\N16 The cock crew again. \STess 4.33|T182 \N17 \`Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!\' said the dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him away. And to his wife as they went indoors: \`Now, to think o' that just to-day! I've not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year afore.\' \STess 4.33|T182 \N21 \`It only means a change in the weather,\' said she; \`not what you think: 'tis impossible!\' \LTess 4.34|T182 \C Phase four, chapter thirtyfour. \N23 They drove by the level road along the valley to a distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half its name. Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings, whose exterior features are so well known to all travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property and seat of a d'Urberville, but since its partial demolition a farm-house. \STess 4.34|T182 \N31 \`Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!\' said Clare as he handed her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it was too near a satire. \STess 4.34|T182 \N34 On entering they found that, though they had only engaged a couple of rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their proposed presence during the coming days to pay a New Year's visit to some friends, leaving a woman from a neighbouring cottage to minister to their few wants. The absoluteness of possession pleased them, and they realized it as the first moment of their experience under their own exclusive roof-tree. \STess 4.34|T182 \N41 But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his bride. When the carriage was gone they ascended the stairs to wash their hands, the charwoman showing the way. On the landing Tess stopped and started. \STess 4.34|T182 \N45 \`What's the matter?\' said he. \PTess 4.34|T183 \N1 \STess 4.34|T183 \N1 \`Those horrid women!\' she answered, with a smile. \`How they frightened me.\' \STess 4.34|T183 \N3 He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built into the masonry. As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams. \STess 4.34|T183 \N11 \`Whose portraits are those?\' asked Clare of the charwoman. \STess 4.34|T183 \N12 \`I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the d'Urberville family, the ancient lords of this manor,\' she said. \`Owing to their being builded into the wall they can't be moved away.\' \STess 4.34|T183 \N15 The unpleasantness of the matter was that, in addition to their effect upon Tess, her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms. He said nothing of this, however, and, regretting that he had gone out of his way to choose the house for their bridal time, went on into the adjoining room. The place having been rather hastily prepared for them they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. \STess 4.34|T183 \N22 \`Which are my fingers and which are yours?\' he said, looking up. \`They are very much mixed.\' \STess 4.34|T183 \N24 \`They are all yours,\' said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer than she was. He had not been displeased with her thoughtfulness on such an occasion; it was what every sensible woman would show: but Tess knew that she had been thoughtful to excess, and struggled against it. \STess 4.34|T183 \N29 The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her. They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first common meal alone. Such was their childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from her lips with his own. He wondered a little that she did not enter into these frivolities with his own zest. \STess 4.34|T183 \N38 Looking at her silently for a long time; \`She is a dear dear Tess,\' he thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of a difficult passage. \`Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!\' \PTess 4.34|T184 \N1 \STess 4.34|T184 \N1 They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage, which the dairyman had promised to send before it grew dark. But evening began to close in, and the luggage did not arrive, and they had brought nothing more than they stood in. With the departure of the sun the calm mood of the winter day changed. Out of doors there began noises as of silk smartly rubbed; the restful dead leaves of the preceding autumn were stirred to irritated resurrection, and whirled about unwillingly, and tapped against the shutters. It soon began to rain. \STess 4.34|T184 \N10 \`That cock knew the weather was going to change,\' said Clare. \STess 4.34|T184 \N11 The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for the night, but she had placed candles upon the table, and now they lit them. Each candle-flame drew towards the fireplace. \STess 4.34|T184 \N14 \`These old houses are so draughty,\' continued Angel, looking at the flames, and at the grease guttering down the sides. \`I wonder where that luggage is. We haven't even a brush and comb.\' \STess 4.34|T184 \N17 \`I don't know,\' she answered, absent-minded. \STess 4.34|T184 \N18 \`Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening-+-not at all as you used to be. Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled you. I am sorry I brought you here. I wonder if you really love me, after all?\' \STess 4.34|T184 \N22 He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent; but she was surcharged with emotion, and winced like a wounded animal. Though she tried not to shed tears she could not help showing one or two. \STess 4.34|T184 \N26 \`I did not mean it!\' said he, sorry. \`You are worried at not having your things, I know. I cannot think why old Jonathan has not come with them. Why, it is seven o'clock? Ah, there he is!\' \STess 4.34|T184 \N29 A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody else to answer it Clare went out. He returned to the room with a small package in his hand. \STess 4.34|T184 \N32 \`It is not Jonathan, after all,\' he said. \STess 4.34|T184 \N33 \`How vexing!\' said Tess. \STess 4.34|T184 \N34 The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who had arrived at Talbothays from Emminster Vicarage immediately after the departure of the married couple, and had followed them hither, being under injunction to deliver it into nobody's hands but theirs. Clare brought it to the light. It was less than a foot long, sewed up in canvas, sealed in red wax with his father's seal, and directed in his father's hand to \`Mrs\. Angel Clare.\' \STess 4.34|T184 \N41 \`It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess,\' said he, handing it to her. \`How thoughtful they are!\' \STess 4.34|T184 \N43 Tess looked a little flustered as she took it. \STess 4.34|T184 \N44 \`I think I would rather have you open it, dearest,\' said she, turning over the parcel. \`I don't like to break those great seals; they look so serious. Please open it for me!\' \PTess 4.34|T185 \N1 \STess 4.34|T185 \N1 He undid the parcel. Inside was a case of morocco leather, on the top of which lay a note and a key. \STess 4.34|T185 \N3 The note was for Clare, in the following words: \STess 4.34|T185 \N4 MY DEAR SON,-+-Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your godmother, Mrs\. Pitney, when you were a lad, she-+-vain, kind woman that she was-+-left to me a portion of the contents of her jewel-case in trust for your wife, if you should ever have one, as a mark of her affection for you and whomsoever you should choose. This trust I have fulfilled, and the diamonds have been locked up at my banker's ever since. Though I feel it to be a somewhat incongruous act in the circumstances, I am, as you will see, bound to hand over the articles to the woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime will now rightly belong, and they are therefore promptly sent. They become, I believe, heirlooms, strictly speaking, according to the terms of your godmother's will. The precise words of the clause that refers to this matter are enclosed. \STess 4.34|T185 \N18 \`I do remember,\' said Clare; \`but I had quite forgotten.\' \STess 4.34|T185 \N19 Unlocking the case, they found it to contain a necklace, with pendant, bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other small ornaments. \STess 4.34|T185 \N22 Tess seemed afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes sparkled for a moment as much as the stones when Clare spread out the set. \STess 4.34|T185 \N24 \`Are they mine?\' she asked incredulously. \STess 4.34|T185 \N25 \`They are, certainly,\' said he. \STess 4.34|T185 \N26 He looked into the fire. He remembered how, when he was a lad of fifteen, his godmother, the Squire's wife-+-the only rich person with whom he had ever come in contact-+-had pinned her faith to his success; had prophesied a wondrous career for him. There had seemed nothing at all out of keeping with such a conjectured career in the storing up of these showy ornaments for his wife and the wives of her descendants. They gleamed somewhat ironically now. \`Yet why?\' he asked himself. It was but a question of vanity throughout; and if that were admitted into one side of the equation it should be admitted into the other. His wife was a d'Urberville: whom could they become better than her? \STess 4.34|T185 \N37 Suddenly he said with enthusiasm-+-| \STess 4.34|T185 \N38 \`Tess, put them on-+-put them on!\' And he turned from the fire to help her. \STess 4.34|T185 \N40 But as if by magic she had already donned them-+-necklace, ear-rings, bracelets, and all. \STess 4.34|T185 \N42 \`But the gown isn't right, Tess,\' said Clare. \`It ought to be a low one for a set of brilliants like that.\' \STess 4.34|T185 \N44 \`Ought it?\' said Tess. \STess 4.34|T185 \N45 \`Yes,\' said he. \STess 4.34|T185 \N46 He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her bodice, \PTess 4.34|T186 \N1 so as to make it roughly approximate to the cut for evening wear; and when she had done this, and the pendant to the necklace hung isolated amid the whiteness of her throat, as it was designed to do, he stepped back to survey her. \STess 4.34|T186 \N5 \`My heavens,\' said Clare, \`how beautiful you are!\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N6 As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a peasant girl but very moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her simple condition and attire, will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a woman of fashion with the aids that Art can render; while the beauty of the midnight crush would often cut but a sorry figure if placed inside the field-woman's wrapper upon a monotonous acreage of turnips on a dull day. He had never till now estimated the artistic excellence of Tess's limbs and features. \STess 4.34|T186 \N14 \`If you were only to appear in a ball-room!\' he said. \`But no-+-no, dearest; I think I love you best in the wing-bonnet and cotton-frock-+-| yes, better than in this, well as you support these dignities.\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N17 Tess's sense of her striking appearance had given her a flush of excitement, which was yet not happiness. \STess 4.34|T186 \N19 \`I'll take them off,\' she said, \`in case Jonathan should see me. They are not fit for me, are they? They must be sold, I suppose?\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N21 \`Let them stay a few minutes longer. Sell them? Never. It would be a breach of faith.\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N23 Influenced by a second thought she readily obeyed. She had something to tell, and there might be help in these. She sat down with the jewels upon her; and they again indulged in conjectures as to where Jonathan could possibly be with their baggage. The ale they had poured out for his consumption when he came had gone flat with long standing. \STess 4.34|T186 \N29 Shortly after this they began supper, which was already laid on a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the passage, and Angel went out. \STess 4.34|T186 \N35 \`I couldn' make nobody hear at all by knocking,\' apologized Jonathan Kail, for it was he at last; \`and as't was raining out I opened the door. I've brought the things, sir.\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N38 \`I am very glad to see them. But you are very late.\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N39 \`Well, yes, sir.\' \STess 4.34|T186 \N40 There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail's tone which had not been there in the day, and lines of concern were ploughed upon his forehead in addition to the lines of years. He continued-+-| \PTess 4.34|T187 \N1 \STess 4.34|T187 \N1 \`We've all been gallied at the dairy at what might ha' been a most terrible affliction since you and your Mis'ess-+-so to name her now-+-left us this a'ternoon. Perhaps you ha'nt forgot the cock's afternoon crow?\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N5 \`Dear me;-+-what-+-\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N6 \`Well, some says it do mane one thing, and some another; but what's happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown herself.\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N9 \`No! Really! Why, she bade us good-bye with the rest-+--+-\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N10 \`Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis'ess-+-so to name what she lawful is-+-when you two drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on their bonnets and went out; and as there is not much doing now, being New Year's Eve, and folks mops and brooms from what's inside 'em, nobody took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had summut to drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads as if for home, and Marian going on to the next village, where there's another public-house. Noting more was zeed or heard o' Retty till the waterman, on his way home, noticed something by the Great Pool; 'twas her bonnet and shawl packed up. In the water he found her. He and another man brought her home, thinking 'a was dead; but she fetched round by degrees.\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N24 Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy tale, went to shut the door between the passage and the ante-room to the inner parlour where she was; but his wife, flinging a shawl round her, had come to the outer room and was listening to the man's narrative, her eyes resting absently on the luggage and the drops of rain glistening upon it. \STess 4.34|T187 \N30 \`And, more than this, there's Marian; she's been found dead drunk by the withy-bed-+-a girl who hev never been known to touch anything before except shilling ale; though, to be sure, 'a was always a good trencher-woman, as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had all gone out o' their minds!\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N35 \`And Izz?\' asked Tess. \STess 4.34|T187 \N36 \`Izz is about house as usual; but 'a do say 'a can guess how it happened; and she seems to be very low in mind about it, poor maid, as well she mid be. And so you see, sir, as all this happened just when we was packing your few traps and your Mis'ess's night-rail and dressing things into the cart, why, it belated me.\' \STess 4.34|T187 \N41 \`Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs, and drink a cup of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be wanted?\' \PTess 4.34|T188 \N1 \STess 4.34|T188 \N1 Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire, looking wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan Kail's heavy footsteps up and down the stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and heard him express his thanks for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the gratuity he received. Jonathan's footsteps then died from the door, and his cart creaked away. \STess 4.34|T188 \N7 Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and coming in to where she sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks between his hands from behind. He expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the toilet-gear that she had been so anxious about, but as she did not rise he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on the supper-table being too thin and glimmering to interfere with its glow. \STess 4.34|T188 \N14 \`I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls,\' he said. \`Still , don't let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid, you know.\' \STess 4.34|T188 \N17 \`Without the least cause,\' said Tess. \`While they who have cause to be, hide it, and pretend they are not.\' \STess 4.34|T188 \N19 This incident had turned the scale for her. They were simple and innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen; they had deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved worse-+-yet she was the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all without paying. She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would tell, there and then. This final determination she came to when she looked into the fire, he holding her hand. \STess 4.34|T188 \N26 A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the mantel-shelf was flushed with the high-colored light, and the legs of the table nearest the fire. Tess's face and neck reflected the same warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius-+-a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation. \STess 4.34|T188 \N34 \`Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about telling our faults?\' he asked abruptly, finding that she still remained immovable. \`We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well have done so. But for me it was no light promise. I want to make a confession to, Love.\' \STess 4.34|T188 \N39 This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of a Providential interposition. \STess 4.34|T188 \N41 \`You have to confess something?\' she said quickly, and even with gladness and relief. \STess 4.34|T188 \N43 \`You did not expect it? Ah-+-you thought too highly of me. Now listen. Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me and \PTess 4.34|T189 \N1 not to be indignant with me for not telling you before, as perhaps I ought to have done.\' \STess 4.34|T189 \N3 How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did not speak, and Clare went on-+-| \STess 4.34|T189 \N5 \`I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering my chance of you, darling, the great prize of my life-+-my Fellowship I call you. My brother's Fellowship was won at his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy. Well, I would not risk it. I was going to tell you a month ago-+-at the time you agreed to be mine, but I could not; I thought it might frighten you away from me. I put it off; then I thought I would tell you yesterday, to give you a chance at least of escaping me. But I did not. And I did not this morning, when you proposed our confessing our faults on the landing-+-the sinner that I was! But I must, now I see you sitting there so solemnly. I wonder if you will forgive me?\' \STess 4.34|T189 \N16 \`O yes! I am sure that-+-\' \STess 4.34|T189 \N17 \`Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don't know. To begin at the beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that I am one of the eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in good morals, Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men, and it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of plenary inspiration, one must heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: "[Be thou an example-+-in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity."] It is the only safeguard for us poor human beings. "[Integer vitae,"] says a Roman poet, who is strange company for St\. Paul-+-| The man of upright life, from frailties free, Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow. Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred in me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell.\' \STess 4.34|T189 \N36 He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been made when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a cork on the waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours' dissipation with a stranger. \STess 4.34|T189 \N40 \`Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly,\' he continued. \`I would have no more to say to her, and I came \PTess 4.34|T190 \N1 home. I have never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling this. Do you forgive me?\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N4 She pressed his hand tightly for an answer. \STess 4.34|T190 \N5 \`Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!-+-too painful as it is for the occasion-+-and talk of something lighter.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N7 \`O, Angel-+-I am almost glad-+-because now \iyou\r can forgive \ime\r! I have not made my confession. I have a confession, too-+-| remember, I said so.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N10 \`Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N11 \`Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours, or more so.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N12 \`It can hardly be more serious, dearest.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N13 \`It cannot-+-O no, it cannot!\' She jumped up joyfully at the hope. \`No, it cannot be more serious, certainly,\' she cried, \`because 'tis just the same! I will tell you now.\' \STess 4.34|T190 \N16 She sat down again. \STess 4.34|T190 \N17 Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Imagination might have beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's; and pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on her story of her acquaintance with Alec d'Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down. \LTess 5t|T190 \C Phase five, chapter thirtyfive. \N0 Phase the Fifth-+-The Woman Pays \LTess 5.35|T190 \CPhase five, chapter thirtyfive. \N28 Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations were done. Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she had not wept. \STess 5.35|T190 \N32 But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate looked impish-+-demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their \PTess 5.35|T191 \N1 irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had changed. \STess 5.35|T191 \N5 When she ceased the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corners of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness. \STess 5.35|T191 \N9 Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted itself now. His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague movement. When he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she had heard from him. \STess 5.35|T191 \N17 \`Tess!