His ultimate inten tion, if he had any, she had no t y et divin ed; and shefound herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have done.So easefully had she delivered her who le being up to him that it pleased her to think he was regard ing her as h is absolute poss ession, to d ispose of as he should choo se.It was consoling, u nder the h overing terror of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast h er off, even if in that reco gnition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of harming her.
Ah！now she knew what he was dreaming of—that Sunday morning when he had born e her along through the water with the other d airymaids, who had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which Tess could hardly admit.Clare did not cross the bridgewith her, but proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill, at length stood still on the brink of the river.
Its waters, in creep ing down these miles of meadowland, frequen tly divided, ser pentining in purposeless curv es, loo ping themselves around litt le islands that had no name, return ing and re-embodying themselves as a br oad main stream further on.Opposite th e spot to which he had b rought her was such a g eneral confluence, and the river was pro portionately voluminous and deep.Across it was a narrow footbridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away, leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the speeding current, formed, a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and Tess had noticed from the window of the h ouse in the daytime young men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing.Her husban d had possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now m ounted the plank, and, sliding one f oot forward, advanced along it.
Was he go ing to drown her?Probably he was.The spot was lonely, the river deep and wide eno ugh to make such a purp ose easy of acco mplishment.He might drown her if he would; it would be better than parting to-morrow to lead severed lives.
The swif t stream r aced and gy rated under th em, tossing, dis torting, and splitting the moon's reflected face.Spots of froth traveled past, and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles.If they could both fall together into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped tog ether th at th ey could not b esaved; they would go out of the world almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to h er, or to h im for marrying her.His las t haft-hour with her would have been a lov ing one, while if they lived till he aw oke his day time aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.
The impuls e stirred in her, y et she dared no t indulge it, to make a movement t hat would h ave prec ipitated them b oth in to th e gulf.How sh e valued her own life had been proved; but his—she had no right to tamper with it.He reached the other side with her in safety.
Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds, and taking a ne w hold of her he went onward a fe w steps till they reached the ruined choir of the Abbey-church.Against the north wall was the empty stone coffin of an abbot, in w hich every tourist w ith a turn for grim hu mour was accustomed to stretch himself.In this Clare carefully laid Tess.Having kissed her lips a second tim e he breathed d eeply, as if a greatly desired end wer e attained.Clare th en lay down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a log.The spurt of mental excitement which had produced the effort was now over.
Tess sat up in the cof fin.The night, though dry and mild for the season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for h im to r emain here long, in his half-clo thed state.If h e were left to h imself h e would in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled to certain death.She had heard of such deaths af ter sleep-walking.But how could she d are to awak en him, and let him know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him to discover his folly in resp ect of her?Tess, however, stepping out of her stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to arouse him without being violent.It was indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection Her ex citement had in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes'adventure; but that beatific interval was over.
It suddenly occurr ed to her to tr y persuasio n; an d acco rdingly sh e whispered in his ea r, with as much f irmness and dec ision as sh e could summon—
“Let us walk on, darling, ”at the same time taking him suggestively by thearm.T o her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had appar ently thrown hi m back into hi s drea m, wh ich thenceforward see med to ent er o n a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit, and was leading him to Heaven.Thus she conducted him by the arm to the stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which they stood at the manor-house door.Tess's feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in his woollen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort.
There was n o further difficulty.She induced him to lie down on his own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood, to dry any dam pness out of him.The no ise of these atten tions she thought might awaken h im, and secre tly wished th at they might.Bu t the e xhaustion of h is mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed.
As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's excursion, though, as regarded himself he may have been aware that he had not lain still.In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the other subject.
He waited in expectancy to discern so me mental pointing; he knew that if any intention of his, concluded overnight, 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 h er; no t 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, h e showed his weariness fr om the night's effort so unmistakably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; bu t the reflection th at it would anger him, grieve h im, stultify him, to kn ow that he had inst inctively manifested a fondness for her of which his commonsense did not approve; that his inclination had co mpromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterr edher.It was too much like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that h e might have a faint recollection of h is tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it fro m a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it gav e 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 incid ent of the nigh t 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 so me surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the millwork was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it w ent.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 rout e lay near the dairy fro m which they had s tarted with su ch 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 cowstalls the mead which had been the scene of the ir 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 k ind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays and its vicinity on the re-appear ance of the newly-married.Then Mr s.Crick emer ged from the house, and sev eral others of their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retry did not seem to be there.
Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friend ly humours, which affected her far otherwise than they supposed.In the tacit agreement of husband and wife to keep their es trangement a secret they behaved as would have b een ordinary.And then, although she would rather th ere had been n o word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the stor y of Marian and Retty.The latter h ad g one ho me to her father's, and Ma rian had lef t to look f or 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 good-b ye, touch ing each of th em 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 the ir adie ux as“we, ”and yet sundered like the poles.Per hapssometh ing unusually stiff and em barrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their profession o f unity, different fro m the natural shyness of young couples, may have been apparen t, 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 qu ite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.”
They re-entered the vehicle, and were driv en along the roads toward s Weatherbury and S tagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lan e inn, where Clare dismissed the fly and man.They rested here a while, and entering the Vale were next driven onward towards her ho me by a str anger who did not know their relations.At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been pas sed, and wher e there were crossroads, Clare stopped the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother's house it was here that h e would leave her.As they could not talk with freed om in the dr iver's presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps on f oot along o ne of th e br anch roads; she assented, and directing the man to wait a few minutes they strolled away.
