These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of

the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and

bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where

he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.

Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this

position she crouched in a heap.

“In the name of our love, forgive me!” she whispered with a dry mouth.

“I have forgiven you for the same!”

And, as he did not answer, she said again—

“Forgive me as you are forgiven! _I_ forgive _you_, Angel.”

“You—yes, you do.”

“But you do not forgive me?”

“O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;

now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness meet such a

grotesque—prestidigitation as that!”

He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into

horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.

“Don’t—don’t! It kills me quite, that!” she shrieked. “O have mercy

upon me—have mercy!”

He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.

“Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?” she cried out. “Do you

know what this is to me?”

He shook his head.

“I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have

thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be

if I do not! That’s what I have felt, Angel!”

“I know that.”

“I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self! If it is I you

do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me!

Having begun to love you, I love you for ever—in all changes, in all

disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O

my own husband, stop loving me?”

“I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.”

“But who?”

“Another woman in your shape.”

She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive

foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of

imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was

upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth

had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his

view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped forward,

thinking she was going to fall.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said gently. “You are ill; and it is natural

that you should be.”

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look

still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.

“I don’t belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?” she asked

helplessly. “It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he

says.”

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was

ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she

turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had

happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of

the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the

violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had

lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

“Angel,” she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice

of terror having left her now. “Angel, am I too wicked for you and me

to live together?”

“I have not been able to think what we can do.”

“I shan’t ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no

right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married,

as I said I would do; and I shan’t finish the good hussif I cut out and

meant to make while we were in lodgings.”

“Shan’t you?”

“No, I shan’t do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away

from me I shall not follow ’ee; and if you never speak to me any more I

shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.”

“And if I order you to do anything?”

“I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down

and die.”

“You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony

between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of

self-preservation.”

These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate sarcasms

at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat. The

charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only

received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled. She

remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for

her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a

tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it

rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. Meanwhile reillumination

as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought in

his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to

advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some consequent

action was necessary; yet what?

“Tess,” he said, as gently as he could speak, “I cannot stay—in this

room—just now. I will walk out a little way.”

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had

poured out for their supper—one for her, one for him—remained on the

table untasted. This was what their _Agape_ had come to. At tea, two or

three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk

from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to,

roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily

flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting

out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and

the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without

purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black, sinister,

and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of

which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her

footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no

difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning arches of the

great bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain

having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away.

Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick

transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining

overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things of the

universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley as

Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings

being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the

road wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare

without any attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with

dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and

still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great

after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air

had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she

knew that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness; that Time

was chanting his satiric psalm at her then—

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;

Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. For thy

life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; And the veil of

thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.

He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now

insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a

weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help

addressing Clare.

“What have I done—what _have_ I done! I have not told of anything that

interferes with or belies my love for you. You don’t think I planned

it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is

not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you

think me!”

“H’m—well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same.

But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not; and I

will do everything to avoid it.”

But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things

that would have been better left to silence.

“Angel!—Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing

of men.”

“You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.”

“Then will you not forgive me?”

“I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.”

“And love me?”

To this question he did not answer.

“O Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—she knows several

cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it

much—has got over it at least. And yet the woman had not loved him as I

do you!”

“Don’t, Tess; don’t argue. Different societies, different manners. You

almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have

never been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don’t

know what you say.”

“I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!”

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.

“So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your

pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot

help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your

want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit

conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by

informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung

child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete

aristocracy!”

“Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty’s family were once

large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett’s. And the Debbyhouses,

who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I

everywhere; ’tis a feature of our county, and I can’t help it.”

“So much the worse for the county.”

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their

particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to

all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a

cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met

two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one

behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he

obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and

sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field,

progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the

cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation

with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not

bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long

while after.

During the interval of the cottager’s going and coming, she had said to

her husband—

“I don’t see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all

your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I

am not afraid.”

“I don’t wish to add murder to my other follies,” he said.

“I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on account of my

shame. They will not blame you then.”

“Don’t speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have

such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical

laughter than for tragedy. You don’t in the least understand the

quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by

nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by

returning to the house, and going to bed.”

“I will,” said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of

the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries

past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still

worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished,

creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the

temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having

been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying

his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the

main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back,

everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning.

She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to

her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down on

the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to

undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon

the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she

lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had

put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of

that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and

bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time

would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he

had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked

now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that

he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.

