘sir’, like my own

ancestry,” he said, “though nowadays their true style, strictly

speaking, is ‘clerk’ only.” As Tess had wished that no great publicity

should be given to the event, he had mentioned no particulars. He hoped

she would remove that prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple

should take Tess’s own name, d’Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was

better than her husbands’s. He asked if any letter had come from her

that day.

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

unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen

mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of

the cheering glass. Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his

touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of

others.

“To think, now, that this was to be the end o’t!” said Sir John. “And I

with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as

Squire Jollard’s ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and

sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history.

And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver’s and The Pure Drop

will say to me! How they’ll squint and glane, and say, ‘This is yer

mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer

forefathers in King Norman’s time!’ I feel this is too much, Joan; I

shall put an end to myself, title and all—I can bear it no longer!...

But she can make him keep her if he’s married her?”

“Why, yes. But she won’t think o’ doing that.”

“D’ye think he really have married her?—or is it like the first—”

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.

The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own

parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could

have done. How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her

father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance

doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the

end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her

that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In her

craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide

from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made

use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them

under the impression that she was setting out to join him. Still

further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her,

she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and

handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel

Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the

trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past. With

this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell; and after that

there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for some time on

the strength of Tess’s bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed,

believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband

and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could

not live apart from each other.

XXXIX

It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself

descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his

father. With his downward course the tower of the church rose into the

evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living

person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to

expect him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own

footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.

The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known

it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man;

though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before

him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the

staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of

a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond

description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural

plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in the manner recommended

by the great and wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of

those great and wise men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to

test the feasibility of their counsel. “This is the chief thing: be not

perturbed,” said the Pagan moralist. That was just Clare’s own opinion.

But he was perturbed. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it

be afraid,” said the Nazarene. Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart

was troubled all the same. How he would have liked to confront those

two great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to

fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their method!

His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length he

fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive interest

of an outsider.

He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been

brought about by the accident of her being a d’Urberville. When he

found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the

new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not

stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles? This was what he

had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.

Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He

wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that he

ate, and drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the

motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself

to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a

dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and ways.

In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small

town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of the

Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist. Land was

offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat

attracted him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him there, and

perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits

the conventions would not be so operative which made life with her seem

impracticable to him here. In brief he was strongly inclined to try

Brazil, especially as the season for going thither was just at hand.

With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan to

his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of arriving

without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated them. As

he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just as the old

one had done in the small hours of that morning when he had carried his

wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks; but

his face was thinner now.

Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival

stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher

stirs a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the

drawing-room, but neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel

entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.

“But—where’s your wife, dear Angel?” cried his mother. “How you

surprise us!”

“She is at her mother’s—temporarily. I have come home rather in a hurry

because I’ve decided to go to Brazil.”

“Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!”

“Are they? I hadn’t thought of that.”

But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical land

could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare’s natural interest in

their son’s marriage.

“We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken

place,” said Mrs Clare, “and your father sent your godmother’s gift to

her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be

present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and

not at her home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed you,

and given us no pleasure. Your bothers felt that very strongly. Now it

is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits you for the

business you have chosen to follow instead of the ministry of the

Gospel.... Yet I wish I could have seen her first, Angel, or have known

a little more about her. We sent her no present of our own, not knowing

what would best give her pleasure, but you must suppose it only

delayed. Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your father’s

against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much better to

reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her. And now you

have not brought her. It seems strange. What has happened?”

He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should go to

her parents’ home for the present, whilst he came there.

“I don’t mind telling you, dear mother,” he said, “that I always meant

to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could come with

credit to you. But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent one. If I do

go it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my first journey.

She will remain at her mother’s till I come back.”

“And I shall not see her before you start?”

He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been, as he had

said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while—not to

wound their prejudices—feelings—in any way; and for other reasons he

had adhered to it. He would have to visit home in the course of a year,

if he went out at once; and it would be possible for them to see her

before he started a second time—with her.

A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further

exposition of his plans. His mother’s disappointment at not seeing the

bride still remained with her. Clare’s late enthusiasm for Tess had

infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost

fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth—a charming woman

out of Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate.

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

“Of that there can be no question!” he said, with a zest which covered

its bitterness.

“And that she is pure and virtuous goes without question?”

“Pure and virtuous, of course, she is.”

“I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day that she was

fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid’s bow; dark

eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship’s cable; and

large eyes violety-bluey-blackish.”

“I did, mother.”

“I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she naturally had scarce

ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw you.”

“Scarcely.”

“You were her first love?”

“Of course.”

“There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls of

the farm. Certainly I could have wished—well, since my son is to be an

agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should have been

accustomed to an outdoor life.”

His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the chapter

from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers, the Vicar

observed to Mrs Clare—

“I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to

read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should have

had in the usual course of our reading?”

“Yes, certainly,” said Mrs Clare. “The words of King Lemuel” (she could

cite chapter and verse as well as her husband). “My dear son, your

father has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a

virtuous wife. We shall not need to be reminded to apply the words to

the absent one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!”

A lump rose in Clare’s throat. The portable lectern was taken out from

the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old servants

came in, and Angel’s father began to read at the tenth verse of the

aforesaid chapter—

“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. She

riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. She

girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She

perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by

night. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not

the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her

husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously,

but thou excellest them all.”

When prayers were over, his mother said—

“I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear father

read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you have chosen.

The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not a

fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for

the good of others. ‘Her children arise up and call her blessed; her

husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously,

but she excelleth them all.’ Well, I wish I could have seen her, Angel.

Since she is pure and chaste, she would have been refined enough for

me.”

Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which

seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good night to these

sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the

world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts, only as something

vague and external to themselves. He went to his own chamber.

His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to

discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.

“Angel,” she asked, “is there something wrong that you go away so soon?

I am quite sure you are not yourself.”

“I am not, quite, mother,” said he.

“About her? Now, my son, I know it is that—I know it is about her! Have

you quarrelled in these three weeks?”

“We have not exactly quarrelled,” he said. “But we have had a

difference—”

“Angel—is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?”

With a mother’s instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of

trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.

“She is spotless!” he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to

eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

“Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in

nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which

may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,

disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition.”

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the

secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this

marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the

disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his

career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on

account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the

candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on

sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and a

failure.

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with his

poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to practise

deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his anger, as if

she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in

expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips

passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of

her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how

great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper

shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of

his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgement

this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last

five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality

when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him,

and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this

young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any

other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value

having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the

figure near at hand suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its

sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in

that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In

considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot

that the defective can be more than the entire.

XL

At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a

hopeful view of Clare’s proposed experiment with that country’s soil,

notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who had

emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months. After

breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such trifling

matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from the local bank

all the money he possessed. On his way back he encountered Miss Mercy

Chant by the church, from whose walls she seemed to be a sort of

emanation. She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such

was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others

wrought beatific smiles upon her—an enviable result, although, in the

opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of

humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what an

excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

“Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,” he

replied. “But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of existence.

Perhaps a cloister would be preferable.”

“A cloister! O, Angel Clare!”

“Well?”

“Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman

Catholicism.”

“And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art in a parlous

state, Angel Clare.”

“_I_ glory in my Protestantism!” she said severely.

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods in

which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close to

him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he

could think of. His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on

her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for his

welfare.

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

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare

re-entered the Vicarage. With the local banker he deposited the jewels

till happier days should arise. He also paid into the bank thirty

pounds—to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and

wrote to her at her parents’ home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of

what he had done. This amount, with the sum he had already placed in

her hands—about fifty pounds—he hoped would be amply sufficient for her

wants just at present, particularly as in an emergency she had been

directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her by

informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really

happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother

suggested that he should do so. During the day he left the parsonage,

for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary

for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with

Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having

to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or

three small articles fetched away that they had left behind. It was

under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had

stretched its gloom over him. Yet when he had unlocked the door of the

sitting-room and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon

him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first

fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal

together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit,

and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen with a

renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he went

upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth

as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving. The

mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it. Having been

there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and

berries were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed it into the

grate. Standing there, he for the first time doubted whether his course

in this conjecture had been a wise, much less a generous, one. But had

he not been cruelly blinded? In the incoherent multitude of his

emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed. “O Tess! If you had

only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you!” he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs. At

the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning up

her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

“Mr Clare,” she said, “I’ve called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to

inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again.”

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet

guessed his; an honest girl who loved him—one who would have made as

good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer’s wife as Tess.

“I am here alone,” he said; “we are not living here now.” Explaining

why he had come, he asked, “Which way are you going home, Izz?”

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

“Why is that?”

Izz looked down.

“It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way.” She

pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was

journeying.

“Well—are you going there now? I can take you if you wish for a lift.”

Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.

“Thank ’ee, Mr Clare,” she said.

He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and the

few other items which had to be considered by reason of the sudden

abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare’s return to his horse and gig,

Izz jumped up beside him.

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

to Brazil.”

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

“She is not going at present—say for a year or so. I am going out to

reconnoitre—to see what life there is like.”

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

observation.

“How are the others?” he inquired. “How is Retty?”

“She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin

and hollow-cheeked that ’a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever fall

in love wi’ her any more,” said Izz absently.

“And Marian?”

Izz lowered her voice.

“Marian drinks.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her.”

“And you!”

“I don’t drink, and I bain’t in a decline. But—I am no great things at

singing afore breakfast now!”

“How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn ‘’Twas down

in Cupid’s Gardens’ and ‘The Tailor’s Breeches’ at morning milking?”

“Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when you had been

there a bit.”

“Why was that falling-off?”

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

“Izz!—how weak of you—for such as I!” he said, and fell into reverie.

“Then—suppose I had asked _you_ to marry me?”

“If you had I should have said ‘Yes’, and you would have married a

woman who loved ’ee!”

“Really!”

“Down to the ground!” she whispered vehemently. “O my God! did you

never guess it till now!”

By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.

“I must get down. I live out there,” said Izz abruptly, never having

spoken since her avowal.

Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly

disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a

corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be

revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,

instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring

manner?

“I am going to Brazil alone, Izz,” said he. “I have separated from my

wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with her

again. I may not be able to love you; but—will you go with me instead

of her?”

“You truly wish me to go?”

“I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief. And you at

least love me disinterestedly.”

“Yes—I will go,” said Izz, after a pause.

“You will? You know what it means, Izz?”

“It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over

there—that’s good enough for me.”

“Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought to remind

you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization—Western

civilization, that is to say.”

“I don’t mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and

there’s no other way!”

“Then don’t get down, but sit where you are.”

He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing any

signs of affection.

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

“I do—I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the dairy

together!”

“More than Tess?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she murmured, “not more than she.”

“How’s that?”

“Because nobody could love ’ee more than Tess did!... She would have

laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more.”

Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken

perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her

rougher nature by Tess’s character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words

from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was

something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, “_She

would have laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more!_”

“Forget our idle talk, Izz,” he said, turning the horse’s head

suddenly. “I don’t know what I’ve been saying! I will now drive you

back to where your lane branches off.”

“So much for honesty towards ’ee! O—how can I bear it—how can I—how can

I!”

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

she had done.

“Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O,

Izz, don’t spoil it by regret!”

She stilled herself by degrees.

“Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn’t know what I was saying, either,

wh—when I agreed to go! I wish—what cannot be!”

“Because I have a loving wife already.”

“Yes, yes! You have!”

They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an hour

earlier, and she hopped down.

“Izz—please, please forget my momentary levity!” he cried. “It was so

ill-considered, so ill-advised!”

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

He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry

conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and took

her hand.

“Well, but, Izz, we’ll part friends, anyhow? You don’t know what I’ve

had to bear!”

She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to

mar their adieux.

“I forgive ’ee, sir!” she said.

“Now, Izz,” he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself

to the mentor’s part he was far from feeling; “I want you to tell

Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give

way to folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy

men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and

well—remember the words—wisely and well—for my sake. I send this

message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them

again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my

wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery. Women may

be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things! On that one

account I can never forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl you

have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a

faithful friend. Promise.”

She gave the promise.

“Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!”

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was

out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of

racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she

entered her mother’s cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how

Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare’s parting

from her and her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching

thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That

evening he was within a feather-weight’s turn of abandoning his road to

the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line of

South Wessex which divided him from his Tess’s home. It was neither a

contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her heart, which

deterred him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz’s

admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first, he was

right now. And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked

tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more

sustained force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon

come back to her. He took the train that night for London, and five

days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of

embarkation.

XLI

From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an

October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare

and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a

bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely

woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier

time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were

projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary

period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring

and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the time

being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work

near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote

from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living

on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a

condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.

Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the

presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there—he who, the

moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a

shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had

not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done

duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning,

she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty

of further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare’s

allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a

contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she

had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now followed

an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was obliged to

fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,

had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had

consecrated them to souvenirs of himself—they appeared to have had as

yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own

experiences—and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But she

had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to

time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost

gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they were

in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the thatch of

the house, which required entire renewal; but this could not be done

because the previous thatching had never been paid for. New rafters and

a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which, with the previous

bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As her husband was a man

of means, and had doubtless returned by this time, could she not send

them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel’s

bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was

received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she

was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum

for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a

remark of Angel’s that whenever she required further resources she was

to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to

take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be

called, on Clare’s account, which had led her to hide from her own

parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to

his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her. They

probably despised her already; how much more they would despise her in

the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no effort

could the parson’s daughter-in-law bring herself to let him know her

state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband’s parents might, she

thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse

obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent

to her marriage they were under the impression that she was ultimately

going to join her husband; and from that time to the present she had

done nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his return

in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil would result

in a short stay only, after which he would come to fetch her, or that

he would write for her to join him; in any case that they would soon

present a united front to their families and the world. This hope she

still fostered. To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife,

dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own

hands for a living, after the _éclat_ of a marriage which was to

nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had deposited

them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she

could only use and not sell them. Even were they absolutely hers it

would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which

was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband’s days had been by no means free from trial. At

this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba

in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by

other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and

farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither

by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless

assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English

uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been

born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were

surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess’s sovereigns had

been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on

account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get

employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy,

health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from

seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of

means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From

that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might be

better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had

no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid

its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had

served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required

no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her at

Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her

life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax would be

too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized

husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered

remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would

almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual

there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each.

It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness

wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply knew

that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,

to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had

reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was

separated from her husband—probably through Izz Huett—and the

good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had

hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to

this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her

there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that

she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband’s

forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the habitude

of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled

on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every

step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or

contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by

others of importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the

attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of

distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her

natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been

prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her

no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper

of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than once; but

nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November

afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm

for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to

the home of her husband’s father; and to hover about that region

unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at the

Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try

the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot

towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of

the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached the

top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in

glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few

moments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and

said—

“Good night, my pretty maid”: to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the

landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.

“Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile—young

Squire d’Urberville’s friend? I was there at that time, though I don’t

live there now.”

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down

at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot through

her, and she returned him no answer.

“Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true,

though your fancy-man was so up about it—hey, my sly one? You ought to

beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering.”

Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her

hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind,

and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a

gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged,

and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe

against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes

which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off

draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them

into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess

crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard

strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the

breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the

other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there

another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself;

and, thinking of her wasted life, said, “All is vanity.” She repeated

the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most

inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that

more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of

thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind

it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction,

death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its

curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft

skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone

would be bare. “I wish it were now,” she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound

among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any

wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it

was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came

from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the

boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy body upon

the ground. Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant

conditions she would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she

had at present no fear.

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

little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world’s active hours had

grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked

around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb

her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot

into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable

ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage

dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some

staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some

stretched out—all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones

whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to

bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven

down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while

those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before

nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded

birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick

boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew weaker

with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one

as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking

over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their guns,

strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She had been

told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not

like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons

save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the

inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their

purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless feathered creatures,

brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these

propensities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their

weaker fellows in Nature’s teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much

as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds

out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the

necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had

found them till the game-keepers should come—as they probably would

come—to look for them a second time.

“Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in

the sight o’ such misery as yours!” she exclaimed, her tears running

down as she killed the birds tenderly. “And not a twinge of bodily pain

about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands

to feed and clothe me.” She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the

night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation

under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.

XLII

It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon

the highway. But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at hand,

and Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the birds’

silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her the

relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she could

once rise high enough to despise opinion. But that she could not do so

long as it was held by Clare.

She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several

young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks. Somehow

she felt hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband also might

say these same things to her even yet? She was bound to take care of

herself on the chance of it, and keep off these casual lovers. To this

end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her appearance. As soon

as she got out of the village she entered a thicket and took from her

basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which she had never put on even

at the dairy—never since she had worked among the stubble at Marlott.

She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle

and tied it round her face under her bonnet, covering her chin and half

her cheeks and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache. Then

with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she

mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against

aggressive admiration, she went on her uneven way.

“What a mommet of a maid!” said the next man who met her to a

companion.

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

“But I don’t care!” she said. “O no—I don’t care! I’ll always be ugly

now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care of me.

My husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any more; but

I love him just the same, and hate all other men, and like to make ’em

think scornfully of me!”

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a

fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a red

woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper,

and buff-leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become

faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and

the stress of winds. There is no sign of young passion in her now—

The maiden’s mouth is cold

. . . . .

Fold over simple fold

Binding her head.

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a

thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a

pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and

ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty,

directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but

little. Her object being a winter’s occupation and a winter’s home,

there was no time to lose. Her experience of short hirings had been

such that she was determined to accept no more.

Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place

whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of

as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of

tempting. First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment, and,

as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied next for

the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry tendance

that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and course pursuits which

she liked least—work on arable land: work of such roughness, indeed, as

she would never have deliberately voluteered for.

Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land

or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli—as if Cybele the

Many-breasted were supinely extended there—which stretched between the

valley of her birth and the valley of her love.

Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown white

and dusty within a few hours after rain. There were few trees, or none,

those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed

down with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural enemies of

tree, bush, and brake. In the middle distance ahead of her she could

see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout, and they seemed

friendly. They had a low and unassuming aspect from this upland, though

as approached on the other side from Blackmoor in her childhood they

were as lofty bastions against the sky. Southerly, at many miles’

distance, and over the hills and ridges coastward, she could discern a

surface like polished steel: it was the English Channel at a point far

out towards France.

Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village. She

had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian’s sojourn.

There seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to come. The

stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the kind of labour

in demand here was of the roughest kind; but it was time to rest from

searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly as it began to rain.

At the entrance to the village was a cottage whose gable jutted into

the road, and before applying for a lodging she stood under its

shelter, and watched the evening close in.

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

The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that

immediately within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of

which came through the bricks. She warmed her hands upon them, and also

put her cheek—red and moist with the drizzle—against their comforting

surface. The wall seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so

little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night.

Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage—gathered together after

their day’s labour—talking to each other within, and the rattle of

their supper-plates was also audible. But in the village-street she had

seen no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of

one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the print

gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess instinctively thought it

might be Marian, and when she came near enough to be distinguishable in

the gloom, surely enough it was she. Marian was even stouter and redder

in the face than formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any

previous period of her existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew

the acquaintance in such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive,

and she responded readily to Marian’s greeting.

Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved by

the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition than at

first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.

“Tess—Mrs Clare—the dear wife of dear he! And is it really so bad as

this, my child? Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way? Anybody

been beating ’ee? Not _he_?”

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

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

thoughts.

“And you’ve got no collar on” (Tess had been accustomed to wear a

little white collar at the dairy).

“I know it, Marian.”

“You’ve lost it travelling.”

“I’ve not lost it. The truth is, I don’t care anything about my looks;

and so I didn’t put it on.”

“And you don’t wear your wedding-ring?”

“Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on a ribbon. I

don’t wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am married

at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life.”

Marian paused.

“But you _be_ a gentleman’s wife; and it seems hardly fair that you

should live like this!”

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

“Well, well. _He_ married you—and you can be unhappy!”

“Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands—from

their own.”

“You’ve no faults, deary; that I’m sure of. And he’s none. So it must

be something outside ye both.”

“Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking

questions? My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my

allowance, so that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time. Do

not call me Mrs Clare, but Tess, as before. Do they want a hand here?”

“O yes; they’ll take one always, because few care to come. ’Tis a

starve-acre place. Corn and swedes are all they grow. Though I be here

myself, I feel ’tis a pity for such as you to come.”

“But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I.”

“Yes; but I’ve got out o’ that since I took to drink. Lord, that’s the

only comfort I’ve got now! If you engage, you’ll be set swede-hacking.

That’s what I be doing; but you won’t like it.”

“O—anything! Will you speak for me?”

“You will do better by speaking for yourself.”

“Very well. Now, Marian, remember—nothing about _him_ if I get the

place. I don’t wish to bring his name down to the dirt.”

Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain than

Tess, promised anything she asked.

“This is pay-night,” she said, “and if you were to come with me you

would know at once. I be real sorry that you are not happy; but ’tis

because he’s away, I know. You couldn’t be unhappy if he were here,

even if he gie’d ye no money—even if he used you like a drudge.”

“That’s true; I could not!”

They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse, which was

almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight;

there was not, at this season, a green pasture—nothing but fallow and

turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to

unrelieved levels.

Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of

workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her. The

farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who

represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on her

agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was seldom

offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women

could perform as readily as men.

Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at

present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose

gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence that she

had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.

That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case

a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she did not

tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought

reproach upon him.

XLIII

There was no exaggeration in Marian’s definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm

as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian

herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village,

the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and

the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other

words, the village of a resident squire’s tenantry, the village of free

or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner’s village, farmed with the

land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with

physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel

Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a

stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of

the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of

siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose

white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of

each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the

business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the

root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.

Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole

field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without

features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of

skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white

vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and

nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face

looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the

white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls

crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical

regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian

“wroppers”—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep

their gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that

reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.

The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads

would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of

the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they

bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of

their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist

in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said

that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would

not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,

that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally

upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till

they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really

meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is

called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in

a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,

then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work

on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,

demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They

were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and

loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land

where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,

emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of

the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the

irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating

Marian’s remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains

of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers

clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in

memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

“You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley from

here when ’tis fine,” said Marian.

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

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to

enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian’s will had

a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon

wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited

Tess to drink. Tess’s unassisted power of dreaming, however, being

enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest

sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

“I’ve got used to it,” she said, “and can’t leave it off now. ’Tis my

only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn’t; and you can do without it

perhaps.”

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian’s, but upheld by the dignity

of being Angel’s wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian’s

differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon

rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which

process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook

before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could

shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was

frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen

masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She

had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she

persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare’s character would

lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped

flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely

obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom

was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;

and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old

times they had spent out there.

“Ah,” said Marian, “how I should like another or two of our old set to

come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and

talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o’ the old things

we used to know, and make it all come back a’most, in seeming!”

Marian’s eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions

returned. “I’ll write to Izz Huett,” she said. “She’s biding at home

doing nothing now, I know, and I’ll tell her we be here, and ask her to

come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.”

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of

this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days

later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,

and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and

measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few

lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had

put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered

with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving

it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a

staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and

horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none

had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the

crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from

salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when

strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on

the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical

eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in

inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had

ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;

which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by

the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of

colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the

expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless

birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen

which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The

traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb

impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for

the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of

the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to

uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.

There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not

of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,

penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less

than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow

came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable

that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the

night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that

the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she

lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown

through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest

powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that

it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when

she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a

snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to

see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the

time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian

arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at

reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,

as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered

medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their

thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and

across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed

the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and

individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,

arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it

licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with

slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could

in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather

than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes

that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an

achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly

cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

“Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,” said Marian.

“Depend upon’t, they keep just in front o’t all the way from the North

Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching

weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!

Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does

it good.”

“You mustn’t talk about him to me, Marian,” said Tess severely.

“Well, but—surely you care for ’n! Do you?”

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced

in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,

putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

“Well, well, I know you do. But ’pon my body, it is a rum life for a

married couple! There—I won’t say another word! Well, as for the

weather, it won’t hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is

fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I’m

stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can’t think why maister should have

set ’ee at it.”

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long

structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was

carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the

evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the

women to draw from during the day.

“Why, here’s Izz!” said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her

mother’s home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance

so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow

began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her

mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been

afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a

neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start

remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen

of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight

quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly

had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that

occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did

all kinds of men’s work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,

ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted

reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with

some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the

press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under

which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam

being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves

diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors

upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls

pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the

presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and

Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.

Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode

up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and

remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned

at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she

perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she

had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her

history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,

when he said, “So you be the young woman who took my civility in such

ill part? Be drowned if I didn’t think you might be as soon as I heard

of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the

first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the

road, when you bolted; but now I think I’ve got the better of you.” He

concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a

clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could

read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had

nothing to fear from her employer’s gallantry; it was rather the

tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare’s treatment of him. Upon

the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to

endure it.

“You thought I was in love with ’ee I suppose? Some women are such

fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there’s nothing like

a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o’ young wenches’ heads;

and you’ve signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg

my pardon?”

“I think you ought to beg mine.”

“Very well—as you like. But we’ll see which is master here. Be they all

the sheaves you’ve done to-day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“’Tis a very poor show. Just see what they’ve done over there”

(pointing to the two stalwart women). “The rest, too, have done better

than you.”

“They’ve all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made

no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what

we do.”

“Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.”

“I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the

others will do.”

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not

have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than

gallantry. When two o’clock arrived the professional reed-drawers

tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,

tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done

likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer

hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at

the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, “Now, we’ve got it all to

ourselves.” And so at last the conversation turned to their old

experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their

affection for Angel Clare.

“Izz and Marian,” said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was

extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: “I can’t

join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will

see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the

present, he is my husband.”

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls

who had loved Clare. “He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,” she

said; “but I don’t think he is a too fond husband to go away from you

so soon.”

“He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!”

pleaded Tess.

“He might have tided ’ee over the winter.”

“Ah—that’s owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won’t argue

it,” Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. “Perhaps there’s a

good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,

without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.”

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went

on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under

their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing

sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the

hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of

wheat-ears at her feet.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it!” cried Marian. “It wants

harder flesh than yours for this work.”

Just then the farmer entered. “Oh, that’s how you get on when I am

away,” he said to her.

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

“I want it finished,” he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went

out at the other door.

“Don’t ’ee mind him, there’s a dear,” said Marian. “I’ve worked here

before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your

number.”

“I don’t like to let you do that. I’m taller than you, too.”

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and

reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw

had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her

succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening

the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She

lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the

straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of

bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur

of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject

already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch

the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they

were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up

and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the

previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at

five o’clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her

stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without

suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,

to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of

sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great

door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every

afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a

romantic vein.

“I should not have thought it of him—never!” she said in a dreamy tone.

“And I loved him so! I didn’t mind his having _you_. But this about Izz

is too bad!”

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger

with the bill-hook.

“Is it about my husband?” she stammered.

“Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don’t ’ee tell her’; but I am sure I can’t help

it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil

with him.”

Tess’s face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves

straightened. “And did Izz refuse to go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Anyhow he changed his mind.”

“Pooh—then he didn’t mean it! ’Twas just a man’s jest!”

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

“He didn’t take her!”

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,

burst out crying.

“There!” said Marian. “Now I wish I hadn’t told ’ee!”

“No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on

in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I

ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,

but he didn’t say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won’t dally

like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving

everything to be done by him!”

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no

longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into

the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously

writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish

it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it

next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to

fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this

elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him

abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she

write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?

XLIV

By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the

direction which they had taken more than once of late—to the distant

Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband’s parents that she had

been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to

them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no

claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these

notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own

parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This

self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with

her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity

to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts.

She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive

such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had been

established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that family, in a

season of impulse, writing his name in a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz’s tale, there was a limit

to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written to her?

He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her know of the

locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to

notify his address. Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it

for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon the courage of

solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and express her

grief at his silence. If Angel’s father were the good man she had heard

him represented to be, he would be able to enter into her heart-starved

situation. Her social hardships she could conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was the

only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the

cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it would

be necessary to walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she

would have to allow herself a long day for the undertaking by rising

early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by a

hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to try

the experiment. At four o’clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs

and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still favourable,

the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the

journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage a

little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her

departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest

guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she,

knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was

indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now elapsed since her sad

marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from the wreck of

her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple

country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray woollen

gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her face and

neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

“’Tis a thousand pities your husband can’t see ’ee now—you do look a

real beauty!” said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the

threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow

candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself

to the situation; she could not be—no woman with a heart bigger than a

hazel-nut could be—antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence

which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and

strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine

feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let her

go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn. They

heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her

full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without any

particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been

prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only

a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to

start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear

wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs’-backs,

was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting

was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to

that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which

stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the

dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the atmosphere down

there was a deep blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred

acres in which she was now accustomed to toil, there were little fields

below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked

from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was

whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet

it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not

love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in

the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing

above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from

Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy,

with the dell between them called “The Devil’s Kitchen”. Still

following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone

pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or

murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the straight and

deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which as soon as she

reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane into the small

town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the

distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily

enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage

by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by

way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the

spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess’s confidence decrease, and her

enterprise loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such

staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in

danger of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a gate on

the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the Vicar

and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in her eyes. She

wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a week-day. Such a

good man might be prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday,

never realizing the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent upon

her to go on now. She took off the thick boots in which she had walked

thus far, put on her pretty thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing

the former into the hedge by the gatepost where she might readily find

them again, descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived

from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew near the

parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing

favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably in

the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of imagination,

dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was the residence of

near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion,

divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth, death, and

after-death, they were the same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang the

door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No; the thing

was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be

risen to and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of

the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles’ walk, led

her to support herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip

and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The wind was so nipping

that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping

incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A

piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer’s

dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to

rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she walked

out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And though she

looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to return, it was

with a breath of relief that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her

that she might have been recognized (though how she could not tell),

and orders been given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but

determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future

distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all

the windows.

Ah—the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She

remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the

household, servants included, going to morning-service, and, as a

consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore,

only necessary to wait till the service was over. She would not make

herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past

the church into the lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the

people began pouring out, and Tess found herself in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of

small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman

out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her

pace, and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat

between its hedges till the Vicar’s family should have lunched, and it

might be convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the

churchgoers, except two youngish men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were

beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest

discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation,

did not fail to recognize in those noises the quality of her husband’s

tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans,

Tess’s one dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her

disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront them; for

though she felt that they could not identify her, she instinctively

dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly they walked, the more briskly

walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking a short quick stroll

before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs

chilled with sitting through a long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill—a ladylike young woman,

somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle _guindée_ and prudish.

Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law

brought them so nearly behind her back that she could hear every word

of their conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly

interested her till, observing the young lady still further in front,

one of them remarked, “There is Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her.”

Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel’s

life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have

married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much

without previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the

brothers proceeded to say: “Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see

that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in

throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a

queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I

don’t know; but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from

him.”

“I can’t say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered

marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was

begun by his extraordinary opinions.”

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them

without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and

passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps

and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the

three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this

point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all

three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that

time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their

discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with

his umbrella, and dragged something to light.

“Here’s a pair of old boots,” he said. “Thrown away, I suppose, by some

tramp or other.”

“Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and

so excite our sympathies,” said Miss Chant. “Yes, it must have been,

for they are excellent walking-boots—by no means worn out. What a

wicked thing to do! I’ll carry them home for some poor person.”

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for

her with the crook of his stick; and Tess’s boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen

veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party

had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were

running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless

impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own

condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not

contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward omens. It

was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel’s wife felt

almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by

those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been

inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the

sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less

starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.

As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those

habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt

how hopeless life was for their owner.

“Ah!” she said, still sighing in pity of herself, “_they_ didn’t know

that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these

pretty ones _he_ bought for me—no—they did not know it! And they didn’t

think that _he_ chose the colour o’ my pretty frock—no—how could they?

If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don’t

care much for him, poor thing!”

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of

judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way

without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this

feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her

estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was

precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and

Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme

cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among

mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans

and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries

of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have

recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a

fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come

not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in

her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and

there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that

starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the

Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw

up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she

could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But

it was done with a sorry shake of the head. “It is nothing—it is

nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about

the looks of a castaway like me!”

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no

sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of

Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and

paused by milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she

descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of

Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such

contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again

sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while

the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the

street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.

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

“No, my dear,” said the old woman. “’Tis too soon for that; the bells

hain’t strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder

barn. A ranter preaches there between the services—an excellent, fiery,

Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don’t go to hear’n! What comes in

the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.”

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against

the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central

part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn

not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the

preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon

catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The

sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on

justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This

fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in

a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a

dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address,

she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration—

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not

obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently

set forth, crucified among you?”

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in

finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the view of

Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to

detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.

He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had

wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of

awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about

mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first

grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and

had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this

change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which,

impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d’Urberville. Her

face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the

barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the

great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open,

so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the

preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern

breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man

whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable

occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood

upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three

o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction

that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess

ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established

as a fact indeed.

End of Phase the Fifth

Phase the Sixth:

The Convert

XLV

Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d’Urberville since

her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to

permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was

unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a

converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear

overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor

advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,

and to behold it now!... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of

mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable

moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a

modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract

the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief

in his identity.

To Tess’s sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_, a

grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out

of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years

earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose

that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of

sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The

lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express

supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated

as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious

rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the

bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with

such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was

almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to

put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the

incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his

wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted

from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which

Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a

misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer.

D’Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his

wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural

in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at

hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner, the

greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian

history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict

definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would

allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had

obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon

her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his

presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,

seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the words

that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she faced

him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung confusedly

in every other direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap

every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however, but a short time;

for Tess’s energies returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as

fast as she was able past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their

relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side

of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend,

it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon his

altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh extinguished.

She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed

with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her clothing—so alive was she

to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of

that barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy

with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its

trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time

displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still

engirdled her. It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical

despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present

existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.

Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at

right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely

to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its

dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single

figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings

which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting

this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning

she saw approaching that well-known form—so strangely accoutred as the

Methodist—the one personage in all the world she wished not to

encounter alone on this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she

yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake

her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by

the feelings within him.

“Tess!” he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

“Tess!” he repeated. “It is I—Alec d’Urberville.”

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

“I see it is,” she answered coldly.

“Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,” he added, with a

slight laugh, “there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in

seeing me like this. But—I must put up with that.... I heard you had

gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed

you?”

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

“Yes—you may well say it,” he returned grimly, as they moved onward

together, she with unwilling tread. “But don’t mistake me; I beg this

because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice

it—how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a

momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me, it was

natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think

me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all

persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the

wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously

wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in

view—nothing more.”

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: “Have

you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.”

“_I_ have done nothing!” said he indifferently. “Heaven, as I have been

telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can

pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself—the old

Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or

not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was brought

about, and I hope you will be interested enough at least to listen.

Have you ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster—you must have

done do?—old Mr Clare; one of the most earnest of his school; one of

the few intense men left in the Church; not so intense as the extreme

wing of Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but

quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger of whom

are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by their sophistries, till

they are but the shadow of what they were. I only differ from him on

the question of Church and State—the interpretation of the text, ‘Come

out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord’—that’s all. He

is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more

souls in this country than any other man you can name. You have heard

of him?”

“I have,” she said.

“He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of

some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted

him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show

me the way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that some day

I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit—that those who came to

scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange magic in his

words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of my mother hit me most;

and by degrees I was brought to see daylight. Since then my one desire

has been to hand on the true view to others, and that is what I was

trying to do to-day; though it is only lately that I have preached

hereabout. The first months of my ministry have been spent in the North

of England among strangers, where I preferred to make my earliest

clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before undergoing that

severest of all tests of one’s sincerity, addressing those who have

known one, and have been one’s companions in the days of darkness. If

you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at

yourself, I am sure—”

“Don’t go on with it!” she cried passionately, as she turned away from

him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. “I can’t

believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to

me like this, when you know—when you know what harm you’ve done me!

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making

the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a

fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your

pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! Out upon such—I don’t believe

in you—I hate it!”

“Tess,” he insisted; “don’t speak so! It came to me like a jolly new

idea! And you don’t believe me? What don’t you believe?”

“Your conversion. Your scheme of religion.”

“Why?”

She dropped her voice. “Because a better man than you does not believe

in such.”

“What a woman’s reason! Who is this better man?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Well,” he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to

spring out at a moment’s notice, “God forbid that I should say I am a

good man—and you know I don’t say any such thing. I am new to goodness,

truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes.”

“Yes,” she replied sadly. “But I cannot believe in your conversion to a

new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don’t last!”

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been

leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon the

familiar countenance and form, remained contemplating her. The inferior

man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor even

entirely subdued.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien, instantly

withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with a flush, “I

beg your pardon!” And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment

which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly

tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing

wrong.

“No, no! Don’t beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide your

good looks, why don’t you keep it down?”

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, “It was mostly to keep off

the wind.”

“It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this,” he went on; “but it is

better that I should not look too often on you. It might be dangerous.”

“Ssh!” said Tess.

“Well, women’s faces have had too much power over me already for me not

to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they; and it

reminds me of the old times that I would forget!”

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and then

as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was going

with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate.

Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted thereon

in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he

knew who had been at the pains to blazon these announcements. He told

her that the man was employed by himself and others who were working

with him in that district, to paint these reminders that no means might

be left untried which might move the hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called “Cross-in-Hand.” Of all

spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It

was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by

artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative

beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar

which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in

any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand. Differing

accounts were given of its history and purport. Some authorities stated

that a devotional cross had once formed the complete erection thereon,

of which the present relic was but the stump; others that the stone as

it stood was entire, and that it had been fixed there to mark a

boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow, whatever the origin of the relic,

there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in

the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most

phlegmatic passer-by.

“I think I must leave you now,” he remarked, as they drew near to this

spot. “I have to preach at Abbot’s-Cernel at six this evening, and my

way lies across to the right from here. And you upset me somewhat too,

Tessy—I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and get strength....

How is it that you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good

English?”

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

“What troubles have you had?”

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

D’Urberville was struck mute. “I knew nothing of this till now!” he

next murmured. “Why didn’t you write to me when you felt your trouble

coming on?”

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: “Well—you will

see me again.”

“No,” she answered. “Do not again come near me!”

“I will think. But before we part come here.” He stepped up to the

pillar. “This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but I

fear you at moments—far more than you need fear me at present; and to

lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you

will never tempt me—by your charms or ways.”

“Good God—how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is furthest

from my thought!”

“Yes—but swear it.”

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand

upon the stone and swore.

“I am sorry you are not a believer,” he continued; “that some

unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no

more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who

knows what may not happen? I’m off. Goodbye!”

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his eyes

again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down in the

direction of Abbot’s-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation,

and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his

pocket a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter,

worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D’Urberville opened the

letter. It was dated several months before this time, and was signed by

Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer’s unfeigned joy at

d’Urberville’s conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in

communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr Clare’s

warm assurance of forgiveness for d’Urberville’s former conduct and his

interest in the young man’s plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would

much have liked to see d’Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he

had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have helped him to

enter a theological college to that end; but since his correspondent

had possibly not cared to do this on account of the delay it would have

entailed, he was not the man to insist upon its paramount importance.

Every man must work as he could best work, and in the method towards

which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D’Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself

cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till

his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer

troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her

nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary

shepherd.

“What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?” she asked of

him. “Was it ever a Holy Cross?”

“Cross—no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was

put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured

there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie

underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks

at times.”

She felt the _petite mort_ at this unexpectedly gruesome information,

and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to

Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she

approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were

talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman,

in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly

air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a

stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a moment the

voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview

had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which

had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came close, the

girl turned serenely and recognized her, the young man walking off in

embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess’s

excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not

explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact,

began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just

witnessed.

“He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at

Talbothays,” she explained indifferently. “He actually inquired and

found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he’s been

in love wi’ me these two years. But I’ve hardly answered him.”

XLVI

Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was afield.

The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles

erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her. On the

sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of

new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite

its front was a long mound or “grave”, in which the roots had been

preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at the uncovered end,

chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from each root, and

throwing it after the operation into the slicer. A man was turning the

handle of the machine, and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes,

the fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by the sounds of

the snuffling wind, the smart swish of the slicing-blades, and the

choppings of the hook in Tess’s leather-gloved hand.

The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where the

swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of darker

brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each of these

something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up

and down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a man,

the plough going between them, turning up the cleared ground for a

spring sowing.

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far

beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from

the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up

the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere

point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon perceived to

be a man in black, arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The

man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes, continually

observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him

till her companion directed her attention to his approach.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a

semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the

free-and-easy Alec d’Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there

was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder

seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was already on Tess’s face,

and she pulled her curtained hood further over it.

D’Urberville came up and said quietly—

“I want to speak to you, Tess.”

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

“Yes, but I have a good reason.”

“Well, tell it.”

“It is more serious than you may think.”

He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some

distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the

machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec’s words reaching other ears.

D’Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer,

turning his back to the latter.

“It is this,” he continued, with capricious compunction. “In thinking

of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to inquire as to

your worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think of

it. But I see now that it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew

you—harder than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to

me!”

She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent head,

her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her trimming of

the swedes. By going on with her work she felt better able to keep him

outside her emotions.

“Tess,” he added, with a sigh of discontent,—“yours was the very worst

case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had resulted till

you told me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole

blame was mine—the whole unconventional business of our time at

Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am but the base

imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say

in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their

girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked

may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of

simple indifference.”

Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and

taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the

mere fieldwoman alone marking her.

“But it is not that I came to say,” d’Urberville went on. “My

circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at

Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and

devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I

shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask you is,

will you put it in my power to do my duty—to make the only reparation I

can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go

with me?... I have already obtained this precious document. It was my

old mother’s dying wish.”

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

embarrassment.

“What is it?” said she.

“A marriage licence.”

“O no, sir—no!” she said quickly, starting back.

“You will not? Why is that?”

And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely

the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d’Urberville’s face. It was

unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her had

been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

“Surely,” he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked

round at the labourer who turned the slicer.

Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there. Informing

the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she wished to

walk a little way, she moved off with d’Urberville across the

zebra-striped field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed section

he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped forward on

the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.

“You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?” he

repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.

“I cannot.”

“But why?”

“You know I have no affection for you.”

“But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps—as soon as you really

could forgive me?”

“Never!”

“Why so positive?”

“I love somebody else.”

The words seemed to astonish him.

“You do?” he cried. “Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is

morally right and proper any weight with you?”

“No, no, no—don’t say that!”

“Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing

feeling which you will overcome—”

“No—no.”

“Yes, yes! Why not?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“You must in honour!”

“Well then.... I have married him.”

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

“I did not wish to tell—I did not mean to!” she pleaded. “It is a

secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, _please_ will

you, keep from questioning me? You must remember that we are now

strangers.”

“Strangers—are we? Strangers!”

For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he

determinedly chastened it down.

“Is that man your husband?” he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign

the labourer who turned the machine.

“That man!” she said proudly. “I should think not!”

“Who, then?”

“Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!” she begged, and flashed her

appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.

D’Urberville was disturbed.

“But I only asked for your sake!” he retorted hotly. “Angels of

heaven!—God forgive me for such an expression—I came here, I swear, as

I thought for your good. Tess—don’t look at me so—I cannot stand your

looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or

since! There—I won’t lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of

you had waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished

with all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage might be a

sanctification for us both. ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by

the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband,’ I

said to myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must bear the

disappointment!”

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

“Married. Married!... Well, that being so,” he added, quite calmly,

tearing the licence slowly into halves and putting them in his pocket;

“that being prevented, I should like to do some good to you and your

husband, whoever he may be. There are many questions that I am tempted

to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in opposition to your wishes.

Though, if I could know your husband, I might more easily benefit him

and you. Is he on this farm?”

“No,” she murmured. “He is far away.”

“Far away? From _you_? What sort of husband can he be?”

“O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out—”

“Ah, is it so!... That’s sad, Tess!”

“Yes.”

“But to stay away from you—to leave you to work like this!”

“He does not leave me to work!” she cried, springing to the defence of

the absent one with all her fervour. “He don’t know it! It is by my own

arrangement.”

“Then, does he write?”

“I—I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to ourselves.”

“Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my

fair Tess—”

In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was

on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not

express the life or shape of those within.

“You must not—you must not!” she cried fearfully, slipping her hand

from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. “O, will

you go away—for the sake of me and my husband—go, in the name of your

own Christianity!”

“Yes, yes; I will,” he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to

her he turned to leave. Facing round, however, he said, “Tess, as God

is my judge, I meant no humbug in taking your hand!”

A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not

noticed in their preoccupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice

reached her ear:

“What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o’ day?”

Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had

inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his

field.

“Don’t speak like that to her!” said d’Urberville, his face blackening

with something that was not Christianity.

“Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa’sons have to do with she?”

“Who is the fellow?” asked d’Urberville, turning to Tess.

She went close up to him.

“Go—I do beg you!” she said.

“What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his face what a churl

he is.”

“He won’t hurt me. _He’s_ not in love with me. I can leave at

Lady-Day.”

“Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But—well, goodbye!”

Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having

reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which Tess

took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being independent

of sex. To have as a master this man of stone, who would have cuffed

her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences.

She silently walked back towards the summit of the field that was the

scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview which had just taken

place that she was hardly aware that the nose of Groby’s horse almost

touched her shoulders.

“If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I’ll see

that you carry it out,” he growled. “’Od rot the women—now ’tis one

thing, and then ’tis another. But I’ll put up with it no longer!”

Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the farm as

he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once received, she

did for one moment picture what might have been the result if she had

been free to accept the offer just made her of being the monied Alec’s

wife. It would have lifted her completely out of subjection, not only

to her present oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to

despise her. “But no, no!” she said breathlessly; “I could not have

married him now! He is so unpleasant to me.”

That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing from

him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection. Any one

who had been in a position to read between the lines would have seen

that at the back of her great love was some monstrous fear—almost a

desperation—as to some secret contingencies which were not disclosed.

But again she did not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go with

him, and perhaps he did not care for her at all. She put the letter in

her box, and wondered if it would ever reach Angel’s hands.

After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and

brought on the day which was of great import to agriculturists—the day

of the Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were

entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and

those of the farming population who thought of changing their places

duly attended at the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly all

the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended flight, and early in the

morning there was a general exodus in the direction of the town, which

lay at a distance of from ten to a dozen miles over hilly country.

