Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown herself.”
“No! Really! Why, she bade us goodbye with the rest—”
“Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis’ess—so to name what she lawful
is—when you two drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on their
bonnets and went out; and as there is not much doing now, being New
Year’s Eve, and folks mops and brooms from what’s inside ’em, nobody
took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had summut to
drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they
seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads as if for
home, and Marian going on to the next village, where there’s another
public-house. Nothing more was zeed or heard o’ Retty till the
waterman, on his way home, noticed something by the Great Pool; ’twas
her bonnet and shawl packed up. In the water he found her. He and
another man brought her home, thinking ’a was dead; but she fetched
round by degrees.”
Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy
tale, went to shut the door between the passage and the ante-room to
the inner parlour where she was; but his wife, flinging a shawl round
her, had come to the outer room and was listening to the man’s
narrative, her eyes resting absently on the luggage and the drops of
rain glistening upon it.
“And, more than this, there’s Marian; she’s been found dead drunk by
the withy-bed—a girl who hev never been known to touch anything before
except shilling ale; though, to be sure, ’a was always a good
trencher-woman, as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had all
gone out o’ their minds!”
“And Izz?” asked Tess.
“Izz is about house as usual; but ’a do say ’a can guess how it
happened; and she seems to be very low in mind about it, poor maid, as
well she mid be. And so you see, sir, as all this happened just when we
was packing your few traps and your Mis’ess’s night-rail and dressing
things into the cart, why, it belated me.”
“Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs, and drink a cup
of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be
wanted?”
Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire,
looking wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan Kail’s heavy footsteps up
and down the stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and heard him
express his thanks for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the
gratuity he received. Jonathan’s footsteps then died from the door, and
his cart creaked away.
Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and
coming in to where she sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks between
his hands from behind. He expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the
toilet-gear that she had been so anxious about, but as she did not rise
he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on the supper-table
being too thin and glimmering to interfere with its glow.
“I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls,”
he said. “Still, don’t let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid,
you know.”
“Without the least cause,” said Tess. “While they who have cause to be,
hide it, and pretend they are not.”
This incident had turned the scale for her. They were simple and
innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen;
they had deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved
worse—yet she was the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all
without paying. She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would
tell, there and then. This final determination she came to when she
looked into the fire, he holding her hand.
A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back
of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and
the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the
mantel-shelf was flushed with the high-coloured light, and the legs of
the table nearest the fire. Tess’s face and neck reflected the same
warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a
constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their
hues with her every pulsation.
“Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about telling
our faults?” he asked abruptly, finding that she still remained
immovable. “We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well have done so.
But for me it was no light promise. I want to make a confession to you,
Love.”
This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of a
Providential interposition.
“You have to confess something?” she said quickly, and even with
gladness and relief.
“You did not expect it? Ah—you thought too highly of me. Now listen.
Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me, and not to be
indignant with me for not telling you before, as perhaps I ought to
have done.”
How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did not speak, and
Clare went on—
“I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering my chance of
you, darling, the great prize of my life—my Fellowship I call you. My
brother’s Fellowship was won at his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy.
Well, I would not risk it. I was going to tell you a month ago—at the
time you agreed to be mine, but I could not; I thought it might
frighten you away from me. I put it off; then I thought I would tell
you yesterday, to give you a chance at least of escaping me. But I did
not. And I did not this morning, when you proposed our confessing our
faults on the landing—the sinner that I was! But I must, now I see you
sitting there so solemnly. I wonder if you will forgive me?”
“O yes! I am sure that—”
“Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don’t know. To begin at the
beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that I am one of the
eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in good
morals, Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men,
and it was a great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter
the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to
it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of
plenary inspiration, one must heartily subscribe to these words of
Paul: ‘Be thou an example—in word, in conversation, in charity, in
spirit, in faith, in purity.’ It is the only safeguard for us poor
human beings. ‘_Integer vitae_,’ says a Roman poet, who is strange
company for St Paul—
The man of upright life, from frailties free,
Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.
“Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt
all that so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred in
me when, in the midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell.”
He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been
made when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a
cork on the waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours’ dissipation
with a stranger.
“Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly,” he
continued. “I would have no more to say to her, and I came home. I have
never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with
perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling
this. Do you forgive me?”
She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.
“Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too painful as it is for
the occasion—and talk of something lighter.”
“O, Angel—I am almost glad—because now _you_ can forgive _me_! I have
not made my confession. I have a confession, too—remember, I said so.”
“Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one.”
“Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours, or more so.”
“It can hardly be more serious, dearest.”
“It cannot—O no, it cannot!” She jumped up joyfully at the hope. “No,
it cannot be more serious, certainly,” she cried, “because ’tis just
the same! I will tell you now.”
She sat down again.
Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate were lit by
the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Imagination might have beheld
a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face
and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and
firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose
upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on
her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s; and pressing her forehead
against his temple she entered on her story of her acquaintance with
Alec d’Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without
flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.
End of Phase the Fourth
Phase the Fifth:
The Woman Pays
XXXV
Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations
were done. Tess’s voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its
opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she
had not wept.
But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer
transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate
looked impish—demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least
about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care.
The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic
problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility
with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments
when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of
things. But the essence of things had changed.
When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous
endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains,
repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind
foolishness.
Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the
intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring
the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had
imparted itself now. His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his
concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any
contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague
movement. When he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace
voice of the many varied tones she had heard from him.
“Tess!”
“Yes, dearest.”
“Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true. O you
cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are not... My
wife, my Tess—nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?”
“I am not out of my mind,” she said.
“And yet—” He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses: “Why
didn’t you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a
way—but I hindered you, I remember!”
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of
the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and
bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where
he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.
Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this
position she crouched in a heap.
“In the name of our love, forgive me!” she whispered with a dry mouth.
“I have forgiven you for the same!”
And, as he did not answer, she said again—
“Forgive me as you are forgiven! _I_ forgive _you_, Angel.”
“You—yes, you do.”
“But you do not forgive me?”
“O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;
now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness meet such a
grotesque—prestidigitation as that!”
He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into
horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.
“Don’t—don’t! It kills me quite, that!” she shrieked. “O have mercy
upon me—have mercy!”
He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.