“Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that plays the

harp—never says much to us. He is a pa’son’s son, and is too much taken

up wi’ his own thoughts to notice girls. He is the dairyman’s

pupil—learning farming in all its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming

at another place, and he’s now mastering dairy-work.... Yes, he is

quite the gentleman-born. His father is the Reverend Mr Clare at

Emminster—a good many miles from here.”

“Oh—I have heard of him,” said her companion, now awake. “A very

earnest clergyman, is he not?”

“Yes—that he is—the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say—the last of

the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for all about here be what they

call High. All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa’sons too.”

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr Clare

was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep

again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the smell of

the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured dripping of

the whey from the wrings downstairs.

XVIII

Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,

but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes,

and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a

man’s, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and

then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,

something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard,

marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern

about his material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he

was one who might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end

of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months’

pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being to

acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a

view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as

circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step

in the young man’s career which had been anticipated neither by himself

nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,

married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly

brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his

father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of

these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only

son who had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one

of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an

academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance,

on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home,

a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to

the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to

contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat

and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

“Why has this been sent to my house?” he asked peremptorily, holding up

the volume.

“It was ordered, sir.”

“Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.”

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

“Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,” he said. “It was ordered by Mr

Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.”

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and

dejected, and called Angel into his study.

“Look into this book, my boy,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

“I ordered it,” said Angel simply.

“What for?”

“To read.”

“How can you think of reading it?”

“How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,

or even religious, work published.”

“Yes—moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!—and for _you_, who

intend to be a minister of the Gospel!”

“Since you have alluded to the matter, father,” said the son, with

anxious thought upon his face, “I should like to say, once for all,

that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not

conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall

always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for

whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be

ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to

liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.”

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar

that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was

stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to enter

the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The

University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of

fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely

religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is now

elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and

out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:

one who could

Indeed opine

That the Eternal and Divine

Did, eighteen centuries ago

In very truth...

Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

“No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),

taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’ as required by the

Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state

of affairs,” said Angel. “My whole instinct in matters of religion is

towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the Hebrews,

‘the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are

made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

“What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting

ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used

for the honour and glory of God?” his father repeated.

“Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.”

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like

his brothers. But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a

stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so

rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to

the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and

wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his

father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this

uniform plan of education for the three young men.

“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last. “I feel that I have

no right to go there in the circumstances.”

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing

themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,

undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable

indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions

of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the “good old family”

(to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him

unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a

balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see

what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or

business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a

woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly

the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an

unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,

and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by

following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual

one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years;

and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a

Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the

right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at

home—farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the

business by a careful apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would

probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued

even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a

student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he

could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the

dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft,

and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it

as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be

heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone

to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind

which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely

sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming

upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter

humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some

day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals

downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his

wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed a lively assembly;

for though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the

family at meals. The longer Clare resided here the less objection had

he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them

in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their

companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his

imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy

known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days’ residence. At close

quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare’s

intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with

whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level

member of the dairyman’s household seemed at the outset an undignified

proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared

retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after day,

the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle.

Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of

monotonousness. His host and his host’s household, his men and his

maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate

themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal’s was

brought home to him: “_A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il

y a plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de

différence entre les hommes_.” The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased

to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied

fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference;

some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright

even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely

Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian—into men who had private views

of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn

each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each

other’s foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own

individual way the road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and

for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic

melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline

of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he

could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for

a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it

desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and

humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which

he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and

evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,

waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate

things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire

acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs

Crick’s orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their

table, it was Angel Clare’s custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner

during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged

flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned window

opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of

cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read

there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between Clare and the window

was the table at which his companions sat, their munching profiles

rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house

door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to

the brim with the morning’s milk. At the further end the great churn

could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving power

being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse

walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess’s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly

reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by

post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so

little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of

neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general

impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his

music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his

head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled to the

hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting

on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling,

and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks

dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with soot, which

quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an

accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his

phantasmal orchestra till he thought: “What a fluty voice one of those

milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one.”

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his

presence in the room was almost forgotten.

“I don’t know about ghosts,” she was saying; “but I do know that our

souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.”

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with

serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were

breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a

gallows.

“What—really now? And is it so, maidy?” he said.

“A very easy way to feel ’em go,” continued Tess, “is to lie on the

grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by

fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and

hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at

all.”

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

“Now that’s a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o’ the miles I’ve

vamped o’ starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or

trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least

notion o’ that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch

above my shirt-collar.”

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the

dairyman’s pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was

only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and

having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace

imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

“What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!” he

said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,

something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He

concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A

casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and

he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was

sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty

milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

XIX

In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without

fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular

pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse

to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being

unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick’s rule to insist on breaking down these

partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in

the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed

in a difficulty. The maids’ private aims, however, were the reverse of

the dairyman’s rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or

ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the operation on

their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a

preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become

delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had

subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she

would have been glad to meet the milchers’ views in this respect. Out

of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular—Dumpling,

Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who,

though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to

her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the

fingers. Knowing, however, the dairyman’s wish, she endeavoured

conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, excepting the

very hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly

chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she

felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The

dairyman’s pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late,

and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she rested

against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

“Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!” she said, blushing; and in making

the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in

spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip

remaining severely still.

