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

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

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

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

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

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

could perform as readily as men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reproach upon him.

XLIII

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

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

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

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

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

words, the village of a resident squire’s tenantry, the village of free

or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner’s village, farmed with the

land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with

physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel

Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a

stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of

the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of

siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose

white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of

each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the

business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the

root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.

Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole

field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without

features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of

skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white

vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and

nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face

looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the

white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls

crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical

regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian

“wroppers”—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep

their gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that

reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.

The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads

would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of

the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they

bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of

their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist

in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said

that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would

not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,

that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally

upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till

they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really

meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is

called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in

a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,

then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work

on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,

demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They

were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and

loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land

where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,

emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of

the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the

irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating

Marian’s remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains

of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers

clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in

memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

“You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley from

here when ’tis fine,” said Marian.

“Ah! Can you?” said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to

enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian’s will had

a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon

wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited

Tess to drink. Tess’s unassisted power of dreaming, however, being

enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest

sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

“I’ve got used to it,” she said, “and can’t leave it off now. ’Tis my

only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn’t; and you can do without it

perhaps.”

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian’s, but upheld by the dignity

of being Angel’s wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian’s

differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon

rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which

process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook

before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could

shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was

frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen

masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She

had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she

persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare’s character would

lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped

flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely

obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom

was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;

and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old

times they had spent out there.

“Ah,” said Marian, “how I should like another or two of our old set to

come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and

talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o’ the old things

we used to know, and make it all come back a’most, in seeming!”

Marian’s eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions

returned. “I’ll write to Izz Huett,” she said. “She’s biding at home

doing nothing now, I know, and I’ll tell her we be here, and ask her to

come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.”

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of

this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days

later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,

and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and

measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few

lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had

put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered

with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving

it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a

staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and

horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none

had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the

crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from

salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when

strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on

the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical

eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in

inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had

ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;

which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by

the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of

colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the

expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless

birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen

which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The

traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb

impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for

the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of

the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to

uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.

There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not

of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,

penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less

than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow

came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable

that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the

night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that

the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she

lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown

through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest

powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that

it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when

she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a

snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to

see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the

time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian

arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at

reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,

as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered

medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their

thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and

across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed

the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and

individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,

arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it

licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with

slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could

in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather

than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes

that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an

achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly

cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

“Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,” said Marian.

“Depend upon’t, they keep just in front o’t all the way from the North

Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching

weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!

Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does

it good.”

“You mustn’t talk about him to me, Marian,” said Tess severely.

“Well, but—surely you care for ’n! Do you?”

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced

in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,

putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

“Well, well, I know you do. But ’pon my body, it is a rum life for a

married couple! There—I won’t say another word! Well, as for the

weather, it won’t hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is

fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I’m

stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can’t think why maister should have

set ’ee at it.”

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long

structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was

carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the

evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the

women to draw from during the day.

“Why, here’s Izz!” said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her

mother’s home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance

so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow

began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her

mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been

afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a

neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start

remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen

of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight

quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly

had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that

occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did

all kinds of men’s work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,

ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted

reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with

some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the

press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under

which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam

being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves

diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors

upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls

pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the

presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and

Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.

Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode

up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and

remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned

at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she

perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she

had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her

history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,

when he said, “So you be the young woman who took my civility in such

ill part? Be drowned if I didn’t think you might be as soon as I heard

of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the

first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the

road, when you bolted; but now I think I’ve got the better of you.” He

concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a

clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could

read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had

nothing to fear from her employer’s gallantry; it was rather the

tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare’s treatment of him. Upon

the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to

endure it.

“You thought I was in love with ’ee I suppose? Some women are such

fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there’s nothing like

a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o’ young wenches’ heads;

and you’ve signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg

my pardon?”

“I think you ought to beg mine.”

“Very well—as you like. But we’ll see which is master here. Be they all

the sheaves you’ve done to-day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“’Tis a very poor show. Just see what they’ve done over there”

(pointing to the two stalwart women). “The rest, too, have done better

than you.”

“They’ve all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made

no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what

we do.”

“Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.”

“I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the

others will do.”

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not

have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than

gallantry. When two o’clock arrived the professional reed-drawers

tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,

tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done

likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer

hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at

the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, “Now, we’ve got it all to

ourselves.” And so at last the conversation turned to their old

experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their

affection for Angel Clare.

“Izz and Marian,” said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was

extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: “I can’t

join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will

see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the

present, he is my husband.”

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls

who had loved Clare. “He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,” she

said; “but I don’t think he is a too fond husband to go away from you

so soon.”

“He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!”

pleaded Tess.

“He might have tided ’ee over the winter.”

“Ah—that’s owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won’t argue

it,” Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. “Perhaps there’s a

good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,

without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.”

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went

on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under

their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing

sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the

hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of

wheat-ears at her feet.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it!” cried Marian. “It wants

harder flesh than yours for this work.”

Just then the farmer entered. “Oh, that’s how you get on when I am

away,” he said to her.

“But it is my own loss,” she pleaded. “Not yours.”

“I want it finished,” he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went

out at the other door.

“Don’t ’ee mind him, there’s a dear,” said Marian. “I’ve worked here

before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your

number.”

“I don’t like to let you do that. I’m taller than you, too.”

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and

reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw

had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her

succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening

the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She

lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the

straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of

bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur

of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject

already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch

the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they

were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up

and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the

previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at

five o’clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her

stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without

suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,

to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of

sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great

door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every

afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a

romantic vein.

“I should not have thought it of him—never!” she said in a dreamy tone.

“And I loved him so! I didn’t mind his having _you_. But this about Izz

is too bad!”

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger

with the bill-hook.

“Is it about my husband?” she stammered.

“Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don’t ’ee tell her’; but I am sure I can’t help

it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil

with him.”

Tess’s face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves

straightened. “And did Izz refuse to go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Anyhow he changed his mind.”

