Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical things

he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic

and live; and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing them had

arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles

to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over

the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no

doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they love or have

loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself

when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the

harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards

the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The historic interest of her family—that masterful line of

d’Urbervilles—whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his

sentiments now. Why had he not known the difference between the

political value and the imaginative value of these things? In the

latter aspect her d’Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions;

worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer,

to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a fact that would soon

be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name, and

oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments

and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his

own romances. In recalling her face again and again, he thought now

that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which must have graced

her grand-dames; and the vision sent that _aura_ through his veins

which he had formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of

sickness.

Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as

Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of

the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess’s devoted

outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father;

though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in

reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer’s expectation that Angel would come in response to

the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it was that

the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not

changed—could never change; and that, if her presence had not

attenuated them, her absence could not. Nevertheless she addressed her

mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him best if

he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she had taken

more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she had inquired

more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads among those the

country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling, who had

followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby remembered that,

amongst the snatches of melody in which they had indulged at the

dairyman’s, to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed

to like “Cupid’s Gardens”, “I have parks, I have hounds”, and “The

break o’ the day”; and had seemed not to care for “The Tailor’s

Breeches” and “Such a beauty I did grow”, excellent ditties as they

were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised them

privately at odd moments, especially “The break o’ the day”:

Arise, arise, arise!

And pick your love a posy,

All o’ the sweetest flowers

That in the garden grow.

The turtle doves and sma’ birds

In every bough a-building,

So early in the May-time

At the break o’ the day!

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these

ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this

cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the

thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the

simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the

aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to know

how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that

Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the

end of her term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which

made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as

usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the

family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess.

Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure with

the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish

creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the girl said

“Tess!”

“What—is it ’Liza-Lu?” asked Tess, in startled accents. Her sister,

whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had

sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as

yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin

legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her growing, and

her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and inexperience.

“Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess,” said Lu, with

unemotional gravity, “a-trying to find ’ee; and I’m very tired.”

“What is the matter at home?”

“Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she’s dying, and as

father is not very well neither, and says ’tis wrong for a man of such

a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring work, we

don’t know what to do.”

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking ’Liza-Lu

to come in and sit down. When she had done so, and ’Liza-Lu was having

some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that she should go

home. Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth of April,

but as the interval thereto was not a long one she resolved to run the

risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her sister was

too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess ran down

to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had happened, and

begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she

got Lu a supper, and after that, having tucked the younger into her own

bed, packed up as many of her belongings as would go into a withy

basket, and started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.

L

She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck

ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely

districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless

pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along

by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but

marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her

mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile,

ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about midnight

looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all

that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born.

Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she had now

some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey would be finished.

The winding road downwards became just visible to her under the wan

starlight as she followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting

with that above it that the difference was perceptible to the tread and

to the smell. It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part

of the Vale to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions

linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this

shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the

far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making

the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the

witches that had been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies

that “whickered” at you as you passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in

them still, and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in

response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard

but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye beheld relaxed

tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath

coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a

bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow,

as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had

threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a

club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced with

her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet. In the

direction of her mother’s house she saw a light. It came from the

bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at

her. As soon as she could discern the outline of the house—newly

thatched with her money—it had all its old effect upon Tess’s

imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope

of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick

which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her personal

character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to her regard;

it meant the illness of her mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room was

vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came to

the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no

better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a

breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother’s chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a

curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than a

year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying

herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father’s ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his

chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright.

He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.

“I’m thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this

part of England,” he said, “asking them to subscribe to a fund to

maintain me. I’m sure they’d see it as a romantical, artistical, and

proper thing to do. They spend lots o’ money in keeping up old ruins,

and finding the bones o’ things, and such like; and living remains must

be more interesting to ’em still, if they only knowed of me. Would that

somebody would go round and tell ’em what there is living among ’em,

and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa’son Tringham, who discovered

me, had lived, he’d ha’ done it, I’m sure.”

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had grappled

with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved by her

remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she turned her

attention to external things. It was now the season for planting and

sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already

received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the

Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this was

owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes,—that last lapse of

the improvident. At the earliest moment she obtained what others she

could procure, and in a few days her father was well enough to see to

the garden, under Tess’s persuasive efforts: while she herself

undertook the allotment-plot which they rented in a field a couple of

hundred yards out of the village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where she

was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement. Violent

motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open

enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where

labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.

Digging began usually at six o’clock and extended indefinitely into the

dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning

on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and ’Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours

till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that

divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of

the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the

allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under

the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks of

smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become

illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one

another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud”, which was a wall

by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over for

the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting done,

Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one

of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four

shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little

clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire;

then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare

from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat

staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with

a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a

wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back wore white

aprons, which, with their pale faces, were all that could be seen of

them in the gloom, except when at moments they caught a flash from the

flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the

boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower

sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost

to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were appearing

elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally

rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;

and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring in

it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the hours, the

crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made

others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost

of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came

as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the

soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess

stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce now a

hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time

notice the person who worked nearest to her—a man in a long smockfrock

who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and whom she

supposed her father had sent there to advance the work. She became more

conscious of him when the direction of his digging brought him closer.

Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it swerved, and the two were

visible to each other but divided from all the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor

did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been

there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know him as any

one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having

been so long and frequent of late years. By-and-by he dug so close to

her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel

prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a

pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same on the

other side. The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of

d’Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance

in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most

old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled

her as to its bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low, long laugh.

“If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like

Paradise!” he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined

head.

“What do you say?” she weakly asked.

“A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I am

the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior

animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was

theological. Some of it goes—

‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long,

Beyond a row of myrtles....

... If thou accept

My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’

‘Lead then,’ said Eve.

“And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that

you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think so

badly of me.”

“I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don’t think of you in

that way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you

affront me. What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?”

“Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock, which I saw

hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I mightn’t

be noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”

“But I like doing it—it is for my father.”

“Your engagement at the other place is ended?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?”

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

“O—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”

“It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I

have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.

When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there for

you.”

“O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it

from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”

“It _is_ right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom

I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to

help her.”

“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about

living at all!”

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon

the fork-handle and upon the clods.

“About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been

thinking of them.”

Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had

divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out

to those children with an affection that was passionate.

“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for

them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”

“He can with my assistance. He must!”

“And with mine.”

“No, sir!”

“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks

we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!”

“He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”

“The more fool you!”

D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled

off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling it up and

pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;

she wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house; and taking the

fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

“O, Tessy—what do you think! ’Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of

folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they think

father is dead!”

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its

sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,

beholding the effect produced upon her, she said—

“What, Tess, shan’t we talk to father never no more?”

“But father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.

’Liza-Lu came up.

“He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother said

there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in.”

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was out

of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even more

than it sounded. Her father’s life had a value apart from his personal

achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It was the last of

the three lives for whose duration the house and premises were held

under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for

his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage accommodation.

Moreover, “liviers” were disapproved of in villages almost as much as

little freeholders, because of their independence of manner, and when a

lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d’Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the

destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of the

county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough,

upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now. So do

flux and reflux—the rhythm of change—alternate and persist in

everything under the sky.

