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Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #110 · 860,608 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: February 1, 1994 [eBook #110]
                Most recently updated: November 22, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/110

Credits: Steve Menyhert, Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and Joseph E. Loewenstein


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES: A PURE WOMAN ***




Tess of the d’Urbervilles

A Pure Woman

Faithfully presented by

Thomas Hardy




     ... Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed
     Shall lodge thee.—W. Shakespeare.


Contents


 Phase the First: The Maiden
 Chapter I
 Chapter II
 Chapter III
 Chapter IV
 Chapter V
 Chapter VI
 Chapter VII
 Chapter VIII
 Chapter IX
 Chapter X
 Chapter XI

 Phase the Second: Maiden No More
 Chapter XII
 Chapter XIII
 Chapter XIV
 Chapter XV

 Phase the Third: The Rally
 Chapter XVI
 Chapter XVII
 Chapter XVIII
 Chapter XIX
 Chapter XX
 Chapter XXI
 Chapter XXII
 Chapter XXIII
 Chapter XXIV

 Phase the Fourth: The Consequence
 Chapter XXV
 Chapter XXVI
 Chapter XXVII
 Chapter XXVIII
 Chapter XXIX
 Chapter XXX
 Chapter XXXI
 Chapter XXXII
 Chapter XXXIII
 Chapter XXXIV

 Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays
 Chapter XXXV
 Chapter XXXVI
 Chapter XXXVII
 Chapter XXXVIII
 Chapter XXXIX
 Chapter XL
 Chapter XLI
 Chapter XLII
 Chapter XLIII
 Chapter XLIV

 Phase the Sixth: The Convert
 Chapter XLV
 Chapter XLVI
 Chapter XLVII
 Chapter XLVIII
 Chapter XLIX
 Chapter L
 Chapter LI
 Chapter LII

 Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment
 Chapter LIII
 Chapter LIV
 Chapter LV
 Chapter LVI
 Chapter LVII
 Chapter LVIII
 Chapter LIX




Explanatory Note to the First Edition

The main portion of the following story appeared—with slight
modifications—in the _Graphic_ newspaper; other chapters, more
especially addressed to adult readers, in the _Fortnightly Review_ and
the _National Observer_, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered
to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now
to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it
complete, as originally written two years ago.

I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose,
as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and
in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too
genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays
thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If
an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come
than that the truth be concealed.

T.H.

_November_ 1891.




Author’s Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions

This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins
after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as
fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of
her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions
that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding
that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said
about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive
spirit in which _Tess of the d’Urbervilles_ has been received by the
readers of England and America would seem to prove that the plan of
laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it
to square with the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether
a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an
achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain
from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one
so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully
misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these
appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand.

I include amongst them the reviewers—by far the majority—who have so
generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the
others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their
own imaginative intuition.

Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor
aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply and in
the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with
convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the
rendering.

The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of
opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and
reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective
with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted
to it from the ordinances of civilization. They ignore the meaning of
the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic claims upon it, not to
mention the spiritual interpretation afforded by the finest side of
their own Christianity. Others dissent on grounds which are
intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the
views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and not
those of an earlier and simpler generation—an assertion which I can
only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an
impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest; as one is
reminded by a passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe
on judges of this class: “They are those who seek only their own ideas
in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what
is. The cause of the dispute, therefore, lies in the very first
principles, and it would be utterly impossible to come to an
understanding with them.” And again: “As soon as I observe that any
one, when judging of poetical representations, considers anything more
important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.”

In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible
advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something
or other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid
objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him
to read the book through three times, owing to my not having made that
critical effort which “alone can prove the salvation of such an one.”
In another, he objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s
pitchfork, a lodging-house carving-knife, and a shame-bought parasol,
appearing in a respectable story. In another place he was a gentleman
who turned Christian for half-an-hour the better to express his grief
that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals should have been used;
though the same innate gentility compelled him to excuse the author in
words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: “He does but give us
of his best.” I can assure this great critic that to exclaim
illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an
original sin of mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some
local originality; though if Shakespeare were an authority on history,
which perhaps he is not, I could show that the sin was introduced into
Wessex as early as the Heptarchy itself. Says Glo’ster in _Lear_,
otherwise Ina, king of that country:

    As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
    They kill us for their sport.

The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the
predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget;
professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the
occasion; modern “Hammers of Heretics”; sworn Discouragers, ever on the
watch to prevent the tentative half-success from becoming the whole
success later on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under
the name of practising the great historical method. However, they may
have causes to advance, privileges to guard, traditions to keep going;
some of which a mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the
world strike him, without any ulterior intentions whatever, has
overlooked, and may by pure inadvertence have run foul of when in the
least aggressive mood. Perhaps some passing perception, the outcome of
a dream hour, would, if generally acted on, cause such an assailant
considerable inconvenience with respect to position, interests, family,
servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife. He therefore
valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters, and
cries “Shame!” So densely is the world with any shifting of positions,
even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe. Such shiftings
often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a
novel.

_July_ 1892.

The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this
story, when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was
still fresh to the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what
they are worth, as something once said; but probably they would not
have been written now. Even in the first short time which has elapsed
since the book was first published, some of the critics who have
provoked the reply have “gone down into silence,” as if to remind one
of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine.

_January_ 1895.

The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never
appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were
collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were
overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in
Chapter X.

Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add
that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final
proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s
character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was
disputed more than anything else in the book. _Melius fuerat non
scibere._ But there it stands.

The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November,
1891.

T.H.

_March_ 1912.




Phase the First:




The Maiden


I

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking
homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale
of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were
rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat
to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if
in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything
in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of
his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where
his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly
parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering
tune.

“Good night t’ee,” said the man with the basket.

“Good night, Sir John,” said the parson.

The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round.

“Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road
about this time, and I said ‘Good night,’ and you made reply ‘_Good
night, Sir John_,’ as now.”

“I did,” said the parson.

“And once before that—near a month ago.”

“I may have.”

“Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these
different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?”

The parson rode a step or two nearer.

“It was only my whim,” he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: “It
was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was
hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham,
the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield,
that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly
family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan
d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William
the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?”

“Never heard it before, sir!”

“Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the
profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and
chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who
assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of
Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part
of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King
Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give
a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time
your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great
Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to
no serious extent, and in Charles the Second’s reign you were made
Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been
generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary,
like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were
knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now.”

“Ye don’t say so!”

“In short,” concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his
switch, “there’s hardly such another family in England.”

“Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?” said Durbeyfield. “And here have I
been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was
no more than the commonest feller in the parish.... And how long hev
this news about me been knowed, Pa’son Tringham?”

The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died
out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own
investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having
been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the d’Urberville family, he
had observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been
led to make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had no
doubt on the subject.

“At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of
information,” said he. “However, our impulses are too strong for our
judgement sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of it
all the while.”

“Well, I have heard once or twice, ’tis true, that my family had seen
better days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o’t,
thinking it to mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep
only one. I’ve got a wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home,
too; but, Lord, what’s a spoon and seal?... And to think that I and
these noble d’Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. ’Twas said that
my gr’t-granfer had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came
from.... And where do we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so
bold; I mean, where do we d’Urbervilles live?”

“You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county family.”

“That’s bad.”

“Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male
line—that is, gone down—gone under.”

“Then where do we lie?”

“At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with
your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies.”

“And where be our family mansions and estates?”

“You haven’t any.”

“Oh? No lands neither?”

“None; though you once had ’em in abundance, as I said, for your family
consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a seat of
yours at Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another in Millpond,
and another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge.”

“And shall we ever come into our own again?”

“Ah—that I can’t tell!”

“And what had I better do about it, sir?” asked Durbeyfield, after a
pause.

“Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how
are the mighty fallen.’ It is a fact of some interest to the local
historian and genealogist, nothing more. There are several families
among the cottagers of this county of almost equal lustre. Good night.”

“But you’ll turn back and have a quart of beer wi’ me on the strength
o’t, Pa’son Tringham? There’s a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure
Drop—though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver’s.”

“No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You’ve had enough
already.” Concluding thus, the parson rode on his way, with doubts as
to his discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore.

When he was gone, Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound reverie,
and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his
basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance,
walking in the same direction as that which had been pursued by
Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand, and the lad
quickened his pace and came near.

“Boy, take up that basket! I want ’ee to go on an errand for me.”

The lath-like stripling frowned. “Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield,
to order me about and call me ‘boy’? You know my name as well as I know
yours!”

“Do you, do you? That’s the secret—that’s the secret! Now obey my
orders, and take the message I’m going to charge ’ee wi’... Well, Fred,
I don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble
race—it has been just found out by me this present afternoon, p.m.” And
as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from his sitting
position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank among the
daisies.

The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from
crown to toe.

“Sir John d’Urberville—that’s who I am,” continued the prostrate man.
“That is if knights were baronets—which they be. ’Tis recorded in
history all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad, as
Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?”

“Ees. I’ve been there to Greenhill Fair.”

“Well, under the church of that city there lie—”

“’Tisn’t a city, the place I mean; leastwise ’twaddn’ when I was
there—’twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.”

“Never you mind the place, boy, that’s not the question before us.
Under the church of that there parish lie my ancestors—hundreds of
’em—in coats of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and
tons. There’s not a man in the county o’ South-Wessex that’s got
grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I.”

“Oh?”

“Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you’ve come
to The Pure Drop Inn, tell ’em to send a horse and carriage to me
immed’ately, to carry me hwome. And in the bottom o’ the carriage they
be to put a noggin o’ rum in a small bottle, and chalk it up to my
account. And when you’ve done that goo on to my house with the basket,
and tell my wife to put away that washing, because she needn’t finish
it, and wait till I come hwome, as I’ve news to tell her.”

As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in his
pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that he
possessed.

“Here’s for your labour, lad.”

This made a difference in the young man’s estimate of the position.

“Yes, Sir John. Thank ’ee. Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?”

“Tell ’em at hwome that I should like for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if
they can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and if they can’t get
that, well chitterlings will do.”

“Yes, Sir John.”

The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass band
were heard from the direction of the village.

“What’s that?” said Durbeyfield. “Not on account o’ I?”

“’Tis the women’s club-walking, Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’
the members.”

“To be sure—I’d quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well,
vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I’ll
drive round and inspect the club.”

The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and daisies
in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long while, and
the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within
the rim of blue hills.


II

The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the
beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and
secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the
summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the
droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather
is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry
ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the
bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The
traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of
miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge
of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold,
extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from
that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the
sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character
to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the
atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be
constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere
paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a
network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with
azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable
lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales
within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.

The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest.
The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from a
curious legend of King Henry III’s reign, in which the killing by a
certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had
run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In those
days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was densely
wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in
the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon
its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its
pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.
Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The
May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under
notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was
there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott,
though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the
ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of
walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the
members being solely women. In men’s clubs such celebrations were,
though expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of the
softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives, had
denuded such women’s clubs as remained (if any other did) of this their
glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the
local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as
benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from Old
Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms—days before
the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous
average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional
march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly
as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and
creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white
garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure
blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters
(which had possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a
cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.

