Tess of the d'Urbervilles

ngel felt that he would like to spend a day with her before the
wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last jaunt in her company
while there were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day, in
circumstances that would never be repeated; with that other and greater
day beaming close ahead of them. During the preceding week, therefore,
he suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town, and they
started together.

Clare’s life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in respect the
world of his own class. For months he had never gone near a town, and,
requiring no vehicle, had never kept one, hiring the dairyman’s cob or
gig if he rode or drove. They went in the gig that day.

And then for the first time in their lives they shopped as partners in
one concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its loads a holly and
mistletoe, and the town was very full of strangers who had come in from
all parts of the country on account of the day. Tess paid the penalty
of walking about with happiness superadded to beauty on her countenance
by being much stared at as she moved amid them on his arm.

In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had put up, and
Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse and gig
brought to the door. The general sitting-room was full of guests, who
were continually going in and out. As the door opened and shut each
time for the passage of these, the light within the parlour fell full
upon Tess’s face. Two men came out and passed by her among the rest.
One of them had stared her up and down in surprise, and she fancied he
was a Trantridge man, though that village lay so many miles off that
Trantridge folk were rarities here.

“A comely maid that,” said the other.

“True, comely enough. But unless I make a great mistake—” And he
negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.

Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and, confronting the man
on the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of Tess. The
insult to her stung him to the quick, and before he had considered
anything at all he struck the man on the chin with the full force of
his fist, sending him staggering backwards into the passage.

The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare,
stepping outside the door, put himself in a posture of defence. But his
opponent began to think better of the matter. He looked anew at Tess as
he passed her, and said to Clare—

“I beg pardon, sir; ’twas a complete mistake. I thought she was another
woman, forty miles from here.”

Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was,
moreover, to blame for leaving her standing in an inn-passage, did what
he usually did in such cases, gave the man five shillings to plaster
the blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a pacific good
night. As soon as Clare had taken the reins from the ostler, and the
young couple had driven off, the two men went in the other direction.

“And was it a mistake?” said the second one.

“Not a bit of it. But I didn’t want to hurt the gentleman’s
feelings—not I.”

In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.

“Could we put off our wedding till a little later?” Tess asked in a dry
dull voice. “I mean if we wished?”

“No, my love. Calm yourself. Do you mean that the fellow may have time
to summon me for assault?” he asked good-humouredly.

“No—I only meant—if it should have to be put off.”

What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss such
fancies from her mind, which she obediently did as well as she could.
But she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she thought, “We
shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles from these
parts, and such as this can never happen again, and no ghost of the
past reach there.”

They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare ascended to
his attic. Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites, lest the
few remaining days should not afford sufficient time. While she sat she
heard a noise in Angel’s room overhead, a sound of thumping and
struggling. Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her anxiety
lest Clare should be ill she ran up and knocked at his door, and asked
him what was the matter.

“Oh, nothing, dear,” he said from within. “I am so sorry I disturbed
you! But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and dreamt
that I was fighting that fellow again who insulted you, and the noise
you heard was my pummelling away with my fists at my portmanteau, which
I pulled out to-day for packing. I am occasionally liable to these
freaks in my sleep. Go to bed and think of it no more.”

This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her indecision.
Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not; but there was
another way. She sat down and wrote on the four pages of a note-sheet a
succinct narrative of those events of three or four years ago, put it
into an envelope, and directed it to Clare. Then, lest the flesh should
again be weak, she crept upstairs without any shoes and slipped the
note under his door.

Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she listened for
the first faint noise overhead. It came, as usual; he descended, as
usual. She descended. He met her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed
her. Surely it was as warmly as ever!

He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought. But he said not a
word to her about her revelation, even when they were alone. Could he
have had it? Unless he began the subject she felt that she could say
nothing. So the day passed, and it was evident that whatever he thought
he meant to keep to himself. Yet he was frank and affectionate as
before. Could it be that her doubts were childish? that he forgave her;
that he loved her for what she was, just as she was, and smiled at her
disquiet as at a foolish nightmare? Had he really received her note?
She glanced into his room, and could see nothing of it. It might be
that he forgave her. But even if he had not received it she had a
sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely would forgive her.

Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New Year’s Eve
broke—the wedding day.