LI

At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world

was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular date

of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service

during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now

carried out. The labourers—or “work-folk”, as they used to call

themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from

without—who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to the

new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.

When Tess’s mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about

Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the

home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire

for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger families

it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an advantage. The

Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it

from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt

also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village life

did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A depopulation

was also going on. The village had formerly contained, side by side

with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and better-informed

class, ranking distinctly above the former—the class to which Tess’s

father and mother had belonged—and including the carpenter, the smith,

the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other

than farm-labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of

aim and conduct to the fact of their being lifeholders like Tess’s

father, or copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders. But as the

long holdings fell in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants,

and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer

for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land

were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the

trade of others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who

had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the

depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large

centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as “the

tendency of the rural population towards the large towns”, being really

the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this manner

considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house which remained

standing was required by the agriculturist for his work-people. Ever

since the occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow over

Tess’s life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited)

had been tacitly looked on as one which would have to go when their

lease ended, if only in the interests of morality. It was, indeed,

quite true that the household had not been shining examples either of

temperance, soberness, or chastity. The father, and even the mother,

had got drunk at times, the younger children seldom had gone to church,

and the eldest daughter had made queer unions. By some means the

village had to be kept pure. So on this, the first Lady-Day on which

the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy, was required

for a carter with a large family; and Widow Joan, her daughters Tess

and ’Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham, and the younger children had to go

elsewhere.

On the evening preceding their removal it was getting dark betimes by

reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the sky. As it was the last

night they would spend in the village which had been their home and

birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to bid

some friends goodbye, and Tess was keeping house till they should

return.

She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement,

where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of

glass. Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long

ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever

came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement. Tess was

reflecting on the position of the household, in which she perceived her

own evil influence. Had she not come home, her mother and the children

might probably have been allowed to stay on as weekly tenants. But she

had been observed almost immediately on her return by some people of

scrupulous character and great influence: they had seen her idling in

the churchyard, restoring as well as she could with a little trowel a

baby’s obliterated grave. By this means they had found that she was

living here again; her mother was scolded for “harbouring” her; sharp

retorts had ensued from Joan, who had independently offered to leave at

once; she had been taken at her word; and here was the result.

“I ought never to have come home,” said Tess to herself, bitterly.

She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at first took

note of a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw riding down the

street. Possibly it was owing to her face being near to the pane that

he saw her so quickly, and directed his horse so close to the

cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the narrow border for

plants growing under the wall. It was not till he touched the window

with his riding-crop that she observed him. The rain had nearly ceased,

and she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.

“Didn’t you see me?” asked d’Urberville.

“I was not attending,” she said. “I heard you, I believe, though I

fancied it was a carriage and horses. I was in a sort of dream.”

“Ah! you heard the d’Urberville Coach, perhaps. You know the legend, I

suppose?”

“No. My—somebody was going to tell it me once, but didn’t.”

“If you are a genuine d’Urberville I ought not to tell you either, I

suppose. As for me, I’m a sham one, so it doesn’t matter. It is rather

dismal. It is that this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard

by one of d’Urberville blood, and it is held to be of ill-omen to the

one who hears it. It has to do with a murder, committed by one of the

family, centuries ago.”

“Now you have begun it, finish it.”

“Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted some beautiful

woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was carrying her

off, and in the struggle he killed her—or she killed him—I forget

which. Such is one version of the tale... I see that your tubs and

buckets are packed. Going away, aren’t you?”

“Yes, to-morrow—Old Lady Day.”

“I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems so sudden. Why

is it?”

“Father’s was the last life on the property, and when that dropped we

had no further right to stay. Though we might, perhaps, have stayed as

weekly tenants—if it had not been for me.”

“What about you?”

“I am not a—proper woman.”

D’Urberville’s face flushed.

“What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty souls be burnt

to cinders!” he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment. “That’s why

you are going, is it? Turned out?”

“We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we should have to go

soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are

better chances.”

“Where are you going to?”

“Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about

father’s people that she will go there.”

“But your mother’s family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little

hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at

Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother’s death;

but there’s the house, as you know it, and the garden. It can be

whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite comfortably;

and I will put the children to a good school. Really I ought to do

something for you!”

“But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!” she declared. “And

we can wait there—”

“Wait—what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here, Tess, I

know what men are, and, bearing in mind the _grounds_ of your

separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with you. Now,

though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even if you won’t

believe it. Come to this cottage of mine. We’ll get up a regular colony

of fowls, and your mother can attend to them excellently; and the

children can go to school.”

Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said—

“How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may change—and

then—we should be—my mother would be—homeless again.”

“O no—no. I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if

necessary. Think it over.”

Tess shook her head. But d’Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen

him so determined; he would not take a negative.

“Please just tell your mother,” he said, in emphatic tones. “It is her

business to judge—not yours. I shall get the house swept out and

whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the

evening, so that you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect

you.”

Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with complicated

emotion. She could not look up at d’Urberville.

“I owe you something for the past, you know,” he resumed. “And you

cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—”

“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the

practice which went with it!”

“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. To-morrow I

shall expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading... Give me your hand

on it now—dear, beautiful Tess!”

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put

his hand in at the half-open casement. With stormy eyes she pulled the

stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the casement

and the stone mullion.

“Damnation—you are very cruel!” he said, snatching out his arm. “No,

no!—I know you didn’t do it on purpose. Well, I shall expect you, or

your mother and children at least.”

“I shall not come—I have plenty of money!” she cried.

“Where?”

“At my father-in-law’s, if I ask for it.”

“_If_ you ask for it. But you won’t, Tess; I know you; you’ll never ask

for it—you’ll starve first!”

With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he met

the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the

brethren.

“You go to the devil!” said d’Urberville.

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious

sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the rush

of hot tears thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like

others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had! She had never

before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never in her

life—she could swear it from the bottom of her soul—had she ever

intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come. Whatever her

sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why

should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and

scribbled the following lines:

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve

it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never

forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have

you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to

forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!

T.

She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her

epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the

window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How could

he give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was no new

event to alter his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two biggest

of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the four

smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all

in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling their own

little subjects. Tess at length joined them, without lighting a candle.

“This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house

where we were born,” she said quickly. “We ought to think of it,

oughtn’t we?”

They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they were

ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had conjured

up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of

a new place. Tess changed the subject.

“Sing to me, dears,” she said.

“What shall we sing?”

“Anything you know; I don’t mind.”

There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one little

tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third and a

fourth chimed in unison, with words they had learnt at the

Sunday-school—

Here we suffer grief and pain,

Here we meet to part again;

In Heaven we part no more.

The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had long

ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it, felt

that further thought was not required. With features strained hard to

enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the centre of the

flickering fire, the notes of the youngest straying over into the

pauses of the rest.

Tess turned from them, and went to the window again. Darkness had now

fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to peer into

the gloom. It was really to hide her tears. If she could only believe

what the children were singing; if she were only sure, how different

all would now be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence

and their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do

something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to not a few

millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines—

Not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal

compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to

justify, and at best could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall

’Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield’s pattens clicked up to the door,

and Tess opened it.

“I see the tracks of a horse outside the window,” said Joan. “Hev

somebody called?”

