Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And
letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I
think _I_ could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”
Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made
to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a
lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already
laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less
rickety than the vehicle.
The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the
lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that
hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at
rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock of
candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the
load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first
during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal
of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they could, they
made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and
their own conversation, the real morning being far from come. Abraham,
as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),
began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects
against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing
from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.
When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher,
on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh
the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its
earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for
some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham
grew reflective.
“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.
“Yes, Abraham.”
“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”
“Not particular glad.”
“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”
“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.
“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”
“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that
into your head?”
“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find
father. There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother
said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of
marrying a gentleman.”
His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.
Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for
audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant
back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the
stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in
serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life. He asked how
far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of
them. But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed
his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess
were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to
buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as
Nettlecombe-Tout?
The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family,
filled Tess with impatience.
“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the
apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few
blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were
so many more of ’em!”
“Yes.”
“Is it like that _really_, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it
have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”
“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and
wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t
have been always washing, and never getting finished.”
“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be
made rich by marrying a gentleman?”
“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”
Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful
in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon
herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and allow
Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of
nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall,
and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.
Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess
fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the
hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges
became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional
heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul,
conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.
Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see
the vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting
herself in her mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,
laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything
grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed.
A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into
which she, too, had fallen.
They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had
ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of
“Hoi there!”
The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining
in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had
happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the
way.
In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The
morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these
lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and
unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the
breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his
life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the
road.
In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with
the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the
crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood
firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in
a heap.
By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,
seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man
returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.
“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with your
load. I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting
daylight, and you have nothing to fear.”
He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,
arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess
showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was
already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose
a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside,
still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking
scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.
“’Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle.
“No excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,
Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed!”
When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized
on his young face.
“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself. “To
think that I was such a fool!”
“’Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,
Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.
In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the
driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man
from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed
to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on
towards Casterbridge.
The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot
of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning;
but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the
road, though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that
was left of Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly
hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the
setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles to Marlott.
Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of
her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not
lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for
her negligence.
But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a
less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving
family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it
would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances
there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl
from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself.
When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.
“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we
d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for
cat’s meat. Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his
lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”
He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the
garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.
When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the
horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children following in
funeral train. Abraham and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged
their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the walls; and when
Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave. The bread-winner
had been taken away from them; what would they do?
“Is he gone to heaven?” asked Abraham, between the sobs.
Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she
regarded herself in the light of a murderess.
V
The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the horse, became
disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not penury, loomed in the
distance. Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted