 20 The season developed and matured. The year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Raised from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out secrets in invisible jets and breathings. Derryman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenience is begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough. Thus passed the leafy time when arborescent seems to be the only thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Claire unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one veil. Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now. Possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover, she and Claire also stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love. Where no profundities have been reached, no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past? Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Claire as yet, a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher's regard of an exceeding novel, fresh and interesting specimen of womankind. They met continually. They could not help it. They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn, for it was necessary to rise early, so very early here. Milking was done be times, and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually felt a lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest. First being aroused by an alarm clock, and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the alarm as the others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed than she left her room and ran to the Derryman's door, then up the ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper, then woke her fellow Derrymaids. By the time that Tess was dressed, Claire was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the Derryman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not appear until a quarter of an hour later. The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day's clothes, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive. In the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse. Being so often, possibly not always by chance, the first two persons to get up at the Derry House, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral half-compounded aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim, inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Claire to exhibit a dignified largeness, both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon. Very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at Midsummer Dawn's. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere. The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalene might be at his side. Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade, his companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence about it. She looked ghostly as if she were merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the North East. His own face, though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her. It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman, a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis Demeter and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them. Call me Tess," she would say, askance, and he did. Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply feminine. They had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being who craved it. At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl. Others came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead, or if already on the spot hardly maintained their standing in the water, as the pair walked by, watched them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork. They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpains spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small extent. On the grey moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night. Dark green islands of dry herbage, the size of their carcasses, in a general sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail by which the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which they found her, the snoring puff from her nostrils when she recognized them, making an intense little fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then they drove the animals back to the bartern, or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require. And perhaps the summer fog was more general, and their meadows lay like a white sea out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks. Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the wing sunning themselves, or a light on the wet rails subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops upon her hair like seed-pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace, these dried off her. Moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty, her teeth, lips and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams, and she was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of the world. At this time they would hear Derry-man Crick's voice, lecturing the non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old Deborah Fyanda for not washing her hands. "'Forever and sake, pop thy hands under the pump-deb! Upon my soul, if the London folk only know'd of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd swallow their milk and butter more mincingly than they do already, and that's saying a good deal.' The milking proceeded, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast-table dragged out from the wall in the kitchen by Mrs. Crick, this being the invariable preliminary to each meal, the same horrible scrape accompanying its return journey when the table had been cleared. CHAPTER XXI. There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The churn revolved as usual, for the butter would not come. Whenever this happened the dairy was paralysed. Squish-squash echoed the milk in the great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for. Simon Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marion, Retty Priddle, Iz Hewitt and the married ones from the cottages, also Mr. Clare, Jonathan Cale, Old Deborah and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the churn, and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation. Even the melancholy horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair at each walk round. "'Tis year since I went to conjure a trendled son at Egton, years,' said the dairyman bitterly, and he was nothing to whatever his father had been. I have said it fifty times if I have said it once, that I don't believe in him, and I shall have to go to him if he's alive, but yes I shall have to go to him if this sort of thing continues.' Even Mr. Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's desperation. "'Conjure a fall to the other side of Castor Bridge, that they used to call Wido, was a very good man when I was a boy,' said Jonathan Cale. But he's rotten as touch would buy now.' "'My grandfather used to go to Contra and Mighton, out by Elscombe, and a clever man I was, so I've heard grandfather say,' continued Mr. Crick, "'but there's no such genuine folk about nowadays.' Mrs. Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand. "'Perhaps somebody in the house is in love,' she said tentatively. "'I've heard telling my younger days that that will cause it. Why, Crick, that made we had years ago, dear mind, and how the butter didn't come then.' "'Oh, yes, yes, but that isn't the right's aunt. It had nothing to do with the love-making. I could make all about it, towards the damage to the churn.' He turned to Clare. "'Jack Dollop, a horse-bird of a fellow, we had there as a milker at one time here, sir, caught in a young woman over at Melstock, and deceived her, as he had deceived many of four. And he had another sort of woman to reckon with this time, and it were not the girl herself. One holy Tuesday of all the days of the almanac, we was here as we mid-be now. Only there was no churning in hand. When we did the girl's mother coming up to the door, we a great brass-mounted umbrella in her hand, that would have felled an ox, and saying, Do Jack Dollop work here? Because I want him. I have a big bone to pick with he. I can assure him.' And some way behind her mother walked Jack's young woman, crying bitterly into her anchor chair. "'Lord, there's a time,' said Jack, looking out at the window at him. "'She'll murder me. Well, shall I get? Where shall I—' "'Don't tell her where I be.' And with that he scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and shut himself inside, just as the young woman's mother busted into the milk-house. "'The villain, where is he?' says she, all clore his face for her, let me only catch him. Well, she hunted about everywhere, badly ragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying a-most stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid, a young woman, rather, standing at the door, crying her eyes out, I shall never forget it, never, to an a-melting-a-marble stone, but she couldn't find him nowhere at all. The dairy-man paused, and one or two words of comment came from the listeners. Dairy-man-crick's stories often seemed to be ended where they were not really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature ejaculations of finality, though old friends knew better. The narrator went on. "'Well, how the old woman should have found the whip to guess it, I would never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.' Without saying a word, she took hold of the winch. It was turned by hand, poor, then. And round she swung him, and Jack began to flock about inside. "'Oh, lard, stop the churn, let me out,' says he, popping out his head. I shall be churned into a pummy.' He was a cowardly chap in his heart, as most men mostly be. "'Not till ye make amends for ravaging her virgin innocence,' says the old woman. "'Stop the churn, your witch,' screams he. "'You call me old witch, do you, you deceiver?' says she. "'When you ought to have been calling me mother-in-law these last five months.' An arm went the churn, and Jack's bones rattled around again. Well, none of us ventured to interfere, and at last I promised to make it right we're. Yes, I'll be as good as my word,' he said, and so it ended that day. While the listeners were smiling their comments, there was a quick movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess, pale-faced, had gone to the door. "'How warm-tissed to-day,' she said almost inaudibly. It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door for her, saying with tender railery, "'Why, matey?' he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet name. "'The prettiest milker I've got in my dairy. You mustn't get so fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather. Oh, we should be finally put to for one of thee by Doug Day, shall we, Mr. Clare?' I was faint, and I think I am better out at doors,' she said mechanically, and disappeared outside. Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack. "'Come in!' cried Mrs. Crick, and the attention of all was called off from Tess. That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally, but she remained much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking was done she did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out of doors, wandering along she knew not with her. She was wretched—oh, so wretched—at the perception that to her companions the Dairy Man's story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise. None of them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it. To a certainty not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience. The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a solitary, cracked voice, Reed Sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the river in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn. In these long June days the milk-maids, and indeed most of the household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess usually accompanied her fellows upstairs. Indeed, however, she was the first to go to their common chamber, and she had dozed when the other girls came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour. She dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly turned her eyes towards them. Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were standing in a group, in their night-gowns, barefooted at the window, the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks, and the walls around them. They were watching somebody in the garden with deep interest, their three faces close together, a jovial and round one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were urban. Push, you can see as well as I," said Retty, the urban-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window. It is no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty Priddle, said jolly-faced Marion, the eldest, slyly. His thoughts be of other cheeks than thine. Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again. There he is again," cried Is Hewitt, the pale girl with dark damp hair and keenly cut lips. You needn't say anything is," answered Retty, for I did you kiss in his shade. What did you see her doing? asked Marion. Why, he was standing over the way-tub to let off the way, and the shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Is, who was standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall, and kissed the shade of his mouth, I zitter, though he didn't. Oh, Is Hewitt," said Marion. A rosy spot came into the middle of Is Hewitt's cheek. Well, there was no harm in't," she declared with attempted coolness, and if I be in love with him, so is Retty too, and so be you, Marion, come to that. Marion's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkiness. I," she said, what a tale! Oh! There he is again, dear Is, dear face, dear Mr. Clare. There, you've owned it! So have you, so have we all," said Marion, with the dry frankness of complete indifference to opinion. It is silly to pretend otherwise amongst ourselves, though we needn't own it to other folks. I would just Marion to-morrow. So would I, and more, murmured Is Hewitt, and I, too, whispered the more timid Retty. The listener grew warm. We can't all marry him, said Is. We shan't, either of us, which is worse still, said the eldest. There he is again. They all three blew him a silent kiss. Why?" asked Retty quickly. "'Because he likes to test Derby Field best,' said Marion, lowering her voice. I have watched him every day, and have found it out. There was a reflective silence. But she don't care anythin' foreign?' At length breathed Retty. "'Well, I sometimes think that, too.' "'But how silly all this is,' said Is Hewitt, impatiently. Of course he won't marry any one of us, or test, either, a gentleman, so new's going to be a great landowner, and a farmer abroad. More likely to ask us to come we in his farm hands at so much a year.' One side, and another side. And Marion's plump figure side the biggest of all. Somebody in bed, hard by, sighed, too. Others came into the eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty, red-haired youngest, the last bard of the Paradells, so important in the county annals. They watched silently a little longer, their three faces still close together as before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But the unconscious Mr. Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more, and the shades beginning to deepen they crept into their beds. In a few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own room. Marion was soon snoring. But Is did not drop into forgetfulness for a long time. Retty Priddle cried herself to sleep. The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to swallow that day. Perhaps the least feeling of jealousy arose in her breast. For that matter she knew herself to have the preference. Being more finely formed, better educated, and though the youngest except Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare's heart against these her candid friends. But the grave question was, ought she to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for either of them, in a serious sense, but there was or had been a chance of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy for her, and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed there. Such unequal attachments had led to marriage, and she had heard from Mrs. Crick that Mr. Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand acres of colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap. A farmwoman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him. And whether Mr. Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could never conscientiously allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously determined that she would never be tempted to do so, draw off Mr. Clare's attention from other women, for the brief happiness of sunning herself in his eyes, while he remained at Talberthays. CHAPTER XXII They came downstairs yawning next morning, but skimming and milking were preceded with, as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast. Dairy-man Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He had received a letter in which a customer had complained that the butter had a twang. "'And be gad, salt have,' said the dairy-man, who held in his left hand a wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. Yes, taste it for yourself.' Several of them gathered round him, and Mr. Clare tasted. Tess tasted. Also the indoor milk-maids, one or two of the milking men, and last of all Mrs. Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table. There certainly was a twang. The dairy-man, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed, "'Tis garlic!' And I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead. Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the butter in the same way. The dairy-man had not recognized the taste at the time, and thought the butter bewitched. "'We must overhaul that mead,' he resumed. This mustn't continue. All having armed themselves with old, pointed knives, they went out together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grasp for them. However, they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing to the importance of the search. The dairy-man at the upper end, with Mr. Clare, who had volunteered to help. Then Tess, Marion, Ishewitt, and Retty. Then Bill Lule, Jonathan, and the married dairy-women, Beck Krebs, with her woolly black hair and rolling eyes, and Flaxon Francis, presumptive from the winter's damps of the water-meads, who lived in their respective cottages. With eyes fixed upon the ground, they crept slowly across the strip of the field, returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture, but would have fallen under the eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious business. Not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being discoverable in the whole field. Yet such was the herb's pungency, that probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season the whole dairy's produce for the day. Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did, they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row, automatic, noiseless, and an alien observer, passing down the neighbouring lane, might well have been excused for massing them as hodge. As they crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected from the butter-cups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the strength of noon. Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with the rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not, of course, my accident that he walked next to Tess. "'Well, how are you?' he murmured. "'Very well, thank you, sir,' she replied demurely. As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only a half an hour before, the introductory style seemed a little superfluous, but they got no further in speech just then. They crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the dairyman who came next could stand it no longer. Upon my soul and body, this ear-stooping do fairly make my back open and shut, he exclaimed, straightening himself up slowly with an excruciated look, till quite upright. "'And you,' made he Tess, "'you wasn't well a day or two ago. This will make your headache finally. Don't do any more. If you'll fail feinty, leave the rest to finish it.' Dairyman crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr. Clare also stepped out of line and began privateering about for the weed. When she found him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night before made her the first to speak. "'Don't they look pretty?' she said. "'Who? Is he Hewitt and Retty?' Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a good farmer's wife, and that she ought to recommend them and obscure her own wretched charms. "'Pretty? Eh, well, yes, they are pretty girls, fresh-looking, I've often thought so.' "'Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long. Oh, no, unfortunately. They are excellent dairy-women. Yes, though not better than you. They skim better than I. Do they?' Clare remained observing them, not without their observing him. "'She's colouring up,' continued Tess heroically. "'Who? Retty Priddle?' "'Oh, why is that?' "'Because you are looking at her.' Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not go well further and cry, Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairy-woman and not a lady, and don't think of marrying me.' She followed Dairy-Man Crick, and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind. On this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him, never allowing herself as formally to remain long in his company, even if their juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three every chance. Tess was woman enough to realise from their avows to her that Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairy-maids in his keeping, and her preconception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of either in the least degree bred a tender aspect in Tess for what she deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple hearts who were his housemates might have gone weeping on her pilgrimage. CHAPTER XXIII The hot weather of July had crept upon the Munawares, and the atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as alopia to over the dairy-folk, the cows and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and hindering the late hay-making in the other-maids. It was Sunday morning. The milking was done, the outdoor milkers had gone home. This and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly, the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Melstock Church, which lay some three or four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now been two or three months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion. All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river, but this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the deluge, and the air was barmy and clear. The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Melstock ran along the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls reached the most depressed spot, they found that the result of the rain had been to flood the lane overshoe to a distance of some fifty yards. This would have been no serious hindrance on a weekday. They would have clicked through it in their high patterns and boots quite unconcerned. But on this day of vanity, this sun's day, when flesh went forward to coquette with flesh, while hypocritically affecting business with spiritual things, on this occasion for wearing their white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink white and lilac gowns, on which every mud-spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward impediment. They could hear the church bell calling, as yet nearly a mile off. Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summertime? said Marion from the top of the roadside bank on which they had climbed, and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of creeping along its slope till they were past the pool. We can't get there any how without walking right through it, or else go round the turnpike way, and that would make us very late, said Retty, pausing hopelessly. And I do colour up so heart-walking into church late, and all the people staring round, said Marion, that I hardly cool down again till we get into the that it may please these. While they stood clinging to the bank, they heard a splashing round the bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Claire advancing along the lane toward them through the water. Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously. His aspect was probably as unsabotarian a one as a dogmatic parson's son often presented, his attire being his dairy-clothes, his long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to cool his head down with a thistle-spud to finish him off. He's not going to church, said Marion. No, I wish he was, murmur-tes. Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly, to adopt the safe phrase of evasive controversialists, preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine summer days. This morning, however, he had gone out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or not. On his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though they had been so occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to notice him. He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it would soon quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help, one of them in particular. The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light-summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel's eyes at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four. She, being full of suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly. He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long boots and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies. Are you trying to get to church? He said to Marion, who was in front, including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess. Yes, sir, and it's getting late, and my colour do come up so. I'll carry you through the pool every jill of you. The whole four flashed as if one heart beat through them. I think you can't, sir, said Marion. It's the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense, you're not too heavy. I'll carry you all four together. Now, Marion, attend, he continued, and put your arms around my shoulders. So now, hold on, that's well done. Marion had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind, looking like the mere stem to a great nose gay suggested by hers. They disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sowsing footsteps and the top ribbon of Marion's bonnet told where they were. In a few minutes he reappeared. Is Hewitt was the next in order upon the bank? Here he comes, she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were dry with emotion, and I have to put my arms round his neck and look into his face as Marion did. There's nothing in that, said Tess, quickly. There is a time for everything, continued is, unheeding, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. The first is now going to be mine. Fie, it is scripture is. Yes, said is, I always a ear at church for pretty verses. Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a commonplace act of kindness, now approached is. She quietly and dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and that angel methodically marched off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time, Retty's throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the red-herd girl, and while he was seizing her, he glanced at Tess. His lips could not have pronounced more plainly. It will soon be you and I. Her comprehension appeared in her face. She could not help it. There was an understanding between them. Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most troublesome of Clare's burdens. Marion had been like a sack of meal, a dead weight of plumpness under which he had literally staggered. Is had ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics. However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her, and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was now her turn. She was embarrassed to discover that excitement of the proximity of Mr. Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contend in her companions, was intensified in herself, and as a fearful of betraying her secret, she pulted with him at the last moment. I may be able to climb along the bank, perhaps. I can climb better than they. You must be so tired, Mr. Clare." No, no, Tess, said he quickly, and almost before she was aware, she was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder. Three layers to one, Rachel, he whispered. They are better women than I, she replied, magnanimously sticking to her resolve. Not to me, said Angel. He saw her grow warm at this, and they went some steps in silence. I hope I am not too heavy, she said timidly. Oh, no, you should lift Mary in such a lump. You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun, and all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth. It is very pretty if I seem like that to you. Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter? No. I did not expect such an event today. Nor I. The water came up so sudden. That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to, the state of her breathing belied. Clare stood still, and inclined his face toward hers. Oh, Tessy, he exclaimed. The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly taking advantage of an accidental position, and he went no further with it. No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and suspension at this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly to make the remainder of the distance as long as possible. At last they came to the bend, and the rest of their progress was in full view of the other three. The dry land was reached, and he set her down. Her friends were looking with round, thoughtful eyes at her and him, and she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade them farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road. The four moved on together as before, till Marion broke the silence by saying, No, in all truth, we have no chance against her. She looked joylessly at Tess. What do you mean? asked the latter. He likes he best, very best. We could see it as he brought he. He would have kissed he if you would encourage him to do it ever so little. No, no, said she. The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished, and yet there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous young souls. They had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was to be. Tess's heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to him. There is contagion in this sentiment, especially among women, and yet that same hungry heart of hers compassionated her friends. Tess's honest nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the natural result had followed. I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you. She declared to Reti that night in the bedroom, her tears running down. I can't help this, my dear. I don't think marrying is in his mind at all, but if he were even to ask me, I should refuse as I should refuse any man. Oh, would you? Why? said wandering Reti. It cannot be, but I will be plain, putting myself quite on the other side. I don't think he will choose either of you. I have never expected it, thought of it. Moaned Reti, but oh, I wish I was dead. The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned to the two other girls who came upstairs just then. We be friends with her again, she said to them. She thinks no more of his choosing her than we do. So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm. I don't seem to care what I do now, said Marion, whose mood was turned to its lowest base. I was going to marry a dairyman at Stickelford, who asked me twice, but my soul I would put an end to myself rather than be his wife now. Why don't you speak, is? To confess then, murmured is, I made sure today that he was going to kiss me as he held me, and I lay still against his breast, hoping and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don't like boiding here at Talbothoy's any longer. I shall go home. The air of the sleeping chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel nature's law, an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and the torture was almost more than they could endure. The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was just a portion of one organism called sex. There was so much frankness and so little jealousy, because there was no hope. Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself heirs in the idea of outshining the others. The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation from a social point of view, its purposeless beginning, its self-bounded outlook, its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization, while lacking nothing in the eye of nature. The one fact that did exist, ecstaticizing them to a killing joy, all this imparted to them a resignation, a dignity which a practical and sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed. They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-ring dripped monotonously downstairs. "'Be you awake, Tess?' whispered one, half an hour later. It was Iz Hewitt's voice. Tess, replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marion suddenly flung the bed-clothes off them and sighed. "'So be we. I wonder what she be like. The lady they say his family have looked out for him.' "'I wonder,' said Iz. Some lady looked out for him, gasped Tess, starting, "'I have never heard of that.' "'Oh, yes,' his whispered, a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his family, a doctor of divinity's daughter, near his father's parish of Emmister. He don't much care for, they say, but he is sure to marry her.' They had heard so very little of this, yet it was enough to build up wretched, doldrum dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They pictured all the details of his being one round to consent, of the wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and veil, of her blissful home with him, then oblivion would have fallen upon themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus they talked and wept, till sleep charmed their sorrow away. After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that there even looked any grave and deliberate import in Claire's attentions to her. It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own temporary sake, nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest. She who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored. End of chapter 23. Chapter 24 Amid the using fatness and warm ferments of the vile veil, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fermentation, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings. June passed over their heads, and the thermodorian weather which had come in its wake seemed an effort on the part of nature to match the state of hearts at Tal Bethays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and innovating now. Its heavy scents weighed upon them, and at midday the landscape seemed lying in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures, but there were still bright green herbage here where the water-course is polled. And as Clair was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent tess. The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the dairyman's spring cart as he spared home from market licked up the pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribbons of dust as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows jumped wildly over the five-barred Barton Gate, maddened by the gadfly. Dairyman Crick kept his shirt sleeves permanently rolled up from Monday to Saturday. Open windows had no effect on ventilation without open doors, and the