“Well, it makes no difference,” said he. “You will always be here to

milk them.”

“Do you think so? I _hope_ I shall! But I don’t _know_.”

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her

grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her

meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were

somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when

the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her

regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his

considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such

delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed

endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction

between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything

within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive

entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the

strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,

constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as

now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that

of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were

poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a

fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up

towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess

her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left

uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass

which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds

emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues

formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went

stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering

cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot,

staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off

upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the

apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite

near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she

had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now

without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of

the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through

her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his

notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the

garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling

weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the

waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the

western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by

accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive

melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great skill; and she

waited, thinking another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he had

desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess,

her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones

reaching her, though he was some distance off.

“What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?” said he. “Are you afraid?”

“Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now when the

apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green.”

“But you have your indoor fears—eh?”

“Well—yes, sir.”

“What of?”

“I couldn’t quite say.”

“The milk turning sour?”

“No.”

“Life in general?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather

serious, don’t you think so?”

“It is—now you put it that way.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t have expected a young girl like you to see

it so just yet. How is it you do?”

She maintained a hesitating silence.

“Come, Tess, tell me in confidence.”

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and

replied shyly—

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if

they had. And the river says,—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’

And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first

of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and

smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and

cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’

... But _you_, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all

such horrid fancies away!”

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid had

just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of

her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her

own native phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard

training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the

age—the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less when he

reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part

but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by

words in _logy_ and _ism_, of sensations which men and women have

vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so

young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not

guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is

as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess’s passing corporeal

blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family

and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a

mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good

reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended

into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz—as she

herself had felt two or three years ago—“My soul chooseth strangling

and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway.”

It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that

was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright’s yard, he was

studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was

obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a rich and

prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.

He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a

monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his

men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem

unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young

man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a

clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were

respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge

of each other’s character and mood without attempting to pry into each

other’s history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her

nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed

life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather

than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every

discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance

between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean

altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all

further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned

something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was

gathering the buds called “lords and ladies” from the bank while he

spoke.

“Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Oh, ’tis only—about my own self,” she said, with a frail laugh of

sadness, fitfully beginning to peel “a lady” meanwhile. “Just a sense

of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted

for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and

seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I’m like the poor Queen

of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me.”

“Bless my soul, don’t go troubling about that! Why,” he said with some

enthusiasm, “I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to

anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like

to take up—”

“It is a lady again,” interrupted she, holding out the bud she had

peeled.

“What?”

“I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to

peel them.”

“Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any

course of study—history, for example?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I

know already.”

“Why not?”

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row

only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just

like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad,

that’s all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past

doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your

coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.”

“What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?”

“I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the

unjust alike,” she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. “But

that’s what books will not tell me.”

“Tess, fie for such bitterness!” Of course he spoke with a conventional

sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to

himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and

lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have

caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and

ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her

lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek,

lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully

peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it

and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an

ebullition of displeasure with herself for her _niaiseries_, and with a

quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good

opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to

forget, so unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family

with that of the knightly d’Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was,

disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr

Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her

sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies

if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere

Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no

spurious d’Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at

Trantridge, but true d’Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly

sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking

the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families

when they had lost all their money and land.

“Mr Clare,” said the dairyman emphatically, “is one of the most

rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family;

and if there’s one thing that he do hate more than another ’tis the

notion of what’s called a’ old family. He says that it stands to reason

that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can’t

have anything left in ’em now. There’s the Billets and the Drenkhards

and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who

used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy ’em all

up now for an old song a’most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you

know, is one of the Paridelles—the old family that used to own lots o’

the lands out by King’s Hintock, now owned by the Earl o’ Wessex, afore

even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke

quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll

never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in

Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength

for more deeds!’ A boy came here t’other day asking for a job, and said

his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he’d never

heard that ’a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he

supposed his folks hadn’t been ’stablished long enough. ‘Ah! you’re the

very boy I want!’ says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi’en;

‘I’ve great hopes of you;’ and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can’t

stomach old families!”

After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion poor Tess was glad

that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even

though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and

become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it

seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville

vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight

afforded into Clare’s character suggested to her that it was largely

owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest

in his eyes.

XX

The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers,

leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures,

took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their

place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long

stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked

out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably,

placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all

positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness

ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin to cramp

natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too

little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing

aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other,

ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of

it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as

surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,

possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,

physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The

sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its

sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare

also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love;

where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,

awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me?

What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?”

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy,

warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of

persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied

with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s

regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of

womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that

strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet

or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.

Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,

which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some

one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an

alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon

discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the

alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No

sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room

and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to Angel’s, calling

him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that

Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The

remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn

on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the

day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the

twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the

twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent,

and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to

get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons

up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did

not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was

generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light

which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of

isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of

the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of

disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he

knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed

in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the

boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are

usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest

were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together

to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection

hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst

all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was

the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a

sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were

merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do

so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face,

though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She

was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole

sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,

and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because

she did not understand them.

“Call me Tess,” she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply

feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer

bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.

Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters,

out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of

the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing

in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads

round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of

puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and

apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in

detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass

were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands

of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew.