Though Tess also meant to leave at the quarter-day, she was one of the

few who did not go to the fair, having a vaguely-shaped hope that

something would happen to render another outdoor engagement

unnecessary.

It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time, and

one would almost have thought that winter was over. She had hardly

finished her dinner when d’Urberville’s figure darkened the window of

the cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to herself

to-day.

Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she could

hardly in reason run away. D’Urberville’s knock, his walk up to the

door, had some indescribable quality of difference from his air when

she last saw him. They seemed to be acts of which the doer was ashamed.

She thought that she would not open the door; but, as there was no

sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped

back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself down into a chair

before speaking.

“Tess—I couldn’t help it!” he began desperately, as he wiped his heated

face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. “I felt that I

must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been

thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I cannot get rid

of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do

harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!”

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet

Tess did not pity him.

“How can I pray for you,” she said, “when I am forbidden to believe

that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my

account?”

“You really think that?”

“Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.”

“Cured? By whom?”

“By my husband, if I must tell.”

“Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I remember you

hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe

in these matters, Tess?” he asked. “You seem to have no

religion—perhaps owing to me.”

“But I have. Though I don’t believe in anything supernatural.”

D’Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

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

“A good deal of it.”

“H’m—and yet I’ve felt so sure about it,” he said uneasily.

“I believe in the _spirit_ of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my

dear husband.... But I don’t believe—”

Here she gave her negations.

“The fact is,” said d’Urberville drily, “whatever your dear husband

believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the

least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you

women. Your mind is enslaved to his.”

“Ah, because he knew everything!” said she, with a triumphant

simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could

hardly have deserved, much less her husband.

“Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from another

person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to teach you such

scepticism!”

“He never forced my judgement! He would never argue on the subject with

me! But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after inquiring

deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than what I might

believe, who hadn’t looked into doctrines at all.”

“What used he to say? He must have said something?”

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel

Clare’s remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she

recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use

when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking

aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare’s

accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.

“Say that again,” asked d’Urberville, who had listened with the

greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d’Urberville thoughtfully murmured the

words after her.

“Anything else?” he presently asked.

“He said at another time something like this”; and she gave another,

which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the

pedigree ranging from the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ to Huxley’s

_Essays_.

“Ah—ha! How do you remember them?”

“I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn’t wish me to; and

I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts. I can’t say I

quite understand that one; but I know it is right.”

“H’m. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don’t know yourself!”

He fell into thought.

“And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his,” she resumed. “I didn’t

wish it to be different. What’s good enough for him is good enough for

me.”

“Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?”

“No—I never told him—if I am an infidel.”

“Well—you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after all! You don’t

believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore, do no

despite to your conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought to

preach it, but, like the devils, I believe and tremble, for I suddenly

leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you.”

“How?”

“Why,” he said aridly; “I have come all the way here to see you to-day!

But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where I have

undertaken to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two this

afternoon, and where all the brethren are expecting me this minute.

Here’s the announcement.”

He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day,

hour, and place of meeting, at which he, d’Urberville, would preach the

Gospel as aforesaid.

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

“I cannot get there! I have come here.”

“What, you have really arranged to preach, and—”

“I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there—by reason of my

burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised!—No, by my word and

truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now! Why I

did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of

all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you

saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one

petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt, and you are she. But

you may well despise me now! I thought I worshipped on the mountains,

but I find I still serve in the groves! Ha! ha!”

“O Alec d’Urberville! what does this mean? What have I done!”

“Done?” he said, with a soulless sneer in the word. “Nothing

intentionally. But you have been the means—the innocent means—of my

backsliding, as they call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those

‘servants of corruption’ who, ‘after they have escaped the pollutions

of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome’—whose latter

end is worse than their beginning?” He laid his hand on her shoulder.

“Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I

saw you again!” he said freakishly shaking her, as if she were a child.

“And why then have you tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I

saw those eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a

maddening mouth since Eve’s!” His voice sank, and a hot archness shot

from his own black eyes. “You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of

Babylon—I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!”

“I couldn’t help your seeing me again!” said Tess, recoiling.

“I know it—I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact remains. When

I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to think that

I had no legal right to protect you—that I could not have it; whilst he

who has it seems to neglect you utterly!”

“Don’t speak against him—he is absent!” she cried in much excitement.

“Treat him honourably—he has never wronged you! O leave his wife before

any scandal spreads that may do harm to his honest name!”

“I will—I will,” he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream. “I

have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies at

the fair—it is the first time I have played such a practical joke. A

month ago I should have been horrified at such a possibility. I’ll go

away—to swear—and—ah, can I! to keep away.” Then, suddenly: “One clasp,

Tessy—one! Only for old friendship—”

“I am without defence. Alec! A good man’s honour is in my

keeping—think—be ashamed!”

“Pooh! Well, yes—yes!”

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His eyes

were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses of

those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of

his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as

in a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.

Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement

to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as

echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and

continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if

his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that

his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his

whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless

man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his

mother’s death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm

served to chill its effervescence to stagnation. He said to himself, as

he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had

handed on to him, “That clever fellow little thought that, by telling

her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!”

XLVII

It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The

dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is

nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight

rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here

through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a

rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light

increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the

summit. They were busily “unhaling” the rick, that is, stripping off

the thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this

was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their

whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having

insisted upon their being on the spot thus early to get the job over if

possible by the end of the day. Close under the eaves of the stack, and

as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to

serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels

appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up

a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black,

with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The

long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which

radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much

daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum

mobile_ of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless

being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance,

with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation

of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from

Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region

of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to

amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of

it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served

vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from

farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam

threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a

strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon

himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes

around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly

necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom

compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his

Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his

engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between

agriculture and him.

While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his portable

repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning air

quivered. He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His fire was

waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds

he could make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond its

extent the environment might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the

same to him. If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what he

called himself, he replied shortly, “an engineer.”

The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their places,

the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby—or, as they called

him, “he”—had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on

the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed it, her business

being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who

stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and

spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every grain in one

moment.

They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two,

which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped

on till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for half an hour;

and on starting again after the meal the whole supplementary strength

of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick,

which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch was eaten

as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple

of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheel

continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill

to the very marrow all who were near the revolving wire-cage.

The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they

had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when

everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to

their thinking, though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on

the corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine,

including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many

words. It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so

severely, and began to make her wish that she had never come to

Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the corn-rick—Marian, who was one of them,

in particular—could stop to drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now

and then, or to exchange a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their

faces or cleared the fragments of straw and husk from their clothing;

but for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the

man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with

untied sheaves, could not stop either, unless Marian changed places

with her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby’s

objections that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.

For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was

chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in

selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength

with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may

have been true. The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech,

increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the

regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their

heads she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had

come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a

second rick watching the scene and Tess in particular. He was dressed

in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay

walking-cane.

“Who is that?” said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed the

inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.

“Somebody’s fancy-man, I s’pose,” said Marian laconically.

“I’ll lay a guinea he’s after Tess.”

“O no. ’Tis a ranter pa’son who’s been sniffing after her lately; not a

dandy like this.”

“Well—this is the same man.”

“The same man as the preacher? But he’s quite different!”

“He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off

his whiskers; but he’s the same man for all that.”

“D’ye really think so? Then I’ll tell her,” said Marian.

“Don’t. She’ll see him soon enough, good-now.”

“Well, I don’t think it at all right for him to join his preaching to

courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and

she, in a sense, a widow.”

“Oh—he can do her no harm,” said Izz drily. “Her mind can no more be

heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon from

the hole he’s in. Lord love ’ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching,

nor the seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when ’twould be

better for her that she should be weaned.”

Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her

post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine

that she could scarcely walk.

“You ought to het a quart o’ drink into ’ee, as I’ve done,” said

Marian. “You wouldn’t look so white then. Why, souls above us, your

face is as if you’d been hagrode!”

It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired, her

discovery of her visitor’s presence might have the bad effect of taking

away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend

by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the gentleman came

forward and looked up.

Tess uttered a short little “Oh!” And a moment after she said, quickly,

“I shall eat my dinner here—right on the rick.”

Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did

this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and the

rest descended, and sat under the straw-stack.

The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d’Urberville, the late Evangelist,

despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that

the original _Weltlust_ had come back; that he had restored himself, as

nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four years older, to

the old jaunty, slapdash guise under which Tess had first known her

admirer, and cousin so-called. Having decided to remain where she was,

Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight of the ground, and began

her meal; till, by-and-by, she heard footsteps on the ladder, and

immediately after Alec appeared upon the stack—now an oblong and level

platform of sheaves. He strode across them, and sat down opposite of

her without a word.

Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake which

she had brought with her. The other workfolk were by this time all

gathered under the rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable

retreat.

“I am here again, as you see,” said d’Urberville.

“Why do you trouble me so!” she cried, reproach flashing from her very

finger-ends.

“_I_ trouble _you_? I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?”

“Sure, I don’t trouble you any-when!”

“You say you don’t? But you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that you

turned upon me with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come to me

just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever

since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings,

which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream, had suddenly

found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at once gushed

through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith; and it is you who

have done it!”

She gazed in silence.

“What—you have given up your preaching entirely?” she asked. She had

gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modern thought to

despise flash enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was somewhat appalled.

In affected severity d’Urberville continued—

“Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was to

address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows what I

am thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No doubt they pray

for me—weep for me; for they are kind people in their way. But what do

I care? How could I go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in

it?—it would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind! Among them I

should have stood like Hymenaeus and Alexander, who were delivered over

to Satan that they might learn not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge

you have taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years

after, you find me a Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me,

perhaps to my complete perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call

you, this is only my way of talking, and you must not look so horribly

concerned. Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty

face and shapely figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me—that

tight pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet—you field-girls

should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger.” He

regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical laugh

resumed: “I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I

thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have

let go the plough for her sake as I do!”

Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency

failed her, and without heeding he added:

“Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other,

after all. But to speak seriously, Tess.” D’Urberville rose and came

nearer, reclining sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon his

elbow. “Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what you said

that _he_ said. I have come to the conclusion that there does seem

rather a want of common-sense in these threadbare old propositions; how

I could have been so fired by poor Parson Clare’s enthusiasm, and have

gone so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make out! As for

what you said last time, on the strength of your wonderful husband’s

intelligence—whose name you have never told me—about having what they

call an ethical system without any dogma, I don’t see my way to that at

all.”

“Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at least,

if you can’t have—what do you call it—dogma.”

“O no! I’m a different sort of fellow from that! If there’s nobody to

say, ‘Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are dead;

do that, and it will be a bad thing for you,’ I can’t warm up. Hang it,

I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s

nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t

either!”

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain

two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of

mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare’s reticence,

to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions

rather than reasons, she could not get on.

“Well, never mind,” he resumed. “Here I am, my love, as in the old

times!”

“Not as then—never as then—’tis different!” she entreated. “And there

was never warmth with me! O why didn’t you keep your faith, if the loss

of it has brought you to speak to me like this!”

“Because you’ve knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet

head! Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon

him! Ha-ha—I’m awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the

same! Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too. For

all your closeness, I see you are in a bad way—neglected by one who

ought to cherish you.”

She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips were

dry, and she was ready to choke. The voices and laughs of the workfolk

eating and drinking under the rick came to her as if they were a

quarter of a mile off.

“It is cruelty to me!” she said. “How—how can you treat me to this

talk, if you care ever so little for me?”

“True, true,” he said, wincing a little. “I did not come to reproach

you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say that I don’t like you to be

working like this, and I have come on purpose for you. You say you have

a husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I’ve never seen

him, and you’ve not told me his name; and altogether he seems rather a

mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I think I am

nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of

trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words of the

stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me. Don’t you know

them, Tess?—‘And she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not

overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find him; then

shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was

it better with me than now!’ ... Tess, my trap is waiting just under

the hill, and—darling mine, not his!—you know the rest.”

Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but she

did not answer.

“You have been the cause of my backsliding,” he continued, stretching

his arm towards her waist; “you should be willing to share it, and

leave that mule you call husband for ever.”

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her

skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she

passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It

was heavy and thick as a warrior’s, and it struck him flat on the

mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a

trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec

fiercely started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing

appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began

dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon controlled himself,

calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his bleeding

lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. “Now, punish me!” she

said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the

sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck. “Whip me, crush me;

you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out.

Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!”

“O no, no, Tess,” he said blandly. “I can make full allowance for this.

Yet you most unjustly forget one thing, that I would have married you

if you had not put it out of my power to do so. Did I not ask you

flatly to be my wife—hey? Answer me.”

“You did.”

“And you cannot be. But remember one thing!” His voice hardened as his

temper got the better of him with the recollection of his sincerity in

asking her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her

side and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook under his grasp.

“Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will be your master

again. If you are any man’s wife you are mine!”

The threshers now began to stir below.

“So much for our quarrel,” he said, letting her go. “Now I shall leave

you, and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon. You

don’t know me yet! But I know you.”

She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned. D’Urberville

retreated over the sheaves, and descended the ladder, while the workers

below rose and stretched their arms, and shook down the beer they had

drunk. Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the renewed

rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the buzzing drum as

one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless succession.

XLVIII

In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick was to be

finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see to

work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on the

morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with even

less intermission than usual.

It was not till “nammet”-time, about three o’clock, that Tess raised

her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little

surprise at seeing that Alec d’Urberville had come back, and was

standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes,

and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss. It meant

that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and carefully

abstained from gazing in that direction.

Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the

straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six

o’clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But the

unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,

notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the

insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young

hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense stack of

straw where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared as the

_faeces_ of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky a wrathful

shine—all that wild March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst

forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the

threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping

garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.

A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and

Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt

and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face

coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was

the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken

bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated her

from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing duties with her as

they had done. The incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her

frame participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which

her arms worked on independently of her consciousness. She hardly knew

where she was, and did not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her

hair was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and

saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great

upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the

gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob’s

ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a

yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.

She knew that Alec d’Urberville was still on the scene, observing her

from some point or other, though she could not say where. There was an

excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its

final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men unconnected

with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting

characters of all descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious

pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the

base of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in the

direction of the Giant’s Hill by Abbot’s-Cernel dissolved away, the

white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon that lay towards

Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the last hour or

two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could not get near

enough to speak to, the other women having kept up their strength by

drinking ale, and Tess having done without it through traditionary

dread, owing to its results at her home in childhood. But Tess still

kept going: if she could not fill her part she would have to leave; and

this contingency, which she would have regarded with equanimity and

even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a terror since

d’Urberville had begun to hover round her.

The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so low that

people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess’s surprise Farmer

Groby came up on the machine to her, and said that if she desired to

join her friend he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would

send somebody else to take her place. The “friend” was d’Urberville,

she knew, and also that this concession had been granted in obedience

to the request of that friend, or enemy. She shook her head and toiled

on.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The

creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they

were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their

last refuge, they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud

shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions

that one of the rats had invaded her person—a terror which the rest of

the women had guarded against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and

self-elevation. The rat was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of

dogs, masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and

confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum

slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the machine to the

ground.

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

her side.

“What—after all—my insulting slap, too!” said she in an underbreath.

She was so utterly exhausted that she had not strength to speak louder.

“I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything you say or

do,” he answered, in the seductive voice of the Trantridge time. “How

the little limbs tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you

are; and yet you need have done nothing since I arrived. How could you

be so obstinate? However, I have told the farmer that he has no right

to employ women at steam-threshing. It is not proper work for them; and

on all the better class of farms it has been given up, as he knows very

well. I will walk with you as far as your home.”

