TESS OF D'URBERVILLES, PART 2

XVII


The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their
cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival of
the cows from the meads; the maids walking in patterns,
not on account of the weather, but to keep their shoes
above the mulch of the barton.  Each girl sat down on
her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right
cheek resting against the cow; and looked musingly
along the animal's flank at Tess as she approached.
The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting
flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did
not observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man--whose long
white "pinner" was somewhat finer and cleaner than the
wraps of the others, and whose jacket underneath had a
presentable marketing aspect--the master-dairyman, of
whom she was in quest, his double character as a
working milker and butter maker here during six days,
and on the seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in
his family pew at church, being so marked as to have
inspired a rhyme-


             Dairyman Dick
             All the week:--
     On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.


Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking
time, but it happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a
new hand--for the days were busy ones now--and he
received her warmly; inquiring for her mother and the
rest of the family--(though this as a matter of form
merely, for in reality he had not been aware of Mrs
Durbeyfield's existence till apprised of the fact by a
brief business-letter about Tess).

"Oh--ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country
very well," he said terminatively. "Though I've never
been there since.  And a aged woman of ninety that use
to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago, told
me that a family of some such name as yours in
Blackmoor Vale came originally from these parts, and
that 'twere a old ancient race that had all but
perished off the earth--though the new generations
didn't know it.  But, Lord, I took no notice of the old
woman's ramblings, not I."

"Oh no--it is nothing," said Tess.

Then the talk was of business only.

"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cow
going azew at this time o' year."

She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up
and down. She had been staying indoors a good deal, and
her complexion had grown delicate.

"Quite sure you can stand it? 'Tis comfortable enough
here  for rough folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber
frame."

She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and
willingness seemed to win him over.

"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals
of some sort, hey?  Not yet?  Well, do as ye like about
it.  But faith, if 'twas I, I should be as dry as a kex
wi' travelling so far."

"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--
to the surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman
Crick, to whose mind it had apparently never occurred
that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said
indifferently, while holding up the pail that she
sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't touched for years--
not I.  Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like
lead.  You can try your hand upon she," he pursued,
nodding to the nearest cow.  "Not but what she do milk
rather hard. We've hard ones and we've easy ones, like
other folks. However, you'll find out that soon
enough."

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was
really on her stool under the cow, and the milk was
squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to
feel that she really had laid a new foundation for her
future.  The conviction bred serenity, her pulse
slowed, and she was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and
maids, the men operating on the hard-teated animals,
the maids on the kindlier natures.  It was a large
dairy.  There were nearly a hundred milchers under
Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the
master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands,
unless away from home.  These were the cows that milked
hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being more or
less casually hired, he would not entrust this
half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference,
they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest
they should fail in the same way for lack of
finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the
cows would "go azew"--that is, dry up. It was not the
loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious,
but that with the decline of demand there came decline,
and ultimately cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a
time no talk in the barton, and not a sound interfered
with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails,
except a momentary exclamation to one or other of the
beast requesting her to turn round or stand still.  The
only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and
down, and the swing of the cows' tails.  Thus they all
worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which
extended to either slope of the valley--a level
landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten,
and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from
the landscape they composed now.

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly
from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his
three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the
other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his
vicinity; "to my thinking, the cows don't gie down
their milk today as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do
begin keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going
under by midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us,' said
Jonathan Kail.  "I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure.  It may be so.  I didn't think o't."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at
such times," said a dairymaid.

"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied
Dairyman Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft
might be limited by anatomical possibilities, "I
couldn't say; I certainly could not.  But as nott cows
will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't
quite agree to it.  Do ye know that riddle about the
nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott cows give less milk in
a year than horned?"

"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the
dairyman.  "Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly
keep back their milk today.  Folks, we must lift up a
stave or two--that's the only cure for't."

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an
enticement to the cows when they showed signs of
withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers
at this request burst into melody--in purely
business-like tones, it is true, and with no great
spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief,
being a decided improvement during the song's
continuance.  When they had gone through fourteen or
fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer
who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw
certain brimstone flames around him, one of the male
milkers said--

"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a
man's wind! You should get your harp, sir; not but what
a fiddle is best."

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were
addressed to the dairyman, but she was wrong.  A reply,
in the shape of "Why?" came as it were out of the belly
of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been spoken by a
milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto
perceived.

"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the
dairyman. "Though I do think that bulls are more moved
by a tune than cows--at least that's my experience.
Once there was an old aged man over at
Mellstock--William Dewy by name--one of the family that
used to do a good deal of business as tranters over
there, Jonathan, do ye mind?--I knowed the man by sight
as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of
speaking.  Well, this man was a coming home-along from
a wedding where he had been playing his fiddle, one
fine moonlight night, and for shortness' sake he took a
cut across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a
bull was out to grass. The bull seed William, and took
after him, horns aground, begad; and though William
runned his best, and hadn't MUCH drink in him
(considering 'twas a wedding, and the folks well off),
he found he'd never reach the fence and get over in
time to save himself. Well, as a last thought, he
pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a
jig, turning to the bull, and backing towards the
corner.  The bull softened down, and stood still,
looking hard at William Dewy, who fiddled on and on;
till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face.  But
no sooner did William stop his playing and turn to get
over hedge than the bull would stop his smiling and
lower his horns towards the seat of William's breeches.
Well, William had to turn about and play on,
willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in the world,
and 'a knowed that nobody would come that way for
hours, and he so leery and tired that 'a didn't know
what to do.  When he had scraped till about four
o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give over
soon, and he said to himself, 'There's only this last
tune between me and eternal welfare! Heaven save me, or
I'm a done man.' Well, then he called to mind how he'd
seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o'
night.  It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into
his head to play a trick upon the bull.  So he broke
into the 'Tivity Hymm, just as at Christmas
carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the bull
on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if
'twere the true 'Tivity night and hour.  As soon as his
horned friend were down, William turned, clinked off
like a long-dog, and jumped safe over hedge, before
the praying bull had got on his feet again to take
after him.  William used to say that he'd seen a man
look a fool a good many times, but never such a fool as
that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had
been played upon, and 'twas not Christmas Eve. ... Yes,
William Dewy, that was the man's name; and I can tell
you to a foot where's he a-lying in Mellstock
Churchyard at this very moment--just between the second
yew-tree and the north aisle."

"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval
times, when faith was a living thing!"

The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by
the voice behind the dun cow; but as nobody understood
the reference no notice was taken, except that the
narrator seemed to think it might imply scepticism as
to his tale.

"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no.  I knowed
the man well."

"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind
the dun cow.

Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's
interlocutor, of whom she could see but the merest
patch, owing to his burying his head so persistently in
the flank of the milcher.  She could not understand why
he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman
himself.  But no explanation was discernible; he
remained under to cow long enough to have milked three,
uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as if he
could not get on.

"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the
dairyman.  "'Tis knack, not strength that does it."

"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and
stretching his arms.  "I think I have finished her,
however, though she made my fingers ache."

Tess could then see him at full length.  He wore the
ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a
dairy-farmer when milking, and his boots were clogged
with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his local
livery.  Beneath it was something educated, reserved,
subtle, sad, differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust
aside by the discovery that he was one whom she had
seen before.  Such vicissitudes had Tess passed through
since that time that for a moment she could not
remember where she had met him; and then it flashed
upon her that he was the pedestrian who had joined in
the club-dance at Marlott--the passing stranger who had
come she knew not whence, had danced with others but
not with her, and slightingly left her, and gone on his
way with his friends.

The flood of memories brought back by this revival of
an incident anterior to her troubles produced a
momentary dismay lest, recognizing her also, he should
by some means discover her story. But it passed away
when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She saw
by degrees that since their first and only encounter
his mobile face had grown more thoughtful, and had
acquired a young man's shapely moustache and beard--the
latter of the palest straw colour where it began upon
his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther from
its root.  Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a
dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a
starched white shirt.  Without the milking-gear nobody
could have guessed what he was.  He might with equal
probability have been an eccentric landowner or a
gentlemanly ploughman.  That he was but a novice at
dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time
he had spent upon the milking of one cow.

Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another
of the newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of
real generosity and admiration, though with a half hope
that the auditors would qualify the assertion--which,
strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness
being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in
Tess.  When the milking was finished for the evening
they straggled indoors, where Mrs Crick, the dairyman's
wife--who was too respectable to go out milking
herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in warm weather
because the dairymaids wore prints--was giving an eye
to the leads and things.

Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in
the dairy-house besides herself; most of the helpers
going to their homes. She saw nothing at supper-time of
the superior milker who had commented on the story, and
asked no questions about him, the remainder of the
evening being occupied in arranging her place in the
bed-chamber.  It was a large room over the milk-house,
some thirty feet long; the sleeping-cots of the other
three indoor milkmaids being in the same apartment.
They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather
older than herself.  By bedtime Tess was thoroughly
tired, and fell asleep immediately.

But one of the girls who occupied an adjoining bed was
more wakeful than Tess, and would insist upon relating
to the latter various particulars of the homestead into
which she had just entered.  The girl's whispered words
mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy mind,
they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which
they floated.

"Mr Angel Clare--he that is learning milking, and that
plays the harp--never says much to us. He is a pa'son's
son, and is too much taken up wi' his own thoughts to
notice girls.  He is the dairyman's pupil--learning
farming in all its branches. He has learnt
sheep-farming at another place, and he's now mastering
dairy-work.... Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born. His
father is the Reverent Mr Clare at Emminster--a good
many miles from here."

"Oh--I have heard of him," said her companion, now
awake.  "A very earnest clergyman, is he not?"

"Yes--that he is--the earnestest man in all Wessex,
they say--the last of the old Low Church sort, they
tell me--for all about here be what they call High.
All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa'sons too."

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the
present Mr Clare was not made a parson like his
brethren, and gradually fell asleep again, the words of
her informant coming to her along with the smell of the
cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured
dripping of the whey from the wrings downstairs.



XVIII


Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a
distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long
regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of
mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a
man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the
lower lip now and then; enough to do away with any
inference of indecision.  Nevertheless, something
nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and
regard, marked him as one who probably had no very
definite aim or concern about his material future.
Yet as a lad people had said of him that he was one who
might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at
the other end of the county, and had arrived at
Talbothays Dairy as a six months' pupil, after going
the round of some other farms, his object being to
acquire a practical skill in the various processes of
farming, with a view either to the Colonies, or the
tenure of a home-farm, as circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and
breeders was a step in the young man's career which had
been anticipated neither by himself nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left
him a daughter, married a second late in life.  This
lady had somewhat unexpectedly brought him three sons,
so that between Angel, the youngest, and his father the
Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation.
Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old
age, was the only son who had not taken a University
degree, though he was the single one of them whose
early promise might have done full justice to an
academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at
the Marlott dance, on a day when he had left school and
was pursuing his studies at home, a parcel came to the
Vicarage from the local bookseller's, directed to the
Reverend James Clare.  The Vicar having opened it and
found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon
he jumped up from his seat and went straight to the
shop with the book under his arm.

"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked
peremptorily, holding up the volume.

"It was ordered, sir."

"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to
say."

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said.  "It was
ordered by Mr Angel Clare, and should have been sent to
him."

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck.  He went home
pale and dejected, and called Angel into his study.

"Look into this book, my boy," he said. "What do you
know about it?"

"I ordered it," said Angel simply.

"What for?"

"To read." "How can you think of reading it?"

"How can I?  Why--it is a system of philosophy.
There is no more moral, or even religious, work published."

"Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that.  But
religious!--and for YOU, who intend to be a minister of
the Gospel!"

"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said
the son, with anxious thought upon his face, "I should
like to say, once for all, that I should prefer not to
take Orders.  I fear I could not conscientiously do so.
I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall always
have the warmest affection for her.  There is no
institution for whose history I have a deeper
admiration; but I cannot honestly be ordained her
minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to
liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive
theolarty."

It had never occurred to the straightforward and
simple-minded Vicar that one of his own flesh and blood
could come to this!  He was stultified, shocked,
paralysed.  And if Angel were not going to enter the
Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge?
The University as a step to anything but ordination
seemed, to this man of fixed ideas, a preface without a
volume. He was a man not merely religious, but devout;
a firm believer--not as the phrase is now elusively
construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church
and out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the
Evangelical school: one who could

              Indeed opine
        That the Eternal and Divine
        Did, eighteen centuries ago
        In very truth...

Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave
alone the rest), taking it 'in the literal and
grammatical sense' as required by the Declaration; and,
therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state of
affairs," said Angel.  "My whole instinct in matters of
religion is towards reconstruction; to quote your
favorite Epistle to the Hebrews, 'THE REMOVING OF THOSE
THINGS THAT ARE SHAKEN, AS OF THINGS THAT ARE MADE,
THAT THOSE THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN MAY REMAIN.'"

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite
ill to see him.

"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and
stinting ourselves to give you a University education,
if it is not to be used for the honour and glory of
God?" his father repeated.

"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of
man, father."

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to
Cambridge like his brothers.  But the Vicar's view of
that seat of learning as a stepping-stone to Orders
alone was quite a family tradition; and so rooted was
the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear
to the sensitive son akin to an intent to
misappropriate a trust, and wrong the pious heads of
the household, who had been and were, as his father had
hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out
his uniform plan of education for the three young men.

"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last.
"I feel that I have no right to go there in the
circumstances."

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in
showing themselves.  He spent years and years in
desultory studies, undertakings, and meditations; he
began to evince considerable indifference to social
forms and observances.  The material distinctions of
rank and wealth he increasingly despised.  Even the
"good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late
local worthy) had no aroma for him unless there were
good new resolutions in its representatives.  As a
balance to these austerities, when he went to live in
London to see what the world was like, and with a view
to practising a profession or business there, he was
carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a woman
much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not
greatly the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in
him an unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion
to modern town life, and shut him out from such success
as he might have aspired to by following a mundane
calling in the impracticability of the spiritual one.
But something had to be done; he had wasted many
valuable years; and having an acquaintance who was
starting on a thriving life as a Colonial farmer, it
occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the
right direction.  Farming, either in the Colonies,
America, or at home--farming, at any rate, after
becoming well qualified for the business by a careful
apprenticeship--that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice
of what he valued even more than a
competency--intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at
Talbothays as a student of kine, and, as there were no
houses near at hand in which he could get a comfortable
lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole
length of the dairy-house. It could only be reached by
a ladder from the cheese-loft, and had been closed up
for a long time till he arrived and selected it as his
retreat.  Here Clare had plenty of space, and could
often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down
when the household had gone to rest.  A portion was
divided off at one end by a curtain, behind which was
his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely
sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good
deal, and strumming upon an old harp which he had
bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter humour that
he might have to get his living by it in the streets
some day.  But he soon preferred to read human nature
by taking his meals downstairs in the general
dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his wife, and the
maids and men, who all together formed a lively
assembly; for though but few milking hands slept in the
house, several joined the family at meals.  The longer
Clare resided here the less objection had he to his
company, and the more did he like to share quarters
with them in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in
their companionship.  The conventional farm-folk of his
imagination--personified in the newspaper-press by the
pitiable dummy known as Hodge--were obliterated after a
few days' residence. At close quarters no Hodge was to
be seen.  At first, it is true, when Clare's
intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society,
these friends with whom he now hobnobbed seemed a
little strange. Sitting down as a level member of the
dairyman's household seemed at the outset an
undignified proceeding.  The ideas, the modes, the
surroundings, appeared retrogressive and unmeaning.
But with living on there, day after day, the acute
sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the
spectacle. Without any objective change whatever,
variety had taken the place of monotonousness. His host
and his host's household, his men and his maids, as
they became intimately known to Clare, began to
differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.  The
thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A MESURE
QU'ON A PLUS D'ESPRIT, ON TROUVE QU'IL Y A PLUS
D'HOMMES ORIGINAUX. LES GENS DU COMMUN NE TROUVENT PAS
DE DIFFERENCE ENTRE LES HOMMES."  The typical and
unvarying Hodge ceased to exist.  He had been
disintegrated into a number of varied
fellow-creatures--beings of many minds, beings infinite
in difference; some happy, many serene, a few
depressed, one here and there bright even to genius,
some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely
Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian; into men who
had private views of each other, as he had of his
friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse
or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each
other's foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked
in his own individual way the road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its
own sake, and for what it brought, apart from its
bearing on his own proposed career.  Considering his
position he became wonderfully free from the chronic
melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races
with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.  For
the first time of late years he could read as his
musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for a
profession, since the few farming handbooks which he
deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little
time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something
new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close
acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known
but darkly--the seasons in their moods, morning and
evening, night and noon, winds in their different
tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences,
and the voices of inanimate things.


