Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the
light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure
reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far,
therefore, to be trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the
resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but
denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn;
standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there.
Clare no longer hesitated.
At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,
he showed his weariness from the night’s effort so unmistakeably that
Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the
reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know
that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his
common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised his
dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like
laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection
of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a
conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it
gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.
He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon
after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end—the
temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the
incident of the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The
luggage was put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and
the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their precipitate
departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the mill-work
was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement
that was true so far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the
manner of their leaving to suggest a _fiasco_, or that they were not
going together to visit friends.
Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such
solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind
up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick
a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their
unhappy state.
To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left the carriage by
the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and
descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut,
and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed
her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in
which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away behind the
cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of their first embrace.
The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours mean, the rich
soil mud, and the river cold.
Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing
into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays
and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs
Crick emerged from the house, and several others of their old
acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not seem to be there.
Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which
affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement
of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as
would have been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had
been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the
story of Marian and Retty. The later had gone home to her father’s, and
Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere. They feared she would
come to no good.
To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her
favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she
and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul,
there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one
who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly
were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way,
as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as
“we”, and yet sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually
stiff and embarrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up
to their profession of unity, different from the natural shyness of
young couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs
Crick said to her husband—
“How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood
like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn’t it
strike ’ee that ’twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and
she’s not now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.”
They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards
Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where
Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and entering
the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did
not know their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been
passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance
and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother’s house it
was here that he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom
in the driver’s presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps
on foot along one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the
man to wait a few minutes they strolled away.
“Now, let us understand each other,” he said gently. “There is no anger
between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I
will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go
to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it—if it
is desirable, possible—I will come to you. But until I come to you it
will be better that you should not try to come to me.”
The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of
her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of
one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had
done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the
point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.
“Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?”
“Just so.”
“May I write to you?”
“O yes—if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not be
the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.”
“I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my
punishment ought to be; only—only—don’t make it more than I can bear!”
That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she
made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane,
notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed,
he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood of
long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his best
advocate. Pride, too, entered into her submission—which perhaps was a
symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the
whole d’Urberville family—and the many effective chords which she could
have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.
The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now
handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had
obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest
in which seemed to be Tess’s for her life only (if he understood the
wording of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for
safety; and to this she readily agreed.
These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the carriage, and
handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her.
Taking next his own bag and umbrella—the sole articles he had brought
with him hitherwards—he bade her goodbye; and they parted there and
then.
The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an
unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one
moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to
do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and
in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar
emendations of his own—
God’s _not_ in his heaven: All’s _wrong_ with the world!
When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own
way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.
XXXVIII
As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her youth
began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor. Her
first thought was how would she be able to face her parents?
She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the
village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who had
kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably
left on New Year’s Day, the date when such changes were made. Having
received no intelligence lately from her home, she asked the
turnpike-keeper for news.
“Oh—nothing, miss,” he answered. “Marlott is Marlott still. Folks have
died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter married this
week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John’s own house, you know; they
was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that
John’s own folk was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any
part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know how’t have been
discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman himself by blood,
with family skillentons in their own vaults to this day, but done out
of his property in the time o’ the Romans. However, Sir John, as we
call ’n now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could, and stood
treat to everybody in the parish; and John’s wife sung songs at The
Pure Drop till past eleven o’clock.”
Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide to
go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She asked
the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his house for a
while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage,
and went on to the village alone by a back lane.
At sight of her father’s chimney she asked herself how she could
possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were calmly
supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man,
who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was,
friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself, with no
better place to go to in the world.
She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the garden-hedge she
was met by a girl who knew her—one of the two or three with whom she
had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how
Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted
with—
“But where’s thy gentleman, Tess?”
Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,
leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus
made her way to the house.
As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the back
door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the
doorstep in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this without
observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her.
The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old
quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was
about to plunge her arms in anew.
“Why—Tess!—my chil’—I thought you was married!—married really and truly
this time—we sent the cider—”
“Yes, mother; so I am.”
“Going to be?”
“No—I am married.”
“Married! Then where’s thy husband?”