“O yes,” she answered with a jaded gait. “Walk wi’ me if you will! I do

bear in mind that you came to marry me before you knew o’ my state.

Perhaps—perhaps you are a little better and kinder than I have been

thinking you were. Whatever is meant as kindness I am grateful for;

whatever is meant in any other way I am angered at. I cannot sense your

meaning sometimes.”

“If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist you.

And I will do it with much more regard for your feelings than I

formerly showed. My religious mania, or whatever it was, is over. But I

retain a little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all that’s

tender and strong between man and woman, trust me! I have enough and

more than enough to put you out of anxiety, both for yourself and your

parents and sisters. I can make them all comfortable if you will only

show confidence in me.”

“Have you seen ’em lately?” she quickly inquired.

“Yes. They didn’t know where you were. It was only by chance that I

found you here.”

The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess’s fagged face between the twigs

of the garden-hedge as she paused outside the cottage which was her

temporary home, d’Urberville pausing beside her.

“Don’t mention my little brothers and sisters—don’t make me break down

quite!” she said. “If you want to help them—God knows they need it—do

it without telling me. But no, no!” she cried. “I will take nothing

from you, either for them or for me!”

He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived with the

household, all was public indoors. No sooner had she herself entered,

laved herself in a washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than

she fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under the wall, by

the light of her own little lamp wrote in a passionate mood—

My own Husband,

Let me call you so—I must—even if it makes you angry to think of

such an unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you in my trouble—I have

no one else! I am so exposed to temptation, Angel. I fear to say

who it is, and I do not like to write about it at all. But I cling

to you in a way you cannot think! Can you not come to me now, at

once, before anything terrible happens? O, I know you cannot,

because you are so far away! I think I must die if you do not come

soon, or tell me to come to you. The punishment you have measured

out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved—and you are

right and just to be angry with me. But, Angel, please, please, not

to be just—only a little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it,

and come to me! If you would come, I could die in your arms! I

would be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me!

Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to blame you

for going away, and I know it was necessary you should find a farm.

Do not think I shall say a word of sting or bitterness. Only come

back to me. I am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate!

I do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one little

line, and say, “_I am coming soon_”, I will bide on, Angel—O, so

cheerfully!

It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be

faithful to you in every thought and look, that even when a man

speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you.

Have you never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when we

were at the dairy? If you have, how can you keep away from me? I am

the same woman, Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very

same!—not the one you disliked but never saw. What was the past to

me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became

another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the

early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a

little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see

that you were strong enough to work this change in me, you would

perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you

always to love me! I ought to have known that such as that was not

for poor me. But I am sick at heart, not only for old times, but

for the present. Think—think how it do hurt my heart not to see you

ever—ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little

minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it

might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is the

word they use, since I wish to be truthful). Perhaps I am what they

say. But I do not value my good looks; I only like to have them

because they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at least

one thing about me worth your having. So much have I felt this,

that when I met with annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my

face in a bandage as long as people would believe in it. O Angel, I

tell you all this not from vanity—you will certainly know I do

not—but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to you? I am,

as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will not do. It cannot be

that I shall yield one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an

accident might lead to, and I so defenceless on account of my first

error. I cannot say more about this—it makes me too miserable. But

if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last state

will be worse than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me

come at once, or at once come to me!

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if

I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get

glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I

don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the field, because I

grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long

for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet

you, my own dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what

threatens me!—

Your faithful heartbroken

Tess

XLIX

The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet

Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and

the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid

by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the

human world seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was

purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to send her

communications through his father, whom he kept pretty well informed of

his changing addresses in the country he had gone to exploit for

himself with a heavy heart.

“Now,” said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope,

“if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next

month, as he told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his

plans; for I believe it to be from his wife.” He breathed deeply at the

thought of her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent on to

Angel.

“Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely,” murmured Mrs Clare. “To

my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used. You should have

sent him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith and given him the

same chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out of it under

proper influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders after all. Church

or no Church, it would have been fairer to him.”

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her

husband’s peace in respect to their sons. And she did not vent this

often; for she was as considerate as she was devout, and knew that his

mind too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this matter. Only

too often had she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs for

Angel with prayers. But the uncompromising Evangelical did not even now

hold that he would have been justified in giving his son, an

unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had given to the two

others, when it was possible, if not probable, that those very

advantages might have been used to decry the doctrines which he had

made it his life’s mission and desire to propagate, and the mission of

his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a pedestal under the

feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt the

unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike

inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.

Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned over

this treatment of him as Abraham might have mourned over the doomed

Isaac while they went up the hill together. His silent self-generated

regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which his wife rendered

audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never

been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with

agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated him

and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken place. At

first they had supposed it must be something of the nature of a serious

aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally alluded to the

intention of coming home to fetch her; from which expressions they

hoped the division might not owe its origin to anything so hopelessly

permanent as that. He had told them that she was with her relatives,

and in their doubts they had decided not to intrude into a situation

which they knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess’s letter was intended were gazing at this time

on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which was

bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent towards

the coast. His experiences of this strange land had been sad. The

severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after his arrival had

never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost decided to

relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as the bare

possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change of view a

secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country in

his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had

suffered, died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English

farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child

would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause to

dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the babe

therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and again

trudge on.

Angel’s original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a

northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this place

in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English

agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape

from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years. What

arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its

pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now

began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they

wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who

was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only

in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history

lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began to

oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He could no

longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say that was in

spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time with

her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt herself

at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances or her

feelings. He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her

motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus her

silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really said if he

had understood!—that she adhered with literal exactness to orders which

he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural fearlessness she

asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect the

true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the

country, another man rode beside him. Angel’s companion was also an

Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part

of the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and they

spoke of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that curious

tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant lands, to

entrust to strangers details of their lives which they would on no

account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man as they rode

along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more

peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the

social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the

irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial

curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;

thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she

would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from

her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm. Angel’s companion

was struck down with fever, and died by the week’s end. Clare waited a

few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew

absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his

death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the

philosophers. His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.

His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had persistently

elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in that

civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem. Surely

then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state,

which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at least open to

correction when the result was due to treachery. A remorse struck into

him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in his memory, came

back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved him, and she had replied in

the affirmative. Did she love him more than Tess did? No, she had

replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do

no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding. How

her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words as if

they were a god’s! And during the terrible evening over the hearth,

when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had

looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his

love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical things

he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic

and live; and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing them had

arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles

to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over

the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no

doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they love or have

loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself

when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the

harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards

the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The historic interest of her family—that masterful line of

d’Urbervilles—whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his

sentiments now. Why had he not known the difference between the

political value and the imaginative value of these things? In the

latter aspect her d’Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions;

worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer,

to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a fact that would soon

be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name, and

oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments

and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his

own romances. In recalling her face again and again, he thought now

that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which must have graced

her grand-dames; and the vision sent that _aura_ through his veins

which he had formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of

sickness.

Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as

Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of

the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess’s devoted

outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father;

though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in

reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer’s expectation that Angel would come in response to

the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it was that

the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not

changed—could never change; and that, if her presence had not

attenuated them, her absence could not. Nevertheless she addressed her

mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him best if

he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she had taken

more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she had inquired

more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads among those the

country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling, who had

followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby remembered that,

amongst the snatches of melody in which they had indulged at the

dairyman’s, to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed

to like “Cupid’s Gardens”, “I have parks, I have hounds”, and “The

break o’ the day”; and had seemed not to care for “The Tailor’s

Breeches” and “Such a beauty I did grow”, excellent ditties as they

were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised them

privately at odd moments, especially “The break o’ the day”:

Arise, arise, arise!

And pick your love a posy,

All o’ the sweetest flowers

That in the garden grow.

The turtle doves and sma’ birds

In every bough a-building,

So early in the May-time

At the break o’ the day!

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these

ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this

cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the

thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the

simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the

aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to know

how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that

Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the

end of her term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which

made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as

usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the

family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess.

Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure with

the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish

creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the girl said

“Tess!”

“What—is it ’Liza-Lu?” asked Tess, in startled accents. Her sister,

whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had

sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as

yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin

legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her growing, and

her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and inexperience.

“Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess,” said Lu, with

unemotional gravity, “a-trying to find ’ee; and I’m very tired.”

“What is the matter at home?”

“Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she’s dying, and as

father is not very well neither, and says ’tis wrong for a man of such

a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring work, we

don’t know what to do.”

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking ’Liza-Lu

to come in and sit down. When she had done so, and ’Liza-Lu was having

some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that she should go

home. Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth of April,

but as the interval thereto was not a long one she resolved to run the

risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her sister was

too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess ran down

to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had happened, and

begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she

got Lu a supper, and after that, having tucked the younger into her own

bed, packed up as many of her belongings as would go into a withy

basket, and started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.

L

She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck

ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely

districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless

pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along

by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but

marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her

mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile,

ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about midnight

looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all

that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born.

Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she had now

some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey would be finished.

The winding road downwards became just visible to her under the wan

starlight as she followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting

with that above it that the difference was perceptible to the tread and

to the smell. It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part

of the Vale to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions

linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this

shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the

far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making

the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the

witches that had been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies

that “whickered” at you as you passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in

them still, and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in

response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard

but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye beheld relaxed

tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath

coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a

bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow,

as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had

threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a

club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced with

her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet. In the

direction of her mother’s house she saw a light. It came from the

bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at

her. As soon as she could discern the outline of the house—newly

thatched with her money—it had all its old effect upon Tess’s

imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope

of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick

which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her personal

character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to her regard;

it meant the illness of her mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room was

vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came to

the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no

better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a

breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother’s chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a

curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than a

year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying

herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father’s ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his

chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright.

He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.

“I’m thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this

part of England,” he said, “asking them to subscribe to a fund to

maintain me. I’m sure they’d see it as a romantical, artistical, and

proper thing to do. They spend lots o’ money in keeping up old ruins,

and finding the bones o’ things, and such like; and living remains must

be more interesting to ’em still, if they only knowed of me. Would that

somebody would go round and tell ’em what there is living among ’em,

and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa’son Tringham, who discovered

me, had lived, he’d ha’ done it, I’m sure.”

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had grappled

with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved by her

remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she turned her

attention to external things. It was now the season for planting and

sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already

received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the

Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this was

owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes,—that last lapse of

the improvident. At the earliest moment she obtained what others she

could procure, and in a few days her father was well enough to see to

the garden, under Tess’s persuasive efforts: while she herself

undertook the allotment-plot which they rented in a field a couple of

hundred yards out of the village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where she

was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement. Violent

motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open

enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where

labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.

Digging began usually at six o’clock and extended indefinitely into the

dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning

on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and ’Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours

till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that

divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of

the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the

allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under

the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks of

smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become

illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one

another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud”, which was a wall

by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over for

the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting done,

Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one

of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four

shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little

clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire;

then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare

from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat

staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with

a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a

wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back wore white

aprons, which, with their pale faces, were all that could be seen of

them in the gloom, except when at moments they caught a flash from the

flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the

boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower

sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost

to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were appearing

elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally

rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;

and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring in

it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the hours, the

crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made

others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost

of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came

as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the

soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess

stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce now a

hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time

notice the person who worked nearest to her—a man in a long smockfrock

who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and whom she

supposed her father had sent there to advance the work. She became more

conscious of him when the direction of his digging brought him closer.

Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it swerved, and the two were

visible to each other but divided from all the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor

did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been

there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know him as any

one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having

been so long and frequent of late years. By-and-by he dug so close to

her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel

prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a

pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same on the

other side. The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of

d’Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance

in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most

old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled

her as to its bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low, long laugh.

“If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like

Paradise!” he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined

head.

“What do you say?” she weakly asked.

“A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I am

the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior

animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was

theological. Some of it goes—

‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long,

Beyond a row of myrtles....

... If thou accept

My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’

‘Lead then,’ said Eve.

“And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that

you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think so

badly of me.”

“I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don’t think of you in

that way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you

affront me. What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?”

“Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock, which I saw

hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I mightn’t

be noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”

“But I like doing it—it is for my father.”

“Your engagement at the other place is ended?”

“Yes.”

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

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

“O—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”

“It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I

have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.

When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there for

you.”

“O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it

from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”

“It _is_ right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom

I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to

help her.”

“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about

living at all!”

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon

the fork-handle and upon the clods.

“About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been

thinking of them.”

Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had

divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out

to those children with an affection that was passionate.

“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for

them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”

“He can with my assistance. He must!”

“And with mine.”

“No, sir!”

“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks

we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!”

“He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”

“The more fool you!”

D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled

off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling it up and

pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;

she wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house; and taking the

fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

“O, Tessy—what do you think! ’Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of

folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they think

father is dead!”

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its

sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,

beholding the effect produced upon her, she said—

“What, Tess, shan’t we talk to father never no more?”

“But father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.

’Liza-Lu came up.

“He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother said

there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in.”

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was out

of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even more

than it sounded. Her father’s life had a value apart from his personal

achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It was the last of

the three lives for whose duration the house and premises were held

under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for

his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage accommodation.

Moreover, “liviers” were disapproved of in villages almost as much as

little freeholders, because of their independence of manner, and when a

lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d’Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the

destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of the

county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough,

upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now. So do

flux and reflux—the rhythm of change—alternate and persist in

everything under the sky.

LI

At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world

was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular date

of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service

during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now

carried out. The labourers—or “work-folk”, as they used to call

themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from

without—who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to the

new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.

When Tess’s mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about

Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the

home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire

for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger families

it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an advantage. The

Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it

from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt

also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village life

did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A depopulation

was also going on. The village had formerly contained, side by side

with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and better-informed

class, ranking distinctly above the former—the class to which Tess’s

father and mother had belonged—and including the carpenter, the smith,

the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other

than farm-labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of

aim and conduct to the fact of their being lifeholders like Tess’s

father, or copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders. But as the

long holdings fell in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants,

and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer

for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land

were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the

trade of others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who

had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the

depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large

centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as “the

tendency of the rural population towards the large towns”, being really

the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this manner

considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house which remained

standing was required by the agriculturist for his work-people. Ever

since the occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow over

Tess’s life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited)

had been tacitly looked on as one which would have to go when their

lease ended, if only in the interests of morality. It was, indeed,

quite true that the household had not been shining examples either of

temperance, soberness, or chastity. The father, and even the mother,

had got drunk at times, the younger children seldom had gone to church,

and the eldest daughter had made queer unions. By some means the

village had to be kept pure. So on this, the first Lady-Day on which

the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy, was required

for a carter with a large family; and Widow Joan, her daughters Tess

and ’Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham, and the younger children had to go

elsewhere.

On the evening preceding their removal it was getting dark betimes by

reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the sky. As it was the last

night they would spend in the village which had been their home and

birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to bid

some friends goodbye, and Tess was keeping house till they should

return.

She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement,

where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of

glass. Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long

ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever

came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement. Tess was

reflecting on the position of the household, in which she perceived her

own evil influence. Had she not come home, her mother and the children

might probably have been allowed to stay on as weekly tenants. But she

had been observed almost immediately on her return by some people of

scrupulous character and great influence: they had seen her idling in

the churchyard, restoring as well as she could with a little trowel a

baby’s obliterated grave. By this means they had found that she was

living here again; her mother was scolded for “harbouring” her; sharp

retorts had ensued from Joan, who had independently offered to leave at

once; she had been taken at her word; and here was the result.

“I ought never to have come home,” said Tess to herself, bitterly.

She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at first took

note of a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw riding down the

street. Possibly it was owing to her face being near to the pane that

he saw her so quickly, and directed his horse so close to the

cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the narrow border for

plants growing under the wall. It was not till he touched the window

with his riding-crop that she observed him. The rain had nearly ceased,

and she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.