The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through the whole of
this last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something of
the position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her own.
When they arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were surprised to
see what effects had been produced in the large kitchen for their glory
since they had last beheld it. At some unnatural hour of the morning
the dairyman had caused the yawning chimney-corner to be whitened, and
the brick hearth reddened, and a blazing yellow damask blower to be
hung across the arch in place of the old grimy blue cotton one with a
black sprig pattern which had formerly done duty there. This renovated
aspect of what was the focus indeed of the room on a full winter
morning threw a smiling demeanour over the whole apartment.

“I was determined to do summat in honour o’t”, said the dairyman. “And
as you wouldn’t hear of my gieing a rattling good randy wi’ fiddles and
bass-viols complete, as we should ha’ done in old times, this was all I
could think o’ as a noiseless thing.”

Tess’s friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have been
present at the ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact nobody
was invited from Marlott. As for Angel’s family, he had written and
duly informed them of the time, and assured them that he would be glad
to see one at least of them there for the day if he would like to come.
His brothers had not replied at all, seeming to be indignant with him;
while his father and mother had written a rather sad letter, deploring
his precipitancy in rushing into marriage, but making the best of the
matter by saying that, though a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law
they could have expected, their son had arrived at an age which he
might be supposed to be the best judge.

This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would have
done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to surprise
them ere long. To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as a d’Urberville
and a lady, he had felt to be temerarious and risky; hence he had
concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized with worldly ways
by a few months’ travel and reading with him, he could take her on a
visit to his parents and impart the knowledge while triumphantly
producing her as worthy of such an ancient line. It was a pretty
lover’s dream, if no more. Perhaps Tess’s lineage had more value for
himself than for anybody in the world beside.

Her perception that Angel’s bearing towards her still remained in no
whit altered by her own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful
if he could have received it. She rose from breakfast before he had
finished, and hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once
more into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare’s den, or rather
eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood at the open door
of the apartment, regarding and pondering. She stooped to the threshold
of the doorway, where she had pushed in the note two or three days
earlier in such excitement. The carpet reached close to the sill, and
under the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint white margin of
the envelope containing her letter to him, which he obviously had never
seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it beneath the carpet as
well as beneath the door.

With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it
was—sealed up, just as it had left her hands. The mountain had not yet
been removed. She could not let him read it now, the house being in
full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room she
destroyed the letter there.

She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious. The
incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it prevented a
confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need not; there was
still time. Yet everything was in a stir; there was coming and going;
all had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick having been asked to
accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate talk was
well-nigh impossible. The only minute Tess could get to be alone with
Clare was when they met upon the landing.

“I am so anxious to talk to you—I want to confess all my faults and
blunders!” she said with attempted lightness.

“No, no—we can’t have faults talked of—you must be deemed perfect
to-day at least, my Sweet!” he cried. “We shall have plenty of time,
hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at
the same time.”

“But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you could
not say—”

“Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say, as soon as we
are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my faults
then. But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent
matter for a dull time.”

“Then you don’t wish me to, dearest?”

“I do not, Tessy, really.”

The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this.
Those words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection. She
was whirled onward through the next couple of critical hours by the
mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further
meditation. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to
call him her lord, her own—then, if necessary, to die—had at last
lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway. In dressing, she
moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which
eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive,
particularly as it was winter. A closed carriage was ordered from a
roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the old
days of post-chaise travelling. It had stout wheel-spokes and heavy
felloes, a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole
like a battering-ram. The postilion was a venerable “boy” of sixty—a
martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive exposure in youth,
counter-acted by strong liquors—who had stood at inn-doors doing
nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed since he
had no longer been required to ride professionally, as if expecting the
old times to come back again. He had a permanent running wound on the
outside of his right leg, originated by the constant bruisings of
aristocratic carriage-poles during the many years that he had been in
regular employ at the King’s Arms, Casterbridge.

Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind this decayed
conductor, the partie carrée took their seats—the bride and
bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel would have liked one at least of
his brothers to be present as groomsman, but their silence after his
gentle hint to that effect by letter had signified that they did not
care to come. They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be
expected to countenance it. Perhaps it was as well that they could not
be present. They were not worldly young fellows, but fraternizing with
dairy-folk would have struck unpleasantly upon their biased niceness,
apart from their views of the match.

Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew nothing of this, did not
see anything, did not know the road they were taking to the church. She
knew that Angel was close to her; all the rest was a luminous mist. She
was a sort of celestial person, who owed her being to poetry—one of
those classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to her about
when they took their walks together.