The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to
render a fire acceptable in the large room wherein they
breakfasted; and, by Mrs Crick's orders, who held that
he was too genteel to mess at their table, it was Angel
Clare's custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner
during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being
placed on a hinged flap at his elbow.  The light from
the long, wide, mullioned window opposite shone in upon
his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of cold
blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him
to read there easily whenever disposed to do so.
Between Clare and the window was the table at which his
companions sat, their munching profiles rising sharp
against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house
door, through which were visible the rectangular leads
in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk. At
the further end the great churn could be seen
revolving, and its slip-slopping heard--the moving
power being discernible through the window in the form
of a spiritless horse walking in a circle and driven by
a boy.

For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting
abstractedly reading from some book, periodical, or
piece of music just come by post, hardly noticed that
she was present at table.  She talked so little, and
the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not
strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in
the habit of neglecting the particulars of an outward
scene for the general impression.  One day, however,
when he had been conning one of his music-scores, and
by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his
head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet
rolled to the hearth.  He looked at the fire of logs,
with its one flame pirouetting on the top in a dying
dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling, and it
seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two
chimney crooks dangling down from the cotterel or
cross-bar, plumed with soot which quivered to the same
melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an
accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in
with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought: "What a
fluty voice one of those milkmaids has! I suppose it is
the new one."

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his
long silence, his presence in the room was almost
forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do
know that our souls can be made to go outside our
bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his
eyes charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife
and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted
erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows.

"What--really now?  And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is
to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at
some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it,
you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds
o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to
want at all."

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed
it on his wife.

"Now that's a rum thing, Christianner--hey?  To think
o' the miles I've vamped o' starlight nights these last
thirty year, courting, or trading, or for doctor, or
for nurse, and yet never had the least notion o' that
till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar."

The general attention being drawn to her, including
that of the dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and
remarking evasively that it was only a fancy, resumed
her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her
eating, and having a consciousness that Clare was
regarding her, began to trace imaginary patterns on the
tablecloth with her forefinger with the constraint of a
domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that
milkmaid is!" he said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was
familiar, something which carried him back into a
joyous and unforeseeing past, before the necessity of
taking thought had made the heavens gray.  He concluded
that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell.
A casual encounter during some country ramble it
certainly had been, and he was not greatly curious
about it. But the circumstance was sufficient to lead
him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty
milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous
womankind.



XIX


In general the cows were milked as they presented
themselves, without fancy or choice.  But certain cows
will show a fondness for a particular pair of hands,
sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to
refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the
pail of a stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down
these partialities and aversions by constant
interchange, since otherwise, in the event of a milkman
or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed in a
difficulty.  The maids' private aims, however, were the
reverse of the dairyman's rule, the daily selection by
each damsel of the eight or ten cows to which she had
grown accustomed rendering the operation on their
willing udders surprising easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the
cows had a preference for her style of manipulation,
and her fingers having become delicate from the long
domiciliary imprisonments to which she had subjected
herself at intervals during the last two or three
years, she would have been glad to meet the milchers'
views in this respect.  Out of the whole ninety-five
there were eight in particular--Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty,
Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud--who,
though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots,
gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on
them a mere touch of the fingers. Knowing, however, the
dairyman's wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to
take the animals just as they came, expecting the very
hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the
ostensibly chance position of the cows and her wishes
in this matter, till she felt that their order could
not be the result of accident.  The dairyman's pupil
had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late,
and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as
she rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon
him.

"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said,
blushing; and in making the accusation symptoms of a
smile gently lifted her upper lip in spite of her, so
as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip
remaining severely still.

"Well, it makes no difference," said he.  "You will
always be here to milk them."

"Do you think so?  I HOPE I shall!  But I don't KNOW."

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that
he, unaware of her grave reasons for liking this
seclusion, might have mistaken her meaning.  She had
spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were
somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such
that at dusk, when the milking was over, she walked in
the garden alone, to continue her regrets that she had
disclosed to him her discovery of his considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere
being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive
that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three
senses, if not five. There was no distinction between
the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to
everything within the horizon.  The soundlessness
impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the
mere negation of noise.  It was broken by the strumming
of strings. Tess had heard those notes in the attic
above her head. Dim, flattened, constrained by their
confinement, they had never appealed to her as now,
when they wandered in the still air with a stark
quality like that of nudity.  To speak absolutely, both
instrument and execution were poor; but the relative is
all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated bird,
could not leave the spot.  Far from leaving she drew up
towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he
might not guess her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself
had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now
damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of
pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds
emitting offensive smells--weeds whose red and yellow
and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that
of cultivated flowers.  She went stealthily as a cat
through this profusion of growth, gathering
cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were
underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and
slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky
blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree
trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew
quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space.  The
exaltation which she had described as being producible
at will by gazing at a star, came now without any
determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin
notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies
passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into
her eyes.  The floating pollen seemed to be his notes
made visible, and the dampness of the garden the
weeping of the garden's sensibility.  Though near
nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if
they would not close for intentness, and the waves of
colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a
large hole in the western bank of cloud; it was like a
piece of day left behind by accident, dusk having
closed in elsewhere.  He concluded his plaintive
melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great
skill; and she waited, thinking another might be begun.
But, tired of playing, he had desultorily come round
the fence, and was rambling up behind her.  Tess, her
cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if hardly
moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he
spoke; his low tones reaching her, though he was some
distance off.

"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he.
"Are you afraid?"

"Oh no, sir ... not of outdoor things; especially just
now when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything is
so green."

"But you have your indoor fears--eh?"

"Well--yes, sir."

"What of?"

"I couldn't quite say."

"The milk turning sour?"

"No."

"Life in general?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ah--so have I, very often.  This hobble of being alive
is rather serious, don't you think so?"

"It is--now you put it that way."

"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl
like you to see it so just yet.  How is it you do?"

She maintained a hesitating silence.

"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of
things to her, and replied shyly --

"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that
is, seem as if they had.  And the river says,--'Why do
ye trouble me with your looks?'  And you seem to see
numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of
them the biggest and clearest, the others getting
smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but
they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they
said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me!  Beware of me!' ...
But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and
drive all such horrid fancies away!"

He was surprised to find this young woman--who though
but a milkmaid had just that touch of rarity about her
which might make her the envied of her
housemates--shaping such sad imaginings. She was
expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little
by her Sixth Standard training--feelings which might
almost have been called those of the age--the ache of
modernism.  The perception arrested him less when he
reflected that what are called advanced ideas are
really in great part but the latest fashion in
definition--a more accurate expression, by words in
LOGY and ISM, of sensations which men and women have
vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her
while yet so young; more than strange; it was
impressive, interesting, pathetic.  Not guessing the
cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience
is as to intensity, and not as to duration.  Tess's
passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of
clerical family and good education, and above physical
want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive.  For
the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason.
But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have
descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt
with the man of Uz--as she herself had felt two or
three years ago--'My soul chooseth strangling and death
rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live
alway."

It was true that he was at present out of his class.
But she knew that was only because, like Peter the
Great in a shipwright's yard, he was studying what he
wanted to know.  He did not milk cows because he was
obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be
a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner,
agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.  He would become
an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a
monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his
ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times,
nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a
decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man should
have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a
clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret,
they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed,
and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and
mood without attempting to pry into each other's
history.


Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little
stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess
was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little
divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an
intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared
him with herself; and at every discovery of the
abundance of his illuminations, and the unmeasurable,
Andean altitude of his, she became quite dejected,
disheartened from all further effort on her own part
whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually
mentioned something to her about pastoral life in
ancient Greece.  She was gathering the buds called
"lords and ladies" from the bank while he spoke.

"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he
asked.

"Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a
frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a
lady" meanwhile.  "Just a sense of what might have been
with me!  My life looks as if it had been wasted for
want of chances! When I see what you know, what you
have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing
I am!  I'm like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in
the Bible.  There is no more spirit in me."

"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that!  Why,"
he said with some enthusiasm, "I should be only too
glad, my dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way
of history, or any line of reading you would like to
take up--"

"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the
bud she had peeled.

"What?"

"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords
when you come to peel them."

"Never mind about the lords and ladies.  Would you like
to take up any course of study--history, for example?"

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more
about it than I know already."

"Why not?"

"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a
long row only--finding out that there is set down in
some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I
shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all.
The best is not to remember that your nature and your
past doings have been just like thousands' and
thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be
like thousands's and thousands'."

"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"

"I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on
the just and the unjust alike," she answered, with a
slight quaver in her voice.  "But that's what books
will not tell me." "Tess, fie for such bitterness!"
Of course he spoke with a conventional sense of duty only,
for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to
himself in bygone days.  And as he looked at the
unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a
daughter of the soil could only have caught up the
sentiment by rote.  She went on peeling the lords and
ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like
curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze
on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away.  When he was
gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last
bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it and
all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the
ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with herself
for her NIAISERIES, and with a quickening warmth in her
heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her!  In an access of hunger
for his good opinion she bethought herself of what she
had latterly endeavoured to forget, so unpleasant had
been its issues--the identity of her family with that
of the knightly d'Urbervilles.  Barren attribute as it
was, disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways
to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student
of history, would respect her sufficiently to forget
her childish conduct with the lords and ladies if he
knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in
Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal
forefathers; that she was no spurious d'Urberville,
compounded of money and ambition like those at
Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious
Tess indirectly sounded the dairyman as to its possible
effect upon Mr Clare, by asking the former if Mr Clare
had any great respect for old county families when they
had lost all their money and land.

"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of
the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed--not a bit
like the rest of his family; and if there's one thing
that he do hate more than another 'tis the notion of
what's called a' old family.  He says that it stands to
reason that old families have done their spurt of work
in past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now.
There's the Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys
and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who
used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you
could buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most. Why,
our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the
Paridelles--the old family that used to own lots o' the
lands out by King's Hintock now owned by the Earl o'
Wessex, afore even he or his was heard of.  Well, Mr
Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the
poor girl for days. 'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll never
make a good dairymaid!  All your skill was used up ages
ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a
thousand years to git strength for more deeds!'  A boy
came here t'other day asking for a job, and said his
name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he
said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when
we asked why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been
'stablished long enough. 'Ah! you're the very boy I
want!' says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands
wi'en; 'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him
half-a-crown. O no! he can't stomach old families!'

After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor
Tess was glad that she had not said a word in a weak
moment about her family--even though it was so
unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and
become a new one.  Besides, another diary-girl was as
good as she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her
tongue about the d'Urberville vault, the Knight of the
Conqueror whose name she bore.  The insight afforded
into Clare's character suggested to her that it was
largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness
that she had won interest in his eyes.



XX


The season developed and matured.  Another year's
instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes,
finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their
positions where only a year ago others had stood in
their place when these were nothing more than germs and
inorganic particles.  Rays from the sunrise drew forth
the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up
sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out
scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on
comfortably, placidly, even merrily.  Their position
was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social
scale, being above the line at which neediness ends,
and below the line at which the CONVENANCES begin to
cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare
modishness makes too little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to
be the one thing aimed at out of doors.  Tess and Clare
unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the
edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it.
All the while they were converging, under an
irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she
was now, possibly never would be so happy again.  She
was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited
among these new surroundings. The sapling which had
rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its
sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil.
Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the
debatable land between predilection and love; where no
profundities have been reached; no reflections have set
in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current
tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How
does it stand towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as
yet--a rosy warming apparition which had only just
acquired the attribute of persistence in his
consciousness.  So he allowed his mind to be occupied
with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than
a philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh,
and interesting specimen of womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it.  They met
daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight
of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was
necessary to rise early, so very early, here.  Milking
was done betimes; and before the milking came the
skimming, which began at a little past three.  It
usually fell to the lot of some one or other of them to
wake the rest, the first being aroused by an
alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and
they soon discovered that she could be depended upon
not to sleep though the alarm as others did, this task
was thrust most frequently upon her.  No sooner had the
hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her
room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the ladder
to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke
her fellow-milkmaids.  By the time that Tess was
dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air.
The remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave
themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not
appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray
half-tones of the day's close, though the degree of
their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the
morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the
twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active
and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy
reverse.

Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the
first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they
seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the
world.  In these early days of her residence here Tess
did not skim, but went out of doors at once after
rising, where he was generally awaiting her.  The
spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded
the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of
isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim
inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to
exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and
physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he
knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman
so well endowed in person as she was likely to be
walking in the open air within the boundaries of his
horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are
usually asleep at mid-summer dawns.  She was close at
hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they
walked along together to the spot where the cows lay,
often made him think of the Resurrection hour.  He
little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side.
Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his
companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes,
rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of
phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she
were merely a soul at large.  In reality her face,
without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam
of day from the north-east; his own face, though he did
not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him
most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a
visionary essence of woman--a whole sex condensed into
one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and
other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not
like because she did not understand them.

"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would
become simply feminine; they had changed from those of
a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being
who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to
the waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as
of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a
plantation which they frequented at the side of the
mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained
their standing in the water as the pair walked by,
watching them by moving their heads round in a slow,
horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets
by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers,
woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than
counterpanes, spread about the meadows in detached
remnants of small extent.  On the gray moisture of the
grass were marks where the cows had lain through the
night--dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of
their carcasses, in the general sea of dew. From each
island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow
had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end
of which trail they found her; the snoring puff from
her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an
intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.
Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat
down to milk them on the spot, as the case might
require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the
meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the
scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.  Birds would
soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on
the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails
subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods.
Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too,
upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like
seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and
commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then
lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips,
and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again
the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her
own against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice,
lecturing the non-resident milkers for arriving late,
and speaking sharply to old Deborah Fyander for not
washing her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!
Upon my soul, if the London folk only knowed of thee
and thy slovenly ways, they'd swaller their milk and
butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and that's
saying a good deal."

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and
Clare, in common with the rest, could hear the heavy
breakfast table dragged out from the wall in the
kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable
preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape
accompanying its return journey when the table had been
cleared.



XXI


There was a great stir in the milk-house just after
breakfast.  The churn revolved as usual, but the butter
would not come. Whenever this happened the dairy was
paralyzed. Squish, squash, echoed the milk in the great
cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess,
Marian, Retty Priddle, Izz Huett, and the married ones
from the cottages; also Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old
Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the
churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside put
on moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation.
Even the melancholy horse himself seemed to look in at
the window in inquiring despair at each walk round.

"'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in
Egdon--years!" said the dairyman bitterly.  "And he was
nothing to what his father had been. I have said fifty
times, if I have said once, that I DON'T believe in en;
though 'a do cast folks' waters very true.  But I shall
have to go to 'n if he's alive.  O yes, I shall have to
go to 'n, if this sort of thing continnys!"

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's
desperation.

"Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they
used to call 'Wide-O', was a very good man when I was a
boy," said Jonathan Kail.  "But he's rotten as
touchwood by now."

"My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at
Owlscombe, and a clever man a' were, so I've heard
grandf'er say," continued Mr Crick. "But there's no
such genuine folk about nowadays!"

Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

"Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said
tentatively. "I've heard tell in my younger days that
that will cause it.  Why, Crick--that maid we had years
ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn't come
then---"

"Ah yes, yes!--but that isn't the rights o't.  It had
nothing to do with the love-making.  I can mind all
about it--'twas the damage to the churn."