In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl
carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a bunch
of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the
latter, had been an operation of personal care.

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their
silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble,
having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a
jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be
gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the
years were drawing nigh when she should say, “I have no pleasure in
them,” than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over
here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm.

The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their
heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold,
and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose,
others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty
of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an
inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness
from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were
genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes.

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had
a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some
affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which,
though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They
were all cheerful, and many of them merry.

They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the high
road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of the
women said—

“The Load-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn’t thy father
riding hwome in a carriage!”

A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was
a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but
her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to
colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only
one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced
adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the
road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop, driven by a frizzle-headed
brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was
the cheerful servant of that establishment, who, in her part of
factotum, turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning back,
and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving his hand above his
head, and singing in a slow recitative—

“I’ve-got-a-gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere—and
knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!”

The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in whom a slow heat
seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself foolish
in their eyes.

“He’s tired, that’s all,” she said hastily, “and he has got a lift
home, because our own horse has to rest to-day.”

“Bless thy simplicity, Tess,” said her companions. “He’s got his
market-nitch. Haw-haw!”

“Look here; I won’t walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes
about him!” Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over her
face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped
to the ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no
more, and order again prevailed. Tess’s pride would not allow her to
turn her head again, to learn what her father’s meaning was, if he had
any; and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where
there was to be dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached
she had recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her
wand and talked as usual.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion
untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some
extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of
that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered
by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in
human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was
native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower
lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they
closed together after a word.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along
to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes
see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her
eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now
and then.

Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority, mainly
strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow
momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever
see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque
country girl, and no more.

Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal
chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having entered
the allotted space, dancing began. As there were no men in the company,
the girls danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the
close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village,
together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round the spot,
and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.

Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class,
carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks
in their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and their
consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they might be, what
in fact they were, brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high
waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the second
was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and youngest
would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an
uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he
had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That
he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might
only have been predicted of him.

These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending
their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor,
their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the
north-east.

They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning
of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers
were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the
spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners seemed to
amuse the third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his
knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the
gate.

“What are you going to do, Angel?” asked the eldest.

“I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of us—just
for a minute or two—it will not detain us long?”

“No—no; nonsense!” said the first. “Dancing in public with a troop of
country hoydens—suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be
dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there’s no place we can sleep at
nearer than that; besides, we must get through another chapter of _A
Counterblast to Agnosticism_ before we turn in, now I have taken the
trouble to bring the book.”

“All right—I’ll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don’t stop;
I give my word that I will, Felix.”

The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their
brother’s knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest
entered the field.

“This is a thousand pities,” he said gallantly, to two or three of the
girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance. “Where
are your partners, my dears?”

“They’ve not left off work yet,” answered one of the boldest. “They’ll
be here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?”

“Certainly. But what’s one among so many!”

“Better than none. ’Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one of
your own sort, and no clipsing and colling at all. Now, pick and
choose.”

“’Ssh—don’t be so for’ard!” said a shyer girl.

The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some
discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not
very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand,
which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be
Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the
d’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet,
even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the
heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by
Victorian lucre.

The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed
down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of
a masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of example
that the village young men, who had not hastened to enter the gate
while no intruder was in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the
couples became leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till at
length the plainest woman in the club was no longer compelled to foot
it on the masculine side of the figure.

The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must
leave—he had been forgetting himself—he had to join his companions. As
he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose
own large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach
that he had not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her
backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in his mind he
left the pasture.

On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane
westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He
had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and
looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green
enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them.
They seemed to have quite forgotten him already.

All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the
hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with
whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet
instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that
he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so
modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown
that he felt he had acted stupidly.

However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a
rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.


III

As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long
time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did
not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till
the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure
on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her
would-be partner in the affirmative.

She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a
certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she
enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining
when she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains,
and the agreeable distresses” of those girls who had been wooed and
won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and
wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no
more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd
appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her
anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the
dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the
parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she
had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well.
They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house,
occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to
which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous
gallopade, the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—

    I saw her lie do′-own in yon′-der green gro′-ove;
    Come, love!′ and I'll tell′ you where!′

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place
of the melody.

“God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry mouth!
And thy Cubit’s thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!”

After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and
the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened
the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the scene.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses
with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the
field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling
movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a
step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in
these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left
her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,
lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day
before—Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white
frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt
on the damping grass—which had been wrung up and ironed by her mother’s
own hands.

As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the
other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest
child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under
the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor, that they were
worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each
swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s
shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with
all the spring that was left in her after a long day’s seething in the
suds.

Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched
itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the
matron’s elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs
Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened
with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune.
No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s
mother caught up its notation in a week.

There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the
freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable
that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part
her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

“I’ll rock the cradle for ’ee, mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or
I’ll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had
finished long ago.”

Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her
single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her
thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance
whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in
postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than
usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the
maternal look which the girl could not understand.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said, as soon as the last note
had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s
more’n that, I want to tell ’ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess
enough, my poppet, when th’st know!” (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke
the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the
National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages:
the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to
persons of quality.)

“Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.

“Ay!”

“Had it anything to do with father’s making such a mommet of himself in
thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ’er? I felt inclined to sink into
the ground with shame!”

“That wer all a part of the larry! We’ve been found to be the greatest
gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver
Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and
vaults, and crests, and ’scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In
Saint Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real
name being d’Urberville!... Don’t that make your bosom plim? ’Twas on
this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not because he’d
been drinking, as people supposed.”

“I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?”

“O yes! ’Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a
mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as
soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome from
Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”

“Where is father now?” asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to
see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it
seems. It is fat round his heart, ’a says. There, it is like this.”
Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to
the shape of the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer.
“‘At the present moment,’ he says to your father, ‘your heart is
enclosed all round there, and all round there; this space is still
open,’ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so,’”—Mrs Durbeyfield closed
her fingers into a circle complete—“‘off you will go like a shadder, Mr
Durbeyfield,’ ’a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten
months, or ten days.’”

Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud
so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!

“But where _is_ father?” she asked again.

Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now don’t you be bursting out
angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the
pa’son’s news—that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do
want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load of
beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start
shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long.”

“Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to her
eyes. “O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you
as well agreed as he, mother!”

Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart a
cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about,
and to her mother’s face.

“No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting
for ’ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him.”

“I’ll go.”

“O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”

Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant.
Mrs Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slily upon a
chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason
for which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

“And take the _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ to the outhouse,” Joan
continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.

The _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached
the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.

This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs
Durbeyfield’s still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing
children. To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or
two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during
the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came
over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a
metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene
contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed
body and soul. The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed
rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents
of daily life were not without humorousness and jollity in their aspect
there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her
now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her
eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal
presentation as lover.

Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the
outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch.
A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her
mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all night,
and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between
the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore,
dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her
trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely
Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily
understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages
were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She
guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not
divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however, she
busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in
company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister
Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “’Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones
being put to bed. There was an interval of four years and more between
Tess and the next of the family, the two who had filled the gap having
died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude
when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came
two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the
baby, who had just completed his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely
dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their
pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If
the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,
disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these
half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with
them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished
for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard
conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of
Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his
song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s
holy plan.”

It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked
out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village
was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere:
she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a
journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this
late hour celebrating his ancient blood.

“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you
bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’
father and mother.”

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

“I must go myself,” she said.

’Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on
her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty
progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when
one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.


IV

Rolliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken
village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could
legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for
consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide
and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so
as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their
cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the
dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and wished they could have a
restful seat inside.

Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the
same wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.

In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained
with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs
Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all
seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott,
and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to the The
Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the further part of the
dispersed village, render its accommodation practically unavailable for
dwellers at this end; but the far more serious question, the quality of
the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink
with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the other landlord
in a wide house.

A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded
sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a
couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another
rested on the oak-carved “cwoffer”; two on the wash-stand; another on
the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The stage
of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one
wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their
personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and
its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl
hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the
brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the
carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent
pillars of Solomon’s temple.

Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from
Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in
deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers
knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked
staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light
above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party assembled
in the bedroom.

“—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at
my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as
glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the
stairs. “Oh, ’tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I
thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder of
the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming
absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here
and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,
and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”

“I’ve something to tell ’ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand
projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?”
She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane,
went on with his recitative.

“Hush! Don’t ’ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in
case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my
licends.”

“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs
Durbeyfield.

“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”

“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ’tis
well to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped
her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve
been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady
out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of
d’Urberville.”

“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.

She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she
said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”

“There _is_ a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield.
“Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a
junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”

While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in
their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and
was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.

“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued
Mrs Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two
branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”

“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the
bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with
her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”

“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away, and
play on the stairs till father and mother be ready!... Well, Tess ought
to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the
lady—Tess would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman
marrying her. In short, I know it.”

“How?”

“I tried her fate in the _Fortune-Teller_, and it brought out that very
thing!... You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is
as sumple as a duchess’.”

“What says the maid herself to going?”

“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation
yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and
she won’t say nay to going.”

“Tess is queer.”

“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import
reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the
Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks
had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in
store.

“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed
her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly
boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t
get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar
meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were
heard crossing the room below.

“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking
at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she
kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was
Tess.

Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of
place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable
medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from
Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their
seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs
Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my
licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs
Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth
of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a
Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but
the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty
sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently
unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were
marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to
Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on
nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so
comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced
excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield,
their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they
approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting
suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his
soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—

“I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”

“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only
family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and
Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as
you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I
was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”

“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your nater ’tis my belief you’ve
disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens
outright at one time.”

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her
own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—“I am afraid
father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so
early.”

“I? I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield.

It was eleven o’clock before the family were all in bed, and two
o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives
if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before
the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a
distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon
being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the
large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great
eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this
information.

“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already.
Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em
till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be
thrown on our hands.”

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller,
perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee
yesterday,” she presently suggested.

“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And
letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I
think _I_ could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made
to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a
lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already
laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less
rickety than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the
lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that
hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at
rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock of
candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the
load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first
during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal
of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they could, they
made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and
their own conversation, the real morning being far from come. Abraham,
as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),
began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects
against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing
from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.

When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher,
on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh
the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its
earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for
some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham
grew reflective.

“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.

“Yes, Abraham.”

“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”

“Not particular glad.”

“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”

“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.

“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”

“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that
into your head?”

“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find
father. There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother
said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of
marrying a gentleman.”

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.
Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for
audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant
back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the
stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in
serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life. He asked how
far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of
them. But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed
his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess
were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to
buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as
Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family,
filled Tess with impatience.

“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

“Yes.”

“All like ours?”

“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the
apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few
blighted.”

“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”

“A blighted one.”

“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were
so many more of ’em!”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that _really_, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it
have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and
wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t
have been always washing, and never getting finished.”

“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be
made rich by marrying a gentleman?”

“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”

Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful
in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon
herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and allow
Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of
nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall,
and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.

Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess
fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the
hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges
became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional
heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul,
conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.

Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see
the vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting
herself in her mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,
laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything
grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed.
A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into
which she, too, had fallen.

They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had
ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of
“Hoi there!”

The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining
in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had
happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the
way.

In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The
morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these
lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and
unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the
breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his
life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the
road.

In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with
the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the
crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood
firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in
a heap.

By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,
seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man
returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.

“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with your
load. I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting
daylight, and you have nothing to fear.”

He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,
arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess
showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was
already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose
a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside,
still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking
scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.

“’Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle.
“No excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,
Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed!”

When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized
on his young face.

“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself. “To
think that I was such a fool!”

“’Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,
Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.

In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the
driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man
from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed
to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on
towards Casterbridge.

The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot
of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning;
but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the
road, though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that
was left of Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly
hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the
setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles to Marlott.

Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of
her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not
lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for
her negligence.

But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a
less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving
family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it
would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances
there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl
from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we
d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for
cat’s meat. Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his
lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”

He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the
garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.
When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the
horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children following in
funeral train. Abraham and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged
their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the walls; and when
Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave. The bread-winner
had been taken away from them; what would they do?

“Is he gone to heaven?” asked Abraham, between the sobs.

Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she
regarded herself in the light of a murderess.


V

The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the horse, became
disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not penury, loomed in the
distance. Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted
fellow; he had good strength to work at times; but the times could not
be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having
been unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not
particularly persistent when they did so coincide.

Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents into this
quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of
it; and then her mother broached her scheme.

“We must take the ups wi’ the downs, Tess,” said she; “and never could
your high blood have been found out at a more called-for moment. You
must try your friends. Do ye know that there is a very rich Mrs
d’Urberville living on the outskirts o’ The Chase, who must be our
relation? You must go to her and claim kin, and ask for some help in
our trouble.”

“I shouldn’t care to do that,” says Tess. “If there is such a lady,
’twould be enough for us if she were friendly—not to expect her to give
us help.”

“You could win her round to do anything, my dear. Besides, perhaps
there’s more in it than you know of. I’ve heard what I’ve heard,
good-now.”

The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to be more
deferential than she might otherwise have been to the maternal wish;
but she could not understand why her mother should find such
satisfaction in contemplating an enterprise of, to her, such doubtful
profit. Her mother might have made inquiries, and have discovered that
this Mrs d’Urberville was a lady of unequalled virtues and charity. But
Tess’s pride made the part of poor relation one of particular distaste
to her.

“I’d rather try to get work,” she murmured.

“Durbeyfield, you can settle it,” said his wife, turning to where he
sat in the background. “If you say she ought to go, she will go.”

“I don’t like my children going and making themselves beholden to
strange kin,” murmured he. “I’m the head of the noblest branch o’ the
family, and I ought to live up to it.”

His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than her own objections
to going. “Well, as I killed the horse, mother,” she said mournfully,
“I suppose I ought to do something. I don’t mind going and seeing her,
but you must leave it to me about asking for help. And don’t go
thinking about her making a match for me—it is silly.”

“Very well said, Tess!” observed her father sententiously.

“Who said I had such a thought?” asked Joan.

“I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I’ll go.”

Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town called Shaston, and
there took advantage of a van which twice in the week ran from Shaston
eastward to Chaseborough, passing near Trantridge, the parish in which
the vague and mysterious Mrs d’Urberville had her residence.

Tess Durbeyfield’s route on this memorable morning lay amid the
north-eastern undulations of the Vale in which she had been born, and
in which her life had unfolded. The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the
world, and its inhabitants the races thereof. From the gates and stiles
of Marlott she had looked down its length in the wondering days of
infancy, and what had been mystery to her then was not much less than
mystery to her now. She had seen daily from her chamber-window towers,
villages, faint white mansions; above all, the town of Shaston standing
majestically on its height; its windows shining like lamps in the
evening sun. She had hardly ever visited the place, only a small tract
even of the Vale and its environs being known to her by close
inspection. Much less had she been far outside the valley. Every
contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her
relatives’ faces; but for what lay beyond, her judgment was dependent
on the teaching of the village school, where she had held a leading
place at the time of her leaving, a year or two before this date.

In those early days she had been much loved by others of her own sex
and age, and had used to be seen about the village as one of three—all
nearly of the same year—walking home from school side by side; Tess the
middle one—in a pink print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern,
worn over a stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a
nondescript tertiary—marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight
stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the knees, torn by
kneeling in the roads and banks in search of vegetable and mineral
treasures; her then earth-coloured hair hanging like pot-hooks; the
arms of the two outside girls resting round the waist of Tess; her arms
on the shoulders of the two supporters.

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite
a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many
little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and
provide for them. Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child:
Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest,
to her own long family of waiters on Providence.

However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and to
help them as much as possible she used, as soon as she left school, to
lend a hand at haymaking or harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by
preference, at milking or butter-making processes, which she had learnt
when her father had owned cows; and being deft-fingered it was a kind
of work in which she excelled.

Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more of the family
burdens, and that Tess should be the representative of the Durbeyfields
at the d’Urberville mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance
it must be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting their fairest
side outward.

She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and ascended on foot a
hill in the direction of the district known as The Chase, on the
borders of which, as she had been informed, Mrs d’Urberville’s seat,
The Slopes, would be found. It was not a manorial home in the ordinary
sense, with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom
the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his family by hook
or by crook. It was more, far more; a country-house built for enjoyment
pure and simple, with not an acre of troublesome land attached to it
beyond what was required for residential purposes, and for a little
fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a bailiff.

The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its eaves in dense
evergreens. Tess thought this was the mansion itself till, passing
through the side wicket with some trepidation, and onward to a point at
which the drive took a turn, the house proper stood in full view. It
was of recent erection—indeed almost new—and of the same rich red
colour that formed such a contrast with the evergreens of the lodge.
Far behind the corner of the house—which rose like a geranium bloom
against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape
of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few
remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein
Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous
yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when
they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however,
though visible from The Slopes, was outside the immediate boundaries of
the estate.

Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and well kept;
acres of glass-houses stretched down the inclines to the copses at
their feet. Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from
the Mint. The stables, partly screened by Austrian pines and evergreen
oaks, and fitted with every late appliance, were as dignified as
Chapels-of-Ease. On the extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent, its
door being towards her.

Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a half-alarmed attitude, on
the edge of the gravel sweep. Her feet had brought her onward to this
point before she had quite realized where she was; and now all was
contrary to her expectation.

“I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!” she said, in
her artlessness. She wished that she had not fallen in so readily with
her mother’s plans for “claiming kin,” and had endeavoured to gain
assistance nearer home.

The d’Urbervilles—or Stoke-d’Urbervilles, as they at first called
themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find
in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had
spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the
only really lineal representative of the old d’Urberville family
existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew
very well, that the Stoke-d’Urbervilles were no more d’Urbervilles of
the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must be admitted that this
family formed a very good stock whereon to regraft a name which sadly
wanted such renovation.

When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his fortune as an
honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North, he decided to
settle as a county man in the South of England, out of hail of his
business district; and in doing this he felt the necessity of
recommencing with a name that would not too readily identify him with
the smart tradesman of the past, and that would be less commonplace
than the original bald, stark words. Conning for an hour in the British
Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct, half-extinct, obscured,
and ruined families appertaining to the quarter of England in which he
proposed to settle, he considered that _d’Urberville_ looked and
sounded as well as any of them: and d’Urberville accordingly was
annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally. Yet he was
not an extravagant-minded man in this, and in constructing his family
tree on the new basis was duly reasonable in framing his
inter-marriages and aristocratic links, never inserting a single title
above a rank of strict moderation.

Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents were naturally in
ignorance—much to their discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of
such annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that, though to be
well-favoured might be the gift of fortune, a family name came by
nature.

Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make his plunge,
hardly knowing whether to retreat or to persevere, when a figure came
forth from the dark triangular door of the tent. It was that of a tall
young man, smoking.

He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips, badly moulded,
though red and smooth, above which was a well-groomed black moustache
with curled points, though his age could not be more than three- or
four-and-twenty. Despite the touches of barbarism in his contours,
there was a singular force in the gentleman’s face, and in his bold
rolling eye.

“Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?” said he, coming forward. And
perceiving that she stood quite confounded: “Never mind me. I am Mr
d’Urberville. Have you come to see me or my mother?”

This embodiment of a d’Urberville and a namesake differed even more
from what Tess had expected than the house and grounds had differed.
She had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all
the d’Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories
representing in hieroglyphic the centuries of her family’s and
England’s history. But she screwed herself up to the work in hand,
since she could not get out of it, and answered—

“I came to see your mother, sir.”

“I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid,” replied the present
representative of the spurious house; for this was Mr Alec, the only
son of the lately deceased gentleman. “Cannot I answer your purpose?
What is the business you wish to see her about?”

“It isn’t business—it is—I can hardly say what!”

“Pleasure?”

“Oh no. Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem—”

Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong
that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at
being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the
attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

“It is so very foolish,” she stammered; “I fear I can’t tell you!”

“Never mind; I like foolish things. Try again, my dear,” said he
kindly.

“Mother asked me to come,” Tess continued; “and, indeed, I was in the
mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like
this. I came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you.”

“Ho! Poor relations?”

“Yes.”

“Stokes?”

“No; d’Urbervilles.”

“Ay, ay; I mean d’Urbervilles.”

“Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs
that we are d’Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold we are,—and—and we have an
old seal, marked with a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over
him. And we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a
little ladle, and marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that
mother uses it to stir the pea-soup.”

“A castle argent is certainly my crest,” said he blandly. “And my arms
a lion rampant.”

“And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to you—as we’ve
lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the oldest branch o’ the
family.”

“Very kind of your mother, I’m sure. And I, for one, don’t regret her
step.” Alec looked at Tess as he spoke, in a way that made her blush a
little. “And so, my pretty girl, you’ve come on a friendly visit to us,
as relations?”

“I suppose I have,” faltered Tess, looking uncomfortable again.

“Well—there’s no harm in it. Where do you live? What are you?”

She gave him brief particulars; and responding to further inquiries
told him that she was intending to go back by the same carrier who had
brought her.

“It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge Cross. Supposing
we walk round the grounds to pass the time, my pretty Coz?”

Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible; but the young man
was pressing, and she consented to accompany him. He conducted her
about the lawns, and flower-beds, and conservatories; and thence to the
fruit-garden and greenhouses, where he asked her if she liked
strawberries.

“Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.”

“They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of the
fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently,
selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety, he
stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.

“No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her
lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”

“Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips
and took it in.