From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had

rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they

found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized

them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.

Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk

them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a

white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.

Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the

wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the

mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from

the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair,

like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these

dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal

beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she

was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own

against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s voice, lecturing the

non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old

Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if

the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d

swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and

that’s saying a good deal.”

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common

with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from

the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable

preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its

return journey when the table had been cleared.

XXI

There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The

churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come. Whenever this

happened the dairy was paralyzed. Squish, squash echoed the milk in the

great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle,

Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare,

Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at

the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on

moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation. Even the melancholy

horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair at

each walk round.

“’Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle’s son in Egdon—years!”

said the dairyman bitterly. “And he was nothing to what his father had

been. I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I _don’t_

believe in en; though ’a do cast folks’ waters very true. But I shall

have to go to ’n if he’s alive. O yes, I shall have to go to ’n, if

this sort of thing continnys!”

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman’s desperation.

“Conjuror Fall, t’other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call

‘Wide-O’, was a very good man when I was a boy,” said Jonathan Kail.

“But he’s rotten as touchwood by now.”

“My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and

a clever man a’ were, so I’ve heard grandf’er say,” continued Mr Crick.

“But there’s no such genuine folk about nowadays!”

Mrs Crick’s mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

“Perhaps somebody in the house is in love,” she said tentatively. “I’ve

heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it. Why, Crick—that

maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn’t come

then—”

“Ah yes, yes!—but that isn’t the rights o’t. It had nothing to do with

the love-making. I can mind all about it—’twas the damage to the

churn.”

He turned to Clare.

“Jack Dollop, a ’hore’s-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one

time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her as

he had deceived many afore. But he had another sort o’ woman to reckon

wi’ this time, and it was not the girl herself. One Holy Thursday of

all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now, only there was

no churning in hand, when we zid the girl’s mother coming up to the

door, wi’ a great brass-mounted umbrella in her hand that would ha’

felled an ox, and saying ‘Do Jack Dollop work here?—because I want him!

I have a big bone to pick with he, I can assure ’n!’ And some way

behind her mother walked Jack’s young woman, crying bitterly into her

handkercher. ‘O Lard, here’s a time!’ said Jack, looking out o’ winder

at ’em. ‘She’ll murder me! Where shall I get—where shall I—? Don’t tell

her where I be!’ And with that he scrambled into the churn through the

trap-door, and shut himself inside, just as the young woman’s mother

busted into the milk-house. ‘The villain—where is he?’ says she. ‘I’ll

claw his face for’n, let me only catch him!’ Well, she hunted about

everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying a’most

stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid—or young woman

rather—standing at the door crying her eyes out. I shall never forget

it, never! ’Twould have melted a marble stone! But she couldn’t find

him nowhere at all.”

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the

listeners.

Dairyman Crick’s stories often seemed to be ended when they were not

really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of

finality; though old friends knew better. The narrator went on—

“Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could

never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.

Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by

handpower then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop about

inside. ‘O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!’ says he, popping out his

head. ‘I shall be churned into a pummy!’ (He was a cowardly chap in his

heart, as such men mostly be). ‘Not till ye make amends for ravaging

her virgin innocence!’ says the old woman. ‘Stop the churn you old

witch!’ screams he. ‘You call me old witch, do ye, you deceiver!’ says

she, ‘when ye ought to ha’ been calling me mother-law these last five

months!’ And on went the churn, and Jack’s bones rattled round again.

Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at last ’a promised to make

it right wi’ her. ‘Yes—I’ll be as good as my word!’ he said. And so it

ended that day.”

While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a quick

movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess, pale-faced,

had gone to the door.

“How warm ’tis to-day!” she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the

reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door for

her, saying with tender raillery—

“Why, maidy” (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet

name), “the prettiest milker I’ve got in my dairy; you mustn’t get so

fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we shall be

finely put to for want of ’ee by dog-days, shan’t we, Mr Clare?”

“I was faint—and—I think I am better out o’ doors,” she said

mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment

changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

“’Tis coming!” cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called off

from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she remained

much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking was done she

did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out of doors,

wandering along she knew not whither. She was wretched—O so wretched—at

the perception that to her companions the dairyman’s story had been

rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but herself

seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how

cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience. The evening sun

was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a

solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the

river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend

whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the

household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before

milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess usually

accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was the first

to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the other girls

came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished

sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she dozed again, but

she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly turned her eyes towards

them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were

standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,

the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and

the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with

deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round

one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were

auburn.

“Don’t push! You can see as well as I,” said Retty, the auburn-haired

and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window.

“’Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty

Priddle,” said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. “His thoughts be

of other cheeks than thine!”

Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

“There he is again!” cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair

and keenly cut lips.

“You needn’t say anything, Izz,” answered Retty. “For I zid you kissing

his shade.”

_”What_ did you see her doing?” asked Marian.

“Why—he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the

shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was

standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and

kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn’t.”

“O Izz Huett!” said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett’s cheek.

“Well, there was no harm in it,” she declared, with attempted coolness.

“And if I be in love wi’en, so is Retty, too; and so be you, Marian,

come to that.”

Marian’s full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

“I!” she said. “What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear eyes—dear

face—dear Mr Clare!”

“There—you’ve owned it!”