“Pooh—then he didn’t mean it! ’Twas just a man’s jest!”

“Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.”

“He didn’t take her!”

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,

burst out crying.

“There!” said Marian. “Now I wish I hadn’t told ’ee!”

“No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on

in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I

ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,

but he didn’t say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won’t dally

like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving

everything to be done by him!”

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no

longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into

the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously

writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish

it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it

next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to

fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this

elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him

abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she

write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?

XLIV

By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the

direction which they had taken more than once of late—to the distant

Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband’s parents that she had

been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to

them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no

claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these

notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own

parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This

self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with

her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity

to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts.

She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive

such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had been

established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that family, in a

season of impulse, writing his name in a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz’s tale, there was a limit

to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written to her?

He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her know of the

locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to

notify his address. Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it

for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon the courage of

solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and express her

grief at his silence. If Angel’s father were the good man she had heard

him represented to be, he would be able to enter into her heart-starved

situation. Her social hardships she could conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was the

only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the

cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it would

be necessary to walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she

would have to allow herself a long day for the undertaking by rising

early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by a

hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to try

the experiment. At four o’clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs

and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still favourable,

the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the

journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage a

little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her

departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest

guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she,

knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was

indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now elapsed since her sad

marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from the wreck of

her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple

country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray woollen

gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her face and

neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

“’Tis a thousand pities your husband can’t see ’ee now—you do look a

real beauty!” said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the

threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow

candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself

to the situation; she could not be—no woman with a heart bigger than a

hazel-nut could be—antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence

which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and

strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine

feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let her

go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn. They

heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her

full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without any

particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been

prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only

a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to

start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear

wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs’-backs,

was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting

was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to

that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which

stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the

dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the atmosphere down

there was a deep blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred

acres in which she was now accustomed to toil, there were little fields

below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked

from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was

whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet

it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not

love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in

the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing

above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from

Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy,

with the dell between them called “The Devil’s Kitchen”. Still

following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone

pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or

murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the straight and

deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which as soon as she

reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane into the small

town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the

distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily

enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage

by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by

way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the

spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess’s confidence decrease, and her

enterprise loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such

staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in

danger of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a gate on

the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the Vicar

and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in her eyes. She

wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a week-day. Such a

good man might be prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday,

never realizing the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent upon

her to go on now. She took off the thick boots in which she had walked

thus far, put on her pretty thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing

the former into the hedge by the gatepost where she might readily find

them again, descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived

from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew near the

parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing

favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably in

the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of imagination,

dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was the residence of

near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion,

divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth, death, and

after-death, they were the same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang the

door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No; the thing

was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be

risen to and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of

the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles’ walk, led

her to support herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip

and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The wind was so nipping

that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping

incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A

piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer’s

dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to

rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she walked

out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And though she

looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to return, it was

with a breath of relief that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her

that she might have been recognized (though how she could not tell),

and orders been given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but

determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future

distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all

the windows.

Ah—the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She

remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the

household, servants included, going to morning-service, and, as a

consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore,

only necessary to wait till the service was over. She would not make

herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past

the church into the lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the

people began pouring out, and Tess found herself in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of

small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman

out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her

pace, and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat

between its hedges till the Vicar’s family should have lunched, and it

might be convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the

churchgoers, except two youngish men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were

beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest

discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation,

did not fail to recognize in those noises the quality of her husband’s

tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans,

Tess’s one dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her

disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront them; for

though she felt that they could not identify her, she instinctively

dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly they walked, the more briskly

walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking a short quick stroll

before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs

chilled with sitting through a long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill—a ladylike young woman,

somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle _guindée_ and prudish.

Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law

brought them so nearly behind her back that she could hear every word

of their conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly

interested her till, observing the young lady still further in front,

one of them remarked, “There is Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her.”

Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel’s

life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have

married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much

without previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the

brothers proceeded to say: “Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see

that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in

throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a

queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I

don’t know; but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from

him.”

“I can’t say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered

marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was

begun by his extraordinary opinions.”

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them

without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and

passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps

and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the

three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this

point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all

three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that

time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their

discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with

his umbrella, and dragged something to light.

“Here’s a pair of old boots,” he said. “Thrown away, I suppose, by some

tramp or other.”

“Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and

so excite our sympathies,” said Miss Chant. “Yes, it must have been,

for they are excellent walking-boots—by no means worn out. What a

wicked thing to do! I’ll carry them home for some poor person.”

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for

her with the crook of his stick; and Tess’s boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen

veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party

had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were

running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless

impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own

condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not

contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward omens. It

was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel’s wife felt

almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by

those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been

inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the

sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less

starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.

As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those

habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt

how hopeless life was for their owner.

“Ah!” she said, still sighing in pity of herself, “_they_ didn’t know

that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these

pretty ones _he_ bought for me—no—they did not know it! And they didn’t

think that _he_ chose the colour o’ my pretty frock—no—how could they?

If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don’t

care much for him, poor thing!”

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of

judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way

without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this

feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her

estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was

precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and

Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme

cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among

mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans

and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries

of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have

recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a

fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come

not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in

her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and

there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that

starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the

Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw

up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she

could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But

it was done with a sorry shake of the head. “It is nothing—it is

nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about

the looks of a castaway like me!”

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no

sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of

Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and

paused by milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she

descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of

Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such

contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again

sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while

the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the

street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.

“The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?” she said.

“No, my dear,” said the old woman. “’Tis too soon for that; the bells

hain’t strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder

barn. A ranter preaches there between the services—an excellent, fiery,

Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don’t go to hear’n! What comes in

the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.”

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against

the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central

part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn

not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the

preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon

catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The

sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on

justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This

fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in

a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a

dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address,

she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration—

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not

obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently

set forth, crucified among you?”

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in

finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the view of

Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to

detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.

He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had

wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of

awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about

mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first

grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and

had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this

change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which,

impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d’Urberville. Her

face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the

barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the

great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open,

so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the

preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern

breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man

whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable

occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood

upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three

o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction

that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess

ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established

as a fact indeed.

End of Phase the Fifth

Phase the Sixth:

The Convert

XLV

Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d’Urberville since

her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to

permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was

unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a

converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear

overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor

advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,

and to behold it now!... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of

mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable

moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a

modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract

the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief

in his identity.

To Tess’s sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_, a

grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out

of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years

earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose

that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of

sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The

lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express

supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated

as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious

rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the

bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with

such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was

almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to

put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the

incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his

wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted

from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which

Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a

misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer.

D’Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his

wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural

in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at

hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner, the

greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian

history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict

definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would

allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had

obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon

her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his

presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,

seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the words

that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she faced

him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung confusedly

in every other direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap

every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however, but a short time;

for Tess’s energies returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as

fast as she was able past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their

relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side

of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend,

it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon his

altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh extinguished.

She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed

with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her clothing—so alive was she

to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of

that barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy

with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its

trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time

displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still

engirdled her. It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical

despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present

existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.

Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at

right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely

to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its

dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single

figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings

which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting

this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning

she saw approaching that well-known form—so strangely accoutred as the

Methodist—the one personage in all the world she wished not to

encounter alone on this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she

yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake

her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by

the feelings within him.

“Tess!” he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

“Tess!” he repeated. “It is I—Alec d’Urberville.”

She then looked back at him, and he came up.

“I see it is,” she answered coldly.

“Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,” he added, with a

slight laugh, “there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in

seeing me like this. But—I must put up with that.... I heard you had

gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed

you?”

“I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!”

“Yes—you may well say it,” he returned grimly, as they moved onward

together, she with unwilling tread. “But don’t mistake me; I beg this

because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice

it—how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a

momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me, it was

natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think

me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all

persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the

wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously

wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in

view—nothing more.”

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: “Have

you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.”

“_I_ have done nothing!” said he indifferently. “Heaven, as I have been

telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can

pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself—the old

Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or

not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was brought

about, and I hope you will be interested enough at least to listen.

Have you ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster—you must have

done do?—old Mr Clare; one of the most earnest of his school; one of

the few intense men left in the Church; not so intense as the extreme

wing of Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but

quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger of whom

are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by their sophistries, till

they are but the shadow of what they were. I only differ from him on

the question of Church and State—the interpretation of the text, ‘Come

out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord’—that’s all. He

is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more

souls in this country than any other man you can name. You have heard

of him?”

“I have,” she said.

“He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of

some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted

him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show

me the way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that some day

I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit—that those who came to

scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange magic in his

words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of my mother hit me most;

and by degrees I was brought to see daylight. Since then my one desire

has been to hand on the true view to others, and that is what I was

trying to do to-day; though it is only lately that I have preached

hereabout. The first months of my ministry have been spent in the North

of England among strangers, where I preferred to make my earliest

clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before undergoing that

severest of all tests of one’s sincerity, addressing those who have

known one, and have been one’s companions in the days of darkness. If

you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at

yourself, I am sure—”

“Don’t go on with it!” she cried passionately, as she turned away from

him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. “I can’t

believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to

me like this, when you know—when you know what harm you’ve done me!

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making

the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a

fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your

pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! Out upon such—I don’t believe

in you—I hate it!”

“Tess,” he insisted; “don’t speak so! It came to me like a jolly new

idea! And you don’t believe me? What don’t you believe?”

“Your conversion. Your scheme of religion.”

“Why?”

She dropped her voice. “Because a better man than you does not believe

in such.”

“What a woman’s reason! Who is this better man?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Well,” he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to

spring out at a moment’s notice, “God forbid that I should say I am a

good man—and you know I don’t say any such thing. I am new to goodness,

truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes.”

“Yes,” she replied sadly. “But I cannot believe in your conversion to a

new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don’t last!”

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been

leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon the

familiar countenance and form, remained contemplating her. The inferior

man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor even

entirely subdued.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien, instantly

withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with a flush, “I

beg your pardon!” And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment

which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly

tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing

wrong.

“No, no! Don’t beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide your

good looks, why don’t you keep it down?”

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, “It was mostly to keep off

the wind.”

“It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this,” he went on; “but it is

better that I should not look too often on you. It might be dangerous.”

“Ssh!” said Tess.

“Well, women’s faces have had too much power over me already for me not

to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they; and it

reminds me of the old times that I would forget!”

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and then

as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was going

with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate.

Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted thereon

in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he

knew who had been at the pains to blazon these announcements. He told

her that the man was employed by himself and others who were working

with him in that district, to paint these reminders that no means might

be left untried which might move the hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called “Cross-in-Hand.” Of all

spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It

was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by

artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative

beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar

which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in

any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand. Differing

accounts were given of its history and purport. Some authorities stated

that a devotional cross had once formed the complete erection thereon,

of which the present relic was but the stump; others that the stone as

it stood was entire, and that it had been fixed there to mark a

boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow, whatever the origin of the relic,

there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in

the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most

phlegmatic passer-by.

“I think I must leave you now,” he remarked, as they drew near to this

spot. “I have to preach at Abbot’s-Cernel at six this evening, and my

way lies across to the right from here. And you upset me somewhat too,

Tessy—I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and get strength....

How is it that you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good

English?”

“I have learnt things in my troubles,” she said evasively.

“What troubles have you had?”

She told him of the first one—the only one that related to him.

D’Urberville was struck mute. “I knew nothing of this till now!” he

next murmured. “Why didn’t you write to me when you felt your trouble

coming on?”

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: “Well—you will

see me again.”

“No,” she answered. “Do not again come near me!”

“I will think. But before we part come here.” He stepped up to the

pillar. “This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but I

fear you at moments—far more than you need fear me at present; and to

lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you

will never tempt me—by your charms or ways.”

“Good God—how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is furthest

from my thought!”

“Yes—but swear it.”

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand

upon the stone and swore.

“I am sorry you are not a believer,” he continued; “that some

unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no

more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who

knows what may not happen? I’m off. Goodbye!”