\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N18 \`Yes, dearest.\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N19 \`Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true. O you cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are not....My wife, my Tess-+-nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N23 \`I am not out of my mind,\' she said. \STess 5.35|T191 \N24 \`And yet-+--+-\'He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses: \`Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a way-+-but I hindered you, I remember!\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N27 These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep. Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this position she crouched in a heap. \STess 5.35|T191 \N33 \`In the name of our love, forgive me!\' she whispered with a dry mouth. \`I have forgiven you for the same!\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N35 And, as he did not answer, she said again-+-| \STess 5.35|T191 \N36 \`Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive \iyou\r, Angel.\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N37 \`You-+-yes, you do.\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N38 \`But you do not forgive me?\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N39 \`O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another. My God-+-how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque-+-prestidigitation as that!\' \STess 5.35|T191 \N42 He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into horrible laughter-+-as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell. \STess 5.35|T191 \N44 \`Don't-+-don't! It kills me quite, that!\' she shrieked. \`O have mercy upon me-+-have mercy!\' \PTess 5.35|T192 \N1 \STess 5.35|T192 \N1 He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up. \STess 5.35|T192 \N2 \`Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?\' she cried out. \`Do you know what this is to me?\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N4 He shook his head. \STess 5.35|T192 \N5 \`I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be if I do not! That's what I have felt, Angel!\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N8 \`I know that.\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N9 \`I thought, Angel, that you loved me-+-me, my very self! If it is I you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me! Having begun to love you, I love you for ever-+-in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me?\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N14 \`I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N15 \`But who?\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N16 \`Another woman in your shape.\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N17 She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of impostor; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered; and he stepped forward, thinking she was going to fall. \STess 5.35|T192 \N24 \`Sit down, sit down,\' he said gently. \`You are ill; and it is natural that you should be.\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N26 She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep. \STess 5.35|T192 \N29 \`I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?\' she asked helplessly. \`It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N32 The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears. \STess 5.35|T192 \N36 Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals. \STess 5.35|T192 \N41 \`Angel,\' she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice of terror having left her now. \`Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to live together?\' \STess 5.35|T192 \N44 \`I have not been able to think what we can do.\' \PTess 5.35|T193 \N1 \STess 5.35|T193 \N1 \`I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married, as I said I would do; and I shan't finish the good-hussif' I cut out and meant to make while we were in lodgings.\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N5 \`Shan't you?\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N6 \`No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N9 \`And if I do order you to do anything?\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N10 \`I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down and die.\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N12 \`You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N15 These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat. The charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled. She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought in his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some consequent action was necessary; yet what? \STess 5.35|T193 \N27 \`Tess,\' he said, as gently as he could speak, \`I cannot stay-+-in this room-+-just now. I will walk out a little way.\' \STess 5.35|T193 \N29 He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured out for their supper-+-one for her, one for him-+-| remained on the table untasted. This was what their \iAgape\r had come to. At tea, two or three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk from one cup. \STess 5.35|T193 \N34 The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear. \STess 5.35|T193 \N39 She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black, sinister, and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned \PTess 5.35|T194 \N1 at hearing her footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no difference in him, and he went on over the five yawning arches of the great bridge in front of the house. \STess 5.35|T194 \N4 The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there-+-the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean. \STess 5.35|T194 \N10 The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings being open she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the road wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare without any attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with dumb and vacant fidelity. \STess 5.35|T194 \N16 At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she knew that he saw her without irradiation-+-in all her bareness; that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then-+-| Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate; \/ Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. \/ For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; \/ And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain. \STess 5.35|T194 \N27 He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help addressing Clare. \STess 5.35|T194 \N31 \`What have I done-+-what \ihave\r I done! I have not told of anything that interferes with or belies my love for you. You don't think I planned it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think me!\' \STess 5.35|T194 \N36 \`H'm-+-well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same. But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not; and I will do everything to avoid it.\' \STess 5.35|T194 \N39 But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things that would have been better left to silence. \STess 5.35|T194 \N41 \`Angel!-+-Angel! I was a child-+-a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men.\' \STess 5.35|T194 \N43 \`You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.\' \PTess 5.35|T195 \N1 \STess 5.35|T195 \N1 \`Then will you not forgive me?\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N2 \`I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N3 \`And love me?\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N4 To this question he did not answer. \STess 5.35|T195 \N5 \`O Angel-+-my mother says that it sometimes happens so!-+-she knows several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it much-+-has got over it at least. And yet the woman has not loved him as I do you!\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N9 \`Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don't know what you say.\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N13 \`I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N14 She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came. \STess 5.35|T195 \N15 \`So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact-+-of your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N23 \`Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I everywhere; 'tis a feature of our county, and I can't help it.\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N28 \`So much the worse for the county.\' \STess 5.35|T195 \N29 She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to all else she was indifferent. \STess 5.35|T195 \N32 They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field, progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long while after. \STess 5.35|T195 \N43 During the interval of the cottager's going and coming, she had said to her husband-+-| \STess 5.35|T195 \N45 \`I don't see how I can help being the cause of much misery to \PTess 5.35|T196 \N1 you all your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I am not afraid.\' \STess 5.35|T196 \N3 \`I don't wish to add murder to my other follies,\' he said. \STess 5.35|T196 \N4 \`I will leave something to show that I did it myself-+-on account of my shame. They will not blame you then.\' \STess 5.35|T196 \N6 \`Don't speak so absurdly-+-I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical laughter than for tragedy. You don't in the least understand the quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by returning to the house, and going to bed.\' \STess 5.35|T196 \N12 \`I will,\' said she dutifully. \STess 5.35|T196 \N13 They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having been circuitous they were still not far from the house, and in obeying his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the main river, and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning. She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked now. \STess 5.35|T196 \N35 Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully. When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity. Among so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence, surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once, possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry. \STess 5.35|T196 \N43 Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house. Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly \PTess 5.35|T197 \N1 shaped it to a sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that she was sleeping profoundly. \STess 5.35|T197 \N4 \`Thank God!\' murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of bitterness at the thought-+-approximately true, though not wholly so-+-that having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders she was now reposing without care. \STess 5.35|T197 \N8 He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d'Urberville dames, whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess's bedchamber. In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister design lurked in the woman's features, a concentrated purpose of revenge on the other sex-+-so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice of the portrait was low-+-precisely as Tess's had been when he tucked it in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance between them. \STess 5.35|T197 \N17 The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended. \STess 5.35|T197 \N18 His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terribly sterile expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the face of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things. Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but The little less, and what worlds away! He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one, discordant and contrasting. \STess 5.35|T197 \N34 He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien. \LTess 5.36|T197 \C Phase five, chapter thirtysix. \N40 Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with \PTess 5.36|T198 \N1 its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager's wife, who was to minister to their wants while they remained here. \STess 5.36|T198 \N9 The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door. When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied their happiness. \STess 5.36|T198 \N21 Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice-+-| \STess 5.36|T198 \N23 \`Breakfast is ready!\' \STess 5.36|T198 \N24 He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air. When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the sitting-room, mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks-+-a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him. \STess 5.36|T198 \N37 The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more. \STess 5.36|T198 \N41 He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object also. \STess 5.36|T198 \N45 \`Angel!\' she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers \PTess 5.36|T199 \N1 lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly, that a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin. \STess 5.36|T199 \N9 She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air. \STess 5.36|T199 \N12 \`Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N13 \`It is true.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N14 \`Every word?\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N15 \`Every word.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N16 He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated-+-| \STess 5.36|T199 \N20 \`It is true.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N21 \`Is he living?\' Angel then asked. \STess 5.36|T199 \N22 \`The baby died.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N23 \`But the man?\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N24 \`He is alive.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N25 A last despair passed over Clare's face. \STess 5.36|T199 \N26 \`Is he in England?\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N27 \`Yes.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N28 He took a few vague steps. \STess 5.36|T199 \N29 \`My position-+-is this,\' he said abruptly. \`I thought-+-any man would have thought-+-that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but-+--+-However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N35 Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost all round. \STess 5.36|T199 \N38 \`Angel-+-I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I hoped you would never-+--+-\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N41 Her voice grew husky. \STess 5.36|T199 \N42 \`A last way?\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N43 \`I mean, to get rid of me. You \ican\r get rid of me.\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N44 \`How?\' \STess 5.36|T199 \N45 \`By divorcing me.\' \PTess 5.36|T200 \N1 \STess 5.36|T200 \N1 \`Good heavens-+-how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N2 \`Can't you-+-now I have told you? I thought my confession would give you grounds for that.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N4 \`O Tess-+-you are too, too-+-childish-+-unformed-+-crude, I suppose! I don't know what you are. You don't understand the law-+-| you don't understand!\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N7 \`What-+-you cannot?\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N8 \`Indeed I cannot.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N9 A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's face. \STess 5.36|T200 \N10 \`I thought-+-I thought,\' she whispered. \`O, now I see how wicked I seem to you! Believe me-+-believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you could cast me off if you were determined, and didn't love me at-+-at-+-all!\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N15 \`You were mistaken,\' he said. \STess 5.36|T200 \N16 \`O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I hadn't the courage. That's just like me!\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N18 \`The courage to do what?\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N19 As she did not answer he took her by the hand. \STess 5.36|T200 \N20 \`What were you thinking of doing?\' he inquired. \STess 5.36|T200 \N21 \`Of putting an end to myself.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N22 \`When?\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N23 She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. \`Last night,\' she answered. \STess 5.36|T200 \N25 \`Where?\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N26 \`Under your mistletoe.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N27 \`My good-+-! How?\' he asked sternly. \STess 5.36|T200 \N28 \`I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!\' she said, shrinking. \`It was with the cord of my box. But I could not-+-do the last thing! I was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N31 The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, \STess 5.36|T200 \N34 \`Now, listen to this. You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You will promise me as your husband to attempt that no more.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N37 \`I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N38 \`Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description.\' \STess 5.36|T200 \N39 \`But, Angel,\' she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon him, \`it was thought of entirely on your account-+-to set you free without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love you more, if that were possible, if you could \PTess 5.36|T201 \N1 bring yourself to do it, since there's no other way of escape for 'ee. I feel I am so utterly worthless! So very greatly in the way!\' \STess 5.36|T201 \N3 \`Ssh!\' \STess 5.36|T201 \N4 \`Well, since you say no, I won't. I have no wish opposed to yours.\' \STess 5.36|T201 \N5 He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be feared. \STess 5.36|T201 \N8 Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more or less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the amount of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over he rose, and telling her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went off to the miller's in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying that business, which had been his only practical reason for coming here. \STess 5.36|T201 \N17 When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises. He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then, without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began clearing the table and setting it in order. \STess 5.36|T201 \N22 The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon Tess, but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she left her assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room, waited for the reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge. \STess 5.36|T201 \N27 About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where they had washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own motion. \STess 5.36|T201 \N33 \`How punctual!\' he said. \STess 5.36|T201 \N34 \`Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge,\' said she. \STess 5.36|T201 \N35 The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings-+-now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way, and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour. \PTess 5.36|T202 \N1 \STess 5.36|T202 \N1 Clare's shape appeared at the door. \STess 5.36|T202 \N2 \`You must not work like this,\' he said. \`You are not my servant; you are my wife.\' \STess 5.36|T202 \N4 She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. \`I may think myself that-+-indeed?\' she murmured, in piteous raillery. \`You mean in name! Well, I don't want to be anything more.\' \STess 5.36|T202 \N7 \`You \imay\r think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?\' \STess 5.36|T202 \N8 \`I don't know,\' she said hastily, with tears in her accents. \`I thought I-+-because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not respectable enough long ago-+-and on that account I didn't want to marry you, only-+-only you urged me!\' \STess 5.36|T202 \N12 She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost have won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He waited till her sobbing ceased. \STess 5.36|T202 \N24 \`I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,\' he said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. \`It isn't a question of respectability, but one of principle!\' \STess 5.36|T202 \N27 He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked; thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world. \STess 5.36|T202 \N39 This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did she-+-the formerly free and independent Tess-+-venture to make any advances. It was on the third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he \PTess 5.36|T203 \N1 said \`Good-bye,\' and she replied in the same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the way of his. He did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily aside-+-| \STess 5.36|T203 \N4 \`I shall be home punctually.\' \STess 5.36|T203 \N5 Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had he tried to reach those lips against her consent-+-often had he said gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now. He observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently-+-| \STess 5.36|T203 \N12 \`You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it is only for form's sake.