“So have you—so have we all,” said Marian, with the dry frankness of

complete indifference to opinion. “It is silly to pretend otherwise

amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would

just marry ’n to-morrow!”

“So would I—and more,” murmured Izz Huett.

“And I too,” whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

“We can’t all marry him,” said Izz.

“We shan’t, either of us; which is worse still,” said the eldest.

“There he is again!”

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

“Why?” asked Retty quickly.

“Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best,” said Marian, lowering her

voice. “I have watched him every day, and have found it out.”

There was a reflective silence.

“But she don’t care anything for ’n?” at length breathed Retty.

“Well—I sometimes think that too.”

“But how silly all this is!” said Izz Huett impatiently. “Of course he

won’t marry any one of us, or Tess either—a gentleman’s son, who’s

going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us

to come wi’en as farm-hands at so much a year!”

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian’s plump figure sighed

biggest of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too. Tears came into the

eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest—the last bud of

the Paridelles, so important in the county annals. They watched

silently a little longer, their three faces still close together as

before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But the unconscious

Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more; and, the shades

beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds. In a few minutes they

heard him ascend the ladder to his own room. Marian was soon snoring,

but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for a long time. Retty Priddle

cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This

conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to

swallow that day. Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her

breast. For that matter she knew herself to have the preference. Being

more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except

Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest

ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare’s heart

against these her candid friends. But the grave question was, ought she

to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for

either of them, in a serious sense; but there was, or had been, a

chance of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy for her,

and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed here. Such

unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs

Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be

the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand

acres of Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to

reap. A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him. But

whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could

never conscientiously allow any man to marry her now, and who had

religiously determined that she never would be tempted to do so, draw

off Mr Clare’s attention from other women, for the brief happiness of

sunning herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?

XXII

They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking

were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.

Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He had received

a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter had a

twang.

“And begad, so ’t have!” said the dairyman, who held in his left hand a

wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. “Yes—taste for

yourself!”

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,

also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and

last of all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.

There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize

the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to

which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed—

“’Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn’t a blade left in that mead!”

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a

few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by,

spoilt the butter in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized the

taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

“We must overhaul that mead,” he resumed; “this mustn’t continny!”

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out

together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very

microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it

seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass before

them. However, they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing

to the importance of the search; the dairyman at the upper end with Mr

Clare, who had volunteered to help; then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and

Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and the married dairywomen—Beck

Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances,

consumptive from the winter damps of the water-meads—who lived in their

respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of the

field, returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they

should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture but would have

fallen under the eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious

business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being

discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb’s pungency that

probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season the

whole dairy’s produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did,

they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row—automatic, noiseless;

and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might well

have been excused for massing them as “Hodge”. As they crept along,

stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected

from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish,

moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the

strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with

the rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not, of course,

by accident that he walked next to Tess.

“Well, how are you?” he murmured.

“Very well, thank you, sir,” she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only

half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a little

superfluous. But they got no further in speech just then. They crept

and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his

elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the dairyman, who came next,

could stand it no longer.

“Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back open

and shut!” he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an

excruciated look till quite upright. “And you, maidy Tess, you wasn’t

well a day or two ago—this will make your head ache finely! Don’t do

any more, if you feel fainty; leave the rest to finish it.”

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr Clare also stepped

out of line, and began privateering about for the weed. When she found

him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night before

made her the first to speak.

“Don’t they look pretty?” she said.

“Who?”

“Izzy Huett and Retty.”

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a good

farmer’s wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure her

own wretched charms.

“Pretty? Well, yes—they are pretty girls—fresh looking. I have often

thought so.”

“Though, poor dears, prettiness won’t last long!”

“O no, unfortunately.”

“They are excellent dairywomen.”

“Yes: though not better than you.”

“They skim better than I.”

“Do they?”

Clare remained observing them—not without their observing him.

“She is colouring up,” continued Tess heroically.

“Who?”

“Retty Priddle.”

“Oh! Why it that?”

“Because you are looking at her.”

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further

and cry, “Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and not

a lady; and don’t think of marrying me!” She followed Dairyman Crick,

and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him—never

allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if

their juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three

every chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that

Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and

her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of

either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she

deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by

him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the

opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple

hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping on her

pilgrimage.

XXIII

The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the

atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the

dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell

frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and

hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers had

gone home. Tess and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly,

the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which

lay some three or four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now

been two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed

down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but

this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the deluge,

and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along

the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls

reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the rain

had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards.

This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they would

have clicked through it in their high pattens and boots quite

unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun’s-day, when flesh went

forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting business with

spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their white stockings

and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac gowns, on which every

mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward impediment. They

could hear the church-bell calling—as yet nearly a mile off.

“Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!” said

Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had climbed,

and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of creeping along

its slope till they were past the pool.

“We can’t get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else

going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!”

said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

“And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the

people staring round,” said Marian, “that I hardly cool down again till

we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees.”

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the

bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along

the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic parson’s

son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading

boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a

thistle-spud to finish him off. “He’s not going to church,” said

Marian.

“No—I wish he was!” murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive

controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches

and chapels on fine summer days. This morning, moreover, he had gone

out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or

not. On his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though

they had been so occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to

notice him. He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it

would quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim

idea of how he could help them—one of them in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light

summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a

roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming

close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable

flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the

transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess,

the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed laughter at

their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long

boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

“Are you trying to get to church?” he said to Marian, who was in front,

including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

“Yes, sir; and ’tis getting late; and my colour do come up so—”

“I’ll carry you through the pool—every Jill of you.”

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

“I think you can’t, sir,” said Marian.

“It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense—you are

not too heavy! I’d carry you all four together. Now, Marian, attend,”

he continued, “and put your arms round my shoulders, so. Now! Hold on.

That’s well done.”

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and

Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,

looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers. They

disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing footsteps

and the top ribbon of Marian’s bonnet told where they were. In a few

minutes he reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.

“Here he comes,” she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were

dry with emotion. “And I have to put my arms round his neck and look

into his face as Marian did.”

“There’s nothing in that,” said Tess quickly.

“There’s a time for everything,” continued Izz, unheeding. “A time to

embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now going

to be mine.”

“Fie—it is Scripture, Izz!”

“Yes,” said Izz, “I’ve always a’ ear at church for pretty verses.”

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a

commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She quietly and

dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically marched

off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time Retty’s

throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the

red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at Tess. His

lips could not have pronounced more plainly, “It will soon be you and

I.” Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not help it.

There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most

troublesome of Clare’s burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal, a

dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered. Izz

had ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,

and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a

group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was

now her turn. She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at the

proximity of Mr Clare’s breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her

companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of betraying

her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

“I may be able to clim’ along the bank perhaps—I can clim’ better than

they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!”

“No, no, Tess,” said he quickly. And almost before she was aware, she

was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

“Three Leahs to get one Rachel,” he whispered.

“They are better women than I,” she replied, magnanimously sticking to

her resolve.

“Not to me,” said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

“I hope I am not too heavy?” she said timidly.

“O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating

billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the

froth.”

“It is very pretty—if I seem like that to you.”

“Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour

entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?”

“No.”

“I did not expect such an event to-day.”

“Nor I... The water came up so sudden.”

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to, the

state of breathing belied. Clare stood still and inclinced his face

towards hers.

“O Tessy!” he exclaimed.

The girl’s cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his

eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly

taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no further with

it. No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and

suspension at this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly,

to make the remainder of the distance as long as possible; but at last

they came to the bend, and the rest of their progress was in full view

of the other three. The dry land was reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him, and

she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade them

farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence by

saying—

“No—in all truth; we have no chance against her!” She looked joylessly

at Tess.

“What do you mean?” asked the latter.

“He likes ’ee best—the very best! We could see it as he brought ’ee. He

would have kissed ’ee, if you had encouraged him to do it, ever so

little.”

“No, no,” said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and yet

there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous young

souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism

is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was

to be.

Tess’s heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that

she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing

that the others had also lost their hearts to him. There is contagion

in this sentiment, especially among women. And yet that same hungry

nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the natural result

had followed.

“I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!” she

declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running down).

“I can’t help this, my dear! I don’t think marrying is in his mind at

all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him, as I should

refuse any man.”

“Oh! would you? Why?” said wondering Retty.

“It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite on one side, I

don’t think he will choose either of you.”

“I have never expected it—thought of it!” moaned Retty. “But O! I wish

I was dead!”

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned

to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

“We be friends with her again,” she said to them. “She thinks no more

of his choosing her than we do.”

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

“I don’t seem to care what I do now,” said Marian, whose mood was

turned to its lowest bass. “I was going to marry a dairyman at

Stickleford, who’s asked me twice; but—my soul—I would put an end to

myself rather’n be his wife now! Why don’t ye speak, Izz?”

“To confess, then,” murmured Izz, “I made sure to-day that he was going

to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast, hoping

and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don’t like biding

here at Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome.”

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless

passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness

of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which

they had neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day had

fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and

the torture was almost more than they could endure. The differences

which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this

passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. There was

so much frankness and so little jealousy because there was no hope.

Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude

herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself airs,

in the idea of outshining the others. The full recognition of the

futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its

purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything

to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking

nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist,

ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them a

resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid expectation of

winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring

dripped monotonously downstairs.

“B’ you awake, Tess?” whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett’s voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian

suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed—

“So be we!”

“I wonder what she is like—the lady they say his family have looked out

for him!”

“I wonder,” said Izz.

“Some lady looked out for him?” gasped Tess, starting. “I have never

heard o’ that!”

“O yes—’tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his

family; a Doctor of Divinity’s daughter near his father’s parish of

Emminster; he don’t much care for her, they say. But he is sure to

marry her.”

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up

wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They

pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the

wedding preparations, of the bride’s happiness, of her dress and veil,

of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen upon

themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus they

talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that

there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare’s attentions to

her. It was a passing summer love of her face, for love’s own temporary

sake—nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that

she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who

knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful

than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the

homelier ones whom he ignored.

XXIV

Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a

season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of

fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not

grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by

their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came

in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state

of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the

spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy

scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in

a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures,

but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses

purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he

burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent

Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the

dairyman’s spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the

pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands

of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows

jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the

gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up

from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation

without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and thrushes

crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner of

quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were

lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted places, on

the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids’ hands.

Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still

more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without

driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed

the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the

diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still

for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand

apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them

being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess’s hands above those of

any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow,

Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she

would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and

with her stool at arm’s length, and the pail against her knee, went

round to where they stood. Soon the sound of Old Pretty’s milk fizzing

into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to

go round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had

strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads

into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger

ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield’s habit,

her temple pressing the milcher’s flank, her eyes fixed on the far end

of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking

Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side, it

shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and

upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun

background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat

under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was

remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet

unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty’s tail and Tess’s

pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as

if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal

about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it

was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking

he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin

and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on

the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that

little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting,

infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and

teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old

Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover,

might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it

was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the

sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could

reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted

him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_ over his flesh,

a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and

actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic

sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not

show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like fixity

disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the

rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it

was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the

sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell

back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and,

leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went

quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her,

clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace

with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her

lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank

upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic

cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he

checked himself, for tender conscience’ sake.

“Forgive me, Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did

not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted

to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!”

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two

people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should

have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

“She is angry—she doesn’t know what we mean—she’ll kick over the milk!”

exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned

with the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with

herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still

encircling her. Tess’s eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

“Why do you cry, my darling?” he said.

“O—I don’t know!” she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became

agitated and tried to withdraw.

“Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last,” said he, with a

curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart

had outrun his judgement. “That I—love you dearly and truly I need not

say. But I—it shall go no further now—it distresses you—I am as

surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your

defencelessness—been too quick and unreflecting, will you?”

“N’—I can’t tell.”

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking

of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into

one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few

minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly

sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in

the interval since Crick’s last view of them something had occurred

which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures;

something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have

despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn

and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities.

A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s outlook was to

have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.

End of Phase the Third

Phase the Fourth:

The Consequence

XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who

had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark

unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the

barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime

temperature into the noctambulist’s face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think

of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept apart.

She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the

novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted

him—palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He could hardly

realize their true relations to each other as yet, and what their

mutual bearing should be before third parties thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary

existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed

through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as

from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world

without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman—

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,

How curious you are to me!—

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold, the

absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the engrossing

world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here,

in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had

volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up

elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the yard

each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house, so

humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained

sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance

to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the

landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables breathed

forth “Stay!” The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the

creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so

far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks,

mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.

Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid’s.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the

obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held

partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides Angel

have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external

displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The

impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than

the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life was to

be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a

conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss;

but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who

endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of

the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended

to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to

her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the

particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single

opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic

First Cause—her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look

upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to

caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with

the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her—so fervid and

so impressionable as she was under her reserve—in order that it might

not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop

what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall

into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and, having

arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided

to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which they would be

mutually engaged. As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach her.

He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible to

sound them upon this. In less than five months his term here would have

ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other farms he

would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in a position to

start on his own account. Would not a farmer want a wife, and should a

farmer’s wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who understood

farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned to him by the

silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some

maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

“O no,” said Dairyman Crick. “Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster to

spend a few days wi’ his kinsfolk.”

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the morning

went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither

girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. “He’s getting on

towards the end of his time wi’ me,” added the dairyman, with a phlegm

which unconsciously was brutal; “and so I suppose he is beginning to

see about his plans elsewhere.”

“How much longer is he to bide here?” asked Izz Huett, the only one of

the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the question.

The others waited for the dairyman’s answer as if their lives hung upon

it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian with heat

added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at the meads.

“Well, I can’t mind the exact day without looking at my

memorandum-book,” replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.

“And even that may be altered a bit. He’ll bide to get a little

practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain. He’ll hang

on till the end of the year I should say.”

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society—of “pleasure

girdled about with pain”. After that the blackness of unutterable

night.

At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow

lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of his

father’s Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could, a little

basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of mead, sent

by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The white lane

stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they were staring

into next year, and not at the lane. He loved her; ought he to marry

her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say?

What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would

depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the

temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only,

with no substratum of everlastingness.

His father’s hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of red

stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into view

beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate. Casting a

glance in the direction of the church before entering his home, he

beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of ages between

twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of some other one,

who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat older than the

school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and highly-starched cambric

morning-gown, with a couple of books in her hand.

Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he

hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go and

speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering

reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him. The

young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his father’s

neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents’ quiet hope that he might

wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism and Bible-classes, and was

plainly going to hold a class now. Clare’s mind flew to the

impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var Vale, their rosy faces

court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one the most impassioned of

them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot over

to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother and

father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour, before

they should have gone out to their parish duties. He was a little late,

and they had already sat down to the morning meal. The group at the

table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he entered. They were his

father and mother, his brother the Reverend Felix—curate at a town in

the adjoining county, home for the inside of a fortnight—and his other

brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the classical scholar, and Fellow and

Dean of his College, down from Cambridge for the long vacation. His

mother appeared in a cap and silver spectacles, and his father looked

what in fact he was—an earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in

years about sixty-five, his pale face lined with thought and purpose.