He turned to Clare.

"Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as
milker at one time, sir, courted a young woman over at
Mellstock, and deceived her as he had deceived many
afore.  But he had another sort o' woman to reckon wi'
this time, and it was not the girl herself.  One Holy
Thursday of all days in the almanack, we was here as we
mid be now, only there was no churning in hand, when we
zid the girl's mother coming up to the door, wi' a
great brass-mounted umbrella in her hand that would ha'
felled an ox, and saying 'Do Jack Dollop work
here?--because I want him! I have a big bone to pick
with he, I can assure 'n!'  And some way behind her
mother walked Jack's young woman, crying bitterly into
her handkercher. 'O Lard, here's a time!' said Jack,
looking out o' winder at 'em. 'She'll murder me!  Where
shall I get--where shall I--? Don't tell her where I
be!'  And with that he scrambled into the churn through
the trap-door, and shut himself inside, just as the
young woman's mother busted into the milk-house. 'The
villain--where is he?' says she, 'I'll claw his face
for'n, let me only catch him!'  Well, she hunted about
everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack
lying a'most stifled inside the churn, and the poor
maid--or young woman rather--standing at the door
crying her eyes out. I shall never forget it, never!
'Twould have melted a marble stone! But she couldn't
find him nowhere at all."

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment
came from the listeners.

Dairyman Crick's stories often seemed to be ended when
they were not really so, and strangers were betrayed
into premature interjections of finality; though old
friends knew better.  The narrator went on--

"Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to
guess it I could never tell, but she found out that he
was inside that there churn.  Without saying a word she
took hold of the winch (it was turned by handpower
then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop
about inside.  'O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!'
says he, popping out his head, 'I shall be churned into
a pummy!' (he was a cowardly chap in his heart, as such
men mostly be).  'Not till ye make amends for ravaging
her virgin innocence!' says the old woman.  'Stop the
churn you old witch!' screams he.  'You call me old
witch, do ye, you deceiver!' says she, 'when ye ought
to ha' been calling me mother-law these last five
months!'  And on went the churn, and Jack's bones
rattled round again. Well, none of us ventured to
interfere; and at last 'a promised to make it right wi'
her. 'Yes--I'll be as good as my word!' he said. And so
it ended that day."

While the listeners were smiling their comments there
was a quick movement behind their backs, and they
looked round.  Tess, pale-faced, had gone to the door.

"How warm 'tis today!" she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal
with the reminiscences of the dairyman.  He went
forward and opened the door for her, saying with tender
raillery--

"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony,
gave her this pet name), "the prettiest milker I've got
in my dairy; you mustn't get so fagged as this at the
first breath of summer weather, or we shall be finely
put to for want of 'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr Clare?"

"I was faint--and--I think I am better out o' doors,"
she said mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at
that moment changed its squashing for a decided
flick-flack.

"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of
all was called off from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally;
but she remained much depressed all the afternoon.
When the evening milking was done she did not care to
be with the rest of them, and went out of doors
wandering along she knew not whither.  She was
wretched--O so wretched--at the perception that to her
companions the dairyman's story had been rather a
humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but
herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty,
not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in
her experience.  The evening sun was now ugly to her,
like a great inflamed wound in the sky.  Only a
solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from
the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone,
resembling that of a past friend whose friendship she
had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed,
most of the household, went to bed at sunset or sooner,
the morning work before milking being so early and
heavy at a time of full pairs.  Tess usually
accompanied her fellows upstairs.  Tonight, however,
she was the first to go to their common chamber; and
she had dozed when the other girls came in.  She saw
them undressing in the orange light of the vanished
sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she
dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices,
and quietly turned her eyes towards them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into
bed.  They were standing in a group, in their
nightgowns, barefooted, at the window, the last red
rays of the west still warming their faces and necks,
and the walls around them.  All were watching somebody
in the garden with deep interest, their three faces
close together: a jovial and round one, a pale one with
dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were auburn.

"Don't push!  You can see as well as I," said Retty,
the auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing
her eyes from the window.

"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more
than me, Retty Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the
eldest, slily.  "His thoughts be of other cheeks than
thine!"

Retty Priddle still looked, and the other looked again.

"There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl
with dark damp hair and keenly cut lips.

"You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty.
"For I zid you kissing his shade."

"WHAT did you see her doing?" asked Marian.

"Why--he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the
whey, and the shade of his face came upon the wall
behind, close to Izz, who was standing there filling a
vat.  She put her mouth against the wall and kissed the
shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn't."

"O Izz Huett!" said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.

"Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with
attempted coolness.  "And if I be in love wi'en, so is
Retty, too; and so be you, Marian, come to that."

Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic
pinkness.

"I!" she said.  "What a tale!  Ah, there he is again!
Dear eyes--dear face--dear Mr Clare!"

"There--you've owned it!"

"So have you--so have we all," said Marian, with the
dry frankness of complete indifference to opinion.
"It is silly to pretend otherwise amongst ourselves, though
we need not own it to other folks.  I would just marry
'n to-morrow!"

"So would I--and more," murmured Izz Huett.

"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

"We can't all marry him," said Izz.

"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said
the eldest. "There he is again!"

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

"Why?" asked Retty quickly.

"Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian,
lowering her voice. "I have watched him every day, and
have found it out."

There was a reflective silence.

"But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length
breathed Retty.

"Well--I sometimes think that too."

"But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett
impatiently.  "Of course he won't marry any one of us,
or Tess either--a gentleman's son, who's going to be a
great landowner and farmer abroad!  More likely to ask
us to come wi'en as farm-hands at so much a year!"

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump
figure sighed biggest of all.  Somebody in bed hard by
sighed too.  Tears came into the eyes of Retty Priddle,
the pretty red-haired youngest--the last bud of the
Paridelles, so important in the county annals.  They
watched silently a little longer, their three faces
still close together as before, and the triple hues of
their hair mingling.  But the unconscious Mr Clare had
gone indoors, and they saw him no more; and, the shades
beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds.  In a
few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own
room.  Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did not drop
into forgetfulness for a long time.  Retty Priddle
cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping
even then. This conversation was another of the bitter
pills she had been obliged to swallow that day.  Scarce
the least feeling of jealousy arose in her breast.  For
that matter she knew herself to have the preference.
Being more finely formed, better educated, and, though
the youngest except Retty, more woman than either, she
perceived that only the slightest ordinary care was
necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare's heart
against these her candid friends. But the grave
question was, ought she to do this?  There was, to be
sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for either of them, in
a serious sense; but there was, or had been, a chance
of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy
for her, and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions
while he stayed here.  Such unequal attachments had led
to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs Crick that Mr
Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would
be the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the
while ten thousand acres of Colonial pasture to feed,
and cattle to rear, and corn to reap.  A farm-woman
would be the only sensible kind of wife for him.  But
whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why
should she, who could never conscientiously allow any
man to marry her now, and who had religiously
determined that she never would be tempted to do so,
draw off Mr Clare's attention from other women, for the
brief happiness of sunning herself in his eyes while he
remained at Talbothays?



XXII


They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming
and milking were proceeded with as usual, and they went
indoors to breakfast. Dairyman Crick was discovered
stamping about the house.  He had received a letter, in
which a customer had complained that the butter had a
twang.

"And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in
his left hand a wooden slice on which a lump of butter
was stuck. "Yes--taste for yourself!"

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare
tasted, Tess tasted, also the other indoor milkmaids,
one or two of the milking-men, and last of all Mrs
Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.
There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction
to better realize the taste, and so divine the
particular species of noxious weed to which it
appertained, suddenly exclaimed--

"'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left
in that mead!"

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry
mead, into which a few of the cows had been admitted of
late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the butter in the
same way.  The dairyman had not recognized the taste at
that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

"We must overhaul that mead," he resumed; "this mustn't
continny!"

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives
they went out together.  As the inimical plant could
only be present in very microscopic dimensions to have
escaped ordinary observation, to find it seemed rather
a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass before
them.  However, they formed themselves into line, all
assisting, owing to the importance of the search; the
dairyman at the upper end with Mr Clare, who had
volunteered to help; then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and
Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and the married
dairywomen--Beck Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and
rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from the
winter damps of the water-meads--who lived in their
respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly
across a strip of the field, returning a little further
down in such a manner that, when they should have
finished, not a single inch of the pasture but would
have fallen under the eye of some one of them.  It was
a most tedious business, not more than half a dozen
shoots of garlic being discoverable in the whole field;
yet such was the herb's pungency that probably one bite
of it by one cow had been sufficient to season the
whole dairy's produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so
greatly as they did, they yet formed, bending, a
curiously uniform row--automatic, noiseless; and an
alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might
well have been excused for massing them as "Hodge".  As
they crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a
soft yellow gleam was reflected from the buttercups
into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish, moonlit
aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in
all the strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of
taking part with the rest in everything, glanced up now
and then.  It was not, of course, by accident that he
walked next to Tess.

"Well, how are you?" he murmured.

"Very well, thank you, sir," she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters
only half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed
a little superfluous.  But they got no further in
speech just then.  They crept and crept, the hem of her
petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his elbow
sometimes brushing hers.  At last the dairyman, who
came next, could stand it no longer.

"Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly
make my back open and shut!" he exclaimed,
straightening himself slowly with an excruciated look
till quite upright.  "And you, maidy Tess, you wasn't
well a day or two ago--this will make your head ache
finely! Don't do any more, if you feel fainty; leave
the rest to finish it."

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr
Clare also stepped out of line, and began privateering
about for the weed. When she found him near her, her
very tension at what she had heard the night before
made her the first to speak.

"Don't they look pretty?" she said.

"Who?"

"Izzy Huett and Retty."

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens
would make a good farmer's wife, and that she ought to
recommend them, and obscure her own wretched charms.

"Pretty?  Well, yes--they are pretty girls--fresh
looking.  I have often thought so."

"Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"

"O no, unfortunately."

"They are excellent dairywomen."

"Yes: though not better than you."

"They skim better than I."

"Do they?"

Clare remained observing them--not without their
observing him.

"She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.

"Who?"

"Retty Priddle."

"Oh!  Why it that?"

"Because you are looking at her."

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be Tess could not
well go further and cry, "Marry one of them, if you
really do want a dairywoman and not a lady; and don't
think of marrying me!"  She followed Dairyman Crick,
and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare
remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid
him--never allowing herself, as formerly, to remain
long in his company, even if their juxtaposition were
purely accidental.  She gave the other three every
chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to
herself that Angel Clare had the honour of all the
dairymaids in his keeping, and her perception of his
care to avoid compromising the happiness of either in
the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what
she deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling
sense of duty shown by him, a quality which she had
never expected to find in one of the opposite sex, and
in the absence of which more than one of the simple
hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping
on her pilgrimage.



XXIII


The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares,
and the atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an
opiate over the dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees.
Hot steaming rains fell frequently, making the grass
where the cows fed yet more rank, and hindering the
late haymaking in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the
outdoor milkers had gone home.  Tess and the other
three were dressing themselves rapidly, the whole bevy
having agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which
lay some three or four miles distant from the
dairy-house.  She had now been two months at
Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy
thunderstorms had hissed down upon the meads, and
washed some of the hay into the river; but this morning
the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the
deluge, and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parrish to
Mellstock ran along the lowest levels in a portion of
its length, and when the girls reached the most
depressed spot they found that the result of the rain
had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of
some fifty yards.  This would have been no serious
hindrance on a week-day; they would have clicked
through it in their high patterns and boots quite
unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun's-day,
when flesh went forth to coquet with flesh while
hypocritically affecting business with spiritual
things; on this occasion for wearing their white
stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and
lilac gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible,
the pool was an awkward impediment.  They could hear
the church-bell calling--as yet nearly a mile off.

"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in
summer-time!" said Marian, from the top of the
roadside bank on which they had climbed, and were
maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of
creeping along its slope till they were past the pool.

"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right
through it, or else going round the Turnpike way; and
that would make us so very late!" said Retty, pausing
hopelessly.

"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late,
and all the people staring round," said Marian,
"that I hardly cool down again till we get into the
That-it-may-please-Thees."

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a
splashing round the bend of the road, and presently
appeared Angel Clare, advancing along the lane towards
them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a
dogmatic parson's son often presented; his attire being
his dairy clothes, long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf
inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a
thistle-spud to finish him off. "He's not going to
church," said Marian.

"No--I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe
phrase of evasive controversialists), preferred sermons
in stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine
summer days.  This morning, moreover, he had gone out
to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was
considerable or not.  On his walk he observed the girls
from a long distance, though they had been so occupied
with their difficulties of passage as not to notice
him.  He knew that the water had risen at that spot,
and that it would quite check their progress.  So he
had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help
them--one of them in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so
charming in their light summer attire, clinging to the
roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he
stopped a moment to regard them before coming close.
Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass
innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to
escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in
an aviary.  Angel's eye at last fell upon Tess, the
hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed
laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his
glance radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise
over his long boots; and stood looking at the entrapped
flies and butterflies.

"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian,
who was in front, including the next two in his remark,
but avoiding Tess.

"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come
up so----"

"I'll carry you through the pool--every Jill of you."

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through
them.

"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

"It is the only way for you to get past.  Stand still.
Nonsense--you are not too heavy!  I'd carry you all
four together. Now, Marian, attend," he continued, "and
put your arms round my shoulders, so.  Now!  Hold on.
That's well done."

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as
directed, and Angel strode off with her, his slim
figure, as viewed from behind, looking like the mere
stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers.  They
disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his
sousing footsteps and the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet
told where they were.  In a few minutes he reappeared.
Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.

"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that
her lips were dry with emotion.  "And I have to put my
arms round his neck and look into his face as Marian
did."

"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

"There's a time for everything," continued Izz,
unheeding. "A time to embrace, and a time to refrain
from embracing; the first is now going to be mine."

"Fie--it is Scripture, Izz!"

"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for
pretty verses."

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance
was a commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz.
She quietly and dreamily lowered herself into his arms,
and Angel methodically marched off with her.  When he
was heard returning for the third time Retty's
throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her.  He
went up to the red-haired girl, and while he was
seizing her he glanced at Tess.  His lips could not
have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon be you and
I."  Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could
not help it.  There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight,
was the most troublesome of Clare's burdens.  Marian
had been like a sack of meal, a dead weight of
plumpness under which he has literally staggered.
Izz had ridden sensibly and calmly.  Retty was a bunch of
hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature,
deposited her, and returned.  Tess could see over the
hedge the distant three in a group, standing as he had
placed them on the next rising ground.  It was now her
turn.  She was embarrassed to discover that excitement
at the proximity of Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which
she had contemned in her companions, was intensified in
herself; and as if fearful of betraying her secret she
paltered with him at the last moment.

"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps--I can
clim' better than they.  You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

"No, no, Tess," said he quickly.  And almost before she
was aware she was seated in his arms and resting
against his shoulder.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

"They are better women than I," she replied,
magnanimously sticking to her resolve.

"Not to me," said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps
in silence.

"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.

"O no.  You should lift Marian!  Such a lump.  You are
like an undulating billow warmed by the sun.  And all
this fluff of muslin about you is the froth."

"It is very pretty--if I seem like that to you."

"Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of
this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth
quarter?"

"No."

"I did not expect such an event today."

"Nor I.... The water came up so sudden."

That the rise in the water was what she understood him
to refer to, the state of breathing belied.  Clare
stood still and inclinced his face towards hers.

"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could
not look into his eyes for her emotion.  It reminded
Angel that he was somewhat unfairly taking advantage of
an accidental position; and he went no further with it.
No definite words of love had crossed their lips as
yet, and suspension at this point was desirable now.
However, he walked slowly, to make the remainder of the
distance as long as possible; but at last they came to
the bend, and the rest of their progress was in full
view of the other three.  The dry land was reached, and
he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at
her and him, and she could see that they had been
talking of her.  He hastily bade them farewell, and
splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke
the silence by saying--

"No--in all truth; we have no chance against her!"
She looked joylessly at Tess.

