Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LII

During the small hours of the next morning, while it was still dark,
dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their
night’s rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till
daylight—noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of
the month as the voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same.
They were the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the
empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families;
for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required his
services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination. That this
might be accomplished within the day was the explanation of the
reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of the carters
being to reach the door of the outgoing households by six o’clock, when
the loading of their movables at once began.

But to Tess and her mother’s household no such anxious farmer sent his
team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were
not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at
their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that
morning, to find that though the weather was windy and louring, it did
not rain, and that the waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre
which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding,
damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.

Her mother, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger
children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light, and
the “house-ridding” was taken in hand.

It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two
assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in
position, a circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which
Joan Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through the
journey. After loading there was a long delay before the horses were
brought, these having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at
length, about two o’clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot
swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and family at the
top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent injury to its works, the
head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon,
struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next eldest
girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.

They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous
evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well, though,
in their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible to such a
family, harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except themselves.
Soon the equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew
keener with the change of level and soil.

The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many other
waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was built on a
wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the rural
labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement
was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles, and
finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly
in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and natural
position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they were bound to carry
reverently.

Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping
at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield
menagerie also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.

During the halt Tess’s eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which was
ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine
section of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also
drawn up at a little distance from the same inn. She followed one of
the mug’s journeys upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands
whose owner she well knew. Tess went towards the waggon.

“Marian and Izz!” she cried to the girls, for it was they, sitting with
the moving family at whose house they had lodged. “Are you
house-ridding to-day, like everybody else?”

They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for them at
Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost without notice, leaving
Groby to prosecute them if he chose. They told Tess their destination,
and Tess told them hers.

Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. “Do you know that
the gentleman who follows ’ee—you’ll guess who I mean—came to ask for
’ee at Flintcomb after you had gone? We didn’t tell’n where you was,
knowing you wouldn’t wish to see him.”

“Ah—but I did see him!” Tess murmured. “He found me.”

“And do he know where you be going?”

“I think so.”

“Husband come back?”

“No.”

She bade her acquaintance goodbye—for the respective carters had now
come out from the inn—and the two waggons resumed their journey in
opposite directions; the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the
ploughman’s family with whom they had thrown in their lot, being
brightly painted, and drawn by three powerful horses with shining brass
ornaments on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield
and her family rode was a creaking erection that would scarcely bear
the weight of the superincumbent load; one which had known no paint
since it was made, and drawn by two horses only. The contrast well
marked the difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer and
conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one’s coming.

The distance was great—too great for a day’s journey—and it was with
the utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had
started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned
the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland called
Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess
looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the
half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those
ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness:
Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered
the d’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five
hundred years.

A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards them, and when
he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he quickened his steps.

“You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?” he said to
Tess’s mother, who had descended to walk the remainder of the way.

She nodded. “Though widow of the late Sir John d’Urberville, poor
nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and returning to the domain of his
forefathers.”

“Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs Durbeyfield, I
am sent to tell ’ee that the rooms you wanted be let. We didn’t know
that you was coming till we got your letter this morning—when ’twas too
late. But no doubt you can get other lodgings somewhere.”

The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become ash-pale at his
intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly at fault. “What shall we do
now, Tess?” she said bitterly. “Here’s a welcome to your ancestors’
lands! However, let’s try further.”

They moved on into the town, and tried with all their might, Tess
remaining with the waggon to take care of the children whilst her
mother and ’Liza-Lu made inquiries. At the last return of Joan to the
vehicle, an hour later, when her search for accommodation had still
been fruitless, the driver of the waggon said the goods must be
unloaded, as the horses were half-dead, and he was bound to return part
of the way at least that night.

“Very well—unload it here,” said Joan recklessly. “I’ll get shelter
somewhere.”

The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a spot screened
from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon hauled down the poor heap
of household goods. This done, she paid him, reducing herself to almost
her last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them, only too
glad to get out of further dealings with such a family. It was a dry
night, and he guessed that they would come to no harm.

Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of
this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles,
upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass
handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked
in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the
reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a
roofless exposure for which they were never made. Round about were
deparked hills and slopes—now cut up into little paddocks—and the green
foundations that showed where the d’Urberville mansion once had stood;
also an outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always belonged to the
estate. Hard by, the aisle of the church called the d’Urberville Aisle
looked on imperturbably.

“Isn’t your family vault your own freehold?” said Tess’s mother, as she
returned from a reconnoitre of the church and graveyard. “Why, of
course ’tis, and that’s where we will camp, girls, till the place of
your ancestors finds us a roof! Now, Tess and ’Liza and Abraham, you
help me. We’ll make a nest for these children, and then we’ll have
another look round.”

Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour the old
four-post bedstead was dissociated from the heap of goods, and erected
under the south wall of the church, the part of the building known as
the d’Urberville Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay. Over the
tester of the bedstead was a beautiful traceried window, of many
lights, its date being the fifteenth century. It was called the
d’Urberville Window, and in the upper part could be discerned heraldic
emblems like those on Durbeyfield’s old seal and spoon.

Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an excellent tent of
it, and put the smaller children inside. “If it comes to the worst we
can sleep there too, for one night,” she said. “But let us try further
on, and get something for the dears to eat! O, Tess, what’s the use of
your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!”

Accompanied by ’Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended the little lane
which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got into
the street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. “Ah—I’m
looking for you!” he said, riding up to them. “This is indeed a family
gathering on the historic spot!”

It was Alec d’Urberville. “Where is Tess?” he asked.

Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily signified the
direction of the church, and went on, d’Urberville saying that he would
see them again, in case they should be still unsuccessful in their
search for shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had gone,
d’Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after came out on foot.

In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead,
remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could be
done to make them comfortable just then, she walked about the
churchyard, now beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall.
The door of the church was unfastened, and she entered it for the first
time in her life.

Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of the
family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were canopied,
altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their
brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like
martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders that she had ever
received that her people were socially extinct, there was none so
forcible as this spoliation.

She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D’URBERVILLE

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this
was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall knights of
whom her father had chanted in his cups lay inside.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest
of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not
noticed it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an odd
fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she
discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the
shock to her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was
quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not, however, till she
had recognized Alec d’Urberville in the form.

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

“I saw you come in,” he said smiling, “and got up there not to
interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with these
old fellows under us here? Listen.”

He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose a
hollow echo from below.

“That shook them a bit, I’ll warrant!” he continued. “And you thought I
was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no. The old order
changeth. The little finger of the sham d’Urberville can do more for
you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath.... Now command me.
What shall I do?”

“Go away!” she murmured.

“I will—I’ll look for your mother,” said he blandly. But in passing her
he whispered: “Mind this; you’ll be civil yet!”

When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the vaults, and
said—

“Why am I on the wrong side of this door!”

In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the
chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaan—the
Egypt of some other family who had left it only that morning. But the
girls did not for a long time think of where they were going. Their
talk was of Angel Clare and Tess, and Tess’s persistent lover, whose
connection with her previous history they had partly heard and partly
guessed ere this.

“’Tisn’t as though she had never known him afore,” said Marian. “His
having won her once makes all the difference in the world. ’Twould be a
thousand pities if he were to tole her away again. Mr Clare can never
be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her, and not
try to mend this quarrel? If he could on’y know what straits she’s put
to, and what’s hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.”

“Could we let him know?”

They thought of this all the way to their destination; but the bustle
of re-establishment in their new place took up all their attention
then. But when they were settled, a month later, they heard of Clare’s
approaching return, though they had learnt nothing more of Tess. Upon
that, agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet honourably disposed
to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few
lines were concocted between the two girls.

Honour’d Sir,

Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you.
For she is sore put to by an Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir,
there is one near her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be
try’d beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear away a
Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.

From Two Well-Wishers

This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever heard
him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which they
continued in a mood of emotional exaltation at their own generosity,
which made them sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the same time.

End of Phase the Sixth

Phase the Seventh:

Fulfilment