Tess of the d'Urbervilles

er narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations
were done. Tess’s voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its
opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she
had not wept.

But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer
transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate
looked impish—demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least
about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care.
The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic
problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility
with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments
when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of
things. But the essence of things had changed.

When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous
endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains,
repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind
foolishness.

Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the
intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring
the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had
imparted itself now. His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his
concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any
contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague
movement. When he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace
voice of the many varied tones she had heard from him.

“Tess!”

“Yes, dearest.”

“Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true. O you
cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are not... My
wife, my Tess—nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?”

“I am not out of my mind,” she said.

“And yet—” He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses: “Why
didn’t you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a
way—but I hindered you, I remember!”

These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of
the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and
bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where
he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.
Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this
position she crouched in a heap.

“In the name of our love, forgive me!” she whispered with a dry mouth.
“I have forgiven you for the same!”

And, as he did not answer, she said again—

“Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel.”

“You—yes, you do.”

“But you do not forgive me?”

“O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;
now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness meet such a
grotesque—prestidigitation as that!”

He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into
horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.

“Don’t—don’t! It kills me quite, that!” she shrieked. “O have mercy
upon me—have mercy!”

He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.

“Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?” she cried out. “Do you
know what this is to me?”

He shook his head.

“I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have
thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be
if I do not! That’s what I have felt, Angel!”

“I know that.”

“I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self! If it is I you
do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me!
Having begun to love you, I love you for ever—in all changes, in all
disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O
my own husband, stop loving me?”

“I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.”

“But who?”

“Another woman in your shape.”

She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive
foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of
imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was
upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth
had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his
view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped forward,
thinking she was going to fall.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said gently. “You are ill; and it is natural
that you should be.”

She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look
still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.

“I don’t belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?” she asked
helplessly. “It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he
says.”

The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was
ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she
turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.

Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had
happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of
the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the
violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had
lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.

“Angel,” she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice
of terror having left her now. “Angel, am I too wicked for you and me
to live together?”

“I have not been able to think what we can do.”

“I shan’t ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no
right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married,
as I said I would do; and I shan’t finish the good hussif I cut out and
meant to make while we were in lodgings.”

“Shan’t you?”

“No, I shan’t do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away
from me I shall not follow ’ee; and if you never speak to me any more I
shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.”

“And if I order you to do anything?”

“I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down
and die.”

“You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony
between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of
self-preservation.”

These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate sarcasms
at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat. The
charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only
received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled. She
remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for
her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a
tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it
rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. Meanwhile reillumination
as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought in
his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to
advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some consequent
action was necessary; yet what?

“Tess,” he said, as gently as he could speak, “I cannot stay—in this
room—just now. I will walk out a little way.”

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had
poured out for their supper—one for her, one for him—remained on the
table untasted. This was what their Agape had come to. At tea, two or
three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk
from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to,
roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily
flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting
out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and
the night was now clear.

She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without
purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black, sinister,
and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of
which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her
footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no
difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning arches of the
great bridge in front of the house.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain
having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away.
Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick
transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining
overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things of the
universe imaged in objects so mean.

The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley as
Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings
being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the
road wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare
without any attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with
dumb and vacant fidelity.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and
still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great
after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air
had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she
knew that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness; that Time
was chanting his satiric psalm at her then—

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. For thy
life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; And the veil of
thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.

He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now
insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a
weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help
addressing Clare.

“What have I done—what have I done! I have not told of anything that
interferes with or belies my love for you. You don’t think I planned
it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is
not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you
think me!”

“H’m—well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same.
But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not; and I
will do everything to avoid it.”

But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things
that would have been better left to silence.

“Angel!—Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing
of men.”

“You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.”

“Then will you not forgive me?”

“I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.”

“And love me?”

To this question he did not answer.

“O Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—she knows several
cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it
much—has got over it at least. And yet the woman had not loved him as I
do you!”

“Don’t, Tess; don’t argue. Different societies, different manners. You
almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have
never been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don’t
know what you say.”

“I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!”

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.

“So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your
pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot
help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your
want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit
conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by
informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung
child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete
aristocracy!”

“Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty’s family were once
large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett’s. And the Debbyhouses,
who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I
everywhere; ’tis a feature of our county, and I can’t help it.”

“So much the worse for the county.”

She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their
particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to
all else she was indifferent.

They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a
cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met
two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one
behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he
obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and
sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field,
progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the
cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation
with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not
bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long
while after.

During the interval of the cottager’s going and coming, she had said to
her husband—

“I don’t see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all
your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I
am not afraid.”

“I don’t wish to add murder to my other follies,” he said.

“I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on account of my
shame. They will not blame you then.”

“Don’t speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have
such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical
laughter than for tragedy. You don’t in the least understand the
quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by
nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by
returning to the house, and going to bed.”

“I will,” said she dutifully.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of
the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries
past, been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still
worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished,
creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the
temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having
been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying
his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the
main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back,
everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning.
She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to
her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down on
the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to
undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon
the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she
lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had
put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of
that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and
bring; whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time
would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he
had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked
now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that
he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.
When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among
so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which
welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence,
surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once,
possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house.
Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the
manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the
old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a
sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and
listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that
she was sleeping profoundly.

“Thank God!” murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of
bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that
having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now
reposing without care.

He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door
again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d’Urberville dames,
whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bedchamber.
In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister
design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of
revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice
of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it
in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing
sensation of a resemblance between them.

The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his
powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terrible sterile
expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the
face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave, yet who found no
advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing
contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.
Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all
the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but

The little less, and what worlds away!

He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not
indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate
to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which
as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was
telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,
discordant and contrasting?

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the
light. The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and
indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness,
and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the
happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or
change of mien.