"What do you mean?" asked the latter.

"He likes 'ee best--the very best!  We could see it as
he brought 'ee.  He would have kissed 'ee, if you had
encouraged him to do it, ever so little."

"No, no," said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow
vanished; and yet there was no enmity or malice between
them.  They were generous young souls; they had been
reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a
strong sentiment, and they did not blame her.  Such
supplanting was to be.

Tess's heart ached.  There was no concealing from
herself the fact that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps
all the more passionately from knowing that the others
had also lost their hearts to him.  There is contagion
in this sentiment, especially among women.  And yet
that same hungry nature had fought against this, but
too feebly, and the natural result had followed.

"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of
either of you!" she declared to Retty that night in the
bedroom (her tears running down).  "I can't help this,
my dear!  I don't think marrying is in his mind at all;
but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him, as I
should refuse any man."

"Oh! would you?  Why?" said wondering Retty.

"It cannot be!  But I will be plain.  Putting myself
quite on one side.  I don't think he will choose either
of you."

"I have never expected it--thought of it!" moaned
Retty. "But O!  I wish I was dead!"

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly
understood, turned to the other two girls who came
upstairs just then.

"We be friends with her again," she said to them.
"She thinks no more of his choosing her than we do."

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and
warm.

"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian,
whose mood was turned to its lowest bass.  "I was going
to marry a dairyman at Stickleford, who's asked me
twice; but--my soul--I would put an end to myself
rather'n be his wife now!  Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure today
that he was going to kiss me as he held me; and I lay
still against his breast, hoping and hoping, and never
moved at all.  But he did not.  I don't like biding
here at Talbothays any longer!  I shall go hwome."

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate
with the hopeless passion of the girls.  They writhed
feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion
thrust on them by cruel Nature's law--an emotion which
they had neither expected nor desired.  The incident of
the day had fanned the flame that was burning the
inside of their hearts out, and the torture was almost
more than they could endure.  The differences which
distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by
this passion, and each was but portion of one organism
called sex.  There was so much frankness and so little
jealousy because there was no hope.  Each one was a
girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude
herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or
give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the
others.  The full recognition of the futility of their
infatuation, from a social point of view; its
purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its
lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye
of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of
Nature); the one fact that it did exist, ecstasizing
them to a killing joy; all this imparted to them a
resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid
expectation of winning him as a husband would have
destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the
cheese-wring dripped monotonously downstairs.

"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour
later.

It was Izz Huett's voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty
and Marian suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and
sighed--

"So be we!"

"I wonder what she is like--the lady they say his
family have looked out for him!"

"I wonder," said Izz.

"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting.
"I have never heard o' that!"

"O yes--'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank,
chosen by his family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter
near his father's parish of Emminster; he don't much
care for her, they say.  But he is sure to marry her."

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was
enough to build up wretched dolorous dreams upon, there
in the shade of the night.  They pictured all the
details of his being won round to consent, of the
wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her
dress and veil, of her blissful home with him, when
oblivion would have fallen upon themselves as far as he
and their love were concerned.  Thus they talked, and
ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish
thought that there lurked any grave and deliberate
import in Clare's attentions to her.  It was a passing
summer love of her face, for love's own temporary
sake--nothing more. And thorny crown of this sad
conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a
cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be
more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful
than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy
of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.



XXIV


Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom
Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost
be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was
impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow
passionate.  The ready bosoms existing there were
impregnated by their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean
weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the
part of Nature to match the state of hearts at
Talbothays Dairy.  The air of the place, so fresh in
the spring and early summer, was stagnant and
enervating now.  Its heavy scents weighed upon them,
and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon.
Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the
pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here
where the watercourses purled.  And as Clare was
oppressed by the outward heats, so was he burdened
inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and
silent Tess.

The rains having passed the uplands were dry.  The
wheels of the dairyman's spring cart, as he sped home
from market, licked up the pulverized surface of the
highway, and were followed by white ribands of dust, as
if they had set a thin powertrain on fire.  The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate,
maddened by the gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his
shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up from Monday to
Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the
blackbirds and thrushes crept about under the
currant-bushes, rather in the manner of quadrupeds than
of winged creatures.  The flies in the kitchen were
lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the
unwonted places, on the floors, into drawers, and over
the backs of the milkmaids' hands.  Conversations were
concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still
more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and
convenience, without driving in the cows.  During the
day the animals obsequiously followed the shadow of the
smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the
diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could
hardly stand still for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows
chanced to stand apart from the general herd, behind
the corner of a hedge, among them being Dumpling and
Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands above those of any
other maid.  When she rose from her stool under a
finished cow Angel Clare, who had been observing her
for some time, asked her if she would take the
aforesaid creatures next.  She silently assented, and
with her stool at arm's length, and the pail against
her knee, went round to where they stood.  Soon the
sound of Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came
through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go
round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding
milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable
of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug
their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pail.
But a few--mainly the younger ones--rested their heads
sideways.  This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit, her
temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on
the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in
meditation.  She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the
sun chancing to be on the milking-side it shone flat
upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet,
and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut
from the dun background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and
that he sat under his cow watching her.  The stillness
of her head and features was remarkable: she might have
been in a trance, her eyes open, yet unseeing.  Nothing
in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and Tess's
pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic
pulsation only, as if they were obeying a reflex
stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. yet there was
nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real
warmth, real incarnation.  And it was in her mouth that
this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he
had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as
arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth
he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth.
To a young man with the least fire in him that little
upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was
distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never
before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon
his mind with such persistent iteration the old
Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.  Perfect,
he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand.  But
no--they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the
imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the
sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many
times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease:
and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with
colour and life, they sent an AURA over his flesh, a
breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a
qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious
physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her;
but she would not show it by any change of position,
though the curious dream-like fixity disappeared, and a
close eye might easily have discerned that the rosiness
of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge
of it was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an
excitation from the sky did not die down.  Resolutions,
reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated
battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his
pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind,
went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and,
kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded
to his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness.
Having seen that it was really her lover who had
advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she
sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very
like an ecstatic cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting
mouth, but he checked himself, for tender conscience'
sake.

"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered.  "I ought to
have asked.  I--did not know what I was doing.  I do
not mean it as a liberty.  I am devoted to you, Tessy,
dearest, in all sincerity!"

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and
seeing two people crouching under her where, by
immemorial custom, there should have been only one,
lifted her hind left crossly.

"She is angry--she doesn't know what we mean--she'll
kick over the milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to
free herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped's
actions, her heart more deeply concerned with herself
and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together,
his arm still encircling her.  Tess's eyes, fixed on
distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O--I don't know!" she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was
in she became agitated and tried to withdraw.

"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said
he, with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying
unconsciously that his heart had outrun his judgement.
"That I--love you dearly and truly I need not say.  But
I--it shall go no further now--it distresses you--I am
as surprised as you are.  You will not think I have
presumed upon your defencelessness--been too quick and
unreflecting, will you?"

"N'--I can't tell."

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or
two the milking of each was resumed.  Nobody had beheld
the gravitation of the two into one; and when the
dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes
later there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly
sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance.  Yet in the interval since Crick's last
view of them something had occurred which changed the
pivot of the universe for their two natures; something
which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would
have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a
whole heap of so-called practicalities.  A veil had
been whisked aside; the tract of each one's outlook was
to have a new horizon thenceforward--for a short time
or for a long.


END OF PHASE THE THIRD





Phase the Fourth: The Consequence



XXV


Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening
drew on, she who had won him having retired to her
chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day.  There was no
coolness after dark unless on the grass.  Roads,
garden-paths, the house-fronts, the barton-walls were
warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime temperature
into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not
what to think of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered
judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain
had kept apart.  She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at
what had occurred, while the novelty, unpremeditation,
mastery of circumstance disquieted him--palpitating,
contemplative being that he was.  He could hardly
realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third
parties thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that
his temporary existence here was to be the merest
episode in his life, soon passed through and early
forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as from
a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing
world without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt
Whitman--

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
  How curious you are to me!--

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew.
But behold, the absorbing scene had been imported
hither.  What had been the engrossing world had
dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while
here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place,
novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never,
for him, started up elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open Clare could hear
across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring
household.  The dairy-house, so humble, so
insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained
sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of
sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object
of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it
now?  The aged and lichened brick gables breathed forth
"Stay!"  The windows smiled, the door coaxed and
beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy.  A
personality within it was so far-reaching in her
influence as to spread into and make the bricks,
mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning
sensibility.  Whose was this mighty personality? A
milkmaid's. It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a
matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him.
And though new love was to be held partly responsible
for this it was not solely so.  Many besides Angel have
learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their
external displacements, but as to their subjective
experiences.  The impressionable peasant leads a
larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the
pachydermatous king.  Looking at it thus he found that
life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as
elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare
was a man with a conscience.  Tess was no insignificant
creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living
her precious life--a life which, to herself who
endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension
as the life of the mightiest to himself.  Upon her
sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through
her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her.
The universe itself only came into being for Tess on
the particular day in the particular year in which she
was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the
single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess
by an unsympathetic First Cause--her all; her every and
only chance.  How then should he look upon her as of
less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to
caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest
seriousness with the affection which he knew that he
had awakened in her--so fervid and so impressionable as
she was under her reserve; in order that it might not
agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would
be to develop what had begun.  Living in such close
relations, to meet meant to fall into endearment; flesh
and blood could not resist it; and, having arrived at
no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he
decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations
in which they would be mutually engaged.  As yet the
harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never
to approach her.  He was driven towards her by every
heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends.  It might
be possible to sound them upon this.  In less than five
months his term here would have ended, and after a few
additional months spent upon other farms he would be
fully equipped in agricultural knowledge, and in a
position to start on his own account.  Would not a
farmer want a wife, and should a farmer's wife be a
drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who understood
farming?  Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned
to him by the silence he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at
Talbothays Dairy some maid observed that she had not
seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

"O no," said Dairyman Crick.  "Mr Clare has gone hwome
to Emminster to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."

For four impassioned ones around that table the
sunshine of the morning went out at a stroke, and the
birds muffled their song.  But neither girl by word or
gesture revealed her blankness. "He's getting on
towards the end of his time wi' me," added the
dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal;
"and so I suppose he is beginning to see about his
plans elsewhere."

"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett,
the only one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust
her voice with the question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their
lives hung upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on
the tablecloth, Marian with heat added to her redness,
Tess throbbing and looking out at the meads.

"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same
intolerable unconcern.  "And even that may be altered a
bit.  He'll bide to get a little practice in the
calving out at the straw-yard, for certain.  He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his
society--of "pleasure girdled about with pain".
After that the blackness of unutterable night.


At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding
along a narrow lane ten miles distant from the
breakfasters, in the direction of his father's Vicarage
at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could, a little
basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle
of mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to
his parents.  The white lane stretched before him, and
his eyes were upon it; but they were staring into next
year, and not at the lane.  He loved her; ought he to
marry her?  Dared he to marry her?  What would his
mother and his brothers say?  What would he himself say
a couple of years after the event?  That would depend
upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay
the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous
joy in her form only, with no substratum of
everlastingness.

His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor
church-tower of red stone, the clump of trees near the
Vicarage, came at last into view beneath him, and he
rode down towards the well-known gate.  Casting a
glance in the direction of the church before entering
his home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group
of girls, of ages between twelve and sixteen,
apparently awaiting the arrival of some other one, who
in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat older
than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of
books in her hand.

Clare knew her well.  He could not be sure that she
observed him; he hoped she did not, so as to render it
unnecessary that he should go and speak to her,
blameless creature that she was.  An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had
not seen him.  The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the
only daughter of his father's neighbour and friend,
whom it was his parents' quiet hope that he might wed
some day.  She was great at Antinomianism and Bible-
classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now.
Clare's mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped
heathens in the Var Vale, their rosy faces
court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one the most
impassioned of them all. It was on the impulse of the
moment that he had resolved to trot over to Emminster,
and hence had not written to apprise his mother and
father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast
hour, before they should have gone out to their parish
duties.  He was a little late, and they had already sat
down to the morning meal.  The group at the table
jumped up to welcome him as soon as he entered.  They
were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend
Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home
for the inside of a fortnight--and his other brother,
the Reverend Cuthbert, the classical scholar, and
Fellow and Dean of his College, down from Cambridge for
the long vacation.  His mother appeared in a cap and
silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact
he was--an earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in
years about sixty-five, his pale face lined with
thought and purpose.  Over their heads hung the picture
of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen
years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone
out to Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within
the last twenty years, has wellnigh dropped out of
contemporary life.  A spiritual descendant in the
direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man
of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in
his raw youth made up his mind once for all in the
deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further
reasoning on them thenceforward.  He was regarded even
by those his own date and school of thinking as
extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally
opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for
his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he
showed in dismissing all question as to principles in
his energy for applying them.  He loved Paul of Tarsus,
liked St John, hated St James as much as he dared, and
regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and
Philemon.  The New Testament was less a Christiad then
a Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an
intoxication.  His creed of determinism was such that
it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on
its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which
had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi.
He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the
Articles, and deemed himself consistent through the
whole category--which in a way he might have been.  One
thing he certainly was--sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural
life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately
been experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have
been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by
inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it.  Once
upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his
father, in a moment of irritation, that it might have
resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the
source of the religion of modern civilization, and not
Palestine; and his father's grief was of that blank
description which could not realize that there might
lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much less a half
truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition. He had
simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after.
But the kindness of his heart was such that he never
resented anything for long, and welcomed his son today
with a smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he
did not so much as formerly feel himself one of the
family gathered there.  Every time that he returned
hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since
he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown
even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual.
Its transcendental aspirations--still unconsciously
based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal
paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his own as
if they had been the dreams of people on another
planet.  Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the
great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped,
uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which
futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content
to regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a
growing divergence from the Angel Clare of former
times.  It was chiefly a difference in his manner that
they noticed just now, particularly his brothers.  He
was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs
about; the muscles of his face had grown more
expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his
tongue spoke, and more.  The manner of the scholar had
nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the
drawing-room young man.  A prig would have said that he
had lost culture, and a prude that he had become
coarse.  Such was the contagion of domiciliary
fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers,
non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men,
correct to their remotest fibre, such unimpeachable
models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a
systematic tuition.  They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a
single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass
and string; when it was the custom to wear a double
glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom
to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway,
all without reference to the particular variety of
defect in their own vision.  When Wordsworth was
enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley
was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their
shelves.  When Correggio's Holy Families were admired,
they admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was
decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously
followed suit without any personal objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness,
he noticed their growing mental limitations.  Felix
seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert all College.  His
Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of
the world to the one; Cambridge to the other.  Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few
unimportant score of millions of outsiders in civilized
society, persons who were neither University men nor
churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than
reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were
regular in their visits to their parents. Felix, though
an offshoot from a far more recent point in the
devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested.  More tolerant than
his father of a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as
a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his
father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching.
Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much
heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former
feeling revived in him--that whatever their advantages
by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth
life as it really was lived.  Perhaps, as with many
men, their opportunities of observation were not so
good as their opportunities of expression.  Neither had
an adequate conception of the complicated forces at
work outside the smooth and gentle current in which
they and their associates floated.  Neither saw the
difference between local truth and universal truth;
that what the inner world said in their clerical and
academic hearing was quite a different thing from what
the outer world was thinking.

"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my
dear fellow," Felix was saying, among other things, to
his youngest brother, as he looked through his
spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity.
"And, therefore, we must make the best of it.  But I do
entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in
touch with moral ideals. Farming, of course, means
roughing it externally; but high thinking may go with
plain living, nevertheless."

"Of course it may," said Angel.  "Was it not proved
nineteen hundred years ago--if I may trespass upon your
domain a little?  Why should you think, Felix, that I
am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral
ideals?"

"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were
somehow losing intellectual grasp.  Hasn't it struck
you, Cuthbert?"

"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good
friends, you know; each of us treading our allotted
circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think
you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine
alone, and inquire what has become of yours."

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed
at any time at which their father's and mother's
morning work in the parish usually concluded.
Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last
thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr
and Mrs Clare; though the three sons were sufficiently
in unison on this matter to wish that their parents
would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who
was now an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse DAPES
INEMPTAE of the dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden
table.  But neither of the old people had arrived, and
it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting
that their parents entered.  The self-denying pair had
been occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their
sick parishioners, whom they, somewhat inconsistently,
tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their own
appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold
viands was deposited before them.  Angel looked round
for Mrs Crick's black-puddings, which he had directed
to be nicely grilled as they did them at the dairy, and
of which he wished his father and mother to appreciate
the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did
himself.

"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear
boy," observed Clare's mother.  "But I am sure you will
not mind doing without them as I am sure your father
and I shall not, when you know the reason.  I suggested
to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to
the children of the man who can earn nothing just now
because of his attacks of delirium tremens; and he
agreed that it would be a great pleasure to them; so we
did."

"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for
the mead.

"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued
his mother, "that it was quite unfit for use as a
beverage, but as valuable as rum or brandy in an
emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet."

"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,"
added his father.

"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.

"The truth, of course," said his father.

"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the
black-puddings very much.  She is a kind, jolly sort
of body, and is sure to ask me directly I return."

"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.

"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."

"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.

"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,"
replied Angel, blushing.  He felt that his parents were
right in their practice if wrong in their want of
sentiment, and said no more.



XXVI


It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that
Angel found opportunity of broaching to his father one
or two subjects near his heart.  He had strung himself
up to the purpose while kneeling behind his brothers on
the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots.  When the service was over they
went out of the room with their mother, and Mr Clare
and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans
for the attainment of his position as a farmer on an
extensive scale--either in England or in the Colonies.
His father then told him that, as he had not been put
to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had
felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year
towards the purchase or lease of land for him some day,
that he might not feel himself unduly slighted.

"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father,
"you will no doubt stand far superior to your brothers
in a few years."

This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel
onward to the other and dearer subject.  He observed to
his father that he was then six-and-twenty, and that
when he should start in the farming business he would
require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the
domestic labours of his establishment whilst he was
afield.  Would it not be well, therefore, for him to
marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable;
and then Angel put the question--

"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as
a thrifty hard-working farmer?"

"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a
comfort to you in your goings-out and your comings-in.
Beyond that, it really matters little.  Such an one can
be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and
neighbour, Dr Chant--"

"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows,
churn good butter, make immense cheeses; know how to
sit hens and turkeys and rear chickens, to direct a
field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate the
value of sheep and calves?"

"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly.  It would be
desirable."  Mr Clare, the elder, had plainly never
thought of these points before.  "I was going to add,"
he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you will
not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly
not more to your mother's mind and my own, than your
friend Mercy, whom you used to show a certain interest
in.  It is true that my neighbour Chant's daughter had
lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy
round about us for decorating the Communion-
table--alter, as I was shocked to hear her call it one
day--with flowers and other stuff on festival
occasions.  But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured.  It is a
mere girlish outbreak which, I am sure, will not be
permanent."

"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know.  But,
father, don't you think that a young woman equally pure
and virtuous as Miss Chant, but one who, in place of
that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments, understands
the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge
of a farmer's wife's duties came second to a Pauline
view of humanity; and the impulsive Angel, wishing to
honour his father's feelings and to advance the cause
of his heart at the same time, grew specious.  He said
that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman
who possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of
an agriculturist, and was decidedly of a serious turn
of mind.  He would not say whether or not she had
attached herself to the sound Low Church School of his
father; but she would probably be open to conviction on
that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple
faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful
to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in personal
appearance, exceptionally beautiful.

"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry
into--a lady, in short?" asked his startled mother, who
had come softly into the study during the conversation.

"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady,"
said Angel, unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's
daughter, as I am proud to say. But she IS a lady,
nevertheless--in feeling and nature."

"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."

"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said
Angel quickly.  "How is family to avail the wife of a
man who has to rough it as I have, and shall have to
do?"

"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their
charm," returned his mother, looking at him through her
silver spectacles.

"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use
of them in the life I am going to lead?--while as to
her reading, I can take that in hand.  She'll be apt
pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her.  She's
brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use
the expression.  She LIVES what paper-poets only
write.... And she is an unimpeachable Christian, I am
sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus, and species you
desire to propagate."

"O Angel, you are mocking!"

"Mother, I beg pardon.  But as she really does attend
Church almost every Sunday morning, and is a good
Christian girl, I am sure you will tolerate any social
shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel
that I may do worse than choose her."  Angel waxed
quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his
beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand
him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight
when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid
beliefs essentially naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself
any right whatever to the title he claimed for the
unknown young woman, Mr and Mrs Clare began to feel it
as an advantage not to be overlooked that she at least
was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction
of the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence;
for Angel never would have made orthodoxy a condition
of his choice.  They said finally that it was better
not to act in a hurry, but that they would not object
to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more
particulars now.  He felt that, single-minded and
self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet existed
certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class
people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and
though their daughter-in-law's qualifications could
make no practical difference to their lives, in the
probability of her living far away from them, he wished
for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in
the most important decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon
accidents in Tess's life as if they were vital
features.  It was for herself that he loved Tess; her
soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill in
the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly
not for her simple formal faith-professions.  Her
unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish
of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He held
that education had as yet but little affected the beats
of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness
depends.  It was probable that, in the lapse of ages,
improved systems of moral and intellectual training
would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the
involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day culture, as far as he
could see, might be said to have affected only the
mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought
under its influence.  This belief was confirmed by his
experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the
rural community, had taught him how much less was the
intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of
one social stratum and the good and wise woman of
another social stratum, than between the good and bad,
the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure.  His brothers had
already left the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour
in the north, whence one was to return to his college,
and the other to his curacy.  Angel might have
accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his
sweetheart at Talbothays.  He would have been an
awkward member of the party; for, though the most
appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even
the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was
alienation in the standing consciousness that his
squareness would not fit the round hole that had been
prepared for him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he
ventured to mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father
accompanied him, on his own mare, a little way along
the road.  Having fairly well advanced his own affairs
Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on
together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of
brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict
interpretations of the New Testament by the light of
what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.

"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he
proceeded to recount experiences which would show the
absurdity of that idea.  He told of wondrous
conversions of evil livers of which he had been the
instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the
rich and well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many
failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of
a young upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some
forty miles off, in the neighbourhood of Trantridge.

"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and
other places?" asked his son. "That curiously historic
worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the
coach-and-four?"

"O no.  The original d'Urbervilles decayed and
disappeared sixty or eighty years ago--at least,
I believe so.  This seems to be a new family which had
taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly
line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure.  But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families.
I thought you set less store by them even than I."

"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel
with a little impatience.  "Politically I am sceptical
as to the virtue of their being old.  Some of the wise
even among themselves 'exclaim against their own
succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly
attached to them."

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was
yet too subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on
with the story he had been about to relate; which was
that after the death of the senior so-called
d'Urberville the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition
should have made him know better.  A knowledge of his
career having come to the ears of Mr Clare, when he was
in that part of the country preaching missionary
sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to the
delinquent on his spiritual state.  Though he was a
stranger, occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this
to be his duty, and took for his text the words from St
Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required
of thee!"  The young man much resented this directness
of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr
Clare, without respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not
expose yourself to such gratuitous pain from
scoundrels!"

"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the
ardour of self-abnegation.  "The only pain to me was
pain on his account, poor, foolish young man.  Do you
suppose his incensed words could give me any pain, or
even his blows? 'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we
are made as the filth of the world, and as the
offscouring of all things unto this day.' Those ancient
and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly true at
this present hour."

"Not blows, father?  He did not proceed to blows?"

"No, he did not.  Though I have borne blows from men in
a mad state of intoxication."

"No!" "A dozen times, my boy.  What then?  I have saved
them from the guilt of murdering their own flesh and
blood thereby; and they have lived to thank me, and
praise God."

"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently.
"But I fear otherwise, from what you say."

"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare.  "And I
continue to pray for him, though on this side of the
grave we shall probably never meet again.  But, after
all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in
his heart as a good seed some day."

Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child;
and though the younger could not accept his parent's
narrow dogma he revered his practice, and recognized
the hero under the pietist.  Perhaps he revered his
father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father
had not once thought of inquiring whether she were well
provided or penniless.  The same unworldliness was what
had necessitated Angel's getting a living as a farmer,
and would probably keep his brothers in the position of
poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet
Angel admired it none the less.  Indeed, despite his
own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was nearer to
his father on the human side than was either of his
brethren.



XXVII


An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles
through a garish mid-day atmosphere brought him in the
afternoon to a detached knoll a mile or two west of
Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green
trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var
or Froom.  Immediately he began to descend from the
upland to the fat alluvial soil below, the atmosphere
grew heavier; the languid perfume of the summer fruits,
the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast
pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the
animals, the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare
was now so familiar with the spot that he knew the
individual cows by their names when, a long distance
off, he saw them dotted about the meads.  It was with a
sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing
life here from its inner side, in a way that had been
quite foreign to him in his student-days; and, much as
he loved his parents, he could not help being aware
that to come here, as now, after an experience of
home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and
bandages; even the one customary curb on the humours of
English rural societies being absent in this place,
Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.  The
denizens were all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of
an hour or so which the exceedingly early hours kept in
summer-time rendered a necessity.  At the door the
wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked
and peeled limb of an oak fixed there for that purpose;
all of them ready and dry for the evening milking.
Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of
the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
moment.  Sustained snores came from the cart-house,
where some of the men were lying down; the grunt and
squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further
distance.  The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants
slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun
like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered
the house the clock struck three.  Three was the
afternoon skimming-hour; and, with the stroke, Clare
heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and then
the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.  It was
Tess's, who in another moment came down before his
eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his
presence there.  She was yawning, and he saw the red
interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's.  She
had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable
of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the
sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her
eyelids hung heavy over their pupils.  The brim-fulness
of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a
woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time;
when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh;
and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy
heaviness, before the remainder of her face was well
awake. With an oddly compounded look of gladness,
shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O Mr Clare!
How you frightened me--I----"

There had not at first been time for her to think of
the changed relations which his declaration had
introduced; but the full sense of the matter rose up in
her face when she encountered Clare's tender look as he
stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm
round her, and his face to her flushed cheek.  "Don't,
for Heaven's sake, Mister me any more.  I have hastened
back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of
reply; and there they stood upon the red-brick floor of
the entry, the sun slanting in by the window upon his
back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her
inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon
her naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her
hair.  Having been lying down in her clothes she was
warm as a sunned cat.  At first she would not look
straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his
plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray,
and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second
waking might have regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have
on'y old Deb to help me today. Mrs Crick is gone to
market with Mr Crick, and Retty is not well, and the
others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home till
milking."

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander
appeared on the stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.
"So I can help Tess with the skimming; and, as you are
very tired, I am sure, you needn't come down till
milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly
skimmed that afternoon.  Tess was in a dream wherein
familiar objects appeared as having light and shade and
position, but no particular outline.  Every time she
held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work
her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so
palpable that she seemed to flinch under it like a
plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had
done running her forefinger round the leads to cut off
the cream-edge, he cleaned it in nature's way; for the
unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came
convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he
resumed gently.  "I wish to ask you something of a very
practical nature, which I have been thinking of ever
since that day last week in the meads.  I shall soon
want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall
require for my wife a woman who knows all about the
management of farms.  Will you be that woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had
yielded to an impulse of which his head would
disapprove.

She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the
inevitable result of proximity, the necessity of loving
him; but she had not calculated upon this sudden
corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With
pain that was like the bitterness of dissolution she
murmured the words of her indispensable and sworn
answer as an honourable woman.

"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's
very heart, and she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding
her still more greedily close.  "Do you say no?  Surely
you love me?"

"O yes, yes!  And I would rather by yours than
anybody's in the world," returned the sweet and honest
voice of the distressed girl.  "But I CANNOT marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are
engaged to marry some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

"I don't want to marry!  I have not thought of doing
it.  I cannot!  I only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like
you to marry such as me.  She will want you to marry a
lady."

"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.  That was partly
why I went home."

"I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.

"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"

"Yes--I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give
you time," he said.  "It was very abrupt to come home
and speak to you all at once.  I'll not allude to it
again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath
the pump, and began anew.  But she could not, as at
other times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream
with the delicate dexterity required, try as she might;
sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having
filled with two blurring tears drawn forth by a grief
which, to this her best friend and dear advocate she
could never explain.

"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from
him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer the considerate
Clare began talking in a more general way:

"You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most
simple-mannered people alive, and quite unambitious.
They are two of the few remaining Evangelical school.
Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here
is not very High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom
she heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague
than Clare's, who had never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more
firmly than I do," she remarked as a safe generality.
"It is often a great sorrow to me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his
heart that his father could not object to her on
religious grounds, even though she did not know whether
her principles were High, Low or Broad.  He himself
knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she
held, apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if
anything, Tractarian as to phraseology, and Pantheistic
as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to disturb them
was his last desire:

       Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
         Her early Heaven, her happy views;
         Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
       A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest
than musical; but he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his
father's mode of life, of his zeal for his principles;
she grew serener, and the undulations disappeared from
her skimming; as she finished one lead after another he
followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the
milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came
in," she ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from
the subject of herself.

"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to
me of his troubles and difficulties, and the subject
always tends to depress me.  He is so zealous that he
gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a
different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age,
the more particularly as I don't think earnestness does
any good when carried so far.  He has been telling me
of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite
recently.  He went as the deputy of some missionary
society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
place forty miles from here, and made it his business
to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with
somewhere about there--son of some landowner up that
way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.  My
father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank,
and there was quite a disturbance.  It was very foolish
of my father, I must say, to intrude his conversation
upon a stranger when the probabilities were so obvious
that it would be useless.  But whatever he thinks to be
his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among
the absolutely vicious, but among the easy-going, who
hate being bothered.  He says he glories in what
happened, and that good may be done indirectly; but I
wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting
old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth
tragical; but she no longer showed any tremulousness.
Clare's revived thoughts of his father prevented his
noticing her particularly; and so they went on down the
white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids returned,
and took their pails, and Deb came to scald out the
leads for the new milk.  As Tess withdrew to go afield
to the cows he said to her softly--

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one
who had heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the
allusion to Alec d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other
milkmaids with a bound, as if trying to make the open
air drive away her sad constraint.  All the girls drew
onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in the
farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of
wild animals--the reckless unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned
themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It
seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was again in
sight to choose a mate from unconstrained Nature, and
not from the abodes of Art.



XXVIII


Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently
daunt Clare.  His experience of women was great enough
for him to be aware that the negative often meant
nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and
it was little enough for him not to know that in the
manner of the present negative there lay a great
exception to the dallyings of coyness.  That she had
already permitted him to make love to her he read as an
additional assurance, not fully trowing that in the
fields and pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no means
deemed waste; love-making being here more often
accepted inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake
than in the carking anxious homes of the ambitious,
where a girl's craving for an establishment paralyzes
her healthy thought of a passion as an end.

"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?"
he asked her in the course of a few days.

She started.

"Don't ask me.  I told you why--partly.  I am not good
enough--not worthy enough."

"How?  Not fine lady enough?"

"Yes--something like that," murmured she.  "Your
friends would scorn me."

"Indeed, you mistake them--my father and mother.
As for my brothers, I don't care----"  He clasped his
fingers behind her back to keep her from slipping away.
"Now--you did not mean it, sweet?--I am sure you did
not!  You have made me so restless that I cannot read,
or play, or do anything.  I am in no hurry, Tess, but I
want to know--to hear from your own warm lips--that you
will some day be mine--any time you may choose; but
some day?"

She could only shake her head and look away from him.

Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters
of her face as if they had been hieroglyphics.  The
denial seemed real.

