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