“Didn’t you see me?” asked d’Urberville.

“I was not attending,” she said. “I heard you, I believe, though I

fancied it was a carriage and horses. I was in a sort of dream.”

“Ah! you heard the d’Urberville Coach, perhaps. You know the legend, I

suppose?”

“No. My—somebody was going to tell it me once, but didn’t.”

“If you are a genuine d’Urberville I ought not to tell you either, I

suppose. As for me, I’m a sham one, so it doesn’t matter. It is rather

dismal. It is that this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard

by one of d’Urberville blood, and it is held to be of ill-omen to the

one who hears it. It has to do with a murder, committed by one of the

family, centuries ago.”

“Now you have begun it, finish it.”

“Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted some beautiful

woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was carrying her

off, and in the struggle he killed her—or she killed him—I forget

which. Such is one version of the tale... I see that your tubs and

buckets are packed. Going away, aren’t you?”

“Yes, to-morrow—Old Lady Day.”

“I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems so sudden. Why

is it?”

“Father’s was the last life on the property, and when that dropped we

had no further right to stay. Though we might, perhaps, have stayed as

weekly tenants—if it had not been for me.”

“What about you?”

“I am not a—proper woman.”

D’Urberville’s face flushed.

“What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty souls be burnt

to cinders!” he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment. “That’s why

you are going, is it? Turned out?”

“We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we should have to go

soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are

better chances.”

“Where are you going to?”

“Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about

father’s people that she will go there.”

“But your mother’s family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little

hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at

Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother’s death;

but there’s the house, as you know it, and the garden. It can be

whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite comfortably;

and I will put the children to a good school. Really I ought to do

something for you!”

“But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!” she declared. “And

we can wait there—”

“Wait—what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here, Tess, I

know what men are, and, bearing in mind the _grounds_ of your

separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with you. Now,

though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even if you won’t

believe it. Come to this cottage of mine. We’ll get up a regular colony

of fowls, and your mother can attend to them excellently; and the

children can go to school.”

Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said—

“How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may change—and

then—we should be—my mother would be—homeless again.”

“O no—no. I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if

necessary. Think it over.”

Tess shook her head. But d’Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen

him so determined; he would not take a negative.

“Please just tell your mother,” he said, in emphatic tones. “It is her

business to judge—not yours. I shall get the house swept out and

whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the

evening, so that you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect

you.”

Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with complicated

emotion. She could not look up at d’Urberville.

“I owe you something for the past, you know,” he resumed. “And you

cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—”

“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the

practice which went with it!”

“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. To-morrow I

shall expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading... Give me your hand

on it now—dear, beautiful Tess!”

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put

his hand in at the half-open casement. With stormy eyes she pulled the

stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the casement

and the stone mullion.

“Damnation—you are very cruel!” he said, snatching out his arm. “No,

no!—I know you didn’t do it on purpose. Well, I shall expect you, or

your mother and children at least.”

“I shall not come—I have plenty of money!” she cried.

“Where?”

“At my father-in-law’s, if I ask for it.”

“_If_ you ask for it. But you won’t, Tess; I know you; you’ll never ask

for it—you’ll starve first!”

With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he met

the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the

brethren.

“You go to the devil!” said d’Urberville.

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious

sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the rush

of hot tears thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like

others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had! She had never

before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never in her

life—she could swear it from the bottom of her soul—had she ever

intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come. Whatever her

sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why

should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and

scribbled the following lines:

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve

it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never

forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have

you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to

forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!

T.

She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her

epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the

window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How could

he give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was no new

event to alter his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two biggest

of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the four

smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all

in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling their own

little subjects. Tess at length joined them, without lighting a candle.

“This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house

where we were born,” she said quickly. “We ought to think of it,

oughtn’t we?”

They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they were

ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had conjured

up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of

a new place. Tess changed the subject.

“Sing to me, dears,” she said.

“What shall we sing?”

“Anything you know; I don’t mind.”

There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one little

tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third and a

fourth chimed in unison, with words they had learnt at the

Sunday-school—

Here we suffer grief and pain,

Here we meet to part again;

In Heaven we part no more.

The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had long

ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it, felt

that further thought was not required. With features strained hard to

enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the centre of the

flickering fire, the notes of the youngest straying over into the

pauses of the rest.

Tess turned from them, and went to the window again. Darkness had now

fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to peer into

the gloom. It was really to hide her tears. If she could only believe

what the children were singing; if she were only sure, how different

all would now be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence

and their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do

something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to not a few

millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines—

Not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal

compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to

justify, and at best could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall

’Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield’s pattens clicked up to the door,

and Tess opened it.

“I see the tracks of a horse outside the window,” said Joan. “Hev

somebody called?”

“No,” said Tess.

The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured—

“Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!”

“He didn’t call,” said Tess. “He spoke to me in passing.”

“Who was the gentleman?” asked the mother. “Your husband?”

“No. He’ll never, never come,” answered Tess in stony hopelessness.

“Then who was it?”

“Oh, you needn’t ask. You’ve seen him before, and so have I.”

“Ah! What did he say?” said Joan curiously.

“I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at Kingsbere

to-morrow—every word.”

It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a

physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her

more and more.

LII

During the small hours of the next morning, while it was still dark,

dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their

night’s rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till

daylight—noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of

the month as the voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same.

They were the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the

empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families;

for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required his

services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination. That this

might be accomplished within the day was the explanation of the

reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of the carters

being to reach the door of the outgoing households by six o’clock, when

the loading of their movables at once began.

But to Tess and her mother’s household no such anxious farmer sent his

team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were

not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at

their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that

morning, to find that though the weather was windy and louring, it did

not rain, and that the waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre

which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding,

damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.

Her mother, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger

children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light, and

the “house-ridding” was taken in hand.

It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two

assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in

position, a circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which

Joan Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through the

journey. After loading there was a long delay before the horses were

brought, these having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at

length, about two o’clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot

swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and family at the

top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent injury to its works, the

head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon,

struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next eldest

girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.

They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous

evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well, though,

in their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible to such a

family, harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except themselves.

Soon the equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew

keener with the change of level and soil.

The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many other

waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was built on a

wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the rural

labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement

was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles, and

finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly

in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and natural

position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they were bound to carry

reverently.

Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping

at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield

menagerie also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.

During the halt Tess’s eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which was

ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine

section of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also

drawn up at a little distance from the same inn. She followed one of

the mug’s journeys upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands

whose owner she well knew. Tess went towards the waggon.

“Marian and Izz!” she cried to the girls, for it was they, sitting with

the moving family at whose house they had lodged. “Are you

house-ridding to-day, like everybody else?”

They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for them at

Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost without notice, leaving

Groby to prosecute them if he chose. They told Tess their destination,

and Tess told them hers.

Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. “Do you know that

the gentleman who follows ’ee—you’ll guess who I mean—came to ask for

’ee at Flintcomb after you had gone? We didn’t tell’n where you was,

knowing you wouldn’t wish to see him.”

“Ah—but I did see him!” Tess murmured. “He found me.”

“And do he know where you be going?”

“I think so.”

“Husband come back?”

“No.”

She bade her acquaintance goodbye—for the respective carters had now

come out from the inn—and the two waggons resumed their journey in

opposite directions; the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the

ploughman’s family with whom they had thrown in their lot, being

brightly painted, and drawn by three powerful horses with shining brass

ornaments on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield

and her family rode was a creaking erection that would scarcely bear

the weight of the superincumbent load; one which had known no paint

since it was made, and drawn by two horses only. The contrast well

marked the difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer and

conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one’s coming.

The distance was great—too great for a day’s journey—and it was with

the utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had

started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned

the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland called

Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess

looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the

half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those

ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness:

Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered

the d’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five

hundred years.

A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards them, and when

he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he quickened his steps.

“You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?” he said to

Tess’s mother, who had descended to walk the remainder of the way.

She nodded. “Though widow of the late Sir John d’Urberville, poor

nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and returning to the domain of his

forefathers.”

“Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs Durbeyfield, I

am sent to tell ’ee that the rooms you wanted be let. We didn’t know

that you was coming till we got your letter this morning—when ’twas too

late. But no doubt you can get other lodgings somewhere.”

The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become ash-pale at his

intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly at fault. “What shall we do

now, Tess?” she said bitterly. “Here’s a welcome to your ancestors’

lands! However, let’s try further.”

They moved on into the town, and tried with all their might, Tess

remaining with the waggon to take care of the children whilst her

mother and ’Liza-Lu made inquiries. At the last return of Joan to the

vehicle, an hour later, when her search for accommodation had still

been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the goods must be

unloaded, as the horses were half-dead, and he was bound to return part

of the way at least that night.

“Very well—unload it here,” said Joan recklessly. “I’ll get shelter

somewhere.”

The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a spot screened

from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon hauled down the poor heap

of household goods. This done, she paid him, reducing herself to almost

her last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them, only too

glad to get out of further dealings with such a family. It was a dry

night, and he guessed that they would come to no harm.

Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of

this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles,

upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass

handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked

in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the

reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a

roofless exposure for which they were never made. Round about were

deparked hills and slopes—now cut up into little paddocks—and the green

foundations that showed where the d’Urberville mansion once had stood;

also an outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always belonged to the

estate. Hard by, the aisle of the church called the d’Urberville Aisle

looked on imperturbably.

“Isn’t your family vault your own freehold?” said Tess’s mother, as she

returned from a reconnoitre of the church and graveyard. “Why, of

course ’tis, and that’s where we will camp, girls, till the place of

your ancestors finds us a roof! Now, Tess and ’Liza and Abraham, you

help me. We’ll make a nest for these children, and then we’ll have

another look round.”

Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour the old

four-post bedstead was dissociated from the heap of goods, and erected

under the south wall of the church, the part of the building known as

the d’Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay. Over the

tester of the bedstead was a beautiful traceried window, of many

lights, its date being the fifteenth century. It was called the

d’Urberville Window, and in the upper part could be discerned heraldic

emblems like those on Durbeyfield’s old seal and spoon.

Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an excellent tent of

it, and put the smaller children inside. “If it comes to the worst we

can sleep there too, for one night,” she said. “But let us try further

on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess, what’s the use of

your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!”

Accompanied by ’Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended the little lane

which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got into

the street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. “Ah—I’m

looking for you!” he said, riding up to them. “This is indeed a family

gathering on the historic spot!”

It was Alec d’Urberville. “Where is Tess?” he asked.

Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily signified the

direction of the church, and went on, d’Urberville saying that he would

see them again, in case they should be still unsuccessful in their

search for shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had gone,

d’Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after came out on foot.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead,

remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could be

done to make them comfortable just then, she walked about the

churchyard, now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall.

The door of the church was unfastened, and she entered it for the first

time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of the

family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were canopied,

altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their

brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like

martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders that she had ever

received that her people were socially extinct, there was none so

forcible as this spoliation.

She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D’URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this

was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall knights of

whom her father had chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest

of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not

noticed it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an odd

fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she

discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the

shock to her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was

quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not, however, till she

had recognized Alec d’Urberville in the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

“I saw you come in,” he said smiling, “and got up there not to

interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with these

old fellows under us here? Listen.”

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose a

hollow echo from below.

“That shook them a bit, I’ll warrant!” he continued. “And you thought I

was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no. The old order

changeth. The little finger of the sham d’Urberville can do more for

you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath.... Now command me.

What shall I do?”

“Go away!” she murmured.

“I will—I’ll look for your mother,” said he blandly. But in passing her

he whispered: “Mind this; you’ll be civil yet!”

When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the vaults, and

said—

“Why am I on the wrong side of this door!”

In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the

chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaan—the

Egypt of some other family who had left it only that morning. But the

girls did not for a long time think of where they were going. Their

talk was of Angel Clare and Tess, and Tess’s persistent lover, whose

connection with her previous history they had partly heard and partly

guessed ere this.

“’Tisn’t as though she had never known him afore,” said Marian. “His

having won her once makes all the difference in the world. ’Twould be a

thousand pities if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can never

be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her, and not

try to mend this quarrel? If he could on’y know what straits she’s put

to, and what’s hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.”

“Could we let him know?”

They thought of this all the way to their destination; but the bustle

of re-establishment in their new place took up all their attention

then. But when they were settled, a month later, they heard of Clare’s

approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more of Tess. Upon

that, agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet honourably disposed

to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few

lines were concocted between the two girls.

Honour’d Sir,

Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you.

For she is sore put to by an Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir,

there is one near her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be

try’d beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear away a

Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.

From Two Well-Wishers

This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever heard

him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which they

continued in a mood of emotional exaltation at their own generosity,

which made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the same time.

End of Phase the Sixth

Phase the Seventh:

Fulfilment

LIII

It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were

burning under their green shades in the Vicar’s study, but he had not

been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire

which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went out

again; sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the

drawing-room, then returning again to the front door.

It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still

light enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been

sitting in the drawing-room, followed him hither.

“Plenty of time yet,” said the Vicar. “He doesn’t reach Chalk-Newton

till six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of

country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in

a hurry by our old horse.”

“But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear.”

“Years ago.”

Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only

waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.

At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old pony-chaise

appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight therefrom a form

which they affected to recognize, but would actually have passed by in

the street without identifying had he not got out of their carriage at

the particular moment when a particular person was due.

Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her husband

came more slowly after her.

The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces

in the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because

they confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his shape

against the light.

“O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!” cried Mrs Clare, who cared no

more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused all

this separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed,

among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises

and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own

children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed

against their happiness? As soon as they reached the room where the

candles were lighted she looked at his face.

“O, it is not Angel—not my son—the Angel who went away!” she cried in

all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure

from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had

experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his

first aversion to the mockery of events at home. You could see the

skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He

matched Crivelli’s dead _Christus_. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid

hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines

of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty

years before their time.

“I was ill over there, you know,” he said. “I am all right now.”

As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give way,

and he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was only a

slight attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day’s journey,

and the excitement of arrival.

“Has any letter come for me lately?” he asked. “I received the last you

sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay through

being inland; or I might have come sooner.”

“It was from your wife, we supposed?”

“It was.”

Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,

knowing he would start for home so soon.

He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbed to read

in Tess’s handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried

scrawl to him.

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve

it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never

forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have

you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to

forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!

T.

“It is quite true!” said Angel, throwing down the letter. “Perhaps she

will never be reconciled to me!”

“Don’t, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the soil!” said his

mother.

“Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the soil. I wish she

were so in the sense you mean; but let me now explain to you what I

have never explained before, that her father is a descendant in the

male line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good many others

who lead obscure agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed

‘sons of the soil.’”

He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling exceedingly

unwell, he remained in his room pondering. The circumstances amid which

he had left Tess were such that though, while on the south of the

Equator and just in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the

easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms the moment he

chose to forgive her, now that he had arrived it was not so easy as it

had seemed. She was passionate, and her present letter, showing that

her estimate of him had changed under his delay—too justly changed, he

sadly owned,—made him ask himself if it would be wise to confront her

unannounced in the presence of her parents. Supposing that her love had

indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of separation, a sudden

meeting might lead to bitter words.

Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess and her family

by sending a line to Marlott announcing his return, and his hope that

she was still living with them there, as he had arranged for her to do

when he left England. He despatched the inquiry that very day, and

before the week was out there came a short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield

which did not remove his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though

to his surprise it was not written from Marlott.