\' \STess 5.36|T203 \N16 \`Yes,\' said Tess absently. \STess 5.36|T203 \N17 He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at least. \STess 5.36|T203 \N20 Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same house, truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It was evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed activities, in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She was awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent flexibility. His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of going away from him during his absence at the mill; but she feared that this, instead of benefiting him, might be the means of hampering and humiliating him yet more if it should become known. \STess 5.36|T203 \N30 Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself, \`What's to be done-+-what's to be done?\' and by chance she overheard him. It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had hitherto prevailed. \STess 5.36|T203 \N37 \`I suppose-+-you are not going to live with me-+-long, are you, Angel?\' she asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely mechanical were the means by which she retained that expression of chastened calm upon her face. \STess 5.36|T203 \N41 \`I cannot,\' he said, \`without despising myself, and what is worse, perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you in the ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you. And, let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my difficulties. How can we live together while that man lives?-+-he being your husband in \PTess 5.36|T204 \N1 Nature, and not I. If he were dead it might be different....Besides, that's not all the difficulty; it lies in another consideration-+-one bearing upon the future of other people than ourselves. Think of years to come, and children being born to us, and this past matter getting known-+-for it must get known. There is not an uttermost part of the earth but somebody comes from it or goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of wretches of our flesh and blood growing up under a taunt which they will gradually get to feel the full force of with their expanding years. What an awakening for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly say Remain, after contemplating this contingency? Don't you think we had better endure the ills we have than fly to others?\' \STess 5.36|T204 \N13 Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before. \STess 5.36|T204 \N14 \`I cannot say Remain,\' she answered. \`I cannot; I had not thought so far.\' \STess 5.36|T204 \N16 Tess's feminine hope-+-shall we confess it-+-had been so obstinately recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against his judgment. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity. Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to herself: yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation had now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who would scorn her was one that brought deadly conviction to an honest heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that, in some circumstances, there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of M\. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, \`You shall be born,\' particularly if addressed to potential issue of hers. \STess 5.36|T204 \N35 Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had bewailed as a misfortune to herself. \STess 5.36|T204 \N39 She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto arose in Clare's own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it promisingly. She might have added besides: \`On an Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach \PTess 5.36|T205 \N1 me or you?\' Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right. The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own fastidious brain. \STess 5.36|T205 \N7 It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire. \STess 5.36|T205 \N16 \`I have thought over what you say,\' she remarked to him, moving her forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. \`It is quite true all of it; it must be. You must go away from me.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N20 \`But what can you do?\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N21 \`I can go home.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N22 Clare had not thought of that. \STess 5.36|T205 \N23 \`Are you sure?\' he inquired. \STess 5.36|T205 \N24 \`Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and done. You once said that I was apt to win men against their better judgment; and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change your plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your repentance and my sorrow will be terrible.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N29 \`And you would like to go home?\' he asked. \STess 5.36|T205 \N30 \`I want to leave you, and go home.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N31 \`Then it shall be so.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N32 Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a difference between the proposition and the covenant, which she had felt only too quickly. \STess 5.36|T205 \N35 \`I feared it would come to this,\' she murmured, her countenance meekly fixed. \`I don't complain, Angel. I-+-I think it best. What you said has quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of my bygones you yourself might be tempted to say words, and they might be overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then! I will go-+-| to-morrow.\' \STess 5.36|T205 \N44 \`And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to initiate it, I have seen that it was advisable we should part-+-at least for a while, till I \PTess 5.36|T206 \N1 can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write to you.\' \STess 5.36|T206 \N2 Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous; but, as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths of this gentle being she had married-+-the will to subdue the grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency. \STess 5.36|T206 \N8 He may have observed her look, for he explained-+-| \STess 5.36|T206 \N9 \`I think of people more kindly when I am away from them;\' adding cynically, \`God knows; perhaps we shall shake down together some day, for weariness; thousands have done it!\' \STess 5.36|T206 \N12 That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part the next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom any parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised over the other-+-on her part independently of accomplishments-+-| would probably in the first days of their separation be even more potent than ever, time must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments against accepting her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more strongly in the boreal light of a remoter view. Moreover, when two people are once parted-+-have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment-+-new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten. \LTess 5.37|T206 \C Phase five, chapter thirtyseven. \N27 Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it in the Valley of the Froom. \STess 5.37|T206 \N29 Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in the darkened farmhouse once the mansion of the d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the upper chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step of the staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the stream of moonlight with a curiously careful tread. He was in his shirt and trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy. When he reached the middle of the room he stood still and murmured, in tones of indescribable sadness-+-| \STess 5.37|T206 \N39 \`Dead! dead! dead!\' \STess 5.37|T206 \N40 Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force Clare would occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such as he had done on the night of their return from market just before their marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with \PTess 5.37|T207 \N1 the man who had insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought him into that somnambulistic state now. \STess 5.37|T207 \N3 Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart that, awake or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If he had entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust in his protectiveness. \STess 5.37|T207 \N7 Clare came close, and bent over her. \`Dead, dead, dead!\' he murmured. \STess 5.37|T207 \N9 After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of unmeasurable woe he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled her in the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as much respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her across the room, murmuring-+-| \STess 5.37|T207 \N14 \`My poor, poor Tess-+-my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so true!\' \STess 5.37|T207 \N16 The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours, were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering what he was going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the landing. \STess 5.37|T207 \N23 \`My wife-+-dead, dead!\' he said. \STess 5.37|T207 \N24 He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the banister. Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit, how desirable. \STess 5.37|T207 \N31 However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips-+-lips in the daytime scorned. Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and descended the staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken him, and they reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar and passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge of the door. But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room for extension in the open air, he lifted her against his shoulder, so that he could carry her with ease, the absence of clothes taking much from his burden. Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction of the river a few yards distant. \STess 5.37|T207 \N43 His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and she found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him \PTess 5.37|T208 \N1 that it pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute possession, to dispose of as he should choose, It was consoling, under the hovering terror of tomorrow's separation, to feel that he really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of harming her. \STess 5.37|T208 \N7 Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of-+-that Sunday morning when he had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which Tess could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill, at length stood still on the brink of the river. \STess 5.37|T208 \N14 Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland, frequently divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves around little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying themselves as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to which he had brought her was such a general confluence, and the river was proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away, leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the daytime young men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it. \STess 5.37|T208 \N27 Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was lonely, the river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of accomplishment. He might drown her if he would; it would be better than parting to-morrow to lead severed lives. \STess 5.37|T208 \N31 The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting, and splitting the moon's reflected face. Spots of froth travelled past, and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could both fall together into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped together that they could not be saved; they would go out of the world almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to her, or to him for marrying her. His last half-hour with her would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke his daytime aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream. \STess 5.37|T208 \N41 The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How she valued her own life had been proved; but his-+-she had no right to tamper with it. He reached the other side with her in safety. \PTess 5.37|T209 \N1 \STess 5.37|T209 \N1 Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds, and taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they reached the ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with a turn for grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself. In this Clare carefully laid Tess. Having kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained. Clare then lay down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a log. The spurt of mental excitement which had produced the effort was now over. \STess 5.37|T209 \N12 Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him to remain here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to himself he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled to certain death. She had heard of such deaths after sleep-walking. But how could she dare to awaken him, and let him know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him to discover his folly in respect of her? Tess, however, stepping out of her stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to arouse him without being violent. It was indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection. Her excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes' adventure; but that beatific interval was over. \STess 5.37|T209 \N25 It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could summon-+-| \STess 5.37|T209 \N28 \`Let us walk on, darling,\' at the same time taking him suggestively by the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit, and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to the stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which they stood at the manor-house door. Tess's feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in his woollen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort. \STess 5.37|T209 \N37 There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood, to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions she thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed. \STess 5.37|T209 \N43 As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the \PTess 5.37|T210 \N1 night's excursion, though, as regarded himself he may have been aware that he had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding. But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the other subject. \STess 5.37|T210 \N8 He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far, therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there. Clare no longer hesitated. \STess 5.37|T210 \N17 At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense did not approve; that his inclination had compromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication. \STess 5.37|T210 \N26 It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go. \STess 5.37|T210 \N30 He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end-+-| the temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the incident of the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The luggage was put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to suggest a \ifiasco\r, or that they were not going together to visit friends. \STess 5.37|T210 \N41 Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such solemn joy in each other a few days back, and, as Clare wished \PTess 5.37|T211 \N1 to wind up his business with Mr\. Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs\. Crick a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their unhappy state. \STess 5.37|T211 \N4 To make the call as unobtrusive as possible they left the carriage by the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut, and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away behind the cowstalls the mead which had been the scene of their first embrace. The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold. \STess 5.37|T211 \N13 Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs\. Crick emerged from the house, and several others of their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not seem to be there. \STess 5.37|T211 \N18 Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as would have been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the story of Marian and Retty. The latter had gone home to her father's, and Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere. They feared she would come to no good. \STess 5.37|T211 \N26 To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her favourite cows good-bye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul, there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way, as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as \`we,\' and yet sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their profession of unity, different from the natural shyness of young couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs\. Crick said to her husband-+-| \STess 5.37|T211 \N38 \`How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn't it strike 'ee that 'twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and she's not now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.\' \STess 5.37|T211 \N43 They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, \PTess 5.37|T212 \N1 and entering the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did not know their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother's house it was here that he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom in the driver's presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps on foot along one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the man to wait a few minutes they strolled away. \STess 5.37|T212 \N10 \`Now, let us understand each other,\' he said gently. \`There is no anger between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it-+-| if it is desirable, possible-+-I will come to you. But until I come to you it will be better that you should not try to come to me.\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N16 The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words. \STess 5.37|T212 \N22 \`Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N23 \`Just so.\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N24 \`May I write to you?\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N25 \`O yes-+-if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not be the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N27 \`I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only-+-only-+-don't make it more than I can bear!\' \STess 5.37|T212 \N30 That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane, notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed, he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood of long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his best advocate. Pride, too, entered into her submission-+-which perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the whole d'Urberville family-+-and the many effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched. \STess 5.37|T212 \N39 The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only (if he understood the wording of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for safety; and to this she readily agreed. \STess 5.37|T212 \N45 These things arranged he walked with Tess back to the carriage, \PTess 5.37|T213 \N1 and handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her. Taking next his own bag and umbrella-+-the sole articles he had brought with him hitherwards-+-he bade her good-bye; and they parted there and then. \STess 5.37|T213 \N5 The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar emendations of his own-+-| God's \inot\r in his heaven: all's \iwrong\r with the world! When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still. \LTess 5.38|T213 \C Phase five, chapter thirtyeight. \N14 As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her youth began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor. Her first thought was how would she be able to face her parents? \STess 5.38|T213 \N17 She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who had kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably left on New Year's Day, the date when such changes were made. Having received no intelligence lately from her home, she asked the turnpike-keeper for news. \STess 5.38|T213 \N23 \`Oh-+-nothing, miss,\' he answered. \`Marlott is Marlott still. Folks have died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter married this week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house, you know; they was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that John's own folk was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know how't have been discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own vaults to this day, but done out of his property in the time o' the Romans. However, Sir John, as we call'n now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could, and stood treat to everybody in the parish; and John's wife sung songs at The Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock.\' \STess 5.38|T213 \N35 Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide to go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She asked the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his house for a while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage, and went on to the village alone by a back lane. \STess 5.38|T213 \N40 At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how she could \PTess 5.38|T214 \N1 possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were calmly supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man, who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was, friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself, with no better place to go in the world. \STess 5.38|T214 \N6 She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the garden-hedge she was met by a girl who knew her-+-one of the two or three with whom she had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted with-+-| \STess 5.38|T214 \N11 \`But where's thy gentleman, Tess?