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his eyes

again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down in the

direction of Abbot’s-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation,

and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his

pocket a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter,

worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D’Urberville opened the

letter. It was dated several months before this time, and was signed by

Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer’s unfeigned joy at

d’Urberville’s conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in

communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr Clare’s

warm assurance of forgiveness for d’Urberville’s former conduct and his

interest in the young man’s plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would

much have liked to see d’Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he

had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have helped him to

enter a theological college to that end; but since his correspondent

had possibly not cared to do this on account of the delay it would have

entailed, he was not the man to insist upon its paramount importance.

Every man must work as he could best work, and in the method towards

which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D’Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself

cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till

his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer

troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her

nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary

shepherd.

“What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?” she asked of

him. “Was it ever a Holy Cross?”

“Cross—no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was

put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured

there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie

underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks

at times.”

She felt the _petite mort_ at this unexpectedly gruesome information,

and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to

Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she

approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were

talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman,

in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly

air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a

stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a moment the

voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview

had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which

had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came close, the

girl turned serenely and recognized her, the young man walking off in

embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess’s

excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not

explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact,

began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just

witnessed.

“He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at

Talbothays,” she explained indifferently. “He actually inquired and

found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he’s been

in love wi’ me these two years. But I’ve hardly answered him.”

XLVI

Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was afield.

The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles

erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her. On the

sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of

new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite

its front was a long mound or “grave”, in which the roots had been

preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at the uncovered end,

chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from each root, and

throwing it after the operation into the slicer. A man was turning the

handle of the machine, and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes,

the fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by the sounds of

the snuffling wind, the smart swish of the slicing-blades, and the

choppings of the hook in Tess’s leather-gloved hand.

The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where the

swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of darker

brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each of these

something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up

and down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a man,

the plough going between them, turning up the cleared ground for a

spring sowing.

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far

beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from

the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up

the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere

point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon perceived to

be a man in black, arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The

man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes, continually

observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him

till her companion directed her attention to his approach.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a

semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the

free-and-easy Alec d’Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there

was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder

seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was already on Tess’s face,

and she pulled her curtained hood further over it.

D’Urberville came up and said quietly—

“I want to speak to you, Tess.”

“You have refused my last request, not to come near me!” said she.

“Yes, but I have a good reason.”

“Well, tell it.”

“It is more serious than you may think.”

He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some

distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the

machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec’s words reaching other ears.

D’Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer,

turning his back to the latter.

“It is this,” he continued, with capricious compunction. “In thinking

of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to inquire as to

your worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think of

it. But I see now that it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew

you—harder than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to

me!”

She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent head,

her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her trimming of

the swedes. By going on with her work she felt better able to keep him

outside her emotions.

“Tess,” he added, with a sigh of discontent,—“yours was the very worst

case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had resulted till

you told me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole

blame was mine—the whole unconventional business of our time at

Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am but the base

imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say

in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their

girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked

may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of

simple indifference.”

Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and

taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the

mere fieldwoman alone marking her.

“But it is not that I came to say,” d’Urberville went on. “My

circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at

Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and

devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I

shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask you is,

will you put it in my power to do my duty—to make the only reparation I

can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go

with me?... I have already obtained this precious document. It was my

old mother’s dying wish.”

He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling of

embarrassment.

“What is it?” said she.

“A marriage licence.”

“O no, sir—no!” she said quickly, starting back.

“You will not? Why is that?”

And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely

the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d’Urberville’s face. It was

unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her had

been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

“Surely,” he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked

round at the labourer who turned the slicer.

Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there. Informing

the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she wished to

walk a little way, she moved off with d’Urberville across the

zebra-striped field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed section

he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped forward on

the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.

“You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?” he

repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.

“I cannot.”

“But why?”

“You know I have no affection for you.”

“But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps—as soon as you really

could forgive me?”

“Never!”

“Why so positive?”

“I love somebody else.”

The words seemed to astonish him.

“You do?” he cried. “Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is

morally right and proper any weight with you?”

“No, no, no—don’t say that!”

“Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing

feeling which you will overcome—”

“No—no.”

“Yes, yes! Why not?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“You must in honour!”

“Well then.... I have married him.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at her.

“I did not wish to tell—I did not mean to!” she pleaded. “It is a

secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, _please_ will

you, keep from questioning me? You must remember that we are now

strangers.”

“Strangers—are we? Strangers!”

For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he

determinedly chastened it down.

“Is that man your husband?” he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign

the labourer who turned the machine.

“That man!” she said proudly. “I should think not!”

“Who, then?”

“Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!” she begged, and flashed her

appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.

D’Urberville was disturbed.

“But I only asked for your sake!” he retorted hotly. “Angels of

heaven!—God forgive me for such an expression—I came here, I swear, as

I thought for your good. Tess—don’t look at me so—I cannot stand your

looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or

since! There—I won’t lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of

you had waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished

with all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage might be a

sanctification for us both. ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by

the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband,’ I

said to myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must bear the

disappointment!”

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

“Married. Married!... Well, that being so,” he added, quite calmly,

tearing the licence slowly into halves and putting them in his pocket;

“that being prevented, I should like to do some good to you and your

husband, whoever he may be. There are many questions that I am tempted

to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in opposition to your wishes.

Though, if I could know your husband, I might more easily benefit him

and you. Is he on this farm?”

“No,” she murmured. “He is far away.”

“Far away? From _you_? What sort of husband can he be?”

“O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out—”

“Ah, is it so!... That’s sad, Tess!”

“Yes.”

“But to stay away from you—to leave you to work like this!”

“He does not leave me to work!” she cried, springing to the defence of

the absent one with all her fervour. “He don’t know it! It is by my own

arrangement.”

“Then, does he write?”

“I—I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to ourselves.”

“Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my

fair Tess—”

In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was

on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not

express the life or shape of those within.

“You must not—you must not!” she cried fearfully, slipping her hand

from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. “O, will

you go away—for the sake of me and my husband—go, in the name of your

own Christianity!”