When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among

so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which

welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,

surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,

possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.

Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the

manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the

old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a

sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and

listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that

she was sleeping profoundly.

“Thank God!” murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of

bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that

having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now

reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door

again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d’Urberville dames,

whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bedchamber.

In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister

design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of

revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice

of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it

in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing

sensation of a resemblance between them.

The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his

powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible sterile

expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the

face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave, yet who found no

advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing

contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.

Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all

the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but

The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not

indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate

to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which

as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was

telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,

discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the

light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and

indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness,

and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the

happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or

change of mien.

XXXVI

Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though

associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct

embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of

untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the

other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able

to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above

there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the

door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager’s wife,

who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward

just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed

her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She

had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.

When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the

house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,

butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast

laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in

domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the

chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were

passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied

their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the

stairs, called in a conventional voice—

“Breakfast is ready!”

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.

When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the

sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was

fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two

or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he

went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at

the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale

blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face

appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the

bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare’s

tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a

new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the

hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as

if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any

more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like

undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his

sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own

formed a visible object also.

“Angel!” she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as

a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh

the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek

still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left

glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as

pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress

of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further

pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes,

and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set

such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance that he gazed at her

with a stupefied air.

“Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!”

“It is true.”

“Every word?”

“Every word.”

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie

from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort

of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated—

“It is true.”

“Is he living?” Angel then asked.

“The baby died.”

“But the man?”

“He is alive.”

A last despair passed over Clare’s face.

“Is he in England?”

“Yes.”

He took a few vague steps.

“My position—is this,” he said abruptly. “I thought—any man would have

thought—that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social

standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure

rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but—However,

I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.”

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been

needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost

all round.

“Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not

known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I

hoped you would never—”

Her voice grew husky.

“A last way?”

“I mean, to get rid of me. You _can_ get rid of me.”

“How?”

“By divorcing me.”

“Good heavens—how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?”

“Can’t you—now I have told you? I thought my confession would give you

grounds for that.”

“O Tess—you are too, too—childish—unformed—crude, I suppose! I don’t

know what you are. You don’t understand the law—you don’t understand!”

“What—you cannot?”

“Indeed I cannot.”

A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener’s face.

“I thought—I thought,” she whispered. “O, now I see how wicked I seem

to you! Believe me—believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you

could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you

could cast me off if you were determined, and didn’t love me

at—at—all!”

“You were mistaken,” he said.

“O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I

hadn’t the courage. That’s just like me!”

“The courage to do what?”

As she did not answer he took her by the hand.

“What were you thinking of doing?” he inquired.

“Of putting an end to myself.”

“When?”

She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. “Last night,” she

answered.

“Where?”

“Under your mistletoe.”

“My good—! How?” he asked sternly.

“I’ll tell you, if you won’t be angry with me!” she said, shrinking.

“It was with the cord of my box. But I could not—do the last thing! I

was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name.”

The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not

volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting

his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, “Now, listen to this.

You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You

will promise me as your husband to attempt that no more.”

“I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was.”

“Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description.”

“But, Angel,” she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon

him, “it was thought of entirely on your account—to set you free

without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to

get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it

with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined

husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love you more,

if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do it, since

there’s no other way of escape for ’ee. I feel I am so utterly

worthless! So very greatly in the way!”

“Ssh!”

“Well, since you say no, I won’t. I have no wish opposed to yours.”

He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her

activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be

feared.

Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more or

less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their

glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing

each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the

amount of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over, he rose,

and telling her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went

off to the miller’s in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying

that business, which had been his only practical reason for coming

here.

When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form

crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.

He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then,

without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began

clearing the table and setting it in order.

The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon Tess,

but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she left her

assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room,

waited for the reappearance of Angel’s form behind the bridge.

About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a

quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served

by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where they had

washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the

sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own

motion.

“How punctual!” he said.

“Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge,” said she.

The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing

during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the

old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him

greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in

use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining

conventual buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in

the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself

through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way and,

when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made

herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare’s shape appeared at the door. “You must not work like this,” he

said. “You are not my servant; you are my wife.”

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. “I may think myself

that—indeed?” she murmured, in piteous raillery. “You mean in name!

Well, I don’t want to be anything more.”