“No,” said Tess.

The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured—

“Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!”

“He didn’t call,” said Tess. “He spoke to me in passing.”

“Who was the gentleman?” asked the mother. “Your husband?”

“No. He’ll never, never come,” answered Tess in stony hopelessness.

“Then who was it?”

“Oh, you needn’t ask. You’ve seen him before, and so have I.”

“Ah! What did he say?” said Joan curiously.

“I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at Kingsbere

to-morrow—every word.”

It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a

physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her

more and more.

LII

During the small hours of the next morning, while it was still dark,

dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their

night’s rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till

daylight—noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of

the month as the voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same.

They were the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the

empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families;

for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required his

services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination. That this

might be accomplished within the day was the explanation of the

reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of the carters

being to reach the door of the outgoing households by six o’clock, when

the loading of their movables at once began.

But to Tess and her mother’s household no such anxious farmer sent his

team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were

not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at

their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that

morning, to find that though the weather was windy and louring, it did

not rain, and that the waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre

which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding,

damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.

Her mother, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger

children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light, and

the “house-ridding” was taken in hand.

It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two

assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in

position, a circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which

Joan Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through the

journey. After loading there was a long delay before the horses were

brought, these having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at

length, about two o’clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot

swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and family at the

top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent injury to its works, the

head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon,

struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next eldest

girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.

They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous

evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well, though,

in their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible to such a

family, harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except themselves.

Soon the equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew

keener with the change of level and soil.

The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many other

waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was built on a

wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the rural

labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement

was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles, and

finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly

in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and natural

position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they were bound to carry

reverently.

Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping

at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield

menagerie also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.

During the halt Tess’s eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which was

ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine

section of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also

drawn up at a little distance from the same inn. She followed one of

the mug’s journeys upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands

whose owner she well knew. Tess went towards the waggon.

“Marian and Izz!” she cried to the girls, for it was they, sitting with

the moving family at whose house they had lodged. “Are you

house-ridding to-day, like everybody else?”

They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for them at

Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost without notice, leaving

Groby to prosecute them if he chose. They told Tess their destination,

and Tess told them hers.

Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. “Do you know that

the gentleman who follows ’ee—you’ll guess who I mean—came to ask for

’ee at Flintcomb after you had gone? We didn’t tell’n where you was,

knowing you wouldn’t wish to see him.”

“Ah—but I did see him!” Tess murmured. “He found me.”

“And do he know where you be going?”

“I think so.”

“Husband come back?”

“No.”

She bade her acquaintance goodbye—for the respective carters had now

come out from the inn—and the two waggons resumed their journey in

opposite directions; the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the

ploughman’s family with whom they had thrown in their lot, being

brightly painted, and drawn by three powerful horses with shining brass

ornaments on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield

and her family rode was a creaking erection that would scarcely bear

the weight of the superincumbent load; one which had known no paint

since it was made, and drawn by two horses only. The contrast well

marked the difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer and

conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one’s coming.

The distance was great—too great for a day’s journey—and it was with

the utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had

started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned

the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland called

Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess

looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the

half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those

ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness:

Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered

the d’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five

hundred years.

A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards them, and when

he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he quickened his steps.

“You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?” he said to

Tess’s mother, who had descended to walk the remainder of the way.

She nodded. “Though widow of the late Sir John d’Urberville, poor

nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and returning to the domain of his

forefathers.”

“Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs Durbeyfield, I

am sent to tell ’ee that the rooms you wanted be let. We didn’t know

that you was coming till we got your letter this morning—when ’twas too

late. But no doubt you can get other lodgings somewhere.”

The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become ash-pale at his

intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly at fault. “What shall we do

now, Tess?” she said bitterly. “Here’s a welcome to your ancestors’

lands! However, let’s try further.”

They moved on into the town, and tried with all their might, Tess

remaining with the waggon to take care of the children whilst her

mother and ’Liza-Lu made inquiries. At the last return of Joan to the

vehicle, an hour later, when her search for accommodation had still

been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the goods must be

unloaded, as the horses were half-dead, and he was bound to return part

of the way at least that night.

“Very well—unload it here,” said Joan recklessly. “I’ll get shelter

somewhere.”

The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a spot screened

from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon hauled down the poor heap

of household goods. This done, she paid him, reducing herself to almost

her last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them, only too

glad to get out of further dealings with such a family. It was a dry

night, and he guessed that they would come to no harm.

Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of

this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles,

upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass

handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked

in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the

reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a

roofless exposure for which they were never made. Round about were

deparked hills and slopes—now cut up into little paddocks—and the green

foundations that showed where the d’Urberville mansion once had stood;

also an outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always belonged to the

estate. Hard by, the aisle of the church called the d’Urberville Aisle

looked on imperturbably.

“Isn’t your family vault your own freehold?” said Tess’s mother, as she

returned from a reconnoitre of the church and graveyard. “Why, of

course ’tis, and that’s where we will camp, girls, till the place of

your ancestors finds us a roof! Now, Tess and ’Liza and Abraham, you

help me. We’ll make a nest for these children, and then we’ll have

another look round.”

Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour the old

four-post bedstead was dissociated from the heap of goods, and erected

under the south wall of the church, the part of the building known as

the d’Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay. Over the

tester of the bedstead was a beautiful traceried window, of many

lights, its date being the fifteenth century. It was called the

d’Urberville Window, and in the upper part could be discerned heraldic

emblems like those on Durbeyfield’s old seal and spoon.

Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an excellent tent of

it, and put the smaller children inside. “If it comes to the worst we

can sleep there too, for one night,” she said. “But let us try further

on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess, what’s the use of

your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!”

Accompanied by ’Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended the little lane

which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got into

the street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. “Ah—I’m

looking for you!” he said, riding up to them. “This is indeed a family

gathering on the historic spot!”

It was Alec d’Urberville. “Where is Tess?” he asked.

Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily signified the

direction of the church, and went on, d’Urberville saying that he would

see them again, in case they should be still unsuccessful in their

search for shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had gone,

d’Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after came out on foot.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead,

remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could be

done to make them comfortable just then, she walked about the

churchyard, now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall.

The door of the church was unfastened, and she entered it for the first

time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of the

family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were canopied,

altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their

brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like

martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders that she had ever

received that her people were socially extinct, there was none so

forcible as this spoliation.

She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D’URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this

was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall knights of

whom her father had chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest

of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not

noticed it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an odd

fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she

discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the

shock to her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was

quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not, however, till she

had recognized Alec d’Urberville in the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

“I saw you come in,” he said smiling, “and got up there not to

interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with these

old fellows under us here? Listen.”

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose a

hollow echo from below.

“That shook them a bit, I’ll warrant!” he continued. “And you thought I

was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no. The old order

changeth. The little finger of the sham d’Urberville can do more for

you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath.... Now command me.

What shall I do?”

“Go away!” she murmured.

“I will—I’ll look for your mother,” said he blandly. But in passing her

he whispered: “Mind this; you’ll be civil yet!”

When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the vaults, and

said—

“Why am I on the wrong side of this door!”