"Then I ought not to hold you in this way--ought I?
I have no right to you--no right to seek out where you
are, or walk with you!  Honestly, Tess, do you love any
other man?"

"How can you ask?" she said, with continued self-suppression.

"I almost know that you do not.  But then, why do you
repulse me?"

"I don't repulse you.  I like you to--tell me you love
me; and you may always tell me so as you go about with
me--and never offend me."

"But you will not accept me as a husband?"

"Ah--that's different--it is for your good, indeed, my
dearest!  O, believe me, it is only for your sake!
I don't like to give myself the great happiness o'
promising to be yours in that way--because--because I
am SURE I ought not to do it."

"But you will make me happy!"

"Ah--you think so, but you don't know!"

At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her
refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in
matters social and polite, he would say that she was
wonderfully well-informed and versatile--which was
certainly true, her natural quickness, and her
admiration for him, having led her to pick up his
vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge,
to a surprising extent.  After these tender contests
and her victory she would go away by herself under the
remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge, or
into her room, if at a leisure interval, and mourn
silently, not a minute after an apparently phlegmatic
negative.

The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so
strongly on the side of his--two ardent hearts against
one poor little conscience--that she tried to fortify
her resolution by every means in her power.  She had
come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account
could she agree to a step which might afterwards cause
bitter rueing to her husband for his blindness in
wedding her.  And she held that what her conscience had
decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not
to be overruled now.

"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said.
"It was only forty miles off--why hasn't it reached
here? Somebody must know!"

Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.

For two or three days no more was said.  She guessed
from the sad countenances of her chamber companions
that they regarded her not only as the favourite, but
as the chosen; but they could see for themselves that
she did not put herself in his way.

Tess had never before known a time in which the thread
of her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands,
positive pleasure and positive pain. At the next
cheese-making the pair were again left alone together.
The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but Mr
Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have
acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these
two; though they walked so circumspectly that suspicion
was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the dairyman left them
to themselves.

They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting
them into the vats.  The operation resembled the act of
crumbling bread on a large scale; and amid the
immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield's
hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful,
suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers.
Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and
bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft arm.

Although the early September weather was sultry, her
arm, from her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and
damp to his mouth as a new-gathered mushroom, and
tasted of the whey. But she was such a sheaf of
susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the
touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the
cool arms flushed hot.  Then, as though her heart had
said, "Is coyness longer necessary?  Truth is truth
between man and woman, as between man and man," she
lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as
her lip rose in a tender half-smile.

"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said.

"Because you love me very much!"

"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty."

"Not AGAIN!"

She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might
break down under her own desire.

"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I CANNOT think why you are so
tantalizing.  Why do you disappoint me so?  You seem
almost like a coquette, upon my life you do--a coquette
of the first urban water!  They blow hot and blow cold,
just as you do, and it is the very last sort of thing
to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothays. ... And
yet, dearest," he quickly added, observing now the
remark had cut her, "I know you to be the most honest,
spotless creature that ever lived.  So how can I
suppose you a flirt?  Tess, why don't you like the idea
of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?"

"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never
could say it; because--it isn't true!"

The stress now getting beyond endurance her lip
quivered, and she was obliged to go away.  Clare was so
pained and perplexed that he ran after and caught her
in the passage.

"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her,
in forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that
you won't belong to anybody but me!"

"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed.  "And I will
give you a complete answer, if you will let me go now.
I will tell you my experiences--all about myself--all!"

"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; and number."
He expressed assent in loving satire, looking into her
face. "My Tess, no doubt, almost as many experiences as
that wild convolvulus out there on the garden hedge,
that opened itself this morning for the first time.
Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched
expression any more about not being worthy of me."

"I will try--not!  And I'll give you my reasons
tomorrow--next week."

"Say on Sunday?"

"Yes, on Sunday."

At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat
till she was in the thicket of pollard willows at the
lower side of the barton, where she could be quite
unseen.  Here Tess flung herself down upon the rustling
undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed, and
remained crouching in palpitating misery broken by
momentary shoots of joy, which her fears about the
ending could not altogether suppress.

In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence.  Every
see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every
pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with
nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.  Reckless,
inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at
the altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery;
to snatch ripe pleasure before the iron teeth of pain
could have time to shut upon her: that was what love
counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy Tess
divined that, despite her many months of lonely
self-chastisement, wrestlings, communings, schemes to
lead a future of austere isolation, love's counsel
would prevail.

The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among
the willows.  She heard the rattle of taking down the
pails from the forked stands; the "waow-waow!" which
accompanied the getting together of the cows.  But she
did not go to the milking.  They would see her
agitation; and the dairyman, thinking the cause to be
love alone, would good-naturedly tease her; and that
harassment could not be borne.

Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and
invented some excuse for her non-appearance, for no
inquiries were made or calls given.  At half-past six
the sun settled down upon the levels, with the aspect
of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a
monstrous pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand.
The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural
shape by incessant choppings, became spiny-haired
monsters as they stood up against it.  She went in,
and upstairs without a light.

It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked
thoughtfully at her from a distance, but intruded in no
way upon her.  The indoor milkmaids, Marian and the
rest, seemed to guess that something definite was
afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in
the bedchamber.  Friday passed; Saturday.  Tomorrow was
the day.

"I shall give way--I shall say yes--I shall let myself
marry him--I cannot help it!" she jealously panted,
with her hot face to the pillow that night, on hearing
one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep.
"I can't bear to let anybody have him but me!  Yet it is a
wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows!  O my
heart--O--O--O!"



XXIX


"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this
morning?" said Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to
breakfast next day, with a riddling gaze round upon the
munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye think?"

One guessed, and another guessed.  Mrs Crick did not
guess, because she knew already.

"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted
'hore's-bird of a feller, Jack Dollop.  He's lately
got married to a widow-woman."

"Not Jack Dollop?  A villain--to think o' that!" said a
milker.

The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's
consciousness, for it was the name of the lover who had
wronged his sweetheart, and had afterwards been so
roughly used by the young woman's mother in the
butter-churn.

"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as
he promised?" asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned
over the newspaper he was reading at the little table
to which he was always banished by Mrs Crick, in her
sense of his gentility.

"Not he, sir.  Never meant to," replied the dairyman.
"As I say, 'tis a widow-woman, and she had money, it
seems--fifty poun' a year or so; and that was all he
was after.  They were married in a great hurry; and
then she told him that by marrying she had lost her
fifty poun' a year.  Just fancy the state o' my
gentleman's mind at that news!  Never such a cat-
and-dog life as they've been leading ever since!  Serve
him will beright.  But onluckily the poor woman gets
the worst o't."

"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that
the ghost of her first man would trouble him," said Mrs
Crick.

"Ay; ay," responded the dairyman indecisively.
"Still, you can see exactly how 'twas.  She wanted a home,
and didn't like to run the risk of losing him.  Don't ye
think that was something like it, maidens?"

He glanced towards the row of girls.

"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to
church, when he could hardly have backed out,"
exclaimed Marian.

"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.

"She must have seen what he was after, and should ha'
refused him," cried Retty spasmodically.

"And what do you say, my dear?" asked the dairyman of
Tess.

"I think she ought--to have told him the true state of
things--or else refused him--I don't know," replied
Tess, the bread-and-butter choking her.

"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck
Knibbs, a married helper from one of the cottages.
"All's fair in love and war.  I'd ha' married en just
as she did, and if he'd said two words to me about not
telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my
first chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked
him down wi' the rolling-pin--a scram little feller
like he!  Any woman could do it."

The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented
only by a sorry smile, for form's sake, from Tess.
What was comedy to them was tragedy to her; and she
could hardly bear their mirth.  She soon rose from
table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon
follow her, went along a little wriggling path, now
stepping to one side of the irrigating channels, and
now to the other, till she stood by the main stream of
the Var.  Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher
up the river, and masses of them were floating past
her--moving islands of green crow-foot, whereon she
might almost have ridden; long locks of which weed had
lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows from
crossing.

Yes, there was the pain of it.  This question of a
woman telling her story--the heaviest of crosses to
herself--seemed but amusement to others.  It was as if
people should laugh at martyrdom.

"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across
the gully, alighting beside her feet.  "My wife--soon!"

"No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your
sake, I say no!"

"Tess!"

"Still I say no!" she repeated.

Not expecting this he had put his arm lightly round her
waist the moment after speaking, beneath her hanging
tail of hair.  (The younger dairymaids, including Tess,
breakfasted with their hair loose on Sunday mornings
before building it up extra high for attending church,
a style they could not adopt when milking with their
heads against the cows.)  If she had said "Yes" instead
of "No" he would have kissed her; it had evidently been
his intention; but her determined negative deterred his
scrupulous heart.  Their condition of domiciliary
comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage
by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to
her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he
might have honestly employed had she been better able
to avoid him.  He release her momentarily-imprisoned
waist, and withheld the kiss.

It all turned on that release.  What had given her
strength to refuse him this time was solely the tale of
the widow told by the dairyman; and that would have
been overcome in another moment.  But Angel said no
more; his face was perplexed; he went away.

Day after day they met--somewhat less constantly than
before; and thus two or three weeks went by.  The end
of September drew near, and she could see in his eye
that he might ask her again.

His plan of procedure was different now--as though he
had made up his mind that her negatives were, after
all, only coyness and youth startled by the novelty of
the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of her manner when
the subject was under discussion countenanced the idea.
So he played a more coaxing game; and while never going
beyond words, or attempting the renewal of caresses, he
did his utmost orally.

In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones
like that of the purling milk--at the cow's side, at
skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-makings, among
broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs--as no
milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.

Tess knew that she must break down.  Neither a
religious sense of a certain moral validity in the
previous union nor a conscientious wish for candour
could hold out against it much longer.  She loved him
so passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and
being, though untrained, instinctively refined, her
nature cried for his tutelary guidance.  And thus,
though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can never be
his wife," the words were vain.  A proof of her
weakness lay in the very utterance of what calm
strength would not have taken the trouble to formulate.
Every sound of his voice beginning on the old subject
stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted
the recantation she feared.

His manner was--what man's is not?--so much that of one
who would love and cherish and defend her under any
conditions, changes, charges, or revelations, that her
gloom lessened as she basked in it.  The season
meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though
it was still fine, the days were much shorter.  The
dairy had again worked by morning candlelight for a
long time; and a fresh renewal of Clare's pleading
occurred one morning between three and four.

She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him
as usual; then had gone back to dress and call the
others; and in ten minutes was walking to the head of
the stairs with the candle in her hand.  At the same
moment he came down his steps from above in his
shirt-sleeves and put his arm across the stairway.

"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said
peremptorily. "It is a fortnight since I spoke, and
this won't do any longer.  You MUST tell me what you
mean, or I shall have to leave this house.  My door was
ajar just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I
must go.  You don't know.  Well?  Is it to be yes at
last?"

"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to
take me to task!" she pouted.  "You need not call me
Flirt.  'Tis cruel and untrue.  Wait till by and by.
Please wait till by and by! I will really think
seriously about it between now and then.  Let me go
downstairs!"

She looked a little like what he said she was as,
holding the candle sideways, she tried to smile away
the seriousness of her words.

"Call me Angel, then and not Mr Clare."

"Angel."

"Angel dearest--why not?"

"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?" "It would
only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry
me; and you were so good as to own that long ago."

"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I MUST," she
murmured, looking at her candle, a roguish curl coming
upon her mouth, notwithstanding her suspense.

Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had
obtained her promise; but somehow, as Tess stood there
in her prettily tucked-up milking gown, her hair
carelessly heaped upon her head till there should be
leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were
done, he broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her
cheek for one moment.  She passed downstairs very
quickly, never looking back at him or saying another
word.  The other maids were already down, and the
subject was not pursued.  Except Marian, they all
looked wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the
sad yellow rays which the morning candles emitted in
contrast with the first cold signals of the dawn
without.

When skimming was done--which, as the milk diminished
with the approach of autumn, was a lessening process
day by day--Retty and the rest went out.  The lovers
followed them.

"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are
they not?" he musingly observed to her, as he regarded
the three figures tripping before him through the
frigid pallor of opening day.

"Not so very different, I think," she said.

"Why do you think that?"

"There are very few women's lives that are
not--tremulous," Tess replied, pausing over the new
word as if it impressed her.  "There's more in those
three than you think."

"What is in them?"

"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make--perhaps
would make--a properer wife than I.  And perhaps they
love you as well as I--almost."

"O, Tessy!"

There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her
to hear the impatient exclamation, though she had
resolved so intrepidly to let generosity make one bid
against herself. That was now done, and she had not the
power to attempt self-immolation a second time then.
They were joined by a milker from one of the cottages,
and no more was said on that which concerned them so
deeply.  But Tess knew that this day would decide it.

In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household
and assistants went down to the meads as usual, a long
way from the dairy, where many of the cows were milked
without being driven home.  The supply was getting less
as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary
milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.

The work progressed leisurely.  Each pailful was poured
into tall cans that stood in a large spring-waggon
which had been brought upon the scene; and when they
were milked the cows trailed away. Dairyman Crick, who
was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming
miraculously white against a leaden evening sky,
suddenly looked at his heavy watch.

"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said.  "Begad!  We
shan't be soon enough with this milk at the station, if
we don't mind.  There's no time today to take it home
and mix it with the bulk afore sending off.  It must go
to station straight from here.  Who'll drive it
across?"

Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of
his business, asking Tess to accompany him.  The
evening, though sunless, had been warm and muggy for
the season, and Tess had come out with her milking-hood
only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed
for a drive.  She therefore replied by glancing over
her scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her.  She
assented by relinquishing her pail and stool to the
dairyman to take home; and mounted the spring-waggon
beside Clare.



XXX


In the diminishing daylight they went along the level
roadway through the meads, which stretched away into
gray miles, and were backed in the extreme edge of
distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon
Heath.  On its summit stood clumps and stretches of
fir-trees, whose notched tips appeared like
battlemented towers crowning black-fronted castles of
enchantment.

They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to
each other that they did not begin talking for a long
while, the silence being broken only by the clucking of
the milk in the tall cans behind them.  The lane they
followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had
remained on the boughs till they slipped from their
shells, and the blackberries hung in heavy clusters.
Every now and then Angel would fling the lash of his
whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give it to
his companion.

The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending
down herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the
day changed into a fitful breeze which played about
their faces. The quick-silvery glaze on the rivers and
pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light they
changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface
like a rasp.  But that spectacle did not affect her
preoccupation.  Her countenance, a natural carnation
slightly embrowned by the season, had deepened its
tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her hair,
which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual,
caused to tumble down from its fastenings and stray
beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was made
clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was better than
seaweed.

"I ought not to have come, I suppose," she murmured,
looking at the sky.

"I am sorry for the rain," said he.  "But how glad I am
to have you here!"

Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid
gauze. The evening grew darker, and the roads being
crossed by gates it was not safe to drive faster than
at a walking pace.  The air was rather chill.

"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon
your arms and shoulders," he said.  "Creep close to me,
and perhaps the drizzle won't hurt you much.  I should
be sorrier still if I did not think that the rain might
be helping me."

She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round
them both a large piece of sail-cloth, which was
sometimes used to keep the sun off the milk-cans.
Tess held it from slipping off him as well as herself,
Clare's hands being occupied.

"Now we are all right again.  Ah--no we are not!  It
runs down into my neck a little, and it must still more
into yours. That's better.  Your arms are like wet
marble, Tess.  Wipe them in the cloth.  Now, if you
stay quiet, you will not get another drop.  Well,
dear--about that question of mine--that long-standing
question?"

The only reply that he could hear for a little while
was the smack of the horse's hoofs on the moistening
road, and the cluck of the milk in the cans behind
them.

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I do," she replied.

"Before we get home, mind."

"I'll try."

He said no more then.  As they drove on the fragment of
an old manor house of Caroline date rose against the
sky, and was in due course passed and left behind.