“You _may_ think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said hastily, with tears in her accents. “I thought

I—because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not

respectable enough long ago—and on that account I didn’t want to marry

you, only—only you urged me!”

She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost have

won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of his

constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there

lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam,

which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It

had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of

Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and,

with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to

follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who

remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He

waited till her sobbing ceased.

“I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,” he said,

in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. “It isn’t

a question of respectability, but one of principle!”

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being

still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with

such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by

appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of

sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.

But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and

hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed

almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he

could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked;

thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just now have been

Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.

This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding

ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did she—the

formerly free and independent Tess—venture to make any advances. It was

on the third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the

flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said “Goodbye,” and she

replied in the same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the

way of his. He did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he

turned hastily aside—

“I shall be home punctually.”

Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had he

tried to reach those lips against her consent—often had he said gaily

that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and

honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and

other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now. He

observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently—

“You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we

should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that

would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it is

only for form’s sake.”

“Yes,” said Tess absently.

He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a

moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at

least.

Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same house,

truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It was

evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed

activities in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She was

awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent

flexibility. His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer

expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of going away from

him during his absence at the mill; but she feared that this, instead

of benefiting him, might be the means of hampering and humiliating him

yet more if it should become known.

Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been

unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with

thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former

pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself,

“What’s to be done—what’s to be done?” and by chance she overheard him.

It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had

hitherto prevailed.

“I suppose—you are not going to live with me—long, are you, Angel?” she

asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely mechanical

were the means by which she retained that expression of chastened calm

upon her face.

“I cannot” he said, “without despising myself, and what is worse,

perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you in the

ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you. And,

let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my difficulties. How can

we live together while that man lives?—he being your husband in nature,

and not I. If he were dead it might be different... Besides, that’s not

all the difficulty; it lies in another consideration—one bearing upon

the future of other people than ourselves. Think of years to come, and

children being born to us, and this past matter getting known—for it

must get known. There is not an uttermost part of the earth but

somebody comes from it or goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of

wretches of our flesh and blood growing up under a taunt which they

will gradually get to feel the full force of with their expanding

years. What an awakening for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly

say ‘Remain’ after contemplating this contingency? Don’t you think we

had better endure the ills we have than fly to others?”

Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before.

“I cannot say ‘Remain,’” she answered, “I cannot; I had not thought so

far.”

Tess’s feminine hope—shall we confess it?—had been so obstinately

recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary

intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against

his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not

incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she

had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity.

Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to

hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to herself: yet

that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation had

now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never

thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who

would scorn her was one that brought deadly convictions to an honest

heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had

already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing

better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading

any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she

could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the

fiat, “You shall be born,” particularly if addressed to potential issue

of hers.

Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess

had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might

result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had

bewailed as misfortune to herself.

She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the

self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto

arose in Clare’s own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her

exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it promisingly.

She might have added besides: “On an Australian upland or Texan plain,

who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?”

Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the momentary presentment

as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right. The

intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its

husband’s, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be

addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his

ears from his own fastidious brain.

It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd

paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We

do not say it. Yet Clare’s love was doubtless ethereal to a fault,

imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence

is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating

an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She

found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she

had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman

than the one who had excited his desire.

“I have thought over what you say,” she remarked to him, moving her

forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring

that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. “It is quite true, all

of it; it must be. You must go away from me.”

“But what can you do?”

“I can go home.”

Clare had not thought of that.

“Are you sure?” he inquired.

“Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and done.

You once said that I was apt to win men against their better judgement;

and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change your

plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your

repentance and my sorrow will be terrible.”

“And you would like to go home?” he asked.

“I want to leave you, and go home.”

“Then it shall be so.”

Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a difference

between the proposition and the covenant, which she had felt only too

quickly.

“I feared it would come to this,” she murmured, her countenance meekly

fixed. “I don’t complain, Angel, I—I think it best. What you said has

quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we

should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry

with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of my bygones,

you yourself might be tempted to say words, and they might be

overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what only hurts me now would

torture and kill me then! I will go—to-morrow.”

“And I shall not stay here. Though I didn’t like to initiate it, I have

seen that it was advisable we should part—at least for a while, till I

can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write to you.”

Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous; but,

as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths

of this gentle being she had married—the will to subdue the grosser to

the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the

spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the

tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.

He may have observed her look, for he explained—

“I think of people more kindly when I am away from them”; adding

cynically, “God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day,

for weariness; thousands have done it!”