In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the

chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaan—the

Egypt of some other family who had left it only that morning. But the

girls did not for a long time think of where they were going. Their

talk was of Angel Clare and Tess, and Tess’s persistent lover, whose

connection with her previous history they had partly heard and partly

guessed ere this.

“’Tisn’t as though she had never known him afore,” said Marian. “His

having won her once makes all the difference in the world. ’Twould be a

thousand pities if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can never

be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her, and not

try to mend this quarrel? If he could on’y know what straits she’s put

to, and what’s hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.”

“Could we let him know?”

They thought of this all the way to their destination; but the bustle

of re-establishment in their new place took up all their attention

then. But when they were settled, a month later, they heard of Clare’s

approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more of Tess. Upon

that, agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet honourably disposed

to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few

lines were concocted between the two girls.

Honour’d Sir,

Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you.

For she is sore put to by an Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir,

there is one near her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be

try’d beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear away a

Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.

From Two Well-Wishers

This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever heard

him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which they

continued in a mood of emotional exaltation at their own generosity,

which made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the same time.

End of Phase the Sixth

Phase the Seventh:

Fulfilment

LIII

It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were

burning under their green shades in the Vicar’s study, but he had not

been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire

which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went out

again; sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the

drawing-room, then returning again to the front door.

It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still

light enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been

sitting in the drawing-room, followed him hither.

“Plenty of time yet,” said the Vicar. “He doesn’t reach Chalk-Newton

till six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of

country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in

a hurry by our old horse.”

“But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear.”

“Years ago.”

Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only

waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.

At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old pony-chaise

appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight therefrom a form

which they affected to recognize, but would actually have passed by in

the street without identifying had he not got out of their carriage at

the particular moment when a particular person was due.

Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her husband

came more slowly after her.

The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces

in the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because

they confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his shape

against the light.

“O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!” cried Mrs Clare, who cared no

more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused all

this separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed,

among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises

and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own

children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed

against their happiness? As soon as they reached the room where the

candles were lighted she looked at his face.

“O, it is not Angel—not my son—the Angel who went away!” she cried in

all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure

from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had

experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his

first aversion to the mockery of events at home. You could see the

skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He

matched Crivelli’s dead _Christus_. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid

hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines

of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty

years before their time.

“I was ill over there, you know,” he said. “I am all right now.”

As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give way,

and he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was only a

slight attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day’s journey,

and the excitement of arrival.

“Has any letter come for me lately?” he asked. “I received the last you

sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay through

being inland; or I might have come sooner.”

“It was from your wife, we supposed?”

“It was.”

Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,

knowing he would start for home so soon.

He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbed to read

in Tess’s handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried

scrawl to him.

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve

it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never

forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have

you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to

forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!

T.

“It is quite true!” said Angel, throwing down the letter. “Perhaps she

will never be reconciled to me!”

“Don’t, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the soil!” said his

mother.

“Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the soil. I wish she

were so in the sense you mean; but let me now explain to you what I

have never explained before, that her father is a descendant in the

male line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good many others

who lead obscure agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed

‘sons of the soil.’”

He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling exceedingly

unwell, he remained in his room pondering. The circumstances amid which

he had left Tess were such that though, while on the south of the

Equator and just in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the

easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms the moment he

chose to forgive her, now that he had arrived it was not so easy as it

had seemed. She was passionate, and her present letter, showing that

her estimate of him had changed under his delay—too justly changed, he

sadly owned,—made him ask himself if it would be wise to confront her

unannounced in the presence of her parents. Supposing that her love had

indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of separation, a sudden

meeting might lead to bitter words.

Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess and her family

by sending a line to Marlott announcing his return, and his hope that

she was still living with them there, as he had arranged for her to do

when he left England. He despatched the inquiry that very day, and

before the week was out there came a short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield

which did not remove his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though

to his surprise it was not written from Marlott.

Sir,

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away from me at

present, and J am not sure when she will return, but J will let you

know as Soon as she do. J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where

she is temperly biding. J should say that me and my Family have

left Marlott for some Time.—

Yours,

J. Durbeyfield

It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least

apparently well that her mother’s stiff reticence as to her whereabouts

did not long distress him. They were all angry with him, evidently. He

would wait till Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess’s return,

which her letter implied to be soon. He deserved no more. His had been

a love “which alters when it alteration finds”. He had undergone some

strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in

the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne; he

had thought of the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to

be stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen; and he had

asked himself why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than

biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?

A day or two passed while he waited at his father’s house for the

promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a

little more strength. The strength showed signs of coming back, but

there was no sign of Joan’s letter. Then he hunted up the old letter

sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess had written from Flintcomb-Ash,

and re-read it. The sentences touched him now as much as when he had

first perused them.

...I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else!... I think I

must die if you do not come soon, or tell me to come to you... please,

please, not to be just—only a little kind to me.... If you would come,

I could die in your arms! I would be well content to do that if so be

you had forgiven me!... if you will send me one little line, and say,

_I am coming soon_, I will bide on, Angel—O, so cheerfully!... think

how it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—ever! Ah, if I could only

make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does

every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor

lonely one.... I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your

servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you,

and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.... I long for only

one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own

dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what threatens me!

Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and

severer regard of him, but would go and find her immediately. He asked

his father if she had applied for any money during his absence. His

father returned a negative, and then for the first time it occurred to

Angel that her pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered

privation. From his remarks his parents now gathered the real reason of

the separation; and their Christianity was such that, reprobates being

their especial care, the tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her

simplicity, even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited

by her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey

he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand—the one

from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—

“Honour’d Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do

love you,” and signed, “From Two Well-Wishers.”

LIV

In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his mother

watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street. He had

declined to borrow his father’s old mare, well knowing of its necessity

to the household. He went to the inn, where he hired a trap, and could

hardly wait during the harnessing. In a very few minutes after, he was

driving up the hill out of the town which, three or four months earlier

in the year, Tess had descended with such hopes and ascended with such

shattered purposes.

Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple

with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled

himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In

something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the

King’s Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of

Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec

d’Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange oath

that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and blasted

nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the

banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from their

roots.

Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other

Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing

calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had

written to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to be the

place of sojourn referred to by her mother. Here, of course, he did not

find her; and what added to his depression was the discovery that no

“Mrs Clare” had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by the farmer

himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by her Christian name.

His name she had obviously never used during their separation, and her

dignified sense of their total severance was shown not much less by

this abstention than by the hardships she had chosen to undergo (of

which he now learnt for the first time) rather than apply to his father

for more funds.

From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due

notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor, and

it therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had told him

she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent as to her

actual address, and the only course was to go to Marlott and inquire

for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with Tess was quite

smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man to drive him

towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in being sent back to

Emminster; for the limit of a day’s journey with that horse was

reached.

Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer’s vehicle for a further

distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with

the man who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered

on foot the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess’s birth. It

was as yet too early in the year for much colour to appear in the

gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter overlaid with

a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his expectations.

The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was now

inhabited by another family who had never known her. The new residents

were in the garden, taking as much interest in their own doings as if

the homestead had never passed its primal time in conjunction with the

histories of others, beside which the histories of these were but as a

tale told by an idiot. They walked about the garden paths with thoughts

of their own concerns entirely uppermost, bringing their actions at

every moment in jarring collision with the dim ghosts behind them,

talking as though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit

intenser in story than now. Even the spring birds sang over their heads

as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular.