“Yes, yes; I will,” he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to

her he turned to leave. Facing round, however, he said, “Tess, as God

is my judge, I meant no humbug in taking your hand!”

A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not

noticed in their preoccupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice

reached her ear:

“What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o’ day?”

Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had

inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his

field.

“Don’t speak like that to her!” said d’Urberville, his face blackening

with something that was not Christianity.

“Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa’sons have to do with she?”

“Who is the fellow?” asked d’Urberville, turning to Tess.

She went close up to him.

“Go—I do beg you!” she said.

“What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his face what a churl

he is.”

“He won’t hurt me. _He’s_ not in love with me. I can leave at

Lady-Day.”

“Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But—well, goodbye!”

Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having

reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which Tess

took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being independent

of sex. To have as a master this man of stone, who would have cuffed

her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences.

She silently walked back towards the summit of the field that was the

scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview which had just taken

place that she was hardly aware that the nose of Groby’s horse almost

touched her shoulders.

“If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I’ll see

that you carry it out,” he growled. “’Od rot the women—now ’tis one

thing, and then ’tis another. But I’ll put up with it no longer!”

Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the farm as

he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once received, she

did for one moment picture what might have been the result if she had

been free to accept the offer just made her of being the monied Alec’s

wife. It would have lifted her completely out of subjection, not only

to her present oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to

despise her. “But no, no!” she said breathlessly; “I could not have

married him now! He is so unpleasant to me.”

That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing from

him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection. Any one

who had been in a position to read between the lines would have seen

that at the back of her great love was some monstrous fear—almost a

desperation—as to some secret contingencies which were not disclosed.

But again she did not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go with

him, and perhaps he did not care for her at all. She put the letter in

her box, and wondered if it would ever reach Angel’s hands.

After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and

brought on the day which was of great import to agriculturists—the day

of the Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were

entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and

those of the farming population who thought of changing their places

duly attended at the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly all

the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended flight, and early in the

morning there was a general exodus in the direction of the town, which

lay at a distance of from ten to a dozen miles over hilly country.

Though Tess also meant to leave at the quarter-day, she was one of the

few who did not go to the fair, having a vaguely-shaped hope that

something would happen to render another outdoor engagement

unnecessary.

It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time, and

one would almost have thought that winter was over. She had hardly

finished her dinner when d’Urberville’s figure darkened the window of

the cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to herself

to-day.

Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she could

hardly in reason run away. D’Urberville’s knock, his walk up to the

door, had some indescribable quality of difference from his air when

she last saw him. They seemed to be acts of which the doer was ashamed.

She thought that she would not open the door; but, as there was no

sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped

back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself down into a chair

before speaking.

“Tess—I couldn’t help it!” he began desperately, as he wiped his heated

face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. “I felt that I

must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been

thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I cannot get rid

of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do

harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!”

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet

Tess did not pity him.

“How can I pray for you,” she said, “when I am forbidden to believe

that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my

account?”

“You really think that?”

“Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.”

“Cured? By whom?”

“By my husband, if I must tell.”

“Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I remember you

hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe

in these matters, Tess?” he asked. “You seem to have no

religion—perhaps owing to me.”

“But I have. Though I don’t believe in anything supernatural.”

D’Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

“Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?”

“A good deal of it.”

“H’m—and yet I’ve felt so sure about it,” he said uneasily.

“I believe in the _spirit_ of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my

dear husband.... But I don’t believe—”

Here she gave her negations.

“The fact is,” said d’Urberville drily, “whatever your dear husband

believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the

least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you

women. Your mind is enslaved to his.”

“Ah, because he knew everything!” said she, with a triumphant

simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could

hardly have deserved, much less her husband.

“Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from another

person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to teach you such

scepticism!”

“He never forced my judgement! He would never argue on the subject with

me! But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after inquiring

deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than what I might

believe, who hadn’t looked into doctrines at all.”

“What used he to say? He must have said something?”

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel

Clare’s remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she

recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use

when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking

aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare’s

accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.

“Say that again,” asked d’Urberville, who had listened with the

greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d’Urberville thoughtfully murmured the

words after her.

“Anything else?” he presently asked.

“He said at another time something like this”; and she gave another,

which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the

pedigree ranging from the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ to Huxley’s

_Essays_.

“Ah—ha! How do you remember them?”

“I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn’t wish me to; and

I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts. I can’t say I

quite understand that one; but I know it is right.”

“H’m. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don’t know yourself!”

He fell into thought.

“And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his,” she resumed. “I didn’t

wish it to be different. What’s good enough for him is good enough for

me.”

“Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?”

“No—I never told him—if I am an infidel.”

“Well—you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after all! You don’t

believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore, do no

despite to your conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought to

preach it, but, like the devils, I believe and tremble, for I suddenly

leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you.”

“How?”

“Why,” he said aridly; “I have come all the way here to see you to-day!

But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where I have

undertaken to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two this

afternoon, and where all the brethren are expecting me this minute.

Here’s the announcement.”

He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day,

hour, and place of meeting, at which he, d’Urberville, would preach the

Gospel as aforesaid.

“But how can you get there?” said Tess, looking at the clock.

“I cannot get there! I have come here.”

“What, you have really arranged to preach, and—”

“I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there—by reason of my

burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised!—No, by my word and

truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now! Why I

did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of

all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you

saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one

petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt, and you are she. But

you may well despise me now! I thought I worshipped on the mountains,

but I find I still serve in the groves! Ha! ha!”

“O Alec d’Urberville! what does this mean? What have I done!”

“Done?” he said, with a soulless sneer in the word. “Nothing

intentionally. But you have been the means—the innocent means—of my

backsliding, as they call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those

‘servants of corruption’ who, ‘after they have escaped the pollutions

of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome’—whose latter

end is worse than their beginning?” He laid his hand on her shoulder.

“Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I

saw you again!” he said freakishly shaking her, as if she were a child.

“And why then have you tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I

saw those eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a

maddening mouth since Eve’s!” His voice sank, and a hot archness shot

from his own black eyes. “You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of

Babylon—I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!”

“I couldn’t help your seeing me again!” said Tess, recoiling.