\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N12 Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and, leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus made her way to the house. \STess 5.38|T214 \N15 As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the back door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs\. Durbeyfield on the door step in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this without observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her. \STess 5.38|T214 \N20 The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was about to plunge her arms in anew. \STess 5.38|T214 \N23 \`Why-+-Tess!-+-my chil'-+-I though you was married!-+-married real and truly this time-+-we sent the cider-+-\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N25 \`Yes, mother; so I am.\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N26 \`Going to be?\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N27 \`No-+-I am married.\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N28 \`Married! Then where's thy husband?\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N29 \`Oh, he's gone away for a time.\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N30 \`Gone away! When was you married, then? The day you said?\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N31 \`Yes, Tuesday, mother.\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N32 \`And now 'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N33 \`Yes; he's gone.\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N34 \`What's the meaning o' that? 'Nation seize such husbands as you seem to get, say I!\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N36 \`Mother!\' Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs. \`I don't know how to tell 'ee, mother! You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him. But I did tell him-+-I couldn't help it-+-and he went away!\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N41 \`O you little fool-+-you little fool!\' burst out Mrs\. Durbeyfield, splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. \`My good God! that ever I should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!\' \STess 5.38|T214 \N44 Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having relaxed at last. \STess 5.38|T214 \N46 \`I know it-+-I know-+-I know!\' she gasped through her sobs. \`But, \PTess 5.38|T215 \N1 O my mother, I could not help it! He was so good-+-and I felt the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If-+-if-+-it were to be done again-+-I should do the same. I could not-+-I dared not-+-so sin-+-against him!\' \STess 5.38|T215 \N5 \`But you sinned enough to marry him first!\' \STess 5.38|T215 \N6 \`Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if you knew-+-if you could only half know how I loved him-+-how anxious I was to have him-+-and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my wish to be fair to him!\' \STess 5.38|T215 \N11 Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank a helpless thing into a chair. \STess 5.38|T215 \N13 \`Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than other people's-+-not to know better than to blab such a thing as that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!\' Here Mrs\. Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied. \`What your father will say I don't know,\' she continued; \`for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their rightful position through you-+-poor silly man!-+-and now you've made this mess of it. The Lord-a-Lord!\' \STess 5.38|T215 \N23 As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately, and Mrs\. Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present. After her first burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a lesson. \STess 5.38|T215 \N32 Tess retreated upstairs, and beheld casually that the beds had been shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for two younger children. There was no place here for her now. \STess 5.38|T215 \N35 The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying a live hen. He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen had been carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show people that he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour. \STess 5.38|T215 \N42 \`We've just had up a story about-+--+-\' Durbeyfield began, and thereupon related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married into a clerical family. \`They was formerly styled "[sir,"] like my own ancestry,\' he said, \`though nowadays their true style, \PTess 5.38|T216 \N1 strictly speaking, is "[clerk"] only.\' As Tess had wished that no great publicity should be given to the event, he had mentioned no particulars. He hoped she would remove that prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was better than her husband's. He asked if any letter had come from her that day. \STess 5.38|T216 \N7 Then Mrs\. Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess unfortunately had come herself. \STess 5.38|T216 \N9 When at length the collapse was explained to him a sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of the cheering glass. Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of others. \STess 5.38|T216 \N13 \`To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!\' said Sir John. \`And I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history. And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop will say to me! How they'll squint and glane, and say, "[This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!"] I feel this is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and all-+-I can bear it no longer!...But she can make him keep her if he's married her?\' \STess 5.38|T216 \N24 \`Why, yes. But she won't think o' doing that.\' \STess 5.38|T216 \N25 \`D'ye think he really have married her?-+-or is it like the first-+-\' \STess 5.38|T216 \N26 Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more. The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could have done. How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home! \STess 5.38|T216 \N32 A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In her craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them under the impression that she was setting out to join him. Still further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past. With this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell; and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for \PTess 5.38|T217 \N1 some time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could not live apart from each other. \LTess 5.39|T217 \C Phase five, chapter thirtynine. \N5 It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his father. With his downward course the tower of the church rose into the evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to expect him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of. \STess 5.39|T217 \N12 The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man; though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers. \STess 5.39|T217 \N18 His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in the manner recommended by the great and wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of those great and wise men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to test the feasibility of their counsel. \`This is the chief thing: be not perturbed,\' said the Pagan moralist. That was just Clare's own opinion. But he was perturbed. \`Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,\' said the Nazarene. Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart was troubled all the same. How he would have liked to confront those two great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their method! \STess 5.39|T217 \N31 His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length he fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive interest of an outsider. \STess 5.39|T217 \N34 He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been brought about by the accident of her being a d'Urberville. When he found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had \PTess 5.39|T218 \N1 he not stoically abandoned her, in fidelity to his principles? This was what he had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved. \STess 5.39|T218 \N3 Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that he ate, and drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and ways. \STess 5.39|T218 \N10 In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of the Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist. Land was offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat attracted him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him there, and perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits the conventions would not be so operative which made life with her seem impracticable to him here. In brief he was strongly inclined to try Brazil, especially as the season for going thither was just at hand. \STess 5.38|T218 \N20 With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan to his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of arriving without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated them. As he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just as the old one had done in the small hours of that morning when he had carried his wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks; but his face was thinner now. \STess 5.39|T218 \N27 Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher stirs a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the drawing-room, but neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel entered, and closed the door quietly behind him. \STess 5.39|T218 \N32 \`But-+-where's your wife, dear Angel?\' cried his mother. \`How you surprise us!\' \STess 5.39|T218 \N34 \`She is at her mother's-+-temporarily. I have come home rather in a hurry because I've decided to go to Brazil.\' \STess 5.39|T218 \N36 \`Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!\' \STess 5.39|T218 \N37 \`Are they? I hadn't thought of that.\' \STess 5.39|T218 \N38 But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical land could not displace for long Mr\. and Mrs\. Clare's natural interest in their son's marriage. \STess 5.39|T218 \N41 \`We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken place,\' said Mrs\. Clare, \`and your father sent your godmother's gift to her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and not at her home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed \PTess 5.39|T219 \N1 you, and given us no pleasure. Your brothers felt that very strongly. Now it is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits you for the business you have chosen to follow instead of the ministry of the Gospel.+.+..Yet I wish I could have seen her first, Angel, or have known a little more about her. We sent her no present of our own, not knowing what would best give her pleasure, but you must suppose it only delayed. Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your father's against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much better to reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her. And now you have not brought her. It seems strange. What has happened?\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N11 He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should go to her parents' home for the present, whilst he came there. \STess 5.39|T219 \N13 \`I don't mind telling you, dear mother,\' he said \`that I always meant to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could come with credit to you. But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent one. If I do go it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my first journey. She will remain at her mother's till I come back.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N18 \`And I shall not see her before you start?\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N19 He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been, as he said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while-+-| not to wound their prejudices-+-feelings-+-in any way; and for other reasons he had adhered to it. He would have to visit home in the course of a year, if he went out at once; and it would be possible for them to see her before he started a second time-+-with her. \STess 5.39|T219 \N25 A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further exposition of his plans. His mother's disappointment at not seeing the bride still remained with her. Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess had infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth-+-a charming woman out of Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate. \STess 5.39|T219 \N31 \`Cannot you describe her? I am sure she is very pretty, Angel.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N32 \`Of that there can be no question!\' he said, with a zest which covered its bitterness. \STess 5.39|T219 \N34 \`And that she is pure and virtuous goes without question?\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N35 \`Pure and virtuous, of course, she is.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N36 \`I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day that she was fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid's bow; dark eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's cable; and large eyes violety-bluey-blackish.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N40 \`I did, mother.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N41 \`I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she naturally had scarce ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw you.\' \STess 5.39|T219 \N44 \`Scarcely.\' \PTess 5.39|T220 \N1 \STess 5.39|T220 \N1 \`You were her first love?\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N2 \`Of course.\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N3 \`There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls of the farm. Certainly I could have wished-+-well, since my son is to be an agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should have been accustomed to an outdoor life.\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N7 His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the chapter from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers, the Vicar observed to Mrs\. Clare-+-| \STess 5.39|T220 \N10 \`I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should have had in the usual course of our reading?\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N13 \`Yes, certainly,\' said Mrs\. Clare. \`The words of King Lemuel\' (she could cite chapter and verse as well as her husband). \`My dear son, your father has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a virtuous wife. We shall not need to be reminded to apply the words to the absent one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N18 A lump rose in Clare's throat. The portable lectern was taken out from the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old servants came in, and Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse of the aforesaid chapter-+-| \STess 5.39|T220 \N22 \`"[Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. She girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by night. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."]\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N30 When prayers were over, his mother said-+-| \STess 5.39|T220 \N31 \`I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear father read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you have chosen. The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others. "[Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but she excelleth them all."] Well, I wish I could have seen her, Angel. Since she is pure and chaste she would have been refined enough for me.\' \STess 5.39|T220 \N40 Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good-night to these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts; only as something vague and external to themselves. He went to his own chamber. \PTess 5.39|T221 \N1 \STess 5.39|T221 \N1 His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to discover her standing without, with anxious eyes. \STess 5.39|T221 \N3 \`Angel,\' she asked, \`is there something wrong that you go away so soon? I am quite sure you are not yourself.\' \STess 5.39|T221 \N5 \`I am not, quite, mother,\' said he. \STess 5.39|T221 \N6 \`About her? Now, my son, I know it is that-+-I know it is about her! Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?\' \STess 5.39|T221 \N8 \`We have not exactly quarrelled,\' he said. \`But we have had a difference-+--+-\' \STess 5.39|T221 \N10 \`Angel-+-is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?\' \STess 5.39|T221 \N12 With a mother's instinct Mrs\. Clare had put her finger on the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son. \STess 5.39|T221 \N15 \`She is spotless!\' he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie. \STess 5.39|T221 \N17 \`Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in nature than an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure, disappear under the influence of your companionship and tuition.\' \STess 5.39|T221 \N21 Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and a failure. \STess 5.39|T221 \N30 When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to practise deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his anger, as if she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath. \STess 5.39|T221 \N37 This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgment this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving \PTess 5.39|T222 \N1 of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire. \LTess 5.40|T222 \C Phase five, chapter forty. \N9 At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil, notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who had emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months. After breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such trifling matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from the local bank all the money he possessed. On his way back he encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose walls she seemed to be a sort of emanation. She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her-+-an enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism. \STess 5.40|T222 \N22 She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be. \STess 5.40|T222 \N24 \`Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,\' he replied. \`But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of existence. Perhaps a cloister would be preferable.\' \STess 5.40|T222 \N27 \`A cloister! O, Angel Clare!\' \STess 5.40|T222 \N28 \`Well?\' \STess 5.40|T222 \N29 \`Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman Catholicism.\' \STess 5.40|T222 \N31 \`And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art in a parlous state, Angel Clare.\' \STess 5.40|T222 \N33 \`\iI\r glory in my Protestantism!\' she said severely. \STess 5.40|T222 \N34 Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods in which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close to him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he could think of. His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for his welfare. \STess 5.40|T222 \N40 \`Dear Mercy,\' he said, \`you must forgive me. I think I am going crazy!\' \PTess 5.40|T223 \N1 \STess 5.40|T223 \N1 She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare re-entered the Vicarage. With the local banker he deposited the jewels till happier days should arise. He also paid into the bank thirty pounds-+-to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of what he had done. This amount, with the sum he had already placed in her hands-+-about fifty pounds-+-he hoped would be amply sufficient for her wants just at present, particularly as in an emergency she had been directed to apply to his father. \STess 5.40|T223 \N10 He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother suggested that he should do so. During the day he left the parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly. \STess 5.40|T223 \N16 As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or three small articles fetched away that they had left behind. It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had stretched its gloom over him. Yet when he had unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands. \STess 5.40|T223 \N27 The farmer and his wife were in the fields at the moment of his visit, and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen with a renewal of sentiments that he had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving. The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it. Having been there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and berries were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed it into the grate. Standing there he for the first time doubted whether his course in this conjunction had been a wise, much less a generous, one. But had he not been cruelly blinded? In the incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed. \`O Tess! If you had only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you!\' he mourned. \STess 5.40|T223 \N41 Hearing a footstep below he rose and went to the top of the stairs. At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning up her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett. \STess 5.40|T223 \N44 \`Mr\. Clare,\' she said, \`I've called to see you and Mrs\. Clare, and to inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again.\' \STess 5.40|T223 \N46 This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet \PTess 5.40|T224 \N1 guessed his; an honest girl who loved him-+-one who would have made as good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess. \STess 5.40|T224 \N3 \`I am here alone,\' he said; \`we are not living here now.\' Explaining why he had come, he asked, \`Which way are you going home, Izz?\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N5 \`I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir,\' she said. \STess 5.40|T224 \N6 \`Why is that?