They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus, Tess eating in a
half-pleased, half-reluctant state whatever d’Urberville offered her.
When she could consume no more of the strawberries he filled her little
basket with them; and then the two passed round to the rose-trees,
whence he gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom. She
obeyed like one in a dream, and when she could affix no more he himself
tucked a bud or two into her hat, and heaped her basket with others in
the prodigality of his bounty. At last, looking at his watch, he said,
“Now, by the time you have had something to eat, it will be time for
you to leave, if you want to catch the carrier to Shaston. Come here,
and I’ll see what grub I can find.”

Stoke d’Urberville took her back to the lawn and into the tent, where
he left her, soon reappearing with a basket of light luncheon, which he
put before her himself. It was evidently the gentleman’s wish not to be
disturbed in this pleasant _tête-à-tête_ by the servantry.

“Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all, sir.”

He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of
smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as
she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind
the blue narcotic haze was potentially the “tragic mischief” of her
drama—one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her
young life. She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just
now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet
themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of
growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She
had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it
denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had
said that it was a fault which time would cure.

She soon had finished her lunch. “Now I am going home, sir,” she said,
rising.

“And what do they call you?” he asked, as he accompanied her along the
drive till they were out of sight of the house.

“Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott.”

“And you say your people have lost their horse?”

“I—killed him!” she answered, her eyes filling with tears as she gave
particulars of Prince’s death. “And I don’t know what to do for father
on account of it!”

“I must think if I cannot do something. My mother must find a berth for
you. But, Tess, no nonsense about ‘d’Urberville’;—‘Durbeyfield’ only,
you know—quite another name.”

“I wish for no better, sir,” said she with something of dignity.

For a moment—only for a moment—when they were in the turning of the
drive, between the tall rhododendrons and conifers, before the lodge
became visible, he inclined his face towards her as if—but, no: he
thought better of it, and let her go.

Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might
have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the
wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all
respects—as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to
him who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind,
she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call
seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the
hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature
at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a
body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome,
outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human
progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a
closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us
round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even
conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions,
it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other
at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently
about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.
Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks,
catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.

When d’Urberville got back to the tent he sat down astride on a chair,
reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his face. Then he broke into a loud
laugh.

“Well, I’m damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what a crumby
girl!”


VI

Tess went down the hill to Trantridge Cross, and inattentively waited
to take her seat in the van returning from Chaseborough to Shaston. She
did not know what the other occupants said to her as she entered,
though she answered them; and when they had started anew she rode along
with an inward and not an outward eye.

One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more pointedly than any
had spoken before: “Why, you be quite a posy! And such roses in early
June!”

Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their surprised
vision: roses at her breasts; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries
in her basket to the brim. She blushed, and said confusedly that the
flowers had been given to her. When the passengers were not looking she
stealthily removed the more prominent blooms from her hat and placed
them in the basket, where she covered them with her handkerchief. Then
she fell to reflecting again, and in looking downwards a thorn of the
rose remaining in her breast accidentally pricked her chin. Like all
the cottagers in Blackmoor Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and
prefigurative superstitions; she thought this an ill omen—the first she
had noticed that day.

The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there were several miles
of pedestrian descent from that mountain-town into the vale to Marlott.
Her mother had advised her to stay here for the night, at the house of
a cottage-woman they knew, if she should feel too tired to come on; and
this Tess did, not descending to her home till the following afternoon.

When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from her mother’s
triumphant manner that something had occurred in the interim.

“Oh yes; I know all about it! I told ’ee it would be all right, and now
’tis proved!”

“Since I’ve been away? What has?” said Tess rather wearily.

Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch approval, and went
on banteringly: “So you’ve brought ’em round!”

“How do you know, mother?”

“I’ve had a letter.”

Tess then remembered that there would have been time for this.

“They say—Mrs d’Urberville says—that she wants you to look after a
little fowl-farm which is her hobby. But this is only her artful way of
getting ’ee there without raising your hopes. She’s going to own ’ee as
kin—that’s the meaning o’t.”

“But I didn’t see her.”

“You zid somebody, I suppose?”

“I saw her son.”

“And did he own ’ee?”

“Well—he called me Coz.”

“An’ I knew it! Jacky—he called her Coz!” cried Joan to her husband.
“Well, he spoke to his mother, of course, and she do want ’ee there.”

“But I don’t know that I am apt at tending fowls,” said the dubious
Tess.

“Then I don’t know who is apt. You’ve be’n born in the business, and
brought up in it. They that be born in a business always know more
about it than any ’prentice. Besides, that’s only just a show of
something for you to do, that you midn’t feel beholden.”

“I don’t altogether think I ought to go,” said Tess thoughtfully. “Who
wrote the letter? Will you let me look at it?”

“Mrs d’Urberville wrote it. Here it is.”

The letter was in the third person, and briefly informed Mrs
Durbeyfield that her daughter’s services would be useful to that lady
in the management of her poultry-farm, that a comfortable room would be
provided for her if she could come, and that the wages would be on a
liberal scale if they liked her.

“Oh—that’s all!” said Tess.

“You couldn’t expect her to throw her arms round ’ee, an’ to kiss and
to coll ’ee all at once.”

Tess looked out of the window.

“I would rather stay here with father and you,” she said.

“But why?”

“I’d rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don’t quite know why.”

A week afterwards she came in one evening from an unavailing search for
some light occupation in the immediate neighbourhood. Her idea had been
to get together sufficient money during the summer to purchase another
horse. Hardly had she crossed the threshold before one of the children
danced across the room, saying, “The gentleman’s been here!”

Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from every inch of her
person. Mrs d’Urberville’s son had called on horseback, having been
riding by chance in the direction of Marlott. He had wished to know,
finally, in the name of his mother, if Tess could really come to manage
the old lady’s fowl-farm or not; the lad who had hitherto superintended
the birds having proved untrustworthy. “Mr d’Urberville says you must
be a good girl if you are at all as you appear; he knows you must be
worth your weight in gold. He is very much interested in ’ee—truth to
tell.”

Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that she had won such
high opinion from a stranger when, in her own esteem, she had sunk so
low.

“It is very good of him to think that,” she murmured; “and if I was
quite sure how it would be living there, I would go any-when.”

“He is a mighty handsome man!”

“I don’t think so,” said Tess coldly.

“Well, there’s your chance, whether or no; and I’m sure he wears a
beautiful diamond ring!”

“Yes,” said little Abraham, brightly, from the window-bench; “and I
seed it! and it did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers.
Mother, why did our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his
mistarshers?”

“Hark at that child!” cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with parenthetic
admiration.

“Perhaps to show his diamond ring,” murmured Sir John, dreamily, from
his chair.

“I’ll think it over,” said Tess, leaving the room.

“Well, she’s made a conquest o’ the younger branch of us, straight
off,” continued the matron to her husband, “and she’s a fool if she
don’t follow it up.”

“I don’t quite like my children going away from home,” said the
haggler. “As the head of the family, the rest ought to come to me.”

“But do let her go, Jacky,” coaxed his poor witless wife. “He’s struck
wi’ her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He’ll marry her, most
likely, and make a lady of her; and then she’ll be what her forefathers
was.”

John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health, and this
supposition was pleasant to him.

“Well, perhaps that’s what young Mr d’Urberville means,” he admitted;
“and sure enough he mid have serious thoughts about improving his blood
by linking on to the old line. Tess, the little rogue! And have she
really paid ’em a visit to such an end as this?”

Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the gooseberry-bushes in
the garden, and over Prince’s grave. When she came in her mother
pursued her advantage.

“Well, what be you going to do?” she asked.

“I wish I had seen Mrs d’Urberville,” said Tess.

“I think you mid as well settle it. Then you’ll see her soon enough.”

Her father coughed in his chair.

“I don’t know what to say!” answered the girl restlessly. “It is for
you to decide. I killed the old horse, and I suppose I ought to do
something to get ye a new one. But—but—I don’t quite like Mr
d’Urberville being there!”

The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being taken up by
their wealthy kinsfolk (which they imagined the other family to be) as
a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse, began to cry at
Tess’s reluctance, and teased and reproached her for hesitating.

“Tess won’t go-o-o and be made a la-a-dy of!—no, she says she
wo-o-on’t!” they wailed, with square mouths. “And we shan’t have a nice
new horse, and lots o’ golden money to buy fairlings! And Tess won’t
look pretty in her best cloze no mo-o-ore!”

Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way she had of making
her labours in the house seem heavier than they were by prolonging them
indefinitely, also weighed in the argument. Her father alone preserved
an attitude of neutrality.

“I will go,” said Tess at last.

Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the nuptial vision
conjured up by the girl’s consent.

“That’s right! For such a pretty maid as ’tis, this is a fine chance!”

Tess smiled crossly.

“I hope it is a chance for earning money. It is no other kind of
chance. You had better say nothing of that silly sort about parish.”

Mrs Durbeyfield did not promise. She was not quite sure that she did
not feel proud enough, after the visitor’s remarks, to say a good deal.

Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote, agreeing to be ready to
set out on any day on which she might be required. She was duly
informed that Mrs d’Urberville was glad of her decision, and that a
spring-cart should be sent to meet her and her luggage at the top of
the Vale on the day after the morrow, when she must hold herself
prepared to start. Mrs d’Urberville’s handwriting seemed rather
masculine.

“A cart?” murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly. “It might have been a
carriage for her own kin!”

Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless and abstracted,
going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of
acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not
be onerous. She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates
seemed to decide otherwise. Being mentally older than her mother she
did not regard Mrs Durbeyfield’s matrimonial hopes for her in a serious
aspect for a moment. The light-minded woman had been discovering good
matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth.


VII

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake before
dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute,
save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction
that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving
silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. She remained
upstairs packing till breakfast-time, and then came down in her
ordinary week-day clothes, her Sunday apparel being carefully folded in
her box.

Her mother expostulated. “You will never set out to see your folks
without dressing up more the dand than that?”

“But I am going to work!” said Tess.

“Well, yes,” said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private tone, “at first
there mid be a little pretence o’t.... But I think it will be wiser of
’ee to put your best side outward,” she added.

“Very well; I suppose you know best,” replied Tess with calm
abandonment.

And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan’s hands,
saying serenely—“Do what you like with me, mother.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this tractability. First she
fetched a great basin, and washed Tess’s hair with such thoroughness
that when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times.
She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than usual. Then she put upon
her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy
fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged _coiffure_, imparted to
her developing figure an amplitude which belied her age, and might
cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a
child.

“I declare there’s a hole in my stocking-heel!” said Tess.

“Never mind holes in your stockings—they don’t speak! When I was a
maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha’ found me in
heels.”

Her mother’s pride in the girl’s appearance led her to step back, like
a painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.

“You must zee yourself!” she cried. “It is much better than you was
t’other day.”

As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a very small
portion of Tess’s person at one time, Mrs Durbeyfield hung a black
cloak outside the casement, and so made a large reflector of the panes,
as it is the wont of bedecking cottagers to do. After this she went
downstairs to her husband, who was sitting in the lower room.

“I’ll tell ’ee what ’tis, Durbeyfield,” said she exultingly; “he’ll
never have the heart not to love her. But whatever you do, don’t zay
too much to Tess of his fancy for her, and this chance she has got. She
is such an odd maid that it mid zet her against him, or against going
there, even now. If all goes well, I shall certainly be for making some
return to pa’son at Stagfoot Lane for telling us—dear, good man!”