“I know it—I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact remains. When

I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to think that

I had no legal right to protect you—that I could not have it; whilst he

who has it seems to neglect you utterly!”

“Don’t speak against him—he is absent!” she cried in much excitement.

“Treat him honourably—he has never wronged you! O leave his wife before

any scandal spreads that may do harm to his honest name!”

“I will—I will,” he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream. “I

have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies at

the fair—it is the first time I have played such a practical joke. A

month ago I should have been horrified at such a possibility. I’ll go

away—to swear—and—ah, can I! to keep away.” Then, suddenly: “One clasp,

Tessy—one! Only for old friendship—”

“I am without defence. Alec! A good man’s honour is in my

keeping—think—be ashamed!”

“Pooh! Well, yes—yes!”

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His eyes

were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses of

those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of

his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as

in a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.

Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement

to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as

echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and

continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if

his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that

his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his

whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless

man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his

mother’s death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm

served to chill its effervescence to stagnation. He said to himself, as

he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had

handed on to him, “That clever fellow little thought that, by telling

her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!”

XLVII

It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The

dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is

nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight

rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here

through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a

rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light

increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the

summit. They were busily “unhaling” the rick, that is, stripping off

the thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this

was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their

whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having

insisted upon their being on the spot thus early to get the job over if

possible by the end of the day. Close under the eaves of the stack, and

as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to

serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels

appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up

a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black,

with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The

long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which

radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much

daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum

mobile_ of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless

being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance,

with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation

of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from

Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region

of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to

amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of

it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served

vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from

farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam

threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a

strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon

himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes

around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly

necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom

compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his

Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his

engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between

agriculture and him.

While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his portable

repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning air

quivered. He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His fire was

waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds

he could make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond its

extent the environment might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the

same to him. If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what he

called himself, he replied shortly, “an engineer.”

The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their places,

the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby—or, as they called

him, “he”—had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on

the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed it, her business

being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who

stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and

spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every grain in one

moment.

They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two,

which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped

on till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for half an hour;

and on starting again after the meal the whole supplementary strength

of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick,

which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch was eaten

as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple

of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheel

continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill

to the very marrow all who were near the revolving wire-cage.

The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they

had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when

everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to

their thinking, though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on

the corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine,

including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many

words. It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so

severely, and began to make her wish that she had never come to

Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the corn-rick—Marian, who was one of them,

in particular—could stop to drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now

and then, or to exchange a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their

faces or cleared the fragments of straw and husk from their clothing;

but for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the

man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with

untied sheaves, could not stop either, unless Marian changed places

with her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby’s

objections that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.

For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was

chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in

selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength

with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may

have been true. The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech,

increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the

regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their

heads she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had

come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a

second rick watching the scene and Tess in particular. He was dressed

in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay

walking-cane.

“Who is that?” said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed the

inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.

“Somebody’s fancy-man, I s’pose,” said Marian laconically.

“I’ll lay a guinea he’s after Tess.”

“O no. ’Tis a ranter pa’son who’s been sniffing after her lately; not a

dandy like this.”

“Well—this is the same man.”

“The same man as the preacher? But he’s quite different!”

“He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off

his whiskers; but he’s the same man for all that.”

“D’ye really think so? Then I’ll tell her,” said Marian.

“Don’t. She’ll see him soon enough, good-now.”

“Well, I don’t think it at all right for him to join his preaching to

courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and

she, in a sense, a widow.”

“Oh—he can do her no harm,” said Izz drily. “Her mind can no more be

heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon from

the hole he’s in. Lord love ’ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching,

nor the seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when ’twould be

better for her that she should be weaned.”

Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her

post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine

that she could scarcely walk.

“You ought to het a quart o’ drink into ’ee, as I’ve done,” said

Marian. “You wouldn’t look so white then. Why, souls above us, your

face is as if you’d been hagrode!”

It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired, her

discovery of her visitor’s presence might have the bad effect of taking

away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend

by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the gentleman came

forward and looked up.

Tess uttered a short little “Oh!” And a moment after she said, quickly,

“I shall eat my dinner here—right on the rick.”

Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did

this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and the

rest descended, and sat under the straw-stack.

The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d’Urberville, the late Evangelist,

despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that

the original _Weltlust_ had come back; that he had restored himself, as

nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four years older, to

the old jaunty, slapdash guise under which Tess had first known her

admirer, and cousin so-called. Having decided to remain where she was,

Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight of the ground, and began

her meal; till, by-and-by, she heard footsteps on the ladder, and

immediately after Alec appeared upon the stack—now an oblong and level

platform of sheaves. He strode across them, and sat down opposite of

her without a word.

Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake which

she had brought with her. The other workfolk were by this time all

gathered under the rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable

retreat.

“I am here again, as you see,” said d’Urberville.

“Why do you trouble me so!” she cried, reproach flashing from her very

finger-ends.

“_I_ trouble _you_? I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?”

“Sure, I don’t trouble you any-when!”

“You say you don’t? But you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that you

turned upon me with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come to me

just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever

since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings,

which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream, had suddenly

found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at once gushed

through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith; and it is you who

have done it!”

She gazed in silence.

“What—you have given up your preaching entirely?” she asked. She had

gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modern thought to

despise flash enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was somewhat appalled.

In affected severity d’Urberville continued—

“Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was to

address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows what I

am thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No doubt they pray

for me—weep for me; for they are kind people in their way. But what do

I care? How could I go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in

it?—it would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind! Among them I

should have stood like Hymenaeus and Alexander, who were delivered over

to Satan that they might learn not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge

you have taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years

after, you find me a Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me,

perhaps to my complete perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call

you, this is only my way of talking, and you must not look so horribly

concerned. Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty

face and shapely figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me—that

tight pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet—you field-girls

should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger.” He

regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical laugh

resumed: “I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I

thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have

let go the plough for her sake as I do!”

Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency

failed her, and without heeding he added:

“Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other,

after all. But to speak seriously, Tess.” D’Urberville rose and came

nearer, reclining sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon his

elbow. “Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what you said

that _he_ said. I have come to the conclusion that there does seem

rather a want of common-sense in these threadbare old propositions; how

I could have been so fired by poor Parson Clare’s enthusiasm, and have

gone so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make out! As for

what you said last time, on the strength of your wonderful husband’s

intelligence—whose name you have never told me—about having what they

call an ethical system without any dogma, I don’t see my way to that at

all.”

“Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at least,

if you can’t have—what do you call it—dogma.”

“O no! I’m a different sort of fellow from that! If there’s nobody to

say, ‘Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are dead;

do that, and it will be a bad thing for you,’ I can’t warm up. Hang it,

I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s

nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t

either!”

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain

two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of

mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare’s reticence,

to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions

rather than reasons, she could not get on.

“Well, never mind,” he resumed. “Here I am, my love, as in the old

times!”

“Not as then—never as then—’tis different!” she entreated. “And there

was never warmth with me! O why didn’t you keep your faith, if the loss

of it has brought you to speak to me like this!”

“Because you’ve knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet

head! Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon

him! Ha-ha—I’m awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the

same! Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too. For

all your closeness, I see you are in a bad way—neglected by one who

ought to cherish you.”

She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips were

dry, and she was ready to choke. The voices and laughs of the workfolk

eating and drinking under the rick came to her as if they were a

quarter of a mile off.

“It is cruelty to me!” she said. “How—how can you treat me to this

talk, if you care ever so little for me?”

“True, true,” he said, wincing a little. “I did not come to reproach

you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say that I don’t like you to be

working like this, and I have come on purpose for you. You say you have

a husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I’ve never seen

him, and you’ve not told me his name; and altogether he seems rather a

mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I think I am

nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of

trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words of the

stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me. Don’t you know

them, Tess?—‘And she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not

overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find him; then

shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was

it better with me than now!’ ... Tess, my trap is waiting just under

the hill, and—darling mine, not his!—you know the rest.”

Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but she

did not answer.

“You have been the cause of my backsliding,” he continued, stretching

his arm towards her waist; “you should be willing to share it, and

leave that mule you call husband for ever.”

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her

skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she

passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It

was heavy and thick as a warrior’s, and it struck him flat on the

mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a

trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec

fiercely started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing

appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began

dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon controlled himself,

calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his bleeding

lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. “Now, punish me!” she

said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the

sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck. “Whip me, crush me;

you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out.

Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!”

“O no, no, Tess,” he said blandly. “I can make full allowance for this.

Yet you most unjustly forget one thing, that I would have married you

if you had not put it out of my power to do so. Did I not ask you

flatly to be my wife—hey? Answer me.”

“You did.”

“And you cannot be. But remember one thing!” His voice hardened as his

temper got the better of him with the recollection of his sincerity in

asking her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her

side and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook under his grasp.

“Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will be your master

again. If you are any man’s wife you are mine!”

The threshers now began to stir below.

“So much for our quarrel,” he said, letting her go. “Now I shall leave

you, and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon. You

don’t know me yet! But I know you.”

She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned. D’Urberville

retreated over the sheaves, and descended the ladder, while the workers

below rose and stretched their arms, and shook down the beer they had

drunk. Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the renewed

rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the buzzing drum as

one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless succession.

XLVIII

In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick was to be

finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see to

work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on the

morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with even

less intermission than usual.

It was not till “nammet”-time, about three o’clock, that Tess raised

her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little

surprise at seeing that Alec d’Urberville had come back, and was

standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes,

and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss. It meant

that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and carefully

abstained from gazing in that direction.

Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the

straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six

o’clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But the

unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,

notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the

insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young

hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense stack of

straw where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared as the

_faeces_ of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky a wrathful

shine—all that wild March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst

forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the

threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping

garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.

A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and

Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt

and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face

coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was

the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken

bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated her

from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing duties with her as

they had done. The incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her

frame participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which

her arms worked on independently of her consciousness. She hardly knew

where she was, and did not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her

hair was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and

saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great

upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the

gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob’s

ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a

yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.

She knew that Alec d’Urberville was still on the scene, observing her

from some point or other, though she could not say where. There was an

excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its

final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men unconnected

with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting

characters of all descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious

pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the

base of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in the

direction of the Giant’s Hill by Abbot’s-Cernel dissolved away, the

white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon that lay towards

Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the last hour or

two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could not get near

enough to speak to, the other women having kept up their strength by

drinking ale, and Tess having done without it through traditionary

dread, owing to its results at her home in childhood. But Tess still

kept going: if she could not fill her part she would have to leave; and

this contingency, which she would have regarded with equanimity and

even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a terror since

d’Urberville had begun to hover round her.

The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so low that

people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess’s surprise Farmer

Groby came up on the machine to her, and said that if she desired to

join her friend he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would

send somebody else to take her place. The “friend” was d’Urberville,

she knew, and also that this concession had been granted in obedience

to the request of that friend, or enemy. She shook her head and toiled

on.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The

creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they

were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their

last refuge, they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud

shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions

that one of the rats had invaded her person—a terror which the rest of

the women had guarded against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and

self-elevation. The rat was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of

dogs, masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and

confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum

slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the machine to the

ground.

Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching, was promptly at

her side.

“What—after all—my insulting slap, too!” said she in an underbreath.

She was so utterly exhausted that she had not strength to speak louder.

“I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything you say or

do,” he answered, in the seductive voice of the Trantridge time. “How

the little limbs tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you

are; and yet you need have done nothing since I arrived. How could you

be so obstinate? However, I have told the farmer that he has no right

to employ women at steam-threshing. It is not proper work for them; and

on all the better class of farms it has been given up, as he knows very

well. I will walk with you as far as your home.”

“O yes,” she answered with a jaded gait. “Walk wi’ me if you will! I do

bear in mind that you came to marry me before you knew o’ my state.

Perhaps—perhaps you are a little better and kinder than I have been

thinking you were. Whatever is meant as kindness I am grateful for;

whatever is meant in any other way I am angered at. I cannot sense your

meaning sometimes.”

