Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first
fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal
together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.
The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit,
and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen with a
renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he went
upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth
as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving. The
mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it. Having been
there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and
berries were wrinkled. Angel took it down and crushed it into the
grate. Standing there, he for the first time doubted whether his course
in this conjecture had been a wise, much less a generous, one. But had
he not been cruelly blinded? In the incoherent multitude of his
emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed. “O Tess! If you had
only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you!” he mourned.
Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs. At
the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning up
her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.
“Mr Clare,” she said, “I’ve called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to
inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again.”
This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet
guessed his; an honest girl who loved him—one who would have made as
good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer’s wife as Tess.
“I am here alone,” he said; “we are not living here now.” Explaining
why he had come, he asked, “Which way are you going home, Izz?”
“I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir,” she said.
“Why is that?”
Izz looked down.
“It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way.” She
pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was
journeying.
“Well—are you going there now? I can take you if you wish for a lift.”
Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.
“Thank ’ee, Mr Clare,” she said.
He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and the
few other items which had to be considered by reason of the sudden
abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare’s return to his horse and gig,
Izz jumped up beside him.
“I am going to leave England, Izz,” he said, as they drove on. “Going
to Brazil.”
“And do Mrs Clare like the notion of such a journey?” she asked.
“She is not going at present—say for a year or so. I am going out to
reconnoitre—to see what life there is like.”
They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making no
observation.
“How are the others?” he inquired. “How is Retty?”
“She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin
and hollow-cheeked that ’a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever fall
in love wi’ her any more,” said Izz absently.
“And Marian?”
Izz lowered her voice.
“Marian drinks.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her.”
“And you!”
“I don’t drink, and I bain’t in a decline. But—I am no great things at
singing afore breakfast now!”
“How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn ‘’Twas down
in Cupid’s Gardens’ and ‘The Tailor’s Breeches’ at morning milking?”
“Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when you had been
there a bit.”
“Why was that falling-off?”
Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by way of answer.
“Izz!—how weak of you—for such as I!” he said, and fell into reverie.
“Then—suppose I had asked _you_ to marry me?”
“If you had I should have said ‘Yes’, and you would have married a
woman who loved ’ee!”
“Really!”
“Down to the ground!” she whispered vehemently. “O my God! did you
never guess it till now!”
By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.
“I must get down. I live out there,” said Izz abruptly, never having
spoken since her avowal.
Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly
disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a
corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be
revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,
instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring
manner?
“I am going to Brazil alone, Izz,” said he. “I have separated from my
wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with her
again. I may not be able to love you; but—will you go with me instead
of her?”
“You truly wish me to go?”
“I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief. And you at
least love me disinterestedly.”
“Yes—I will go,” said Izz, after a pause.
“You will? You know what it means, Izz?”
“It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over
there—that’s good enough for me.”
“Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought to remind
you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization—Western
civilization, that is to say.”
“I don’t mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and
there’s no other way!”
“Then don’t get down, but sit where you are.”
He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing any
signs of affection.
“You love me very, very much, Izz?” he suddenly asked.
“I do—I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the dairy
together!”
“More than Tess?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she murmured, “not more than she.”
“How’s that?”
“Because nobody could love ’ee more than Tess did!... She would have
laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more.”
Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken
perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her
rougher nature by Tess’s character compelled her to grace.
Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words
from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was
something as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, “_She
would have laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more!_”
“Forget our idle talk, Izz,” he said, turning the horse’s head
suddenly. “I don’t know what I’ve been saying! I will now drive you
back to where your lane branches off.”
“So much for honesty towards ’ee! O—how can I bear it—how can I—how can
I!”
Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw what
she had done.
“Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O,
Izz, don’t spoil it by regret!”
She stilled herself by degrees.
“Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn’t know what I was saying, either,
wh—when I agreed to go! I wish—what cannot be!”
“Because I have a loving wife already.”
“Yes, yes! You have!”
They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an hour
earlier, and she hopped down.
“Izz—please, please forget my momentary levity!” he cried. “It was so
ill-considered, so ill-advised!”
“Forget it? Never, never! O, it was no levity to me!”
He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry
conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and took
her hand.
“Well, but, Izz, we’ll part friends, anyhow? You don’t know what I’ve
had to bear!”
She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to
mar their adieux.
“I forgive ’ee, sir!” she said.
“Now, Izz,” he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself
to the mentor’s part he was far from feeling; “I want you to tell
Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give
way to folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy
men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and
well—remember the words—wisely and well—for my sake. I send this
message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them
again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my
wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery. Women may
be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things! On that one
account I can never forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl you
have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a
faithful friend. Promise.”
She gave the promise.
“Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!”
He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was
out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of
racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she
entered her mother’s cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how
Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare’s parting
from her and her arrival home.
Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching
thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That
evening he was within a feather-weight’s turn of abandoning his road to
the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line of
South Wessex which divided him from his Tess’s home. It was neither a
contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her heart, which
deterred him.
No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz’s
admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first, he was
right now. And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked
tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more
sustained force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon
come back to her. He took the train that night for London, and five
days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of
embarkation.
XLI
From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an
October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare
and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a
bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely
woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier
time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were
projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary
period, she can produce only a flattened purse.
After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring
and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the time
being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work
near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote
from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living
on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a
condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.
Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the
presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there—he who, the
moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a
shape in a vision.
The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had
not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done
duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning,
she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty
of further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done.
Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare’s
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a
contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she
had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now followed
an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was obliged to
fall back upon her sovereigns.
She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself—they appeared to have had as