However, as the moment for the girl’s setting out drew nigh, when the
first excitement of the dressing had passed off, a slight misgiving
found place in Joan Durbeyfield’s mind. It prompted the matron to say
that she would walk a little way—as far as to the point where the
acclivity from the valley began its first steep ascent to the outer
world. At the top Tess was going to be met with the spring-cart sent by
the Stoke-d’Urbervilles, and her box had already been wheeled ahead
towards this summit by a lad with trucks, to be in readiness.

Seeing their mother put on her bonnet, the younger children clamoured
to go with her.

“I do want to walk a little-ways wi’ Sissy, now she’s going to marry
our gentleman-cousin, and wear fine cloze!”

“Now,” said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, “I’ll hear no more o’
that! Mother, how could you ever put such stuff into their heads?”

“Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and help get enough
money for a new horse,” said Mrs Durbeyfield pacifically.

“Goodbye, father,” said Tess, with a lumpy throat.

“Goodbye, my maid,” said Sir John, raising his head from his breast as
he suspended his nap, induced by a slight excess this morning in honour
of the occasion. “Well, I hope my young friend will like such a comely
sample of his own blood. And tell’n, Tess, that being sunk, quite, from
our former grandeur, I’ll sell him the title—yes, sell it—and at no
onreasonable figure.”

“Not for less than a thousand pound!” cried Lady Durbeyfield.

“Tell’n—I’ll take a thousand pound. Well, I’ll take less, when I come
to think o’t. He’ll adorn it better than a poor lammicken feller like
myself can. Tell’n he shall hae it for a hundred. But I won’t stand
upon trifles—tell’n he shall hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes,
twenty pound—that’s the lowest. Dammy, family honour is family honour,
and I won’t take a penny less!”

Tess’s eyes were too full and her voice too choked to utter the
sentiments that were in her. She turned quickly, and went out.

So the girls and their mother all walked together, a child on each side
of Tess, holding her hand and looking at her meditatively from time to
time, as at one who was about to do great things; her mother just
behind with the smallest; the group forming a picture of honest beauty
flanked by innocence, and backed by simple-souled vanity. They followed
the way till they reached the beginning of the ascent, on the crest of
which the vehicle from Trantridge was to receive her, this limit having
been fixed to save the horse the labour of the last slope. Far away
behind the first hills the cliff-like dwellings of Shaston broke the
line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in the elevated road which
skirted the ascent save the lad whom they had sent on before them,
sitting on the handle of the barrow that contained all Tess’s worldly
possessions.

“Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no doubt,” said Mrs
Durbeyfield. “Yes, I see it yonder!”

It had come—appearing suddenly from behind the forehead of the nearest
upland, and stopping beside the boy with the barrow. Her mother and the
children thereupon decided to go no farther, and bidding them a hasty
goodbye, Tess bent her steps up the hill.

They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart, on which her box
was already placed. But before she had quite reached it another vehicle
shot out from a clump of trees on the summit, came round the bend of
the road there, passed the luggage-cart, and halted beside Tess, who
looked up as if in great surprise.

Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the second vehicle was
not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or
dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of
three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a
dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth,
stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the
handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before
to get her answer about Tess.

Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child. Then she looked down,
then stared again. Could she be deceived as to the meaning of this?

“Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who’ll make Sissy a lady?” asked the
youngest child.

Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen standing still,
undecided, beside this turn-out, whose owner was talking to her. Her
seeming indecision was, in fact, more than indecision: it was
misgiving. She would have preferred the humble cart. The young man
dismounted, and appeared to urge her to ascend. She turned her face
down the hill to her relatives, and regarded the little group.
Something seemed to quicken her to a determination; possibly the
thought that she had killed Prince. She suddenly stepped up; he mounted
beside her, and immediately whipped on the horse. In a moment they had
passed the slow cart with the box, and disappeared behind the shoulder
of the hill.

Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a
drama was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears. The
youngest child said, “I wish poor, poor Tess wasn’t gone away to be a
lady!” and, lowering the corners of his lips, burst out crying. The new
point of view was infectious, and the next child did likewise, and then
the next, till the whole three of them wailed loud.

There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield’s eyes as she turned to go
home. But by the time she had got back to the village she was passively
trusting to the favour of accident. However, in bed that night she
sighed, and her husband asked her what was the matter.

“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was thinking that perhaps it
would ha’ been better if Tess had not gone.”

“Oughtn’t ye to have thought of that before?”

“Well, ’tis a chance for the maid—Still, if ’twere the doing again, I
wouldn’t let her go till I had found out whether the gentleman is
really a good-hearted young man and choice over her as his kinswoman.”

“Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha’ done that,” snored Sir John.

Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation somewhere: “Well,
as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with ’en, if she
plays her trump card aright. And if he don’t marry her afore he will
after. For that he’s all afire wi’ love for her any eye can see.”

“What’s her trump card? Her d’Urberville blood, you mean?”

“No, stupid; her face—as ’twas mine.”


VIII

Having mounted beside her, Alec d’Urberville drove rapidly along the
crest of the first hill, chatting compliments to Tess as they went, the
cart with her box being left far behind. Rising still, an immense
landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley
of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except
from her first brief visit to Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge
of an incline down which the road stretched in a long straight descent
of nearly a mile.

Ever since the accident with her father’s horse Tess Durbeyfield,
courageous as she naturally was, had been exceedingly timid on wheels;
the least irregularity of motion startled her. She began to get uneasy
at a certain recklessness in her conductor’s driving.

“You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?” she said with attempted
unconcern.

D’Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar with the tips of
his large white centre-teeth, and allowed his lips to smile slowly of
themselves.

“Why, Tess,” he answered, after another whiff or two, “it isn’t a brave
bouncing girl like you who asks that? Why, I always go down at full
gallop. There’s nothing like it for raising your spirits.”

“But perhaps you need not now?”

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “there are two to be reckoned with. It
is not me alone. Tib has to be considered, and she has a very queer
temper.”

“Who?”

“Why, this mare. I fancy she looked round at me in a very grim way just
then. Didn’t you notice it?”

“Don’t try to frighten me, sir,” said Tess stiffly.

“Well, I don’t. If any living man can manage this horse I can: I won’t
say any living man can do it—but if such has the power, I am he.”

“Why do you have such a horse?”

“Ah, well may you ask it! It was my fate, I suppose. Tib has killed one
chap; and just after I bought her she nearly killed me. And then, take
my word for it, I nearly killed her. But she’s touchy still, very
touchy; and one’s life is hardly safe behind her sometimes.”

They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident that the horse,
whether of her own will or of his (the latter being the more likely),
knew so well the reckless performance expected of her that she hardly
required a hint from behind.

Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top, the dog-cart
rocking right and left, its axis acquiring a slightly oblique set in
relation to the line of progress; the figure of the horse rising and
falling in undulations before them. Sometimes a wheel was off the
ground, it seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning
over the hedge, and flinty sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshone the
daylight. The aspect of the straight road enlarged with their advance,
the two banks dividing like a splitting stick; one rushing past at each
shoulder.

The wind blew through Tess’s white muslin to her very skin, and her
washed hair flew out behind. She was determined to show no open fear,
but she clutched d’Urberville’s rein-arm.

“Don’t touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do! Hold on round my
waist!”

She grasped his waist, and so they reached the bottom.

“Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!” said she, her face on
fire.

“Tess—fie! that’s temper!” said d’Urberville.

“’Tis truth.”

“Well, you need not let go your hold of me so thanklessly the moment
you feel yourself out of danger.”

She had not considered what she had been doing; whether he were man or
woman, stick or stone, in her involuntary hold on him. Recovering her
reserve, she sat without replying, and thus they reached the summit of
another declivity.

“Now then, again!” said d’Urberville.

“No, no!” said Tess. “Show more sense, do, please.”

“But when people find themselves on one of the highest points in the
county, they must get down again,” he retorted.

He loosened rein, and away they went a second time. D’Urberville turned
his face to her as they rocked, and said, in playful raillery: “Now
then, put your arms round my waist again, as you did before, my
Beauty.”

“Never!” said Tess independently, holding on as well as she could
without touching him.

“Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips, Tess, or even on
that warmed cheek, and I’ll stop—on my honour, I will!”

Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still on her seat, at
which he urged the horse anew, and rocked her the more.

“Will nothing else do?” she cried at length, in desperation, her large
eyes staring at him like those of a wild animal. This dressing her up
so prettily by her mother had apparently been to lamentable purpose.

“Nothing, dear Tess,” he replied.

“Oh, I don’t know—very well; I don’t mind!” she panted miserably.

He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of imprinting the
desired salute, when, as if hardly yet aware of her own modesty, she
dodged aside. His arms being occupied with the reins there was left him
no power to prevent her manœuvre.

“Now, damn it—I’ll break both our necks!” swore her capriciously
passionate companion. “So you can go from your word like that, you
young witch, can you?”

“Very well,” said Tess, “I’ll not move since you be so determined! But
I—thought you would be kind to me, and protect me, as my kinsman!”

“Kinsman be hanged! Now!”

“But I don’t want anybody to kiss me, sir!” she implored, a big tear
beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling
in her attempts not to cry. “And I wouldn’t ha’ come if I had known!”

He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d’Urberville gave her the
kiss of mastery. No sooner had he done so than she flushed with shame,
took out her handkerchief, and wiped the spot on her cheek that had
been touched by his lips. His ardour was nettled at the sight, for the
act on her part had been unconsciously done.

“You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!” said the young man.

Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed, she did not quite
comprehend the drift, unheeding the snub she had administered by her
instinctive rub upon her cheek. She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as
far as such a thing was physically possible. With a dim sense that he
was vexed she looked steadily ahead as they trotted on near Melbury
Down and Wingreen, till she saw, to her consternation, that there was
yet another descent to be undergone.

“You shall be made sorry for that!” he resumed, his injured tone still
remaining, as he flourished the whip anew. “Unless, that is, you agree
willingly to let me do it again, and no handkerchief.”

She sighed. “Very well, sir!” she said. “Oh—let me get my hat!”

At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into the road, their
present speed on the upland being by no means slow. D’Urberville pulled
up, and said he would get it for her, but Tess was down on the other
side.

She turned back and picked up the article.

“You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that’s possible,” he
said, contemplating her over the back of the vehicle. “Now then, up
again! What’s the matter?”

The hat was in place and tied, but Tess had not stepped forward.

“No, sir,” she said, revealing the red and ivory of her mouth as her
eye lit in defiant triumph; “not again, if I know it!”

“What—you won’t get up beside me?”

“No; I shall walk.”

“’Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge.”

“I don’t care if ’tis dozens. Besides, the cart is behind.”

“You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on
purpose? I’ll swear you did!”

Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.

Then d’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he
could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to
drive back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge.
But he could not do this short of injuring her.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such wicked words!”
cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the hedge into which she had
scrambled. “I don’t like ’ee at all! I hate and detest you! I’ll go
back to mother, I will!”