The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people
in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced no
more effect upon her. They were at stellar distances from her present
world. In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her faith to him
the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy. At a pause in the
service, while they were kneeling together, she unconsciously inclined
herself towards him, so that her shoulder touched his arm; she had been
frightened by a passing thought, and the movement had been automatic,
to assure herself that he was really there, and to fortify her belief
that his fidelity would be proof against all things.

Clare knew that she loved him—every curve of her form showed that—but
he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its
single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed,
what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.

As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their rests,
and a modest peal of three notes broke forth—that limited amount of
expression having been deemed sufficient by the church builders for the
joys of such a small parish. Passing by the tower with her husband on
the path to the gate she could feel the vibrant air humming round them
from the louvred belfry in the circle of sound, and it matched the
highly-charged mental atmosphere in which she was living.

This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation
not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till
the sound of the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the
wedding-service had calmed down. Her eyes could dwell upon details more
clearly now, and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig to be
sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple, she observed
the build and character of that conveyance for the first time. Sitting
in silence she regarded it long.

“I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy,” said Clare.

“Yes,” she answered, putting her hand to her brow. “I tremble at many
things. It is all so serious, Angel. Among other things I seem to have
seen this carriage before, to be very well acquainted with it. It is
very odd—I must have seen it in a dream.”

“Oh—you have heard the legend of the d’Urberville Coach—that well-known
superstition of this county about your family when they were very
popular here; and this lumbering old thing reminds you of it.”

“I have never heard of it to my knowledge,” said she. “What is the
legend—may I know it?”

“Well—I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A certain
d’Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a
dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time members of the
family see or hear the old coach whenever—— But I’ll tell you another
day—it is rather gloomy. Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been
brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable caravan.”

“I don’t remember hearing it before,” she murmured. “Is it when we are
going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it when we
have committed a crime?”

“Now, Tess!”

He silenced her by a kiss.

By the time they reached home she was contrite and spiritless. She was
Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any moral right to the name? Was
she not more truly Mrs Alexander d’Urberville? Could intensity of love
justify what might be considered in upright souls as culpable
reticence? She knew not what was expected of women in such cases; and
she had no counsellor.

However, when she found herself alone in her room for a few minutes—the
last day this on which she was ever to enter it—she knelt down and
prayed. She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had
her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself
almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion
expressed by Friar Laurence: “These violent delights have violent
ends.” It might be too desperate for human conditions—too rank, to
wild, too deadly.

“O my love, why do I love you so!” she whispered there alone; “for she
you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have
been!”

Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided to
fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old
farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during his
investigation of flour processes. At two o’clock there was nothing left
to do but to start. All the servantry of the dairy were standing in the
red-brick entry to see them go out, the dairyman and his wife following
to the door. Tess saw her three chamber-mates in a row against the
wall, pensively inclining their heads. She had much questioned if they
would appear at the parting moment; but there they were, stoical and
staunch to the last. She knew why the delicate Retty looked so fragile,
and Izz so tragically sorrowful, and Marian so blank; and she forgot
her own dogging shadow for a moment in contemplating theirs.

She impulsively whispered to him—

“Will you kiss ’em all, once, poor things, for the first and last
time?”

Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality—which
was all that it was to him—and as he passed them he kissed them in
succession where they stood, saying “Goodbye” to each as he did so.
When they reached the door Tess femininely glanced back to discern the
effect of that kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her glance, as
there might have been. If there had it would have disappeared when she
saw how moved the girls all were. The kiss had obviously done harm by
awakening feelings they were trying to subdue.

Of all this Clare was unconscious. Passing on to the wicket-gate he
shook hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed his last
thanks to them for their attentions; after which there was a moment of
silence before they had moved off. It was interrupted by the crowing of
a cock. The white one with the rose comb had come and settled on the
palings in front of the house, within a few yards of them, and his
notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling away like echoes down a
valley of rocks.

“Oh?” said Mrs Crick. “An afternoon crow!”

Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding it open.

“That’s bad,” one murmured to the other, not thinking that the words
could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.

The cock crew again—straight towards Clare.

“Well!” said the dairyman.

“I don’t like to hear him!” said Tess to her husband. “Tell the man to
drive on. Goodbye, goodbye!”

The cock crew again.

“Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I’ll twist your neck!” said the
dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him
away. And to his wife as they went indoors: “Now, to think o’ that just
to-day! I’ve not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year afore.”

“It only means a change in the weather,” said she; “not what you think:
’tis impossible!”