\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N7 Izz looked down. \STess 5.40|T224 \N8 \`It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way.\' She pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was journeying. \STess 5.40|T224 \N11 \`Well-+-are you going there now? I can take you if you wish for a lift.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N13 Her olive complexion grew richer in hue. \STess 5.40|T224 \N14 \`Thank 'ee, Mr\. Clare,\' she said. \STess 5.40|T224 \N15 He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and the few other items which had to be considered by reason of the sudden abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare's return to his horse and gig Izz jumped up beside him. \STess 5.40|T224 \N19 \`I am going to leave England, Izz,\' he said, as they drove on. \`Going to Brazil.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N21 \`And do Mrs\. Clare like the notion of such a journey?\' she asked. \STess 5.40|T224 \N22 \`She is not going at present-+-say for a year or so. I am going out to reconnoitre-+-to see what life there is like.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N24 They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making no observation. \STess 5.40|T224 \N26 \`How are the others?\' he inquired. \`How is Retty?\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N27 \`She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever fall in love wi' her any more,\' said Izz absently. \STess 5.40|T224 \N30 \`And Marian?\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N31 Izz lowered her voice. \STess 5.40|T224 \N32 \`Marian drinks.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N33 \`Indeed!\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N34 \`Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N35 \`And you!\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N36 \`I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline. But-+-I am no great things at singing afore breakfast now!\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N38 \`How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn "['Twas down in Cupid's Gardens"] and "[The Tailor's Breeches"] at morning milking?\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N41 \`Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when you had been there a bit.\' \STess 5.40|T224 \N43 \`Why was that falling-off?\' \PTess 5.40|T225 \N1 \STess 5.40|T225 \N1 Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by way of answer. \STess 5.40|T225 \N3 \`Izz-+-how weak of you-+-for such as I!\' he said, and fell into reverie. \`Then-+-suppose I had asked \iyou\r to marry me?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N5 \`If you had I should have said "[Yes,"] and you would have married a woman who loved 'ee!\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N7 \`Really!\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N8 \`Down to the ground!\' she whispered vehemently. \`O my God! did you never guess it till now!\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N10 By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village. \STess 5.40|T225 \N11 \`I must get down. I live out there,\' said Izz abruptly, never having spoken since her avowal. \STess 5.40|T225 \N13 Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely, instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring manner. \STess 5.40|T225 \N19 \`I am going to Brazil alone, Izz,\' said he. \`I have separated from my wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with her again. I may not be able to love you; but-+-will you go with me instead of her?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N23 \`You truly wish me to go?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N24 \`I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief. And you at least love me disinterestedly.\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N26 \`Yes-+-I will go,\' said Izz, after a pause. \STess 5.40|T225 \N27 \`You will? You know what it means, Izz?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N28 \`It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over there| -+-that's good enough for me.\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N30 \`Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization-+-| Western civilization, that is to say.\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N33 \`I don't mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and there's no other way!\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N35 \`Then don't get down, but sit where you are.\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N36 He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing any signs of affection. \STess 5.40|T225 \N38 \`You love me very, very much, Izz?\' he suddenly asked. \STess 5.40|T225 \N39 \`I do-+-I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the dairy together!\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N41 \`More than Tess?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N42 She shook her head. \STess 5.40|T225 \N43 \`No,\' she murmured, \`not more than she.\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N44 \`How's that?\' \STess 5.40|T225 \N45 \`Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did!...She would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more.\' \PTess 5.40|T226 \N1 \STess 5.40|T226 \N1 Like the prophet on the top of Peor Izz Huett would fain have spoken perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace. \STess 5.40|T226 \N4 Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words from such an unexpected, unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, \`\iShe\r \iwould have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more\r!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N8 \`Forget our idle talk, Izz,\' he said, turning the horse's head suddenly. \`I don't know what I've been saying! I will now drive you back to where your lane branches off.\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N11 \`So much for honesty towards 'ee! O-+-how can I bear it-+-how can I-+-how can I!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N13 Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw what she had done. \STess 5.40|T226 \N15 \`Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O, Izz, don't spoil it by regret!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N17 She stilled herself by degrees. \STess 5.40|T226 \N18 \`Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying, either, wh-+-when I agreed to go! I wish-+-what cannot be!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N20 \`Because I have a loving wife already.\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N21 \`Yes, yes! You have.\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N22 They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an hour earlier, and she hopped down. \STess 5.40|T226 \N24 \`Izz-+-please, please forget my momentary levity!\' he cried. \`It was so ill-considered, so ill-advised!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N26 \`Forget it? Never, never! O, it was no levity to me!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N27 He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and took her hand. \STess 5.40|T226 \N30 \`Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow? You don't know what I've had to bear!\' \STess 5.40|T226 \N32 She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to mar their adieux. \STess 5.40|T226 \N34 \`I forgive 'ee, sir!\' she said. \STess 5.40|T226 \N35 \`Now Izz,\' he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself to the mentor's part he was far from feeling; \`I want you to tell Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give way to folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and well-+-remember the words-+-wisely and well-+-for my sake. I send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and \PTess 5.40|T227 \N1 treachery. Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things! On that one account I can never forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a faithful friend. Promise.\' \STess 5.40|T227 \N5 She gave the promise. \STess 5.40|T227 \N6 \`Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Good-bye!\' \STess 5.40|T227 \N7 He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she entered her mother's cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's parting from her and her arrival home. \STess 5.40|T227 \N13 Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That evening he was within a feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road to the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line of South Wessex which divided him from his Tess's home. It was neither a contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her heart, which deterred him. \STess 5.40|T227 \N20 No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz's admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first, he was right now. And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more sustained force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon come back to her. He took the train that night for London, and five days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of embarkation. \LTess 5.41|T227 \C Phase five, chapter fortyone. \N28 From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse. \STess 5.41|T227 \N36 After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked. Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had confronted \PTess 5.41|T228 \N1 her there-+-he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision. \STess 5.41|T228 \N3 The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty of further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done. \STess 5.41|T228 \N9 Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns. \STess 5.41|T228 \N15 She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand, had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had consecrated them to souvenirs of himself-+-they appeared to have had as yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own experiences-+-and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But she had to do it, and one by one they left her hands. \STess 5.41|T228 \N21 She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they were in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but this could not be done because the previous thatching had never been paid for. New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which, with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by this time, could she not send them the money? \STess 5.41|T228 \N31 Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a remark of Angel's that whenever she required further resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be considered. \STess 5.41|T228 \N38 But the more Tess thought of the step the more reluctant was she to take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her in owning to his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her. They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise her in the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him know her state. \PTess 5.41|T229 \N1 \STess 5.41|T229 \N1 Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might, she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any case that they would soon present a united front to their families and the world. This hope she still fostered. To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the \ie+'clat\r of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed. \STess 5.41|T229 \N15 The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she could only use and not sell them. Even were they absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which was not essentially hers at all. \STess 5.41|T229 \N20 Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial. At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains. \STess 5.41|T229 \N30 To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its purlieus. \STess 5.41|T229 \N41 The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer \PTess 5.41|T230 \N1 required no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her life had been there she could not go back. The anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply knew that she felt it. \STess 5.41|T230 \N12 She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county, to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from her husband-+-probably through Izz Huett-+-| and the good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that she worked again as of old. \STess 5.41|T230 \N21 With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on-+-disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs. \STess 5.41|T230 \N29 Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November afternoon. \STess 5.41|T230 \N38 She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night. \PTess 5.41|T231 \N1 \STess 5.41|T231 \N1 The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few moments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and said-+-| \STess 5.41|T231 \N7 \`Good-night, my pretty maid:\' to which she civilly replied. \STess 5.41|T231 \N8 The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her. \STess 5.41|T231 \N10 \`Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile| -+-young Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at that time, though I don't live there now.\' \STess 5.41|T231 \N13 She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot through her, and she returned him no answer. \STess 5.41|T231 \N16 \`Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true, though your fancy-man was so up about it-+-hey, my sly one? You ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering.\' \STess 5.41|T231 \N19 Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe against any possibility of discovery. \STess 5.41|T231 \N25 Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess crept. \STess 5.41|T231 \N30 Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, \`All is vanity.\' She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity-+-injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come \PTess 5.41|T232 \N1 when that bone would be bare. \`I wish it were now,\' she said. \STess 5.41|T232 \N3 In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy body upon the ground. Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear. \STess 5.41|T232 \N12 Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some little while it became day in the wood. \STess 5.41|T232 \N14 Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours had grown strong she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out-+-all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more. \STess 5.41|T232 \N25 Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one as she had heard them. \STess 5.41|T232 \N33 She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking over hedges, or peering through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their purpose to destroy life-+-in this case harmless feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propensities-+-| at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family. \STess 5.41|T232 \N44 With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living \PTess 5.41|T233 \N1 birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come-+-as they probably would come to look for them a second time. \STess 5.41|T233 \N5 \`Poor darlings-+-to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o' such misery as yours!\' she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds tenderly. \`And not a twinge of bodily pain about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands to feed and clothe me.\' She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature. \LTess 5.42|T233 \C Phase five, chapter forty-two. \N13 It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon the highway. But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at hand, and Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the birds' silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her the relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she could once rise high enough to despise opinion. But that she could not do so long as it was held by Clare. \STess 5.42|T233 \N20 She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks. Somehow she felt hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband also might say these same things to her even yet? She was bound to take care of herself on the chance of it, and keep off these casual lovers. To this end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her appearance. As soon as she got out of the village she entered a thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the dairy-+-never since she had worked among the stubble at Marlott. She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache. Then with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration she went on her uneven way. \STess 5.42|T233 \N36 \`What a mommet of a maid!\' said the next man who met her to a companion. \STess 5.42|T233 \N38 Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she heard him. \STess 5.42|T233 \N39 \`But I don't care!\' she said. \`O no-+-I don't care! I'll always be ugly now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care of me. My husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any more; but I love him just the same, and hate all other men, and like to make 'em think scornfully of me!\' \PTess 5.42|T234 \N1 \STess 5.42|T234 \N1 Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and buff-leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and the stress of winds. There is no sign of young passion in her now-+-| The maiden's mouth is cold \/ . . . . . \/ Fold over simple fold \/ Binding her head. Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love. \STess 5.42|T234 \N16 Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty, directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but little. Her object being a winter's occupation and a winter's home, there was no time to lose. Her experience of short hirings had been such that she was determined to accept no more. \STess 5.42|T234 \N21 Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of tempting. First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment, and, as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied next for the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry tendance that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and coarse pursuits which she liked least-+-work on arable land: work of such roughness, indeed, as she would never have deliberately volunteered for. \STess 5.42|T234 \N31 Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli-+-as if Cybele the Many-breasted were supinely extended there-+-which stretched between the valley of her birth and the valley of her love. \STess 5.42|T234 \N35 Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown white and dusty within a few hours after rain. There were few trees, or none, those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed down with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural enemies of tree, bush, and brake. In the middle distance ahead of her she could see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout, and they seemed friendly. They had a low a unassuming aspect \PTess 5.42|T235 \N1 from this upland, though as approached on the other side from Blackmoor in her childhood they were as lofty bastions against the sky. Southerly, at many miles' distance, and over the hills and ridges coastward, she could discern a surface like polished steel: it was the English Channel at a point far out towards France. \STess 5.42|T235 \N6 Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village. She had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian's sojourn. There seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to come. The stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the kind of labour in demand here was of the roughest kind; but it was time to rest from searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly as it began to rain. At the entrance to the village was a cottage whose gable jutted into the road, and before applying for a lodging she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening close in. \STess 5.42|T235 \N15 \`Who would think I was Mrs\. Angel Clare!\' she said. \STess 5.42|T235 \N16 The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that immediately within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of which came through the bricks. She warmed her hands upon them, and also put her cheek-+-red and moist with the drizzle-+-against their comforting surface. The wall seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night. \STess 5.42|T235 \N23 Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage-+-gathered together after their day's labour-+-talking to each other within, and the rattle of their supper-plates was also audible. But in the village-street she had seen no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the print gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess instinctively thought it might be Marian, and when she came near enough to be distinguishable in the gloom surely enough it was she. Marian was even stouter and redder in the face than formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any previous period of her existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew the acquaintance in such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive, and she responded readily to Marian's greeting. \STess 5.42|T235 \N36 Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved by the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition than at first; though she had dimly heard of the separation. \STess 5.42|T235 \N39 \`Tess-+-Mrs\. Clare-+-the dear wife of dear he! And is it really so bad as this, my child? Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way? Anybody been beating 'ee? Not \ihe\r?\' \STess 5.42|T235 \N42 \`No, no, no! I merely did it not be be clipsed or colled, Marian.\' \STess 5.42|T235 \N43 She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest such wild thoughts. \STess 5.42|T235 \N45 \`And you've got no collar on\' (Tess had been accustomed to wear a little white collar at the dairy). \PTess 5.42|T236 \N1 \STess 5.42|T236 \N1 \`I know it, Marian.