On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of their

predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John Durbeyfield

was dead; that his widow and children had left Marlott, declaring that

they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of doing so had gone

on to another place they mentioned. By this time Clare abhorred the

house for ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened away from its hated

presence without once looking back.

His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her at the dance.

It was as bad as the house—even worse. He passed on through the

churchyard, where, amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a somewhat

superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:

In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d’Urberville, of the once

powerful family of that Name, and Direct Descendant through an

illustrious Line from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, one of the Knights of

the Conqueror. Died March 10th, 18—

How are the Mighty Fallen.

Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there, and

drew nigh. “Ah, sir, now that’s a man who didn’t want to lie here, but

wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be.”

“And why didn’t they respect his wish?”

“Oh—no money. Bless your soul, sir, why—there, I wouldn’t wish to say

it everywhere, but—even this headstone, for all the flourish wrote upon

en, is not paid for.”

“Ah, who put it up?”

The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on leaving the

churchyard, Clare called at the mason’s house. He found that the

statement was true, and paid the bill. This done, he turned in the

direction of the migrants.

The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such a strong

desire for isolation that at first he would neither hire a conveyance

nor go to a circuitous line of railway by which he might eventually

reach the place. At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but the

way was such that he did not enter Joan’s place till about seven

o’clock in the evening, having traversed a distance of over twenty

miles since leaving Marlott.

The village being small he had little difficulty in finding Mrs

Durbeyfield’s tenement, which was a house in a walled garden, remote

from the main road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old furniture

as best she could. It was plain that for some reason or other she had

not wished him to visit her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an

intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the light from the evening

sky fell upon her face.

This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but he was too

preoccupied to observe more than that she was still a handsome woman,

in the garb of a respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that he

was Tess’s husband, and his object in coming there, and he did it

awkwardly enough. “I want to see her at once,” he added. “You said you

would write to me again, but you have not done so.”

“Because she’ve not come home,” said Joan.

“Do you know if she is well?”

“I don’t. But you ought to, sir,” said she.

“I admit it. Where is she staying?”

From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her

embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.

“I—don’t know exactly where she is staying,” she answered. “She

was—but—”

“Where was she?”

“Well, she is not there now.”

In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by

this time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother’s skirts, the

youngest murmured—

“Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?”

“He has married her,” Joan whispered. “Go inside.”

Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked—

“Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of

course—”

“I don’t think she would.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure she wouldn’t.”

He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess’s tender letter.

“I am sure she would!” he retorted passionately. “I know her better

than you do.”

“That’s very likely, sir; for I have never really known her.”

“Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely

wretched man!” Tess’s mother again restlessly swept her cheek with her

vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is a low

voice—

“She is at Sandbourne.”

“Ah—where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.”

“I don’t know more particularly than I have said—Sandbourne. For

myself, I was never there.”

It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her

no further.

“Are you in want of anything?” he said gently.

“No, sir,” she replied. “We are fairly well provided for.”

Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station three

miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither. The last

train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare on its

wheels.

LV

At eleven o’clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the hotels

and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his arrival,

he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too late to call

on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed his purpose

till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just yet.

This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western

stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its

covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly

created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An

outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at hand,

yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a

glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.

Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the

soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway;

not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Cæsars. Yet

the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd; and had

drawn hither Tess.

By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way of this new

world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against

the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the

numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a

city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the

English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing

than it was.

The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he

thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same

tones, and he thought they were the sea.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst

all this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered, the more was he

puzzled. Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were no

fields to till. She was most probably engaged to do something in one of

these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at the

chamber-windows and their lights going out one by one, and wondered

which of them might be hers.

Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o’clock he entered and

went to bed. Before putting out his light he re-read Tess’s impassioned

letter. Sleep, however, he could not—so near her, yet so far from

her—and he continually lifted the window-blind and regarded the backs

of the opposite houses, and wondered behind which of the sashes she

reposed at that moment.

He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the morning he arose

at seven, and shortly after went out, taking the direction of the chief

post-office. At the door he met an intelligent postman coming out with

letters for the morning delivery.

“Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?” asked Angel. The postman

shook his head.

Then, remembering that she would have been likely to continue the use

of her maiden name, Clare said—

“Of a Miss Durbeyfield?”

“Durbeyfield?”

This also was strange to the postman addressed.

“There’s visitors coming and going every day, as you know, sir,” he

said; “and without the name of the house ’tis impossible to find ’em.”

One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the name was repeated

to him.

“I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name of d’Urberville

at The Herons,” said the second.

“That’s it!” cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to the

real pronunciation. “What place is The Herons?”

“A stylish lodging-house. ’Tis all lodging-houses here, bless ’ee.”

Clare received directions how to find the house, and hastened thither,

arriving with the milkman. The Herons, though an ordinary villa, stood

in its own grounds, and was certainly the last place in which one would

have expected to find lodgings, so private was its appearance. If poor

Tess was a servant here, as he feared, she would go to the back-door to

that milkman, and he was inclined to go thither also. However, in his

doubts he turned to the front, and rang.

The hour being early, the landlady herself opened the door. Clare

inquired for Teresa d’Urberville or Durbeyfield.

“Mrs d’Urberville?”

“Yes.”

Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad, even though

she had not adopted his name.

“Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to see her?”

“It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?”

“Angel.”

“Mr Angel?”

“No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She’ll understand.”

“I’ll see if she is awake.”

He was shown into the front room—the dining-room—and looked out through

the spring curtains at the little lawn, and the rhododendrons and other

shrubs upon it. Obviously her position was by no means so bad as he had

feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow have claimed and

sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her for one moment. Soon

his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his

heart thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm. “Dear me!

what will she think of me, so altered as I am!” he said to himself; and

the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold—not at all as he had expected to see

her—bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if

not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely

wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in

half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck

rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered cable of

dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of her

head and partly hanging on her shoulder—the evident result of haste.

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for

she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the

doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast

between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.

“Tess!” he said huskily, “can you forgive me for going away? Can’t

you—come to me? How do you get to be—like this?”

“It is too late,” said she, her voice sounding hard through the room,

her eyes shining unnaturally.

“I did not think rightly of you—I did not see you as you were!” he

continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!”

“Too late, too late!” she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a

person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don’t come

close to me, Angel! No—you must not. Keep away.”

“But don’t you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled

down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come on purpose for you—my

mother and father will welcome you now!”

“Yes—O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.”

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away,

but cannot. “Don’t you know all—don’t you know it? Yet how do you come

here if you do not know?”

“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.”

“I waited and waited for you,” she went on, her tones suddenly resuming

their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and

you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and

that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and

to all of us after father’s death. He—”

“I don’t understand.”

“He has won me back to him.”

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like

one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which,

once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued—

“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie—that you

would not come again; and you _have_ come! These clothes are what he’s

put upon me: I didn’t care what he did wi’ me! But—will you go away,

Angel, please, and never come any more?”

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a

joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter

them from reality.

“Ah—it is my fault!” said Clare.

