Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and
bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time
would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he
had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked
now.
Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that
he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.
When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among
so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which
welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,
surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,
possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.
Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.
Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the
manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the
old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a
sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and
listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that
she was sleeping profoundly.
“Thank God!” murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of
bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that
having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now
reposing without care.
He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door
again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d’Urberville dames,
whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bedchamber.
In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister
design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of
revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice
of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it
in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing
sensation of a resemblance between them.
The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.
His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his
powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible sterile
expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the
face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave, yet who found no
advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing
contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.
Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all
the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but
The little less, and what worlds away!
He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not
indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate
to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which
as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was
telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,
discordant and contrasting?
He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the
light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and
indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness,
and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the
happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or
change of mien.
XXXVI
Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though
associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct
embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of
untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the
other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able
to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above
there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the
door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager’s wife,
who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.
The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward
just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed
her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She
had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.
When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the
house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,
butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast
laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in
domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the
chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were
passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied
their happiness.
Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the
stairs, called in a conventional voice—
“Breakfast is ready!”
He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.
When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the
sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was
fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two
or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he
went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at
the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale
blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face
appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the
bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare’s
tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a
new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the
hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as
if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any
more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his
sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own
formed a visible object also.
“Angel!” she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as
a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh
the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek
still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left
glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as
pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress
of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further
pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes,
and make her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set
such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance that he gazed at her
with a stupefied air.
“Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!”
“It is true.”
“Every word?”
“Every word.”
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie
from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort
of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated—
“It is true.”
“Is he living?” Angel then asked.
“The baby died.”
“But the man?”
“He is alive.”
A last despair passed over Clare’s face.
“Is he in England?”
“Yes.”
He took a few vague steps.
“My position—is this,” he said abruptly. “I thought—any man would have
thought—that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social
standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure
rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but—However,
I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.”
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been
needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost
all round.
“Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not
known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I
hoped you would never—”
Her voice grew husky.
“A last way?”
“I mean, to get rid of me. You _can_ get rid of me.”
“How?”
“By divorcing me.”
“Good heavens—how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?”
“Can’t you—now I have told you? I thought my confession would give you
grounds for that.”
“O Tess—you are too, too—childish—unformed—crude, I suppose! I don’t
know what you are. You don’t understand the law—you don’t understand!”
“What—you cannot?”
“Indeed I cannot.”
A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener’s face.
“I thought—I thought,” she whispered. “O, now I see how wicked I seem
to you! Believe me—believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you
could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you
could cast me off if you were determined, and didn’t love me
at—at—all!”
“You were mistaken,” he said.
“O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I
hadn’t the courage. That’s just like me!”
“The courage to do what?”
As she did not answer he took her by the hand.
“What were you thinking of doing?” he inquired.
“Of putting an end to myself.”
“When?”
She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. “Last night,” she
answered.
“Where?”
“Under your mistletoe.”
“My good—! How?” he asked sternly.
“I’ll tell you, if you won’t be angry with me!” she said, shrinking.
“It was with the cord of my box. But I could not—do the last thing! I
was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name.”
The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not
volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting
his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, “Now, listen to this.
You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You
will promise me as your husband to attempt that no more.”
“I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was.”
“Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description.”
“But, Angel,” she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon
him, “it was thought of entirely on your account—to set you free
without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to
get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it
with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined
husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love you more,
if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do it, since
there’s no other way of escape for ’ee. I feel I am so utterly
worthless! So very greatly in the way!”
“Ssh!”
“Well, since you say no, I won’t. I have no wish opposed to yours.”
He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her
activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be
feared.
Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more or
less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their
glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing
each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the
amount of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over, he rose,
and telling her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went
off to the miller’s in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying
that business, which had been his only practical reason for coming
here.
When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form
crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.
He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then,
without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began
clearing the table and setting it in order.