D’Urberville’s bad temper cleared up at sight of hers; and he laughed
heartily.

“Well, I like you all the better,” he said. “Come, let there be peace.
I’ll never do it any more against your will. My life upon it now!”

Still Tess could not be induced to remount. She did not, however,
object to his keeping his gig alongside her; and in this manner, at a
slow pace, they advanced towards the village of Trantridge. From time
to time d’Urberville exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the sight
of the tramping he had driven her to undertake by his misdemeanour. She
might in truth have safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her
confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing
thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home.
Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to
childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could
she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme
for the rehabilitation of her family on such sentimental grounds?

A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared in view, and in
a snug nook to the right the poultry-farm and cottage of Tess’s
destination.


IX

The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed as supervisor,
purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its headquarters in an old
thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that had once been a garden,
but was now a trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun with
ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to the
aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely given over to
the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the
place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty
copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard. The
descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their
family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so
much of their forefathers’ money, and had been in their possession for
several generations before the d’Urbervilles came and built here, was
indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville as
soon as the property fell into hand according to law. “’Twas good
enough for Christians in grandfather’s time,” they said.

The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now
resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops
occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate
agriculturists. The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now
filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while
out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully
shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.

The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and
could only be entered through a door.

When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in
altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas
as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened
and a servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from the
manor-house.

“Mrs d’Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving
that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old
lady, and blind.”

“Blind!” said Tess.

Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape itself
she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful of
the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had
likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and
imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of
its chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures—feathers floating
within view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.

In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with
her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a
white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a
large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has
decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly
let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long
sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered
charges—one sitting on each arm.

“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs
d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. “I hope you will be kind to
them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where
are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he?
He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena
too—yes, they are a little frightened—aren’t you, dears? But they will
soon get used to you.”

While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in
obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap,
and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks,
their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her
touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a
single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their crops, and
knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face
enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her mind.

The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the
yard, and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens had
been submitted to the old woman—Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas,
Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then—her
perception of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the
bird upon her knees.

It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d’Urberville was the
bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the
maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up. At
the end of the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling
and twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”

“Whistle, Ma’am?”

“Yes, whistle tunes.”

Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the
accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel
company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.

“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it
very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as
I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way.
Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin to-morrow, or
they will go back in their piping. They have been neglected these
several days.”

“Mr d’Urberville whistled to ’em this morning, ma’am,” said Elizabeth.

“He! Pooh!”

The old lady’s face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made no
further reply.

Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and the
birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl’s surprise at Mrs
d’Urberville’s manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the
house she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware that
the old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship. She
gathered that no great affection flowed between the blind woman and her
son. But in that, too, she was mistaken. Mrs d’Urberville was not the
first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be
bitterly fond.

In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined
to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the
sun shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious
to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to
ascertain her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone
within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously
screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected practice. She found her
former ability to have degenerated to the production of a hollow rush
of wind through the lips, and no clear note at all.

She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she could
have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till she became
aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall
no less then the cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing
from the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not
set eyes on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of
the gardener’s cottage where she had lodgings.

“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful
thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess (‘Cousin’ had a faint
ring of mockery). I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting
like _Im_-patience on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth
to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing,
and never being able to produce a note. Why, you are quite cross
because you can’t do it.”

“I may be cross, but I didn’t swear.”

“Ah! I understand why you are trying—those bullies! My mother wants you
to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if
attending to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work for
any girl. I would flatly refuse, if I were you.”

“But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by to-morrow
morning.”

“Does she? Well then—I’ll give you a lesson or two.”

“Oh no, you won’t!” said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.

“Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See—I’ll stand on this side of
the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite
safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There
’tis—so.”

He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O take
those lips away.” But the allusion was lost upon Tess.

“Now try,” said d’Urberville.

She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural severity.
But he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of him, she did
put up her lips as directed for producing a clear note; laughing
distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation that she had
laughed.

He encouraged her with “Try again!”

Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she
tried—ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound. The
momentary pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes enlarged,
and she involuntarily smiled in his face.

“That’s it! Now I have started you—you’ll go on beautifully. There—I
said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such temptation as
never before fell to mortal man, I’ll keep my word.... Tess, do you
think my mother a queer old soul?”

“I don’t know much of her yet, sir.”

“You’ll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her
bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be
quite in favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If you
meet with any difficulties and want help here, don’t go to the bailiff,
come to me.”

It was in the economy of this _régime_ that Tess Durbeyfield had
undertaken to fill a place. Her first day’s experiences were fairly
typical of those which followed through many succeeding days. A
familiarity with Alec d’Urberville’s presence—which that young man
carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly
calling her his cousin when they were alone—removed much of her
original shyness of him, without, however, implanting any feeling which
could engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she was more
pliable under his hands than a mere companionship would have made her,
owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through that
lady’s comparative helplessness, upon him.

She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s
room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for
she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those
songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she
practised in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning.
Unrestrained by the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put
her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the
attentive listeners.

Mrs d’Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy
damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment, where
they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little white spots
on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window
where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought
she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not present, and
turning round the girl had an impression that the toes of a pair of
boots were visible below the fringe of the curtains. Thereupon her
whistling became so disjointed that the listener, if such there were,
must have discovered her suspicion of his presence. She searched the
curtains every morning after that, but never found anybody within them.
Alec d’Urberville had evidently thought better of his freak to terrify
her by an ambush of that kind.


X

Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own
code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about
Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit
who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more
abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms
around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smock-frocked
arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into
calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller
provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from
savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.

The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday
night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two
or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next
morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the
curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the
once-independent inns.

For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But under
pressure from matrons not much older than herself—for a field-man’s
wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage was early
here—Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience of the
journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected, the
hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her monotonous
attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again and again.
Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the momentary
threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her some sly
regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though
sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she always
searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection of their
companionship homeward.

This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in
September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims
from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account.
Tess’s occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades
reached the town long before her. It was a fine September evening, just
before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike
lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more
solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it.
Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.

She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till
she had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk. Her
limited marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to
look about for some of the Trantridge cottagers.

At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of
them had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house of
a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm. He
lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find
her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr d’Urberville standing at a
street corner.

“What—my Beauty? You here so late?” he said.

She told him that she was simply waiting for company homeward.

“I’ll see you again,” said he over her shoulder as she went on down the
back lane.

Approaching the hay-trussers, she could hear the fiddled notes of a
reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing
was audible—an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a
rule the stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she
could see straight through the house into the garden at the back as far
as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock,
she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence
the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door
there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at
first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she
perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the
outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the
doorway into the wide night of the garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up
and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls
arising from their being overshoe in “scroff”—that is to say, the
powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the
stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that
involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty _débris_ of peat and
hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and
forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles
feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which
the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed
as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned
more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs
clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of
Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.

At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze
no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into
the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could
Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus
madly!

Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall;
and one of them recognized her.

“The maids don’t think it respectable to dance at The Flower-de-Luce,”
he explained. “They don’t like to let everybody see which be their
fancy-men. Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints
begin to get greased. So we come here and send out for liquor.”

“But when be any of you going home?” asked Tess with some anxiety.

“Now—a’most directly. This is all but the last jig.”

She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in the
mind of starting. But others would not, and another dance was formed.
This surely would end it, thought Tess. But it merged in yet another.
She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was
necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the roads were dotted
with roving characters of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful
of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown. Had she been near
Marlott she would have had less dread.

“Don’t ye be nervous, my dear good soul,” expostulated, between his
coughs, a young man with a wet face and his straw hat so far back upon
his head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint. “What’s
yer hurry? To-morrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in
church-time. Now, have a turn with me?”

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The
movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar
of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of
the bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the
panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to
previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory
choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and
by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that
the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the
universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you
from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen, and
lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable to check its progress,
came toppling over the obstacle. An inner cloud of dust rose around the
prostrate figures amid the general one of the room, in which a
twitching entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.

“You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” burst
in female accents from the human heap—those of the unhappy partner of
the man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to be
his recently married wife, in which assortment there was nothing
unusual at Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded
couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to
avoid making odd lots of the single people between whom there might be
a warm understanding.

A loud laugh from behind Tess’s back, in the shade of the garden,
united with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the
red coal of a cigar: Alec d’Urberville was standing there alone. He
beckoned to her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.

“Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?”

She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her
trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever since he saw her to have
their company home, because the road at night was strange to her. “But
it seems they will never leave off, and I really think I will wait no
longer.”

“Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to
The Flower-de-Luce, and I’ll hire a trap, and drive you home with me.”

Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original mistrust
of him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with
the work-folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but
would not trouble him. “I have said that I will wait for ’em, and they
will expect me to now.”

“Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself... Then I shall not
hurry... My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!”

He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them had
perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a
consideration of how the time was flying. As soon as he had re-lit a
cigar and walked away the Trantridge people began to collect themselves
from amid those who had come in from other farms, and prepared to leave
in a body. Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour
later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were
straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards their homes.

It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night
by the light of the moon.

Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this
one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing
staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too
freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their
gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till
lately a favourite of d’Urberville’s; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the
Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already tumbled
down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to
the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They
followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a
supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts,
themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the
parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were
as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars
were as ardent as they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in
her father’s house that the discovery of their condition spoilt the
pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she
stuck to the party, for reasons above given.

In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now
their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a
difficulty in opening it, they closed up together.

This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a
wicker-basket containing her mother’s groceries, her own draperies, and
other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had
placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it
rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.

“Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?” said one
of the group suddenly.

All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back
of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance
below her waist, like a Chinaman’s queue.

“’Tis her hair falling down,” said another.

No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from
her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays
of the moon.

“’Tis treacle,” said an observant matron.

Treacle it was. Car’s poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet
stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was
what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of
surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the
vessel containing the syrup had been smashed within.

By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary
appearance of Car’s back, which irritated the dark queen into getting
rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and
independently of the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into
the field they were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her
back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could by
spinning horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over it upon
her elbows.

The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested
on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the
spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this
wild moment could not help joining in with the rest.

It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark queen
hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other
work-people than a long-smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to
madness. She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her
dislike.

“How darest th’ laugh at me, hussy!” she cried.

“I couldn’t really help it when t’others did,” apologized Tess, still
tittering.

“Ah, th’st think th’ beest everybody, dostn’t, because th’ beest first
favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I’m as
good as two of such! Look here—here’s at ’ee!”

To Tess’s horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her
gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only
too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders,
and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and
beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the
faultless rotundities of a lusty country-girl. She closed her fists and
squared up at Tess.

“Indeed, then, I shall not fight!” said the latter majestically; “and
if I had known you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down
as to come with such a whorage as this is!”

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation
from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from
the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to
d’Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the
latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in,
with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show
but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess
unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by
defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase
the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of
the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away
from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the
better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all
now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a
horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that
screened the road, and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.