Sir,

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away from me at

present, and J am not sure when she will return, but J will let you

know as Soon as she do. J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where

she is temperly biding. J should say that me and my Family have

left Marlott for some Time.—

Yours,

J. Durbeyfield

It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least

apparently well that her mother’s stiff reticence as to her whereabouts

did not long distress him. They were all angry with him, evidently. He

would wait till Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess’s return,

which her letter implied to be soon. He deserved no more. His had been

a love “which alters when it alteration finds”. He had undergone some

strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in

the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne; he

had thought of the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to

be stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen; and he had

asked himself why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than

biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?

A day or two passed while he waited at his father’s house for the

promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a

little more strength. The strength showed signs of coming back, but

there was no sign of Joan’s letter. Then he hunted up the old letter

sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess had written from Flintcomb-Ash,

and re-read it. The sentences touched him now as much as when he had

first perused them.

...I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else!... I think I

must die if you do not come soon, or tell me to come to you... please,

please, not to be just—only a little kind to me.... If you would come,

I could die in your arms! I would be well content to do that if so be

you had forgiven me!... if you will send me one little line, and say,

_I am coming soon_, I will bide on, Angel—O, so cheerfully!... think

how it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—ever! Ah, if I could only

make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does

every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor

lonely one.... I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your

servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you,

and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.... I long for only

one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own

dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what threatens me!

Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and

severer regard of him, but would go and find her immediately. He asked

his father if she had applied for any money during his absence. His

father returned a negative, and then for the first time it occurred to

Angel that her pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered

privation. From his remarks his parents now gathered the real reason of

the separation; and their Christianity was such that, reprobates being

their especial care, the tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her

simplicity, even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited

by her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey

he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand—the one

from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—

“Honour’d Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do

love you,” and signed, “From Two Well-Wishers.”

LIV

In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his mother

watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street. He had

declined to borrow his father’s old mare, well knowing of its necessity

to the household. He went to the inn, where he hired a trap, and could

hardly wait during the harnessing. In a very few minutes after, he was

driving up the hill out of the town which, three or four months earlier

in the year, Tess had descended with such hopes and ascended with such

shattered purposes.

Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple

with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled

himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In

something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the

King’s Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of

Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec

d’Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange oath

that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and blasted

nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the

banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from their

roots.

Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other

Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing

calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had

written to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to be the

place of sojourn referred to by her mother. Here, of course, he did not

find her; and what added to his depression was the discovery that no

“Mrs Clare” had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by the farmer

himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by her Christian name.

His name she had obviously never used during their separation, and her

dignified sense of their total severance was shown not much less by

this abstention than by the hardships she had chosen to undergo (of

which he now learnt for the first time) rather than apply to his father

for more funds.

From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due

notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor, and

it therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had told him

she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent as to her

actual address, and the only course was to go to Marlott and inquire

for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with Tess was quite

smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man to drive him

towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in being sent back to

Emminster; for the limit of a day’s journey with that horse was

reached.

Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer’s vehicle for a further

distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with

the man who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered

on foot the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess’s birth. It

was as yet too early in the year for much colour to appear in the

gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter overlaid with

a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his expectations.

The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was now

inhabited by another family who had never known her. The new residents

were in the garden, taking as much interest in their own doings as if

the homestead had never passed its primal time in conjunction with the

histories of others, beside which the histories of these were but as a

tale told by an idiot. They walked about the garden paths with thoughts

of their own concerns entirely uppermost, bringing their actions at

every moment in jarring collision with the dim ghosts behind them,

talking as though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit

intenser in story than now. Even the spring birds sang over their heads

as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular.

On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of their

predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John Durbeyfield

was dead; that his widow and children had left Marlott, declaring that

they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of doing so had gone

on to another place they mentioned. By this time Clare abhorred the

house for ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened away from its hated

presence without once looking back.

His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her at the dance.

It was as bad as the house—even worse. He passed on through the

churchyard, where, amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a somewhat

superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:

In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d’Urberville, of the once

powerful family of that Name, and Direct Descendant through an

illustrious Line from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, one of the Knights of

the Conqueror. Died March 10th, 18—

How are the Mighty Fallen.

Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there, and

drew nigh. “Ah, sir, now that’s a man who didn’t want to lie here, but

wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be.”

“And why didn’t they respect his wish?”

“Oh—no money. Bless your soul, sir, why—there, I wouldn’t wish to say

it everywhere, but—even this headstone, for all the flourish wrote upon

en, is not paid for.”

“Ah, who put it up?”

The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on leaving the

churchyard, Clare called at the mason’s house. He found that the

statement was true, and paid the bill. This done, he turned in the

direction of the migrants.

The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such a strong

desire for isolation that at first he would neither hire a conveyance

nor go to a circuitous line of railway by which he might eventually

reach the place. At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but the

way was such that he did not enter Joan’s place till about seven

o’clock in the evening, having traversed a distance of over twenty

miles since leaving Marlott.

The village being small he had little difficulty in finding Mrs

Durbeyfield’s tenement, which was a house in a walled garden, remote

from the main road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old furniture

as best she could. It was plain that for some reason or other she had

not wished him to visit her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an

intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the light from the evening

sky fell upon her face.

This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but he was too

preoccupied to observe more than that she was still a handsome woman,

in the garb of a respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that he

was Tess’s husband, and his object in coming there, and he did it

awkwardly enough. “I want to see her at once,” he added. “You said you

would write to me again, but you have not done so.”

“Because she’ve not come home,” said Joan.

“Do you know if she is well?”

“I don’t. But you ought to, sir,” said she.

“I admit it. Where is she staying?”

From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her

embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.

“I—don’t know exactly where she is staying,” she answered. “She

was—but—”

“Where was she?”

“Well, she is not there now.”

In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by

this time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother’s skirts, the

youngest murmured—

“Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?”

“He has married her,” Joan whispered. “Go inside.”

Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked—

“Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of

course—”

“I don’t think she would.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure she wouldn’t.”

He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess’s tender letter.

“I am sure she would!” he retorted passionately. “I know her better

than you do.”

“That’s very likely, sir; for I have never really known her.”

“Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely

wretched man!” Tess’s mother again restlessly swept her cheek with her

vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is a low

voice—

“She is at Sandbourne.”

“Ah—where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.”

“I don’t know more particularly than I have said—Sandbourne. For

myself, I was never there.”

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her

no further.

“Are you in want of anything?” he said gently.

“No, sir,” she replied. “We are fairly well provided for.”

Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station three

miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither. The last

train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare on its

wheels.

LV

At eleven o’clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the hotels

and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his arrival,

he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too late to call

on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed his purpose

till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just yet.

This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western

stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its

covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly

created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An

outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at hand,

yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a

glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.

Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the

soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway;

not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Cæsars. Yet

the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd; and had

drawn hither Tess.

By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way of this new

world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against

the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the

numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a

city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the

English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing

than it was.

The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he

thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same

tones, and he thought they were the sea.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst

all this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered, the more was he

puzzled. Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were no

fields to till. She was most probably engaged to do something in one of

these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at the

chamber-windows and their lights going out one by one, and wondered

which of them might be hers.

Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o’clock he entered and

went to bed. Before putting out his light he re-read Tess’s impassioned

letter. Sleep, however, he could not—so near her, yet so far from

her—and he continually lifted the window-blind and regarded the backs

of the opposite houses, and wondered behind which of the sashes she

reposed at that moment.

He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the morning he arose

at seven, and shortly after went out, taking the direction of the chief

post-office. At the door he met an intelligent postman coming out with

letters for the morning delivery.

“Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?” asked Angel. The postman

shook his head.

Then, remembering that she would have been likely to continue the use

of her maiden name, Clare said—

“Of a Miss Durbeyfield?”

“Durbeyfield?”

This also was strange to the postman addressed.

“There’s visitors coming and going every day, as you know, sir,” he

said; “and without the name of the house ’tis impossible to find ’em.”

One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the name was repeated

to him.

“I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name of d’Urberville

at The Herons,” said the second.

“That’s it!” cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to the

real pronunciation. “What place is The Herons?”

“A stylish lodging-house. ’Tis all lodging-houses here, bless ’ee.”

Clare received directions how to find the house, and hastened thither,

arriving with the milkman. The Herons, though an ordinary villa, stood

in its own grounds, and was certainly the last place in which one would

have expected to find lodgings, so private was its appearance. If poor

Tess was a servant here, as he feared, she would go to the back-door to

that milkman, and he was inclined to go thither also. However, in his

doubts he turned to the front, and rang.

The hour being early, the landlady herself opened the door. Clare

inquired for Teresa d’Urberville or Durbeyfield.

“Mrs d’Urberville?”

“Yes.”

Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad, even though

she had not adopted his name.

“Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to see her?”

“It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?”

“Angel.”

“Mr Angel?”

“No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She’ll understand.”

“I’ll see if she is awake.”

He was shown into the front room—the dining-room—and looked out through

the spring curtains at the little lawn, and the rhododendrons and other

shrubs upon it. Obviously her position was by no means so bad as he had

feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow have claimed and

sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her for one moment. Soon

his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his

heart thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm. “Dear me!

what will she think of me, so altered as I am!” he said to himself; and

the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold—not at all as he had expected to see

her—bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if

not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely

wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in

half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck

rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered cable of

dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of her

head and partly hanging on her shoulder—the evident result of haste.

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for

she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the

doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast

between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.

“Tess!” he said huskily, “can you forgive me for going away? Can’t

you—come to me? How do you get to be—like this?”

“It is too late,” said she, her voice sounding hard through the room,

her eyes shining unnaturally.

“I did not think rightly of you—I did not see you as you were!” he

continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!”

“Too late, too late!” she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a

person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don’t come

close to me, Angel! No—you must not. Keep away.”

“But don’t you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled

down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come on purpose for you—my

mother and father will welcome you now!”

“Yes—O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.”

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away,

but cannot. “Don’t you know all—don’t you know it? Yet how do you come

here if you do not know?”

“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.”

“I waited and waited for you,” she went on, her tones suddenly resuming

their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and

you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and

that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and

to all of us after father’s death. He—”

“I don’t understand.”

“He has won me back to him.”

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like

one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which,

once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued—

“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie—that you

would not come again; and you _have_ come! These clothes are what he’s

put upon me: I didn’t care what he did wi’ me! But—will you go away,

Angel, please, and never come any more?”

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a

joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter

them from reality.

“Ah—it is my fault!” said Clare.

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he

had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him

till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize

the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon

the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew

colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a

minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking along he

did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner of

all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually curious

turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long

and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to

retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible

lodgers’ pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her

well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d’Urberville, as she deemed them, was

sufficiently exceptional in point of time and manner to reinvigorate

the feminine proclivity which had been stifled down as useless save in

its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the

dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed door of

her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments

of the conversation—if conversation it could be called—between those

two wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first

floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door

behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut, and Mrs Brooks

knew that Tess had re-entered her apartment. As the young lady was not

fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some

time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of

the front room—a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately

behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.

This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks’s best apartments, had been

taken by the week by the d’Urbervilles. The back room was now in

silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable,

continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a

soul bound to some Ixionian wheel—

“O—O—O!”

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again—

“O—O—O!”

The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the room

inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the

breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a

chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess’s face was bowed, her

posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped

over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of

her night-gown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless

feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded upon the carpet. It

was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair.

Then a man’s voice from the adjoining bedroom—

“What’s the matter?”

She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a soliloquy rather

than an exclamation, and a dirge rather than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks

could only catch a portion:

“And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... and I did not know

it!... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... you did not

stop using it—no—you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and

my mother’s needs—they were the things you moved me by ... and you said

my husband would never come back—never; and you taunted me, and said

what a simpleton I was to expect him!... And at last I believed you and

gave way!... And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second time,

and I have lost him now for ever ... and he will not love me the

littlest bit ever any more—only hate me!... O yes, I have lost him

now—again because of—you!” In writhing, with her head on the chair, she

turned her face towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain

upon it, and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth

upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet

tags to her cheeks. She continued: “And he is dying—he looks as if he

is dying!... And my sin will kill him and not kill me!... O, you have

torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in pity not

to make me be again!... My own true husband will never, never—O God—I

can’t bear this!—I cannot!”

There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle;

she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks, thinking that the speaker was

coming to rush out of the door, hastily retreated down the stairs.

She need not have done so, however, for the door of the sitting-room

was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it unsafe to watch on the landing

again, and entered her own parlour below.

She could hear nothing through the floor, although she listened

intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to finish her interrupted

breakfast. Coming up presently to the front room on the ground floor

she took up some sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might

take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to discover

what was the matter if possible. Overhead, as she sat, she could now

hear the floorboards slightly creak, as if some one were walking about,

and presently the movement was explained by the rustle of garments

against the banisters, the opening and the closing of the front door,

and the form of Tess passing to the gate on her way into the street.

She was fully dressed now in the walking costume of a well-to-do young

lady in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that over her hat

and black feathers a veil was drawn.

Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of farewell, temporary

or otherwise, between her tenants at the door above. They might have

quarrelled, or Mr d’Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an

early riser.

She went into the back room, which was more especially her own

apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady lodger did not

return, nor did the gentleman ring his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the

delay, and on what probable relation the visitor who had called so

early bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant back in her

chair.

As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were

arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had

never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she

first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her

hand, and then she could perceive that it was red. The oblong white

ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a

gigantic ace of hearts.

Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon the table, and

touched the spot in the ceiling with her fingers. It was damp, and she

fancied that it was a blood stain.

Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and went upstairs,

intending to enter the room overhead, which was the bedchamber at the

back of the drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now become,

she could not bring herself to attempt the handle. She listened. The

dead silence within was broken only by a regular beat.

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door, and ran into the

street. A man she knew, one of the workmen employed at an adjoining

villa, was passing by, and she begged him to come in and go upstairs

with her; she feared something had happened to one of her lodgers. The

workman assented, and followed her to the landing.

She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back for him to pass

in, entering herself behind him. The room was empty; the breakfast—a

substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham—lay spread upon the

table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the

carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to go through the

folding-doors into the adjoining room.

He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost

instantly with a rigid face. “My good God, the gentleman in bed is

dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife—a lot of blood has run down

upon the floor!”

The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately been so quiet

resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the rest.

The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart

of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had

scarcely moved after the infliction of the blow. In a quarter of an

hour the news that a gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town

had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street and villa of

the popular watering-place.

LVII

Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along the way by which

he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast,

staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously

till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his

dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and

went out.

At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him—a few words

from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his address, and

informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been

accepted by Mercy Chant.

Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the station;

reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an hour

and more. He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour

felt that he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and numbed, he

had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had

been the scene of such an experience, and turned to walk to the first

station onward, and let the train pick him up there.

The highway that he followed was open, and at a little distance dipped

into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge to edge.

He had traversed the greater part of this depression, and was climbing

the western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked

back. Why he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel him

to the act. The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as

far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the

white vacuity of its perspective.

It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a dim sense that

somebody was trying to overtake him.

The form descending the incline was a woman’s, yet so entirely was his

mind blinded to the idea of his wife’s following him that even when she

came nearer he did not recognize her under the totally changed attire

in which he now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close that he

could believe her to be Tess.

“I saw you—turn away from the station—just before I got there—and I

have been following you all this way!”

She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle, that he

did not ask her a single question, but seizing her hand, and pulling it

within his arm, he led her along. To avoid meeting any possible

wayfarers he left the high road and took a footpath under some

fir-trees. When they were deep among the moaning boughs he stopped and

looked at her inquiringly.

“Angel,” she said, as if waiting for this, “do you know what I have

been running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!” A

pitiful white smile lit her face as she spoke.

“What!” said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she

was in some delirium.