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N2 \`You've lost it travelling.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N3 \`I've not lost it. The truth is, I don't care anything about my looks; and so I didn't put it on.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N5 \`And you don't wear your wedding-ring?\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N6 \`Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on a ribbon. I don't wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am married at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N9 Marian paused. \STess 5.42|T236 \N10 \`But you \ibe\r a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly fair that you should live like this!\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N12 \`O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N13 \`Well, well. \iHe\r married you-+-and you can be unhappy!\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N14 \`Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands-+-| from their own.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N16 \`You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's none. So it must be something outside ye both.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N18 \`Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking questions? My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my allowance, so that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time. Do not call me Mrs\. Clare, but Tess, as before. Do they want a hand here?\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N23 \`O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to come. 'Tis a starve-acre place. Corn and swedes are all they grow. Though I be here myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such as you to come.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N26 \`But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N27 \`Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink. Lord, that's the only comfort I've got now! If you engage, you'll be set swede-hacking. That's what I be doing; but you won't like it.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N30 \`O-+-anything! Will you speak for me?\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N31 \`You will do better by speaking for yourself.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N32 \`Very well. Now, Marian, remember-+-nothing about \ihim\r, if I get the place. I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N34 Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain than Tess, promised anything she asked. \STess 5.42|T236 \N36 \`This is pay-night,\' she said, \`and if you were to come with me you would know at once. I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis because he's away, I know. You couldn't be unhappy if he were here, even if he gie'd ye no money-+-even if he used you like a drudge.\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N40 \`That's true; I could not!\' \STess 5.42|T236 \N41 They walked on together, and soon reached the farmhouse, which was almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight; there was not, at this season, a green pasture-+-nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere; in large fields divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels. \PTess 5.42|T237 \N1 \STess 5.42|T237 \N1 Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her. The farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on her agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was seldom offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women could perform as readily as men. \STess 5.42|T237 \N8 Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence that she had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate. \STess 5.42|T237 \N13 That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she did not tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought reproach upon him. \LTess 5.43|T237 \C Phase five, chapter fortythree. \N17 There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village, the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other words, the village of a resident squire's tenantry, the village of free or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village, farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third. \STess 5.43|T237 \N25 But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs\. Angel Clare; and it sustained her. \STess 5.43|T237 \N28 The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres, in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets-+-the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two woman to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face \PTess 5.43|T238 \N1 looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies. \STess 5.43|T238 \N4 Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian \`wroppers\'| -+-sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing about-+-scant skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of the two Marys. \STess 5.43|T238 \N12 They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour. \STess 5.43|T238 \N27 Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all, emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating Marian's remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays. \STess 5.43|T238 \N38 \`You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o' Froom Valley from here when 'tis fine,\' said Marian. \STess 5.43|T238 \N40 \`Ah! Can you?\' said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality. \STess 5.43|T238 \N41 So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian's will had a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited Tess to drink. Tess's unassisted power of dreaming, however, \PTess 5.43|T239 \N1 being enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest sip, and then Marian took a pull herself from the spirits. \STess 5.43|T239 \N3 \`I've got used to it,\' she said, \`and can't leave it off now. 'Tis my only comfort-+--+-You see I lost him: you didn't; and you can do without it perhaps.\' \STess 5.43|T239 \N6 Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by the dignity of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian's differentiation. \STess 5.43|T239 \N9 Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare's character would lead him to rejoin her. \STess 5.43|T239 \N19 Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it; and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old times they had spent out there. \STess 5.43|T239 \N25 \`Ah,\' said Marian, \`how I should like another or two of our old set to come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o' the old things we used to know, and make it all come back again a'most, in seeming!\' Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions returned. \`I'll write to Izz Huett,\' she said. \`She's biding at home doing nothing now, I know, and I'll tell her we be here, and ask her to come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.\' \STess 5.43|T239 \N33 Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of this plan for importing old Talbothays' joys was two or three days later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry, and had promised to come if she could. \STess 5.43|T239 \N37 There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been observed till brought out into visibility \PTess 5.43|T240 \N1 by the crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates. \STess 5.43|T240 \N3 After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes-+-eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The travellers' ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland-+-the trivial movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food. \STess 5.43|T240 \N21 Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country. There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache, penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything. \STess 5.43|T240 \N37 Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore, as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and across their chests, and started for the barn. \PTess 5.43|T241 \N1 The snow had followed the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting. \STess 5.43|T241 \N11 \`Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,\' said Marian. \`Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from the North Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all-+-in fact, it rather does it good.\' \STess 5.43|T241 \N17 \`You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian,\' said Tess severely. \STess 5.43|T241 \N18 \`Well, but-+-surely you care for 'n! Do you?\' \STess 5.43|T241 \N19 Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and, putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind. \STess 5.43|T241 \N22 \`Well, well, I know you do. But 'pon my body, it is a rum life for a married couple! There-+-I won't say another word! Well, as for the weather, it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is fearful hard work-+-worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I'm stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can't think why maister should have set 'ee at it.\' \STess 5.43|T241 \N28 They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the women to draw from during the day. \STess 5.43|T241 \N33 \`Why, here's Izz!\' said Marian. \STess 5.43|T241 \N34 Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow began, and sleeping at the ale-house. The farmer had agreed with her mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been afraid to disappoint him by delay. \STess 5.43|T241 \N40 In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start remembered as Dark Car the Queen of Spades and her junior the Queen of Diamonds-+-those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly had none, for they had been under the influence of \PTess 5.43|T242 \N1 liquor on that occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did all kinds of men's work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with some superciliousness. \STess 5.43|T242 \N6 Putting on their gloves all set to work in a row in front of the press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves diminished. \STess 5.43|T242 \N11 The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barn-doors upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do. Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode up to the barn-door. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her history. \STess 5.43|T242 \N23 He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside, when he said, \`So you be the young woman who took my civility in such ill part? Be drowned if I didn't think you might be as soon as I heard of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the road, when you bolted; but now I think I've got the better of you.\' He concluded with a hard laugh. \STess 5.43|T242 \N31 Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer like a bird caught in a clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had nothing to fear from her employer's gallantry; it was rather the tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare's treatment of him. Upon the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to endure it. \STess 5.43|T242 \N38 \`You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose? Some women are such fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there's nothing like a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o' young wenches' heads; and you've signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg my pardon?\' \STess 5.43|T242 \N43 \`I think you ought to beg mine.\' \STess 5.43|T242 \N44 \`Very well-+-as you like. But we'll see which is master here. Be they all the sheaves you've done to-day?\' \PTess 5.43|T243 \N1 \STess 5.43|T243 \N1 \`Yes, sir.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N2 \`'Tis a very poor show. Just see what they've done over there\' (pointing to the two stalwart women). \`The rest, too, have done better than you.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N5 \`They've all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what we do.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N8 \`Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N9 \`I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the others will do.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N11 He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than gallantry. When two o'clock arrived the professional reed-drawers tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks, tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, \`Now, we've got it all to ourselves.\' And so at last the conversation turned to their own experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their affection for Angel Clare. \STess 5.43|T243 \N22 \`Izz and Marian,\' said Mrs\. Angel Clare, with a dignity which was extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: \`I can't join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr\. Clare; you will see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the present, he is my husband.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N27 Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls who had loved Clare. \`He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,\' she said; \`but I don't think he is a too fond husband to go away from you so soon.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N31 \`He had to go-+-he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!\' pleaded Tess. \STess 5.43|T243 \N33 \`He might have tided 'ee over the winter.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N34 \`Ah-+-that's owing to an accident-+-a misunderstanding; and we won't argue it,\' Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. \`Perhaps there's a good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands, without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.\' \STess 5.43|T243 \N38 After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of wheat-ears at her feet. \STess 5.43|T243 \N44 \`I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!\' cried Marian. \`It wants harder flesh than yours for this work.\' \PTess 5.43|T244 \N1 \STess 5.43|T244 \N1 Just then the farmer entered. \`Oh, that's how you get on when I am away,\' he said to her. \STess 5.43|T244 \N3 \`But it is my own loss,\' she pleaded. \`Not yours.\' \STess 5.43|T244 \N4 \`I want it finished,\' he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went out at the other door. \STess 5.43|T244 \N6 \`Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear,\' said Marian. \`I've worked here before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your number.\' \STess 5.43|T244 \N9 \`I don't like to let you do that. I'm taller than you, too.\' \STess 5.43|T244 \N11 However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and reclined on a heap of pull-tails-+-the refuse after the straight straw had been drawn-+-thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her succumbing had been as largely owing to agitation at re-opening the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of bodily touches. \STess 5.43|T244 \N19 She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up and resumed work. \STess 5.43|T244 \N25 Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at five o'clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better, to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of sheaves. \STess 5.43|T244 \N32 Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a romantic vein. \STess 5.43|T244 \N36 \`I should not have thought it of him-+-never!\' she said in a dreamy tone. \`And I loved him so! I didn't mind his having \iyou\r. But this about Izz is too bad!\' \STess 5.43|T244 \N39 Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger with the bill-hook. \STess 5.43|T244 \N41 \`Is it about my husband?\' she stammered. \STess 5.43|T244 \N42 \`Well, yes. Izz said, "[Don't 'ee tell her;"] but I am sure I can't help it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil with him.\' \PTess 5.43|T245 \N1 \STess 5.43|T245 \N1 Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves straightened. \`And did Izz refuse to go?\' she asked. \STess 5.43|T245 \N3 \`I don't know. Anyhow he changed his mind.\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N4 \`Pooh-+-then he didn't mean it! 'Twas just a man's jest!\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N5 \`Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N6 \`He didn't take her!\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N7 They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms, burst out crying. \STess 5.43|T245 \N9 \`There!\' said Marian. \`Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N10 \`No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him, but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won't dally like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving everything to be done by him!\' \STess 5.43|T245 \N16 The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt she could not finish it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it next to her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more? \LTess 5.44|T245 \C Phase five, chapter fortyfour. \N26 By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the direction which they had taken more than once of late-+-to the distant Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband's parents that she had been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts. She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had been established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in a church-book beside hers. \STess 5.44|T245 \N41 But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale there was a \PTess 5.44|T246 \N1 limit to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written to her? He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her know of the locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to notify his address. Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon the courage of solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and express her grief at his silence. If Angel's father were the good man she had heard him represented to be, he would be able to enter into her heart-starved situation. Her social hardships she could conceal. \STess 5.44|T246 \N10 To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was the only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it would be necessary to walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she would have to allow herself a long day for the undertaking by rising early. \STess 5.44|T246 \N16 A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by a hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to try the experiment. At four o'clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still favourable, the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil. \STess 5.44|T246 \N21 Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage a little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she, knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr\. Clare, was indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now elapsed since her sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from the wreck of her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat. \STess 5.44|T246 \N33 \`'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now-+-you do look a real beauty!\' said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the situation; she could not be-+-no woman with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could be-+-antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry. \STess 5.44|T246 \N42 With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn. They heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without \PTess 5.44|T247 \N1 any particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare. \STess 5.44|T247 \N3 It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the truant. \STess 5.44|T247 \N10 In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands the atmosphere down there was a deep blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to toil there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized. \STess 5.44|T247 \N21 Keeping the Vale on her right she steered steadily westward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy, with the dell between them called \`The Devil's Kitchen.\' Still following the elevated way reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which as soon as she reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane into the small town or village of Evershead, being now about half-way over the distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily enough-+-not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church. \STess 5.44|T247 \N34 The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her enterprise loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in danger of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a gate on the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage lay. \STess 5.44|T247 \N42 The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the Vicar and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in her eyes. She wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a week-day. Such a good man might be prejudiced against a woman \PTess 5.44|T248 \N1 who had chosen Sunday, never realizing the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent upon her to go on now. She took off the thick boots in which she had walked thus far, put on her pretty thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge by the gate-post where she might readily find them again, descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew near the parsonage. \STess 5.44|T248 \N8 Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably in the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of imagination, dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was the residence of near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion, divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth, death, and after-death, they were the same. \STess 5.44|T248 \N15 She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang the door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No; the thing was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be risen to and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles' walk, led her to support herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip, and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company. \STess 5.44|T248 \N27 The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And though she looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to return, it was with a breath of relief that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her that she might have been recognized (though how she could not tell), and orders been given not to admit her. \STess 5.44|T248 \N33 Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all the windows. \STess 5.44|T248 \N37 Ah-+-the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the household, servants included, going to morning-service, and, as a consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore, only necessary to wait till the service was over. She would not make herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past the church into the lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess found herself in the midst of them. \PTess 5.44|T249 \N1 \STess 5.44|T249 \N1 The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her pace, and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat between its hedges till the Vicar's family should have lunched, and it might be convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the churchgoers, except two youngish men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were beating up behind her at a quick step. \STess 5.44|T249 \N9 As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation, did not fail to recognize in those voices the quality of her husband's tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans, Tess's one dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront them; for though she felt that they could not identify her she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly they walked the more briskly walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking a short quick stroll before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled with sitting through a long service. \STess 5.44|T249 \N20 Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill-+-a ladylike young woman somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle \iguinde+'e\r and prudish. Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law brought them so nearly behind her back that she could hear every word of their conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly interested her till, observing the young lady still further in front, one of them remarked, \`There is Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her.\' \STess 5.44|T249 \N28 Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel's life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much without previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the brothers proceeded to say: \`Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I don't know; but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from him.\' \STess 5.44|T249 \N38 \`I can't say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was begun by his extraordinary opinions.\' \STess 5.44|T249 \N41 Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps \PTess 5.44|T250 \N1 and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the three went on together. \STess 5.44|T250 \N3 They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with his umbrella, and dragged something to light. \STess 5.44|T250 \N9 \`Here's a pair of old boots,\' he said. \`Thrown away, I suppose, by some tramp or other.\' \STess 5.44|T250 \N11 \`Some impostor who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and so excite our sympathies,\' said Miss Chant, \`Yes, it must have been, for they are excellent walking-boots-+-by no means worn out. What a wicked thing to do! I'll carry them home for some poor person.\' \STess 5.44|T250 \N15 Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated. \STess 5.44|T250 \N17 She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen veil, till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill. \STess 5.44|T250 \N20 Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not contravene in her own defenceless person all these untoward omens. It was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel's wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by those-+-to her-+-superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity. As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their owner. \STess 5.44|T250 \N34 \`Ah!\' she said, still sighing in pity of herself, \`\ithey\r didn't know that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these pretty ones \ihe\r bought for me-+-no-+-they did not know it! And they didn't think that \ihe\r chose the colour o' my pretty frock-+-no-+-how could they? If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don't care much for him, poor thing!\' \STess 5.44|T250 \N40 Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of judgment had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr\. \PTess 5.44|T251 \N1 and Mrs\. Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love. \STess 5.44|T251 \N8 Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But it was done with a sorry shake of the head. \`It is nothing-+-it is nothing!\' she said. \`Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!\' \STess 5.44|T251 \N19 Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by milestones. \STess 5.44|T251 \N23 She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted. \STess 5.44|T251 \N30 \`The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?\' she said. \STess 5.44|T251 \N31 \`No, my dear,\' said the old woman. \`'Tis too soon for that; the bells hain't strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder barn. A ranter preaches there between services-+-an excellent, fiery, Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don't go to hear'n! What comes in the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.\' \STess 5.44|T251 \N37 Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central part her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing \PTess 5.44|T252 \N1 the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher. \STess 5.44|T252 \N3 His voice became so distinct in the still air that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by faith, as exponded in the theology of St\. Paul. This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration-+-| \STess 5.44|T252 \N12 \`\iO foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not\r \iobey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently\r \iset forth, crucified among you?\r\' \STess 5.44|T252 \N15 Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the views of Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views. He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewed. But a day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this change in him, and made him what they saw him. \STess 5.44|T252 \N26 But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d'Urberville. Her face fixed in painful suspense she came round to the front of the barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed. \LTess 6t|T253 \C Phase six, chapter fortyfive. \N0 Phase the Sixth-+-The Convert \LTess 6.45|T253 \C Phase six, chapter fortyfive.-+-The Convert \N1 Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d'Urberville since her departure from Trantridge. \STess 6.45|T253 \N3 The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor advanced. \STess 6.45|T253 \N9 To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last, and to behold it now!...There was the same handsome unpleasantness of mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief in his identity. \STess 6.45|T253 \N16 To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly \ibizarrerie\r, a grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast. \STess 6.45|T253 \N21 It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism Paulinism, the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire. \STess 6.45|T253 \N33 The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify. \STess 6.45|T253 \N37 Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer. D'Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned \PTess 6.45|T254 \N1 away from his wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that. \STess 6.45|T254 \N6 Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun. \STess 6.45|T254 \N10 But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence, seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the words that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she faced him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however, but a short time; for Tess's energies returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as fast as she was able past the barn and onward. \STess 6.45|T254 \N20 As soon as she could reflect it appalled her, this change in their relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend, it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon his altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been wellnigh extinguished. \STess 6.45|T254 \N26 She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed with a sensitiveness to ocular beams-+-even her clothing-+-so alive was she to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of that barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still engirdled her. It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place. Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself. \STess 6.45|T254 \N38 Thus absorbed she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning she saw approaching that well-known form-+-so strangely accoutred \PTess 6.45|T255 \N1 as the Methodist-+-the one personage in all the world she wished not to encounter alone on this side of the grave. \STess 6.45|T255 \N3 There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by the feelings within him. \STess 6.45|T255 \N7 \`Tess!\' he said. \STess 6.45|T255 \N8 She slackened speed without looking round. \STess 6.45|T255 \N9 \`Tess!\' he repeated. \`It is I-+-Alec d'Urberville.\' \STess 6.45|T255 \N10 She then looked back at him, and he came up. \STess 6.45|T255 \N11 \`I see it is,\' she answered coldly. \STess 6.45|T255 \N12 \`Well-+-is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,\' he added, with a slight laugh, \`there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me like this. But-+-I must put up with that....I heard you had gone away, nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed you?\' \STess 6.45|T255 \N17 \`I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!\' \STess 6.45|T255 \N18 \`Yes-+-you may well say it,\' he returned grimly, as they moved onward together, she with unwilling tread. \`But don't mistake me; I beg this because you may have been led to do so in noticing-+-if you did notice it-+-how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a momentary faltering; and considering what you had been to me, it was natural enough. But will helped me through it-+-though perhaps you think me a humbug for saying it-+-and immediately afterwards I felt that, of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the wrath to come-+-sneer if you like-+-the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in view-+-nothing more.\' \STess 6.45|T255 \N29 There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: \`Have you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.\' \STess 6.45|T255 \N31 \`\iI\r have done nothing!\' said he indifferently. \`Heaven, as I have been telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself-+-the old Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was brought about, and I hope you will be interested enough at least to listen. Have you ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster-+-you must have done so?-+-old Mr\. Clare; one of the most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left in the Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by their sophistries, till they are but the shadow of what they were. I only differ from him \PTess 6.45|T256 \N1 on the question of Church and State-+-the interpretation of the text, "[Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord"]| -+-that's all. He is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls in this country than any other man you can name. You have heard of him?\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N6 \`I have,\' she said. \STess 6.45|T256 \N7 \`He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show me the way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that some day I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit-+-that those who came to scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange magic in his words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of my mother hit me most; and by degrees I was brought to see daylight. Since then my one desire has been to hand on the true view to others, and that is what I was trying to do to-day; though it is only lately that I have preached hereabout. The first months of my ministry have been spent in the North of England among strangers, where I preferred to make my earliest clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before undergoing that severest of all tests of one's sincerity, addressing those who have known one, and have been one's companions in the days of darkness. If you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at yourself, I am sure-+--+-\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N24 \`Don't go on with it!\' she cried passionately, as she turned away from him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. \`I can't believe in such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to me like this, when you know-+-when you know what harm you've done me! You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! Out upon such-+-I don't believe in you-+-I hate it!\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N33 \`Tess,\' he insisted; \`don't speak so! It came to me like a jolly new idea! And you don't believe me? What don't you believe?\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N35 \`Your conversion. Your scheme of religion.\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N36 \`Why?\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N37 She dropped her voice. \`Because a better man than you does not believe in such.\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N39 \`What a woman's reason! Who is this better man?\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N40 \`I cannot tell you.\' \STess 6.45|T256 \N41 \`Well,\' he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to spring out at a moment's notice, \`God forbid that I should say I \PTess 6.45|T257 \N1 am a good man-+-and you know I don't say any such thing. I am new to goodness, truly; but new comers see furthest sometimes.\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N3 \`Yes,\' she replied sadly. \`But I cannot believe in your conversion to a new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don't last!\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N5 Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon the familiar countenance and form, remained comtemplating her. The inferior man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor even entirely subdued. \STess 6.45|T257 \N10 \`Don't look at me like that!\' he said abruptly. \STess 6.45|T257 \N11 Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien, instantly withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with a flush, \`I beg your pardon!\' And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong. \STess 6.45|T257 \N17 \`No, no! Don't beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide your good looks, why don't you keep it down?\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N19 She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, \`It was mostly to keep off the wind.\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N21 \`It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this,\' he went on; \`but it is better that I should not look too often on you. It might be dangerous.\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N23 \`Ssh!\' said Tess. \STess 6.45|T257 \N24 \`Well, women's faces have had too much power over me already for me not to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they; and it reminds me of the old times that I would forget!\' \STess 6.45|T257 \N27 After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and then as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was going with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate. Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted thereon in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he knew who had been at the pains to blazon these announcements. He told her that the man was employed by himself and others who were working with him in that district, to paint these reminders that no means might be left untried which might move the hearts of a wicked generation. \STess 6.45|T257 \N37 At length the road touched the spot called \`Cross-in-Hand.\' Of all spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand. Differing accounts were given of its history and purport. Some authorities \PTess 6.45|T258 \N1 stated that a devotional cross had once formed the complete erection thereon, of which the present relic was but the stump; others that the stone as it stood was entire, and that it had been fixed there to mark a boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow, whatever the origin or the relic, there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by. \STess 6.45|T258 \N8 \`I think I must leave you now,\' he remarked, as they drew near to this spot. \`I have to preach at Abbot's-Cernel at six this evening, and my way lies across to the right from here. And you upset me somewhat too, Tessy-+-I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and get strength....How is it that you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good English?\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N14 \`I have learnt things in my troubles,\' she said evasively. \STess 6.45|T258 \N15 \`What troubles have you had?\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N16 She told him of the first one-+-the only one that related to him. \STess 6.45|T258 \N17 D'Urberville was struck mute. \`I knew nothing of this till now!\' he next murmured. \`Why didn't you write to me when you felt your trouble coming on?\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N20 She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: \`Well-+-you will see me again.\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N22 \`No,\' she answered. \`Do not again come near me!\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N23 \`I will think. But before we part come here.\' He stepped up to the pillar. \`This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but I fear you at moments-+-far more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you will never tempt me-+-by your charms or ways.\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N28 \`Good God-+-how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is furthest from my thought!\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N30 \`Yes-+-but swear it.\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N31 Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand upon the stone and swore. \STess 6.45|T258 \N33 \`I am sorry you are not a believer,\' he continued; \`that some unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who knows what may not happen? I'm off. Good-bye!\' \STess 6.45|T258 \N37 He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge, and without letting his eyes again rest upon her leapt over, and struck out across the down in the direction of Abbot's-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation, and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his pocket a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter, worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D'Urberville opened the letter. It was dated several months before this time, and was signed by Parson Clare. \STess 6.45|T258 \N45 The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned joy at d'Urberville's \PTess 6.45|T259 \N1 conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr\. Clare's warm assurance of forgiveness for d'Urberville's former conduct, and his interest in the young man's plans for the future. He, Mr\. Clare, would much have liked to see d'Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have helped him to enter a theological college to that end; but since his correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on account of the delay it would have entailed, he was not the man to insist upon its paramount importance. Every man must work as he could best work, and in the method towards which he felt impelled by the Spirit. \STess 6.45|T259 \N12 D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer troubled his mind. \STess 6.45|T259 \N16 She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary shepherd. \STess 6.45|T259 \N19 \`What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?\' she asked of him. \`Was it ever a Holy Cross?\' \STess 6.45|T259 \N21 \`Cross-+-no; 'twer not a cross! 'Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.\' \STess 6.45|T259 \N26 She felt the \ipetite mort\r at this unexpectedly gruesome information, and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman, in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a moment the voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came close the girl turned serenely and recognized her, the young man walking off in embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess's excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact, began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just witnessed. \STess 6.45|T259 \N43 \`He is Amby Seedling, a chap who used to sometimes come and help at Talbothays,\' she explained indifferently. \`He actually inquired \PTess 6.45|T260 \N1 and found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he's been in love wi' me these two years. But I've hardly answered him.