“What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?” he asked.

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not
require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had
ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over
towards her. “Jump up behind me,” he whispered, “and we’ll get shot of
the screaming cats in a jiffy!”

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis.
At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such
proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times
before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to
do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular
juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be
transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she
abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon
his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The pair were
speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious
revellers became aware of what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside
the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all
with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was
diminishing into silence on the road.

“What be ye looking at?” asked a man who had not observed the incident.

“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.

“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on
the arm of her fond husband.

“Heu-heu-heu!” laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she
explained laconically: “Out of the frying-pan into the fire!”

Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could
scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as
they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s
head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the
glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or
her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar
unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified
it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the
irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the
night’s mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of
Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.


XI

The twain cantered along for some time without speech, Tess as she
clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects
dubious. She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he
sometimes rose, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was
precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow
the animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.

“Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?” he said by and by.

“Yes!” said she. “I am sure I ought to be much obliged to you.”

“And are you?”

She did not reply.

“Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?”

“I suppose—because I don’t love you.”

“You are quite sure?”

“I am angry with you sometimes!”

“Ah, I half feared as much.” Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that
confession. He knew that anything was better then frigidity. “Why
haven’t you told me when I have made you angry?”

“You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself here.”

“I haven’t offended you often by love-making?”

“You have sometimes.”

“How many times?”

“You know as well as I—too many times.”

“Every time I have tried?”

She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance,
till a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the
evening, became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the
moonlight in suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air.
Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness,
she did not perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which
the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her
conductor had not taken the Trantridge track.

She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o’clock every
morning of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on
this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough,
waited three hours for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her
impatience to start them preventing either; she had then walked a mile
of the way home, and had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till,
with the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one o’clock.
Only once, however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that
moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.

D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups,
turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to
support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden
impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push
from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only
just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful
one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.

“That is devilish unkind!” he said. “I mean no harm—only to keep you
from falling.”

She pondered suspiciously, till, thinking that this might after all be
true, she relented, and said quite humbly, “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God!”
he burst out, “what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chit like you?
For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded
me, and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!”

“I’ll leave you to-morrow, sir.”

“No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show
your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us
two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I
love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are.
Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?”

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her
seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, “I don’t know—I wish—how can I
say yes or no when—”

He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired, and
Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they sidled slowly onward till
it struck her they had been advancing for an unconscionable time—far
longer than was usually occupied by the short journey from
Chaseborough, even at this walking pace, and that they were no longer
on hard road, but in a mere trackway.

“Why, where be we?” she exclaimed.

“Passing by a wood.”

“A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?”

“A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a lovely night,
and why should we not prolong our ride a little?”

“How could you be so treacherous!” said Tess, between archness and real
dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by
one, though at the risk of slipping off herself. “Just when I’ve been
putting such trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I
thought I had wronged you by that push! Please set me down, and let me
walk home.”

“You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were clear. We are
miles away from Trantridge, if I must tell you, and in this growing fog
you might wander for hours among these trees.”

“Never mind that,” she coaxed. “Put me down, I beg you. I don’t mind
where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!”

“Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought you here to
this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself responsible for your
safe-conduct home, whatever you may yourself feel about it. As to your
getting to Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible; for,
to tell the truth, dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises
everything, I don’t quite know where we are myself. Now, if you will
promise to wait beside the horse while I walk through the bushes till I
come to some road or house, and ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I’ll
deposit you here willingly. When I come back I’ll give you full
directions, and if you insist upon walking you may; or you may ride—at
your pleasure.”

She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side, though not
till he had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down on the other side.

“I suppose I must hold the horse?” said she.

“Oh no; it’s not necessary,” replied Alec, patting the panting
creature. “He’s had enough of it for to-night.”

He turned the horse’s head into the bushes, hitched him on to a bough,
and made a sort of couch or nest for her in the deep mass of dead
leaves.

“Now, you sit there,” he said. “The leaves have not got damp as yet.
Just give an eye to the horse—it will be quite sufficient.”

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said, “By the bye,
Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him.”

“Somebody? You!”

D’Urberville nodded.

“O how very good of you that is!” she exclaimed, with a painful sense
of the awkwardness of having to thank him just then.

“And the children have some toys.”

“I didn’t know—you ever sent them anything!” she murmured, much moved.
“I almost wish you had not—yes, I almost wish it!”

“Why, dear?”

“It—hampers me so.”

“Tessy—don’t you love me ever so little now?”

“I’m grateful,” she reluctantly admitted. “But I fear I do not—” The
sudden vision of his passion for herself as a factor in this result so
distressed her that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following
with another, she wept outright.

“Don’t cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait till I come.”
She passively sat down amid the leaves he had heaped, and shivered
slightly. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“Not very—a little.”

He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as into down. “You
have only that puffy muslin dress on—how’s that?”

“It’s my best summer one. ’Twas very warm when I started, and I didn’t
know I was going to ride, and that it would be night.”

“Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see.” He pulled off a light
overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly. “That’s
it—now you’ll feel warmer,” he continued. “Now, my pretty, rest there;
I shall soon be back again.”

Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he plunged into the
webs of vapour which by this time formed veils between the trees. She
could hear the rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining
slope, till his movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird,
and finally died away. With the setting of the moon the pale light
lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the
leaves where he had left her.

In the meantime Alec d’Urberville had pushed on up the slope to clear
his genuine doubt as to the quarter of The Chase they were in. He had,
in fact, ridden quite at random for over an hour, taking any turning
that came to hand in order to prolong companionship with her, and
giving far more attention to Tess’s moonlit person than to any wayside
object. A little rest for the jaded animal being desirable, he did not
hasten his search for landmarks. A clamber over the hill into the
adjoining vale brought him to the fence of a highway whose contours he
recognized, which settled the question of their whereabouts.
D’Urberville thereupon turned back; but by this time the moon had quite
gone down, and partly on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in
thick darkness, although morning was not far off. He was obliged to
advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs, and
discovered that to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at
first entirely beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and round, he at
length heard a slight movement of the horse close at hand; and the
sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.

“Tess!” said d’Urberville.

There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see
absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which
represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves.
Everything else was blackness alike. D’Urberville stooped; and heard a
gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath
warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers.
She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the
primaeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle
roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping
rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian
angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that
other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he
was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be
awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as
gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been
traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often
the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the
wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have
failed to explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the
possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe.
Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors rollicking home
from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards
peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities,
it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend
the matter.

As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying
among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be.” There lay the
pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s
personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from
her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.


End of Phase the First


Phase the Second:

Maiden No More


XII

The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she lugged them
along like a person who did not find her especial burden in material
things. Occasionally she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some
gate or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon her full
round arm, went steadily on again.

It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess
Durbeyfield’s arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to
the night ride in The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak, and
the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the
ridge towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale wherein
she had of late been a stranger—which she would have to climb over to
reach her birthplace. The ascent was gradual on this side, and the soil
and scenery differed much from those within Blakemore Vale. Even the
character and accent of the two peoples had shades of difference,
despite the amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so that,
though less than twenty miles from the place of her sojourn at
Trantridge, her native village had seemed a far-away spot. The
field-folk shut in there traded northward and westward, travelled,
courted, and married northward and westward, thought northward and
westward; those on this side mainly directed their energies and
attention to the east and south.

The incline was the same down which d’Urberville had driven her so
wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the remainder of its length
without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over
the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist. It was always
beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess to-day, for
since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses
where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally
changed for her by the lesson. Verily another girl than the simple one
she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here,
and turned to look behind her. She could not bear to look forward into
the Vale.

Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had just laboured
up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside which walked a man, who held
up his hand to attract her attention.

She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative repose, and in
a few minutes man and horse stopped beside her.

“Why did you slip away by stealth like this?” said d’Urberville, with
upbraiding breathlessness; “on a Sunday morning, too, when people were
all in bed! I only discovered it by accident, and I have been driving
like the deuce to overtake you. Just look at the mare. Why go off like
this? You know that nobody wished to hinder your going. And how
unnecessary it has been for you to toil along on foot, and encumber
yourself with this heavy load! I have followed like a madman, simply to
drive you the rest of the distance, if you won’t come back.”

“I shan’t come back,” said she.

“I thought you wouldn’t—I said so! Well, then, put up your basket, and
let me help you on.”

She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the dog-cart, and
stepped up, and they sat side by side. She had no fear of him now, and
in the cause of her confidence her sorrow lay.

D’Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey was continued
with broken unemotional conversation on the commonplace objects by the
wayside. He had quite forgotten his struggle to kiss her when, in the
early summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along the same
road. But she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet, replying to his
remarks in monosyllables. After some miles they came in view of the
clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott stood. It was only
then that her still face showed the least emotion, a tear or two
beginning to trickle down.

“What are you crying for?” he coldly asked.

“I was only thinking that I was born over there,” murmured Tess.

“Well—we must all be born somewhere.”

“I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!”

“Pooh! Well, if you didn’t wish to come to Trantridge why did you
come?”

She did not reply.

“You didn’t come for love of me, that I’ll swear.”

“’Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o’ you, if I had ever
sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and
hate myself for my weakness as I do now!... My eyes were dazed by you
for a little, and that was all.”

He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed—

“I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late.”

“That’s what every woman says.”

“How can you dare to use such words!” she cried, turning impetuously
upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to
see more some day) awoke in her. “My God! I could knock you out of the
gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some
women may feel?”

“Very well,” he said, laughing; “I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong—I
admit it.” He dropped into some little bitterness as he continued:
“Only you needn’t be so everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am
ready to pay to the uttermost farthing. You know you need not work in
the fields or the dairies again. You know you may clothe yourself with
the best, instead of in the bald plain way you have lately affected, as
if you couldn’t get a ribbon more than you earn.”

Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn, as a rule, in
her large and impulsive nature.

“I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will not—I
cannot! I _should_ be your creature to go on doing that, and I won’t!”

“One would think you were a princess from your manner, in addition to a
true and original d’Urberville—ha! ha! Well, Tess, dear, I can say no
more. I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad,
and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. But, upon
my lost soul, I won’t be bad towards you again, Tess. And if certain
circumstances should arise—you understand—in which you are in the least
need, the least difficulty, send me one line, and you shall have by
return whatever you require. I may not be at Trantridge—I am going to
London for a time—I can’t stand the old woman. But all letters will be
forwarded.”

She said that she did not wish him to drive her further, and they
stopped just under the clump of trees. D’Urberville alighted, and
lifted her down bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles on
the ground beside her. She bowed to him slightly, her eye just
lingering in his; and then she turned to take the parcels for
departure.

Alec d’Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her, and said—

“You are not going to turn away like that, dear! Come!”

“If you wish,” she answered indifferently. “See how you’ve mastered
me!”

She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained
like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek—half
perfunctorily, half as if zest had not yet quite died out. Her eyes
vaguely rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was
given, as though she were nearly unconscious of what he did.

