Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I
don’t know; but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from
him.”
“I can’t say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered
marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was
begun by his extraordinary opinions.”
Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them
without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and
passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps
and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the
three went on together.
They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this
point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all
three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that
time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their
discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with
his umbrella, and dragged something to light.
“Here’s a pair of old boots,” he said. “Thrown away, I suppose, by some
tramp or other.”
“Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and
so excite our sympathies,” said Miss Chant. “Yes, it must have been,
for they are excellent walking-boots—by no means worn out. What a
wicked thing to do! I’ll carry them home for some poor person.”
Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for
her with the crook of his stick; and Tess’s boots were appropriated.
She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen
veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party
had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.
Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were
running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless
impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own
condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not
contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward omens. It
was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel’s wife felt
almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by
those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been
inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the
sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less
starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.
As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those
habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt
how hopeless life was for their owner.
“Ah!” she said, still sighing in pity of herself, “_they_ didn’t know
that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these
pretty ones _he_ bought for me—no—they did not know it! And they didn’t
think that _he_ chose the colour o’ my pretty frock—no—how could they?
If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don’t
care much for him, poor thing!”
Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of
judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way
without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this
feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was
precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and
Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme
cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among
mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans
and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries
of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have
recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a
fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.
Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come
not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in
her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and
there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that
starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the
Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw
up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she
could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But
it was done with a sorry shake of the head. “It is nothing—it is
nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about
the looks of a castaway like me!”
Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no
sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of
Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and
paused by milestones.
She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she
descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of
Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such
contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again
sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while
the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the
street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.
“The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?” she said.
“No, my dear,” said the old woman. “’Tis too soon for that; the bells
hain’t strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder
barn. A ranter preaches there between the services—an excellent, fiery,
Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don’t go to hear’n! What comes in
the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.”
Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against
the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central
part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn
not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the
preacher.
His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon
catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The
sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on
justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This
fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in
a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a
dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address,
she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration—
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not
obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently
set forth, crucified among you?”
Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in
finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the view of
Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to
detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.
He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had
wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of
awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about
mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first
grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and
had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this
change in him, and made him what they saw him.
But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which,
impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d’Urberville. Her
face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the
barn, and passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the
great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open,
so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the
preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern
breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man
whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable
occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood
upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three
o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction
that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess
ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established
as a fact indeed.
End of Phase the Fifth
Phase the Sixth:
The Convert
XLV
Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d’Urberville since
her departure from Trantridge.
The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to
permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was
unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a
converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear
overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor
advanced.
To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,
and to behold it now!... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of
mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable
moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a
modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract
the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief
in his identity.
To Tess’s sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_, a
grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out
of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years
earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose
that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of
sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The
lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express
supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated
as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious
rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the
bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with
such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was
almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to
put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the
incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his
wallowing in the mire.
The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted
from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which
Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a
misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.
Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer.
D’Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his
wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural
in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at
hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner, the
greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian
history to discover that.
Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict
definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would
allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had
obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.
But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon
her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his
presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,