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he

had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him

till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize

the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon

the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew

colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a

minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking along he

did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner of

all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually curious

turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long

and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to

retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible

lodgers’ pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her

well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d’Urberville, as she deemed them, was

sufficiently exceptional in point of time and manner to reinvigorate

the feminine proclivity which had been stifled down as useless save in

its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the

dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed door of

her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments

of the conversation—if conversation it could be called—between those

two wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first

floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door

behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut, and Mrs Brooks

knew that Tess had re-entered her apartment. As the young lady was not

fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some

time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of

the front room—a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately

behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.

This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks’s best apartments, had been

taken by the week by the d’Urbervilles. The back room was now in

silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable,

continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a

soul bound to some Ixionian wheel—

“O—O—O!”

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again—

“O—O—O!”

The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the room

inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the

breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a

chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess’s face was bowed, her

posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped

over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of

her night-gown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless

feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded upon the carpet. It

was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair.

Then a man’s voice from the adjoining bedroom—

“What’s the matter?”

She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a soliloquy rather

than an exclamation, and a dirge rather than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks

could only catch a portion:

“And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... and I did not know

it!... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... you did not

stop using it—no—you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and

my mother’s needs—they were the things you moved me by ... and you said

my husband would never come back—never; and you taunted me, and said

what a simpleton I was to expect him!... And at last I believed you and

gave way!... And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second time,

and I have lost him now for ever ... and he will not love me the

littlest bit ever any more—only hate me!... O yes, I have lost him

now—again because of—you!” In writhing, with her head on the chair, she

turned her face towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain

upon it, and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth

upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet

tags to her cheeks. She continued: “And he is dying—he looks as if he

is dying!... And my sin will kill him and not kill me!... O, you have

torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in pity not

to make me be again!... My own true husband will never, never—O God—I

can’t bear this!—I cannot!”

There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle;

she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks, thinking that the speaker was

coming to rush out of the door, hastily retreated down the stairs.

She need not have done so, however, for the door of the sitting-room

was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it unsafe to watch on the landing

again, and entered her own parlour below.

She could hear nothing through the floor, although she listened

intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to finish her interrupted

breakfast. Coming up presently to the front room on the ground floor

she took up some sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might

take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to discover

what was the matter if possible. Overhead, as she sat, she could now

hear the floorboards slightly creak, as if some one were walking about,

and presently the movement was explained by the rustle of garments

against the banisters, the opening and the closing of the front door,

and the form of Tess passing to the gate on her way into the street.

She was fully dressed now in the walking costume of a well-to-do young

lady in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that over her hat

and black feathers a veil was drawn.

Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of farewell, temporary

or otherwise, between her tenants at the door above. They might have

quarrelled, or Mr d’Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an

early riser.

She went into the back room, which was more especially her own

apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady lodger did not

return, nor did the gentleman ring his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the

delay, and on what probable relation the visitor who had called so

early bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant back in her

chair.

As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were

arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had

never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she

first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her

hand, and then she could perceive that it was red. The oblong white

ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a

gigantic ace of hearts.

Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon the table, and

touched the spot in the ceiling with her fingers. It was damp, and she

fancied that it was a blood stain.

Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and went upstairs,

intending to enter the room overhead, which was the bedchamber at the

back of the drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now become,

she could not bring herself to attempt the handle. She listened. The

dead silence within was broken only by a regular beat.

Drip, drip, drip.

Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door, and ran into the

street. A man she knew, one of the workmen employed at an adjoining

villa, was passing by, and she begged him to come in and go upstairs

with her; she feared something had happened to one of her lodgers. The

workman assented, and followed her to the landing.

She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back for him to pass

in, entering herself behind him. The room was empty; the breakfast—a

substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham—lay spread upon the

table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the

carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to go through the

folding-doors into the adjoining room.

He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost

instantly with a rigid face. “My good God, the gentleman in bed is

dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife—a lot of blood has run down

upon the floor!”

The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately been so quiet

resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the rest.

The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart

of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had

scarcely moved after the infliction of the blow. In a quarter of an

hour the news that a gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town

had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street and villa of

the popular watering-place.

LVII

Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along the way by which

he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast,

staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously

till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his

dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and

went out.

At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him—a few words

from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his address, and

informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been

accepted by Mercy Chant.

Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the station;

reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an hour

and more. He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour

felt that he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and numbed, he

had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had

been the scene of such an experience, and turned to walk to the first

station onward, and let the train pick him up there.

The highway that he followed was open, and at a little distance dipped

into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge to edge.

He had traversed the greater part of this depression, and was climbing

the western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked

back. Why he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel him

to the act. The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as

far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the

white vacuity of its perspective.

It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a dim sense that

somebody was trying to overtake him.

The form descending the incline was a woman’s, yet so entirely was his

mind blinded to the idea of his wife’s following him that even when she

came nearer he did not recognize her under the totally changed attire

in which he now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close that he

could believe her to be Tess.

“I saw you—turn away from the station—just before I got there—and I

have been following you all this way!”

She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle, that he

did not ask her a single question, but seizing her hand, and pulling it

within his arm, he led her along. To avoid meeting any possible

wayfarers he left the high road and took a footpath under some

fir-trees. When they were deep among the moaning boughs he stopped and

looked at her inquiringly.

“Angel,” she said, as if waiting for this, “do you know what I have

been running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!” A

pitiful white smile lit her face as she spoke.

“What!” said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she

was in some delirium.

“I have done it—I don’t know how,” she continued. “Still, I owed it to

you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the

mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set

for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come

between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more. I never

loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it, don’t you? You

believe it? You didn’t come back to me, and I was obliged to go back to

him. Why did you go away—why did you—when I loved you so? I can’t think

why you did it. But I don’t blame you; only, Angel, will you forgive me

my sin against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along

that you would be sure to forgive me now I have done that. It came to

me as a shining light that I should get you back that way. I could not

bear the loss of you any longer—you don’t know how entirely I was

unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband;

say you do, now I have killed him!”

“I do love you, Tess—O, I do—it is all come back!” he said, tightening

his arms round her with fervid pressure. “But how do you mean—you have

killed him?”

“I mean that I have,” she murmured in a reverie.

“What, bodily? Is he dead?”

“Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and

called you by a foul name; and then I did it. My heart could not bear

it. He had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed myself and

came away to find you.”

By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted,

at least, what she said she had done; and his horror at her impulse was

mixed with amazement at the strength of her affection for himself, and

at the strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished

her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her

conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked at her as she lay

upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure

strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were

an aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that the

family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the

d’Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his

confused and excited ideas could reason, he supposed that in the moment

of mad grief of which she spoke, her mind had lost its balance, and

plunged her into this abyss.

It was very terrible if true; if a temporary hallucination, sad. But,

anyhow, here was this deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond

woman, clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be anything to

her but a protector. He saw that for him to be otherwise was not, in

her mind, within the region of the possible. Tenderness was absolutely

dominant in Clare at last. He kissed her endlessly with his white lips,

and held her hand, and said—

“I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my power,

dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done!”