That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack

also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part the

next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures

thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom any

parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she

knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised over the

other—on her part independently of accomplishments—would probably in

the first days of their separation be even more potent than ever, time

must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments against accepting

her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more strongly in the

boreal light of a remoter view. Moreover, when two people are once

parted—have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment—new

growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen

accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten.

XXXVII

Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it

in the Valley of the Froom.

Not long after one o’clock there was a slight creak in the darkened

farmhouse once the mansion of the d’Urbervilles. Tess, who used the

upper chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step of

the staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the door of

her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the stream of

moonlight with a curiously careful tread. He was in his shirt and

trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she perceived that

his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy. When he reached

the middle of the room he stood still and murmured in tones of

indescribable sadness—

“Dead! dead! dead!”

Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force, Clare would

occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such as

he had done on the night of their return from market just before their

marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the man who

had insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought

him into that somnambulistic state now.

Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart, that, awake

or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If he had

entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her

trust in his protectiveness.

Clare came close, and bent over her. “Dead, dead, dead!” he murmured.

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of

unmeasurable woe, he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled

her in the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as

much respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her across

the room, murmuring—

“My poor, poor Tess—my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so

true!”

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours, were

inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to

save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an

end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute

stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering what he was

going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the

landing.

“My wife—dead, dead!” he said.

He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the

banister. Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near

extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart

on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this

precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If

they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit,

how desirable.

However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support of

the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips—lips in the day-time

scorned. Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and

descended the staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken

him, and they reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands

from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar and

passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge of

the door. But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room for

extension in the open air, he lifted her against his shoulder, so that

he could carry her with ease, the absence of clothes taking much from

his burden. Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction of the

river a few yards distant.

His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and she

found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have

done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him that it

pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute possession,

to dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling, under the hovering

terror of to-morrow’s separation, to feel that he really recognized her

now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that

recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of

harming her.

Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of—that Sunday morning when he

had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who

had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which Tess

could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but

proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill,

at length stood still on the brink of the river.

Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland, frequently

divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves around

little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying themselves

as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to which he had

brought her was such a general confluence, and the river was

proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow

foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away,

leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the

speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and

Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the day-time young men

walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had possibly

observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the plank, and,

sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.

Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was lonely, the

river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of

accomplishment. He might drown her if he would; it would be better than

parting to-morrow to lead severed lives.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting, and

splitting the moon’s reflected face. Spots of froth travelled past, and

intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could both fall

together into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped

together that they could not be saved; they would go out of the world

almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to her, or to

him for marrying her. His last half-hour with her would have been a

loving one, while if they lived till he awoke, his day-time aversion

would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a

transient dream.

The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a

movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How she

valued her own life had been proved; but his—she had no right to tamper

with it. He reached the other side with her in safety.

Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds, and

taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they reached

the ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the

empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with a turn for

grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself. In this Clare carefully

laid Tess. Having kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as

if a greatly desired end were attained. Clare then lay down on the

ground alongside, when he immediately fell into the deep dead slumber

of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a log. The spurt of mental

excitement which had produced the effort was now over.

Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the

season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him to

remain here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to himself

he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled

to certain death. She had heard of such deaths after sleep-walking. But

how could she dare to awaken him, and let him know what he had been

doing, when it would mortify him to discover his folly in respect of

her? Tess, however, stepping out of her stone confine, shook him

slightly, but was unable to arouse him without being violent. It was

indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the

sheet being but a poor protection. Her excitement had in a measure kept

her warm during the few minutes’ adventure; but that beatific interval

was over.

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she

whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could

summon—

“Let us walk on, darling,” at the same time taking him suggestively by

the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had

apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward seemed

to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit,

and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to the

stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which they stood at

the manor-house door. Tess’s feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt

her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in his woollen

stockings and appeared to feel no discomfort.

There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his own

sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood,

to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions she

thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the

exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed.

As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew

little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night’s

excursion, though, as regarded himself, he may have been aware that he

had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep

deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the

brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had

some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding. But the realities

of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the other subject.

He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that

if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the

light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure

reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far,

therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the

resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but

denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn;

standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there.

Clare no longer hesitated.

At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,

he showed his weariness from the night’s effort so unmistakeably that

Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the

reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know

that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his

common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised his

dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like

laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.

It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection

of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a

conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it

gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.

He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon

after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end—the

temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the

incident of the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The

luggage was put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and

the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their precipitate

departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the mill-work

was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement

that was true so far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the

manner of their leaving to suggest a _fiasco_, or that they were not

going together to visit friends.

Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such

solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind

up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick

a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their

unhappy state.

To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left the carriage by

the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and

descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut,

and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed

her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in

which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away behind the

cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of their first embrace.

The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours mean, the rich

soil mud, and the river cold.

Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing

into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays

and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs

Crick emerged from the house, and several others of their old

acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not seem to be there.

Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which

affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement

of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as

would have been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had

been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the

story of Marian and Retty. The later had gone home to her father’s, and

Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere. They feared she would

come to no good.

To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her

favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she

and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul,

there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one

who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly

were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way,

as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as

“we”, and yet sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually

stiff and embarrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up

to their profession of unity, different from the natural shyness of

young couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs

Crick said to her husband—

“How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood

like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn’t it

strike ’ee that ’twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and

she’s not now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.”

They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards

Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where

Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and entering

the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did

not know their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been

passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance

and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother’s house it

was here that he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom

in the driver’s presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps

on foot along one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the

man to wait a few minutes they strolled away.

“Now, let us understand each other,” he said gently. “There is no anger

between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I

will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go

to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it—if it

is desirable, possible—I will come to you. But until I come to you it

will be better that you should not try to come to me.”

The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of

her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of

one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had

done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the

point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.

“Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?”

“Just so.”

“May I write to you?”

“O yes—if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not be

the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.”

“I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my

punishment ought to be; only—only—don’t make it more than I can bear!”

That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she

made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane,

notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed,

he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood of

long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his best

advocate. Pride, too, entered into her submission—which perhaps was a

symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the

whole d’Urberville family—and the many effective chords which she could

have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.

The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now

handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had

obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest

in which seemed to be Tess’s for her life only (if he understood the

wording of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for

safety; and to this she readily agreed.

These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the carriage, and

handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her.

Taking next his own bag and umbrella—the sole articles he had brought

with him hitherwards—he bade her goodbye; and they parted there and

then.

The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an

unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one

moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to

do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and

in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar

emendations of his own—

God’s _not_ in his heaven: All’s _wrong_ with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own

way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.

XXXVIII

As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her youth

began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor. Her

first thought was how would she be able to face her parents?

She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the

village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who had

kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably

left on New Year’s Day, the date when such changes were made. Having

received no intelligence lately from her home, she asked the

turnpike-keeper for news.

“Oh—nothing, miss,” he answered. “Marlott is Marlott still. Folks have

died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter married this

week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John’s own house, you know; they

was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that

John’s own folk was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pure Drop till past eleven o’clock.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

better place to go to in the world.

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

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

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

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

with—

“But where’s thy gentleman, Tess?”

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

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

made her way to the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

about to plunge her arms in anew.

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

this time—we sent the cider—”

“Yes, mother; so I am.”

“Going to be?”

“No—I am married.”

“Married! Then where’s thy husband?”

“Oh, he’s gone away for a time.”

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

“Yes, Tuesday, mother.”

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

“Yes, he’s gone.”

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

get, say I!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

relaxed at last.

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

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

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

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

him!”

“But you sinned enough to marry him first!”

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

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

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

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

wish to be fair to him!”

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

thing, into a chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord-a-Lord!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

table at Rolliver’s for more than an hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that day.

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

unfortunately had come herself.

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

mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of

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

touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of

others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

not live apart from each other.

XXXIX

It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself

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

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

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

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

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

footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.

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

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

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

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

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

a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond

description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of an outsider.

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

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

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

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

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

had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat

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

perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

his face was thinner now.

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

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

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

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

entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.

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

surprise us!”

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

because I’ve decided to go to Brazil.”

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

“Are they? I hadn’t thought of that.”

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

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

their son’s marriage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

before he started a second time—with her.

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

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

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

infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost

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

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

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

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

its bitterness.

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

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

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

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

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

large eyes violety-bluey-blackish.”

“I did, mother.”

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

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

“Scarcely.”

“You were her first love?”

“Of course.”

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

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

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

accustomed to an outdoor life.”

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

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

observed to Mrs Clare—

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

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

had in the usual course of our reading?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aforesaid chapter—

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

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

girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She

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

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

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

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

but thou excellest them all.”

When prayers were over, his mother said—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.

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

I am quite sure you are not yourself.”

“I am not, quite, mother,” said he.

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

you quarrelled in these three weeks?”

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

difference—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition.”

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the

secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this

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

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

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

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

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

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

failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how

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

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

his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In

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

that the defective can be more than the entire.

XL

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

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

notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who had

emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months. After

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

humanity to mysticism.

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

excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

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

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

Perhaps a cloister would be preferable.”

“A cloister! O, Angel Clare!”

“Well?”

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

Catholicism.”

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

state, Angel Clare.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

welfare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

directed to apply to his father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal

together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why is that?”

Izz looked down.

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

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

journeying.

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

Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.

“Thank ’ee, Mr Clare,” she said.

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

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

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

Izz jumped up beside him.

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

to Brazil.”

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

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

reconnoitre—to see what life there is like.”

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

observation.

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

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

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

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

“And Marian?”

Izz lowered her voice.

“Marian drinks.”

“Indeed!”

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

“And you!”

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

singing afore breakfast now!”

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

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

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

there a bit.”

“Why was that falling-off?”

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

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

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

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

woman who loved ’ee!”

“Really!”

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

never guess it till now!”

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

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

spoken since her avowal.

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

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

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

revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,

instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring

manner?

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

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

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

of her?”

“You truly wish me to go?”

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

least love me disinterestedly.”

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

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

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

there—that’s good enough for me.”

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

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

civilization, that is to say.”

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

there’s no other way!”

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

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

signs of affection.

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

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

together!”

“More than Tess?”

She shook her head.

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

“How’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was

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

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

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

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

back to where your lane branches off.”

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

I!”

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

she had done.

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

Izz, don’t spoil it by regret!”

She stilled herself by degrees.

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

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

“Because I have a loving wife already.”

“Yes, yes! You have!”

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

earlier, and she hopped down.

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

ill-considered, so ill-advised!”

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

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

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

her hand.

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

had to bear!”

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

mar their adieux.

“I forgive ’ee, sir!” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

faithful friend. Promise.”

She gave the promise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

from her and her arrival home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

deterred him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

embarkation.

XLI

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

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

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

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

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

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

projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary

period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.

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

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

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

shape in a vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fall back upon her sovereigns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

them the money?

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

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

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

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

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

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

to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

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

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

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

parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to

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

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

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

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

state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

was not essentially hers at all.

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

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

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

other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and

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

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

assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English

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

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

surprised on Brazilian plains.

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

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

account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

its purlieus.

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

served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required

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

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

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

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

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

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

almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual

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

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

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

that she felt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she worked again as of old.

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

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

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

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

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

contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by

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

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

attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of

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

natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been

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

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

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

nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November

afternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

said—

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

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

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

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

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

live there now.”

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

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

her, and she returned him no answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

against any possibility of discovery.

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

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

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

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

crept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

had at present no fear.

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

little while it became day in the wood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bear more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as she had heard them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these

propensities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their

weaker fellows in Nature’s teeming family.

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

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

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

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

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

come—to look for them a second time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XLII

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

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

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

silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her the

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

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

long as it was held by Clare.

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

young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks. Somehow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against

aggressive admiration, she went on her uneven way.

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

companion.

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

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

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

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

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

think scornfully of me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The maiden’s mouth is cold

. . . . .

Fold over simple fold

Binding her head.

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

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

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

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

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

directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but

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

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

such that she was determined to accept no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she would never have deliberately voluteered for.

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

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

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

valley of her birth and the valley of her love.

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

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

those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

out towards France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shelter, and watched the evening close in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and she responded readily to Marian’s greeting.

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

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

first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.

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

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

been beating ’ee? Not _he_?”

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

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

thoughts.

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

little white collar at the dairy).

“I know it, Marian.”

“You’ve lost it travelling.”

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

and so I didn’t put it on.”

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

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

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

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

Marian paused.

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

should live like this!”

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

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

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

their own.”

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

be something outside ye both.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“O—anything! Will you speak for me?”

“You will do better by speaking for yourself.”

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

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

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

Tess, promised anything she asked.

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

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

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

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

“That’s true; I could not!”

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

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

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

turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to

unrelieved levels.