“Now the other side, for old acquaintance’ sake.”

She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might turn at the
request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he kissed the other side, his
lips touching cheeks that were damp and smoothly chill as the skin of
the mushrooms in the fields around.

“You don’t give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never willingly do
that—you’ll never love me, I fear.”

“I have said so, often. It is true. I have never really and truly loved
you, and I think I never can.” She added mournfully, “Perhaps, of all
things, a lie on this thing would do the most good to me now; but I
have honour enough left, little as ’tis, not to tell that lie. If I did
love you, I may have the best o’ causes for letting you know it. But I
don’t.”

He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather
oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility.

“Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess. I have no reason for
flattering you now, and I can say plainly that you need not be so sad.
You can hold your own for beauty against any woman of these parts,
gentle or simple; I say it to you as a practical man and well-wisher.
If you are wise you will show it to the world more than you do before
it fades... And yet, Tess, will you come back to me! Upon my soul, I
don’t like to let you go like this!”

“Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I ought to have
seen sooner; and I won’t come.”

“Then good morning, my four months’ cousin—good-bye!”

He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone between the tall
red-berried hedges.

Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the crooked lane.
It was still early, and though the sun’s lower limb was just free of
the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than
the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her
sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.

As she walked, however, some footsteps approached behind her, the
footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was
close at her heels and had said “Good morning” before she had been long
aware of his propinquity. He appeared to be an artisan of some sort,
and carried a tin pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a
business-like manner if he should take her basket, which she permitted
him to do, walking beside him.

“It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!” he said cheerfully.

“Yes,” said Tess.

“When most people are at rest from their week’s work.”

She also assented to this.

“Though I do more real work to-day than all the week besides.”

“Do you?”

“All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday for the glory
of God. That’s more real than the other—hey? I have a little to do here
at this stile.” The man turned, as he spoke, to an opening at the
roadside leading into a pasture. “If you’ll wait a moment,” he added,
“I shall not be long.”

As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and she waited,
observing him. He set down her basket and the tin pot, and stirring the
paint with the brush that was in it began painting large square letters
on the middle board of the three composing the stile, placing a comma
after each word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well
home to the reader’s heart—

    THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
        2 Pet. ii. 3.

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses,
the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these
staring vermilion words shone forth. They seemed to shout themselves
out and make the atmosphere ring. Some people might have cried “Alas,
poor Theology!” at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a
creed which had served mankind well in its time. But the words entered
Tess with accusatory horror. It was as if this man had known her recent
history; yet he was a total stranger.

Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she mechanically
resumed her walk beside him.

“Do you believe what you paint?” she asked in low tones.

“Believe that tex? Do I believe in my own existence!”

“But,” said she tremulously, “suppose your sin was not of your own
seeking?”

He shook his head.

“I cannot split hairs on that burning query,” he said. “I have walked
hundreds of miles this past summer, painting these texes on every wall,
gate, and stile the length and breadth of this district. I leave their
application to the hearts of the people who read ’em.”

“I think they are horrible,” said Tess. “Crushing! Killing!”

“That’s what they are meant to be!” he replied in a trade voice. “But
you should read my hottest ones—them I kips for slums and seaports.
They’d make ye wriggle! Not but what this is a very good tex for rural
districts.... Ah—there’s a nice bit of blank wall up by that barn
standing to waste. I must put one there—one that it will be good for
dangerous young females like yerself to heed. Will ye wait, missy?”

“No,” said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A little way
forward she turned her head. The old gray wall began to advertise a
similar fiery lettering to the first, with a strange and unwonted mien,
as if distressed at duties it had never before been called upon to
perform. It was with a sudden flush that she read and realized what was
to be the inscription he was now halfway through—

    THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT—

Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush, and shouted—

“If you want to ask for edification on these things of moment, there’s
a very earnest good man going to preach a charity-sermon to-day in the
parish you are going to—Mr Clare of Emminster. I’m not of his
persuasion now, but he’s a good man, and he’ll expound as well as any
parson I know. ’Twas he began the work in me.”

But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her walk, her eyes
fixed on the ground. “Pooh—I don’t believe God said such things!” she
murmured contemptuously when her flush had died away.

A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father’s chimney, the
sight of which made her heart ache. The aspect of the interior, when
she reached it, made her heart ache more. Her mother, who had just come
downstairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she was
kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle. The young
children were still above, as was also her father, it being Sunday
morning, when he felt justified in lying an additional half-hour.

“Well!—my dear Tess!” exclaimed her surprised mother, jumping up and
kissing the girl. “How be ye? I didn’t see you till you was in upon me!
Have you come home to be married?”

“No, I have not come for that, mother.”

“Then for a holiday?”

“Yes—for a holiday; for a long holiday,” said Tess.

“What, isn’t your cousin going to do the handsome thing?”

“He’s not my cousin, and he’s not going to marry me.”

Her mother eyed her narrowly.

“Come, you have not told me all,” she said.

Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan’s neck, and
told.

“And yet th’st not got him to marry ’ee!” reiterated her mother. “Any
woman would have done it but you, after that!”

“Perhaps any woman would except me.”

“It would have been something like a story to come back with, if you
had!” continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of vexation.
“After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here, who
would have expected it to end like this! Why didn’t ye think of doing
some good for your family instead o’ thinking only of yourself? See how
I’ve got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with his heart
clogged like a dripping-pan. I did hope for something to come out o’
this! To see what a pretty pair you and he made that day when you drove
away together four months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we
thought, because we were his kin. But if he’s not, it must have been
done because of his love for ’ee. And yet you’ve not got him to marry!”

Get Alec d’Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry _her_! On
matrimony he had never once said a word. And what if he had? How a
convulsive snatching at social salvation might have impelled her to
answer him she could not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew
her present feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the
circumstances, unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as
she had said, was what made her detest herself. She had never wholly
cared for him; she did not at all care for him now. She had dreaded
him, winced before him, succumbed to adroit advantages he took of her
helplessness; then, temporarily blinded by his ardent manners, had been
stirred to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly despised and
disliked him, and had run away. That was all. Hate him she did not
quite; but he was dust and ashes to her, and even for her name’s sake
she scarcely wished to marry him.

“You ought to have been more careful if you didn’t mean to get him to
make you his wife!”

“O mother, my mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately
upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be
expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago.
Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you
warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read
novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’
learning in that way, and you did not help me!”

Her mother was subdued.

“I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead to,
you would be hontish wi’ him and lose your chance,” she murmured,
wiping her eyes with her apron. “Well, we must make the best of it, I
suppose. ’Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!”


XIII

The event of Tess Durbeyfield’s return from the manor of her bogus
kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a
space of a square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of
Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see
her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became
visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they
supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.
For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr
d’Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not
altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of
Trantridge, lent Tess’s supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far
higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
back was turned—

“How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe
it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him.”

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard
them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter. But her
mother heard, and Joan’s simple vanity, having been denied the hope of
a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation
of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though
such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter’s
reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her
responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to
tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess’s spirits
also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she
moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all her
young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in
the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far
was she from being, in the words of Robert South, “in love with her own
ruin,” that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came
back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary
pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning’s dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were
gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children
breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return,
and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony
highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy.
Her depression was then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in
a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself
so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked
to hear the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in
the Morning Hymn. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited
from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over
her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the
chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the
lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on
end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in
rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads
as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked
around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be
chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”—but she did not
know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She
thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like
was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences
of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had
never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his
personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service
proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each other. She
knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that
she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of
thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and
successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost
everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She
knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold
accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so
unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with
the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an
integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would
intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her
own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a
psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight
airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of
the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the
expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some
vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of
her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of
convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a
sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins
by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of
harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping
birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,
or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a
figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the
while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been
made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the
environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.


XIV

It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked
by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces
within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried
away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,
demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His
present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,
explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a
saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a
golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in
the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with
interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers,
and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not
already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms
of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by
Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving
Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been brought to the
field on the previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The
paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight,
imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been “opened”; that is to say, a lane a few feet
wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference
of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the
lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck
the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying
sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from
the lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest
field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the
grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three
horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the
gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant
on the seat of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole
wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it
passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came up on the
other side of the field at the same equable pace; the glistening brass
star in the forehead of the fore horse first catching the eye as it
rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the
whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each
circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the
morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards
as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge,
and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert
shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled
together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat
fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every
one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active
binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men
in print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather
straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and
bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as if they
were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of
binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she
becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object
set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality
afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost
her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated
herself with it.

The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton
bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to
prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing
a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,
another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine; and
others, older, in the brown-rough “wropper” or over-all—the
old-established and most appropriate dress of the field-woman, which
the young ones were abandoning. This morning the eye returns
involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most
flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled
so far over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she
binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two
of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of her bonnet.
Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she never
courts it, though the other women often gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left
palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing her
left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side,
holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She brings the
ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it,
beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit
of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet
and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine
smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron,
or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a
handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging
tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall
against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips
thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d’Urberville, somewhat changed—the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as
a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she
was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake
outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of the year in
the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she could do
within the house being so remunerative for the time as harvesting in
the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess’s,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at
the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end
against those of the rest, till a shock, or “stitch” as it was here
called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess’s glance flitted wistfully to
the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the
verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages ranging
from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes.
Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working, took their
provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to,
the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She
sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from
her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin
cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of
ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But she did not accept
his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called up the big girl,
her sister, and took the baby of her, who, glad to be relieved of the
burden, went away to the next shock and joined the other children
playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement,
and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling
the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk,
and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright in
her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy
indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to
violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave
off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely
combined passionateness with contempt.

“She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and
say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,” observed
the woman in the red petticoat.

“She’ll soon leave off saying that,” replied the one in buff. “Lord,
’tis wonderful what a body can get used to o’ that sort in time!”

“A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon.
There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase;
and it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along.”

“Well, a little more, or a little less, ’twas a thousand pities that it
should have happened to she, of all others. But ’tis always the
comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?” The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as
plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises—shade
behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing
and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that
lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She
felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet
independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it
was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over
them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and
she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just
as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as
ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,
nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the
thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an
illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a
structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no
more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable
the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes
herself unhappy.” If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to
take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be
this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it very well.” Moreover, alone in a
desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her?
Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover
herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as
the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to
despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure
therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional
aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself
up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields,
harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had
borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at
times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs,
and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed
and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having
quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and
take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again,
and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the
tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then
they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a
broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards,
its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten
Tuscan saint. Tess’s female companions sang songs, and showed
themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors,
though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few
verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood
and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises and
compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a social
warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage
in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still farther away
from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she became
almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home
it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill
since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender
and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.

The baby’s offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul’s desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child’s simple loss. Her baby had not been
baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she
was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the
histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn
therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it
had a very different colour. Her darling was about to die, and no
salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might
send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her
father’s sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and
his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon tha

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