\' \LTess 6.46|T260 \C Phase six, chapter fortysix. \N3 Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was afield. The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her. On the sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite its front was a long mound or \`grave,\' in which the roots had been preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at the uncovered end, chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from each root, and throwing it after the operation into the slicer. A man was turning the handle of the machine, and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes, the fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish of the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in Tess's leather-gloved hand. \STess 6.46|T260 \N17 The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where the swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of darker brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each of these something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up and down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a man, the plough going between them, turning up the cleared ground for a spring sowing. \STess 6.46|T260 \N24 For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon perceived to be a man in black, arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes, continually observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him till her companion directed her attention to his approach. \STess 6.46|T260 \N34 It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was already on Tess's face, and she pulled her curtained hood further over it. \STess 6.46|T260 \N40 D'Urberville came up and said quietly-+-| \STess 6.46|T260 \N41 \`I want to speak to you, Tess.\' \STess 6.46|T260 \N42 \`You have refused my last request, not to come near me!\' said she. \STess 6.46|T260 \N44 \`Yes, but I have a good reason.\' \PTess 6.46|T261 \N1 \STess 6.46|T261 \N1 \`Well, tell it.\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N2 \`It is more serious than you may think.\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N3 He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other ears. D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer, turning his back to the latter. \STess 6.46|T261 \N8 \`It is this,\' he continued, with capricious compunction. \`In thinking of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to inquire as to your worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think of it. But I see now that it is hard-+-harder than it used to be when I-+-knew you-+-harder than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owing to me!\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N14 She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent head, her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her trimming of the swedes. By going on with her work she felt better able to keep him outside her emotions. \STess 6.46|T261 \N18 \`Tess,\' he added, with a sigh of discontent,-+-\`yours was the very worst case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had resulted till you told me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole blame was mine-+-the whole unconventional business of our time at Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am but the base imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of simple indifference.\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N28 Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the mere fieldwoman alone marking her. \STess 6.46|T261 \N31 \`But it is not that I came to say,\' d'Urberville went on. \`My circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask you is, will you put it in my power to do my duty-+-to make the only reparation I can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go with me?...I have already obtained this precious document. It was my old mother's dying wish.\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N40 He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling of embarrassment. \STess 6.46|T261 \N42 \`What is it?\' said she. \STess 6.46|T261 \N43 \`A marriage licence.\' \STess 6.46|T261 \N44 \`O no, sir-+-no!\' she said quickly, starting back. \STess 6.46|T261 \N45 \`You will not? Why is that?\' \PTess 6.46|T262 \N1 \STess 6.46|T262 \N1 And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d'Urberville's face. It was unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her had been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand. \STess 6.46|T262 \N5 \`Surely,\' he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked round at the labourer who turned the slicer. \STess 6.46|T262 \N7 Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there. Informing the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she wished to walk a little way, she moved off with d'Urberville across the zebra-striped field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed section he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped forward on the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him. \STess 6.46|T262 \N13 \`You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?\' he repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows. \STess 6.46|T262 \N15 \`I cannot.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N16 \`But why?\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N17 \`You know I have no affection for you.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N18 \`But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps-+-as soon as you really could forgive me?\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N20 \`Never!\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N21 \`Why so positive?\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N22 \`I love somebody else.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N23 The words seemed to astonish him. \STess 6.46|T262 \N24 \`You do?\' he cried. \`Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is morally right and proper any weight with you?\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N26 \`No, no, no-+-don't say that!\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N27 \`Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing feeling which you will overcome-+-\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N29 \`No-+-no.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N30 \`Yes, yes! Why not?\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N31 \`I cannot tell you.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N32 \`You must in honour!\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N33 \`Well then...I have married him.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N34 \`Ah!\' he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at her. \STess 6.46|T262 \N35 \`I did not wish to tell-+-I did not mean to!\' she pleaded. \`It is a secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, \iplease\r will you, keep from questioning me? You must remember that we are now strangers.\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N39 \`Strangers-+-are we? Strangers!\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N40 For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he determinedly chastened it down. \STess 6.46|T262 \N42 \`Is that man your husband?\' he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign the labourer who turned the machine. \STess 6.46|T262 \N44 \`That man!\' she said proudly. \`I should think not!\' \STess 6.46|T262 \N45 \`Who, then?\' \PTess 6.46|T263 \N1 \STess 6.46|T263 \N1 \`Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!\' she begged, and flashed her appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes. \STess 6.46|T263 \N3 D'Urberville was disturbed. \STess 6.46|T263 \N4 \`But I only asked for your sake!\' he retorted hotly. \`Angels of heaven!-+-God forgive me for such an expression-+-I came here, I swear, as I thought for your good. Tess-+-don't look at me so-+-I cannot stand your looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or since! There-+-I won't lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of you has waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished with all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage might be a sanctification for us both. "[The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband,"] I said to myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must bear the disappointment!\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N15 He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground. \STess 6.46|T263 \N16 \`Married. Married!...Well, that being so,\' he added, quite calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves and putting them in his pocket; \`that being prevented, I should like to do some good to you and your husband, whoever he may be. There are many questions that I am tempted to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in opposition to your wishes. Though, if I could know your husband, I might more easily benefit him and you. Is he on this farm?\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N23 \`No,\' she murmured. \`He is far away.\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N24 \`Far away? From \iyou\r? What sort of husband can he be?\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N25 \`O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out-+-\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N27 \`Ah, is it so!...That's sad, Tess!\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N28 \`Yes.\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N29 \`But to stay away from you-+-to leave you to work like this!\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N30 \`He does not leave me to work!\' she cried, springing to the defence of the absent one with all her fervour. \`He don't know it! It is by my own arrangement.\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N33 \`Then, does he write?\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N34 \`I-+-I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to ourselves.\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N36 \`Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my fair Tess!\' \STess 6.46|T263 \N38 In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not express the life or shape of those within. \STess 6.46|T263 \N41 \`You must not-+-you must not!\' she cried fearfully, slipping her hand from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. \`O, will you go away-+-for the sake of me and my husband-+-go, in the name of your own Christianity!\' \PTess 6.46|T264 \N1 \STess 6.46|T264 \N1 \`Yes, yes; I will,\' he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to her turned to leave. Facing round, however, he said, \`Tess, as God is my judge, I meant no humbug in taking your hand!\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N4 A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not noticed in their pre-occupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice reached her ear: \STess 6.46|T264 \N7 \`What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o' day?\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N9 Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his field. \STess 6.46|T264 \N12 \`Don't speak like that to her!\' said d'Urberville, his face blackening with something that was not Christianity. \STess 6.46|T264 \N14 \`Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa'sons have to do with she?\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N16 \`Who is the fellow?\' asked d'Urberville, turning to Tess. \STess 6.46|T264 \N17 She went close up to him. \STess 6.46|T264 \N18 \`Go-+-I do beg you!\' she said. \STess 6.46|T264 \N19 \`What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his face what a churl he is.\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N21 \`He won't hurt me. \iHe's\r not in love with me. I can leave at Lady-Day.\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N23 \`Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But-+-well, good-bye!\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N24 Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which Tess took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being independent of sex. To have as a master this man of stone, who would have cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences. She silently walked back towards the summit of the field that was the scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview which had just taken place that she was hardly aware that the nose of Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders. \STess 6.46|T264 \N33 \`If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I'll see that you carry it out,\' he growled. \`'Od rot the women-+-now 'tis one thing, and then 'tis another. But I'll put up with it no longer!\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N36 Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the farm as he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once received, she did for one moment picture what might have been the result if she had been free to accept the offer just made her of being the monied Alec's wife. It would have lifted her completely out of subjection, not only to her present oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to despise her. \`But no, no!\' she said breathlessly; \`I could not have married him now! He is so unpleasant to me.\' \STess 6.46|T264 \N44 That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing from him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection. \PTess 6.46|T265 \N1 Any one who had been in a position to read between the lines would have seen that at the back of her great love was some monstrous fear| -+-almost a desperation-+-as to some secret contingencies which were not disclosed. But again she did not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go with him, and perhaps he did not care for her at all. She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would ever reach Angel's hands. \STess 6.46|T265 \N8 After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and brought on the day which was of great import to agriculturists-+-the day of the Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the farming population who thought of changing their places duly attended at the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly all the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash Farm intended flight, and early in the morning there was a general exodus in the direction of the town, which lay at a distance of from ten to a dozen miles over hilly country. Though Tess also meant to leave at the quarter-day she was one of the few who did not go to the fair, having a vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to render another outdoor engagement unnecessary. \STess 6.46|T265 \N21 It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time, and one would almost have thought that winter was over. She had hardly finished her dinner when d'Urberville's figure darkened the window of the cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to herself to-day. \STess 6.46|T265 \N26 Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she could hardly in reason run away. D'Urberville's knock, his walk up to the door, had some indescribable quality of difference from his air when she last saw him. They seemed to be acts of which the doer was ashamed. She thought that she would not open the door; but, as there was no sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself down into a chair before speaking. \STess 6.46|T265 \N34 \`Tess-+-I couldn't help it!\' he began desperately, as he wiped his heated face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. \`I felt that I must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I cannot get rid of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!\' \STess 6.46|T265 \N41 The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet Tess did not pity him. \STess 6.46|T265 \N43 \`How can I pray for you,\' she said, \`when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?\' \PTess 6.46|T266 \N1 \STess 6.46|T266 \N1 \`You really think that?\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N2 \`Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N4 \`Cured? By whom?\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N5 \`By my husband, if I must tell.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N6 \`Ah-+-your husband-+-your husband! How strange it seems! I remember you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe in these matters, Tess?\' he asked. \`You seem to have no religion-+-perhaps owing to me.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N10 \`But I have. Though I don't believe in anything supernatural.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N11 D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving. \STess 6.46|T266 \N12 \`Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N13 \`A good deal of it.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N14 \`H'm-+-and yet I've felt so sure about it,\' he said uneasily. \STess 6.46|T266 \N15 \`I believe in the \ispirit\r of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my dear husband...But I don't believe-+-\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N17 Here she gave her negations. \STess 6.46|T266 \N18 \`The fact is,\' said d'Urberville drily, \`whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That's just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N22 \`Ah, because he knew everything!\' said she, with a triumphant simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could hardly have deserved, much less her husband. \STess 6.46|T266 \N25 \`Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from another person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to teach you such scepticism!\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N28 \`He never forced my judgment! He would never argue on the subject with me! But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after inquiring deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than what I might believe, who hadn't looked into doctrines at all.\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N33 \`What used he to say? He must have said something?\' \STess 6.46|T266 \N34 She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare's accent and manner with reverential faithfulness. \STess 6.46|T266 \N40 \`Say that again,\' asked d'Urberville, who had listened with the greatest attention. \STess 6.46|T266 \N42 She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville thoughtfully murmured the words after her. \STess 6.46|T266 \N44 \`Anything else?\' he presently asked. \PTess 6.46|T267 \N1 \STess 6.46|T267 \N1 \`He said at another time something like this;\' and she gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the pedigree ranging from the \iDictionnaire Philosophique\r to Huxley's \iEssays\r. \STess 6.46|T267 \N5 \`Ah-+-ha! How do you remember them?\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N6 \`I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't wish me to; and I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts. I can't say I quite understand that one; but I know it is right.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N9 \`H'm. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't know yourself!\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N11 He fell into thought. \STess 6.46|T267 \N12 \`And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his,\' she resumed. \`I didn't wish it to be different. What's good enough for him is good enough for me.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N15 \`Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N16 \`No-+-I never told him-+-if I am an infidel.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N17 \`Well-+-you are better off to-day than I am, Tess, after all! You don't believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore, do no despite to your conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought to preach it, but like the devils I believe and tremble, for I suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N22 \`How?\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N23 \`Why,\' he said aridly; \`I have come all the way here to see you to-day! But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where I have undertaken to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two this afternoon, and where all the brethren are expecting me this minute. Here's the announcement.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N28 He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day, hour, and place of meeting, at which he, d'Urberville, would preach the Gospel as aforesaid. \STess 6.46|T267 \N31 \`But how can you get there?\' said Tess, looking at the clock. \STess 6.46|T267 \N32 \`I cannot get there! I have come here.\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N33 \`What, you have really arranged to preach, and-+-\' \STess 6.46|T267 \N34 \`I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there-+-by reason of my burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised!-+-No, by my word and truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now! Why I did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt, and you are she. But you may well despise me now! I \PTess 6.46|T268 \N1 thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still serve in the groves! Ha! ha!\' \STess 6.46|T268 \N3 \`O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean? What have I done!\' \STess 6.46|T268 \N5 \`Done?\' he said, with a soulless sneer in the word. \`Nothing intentionally. But you have been the means-+-the innocent means-+-of my backsliding, as they call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those