Over their heads hung the picture of Angel’s sister, the eldest of the

family, sixteen years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone

out to Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty

years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual

descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an

Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic

simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his

mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no

further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those

of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other

hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration

for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in

dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying

them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as

he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and

Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his

intelligence—less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of

determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite

amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had

cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He despised the

Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent

through the whole category—which in a way he might have been. One thing

he certainly was—sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush

womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale,

his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either

by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time

Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of

irritation, that it might have resulted far better for mankind if

Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and

not Palestine; and his father’s grief was of that blank description

which could not realize that there might lurk a thousandth part of a

truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition.

He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after. But the

kindness of his heart was such that he never resented anything for

long, and welcomed his son to-day with a smile which was as candidly

sweet as a child’s.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as

formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that

he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he

had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly

foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations—still

unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal

paradise, a nadiral hell—were as foreign to his own as if they had been

the dreams of people on another planet. Latterly he had seen only Life,

felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped,

uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to

check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence

from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a difference in

his manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He

was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the

muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much

information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar

had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young

man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that

he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship

with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,

well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre,

such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a

systematic tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it

was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single

eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they

wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they

wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular

variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned

they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed

him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio’s Holy Families were

admired, they admired Correggio’s Holy Families; when he was decried in

favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal

objection.

If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their

growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert

all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of

the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly

recognized that there were a few unimportant score of millions of

outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men

nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with

and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their

visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more

recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less

self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a

contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was

less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own

teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,

though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel’s former feeling revived in

him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither

saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many

men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their

opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the

complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in

which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference

between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said

in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from

what the outer world was thinking.

“I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,” Felix

was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked

through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity. “And,

therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do entreat you to

endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals.

Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high thinking may

go with plain living, nevertheless.”

“Of course it may,” said Angel. “Was it not proved nineteen hundred

years ago—if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you

think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral

ideals?”

“Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation—it

may be fancy only—that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp.

Hasn’t it struck you, Cuthbert?”

“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know;

each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to

intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better

leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.”

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at

which their father’s and mother’s morning work in the parish usually

concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing

to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though

the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that

their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now an

outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the

dairyman’s somewhat coarsely-laden table. But neither of the old people

had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting

that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in

coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they,

somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their

own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands was

deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs Crick’s

black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they did

them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother to

appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did himself.

“Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy,” observed

Clare’s mother. “But I am sure you will not mind doing without them as

I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I

suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick’s kind present to the

children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his

attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great

pleasure to them; so we did.”

“Of course,” said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

“I found the mead so extremely alcoholic,” continued his mother, “that

it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or

brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet.”

“We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,” added his father.

“But what shall I tell the dairyman’s wife?” said Angel.

“The truth, of course,” said his father.

“I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings very

much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly

I return.”

“You cannot, if we did not,” Mr Clare answered lucidly.

“Ah—no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple.”

“A what?” said Cuthbert and Felix both.

“Oh—’tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,” replied Angel,

blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if

wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.

XXVI

It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found

opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his

heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind

his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of

their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the

room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the

attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale—either in

England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he had

not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had

felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the

purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel

himself unduly slighted.

“As far as worldly wealth goes,” continued his father, “you will no

doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years.”

This considerateness on old Mr Clare’s part led Angel onward to the

other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then

six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming business

he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all

matters—some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic labours

of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be well,

therefore, for him to marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel

put the question—

“What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty

hard-working farmer?”

“A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in

your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters

little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and

neighbour, Dr Chant—”

“But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good

butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and rear

chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate

the value of sheep and calves?”

“Yes; a farmer’s wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable.” Mr

Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before. “I

was going to add,” he said, “that for a pure and saintly woman you will

not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more to

your mother’s mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you used to

show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour Chant’s

daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round

about us for decorating the Communion-table—alter, as I was shocked to

hear her call it one day—with flowers and other stuff on festival

occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as

I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish outbreak which, I am

sure, will not be permanent.”

“Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don’t you

think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant, but

one who, in place of that lady’s ecclesiastical accomplishments,

understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself, would

suit me infinitely better?”

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer’s

wife’s duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the

impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father’s feelings and to advance

the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that

fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every

qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist, and was decidedly

of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had

attached herself to the sound Low Church School of his father; but she

would probably be open to conviction on that point; she was a regular

church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent,

graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in personal appearance,

exceptionally beautiful.

“Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into—a lady, in

short?” asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study

during the conversation.

“She is not what in common parlance is called a lady,” said Angel,

unflinchingly, “for she is a cottager’s daughter, as I am proud to say.

But she _is_ a lady, nevertheless—in feeling and nature.”

“Mercy Chant is of a very good family.”

“Pooh!—what’s the advantage of that, mother?” said Angel quickly. “How

is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have, and

shall have to do?”

“Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,” returned

his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.

“As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the

life I am going to lead?—while as to her reading, I can take that in

hand. She’ll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her.

She’s brim full of poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the

expression. She _lives_ what paper-poets only write... And she is an

unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,

and species you desire to propagate.”

“O Angel, you are mocking!”

“Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost

every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you will

tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel

that I may do worse than choose her.” Angel waxed quite earnest on that

rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming

that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight

when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of

its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right

whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and

Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that

she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of

the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never

would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said finally

that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would not

object to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt

that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet

existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people,

which it would require some tact to overcome. For though legally at

liberty to do as he chose, and though their daughter-in-law’s

qualifications could make no practical difference to their lives, in

the probability of her living far away from them, he wished for

affection’s sake not to wound their sentiment in the most important

decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in

Tess’s life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he

loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the

dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple

formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence

required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He

held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion

and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It was probable that,

in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual

training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the

involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up

to the present day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to

have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been

brought under its influence. This belief was confirmed by his

experience of women, which, having latterly been extended from the

cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how

much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman

of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social

stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of

the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the

Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to

return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel might have

accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays.