"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an
interesting old place--one of the several seats which
belonged to an ancient Norman family formerly of great
influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles.  I never
pass one of their residences without thinking of them.
There is something very sad in the extinction of a
family of renown, even if it was fierce, domineering,
feudal renown."

"Yes," said Tess.

They crept along towards a point in the expanse of
shade just at hand at which a feeble light was
beginning to assert its presence, a spot where, by day,
a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the
dark green background denoted intermittent moments of
contact between their secluded world and modern life.
Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this
point three or four times a day, touched the native
existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as
if what it touched had been uncongenial.

They reached the feeble light, which came from the
smoky lamp of a little railway station; a poor enough
terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more importance
to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the celestial ones
to which it stood in such humiliating contrast.  The
cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting
a little shelter from a neighbouring holly tree.

Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up
almost silently upon the wet rails, and the milk was
rapidly swung can by can into the truck.  The light of
the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield's
figure, motionless under the great holly tree.  No
object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming
cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with
the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the
suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the
print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet
drooping on her brow.

She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute
obedience characteristic of impassioned natures at
times, and when they had wrapped themselves up over
head and ears in the sailcloth again, they plunged back
into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that
the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material
progress lingered in her thought.

"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts tomorrow,
won't they?" she asked.  "Strange people that we have
never seen."

"Yes--I suppose they will.  Though not as we send it.
When its strength has been lowered, so that it may not
get up into their heads."

"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions,
ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen
a cow."

"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."

"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes
from; or think how we two drove miles across the moor
tonight in the rain that it might reach 'em in time?"

"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious
Londoners; we drove a little on our own--on account of
that anxious matter which you will, I am sure, set at
rest, dear Tess.  Now, permit me to put it in this way.
You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I mean.
Does it not?"

"You know as well as I.  O yes--yes!"

"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?"

"My only reason was on account of you--on account of a
question.  I have something to tell you----"

"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my
worldly convenience also?"

"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly
convenience. But my life before I came here--I
want----"

"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my
happiness.  If I have a very large farm, either English
or colonial, you will be invaluable as a wife to me;
better than a woman out of the largest mansion in the
country.  So please--please, dear Tessy, disabuse your
mind of the feeling that you will stand in my way."

"But my history.  I want you to know it--you must let
me tell you--you will not like me so well!"

"Tell it if you wish to, dearest.  This precious
history then.  Yes, I was born at so and so, Anno
Domini----"

"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his
words as a help, lightly as they were spoken.  "And I
grew up there. And I was in the Sixth Standard when I
left school, and they said I had great aptness, and
should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I
should be one.  But there was trouble in my family;
father was not very industrious, and he drank a
little."

"Yes, yes.  Poor child!  Nothing new."  He pressed her
more closely to his side.

"And then--there is something very unusual about
it--about me.  I--I was----"

Tess's breath quickened.

"Yes, dearest.  Never mind."

"I--I--am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville--a
descendant of the same family as those that owned the
old house we passed.  And--we are all gone to nothing!"
"A d'Urberville!--Indeed!  And is that all the trouble,
dear Tess?"

"Yes," she answered faintly.

"Well--why should I love you less after knowing this?"

"I was told by the dairyman that you hated old
families."

He laughed.

"Well, it is true, in one sense.  I do hate the
aristocratic principle of blood before everything, and
do think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we ought
to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and
virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity.  But I
am extremely interested in this news--you can have no
idea how interested I am!  Are you not interested
yourself in being one of that well-known line?"

"No.  I have thought it sad--especially since coming
here, and knowing that many of the hills and fields I
see once belonged to my father's people.  But other
hills and field belonged to Retty's people, and perhaps
others to Marian's, so that I don't value it
particularly."

"Yes--it is surprising how many of the present tillers
of the soil were once owners of it, and I sometimes
wonder that a certain school of politicians don't make
capital of the circumstance; but they don't seem to
know it.... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance
of your name of d'Urberville, and trace the manifest
corruption.  And this was the carking secret!"

She had not told.  At the last moment her courage had
failed her, she feared his blame for not telling him
sooner; and her instinct of self-preservation was
stronger than her candour.

"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should
have been glad to know you to be descended exclusively
from the long-suffering, dumb, unrecorded rank and file
of the English nation, and not from the self-seeking
few who made themselves powerful at the expense of the
rest.  But I am corrupted away from that by my
affection for you, Tess (he laughed as he spoke), and
made selfish likewise.  For your own sake I rejoice in
your descent.  Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this
fact of your extraction may make an appreciable
difference to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I
have made you the well-read woman that I mean to make
you.  My mother too, poor soul, will think so much
better of you on account of it.  Tess, you must spell
your name correctly--d'Urberville--from this very day."

"I like the other way rather best."

"But you MUST, dearest!  Good heavens, why dozens of
mushroom millionaires would jump at such a possession!
By the bye, there's one of that kidney who has taken
the name--where have I heard of him?--Up in the
neighbourhood of The Chase, I think.  Why, he is the
very man who had that rumpus with my father I told you
of.  What an odd coincidence!"

"Angel, I think I would rather not take the name!
It is unlucky, perhaps!"

She was agitated.

"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you.
Take my name, and so you will escape yours!  The secret
is out, so why should you any longer refuse me?"

"If it is SURE to make you happy to have me as your
wife, and you feel that you do wish to marry me, VERY,
VERY much--"

"I do, dearest, of course!"

"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and
being hardly able to keep alive without me, whatever my
offences, that would make me feel I ought to say I
will."

"You will--you do say it, I know!  You will be mine for
ever and ever."

He clasped her close and kissed her.

"Yes!"

She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry
hard sobbing, so violent that it seemed to rend her.
Tess was not a hysterical girl by any means, and he was
surprised.

"Why do you cry, dearest?"

"I can't tell--quite!--I am so glad to think--of being
yours, and making you happy!"

"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my
Tessy!"

"I mean--I cry because I have broken down in my vow!
I said I would die unmarried!"

"But, if you love me you would like me to be your
husband?"

"Yes, yes, yes!  But O, I sometimes wish I had never
been born!"

"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very
much excited, and very inexperienced, I should say that
remark was not very complimentary.  How came you to
wish that if you care for me?  Do you care for me?  I
wish you would prove it in some way."

"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried,
in a distraction of tenderness.  "Will this prove it
more?"

She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare
learnt what an impassioned woman's kisses were like
upon the lips of one whom she loved with all her heart
and soul, as Tess loved him.

"There--now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and
wiping her eyes.

"Yes. I never really doubted--never, never!"

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle
inside the sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and
the rain driving against them.  She had consented.  She
might as well have agreed at first.  The "appetite for
joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous force
which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways
the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague
lucubrations over the social rubric.

"I must write to my mother," she said.  "You don't mind
my doing that?"

"Of course not, dear child.  You are a child to me,
Tess, not to know how very proper it is to write to
your mother at such a time, and how wrong it would be
in me to object. Where does she live?"

"At the same place--Marlott.  On the further side of
Blackmoor Vale."

"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer----"

"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not
dance with me.  O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us
now!"



XXXI


Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her
mother the very next day, and by the end of the week a
response to her communication arrive in Joan
Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.


DEAR TESS,--J write these few lines Hoping they will
find you well, as they leave me at Present, thank God
for it.  Dear Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you
are going really to be married soon.  But with respect
to your question, Tess, J say between ourselves, quite
private but very strong, that on no account do you say
a word of your Bygone Trouble to him.  J did not tell
everything to your Father, he being so Proud on account
of his Respectability, which, perhaps, your Intended is
the same.  Many a woman--some of the Highest in the
Land--have had a Trouble in their time; and why should
you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs?  No
girl would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long
ago, and not your Fault at all.  J shall answer the
same if you ask me fifty times.  Besides, you must bear
in mind that, knowing it to be your Childish Nature to
tell all that's in your heart--so simple!--J made you
promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having
your Welfare in my Mind; and you most solemnly did
promise it going from this Door.  J have not named
either that Question or your coming marriage to your
Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple
Man.

Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send
you a Hogshead of Cyder for you Wedding, knowing there
is not much in your parts, and thin Sour Stuff what
there is.  So no more at present, and with kind love to
your Young Man.---From your affectte. Mother.

J. DURBEYFIELD


"O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.

She was recognizing how light was the touch of events
the most oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's elastic
spirit.  Her mother did not see life as Tess saw it.
That haunting episode of bygone days was to her mother
but a passing accident.  But perhaps her mother was
right as to the course to be followed, whatever she
might be in her reasons. Silence seemed, on the face of
it, best for her adored one's happiness: silence it
should be.

Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the
world who had any shadow of right to control her
action, Tess grew calmer.  The responsibility was
shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had been for
weeks.  The days of declining autumn which followed her
assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a
season through which she lived in spiritual altitudes
more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period
of her life.

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for
Clare.  To her sublime trustfulness he was all that
goodness could be--knew all that a guide, philosopher,
and friend should know. She thought every line in the
contour of his person the perfection of masculine
beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect
that of a seer.  The wisdom of her love for him, as
love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a
crown.  The compassion of his love for her, as she saw
it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion.  He
would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that
had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths,
as if she saw something immortal before her.

She dismissed the past--trod upon it and put it out, as
one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

She had not known that men could be so disinterested,
chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he.
Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in
this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in
truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well
in hand, and was singularly free from grossness.
Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than
hot--less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love
desperately, but with a love more especially inclined
to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious
emotion which could jealously guard the loved one
against his very self. This amazed and enraptured Tess,
whose slight experiences had been so infelicitous till
now; and in her reaction from indignation against the
male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.

They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her
honest faith she did not disguise her desire to be with
him.  The sum of her instincts on this matter, if
clearly stated, would have been that the elusive
quality of her sex which attracts men in general might
be distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of
love, since it must in its very nature carry with it a
suspicion of art.

The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of
doors during betrothal was the only custom she knew,
and to her it had no strangeness; though it seemed
oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw how normal a
thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk,
regarded it.  Thus, during this October month of
wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by
creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling
tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden
bridges to the other side, and back again.  They were
never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz
accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the
sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a
pollen of radiance over the landscape.  They saw tiny
blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the
time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere.  The sun
was so near the ground, and the sward so flat, that the
shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a
mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar
to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the
sloping sides of the vale.

Men were at work here and there--for it was the season
for "taking up" the meadows, or digging the little
waterways clear for the winter irrigation, and mending
their banks where trodden down by the cows.  The
shovelfuls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the
river when it was as wide as the whole valley, were an
essence of soils, pounded campaigns of the past,
steeped, refined, and subtilized to extraordinary
richness, out of which came all the fertility of the
mead, and of the cattle grazing there.

Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of
these watermen, with the air of a man who was
accustomed to public dalliance, though actually as shy
as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the
labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the while.

"You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before
them!" she said gladly.

"O no!"

"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at
Emminster that you are walking about like this with me,
a milkmaid----"

"The most bewitching milkmaid every seen."

"They might feel it a hurt to their dignity."

"My dear girl--a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a
Clare!" It is a grand card to play--that of your
belonging to such a family, and I am reserving it for a
grand effect when we are married, and have the proofs
of your descent from Parson Tringham.  Apart from that,
my future is to be totally foreign to my family--it
will not affect even the surface of their lives.  We
shall leave this part of England--perhaps England
itself--and what does it matter how people regard us
here?  You will like going, will you not?"

She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so
great was the emotion aroused in her at the thought of
going through the world with him as his own familiar
friend.  Her feelings almost filled her ears like a
babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes.  She put
her hand in his, and thus they went on, to a place
where the reflected sun glared up from the river, under
a bridge, with a molten-metallic glow that dazzled
their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the
bridge.  They stood still, whereupon little furred and
feathered heads popped up from the smooth surface of
the water; but, finding that the disturbing presences
had paused, and not passed by, they disappeared again.
Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog began
to close round them--which was very early in the
evening at this time of the year--settling on the
lashes of her eyes, where it rested like crystals, and
on his brows and hair.

They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark.
Some of the dairy-people, who were also out of doors on
the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard
her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though
they were too far off to hear the words discoursed;
noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into
syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked
leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the
occasional little laugh upon which her soul seemed to
ride--the laugh of a woman in company with the man she
loves and has won from all other women--unlike anything
else in nature.  They marked the buoyancy of her tread,
like the skim of a bird which had not quite alighted.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of
Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere,
irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows,
keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in
their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness,
care, shame.  She knew that they were waiting like
wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she
had long spells of power to keep them in hungry
subjection there.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an
intellectual remembrance.  She walked in brightness,
but she knew that in the background those shapes of
darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or
they might be approaching, one or the other, a little
every day.


One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors
keeping house, all the other occupants of the domicile
being away.  As they talked she looked thoughtfully up
at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.

"I am not worthy of you--no, I am not!" she burst out,
jumping up from her low stool as though appalled at his
homage, and the fulness of her own joy thereat.

Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be
that which was only the smaller part of it, said----

"I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess!
Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a
contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered
among those who are true, and honest, and just, and
pure, and lovely, and of good report--as you are, my
Tess."

She struggled with the sob in her throat.  How often
had that string of excellences made her young heart
ache in church of late years, and how strange that he
should have cited them now.

"Why didn't you stay and love me when I--was sixteen;
living with my little sisters and brothers, and you
danced on the green?  O, why didn't you, why didn't
you!" she said, impetuously clasping her hands.

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to
himself, truly enough, what a creature of moods she
was, and how careful he would have to be of her when
she depended for her happiness entirely on him.

"Ah--why didn't I stay!" he said.  "That is just what I
feel. If I had only known!  But you must not be so
bitter in your regret--why should you be?"

With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged
hastily---

"I should have had four years more of your heart than I
can ever have now.  Then I should not have wasted my
time as I have done--I should have had so much longer
happiness!"

It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of
intrigue behind her who was tormented thus; but a girl
of simple life, not yet one-and twenty, who had been
caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a
springe.  To calm herself the more completely she rose
from her little stool and left the room, overturning
the stool with her skirts as she went.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a
bundle of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the
sticks snapped pleasantly, and hissed out bubbles of
sap from their ends. When she came back she was herself
again.

"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious,
fitful, Tess?" he said, good-humouredly, as he spread a
cushion for her on the stool, and seated himself in the
settle beside her.  "I wanted to ask you something, and
just then you ran away."

"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured.  She
suddenly approached him, and put a hand upon each of
his arms.  "No, Angel, I am not really so--by nature,
I mean!"  The more particularly to assure him that she
was not, she placed herself close to him in the settle,
and allowed her head to find a resting-place against
Clare's shoulder.  "What did you want to ask me--I am
sure I will answer it," she continued humbly.

"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and
hence there follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day
be?'"

"I like living like this."

"But I must think of starting in business on my own
hook with the new year, or a little later.  And before
I get involved in the multifarious details of my new
position, I should like to have secured my partner."

"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite
practically, wouldn't it be best not to marry till
after all that?--Though I can't bear the though o'
your going away and leaving me here!"

"Of course you cannot--and it is not best in this case.
I want you to help me in many ways in making my start.
When shall it be?  Why not a fortnight from now?"

"No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so many things
to think of first."

"But----"

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so
near.  Before discussion of the question had proceeded
further there walked round the corner of the settle
into the full firelight of the apartment Mr Dairyman
Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her
feet while her face flushed and her eyes shone in the
firelight.

"I know how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she
cried, with vexation.  "I said to myself, they are sure
to come and catch us!  But I wasn't really sitting on
his knee, though it might ha' seemed as if I was
almost!"

"Well--if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we
shouldn't ha' noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere
at all in this light," replied the dairyman.  He
continued to his wife, with the stolid mien of a man
who understood nothing of the emotions relating to
matrimony--"Now, Christianer, that shows that folks
should never fancy other folks be supposing things when
they bain't.  O no,  I should never ha' thought a word
of where she was a sitting to, if she hadn't told me--
not I."

"We are going to be married soon," said Clare, with
improvised phlegm.

"Ah--and be ye!  Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir.
I've thought you mid do such a thing for some time.
She's too good for a dairymaid--I said so the very
first day I zid her--and a prize for any man; and
what's more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer's
wife; he won't be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at
his side."