“If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist you.

And I will do it with much more regard for your feelings than I

formerly showed. My religious mania, or whatever it was, is over. But I

retain a little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all that’s

tender and strong between man and woman, trust me! I have enough and

more than enough to put you out of anxiety, both for yourself and your

parents and sisters. I can make them all comfortable if you will only

show confidence in me.”

“Have you seen ’em lately?” she quickly inquired.

“Yes. They didn’t know where you were. It was only by chance that I

found you here.”

The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess’s fagged face between the twigs

of the garden-hedge as she paused outside the cottage which was her

temporary home, d’Urberville pausing beside her.

“Don’t mention my little brothers and sisters—don’t make me break down

quite!” she said. “If you want to help them—God knows they need it—do

it without telling me. But no, no!” she cried. “I will take nothing

from you, either for them or for me!”

He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived with the

household, all was public indoors. No sooner had she herself entered,

laved herself in a washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than

she fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under the wall, by

the light of her own little lamp wrote in a passionate mood—

My own Husband,

Let me call you so—I must—even if it makes you angry to think of

such an unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you in my trouble—I have

no one else! I am so exposed to temptation, Angel. I fear to say

who it is, and I do not like to write about it at all. But I cling

to you in a way you cannot think! Can you not come to me now, at

once, before anything terrible happens? O, I know you cannot,

because you are so far away! I think I must die if you do not come

soon, or tell me to come to you. The punishment you have measured

out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved—and you are

right and just to be angry with me. But, Angel, please, please, not

to be just—only a little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it,

and come to me! If you would come, I could die in your arms! I

would be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me!

Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to blame you

for going away, and I know it was necessary you should find a farm.

Do not think I shall say a word of sting or bitterness. Only come

back to me. I am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate!

I do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one little

line, and say, “_I am coming soon_”, I will bide on, Angel—O, so

cheerfully!

It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be

faithful to you in every thought and look, that even when a man

speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you.

Have you never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when we

were at the dairy? If you have, how can you keep away from me? I am

the same woman, Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very

same!—not the one you disliked but never saw. What was the past to

me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became

another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the

early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a

little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see

that you were strong enough to work this change in me, you would

perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you

always to love me! I ought to have known that such as that was not

for poor me. But I am sick at heart, not only for old times, but

for the present. Think—think how it do hurt my heart not to see you

ever—ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little

minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it

might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is the

word they use, since I wish to be truthful). Perhaps I am what they

say. But I do not value my good looks; I only like to have them

because they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at least

one thing about me worth your having. So much have I felt this,

that when I met with annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my

face in a bandage as long as people would believe in it. O Angel, I

tell you all this not from vanity—you will certainly know I do

not—but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to you? I am,

as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will not do. It cannot be

that I shall yield one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an

accident might lead to, and I so defenceless on account of my first

error. I cannot say more about this—it makes me too miserable. But

if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last state

will be worse than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me

come at once, or at once come to me!

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if

I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get

glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I

don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the field, because I

grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long

for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet

you, my own dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what

threatens me!—

Your faithful heartbroken

Tess

XLIX

The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet

Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and

the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid

by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the

human world seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was

purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to send her

communications through his father, whom he kept pretty well informed of

his changing addresses in the country he had gone to exploit for

himself with a heavy heart.

“Now,” said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope,

“if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next

month, as he told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his

plans; for I believe it to be from his wife.” He breathed deeply at the

thought of her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent on to

Angel.

“Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely,” murmured Mrs Clare. “To

my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used. You should have

sent him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith and given him the

same chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out of it under

proper influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders after all. Church

or no Church, it would have been fairer to him.”

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her

husband’s peace in respect to their sons. And she did not vent this

often; for she was as considerate as she was devout, and knew that his

mind too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this matter. Only

too often had she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs for

Angel with prayers. But the uncompromising Evangelical did not even now

hold that he would have been justified in giving his son, an

unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had given to the two

others, when it was possible, if not probable, that those very

advantages might have been used to decry the doctrines which he had

made it his life’s mission and desire to propagate, and the mission of

his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a pedestal under the

feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt the

unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike

inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.

Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned over

this treatment of him as Abraham might have mourned over the doomed

Isaac while they went up the hill together. His silent self-generated

regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which his wife rendered

audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never

been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with

agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated him

and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken place. At

first they had supposed it must be something of the nature of a serious

aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally alluded to the

intention of coming home to fetch her; from which expressions they

hoped the division might not owe its origin to anything so hopelessly

permanent as that. He had told them that she was with her relatives,

and in their doubts they had decided not to intrude into a situation

which they knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess’s letter was intended were gazing at this time

on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which was

bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent towards

the coast. His experiences of this strange land had been sad. The

severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after his arrival had

never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost decided to

relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as the bare

possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change of view a

secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country in

his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had

suffered, died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English

farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child

would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause to

dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the babe

therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and again

trudge on.

Angel’s original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a

northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this place

in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English

agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape

from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years. What

arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its

pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now

began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they

wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who

was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only

in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history

lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began to

oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He could no

longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say that was in

spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time with

her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt herself

at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances or her

feelings. He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her

motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus her

silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really said if he

had understood!—that she adhered with literal exactness to orders which

he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural fearlessness she

asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect the

true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the

country, another man rode beside him. Angel’s companion was also an

Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part

of the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and they

spoke of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that curious

tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant lands, to

entrust to strangers details of their lives which they would on no

account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man as they rode

along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more

peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the

social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the

irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial

curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;

thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she

would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from

her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm. Angel’s companion

was struck down with fever, and died by the week’s end. Clare waited a

few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew

absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his

death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the

philosophers. His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.

His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had persistently

elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in that

civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem. Surely

then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state,

which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at least open to

correction when the result was due to treachery. A remorse struck into

him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in his memory, came

back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved him, and she had replied in

the affirmative. Did she love him more than Tess did? No, she had

replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do

no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding. How

her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words as if

they were a god’s! And during the terrible evening over the hearth,

when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had

looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his

love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.