He would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the most

appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed

Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing

consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had

been prepared for him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to

mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him, on his

own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well advanced his

own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on

together through the shady lanes, to his father’s account of his parish

difficulties, and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved,

because of his strict interpretations of the New Testament by the light

of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.

“Pernicious!” said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to

recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea. He

told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the

instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and

well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart

squire named d’Urberville, living some forty miles off, in the

neighbourhood of Trantridge.

“Not one of the ancient d’Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?”

asked his son. “That curiously historic worn-out family with its

ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?”

“O no. The original d’Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty or

eighty years ago—at least, I believe so. This seems to be a new family

which had taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly line I

hope they are spurious, I’m sure. But it is odd to hear you express

interest in old families. I thought you set less store by them even

than I.”

“You misapprehend me, father; you often do,” said Angel with a little

impatience. “Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of their being

old. Some of the wise even among themselves ‘exclaim against their own

succession,’ as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically, dramatically, and even

historically, I am tenderly attached to them.”

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too subtle

for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had been about

to relate; which was that after the death of the senior so-called

d’Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable passions,

though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have made him know

better. A knowledge of his career having come to the ears of Mr Clare,

when he was in that part of the country preaching missionary sermons,

he boldly took occasion to speak to the delinquent on his spiritual

state. Though he was a stranger, occupying another’s pulpit, he had

felt this to be his duty, and took for his text the words from St Luke:

“Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee!” The young

man much resented this directness of attack, and in the war of words

which followed when they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr

Clare, without respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

“Dear father,” he said sadly, “I wish you would not expose yourself to

such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!”

“Pain?” said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of

self-abnegation. “The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,

foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give me any

pain, or even his blows? ‘Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we

suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the filth of the

world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this day.’ Those

ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly true at this

present hour.”

“Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?”

“No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state of

intoxication.”

“No!”

“A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt of

murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived to

thank me, and praise God.”

“May this young man do the same!” said Angel fervently. “But I fear

otherwise, from what you say.”

“We’ll hope, nevertheless,” said Mr Clare. “And I continue to pray for

him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never meet

again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in

his heart as a good seed some day.”

Now, as always, Clare’s father was sanguine as a child; and though the

younger could not accept his parent’s narrow dogma, he revered his

practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he revered

his father’s practice even more now than ever, seeing that, in the

question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once thought of

inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless. The same

unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel’s getting a living as a

farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the position of poor

parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel admired it none the

less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was

nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren.

XXVII

An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish

mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a

mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green

trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.

Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial

soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the

summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast

pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very

bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot

that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long distance

off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury

that he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side,

in a way that had been quite foreign to him in his student-days; and,

much as he loved his parents, he could not help being aware that to

come here, as now, after an experience of home-life, affected him like

throwing off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on the

humours of English rural societies being absent in this place,

Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were all

enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the exceedingly

early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the

wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung

like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed

there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening

milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of the

house to the back quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained

snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down;

the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further

distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their

broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the

clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with

the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and

then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess’s, who

in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had

been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up

cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn;

her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their

pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a

moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time;

when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the

outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before

the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look

of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed—“O Mr Clare! How you

frightened me—I—”

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed

relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of

the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare’s tender look

as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

“Dear, darling Tessy!” he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his

face to her flushed cheek. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, Mister me any

more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!”

Tess’s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they

stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the

window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her

inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm,

and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down

in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not

look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the

deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of

blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at

her second waking might have regarded Adam.

“I’ve got to go a-skimming,” she pleaded, “and I have on’y old Deb to

help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is

not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won’t be home till

milking.”

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the

stairs.

“I have come back, Deborah,” said Mr Clare, upwards. “So I can help

Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you

needn’t come down till milking-time.”

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that

afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as

having light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every

time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her

hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she

seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running

her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it

in nature’s way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came

convenient now.

“I may as well say it now as later, dearest,” he resumed gently. “I

wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been

thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall soon

want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife

a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be that

woman, Tessy?”

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an

impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of

proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon

this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without

quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the

bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable

and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

“O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!”

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess’s very heart, and

she bowed her face in her grief.

“But, Tess!” he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more

greedily close. “Do you say no? Surely you love me?”

“O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody’s in the world,”

returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl. “But I

_cannot_ marry you!”

“Tess,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “you are engaged to marry

some one else!”

“No, no!”

“Then why do you refuse me?”

“I don’t want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot! I

only want to love you.”

“But why?”

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—

“Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn’ like you to marry

such as me. She will want you to marry a lady.”

“Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went home.”

“I feel I cannot—never, never!” she echoed.

“Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?”

“Yes—I did not expect it.”

“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he

said. “It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.

I’ll not allude to it again for a while.”

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and

began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact

under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as

she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in

the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring

tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear

advocate, she could never explain.

“I can’t skim—I can’t!” she said, turning away from him.