Somehow Tess disappeared.  She had been even more
struck with the look of the girls who followed Crick
than abashed by Crick's blunt praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were
all present.  A light was burning, and each damsel was
sitting up whitely in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole
like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice
in their mood.  They could scarcely feel as a loss what
they had never expected to have.  Their condition was
objective, contemplative.

"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking
eyes off Tess.  "How her face do show it!"

"You BE going to marry him?" asked Marian.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When?"

"Some day."

They thought that this was evasiveness only.

"YES--going to MARRY him--a gentleman!" repeated Izz
Huett.

And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after
another, crept out of their beds, and came and stood
barefooted round Tess.  Retty put her hands upon Tess's
shoulders, as if to realize her friend's corporeality
after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms
round her waist, all looking into her face.

"How it do seem!  Almost more than I can think of!"
said Izz Huett.

Marian kissed Tess.  "Yes," she murmured as she
withdrew her lips.

"Was that because of love for her, or because other
lips have touched there by now?" continued Izz drily to
Marian.

"I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply.
"I was on'y feeling all the strangeness o't--that she is
to be his wife, and nobody else.  I don't say nay to
it, nor either of us, because we did not think of
it--only loved him.  Still, nobody else is to marry'n
in the world--no fine lady, nobody in silks and satins;
but she who do live like we."

"Are you sure you don't dislike me for it?" said Tess
in a low voice.

They hung about her in their white nightgowns before
replying, as if they considered their answer might lie
in her look.

"I don't know--I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle.
"I want to hate 'ee; but I cannot!" "That's how I
feel," echoed Izz and Marian.  "I can't hate her.
Somehow she hinders me!"

"He ought to marry one of you," murmured Tess.

"Why?"

"You are all better than I."

"We better than you?" said the girls in a low, slow
whisper. "No, no, dear Tess!"

"You are!" she contradicted impetuously.  And suddenly
tearing away from their clinging arms she burst into a
hysterical fit of tears, bowing herself on the chest of
drawers and repeating incessantly, "O yes, yes, yes!"

Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.

"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried.  "I think
I ought to make him even now!  You would be better for
him than--I don't know what I'm saying!  O!  O!"

They went up to her and clasped her round, but still
her sobs tore her.

"Get some water," said Marian,  "She's upset by us,
poor thing, poor thing!"

They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where
they kissed her warmly.

"You are best for'n," said Marian.  "More ladylike, and
a better scholar than we, especially since he had
taught 'ee so much.  But even you ought to be proud.
You BE proud, I'm sure!"

"Yes, I am," she said; "and I am ashamed at so breaking
down."

When they were all in bed, and the light was out,
Marian whispered across to her--

"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and
of how we told 'ee that we loved him, and how we tried
not to hate you, and did not hate you, and could not
hate you, because you were his choice, and we never
hoped to be chose by him."

They were not aware that, at these words, salt,
stinging tears trickled down upon Tess's pillow anew,
and how she resolved, with a bursting heart, to tell
all her history to Angel Clare, despite her mother's
command--to let him for whom she lived and breathed
despise her if he would, and her mother regard her as a
fool, rather then preserve a silence which might be
deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow seemed a
wrong to these.



XXXII


This penitential mood kept her from naming the
wedding-day. The beginning of November found its date
still in abeyance, though he asked her at the most
tempting times.  But Tess's desire seemed to be for a
perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain
as it was then.

The meads were changing now; but it was still warm
enough in early afternoons before milking to idle there
awhile, and the state of dairy-work at this time of
year allowed a spare hour for idling.  Looking over the
damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening
ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under
the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea.
Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification,
wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated
as if they bore fire within them, then passed out of
its line, and were quite extinct.  In the presence of
these things he would remind her that the date was
still the question.

Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her
on some mission invented by Mrs Crick to give him the
opportunity.  This was mostly a journey to the
farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how
the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton
to which they were relegated.  For it was a time of the
year that brought great changes to the world of kine.
Batches of the animals were sent away daily to this
lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their
calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the
calf could walk, mother and offspring were driven back
to the dairy.  In the interval which elapsed before the
calves were sold there was, of course, little milking
to be done, but as soon as the calf had been taken away
the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.

Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a
great gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where
they stood still and listened.  The water was now high
in the streams, squirting through the weirs, and
tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all
full; there was no taking short cuts anywhere, and
foot-passengers were compelled to follow the permanent
ways.  From the whole extent of the invisible vale came
a multitudinous intonation; it forced upon their fancy
that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur
was the vociferation of its populace.

"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess;
"holding public-meetings in their market-places,
arguing, preaching, quarrelling, sobbing, groaning,
praying, and cursing."

Clare was not particularly heeding.

"Did Crick speak to you today, dear, about his not
wanting much assistance during the winter months?"

"No."

"The cows are going dry rapidly."

"Yes.  Six of seven went to the straw-barton yesterday,
and three the day before, making nearly twenty in the
straw already.  Ah--is it that the farmer don't want my
help for the calving?  O, I am not wanted here any
more!  And I have tried so hard to---"

"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer
require you.  But, knowing what our relations were, he
said in the most good-natured and respectful manner
possible that he supposed on my leaving at Christmas I
should take you with me, and on my asking what he would
do without you he merely observed that, as a matter of
fact, it was a time of year when he could do with a
very little female help.  I am afraid I was sinner
enough to feel rather glad that he was in this way
forcing your hand."

"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel.
Because 'tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if
at the same time 'tis convenient."

"Well, it is convenient--you have admitted that."
He put his finger upon her cheek.  "Ah!" he said.

"What?"

"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught!
But why should I trifle so!  We will not trifle--life
is too serious."

"It is.  Perhaps I saw that before you did."

She was seeing it then.  To decline to marry him after
all--in obedience to her emotion of last night--and
leave the dairy, meant to go to some strange place, not
a dairy; for milkmaids were not in request now
calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm
where no divine being like Angel Clare was.  She hated
the thought, and she hated more the thought of going
home.

"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued,
"since you will probably have to leave at Christmas, it
is in every way desirable and convenient that I should
carry you off then as my property.  Besides, if you
were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you
would know that we could not go on like this for ever."

"I wish we could.  That it would always be summer and
autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking
as much of me as you have done through the past
summertime!"

"I always shall."

"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour
of faith in him.  "Angel, I will fix the day when I
will become yours for always!"

Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that
dark walk home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on
the right and left.

When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were
promptly told--with injunctions of secrecy; for each of
the lovers was desirous that the marriage should be
kept as private as possible.  The dairyman, though he
had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great
concern about losing her.  What should he do about his
skimming?  Who would make the ornamental butter-pats
for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies?  Mrs Crick
congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at
last come to an end, and said that directly she set
eyes on Tess she divined that she was to be the chosen
one of somebody who was no common outdoor man; Tess had
looked so superior as she walked across the barton on
that afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good
family she could have sworn.  In point of fact Mrs
Crick did remember thinking that Tess was graceful and
good-looking as she approached; but the superiority
might have been a growth of the imagination aided by
subsequent knowledge.

Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours,
without the sense of a will.  The word had been given;
the number of the day written down.  Her naturally
bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic
convictions common to field-folk and those who
associate more extensively with natural phenomena than
with their fellow-creatures; and she accordingly
drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things
her lover suggested, characteristic of the frame of
mind.

But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify
the wedding-day; really to again implore her advice.
It was a gentleman who had chosen her, which perhaps
her mother had not sufficiently considered.  A
post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with
a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received
with the same feeling by him.  But this communication
brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.

Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to
himself and to Tess of the practical need for their
immediate marriage, there was in truth an element of
precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a later
date.  He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather
ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned
thoroughness of her feeling for him.  He had
entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to
an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he
beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind
the scenes.  Unsophistication was a thing to talk of;
but he had not known how it really struck one until he
came here.  Yet he was very far from seeing his future
track clearly, and it might be a year or two before he
would be able to consider himself fairly started in
life.  The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness
imparted to his career and character by the sense that
he had been made to miss his true destiny through the
prejudices of his family.

"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to
wait till you were quite settled in your midland farm?"
she once asked timidly.  (A midland farm was the idea
just then.)

"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be
left anywhere away from my protection and sympathy."

The reason was a good one, so far as it went.  His
influence over her had been so marked that she had
caught his manner and habits, his speech and phrases,
his likings and his aversions.  And to leave her in
farmland would be to let her slip back again out of
accord with him.  He wished to have her under his
charge for another reason.  His parents had naturally
desired to see her once at least before he carried her
off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and
as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his
intention, he judged that a couple of months' life with
him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous
opening would be of some social assistance to her at
what she might feel to be a trying ordeal--her
presentation to his mother at the Vicarage. Next, he
wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill,
having an idea that he might combine the use of one
with corn-growing.  The proprietor of a large old
water-mill at Wellbridge--once the mill of an
Abbey--had offered him the inspection of his
time-honoured mode of procedure, and a hand in the
operations for a few days, whenever he should choose to
come.  Clare paid a visit to the place, some few miles
distant, one day at this time, to inquire particulars,
and returned to Talbothays in the evening.  She found
him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge
flour-mills.  And what had determined him?  Less the
opportunity of an insight into grinding and bolting
than the casual fact that lodgings were to be obtained
in that very farmhouse which, before its mutilation,
had been the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville
family.  This was always how Clare settled practical
questions; by a sentiment which had nothing to do with
them.  They decided to go immediately after the
wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead of
journeying to towns and inns.

"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the
other side of London that I have heard of," he said,
"and by March or April we will pay a visit to my father
and mother."

Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed,
and the day, the incredible day, on which she was to
become his, loomed large in the near future.  The
thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was the date.
His wife, she said to herself.  Could it ever be?
Their two selves together, nothing to divide them,
every incident shared by them; why not?  And yet why?

One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church,
and spoke privately to Tess.

"You was not called home this morning."

"What?"

"It should ha' been the first time of asking today,"
she answered, looking quietly at Tess.  "You meant to
be married New Year's Eve, deary?"

The other returned a quick affirmative.

"And there must be three times of asking.  And now
there be only two Sundays left between."

Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course
there must be three.  Perhaps he had forgotten!  If so,
there must be a week's postponement, and that was
unlucky.  How could she remind her lover?  She who had
been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and
alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.

A natural incident relieved her anxiety.  Izz mentioned
the omission of the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick
assumed a matron's privilege of speaking to Angel on
the point.

"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare?  The banns, I mean."

"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare.

As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:

"Don't let them tease you about the banns.  A licence
will be quieter for us, and I have decided on a licence
without consulting you.  So if you go to church on
Sunday morning you will not hear your own name, if you
wished to."

"I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said proudly.

But to know that things were in train was an immense
relief to Tess notwithstanding, who had well-nigh
feared that somebody would stand up and forbid the
banns on the ground of her history.  How events were
favouring her!

"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself.  "All
this good fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards
by a lot of ill.  That's how Heaven mostly does.  I
wish I could have had common banns!"

But everything went smoothly.  She wondered whether he
would like her to be married in her present best white
frock, or if she ought to buy a new one.  The question
was set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by the
arrival of some large packages addressed to her.
Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from
bonnet to shoes, including a perfect morning costume,
such as would well suit the simple wedding they
planned.  He entered the house shortly after the
arrival of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing
them.

A minute later she came down with a flush on her face
and tears in her eyes.

"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek
upon his shoulder.  "Even to the gloves and
handkerchief!  My own love--how good, how kind!"

"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in
London--nothing more."

And to divert her from thinking too highly of him he
told her to go upstairs, and take her time, and see if
it all fitted; and, if not, to get the village
sempstress to make a few alterations.

She did return upstairs, and put on the gown.  Alone,
she stood for a moment before the glass looking at the
effect of her silk attire; and then there came into her
head her mother's ballad of the mystic robe---

     That never would become that wife
       That had once done amiss,

which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a
child, so blithely and so archly, her foot on the
cradle, which she rocked to the tune.  Suppose this
robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe
had betrayed Queen Guenever. Since she had been at the
dairy she had not once thought of the lines till now.



XXXIII


Angel felt that he would like to spend a day with her
before the wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a
last jaunt in her company while there were yet mere
lover and mistress; a romantic day, in circumstances
that would never be repeated; with that other and
greater day beaming close ahead of them.  During the
preceding week, therefore, he suggested making a few
purchases in the nearest town, and they started
together.

Clare's life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in
respect the world of his own class.  For months he had
never gone near a town, and, requiring no vehicle, had
never kept one, hiring the dairyman's cob or gig if he
rode or drove. They went in the gig that day.

And then for the first time in their lives they shopped
as partners in one concern.  It was Christmas Eve, with
its loads a holly and mistletoe, and the town was very
full of strangers who had come in from all parts of the
country on account of the day.  Tess paid the penalty
of walking about with happiness superadded to beauty on
her countenance by being much stared at as she moved
amid them on his arm.

In the evening they returned to the inn at which they
had put up, and Tess waited in the entry while Angel
went to see the horse and gig brought to the door.
The general sitting-room was full of guests, who were
continually going in and out.  As the door opened and
shut each time for the passage of these, the light
within the parlour fell full upon Tess's face.  Two men
came out and passed by her among the rest.  One of them
had stared her up and down in surprise, and she fancied
he was a Trantridge man, though that village lay so
many miles off that Trantridge folk were rarities here.

"A comely maid that," said the other.

"True, comely enough.  But unless I make a great
mistake----" And negatived the remainder of the
definition forthwith.

Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and,
confronting the man on the threshold, heard the words,
and saw the shrinking of Tess.  The insult to her stung
him to the quick, and before he had considered anything
at all he struck the man on the chin with the full
force of his fist, sending him staggering backwards
into the passage.

The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come
on, and Clare, stepping outside the door, put himself
in a posture of defence.  But his opponent began to
think better of the matter.  He looked anew at Tess as
he passed her, and said to Clare---

"I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake.  I
thought she was another woman, forty miles from here."

Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and
that he was, moreover, to blame for leaving her
standing in an inn-passage, did what he usually did in
such cases, gave the man five shillings to plaster the
blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a
pacific goodnight.  As soon as Clare had taken the
reins from the ostler, and the young couple had driven
off, the two men went in the other direction. "And was
it a mistake?" said the second one.

"Not a bit of it.  But I didn't want to hurt the
gentleman's feelings--not I."

In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.

"Could we put off our wedding till a little later?"
Tess asked in a dry dull voice.  "I mean if we wished?"

"No, my love.  Calm yourself.  Do you mean that the
fellow may have time to summon me for assault?" he
asked good-humouredly.

"No--I only meant--if it should have to be put off."

What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her
to dismiss such fancies from her mind, which she
obediently did as well as she could.  But she was
grave, very grave, all the way home; till she thought,
"We shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of
miles from these parts, and such as this can never
happen again, and no ghost of the past reach there."

They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and
Clare ascended to his attic.  Tess sat up getting on
with some little requisites, lest the few remaining
days should not afford sufficient times.  While she sat
she heard a noise in Angel's room overhead, a sound of
thumping and struggling. Everybody else in the house
was asleep, and in her anxiety lest Clare should be ill
she ran up and knocked at his door, and asked him what
was the matter.

"Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within.  "I am so
sorry I disturbed you!  But the reason is rather an
amusing one: I fell asleep and dreamt that I was
fighting that fellow again who insulted you and the
noise you heard was my pummelling away with my fists at
my portmanteau, which I pulled out today for packing.
I am occasionally liable to these freaks in my sleep.
Go to bed and think of it no more."

This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of
her indecision.  Declare the past to him by word of
mouth she could not; but there was another way.  She
sat down and wrote on the four pages of a note-sheet a
succinct narrative of those events of three or four
years ago, put it into an envelope, and directed it to
Clare.  Then, lest the flesh should again be weak, she
crept upstairs without any shoes and slipped the note
under his door.

Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and
she listened for the first faint noise overhead.  It
came, as usual; he descended, as usual.  She descended.
He met her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed her.
Surely it was as warmly as ever!