“Now, let us understand each o ther, ”he said gen tly.“There is no angerbetween us, though there is that which I cannot endure at pres ent.I will tr y to bring myself to endure it.I will let y ou know where I go to as soon as I kn ow 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 y ou 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 he r clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of one who had practised gross deceit upon him.Yet could a wo man who had done even what she had do ne deserv e all th is?But she cou ld co ntest 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 b e the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.”
“I agree to the con ditions, Angel; because y ou 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 hy sterically, in t hat lonely, lane, notwithstanding the f ury of fastidio usness with which h e was possessed, he would pr obably not h ave withstood her.But her mood of long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his bes t advocate.P ride, too, en tered in to h er sub mission—which perha ps was a sym ptom of that reck less acquies cence in chan ce to o apparent in the whole d'Urberville f amily—and the many ef fective chor ds 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 co ntaining a f airly good sum of money, which he had obtained from his bankers for the pur pose.The brilliants, the interest in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only（if he understood the wording of the will）, he advise d her to l et h im sen d to a bank for sa fety; and to this she re adily agreed.
These th ings arranged he walked with T ess back to th e carriage, an d handed her in.The coachman was paid and told where to drive her.Taking nexthis own bag and u mbrella—the sole articles he had br ought with him hitherwards—he bade her good-bye; and they parted there and then.
The f ly moved cr eepingly up a hill, and Clare watch ed 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 haft-dead faint insid e.Thus he beheld her reced e, 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 ov er the cr est of the hill h e turned to go his own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.
38
As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the lands cape of heryouth 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 h ad been kno wn; he had probably left on New Y ear's Day, the date when such changes were made.Having received no intellig ence lately from her home, she asked the turnpikekeeper for news.
“Oh—nothing, miss, ”he answered.“Marlott is Marlott still.Folks have died and that.John Durbeyfield, too, he had a daughter married this week to a gentleman-farmer; no t fr om John's o wn house, you know; th ey was m arried elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that John's own folk was not cons idered well-be-d oing en ough to h ave any part in it, the brid egroom 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 th e 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 ask ed th e 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 weddingtour with a comparatively rich man, who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while her e she was, friendless, creep ing 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 explain ed that h e had been c alled 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 wash ing-tub s tood in the same o ld p lace on the sam e old quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was about to plunge her arms in anew.
“Why—Tess！—my c hil'—I thought y ou was m arried！—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?”
“Oh, he's gone away for a time.”
“Gone away！When was you married, then?The day you said?”
“Yes, Tuesday, mother.”
“And now'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?”
“Yes; he's gone.”
“What's the meaning o'that?'Nation seize such husbands as you seem to get, say I！”
“Mother！”Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs.“I don't know how to tell'ee, mother！You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to te ll him.But I did tell him—I couldn't help it—and he went away！”
“O you little fool—you little fool！”burst out Mrs.Durbeyfield, splashingTess and herself in her agitation.“Mr good God！that ev er I should ha'lived to say it, but I say it again, you littte fool！”
Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tens ion of so many day s havin g relaxed at last.
“I know it—I know—I know！”she g asped through her sobs.“But, O my mother, I co uld no t h elp it！He was so good—and I f elt the wicked ness o f trying to blind him as to what had happened！If—if—it were to be done again—I should do the same.I could not—I dared not—so sin—against him！”
“But you sinned enough to marry him first！”
“Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie！But I thought he could get rid o'me by law if he were detemined not to overlook it.And O, if you knew—if you could only half know how I loved him—how anxious I was to have him—and how wrung I was between caring so m uch for him and my wish to be fair to him！”
Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank a helpless thing into a chair.
“Well, well; what's don e can't be undone！I'm sure I don't know why children o'm y bringing forth should all b e b igger simpletons than other people's—not to know better than to blab such a thing as that, when he couldn't ha'found it out till too late！”Here Mrs.Durbeytield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be p itied.“What your father will say I do n't know, ”she continued; “for he's been talking about th e wedding up at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop every day since, and abou t h is family getting back to their rightful position through you—poor silly man！—and now you've made this mess of it！The Lord-a-Lord！”
As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard approaching at that moment.He d id not, however, enter immed iately, and M rs.Durbey field said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the p resent.After her first burs t of disappointment Joan began to take th e mishap as she had taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have tak en a wet holiday or f ailure in the potato-cr op; as a th ing which had come upo n th em irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs, and beheld casually that the beds had been shifted, and new arr angements made.Her old bed h ad been adapted for two y ounger children.There was no place here for her now.
The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on there.Presently h er father en tered, appar ently car rying a live hen.He was a foot-haggler now, hav ing been ob liged to sell, his second horse, and h e travelled with his basket on his ar m.The hen h ad been car ried abou t this morning as it was of ten carried, to show people, that he was in his wor k, though it had lain; with its legs tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.
“We've just had up a sto ry about—”Durbey field began, and thereupon related in detail to his wife a discussi on which had aris en at the in n about the clergy, originated by the fact of h is daughter having married into a cler ical family.“They was formerly sty led‘sir', like my own ancestry, ”he said, “though nowadays their true sty le, strictly speaking, is‘clerk'only.”As Tess had wished that no great publicity should b e given to the even t, he had mentioned no particulars.He hoped she would rem ove that prohibition soon.He proposed that the couple shou ld take Tess's own nam e, d'Urberville, as uncorrupted.It was better than her husband's.He asked if any letter had come from her that day.
Then Mrs.Durbeyfield informed h im that no letter had co me, but Tess unfortunately had come herself.
When at length the collapse was exp lained to h im a sul len mortification, not usual with Durbey field, overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.Yet the intrinsic quality of the ev ent moved his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of others.