“I have done it—I don’t know how,” she continued. “Still, I owed it to

you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the

mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set

for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come

between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more. I never

loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it, don’t you? You

believe it? You didn’t come back to me, and I was obliged to go back to

him. Why did you go away—why did you—when I loved you so? I can’t think

why you did it. But I don’t blame you; only, Angel, will you forgive me

my sin against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along

that you would be sure to forgive me now I have done that. It came to

me as a shining light that I should get you back that way. I could not

bear the loss of you any longer—you don’t know how entirely I was

unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband;

say you do, now I have killed him!”

“I do love you, Tess—O, I do—it is all come back!” he said, tightening

his arms round her with fervid pressure. “But how do you mean—you have

killed him?”

“I mean that I have,” she murmured in a reverie.

“What, bodily? Is he dead?”

“Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and

called you by a foul name; and then I did it. My heart could not bear

it. He had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed myself and

came away to find you.”

By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted,

at least, what she said she had done; and his horror at her impulse was

mixed with amazement at the strength of her affection for himself, and

at the strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished

her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her

conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked at her as she lay

upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure

strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were

an aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that the

family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the

d’Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his

confused and excited ideas could reason, he supposed that in the moment

of mad grief of which she spoke, her mind had lost its balance, and

plunged her into this abyss.

It was very terrible if true; if a temporary hallucination, sad. But,

anyhow, here was this deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond

woman, clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be anything to

her but a protector. He saw that for him to be otherwise was not, in

her mind, within the region of the possible. Tenderness was absolutely

dominant in Clare at last. He kissed her endlessly with his white lips,

and held her hand, and said—

“I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my power,

dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done!”

They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her head every now

and then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome as he had become, it was

plain that she did not discern the least fault in his appearance. To

her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and

mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face

was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no

less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one

man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had believed in her as

pure!

With an instinct as to possibilities, he did not now, as he had

intended, make for the first station beyond the town, but plunged still

farther under the firs, which here abounded for miles. Each clasping

the other round the waist they promenaded over the dry bed of

fir-needles, thrown into a vague intoxicating atmosphere at the

consciousness of being together at last, with no living soul between

them; ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for several

miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her, and said, timidly—

“Are we going anywhere in particular?”

“I don’t know, dearest. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is evening find

lodgings somewhere or other—in a lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you walk

well, Tessy?”

“O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm round me!”

Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they quickened

their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure paths tending

more or less northward. But there was an unpractical vagueness in their

movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider

any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their

every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two

children.

At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess would have

entered it with him to get something to eat, but he persuaded her to

remain among the trees and bushes of this half-woodland, half-moorland

part of the country till he should come back. Her clothes were of

recent fashion; even the ivory-handled parasol that she carried was of

a shape unknown in the retired spot to which they had now wandered; and

the cut of such articles would have attracted attention in the settle

of a tavern. He soon returned, with food enough for half-a-dozen people

and two bottles of wine—enough to last them for a day or more, should

any emergency arise.

They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their meal. Between one

and two o’clock they packed up the remainder and went on again.

“I feel strong enough to walk any distance,” said she.

“I think we may as well steer in a general way towards the interior of

the country, where we can hide for a time, and are less likely to be

looked for than anywhere near the coast,” Clare remarked. “Later on,

when they have forgotten us, we can make for some port.”

She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him more tightly, and

straight inland they went. Though the season was an English May, the

weather was serenely bright, and during the afternoon it was quite

warm. Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath had taken

them into the depths of the New Forest, and towards evening, turning

the corner of a lane, they perceived behind a brook and bridge a large

board on which was painted in white letters, “This desirable Mansion to

be Let Furnished”; particulars following, with directions to apply to

some London agents. Passing through the gate they could see the house,

an old brick building of regular design and large accommodation.

“I know it,” said Clare. “It is Bramshurst Court. You can see that it

is shut up, and grass is growing on the drive.”

“Some of the windows are open,” said Tess.

“Just to air the rooms, I suppose.”

“All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our heads!”

“You are getting tired, my Tess!” he said. “We’ll stop soon.” And

kissing her sad mouth, he again led her onwards.

He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a dozen or fifteen

miles, and it became necessary to consider what they should do for

rest. They looked from afar at isolated cottages and little inns, and

were inclined to approach one of the latter, when their hearts failed

them, and they sheered off. At length their gait dragged, and they

stood still.

“Could we sleep under the trees?” she asked.

He thought the season insufficiently advanced.

“I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,” he said. “Let

us go back towards it again.”

They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour before they stood

without the entrance-gate as earlier. He then requested her to stay

where she was, whilst he went to see who was within.

She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and Clare crept towards

the house. His absence lasted some considerable time, and when he

returned Tess was wildly anxious, not for herself, but for him. He had

found out from a boy that there was only an old woman in charge as

caretaker, and she only came there on fine days, from the hamlet near,

to open and shut the windows. She would come to shut them at sunset.

“Now, we can get in through one of the lower windows, and rest there,”

said he.

Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main front, whose

shuttered windows, like sightless eyeballs, excluded the possibility of

watchers. The door was reached a few steps further, and one of the

windows beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and pulled Tess in

after him.

Except the hall, the rooms were all in darkness, and they ascended the

staircase. Up here also the shutters were tightly closed, the

ventilation being perfunctorily done, for this day at least, by opening

the hall-window in front and an upper window behind. Clare unlatched

the door of a large chamber, felt his way across it, and parted the

shutters to the width of two or three inches. A shaft of dazzling

sunlight glanced into the room, revealing heavy, old-fashioned

furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous four-post bedstead,

along the head of which were carved running figures, apparently

Atalanta’s race.

“Rest at last!” said he, setting down his bag and the parcel of viands.

They remained in great quietness till the caretaker should have come to

shut the windows: as a precaution, putting themselves in total darkness

by barring the shutters as before, lest the woman should open the door

of their chamber for any casual reason. Between six and seven o’clock

she came, but did not approach the wing they were in. They heard her

close the windows, fasten them, lock the door, and go away. Then Clare

again stole a chink of light from the window, and they shared another

meal, till by-and-by they were enveloped in the shades of night which

they had no candle to disperse.

LVIII

The night was strangely solemn and still. In the small hours she

whispered to him the whole story of how he had walked in his sleep with

her in his arms across the Froom stream, at the imminent risk of both

their lives, and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined abbey.

He had never known of that till now.

“Why didn’t you tell me next day?” he said. “It might have prevented

much misunderstanding and woe.”

“Don’t think of what’s past!” said she. “I am not going to think

outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?”

But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet and foggy, and

Clare, rightly informed that the caretaker only opened the windows on

fine days, ventured to creep out of their chamber and explore the

house, leaving Tess asleep. There was no food on the premises, but

there was water, and he took advantage of the fog to emerge from the

mansion and fetch tea, bread, and butter from a shop in a little place

two miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and spirit-lamp, that they

might get fire without smoke. His re-entry awoke her; and they

breakfasted on what he had brought.

They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day passed, and the night

following, and the next, and next; till, almost without their being

aware, five days had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a sight or

sound of a human being disturbing their peacefulness, such as it was.

The changes of the weather were their only events, the birds of the New

Forest their only company. By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of

any incident of the past subsequent to their wedding-day. The gloomy

intervening time seemed to sink into chaos, over which the present and

prior times closed as if it never had been. Whenever he suggested that

they should leave their shelter, and go forwards towards Southampton or

London, she showed a strange unwillingness to move.

“Why should we put an end to all that’s sweet and lovely!” she

deprecated. “What must come will come.” And, looking through the

shutter-chink: “All is trouble outside there; inside here content.”

He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union,

error forgiven: outside was the inexorable.

“And—and,” she said, pressing her cheek against his, “I fear that what

you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present

feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried

when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be

known to me that you despised me.”

“I cannot ever despise you.”

“I also hope that. But considering what my life has been, I cannot see

why any man should, sooner or later, be able to help despising me....

How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly

or a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to make me

cry.”

They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky cleared, and

the result was that the old caretaker at the cottage awoke early. The

brilliant sunrise made her unusually brisk; she decided to open the

contiguous mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a day.

Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower rooms before

six o’clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was about to turn the

handle of the one wherein they lay. At that moment she fancied she

could hear the breathing of persons within. Her slippers and her

antiquity had rendered her progress a noiseless one so far, and she

made for instant retreat; then, deeming that her hearing might have

deceived her, she turned anew to the door and softly tried the handle.

The lock was out of order, but a piece of furniture had been moved

forward on the inside, which prevented her opening the door more than

an inch or two. A stream of morning light through the shutter-chink

fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped in profound slumber, Tess’s

lips being parted like a half-opened flower near his cheek. The

caretaker was so struck with their innocent appearance, and with the

elegance of Tess’s gown hanging across a chair, her silk stockings

beside it, the pretty parasol, and the other habits in which she had

arrived because she had none else, that her first indignation at the

effrontery of tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary

sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it seemed. She closed

the door, and withdrew as softly as she had come, to go and consult

with her neighbours on the odd discovery.

Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal when Tess woke,

and then Clare. Both had a sense that something had disturbed them,

though they could not say what; and the uneasy feeling which it

engendered grew stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly scanned

the lawn through the two or three inches of shutter-chink.

“I think we will leave at once,” said he. “It is a fine day. And I

cannot help fancying somebody is about the house. At any rate, the

woman will be sure to come to-day.”

She passively assented, and putting the room in order, they took up the

few articles that belonged to them, and departed noiselessly. When they

had got into the Forest she turned to take a last look at the house.

“Ah, happy house—goodbye!” she said. “My life can only be a question of

a few weeks. Why should we not have stayed there?”

“Don’t say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this district altogether.

We’ll continue our course as we’ve begun it, and keep straight north.

Nobody will think of looking for us there. We shall be looked for at

the Wessex ports if we are sought at all. When we are in the north we

will get to a port and away.”

Having thus persuaded her, the plan was pursued, and they kept a

bee-line northward. Their long repose at the manor-house lent them

walking power now; and towards mid-day they found that they were

approaching the steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in

their way. He decided to rest her in a clump of trees during the

afternoon, and push onward under cover of darkness. At dusk Clare

purchased food as usual, and their night march began, the boundary

between Upper and Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o’clock.

To walk across country without much regard to roads was not new to

Tess, and she showed her old agility in the performance. The

intercepting city, ancient Melchester, they were obliged to pass

through in order to take advantage of the town bridge for crossing a

large river that obstructed them. It was about midnight when they went

along the deserted streets, lighted fitfully by the few lamps, keeping

off the pavement that it might not echo their footsteps. The graceful

pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on their left hand, but it

was lost upon them now. Once out of the town they followed the

turnpike-road, which after a few miles plunged across an open plain.

Though the sky was dense with cloud, a diffused light from some

fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a little. But the moon had

now sunk, the clouds seemed to settle almost on their heads, and the

night grew as dark as a cave. However, they found their way along,

keeping as much on the turf as possible that their tread might not

resound, which it was easy to do, there being no hedge or fence of any

kind. All around was open loneliness and black solitude, over which a

stiff breeze blew.

They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a

sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,

rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against

it.

“What monstrous place is this?” said Angel.

“It hums,” said she. “Hearken!”

He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming

tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound

came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare

felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid

stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found

that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular

pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one

adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black

sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the

pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the

surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of

doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and

Angel, perplexed, said—

“What can it be?”

Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square and

uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The place

was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous

architraves.

“A very Temple of the Winds,” he said.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were

prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway wide enough for a carriage;

and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped

upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into

this pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.

“It is Stonehenge!” said Clare.

“The heathen temple, you mean?”

“Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles! Well,

what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on.”

But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab

that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar.

Owing to the action of the sun during the preceding day, the stone was

warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass

around, which had damped her skirts and shoes.

“I don’t want to go any further, Angel,” she said, stretching out her

hand for his. “Can’t we bide here?”

“I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day, although it does

not seem so now.”

“One of my mother’s people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of

it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am

at home.”

He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his lips upon hers.

“Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an altar.”

“I like very much to be here,” she murmured. “It is so solemn and

lonely—after my great happiness—with nothing but the sky above my face.

It seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish

there were not—except ’Liza-Lu.”

Clare thought she might as well rest here till it should get a little

lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon her, and sat down by her side.

“Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over ’Liza-Lu for my

sake?” she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind among

the pillars.

“I will.”

“She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel—I wish you would marry

her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O, if you would!”

“If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law.”

“That’s nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws continually about

Marlott; and ’Liza-Lu is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing so

beautiful. O, I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits!

If you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your

own self!... She had all the best of me without the bad of me; and if

she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not

divided us... Well, I have said it. I won’t mention it again.”

She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far north-east sky he

could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform

concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot,

letting in at the earth’s edge the coming day, against which the

towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

“Did they sacrifice to God here?” asked she.

“No,” said he.

“Who to?”

“I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the

direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.”

“This reminds me, dear,” she said. “You remember you never would

interfere with any belief of mine before we were married? But I knew

your mind all the same, and I thought as you thought—not from any

reasons of my own, but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do

you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.”

He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.

“O, Angel—I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And

I wanted so to see you again—so much, so much! What—not even you and I,

Angel, who love each other so well?”

Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical

time he did not answer; and they were again silent. In a minute or two

her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and

she fell asleep. The band of silver paleness along the east horizon

made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near;

and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve,

taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The

eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the

light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone

of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the

quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip

eastward—a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the

hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but in

the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight

towards the circle of pillars in which they were.

He heard something behind him, the brush of feet. Turning, he saw over

the prostrate columns another figure; then before he was aware, another

was at hand on the right, under a trilithon, and another on the left.

The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could

discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if trained. They all

closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was true! Springing to

his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose stone, means of escape,

anything. By this time the nearest man was upon him.

“It is no use, sir,” he said. “There are sixteen of us on the Plain,

and the whole country is reared.”

“Let her finish her sleep!” he implored in a whisper of the men as they

gathered round.

When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they

showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars

around. He went to the stone and bent over her, holding one poor little

hand; her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser

creature than a woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and

hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark,

the stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon

the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form,

peering under her eyelids and waking her.

“What is it, Angel?” she said, starting up. “Have they come for me?”

“Yes, dearest,” he said. “They have come.”

“It is as it should be,” she murmured. “Angel, I am almost glad—yes,

glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had

enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!”

She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men

having moved.

“I am ready,” she said quietly.

LIX

The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital of

Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the

brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and

freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument

of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High

Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the

mediæval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was

in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.

From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian

knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a

measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road from

the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly, as if

unconscious of the trying ascent—unconscious through preoccupation and

not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this road through a narrow,

barred wicket in a high wall a little lower down. They seemed anxious

to get out of the sight of the houses and of their kind, and this road

appeared to offer the quickest means of doing so. Though they were

young, they walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the sun’s rays

smiled on pitilessly.

One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding creature—half

girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but

with the same beautiful eyes—Clare’s sister-in-law, ’Liza-Lu. Their

pale faces seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved

on hand in hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads

being that of Giotto’s “Two Apostles”.

When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the clocks

in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and, walking

onward yet a few steps, they reached the first milestone, standing

whitely on the green margin of the grass, and backed by the down, which

here was open to the road. They entered upon the turf, and, impelled by

a force that seemed to overrule their will, suddenly stood still,

turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside the stone.

The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley

beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings

showing as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad cathedral

tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave,

the spires of St Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and,

more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where

to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind

the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill; further off,

landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance

of the sun hanging above it.

Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other city

edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows

of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting

greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic

erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by

yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket

from which the pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this

structure. From the middle of the building an ugly flat-topped

octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and viewed from this

spot, on its shady side and against the light, it seemed the one blot

on the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with the

beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were

riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved

slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a

black flag.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean

phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and

dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent

themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long

time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As

soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.