Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 fields 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
to 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
arrived 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
champaigns 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 ever seen.”