Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
“I am sorry you are not a believer,” he continued; “that some
unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no
more now. At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who
knows what may not happen? I’m off. Goodbye!”
He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his eyes
again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down in the
direction of Abbot’s-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation,
and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his
pocket a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter,
worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D’Urberville opened the
letter. It was dated several months before this time, and was signed by
Parson Clare.
The letter began by expressing the writer’s unfeigned joy at
d’Urberville’s conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in
communicating with the parson on the subject. It expressed Mr Clare’s
warm assurance of forgiveness for d’Urberville’s former conduct and his
interest in the young man’s plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would
much have liked to see d’Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he
had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have helped him to
enter a theological college to that end; but since his correspondent
had possibly not cared to do this on account of the delay it would have
entailed, he was not the man to insist upon its paramount importance.
Every man must work as he could best work, and in the method towards
which he felt impelled by the Spirit.
D’Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself
cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till
his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer
troubled his mind.
She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her
nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary
shepherd.
“What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?” she asked of
him. “Was it ever a Holy Cross?”
“Cross—no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was
put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured
there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie
underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks
at times.”
She felt the _petite mort_ at this unexpectedly gruesome information,
and left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to
Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she
approached a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were
talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman,
in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly
air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a
stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded. For a moment the
voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview
had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which
had been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came close, the
girl turned serenely and recognized her, the young man walking off in
embarrassment. The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess’s
excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not
explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact,
began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just
witnessed.
“He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at
Talbothays,” she explained indifferently. “He actually inquired and
found out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he’s been
in love wi’ me these two years. But I’ve hardly answered him.”
XLVI
Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was afield.
The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles
erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her. On the
sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of
new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite
its front was a long mound or “grave”, in which the roots had been
preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at the uncovered end,
chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from each root, and
throwing it after the operation into the slicer. A man was turning the
handle of the machine, and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes,
the fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by the sounds of
the snuffling wind, the smart swish of the slicing-blades, and the
choppings of the hook in Tess’s leather-gloved hand.
The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where the
swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of darker
brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each of these
something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up
and down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a man,
the plough going between them, turning up the cleared ground for a
spring sowing.
For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far
beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from
the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up
the incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere
point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon perceived to
be a man in black, arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The
man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with his eyes, continually
observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him
till her companion directed her attention to his approach.
It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a
semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the
free-and-easy Alec d’Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there
was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder
seemed to embarrass him. A pale distress was already on Tess’s face,
and she pulled her curtained hood further over it.
D’Urberville came up and said quietly—
“I want to speak to you, Tess.”
“You have refused my last request, not to come near me!” said she.
“Yes, but I have a good reason.”
“Well, tell it.”
“It is more serious than you may think.”
He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some
distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the
machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec’s words reaching other ears.
D’Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer,
turning his back to the latter.
“It is this,” he continued, with capricious compunction. “In thinking
of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to inquire as to
your worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think of
it. But I see now that it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew
you—harder than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to
me!”
She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent head,
her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her trimming of
the swedes. By going on with her work she felt better able to keep him
outside her emotions.
“Tess,” he added, with a sigh of discontent,—“yours was the very worst
case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had resulted till
you told me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole
blame was mine—the whole unconventional business of our time at
Trantridge. You, too, the real blood of which I am but the base
imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say
in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their
girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked
may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of
simple indifference.”
Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and
taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the
mere fieldwoman alone marking her.
“But it is not that I came to say,” d’Urberville went on. “My
circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at
Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and
devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I
shall make at the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask you is,
will you put it in my power to do my duty—to make the only reparation I
can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go
with me?... I have already obtained this precious document. It was my
old mother’s dying wish.”
He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling of
embarrassment.
“What is it?” said she.
“A marriage licence.”
“O no, sir—no!” she said quickly, starting back.
“You will not? Why is that?”
And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely
the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d’Urberville’s face. It was
unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her had
been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.
“Surely,” he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked
round at the labourer who turned the slicer.
Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there. Informing
the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she wished to
walk a little way, she moved off with d’Urberville across the
zebra-striped field. When they reached the first newly-ploughed section
he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped forward on
the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.
“You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?” he
repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.
“I cannot.”
“But why?”
“You know I have no affection for you.”
“But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps—as soon as you really
could forgive me?”
“Never!”
“Why so positive?”
“I love somebody else.”
The words seemed to astonish him.
“You do?” he cried. “Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is
morally right and proper any weight with you?”
“No, no, no—don’t say that!”
“Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing
feeling which you will overcome—”
“No—no.”
“Yes, yes! Why not?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“You must in honour!”
“Well then.... I have married him.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at her.
“I did not wish to tell—I did not mean to!” she pleaded. “It is a
secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, _please_ will
you, keep from questioning me? You must remember that we are now
strangers.”
“Strangers—are we? Strangers!”
For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he
determinedly chastened it down.
“Is that man your husband?” he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign
the labourer who turned the machine.
“That man!” she said proudly. “I should think not!”
“Who, then?”
“Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!” she begged, and flashed her
appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.
D’Urberville was disturbed.
“But I only asked for your sake!” he retorted hotly. “Angels of
heaven!—God forgive me for such an expression—I came here, I swear, as
I thought for your good. Tess—don’t look at me so—I cannot stand your
looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or
since! There—I won’t lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of
you had waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was extinguished
with all such feelings. But I thought that our marriage might be a
sanctification for us both. ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by
the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband,’ I
said to myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must bear the
disappointment!”