They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her head every now

and then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome as he had become, it was

plain that she did not discern the least fault in his appearance. To

her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and

mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face

was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no

less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one

man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had believed in her as

pure!

With an instinct as to possibilities, he did not now, as he had

intended, make for the first station beyond the town, but plunged still

farther under the firs, which here abounded for miles. Each clasping

the other round the waist they promenaded over the dry bed of

fir-needles, thrown into a vague intoxicating atmosphere at the

consciousness of being together at last, with no living soul between

them; ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for several

miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her, and said, timidly—

“Are we going anywhere in particular?”

“I don’t know, dearest. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is evening find

lodgings somewhere or other—in a lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you walk

well, Tessy?”

“O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm round me!”

Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they quickened

their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure paths tending

more or less northward. But there was an unpractical vagueness in their

movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider

any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their

every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two

children.

At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess would have

entered it with him to get something to eat, but he persuaded her to

remain among the trees and bushes of this half-woodland, half-moorland

part of the country till he should come back. Her clothes were of

recent fashion; even the ivory-handled parasol that she carried was of

a shape unknown in the retired spot to which they had now wandered; and

the cut of such articles would have attracted attention in the settle

of a tavern. He soon returned, with food enough for half-a-dozen people

and two bottles of wine—enough to last them for a day or more, should

any emergency arise.

They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their meal. Between one

and two o’clock they packed up the remainder and went on again.

“I feel strong enough to walk any distance,” said she.

“I think we may as well steer in a general way towards the interior of

the country, where we can hide for a time, and are less likely to be

looked for than anywhere near the coast,” Clare remarked. “Later on,

when they have forgotten us, we can make for some port.”

She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him more tightly, and

straight inland they went. Though the season was an English May, the

weather was serenely bright, and during the afternoon it was quite

warm. Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath had taken

them into the depths of the New Forest, and towards evening, turning

the corner of a lane, they perceived behind a brook and bridge a large

board on which was painted in white letters, “This desirable Mansion to

be Let Furnished”; particulars following, with directions to apply to

some London agents. Passing through the gate they could see the house,

an old brick building of regular design and large accommodation.

“I know it,” said Clare. “It is Bramshurst Court. You can see that it

is shut up, and grass is growing on the drive.”

“Some of the windows are open,” said Tess.

“Just to air the rooms, I suppose.”

“All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our heads!”

“You are getting tired, my Tess!” he said. “We’ll stop soon.” And

kissing her sad mouth, he again led her onwards.

He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a dozen or fifteen

miles, and it became necessary to consider what they should do for

rest. They looked from afar at isolated cottages and little inns, and

were inclined to approach one of the latter, when their hearts failed

them, and they sheered off. At length their gait dragged, and they

stood still.

“Could we sleep under the trees?” she asked.

He thought the season insufficiently advanced.

“I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,” he said. “Let

us go back towards it again.”

They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour before they stood

without the entrance-gate as earlier. He then requested her to stay

where she was, whilst he went to see who was within.

She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and Clare crept towards

the house. His absence lasted some considerable time, and when he

returned Tess was wildly anxious, not for herself, but for him. He had

found out from a boy that there was only an old woman in charge as

caretaker, and she only came there on fine days, from the hamlet near,

to open and shut the windows. She would come to shut them at sunset.

“Now, we can get in through one of the lower windows, and rest there,”

said he.

Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main front, whose

shuttered windows, like sightless eyeballs, excluded the possibility of

watchers. The door was reached a few steps further, and one of the

windows beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and pulled Tess in

after him.

Except the hall, the rooms were all in darkness, and they ascended the

staircase. Up here also the shutters were tightly closed, the

ventilation being perfunctorily done, for this day at least, by opening

the hall-window in front and an upper window behind. Clare unlatched

the door of a large chamber, felt his way across it, and parted the

shutters to the width of two or three inches. A shaft of dazzling

sunlight glanced into the room, revealing heavy, old-fashioned

furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous four-post bedstead,

along the head of which were carved running figures, apparently

Atalanta’s race.

“Rest at last!” said he, setting down his bag and the parcel of viands.

They remained in great quietness till the caretaker should have come to

shut the windows: as a precaution, putting themselves in total darkness

by barring the shutters as before, lest the woman should open the door

of their chamber for any casual reason. Between six and seven o’clock

she came, but did not approach the wing they were in. They heard her

close the windows, fasten them, lock the door, and go away. Then Clare

again stole a chink of light from the window, and they shared another

meal, till by-and-by they were enveloped in the shades of night which

they had no candle to disperse.

LVIII

The night was strangely solemn and still. In the small hours she

whispered to him the whole story of how he had walked in his sleep with

her in his arms across the Froom stream, at the imminent risk of both

their lives, and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined abbey.

He had never known of that till now.

“Why didn’t you tell me next day?” he said. “It might have prevented

much misunderstanding and woe.”

“Don’t think of what’s past!” said she. “I am not going to think

outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?”

But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet and foggy, and

Clare, rightly informed that the caretaker only opened the windows on

fine days, ventured to creep out of their chamber and explore the

house, leaving Tess asleep. There was no food on the premises, but

there was water, and he took advantage of the fog to emerge from the

mansion and fetch tea, bread, and butter from a shop in a little place

two miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and spirit-lamp, that they

might get fire without smoke. His re-entry awoke her; and they

breakfasted on what he had brought.

They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day passed, and the night

following, and the next, and next; till, almost without their being

aware, five days had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a sight or

sound of a human being disturbing their peacefulness, such as it was.

The changes of the weather were their only events, the birds of the New

Forest their only company. By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of

any incident of the past subsequent to their wedding-day. The gloomy

intervening time seemed to sink into chaos, over which the present and

prior times closed as if it never had been. Whenever he suggested that

they should leave their shelter, and go forwards towards Southampton or

London, she showed a strange unwillingness to move.

“Why should we put an end to all that’s sweet and lovely!” she

deprecated. “What must come will come.” And, looking through the

shutter-chink: “All is trouble outside there; inside here content.”

He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union,

error forgiven: outside was the inexorable.

“And—and,” she said, pressing her cheek against his, “I fear that what

you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present

feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried

when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be

known to me that you despised me.”

“I cannot ever despise you.”

“I also hope that. But considering what my life has been, I cannot see

why any man should, sooner or later, be able to help despising me....

How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly

or a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to make me

cry.”

They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky cleared, and

the result was that the old caretaker at the cottage awoke early. The

brilliant sunrise made her unusually brisk; she decided to open the

contiguous mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a day.

Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower rooms before

six o’clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was about to turn the

handle of the one wherein they lay. At that moment she fancied she

could hear the breathing of persons within. Her slippers and her

antiquity had rendered her progress a noiseless one so far, and she

made for instant retreat; then, deeming that her hearing might have

deceived her, she turned anew to the door and softly tried the handle.

The lock was out of order, but a piece of furniture had been moved

forward on the inside, which prevented her opening the door more than

an inch or two. A stream of morning light through the shutter-chink

fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped in profound slumber, Tess’s

lips being parted like a half-opened flower near his cheek. The

caretaker was so struck with their innocent appearance, and with the

elegance of Tess’s gown hanging across a chair, her silk stockings

beside it, the pretty parasol, and the other habits in which she had

arrived because she had none else, that her first indignation at the

effrontery of tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary

sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it seemed. She closed

the door, and withdrew as softly as she had come, to go and consult

with her neighbours on the odd discovery.

Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal when Tess woke,

and then Clare. Both had a sense that something had disturbed them,

though they could not say what; and the uneasy feeling which it

engendered grew stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly scanned

the lawn through the two or three inches of shutter-chink.

“I think we will leave at once,” said he. “It is a fine day. And I

cannot help fancying somebody is about the house. At any rate, the

woman will be sure to come to-day.”

She passively assented, and putting the room in order, they took up the

few articles that belonged to them, and departed noiselessly. When they

had got into the Forest she turned to take a last look at the house.

“Ah, happy house—goodbye!” she said. “My life can only be a question of

a few weeks. Why should we not have stayed there?”

“Don’t say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this district altogether.

We’ll continue our course as we’ve begun it, and keep straight north.

Nobody will think of looking for us there. We shall be looked for at

the Wessex ports if we are sought at all. When we are in the north we

will get to a port and away.”

Having thus persuaded her, the plan was pursued, and they kept a

bee-line northward. Their long repose at the manor-house lent them

walking power now; and towards mid-day they found that they were

approaching the steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in

their way. He decided to rest her in a clump of trees during the

afternoon, and push onward under cover of darkness. At dusk Clare

purchased food as usual, and their night march began, the boundary

between Upper and Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o’clock.

To walk across country without much regard to roads was not new to

Tess, and she showed her old agility in the performance. The

intercepting city, ancient Melchester, they were obliged to pass

through in order to take advantage of the town bridge for crossing a

large river that obstructed them. It was about midnight when they went

along the deserted streets, lighted fitfully by the few lamps, keeping

off the pavement that it might not echo their footsteps. The graceful

pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on their left hand, but it

was lost upon them now. Once out of the town they followed the

turnpike-road, which after a few miles plunged across an open plain.

Though the sky was dense with cloud, a diffused light from some

fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a little. But the moon had

now sunk, the clouds seemed to settle almost on their heads, and the

night grew as dark as a cave. However, they found their way along,

keeping as much on the turf as possible that their tread might not

resound, which it was easy to do, there being no hedge or fence of any

kind. All around was open loneliness and black solitude, over which a

stiff breeze blew.

They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a

sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,

rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against

it.

“What monstrous place is this?” said Angel.

“It hums,” said she. “Hearken!”

He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming

tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound

came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare

felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid

stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found

that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular

pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one

adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black

sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the

pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the

surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of

doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and

Angel, perplexed, said—

“What can it be?”

Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square and

uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The place

was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous

architraves.

“A very Temple of the Winds,” he said.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were

prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway wide enough for a carriage;

and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped

upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into

this pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.

“It is Stonehenge!” said Clare.

“The heathen temple, you mean?”

“Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles! Well,

what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on.”

But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab

that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar.

Owing to the action of the sun during the preceding day, the stone was

warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass

around, which had damped her skirts and shoes.

“I don’t want to go any further, Angel,” she said, stretching out her

hand for his. “Can’t we bide here?”

“I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day, although it does

not seem so now.”

“One of my mother’s people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of

it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am

at home.”

He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his lips upon hers.

“Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an altar.”

“I like very much to be here,” she murmured. “It is so solemn and

lonely—after my great happiness—with nothing but the sky above my face.

It seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish

there were not—except ’Liza-Lu.”

Clare thought she might as well rest here till it should get a little

lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon her, and sat down by her side.

“Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over ’Liza-Lu for my

sake?” she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind among

the pillars.

“I will.”

“She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel—I wish you would marry

her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O, if you would!”

“If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law.”

“That’s nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws continually about

Marlott; and ’Liza-Lu is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing so

beautiful. O, I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits!

If you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your

own self!... She had all the best of me without the bad of me; and if

she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not

divided us... Well, I have said it. I won’t mention it again.”

She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far north-east sky he

could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform

concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot,

letting in at the earth’s edge the coming day, against which the

towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

“Did they sacrifice to God here?” asked she.

“No,” said he.

“Who to?”

“I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the

direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.”

“This reminds me, dear,” she said. “You remember you never would

interfere with any belief of mine before we were married? But I knew

your mind all the same, and I thought as you thought—not from any

reasons of my own, but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do

you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.”

He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.

“O, Angel—I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And

I wanted so to see you again—so much, so much! What—not even you and I,

Angel, who love each other so well?”

Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical

time he did not answer; and they were again silent. In a minute or two

her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and

she fell asleep. The band of silver paleness along the east horizon

made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near;

and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve,

taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The

eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the

light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone

of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the

quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip

eastward—a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the

hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but in

the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight

towards the circle of pillars in which they were.

He heard something behind him, the brush of feet. Turning, he saw over

the prostrate columns another figure; then before he was aware, another

was at hand on the right, under a trilithon, and another on the left.

The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could

discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if trained. They all

closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was true! Springing to

his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose stone, means of escape,

anything. By this time the nearest man was upon him.

“It is no use, sir,” he said. “There are sixteen of us on the Plain,

and the whole country is reared.”

“Let her finish her sleep!” he implored in a whisper of the men as they

gathered round.

When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they

showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars

around. He went to the stone and bent over her, holding one poor little

hand; her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser

creature than a woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and

hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark,

the stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon

the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form,

peering under her eyelids and waking her.

“What is it, Angel?” she said, starting up. “Have they come for me?”

“Yes, dearest,” he said. “They have come.”

“It is as it should be,” she murmured. “Angel, I am almost glad—yes,

glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had

enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!”

She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men

having moved.

“I am ready,” she said quietly.

LIX

The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital of

Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the

brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and

freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument

of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High

Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the

mediæval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was

in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.

From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian

knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a

measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road from

the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly, as if

unconscious of the trying ascent—unconscious through preoccupation and

not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this road through a narrow,

barred wicket in a high wall a little lower down. They seemed anxious

to get out of the sight of the houses and of their kind, and this road

appeared to offer the quickest means of doing so. Though they were

young, they walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the sun’s rays

smiled on pitilessly.

One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding creature—half

girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but

with the same beautiful eyes—Clare’s sister-in-law, ’Liza-Lu. Their

pale faces seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved

on hand in hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads

being that of Giotto’s “Two Apostles”.

When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the clocks

in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and, walking

onward yet a few steps, they reached the first milestone, standing

whitely on the green margin of the grass, and backed by the down, which

here was open to the road. They entered upon the turf, and, impelled by

a force that seemed to overrule their will, suddenly stood still,

turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside the stone.

The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley

beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings

showing as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad cathedral

tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave,

the spires of St Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and,

more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where

to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind

the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill; further off,

landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance

of the sun hanging above it.

Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other city

edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows

of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting

greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic

erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by

yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket

from which the pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this

structure. From the middle of the building an ugly flat-topped

octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and viewed from this

spot, on its shady side and against the light, it seemed the one blot

on the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with the

beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were

riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved

slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a

black flag.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean

phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and

dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent

themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long

time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As

soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.