dairy garden, the black birds and thrushes crept out among the current bushes rather in the manner of quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were lazy, teasing and familiar, crawling about in unwanted places, on the floor, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaid's hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke, while butter-making and still more butter-making was a despair. They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience without driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the diurnal roll, and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still for the flies. On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them being dumpling and old pretty, who loved Tess's hands above those of any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length and the pale against her knee went round to where they stood. Soon the sound of old pretty's milk fizzing into the pale came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there. He being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself. All the men and some of the women when milking dug their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pale, but a few, mainly the younger ones, rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Derbyfield's habit, a temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking old pretty thus, and the sun chanting to be on the milking side, it shone flat against her pink-gowned form and her white-curtained bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the done background of the cow. She did not know that Clare had followed her around, and that he sat under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was remarkable. She might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet unseen. Nothing in the picture moved but old pretty's tail and Tess's pink hands. The latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart. How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it. All was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation, and it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking as he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair, brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely. Her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him, that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he as a lover might have called them offhand. But no, they were not perfect, and it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity. Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease. And now, as they again confronted him, clothed with color and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well-nigh produced a quarm, and actually produced by some mysterious physiological process a prosaic sneeze. She then became conscious that he was observing her, but she would not show it by any change of position, though the curious dreamlike fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it was left. The influence that had passed into Clare, like an excitation from the sky, did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and leaving his pale to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went quickly toward the desire of his eyes, and kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms. Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something like a very ecstatic cry. He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he had checked himself for tender conscience sake. Forgive me, Tess, dear, he whispered. I ought to have asked. I did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted to you, Tessie, dearest, in all sincerity. Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled, and seeing two people crouching under her wear by immemorial custom, there should have been only one lifted her hind leg crossly. She's angry. She doesn't know what we mean. She'll kick over the milk, exclaimed Tess gently striving to be free herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped's action, her heart more deeply concerned with herself and Claire. She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still encircling her. Tess's eyes fixed on distance, began to fill. Why do you cry, my darling? he said. Oh, I don't know, she murmured. As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in, she became agitated and tried to withdraw. Well, I had betrayed my feeling, Tess at last, said he with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart had outrun his judgment. That I love you dearly, and truly I need not say, but I, it shall go no further now, it distresses you. I'm surprised as you are, you will not think I have presumed upon your defenselessness, being too quick and unreflecting, will you? Hmm, I can't tell. He had allowed her to free herself, and in a minute or two the milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one, and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them, something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures, something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have despised as a practical man, yet which was based upon a more stubborn and restless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside. The tract of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon hence forward, for a short time, or for a long. End of Chapter 24 and End of Phase III Chapter 25 of Tests of the Derbervilles by Thomas Hardy This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Tests of the Derbervilles by Thomas Hardy Read by Adrian Pretzelis Phase IV The Consequence Chapter 25 Claire, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who had won him having retired to her chamber. The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark and less on the grass. Roads, garden paths, the house fronts, the bartend walls, were warm as hearths and reflected the noontide temperature into the noctambulist's face. He sat in the east gate of the dairy-yard and knew not want to think of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day. Since the sudden embrace three hours before, the twain had kept apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed at what had occurred, while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance, disquieted him, palpitating, concocted him palpitating, contemplated being that he was, he could hardly realise their true relations to each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be before third parties hence forward. Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary residence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and easily forgotten. He had come as to a place from which, as to a screened alcove, he could calmly view the absorbing world without, and apostrophising it with Walt Whitman, crowds of men and women are tired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! Resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold, the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb show, while here in this apparently dim and impassioned place novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never for him started up elsewhere. Every window of the house being open, Claire could hear across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. That dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never hear the two deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoited as an object of any quality whatever in the landscape. What was it now? The aged and likened brick gables breathed forth, stay. The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned. The creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar and whole, overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's. It was amazing indeed to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him, and though new love was to be held partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leaves a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the Pachydermatous King. Looking at it thus, he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere. Despite his heterodoxy, faults and weaknesses, Claire was a man of conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss, but a woman living her precious life, a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as greater dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess. Through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day, in the particular year, in which she was born. This consciousness upon which she had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafe to Tess by an unsympathetic first cause, her all, her every and only chance. How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than himself, as a pretty trifle to caress and grow weary of, and not deal in the great seriousness with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her, so fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve in order that it might not agonise and wreck her? To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall into endearment, flesh and blood could not resist it. And having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which they would be mutually engaged, as yet the harm done was small. But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach her. He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse. He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible to sound them upon this. In less than five months his term here would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in a position to start on his own account. Would not a farmer want a wife? And should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax figure or a woman who understood farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey. One morning, when they sat down at breakfast at Talbothoy's dairy, some maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr. Clare that day. Oh, no! said dairyman Crick. Mr. Clare has gone home to Emynster to spend a few days with his kinfolk. For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. He's getting on towards the end of his time with me, added the dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal, and so I suppose he is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere. How much longer is he to bode here? Asked is Hewitt, the only one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the question. The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung upon it. Retty with parted lips gazing on the tablecloth, Marian with heat added to her redness, tess throbbing and looking out at the meads. Well, I can't mind that exact day without looking at my memorandum book, replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern. And even that may be altered a bit. He'll bode to get a little practice in the carving out at the straw-yard for certain. He'll hang on to the end of the year, I should say. Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society, of pleasure girded about with pain. After that, the blackness of unutterable night At this moment of the morning, Angel Clair was riding along a narrow lane, ten miles distance from the breakfasters, in the direction of his father's vicarage at Eminster, carrying, as well as he could, a little basket which contained some black puddings and a bottle of mead sent by Mrs. Crick with her kind regards to his parents. The white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it, but they were staring into the next year, and not at the lane. He loved her, oughty to marry her? Dare he to marry her? What would his mother and brothers say? What would he himself say in a couple of years after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness. His father's hill surrounded little town, the Tudor church-toward of Redstone, the clump of trees near the vicarage came at last into view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate. Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his home, he beheld, standing by the vestry door, a group of girls, ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of some other one, who in a moment became visible. A figure somewhat older than the schoolgirls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and highly starched cambrick mourning gown with a couple of books in her hand. Claire knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him. He hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go and speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him. The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope that he might wed some day. She was great at antinomanianism and Bible classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now. Claire's mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens of the Var Vale, their rosy faces caught patched with cow droppings, and to one, the most impassioned of them all. It was on the impulse of the moment that he resolved a trot over to Eminster, and hence had not written to apprise his father and mother, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour, before they should have gone out to their parish duties. He was a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal. The group at table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he entered. They were his father and mother, his brother, the Reverend Felix, curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside of a fortnight, and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the classical scholar and fellow and dean of his college, down from Cambridge for the long vacation. His mother appeared in a cap and silver spectacles, and his father looked what, in fact, he was, an earnest, god-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five. His pale face lined with thought and purpose. Over their heads hung the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to Africa. Old Mr. Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, an evangelical of the evangelicals, a conversionist, a man of apostolic simplicity in life, and thought he had, in his raw youth, made up his mind once and for all on the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further reasoning on them hence-forward. He was regarded even by those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme. While, on the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly one to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St. John, hated St. James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philoman. The New Testament was less a Christianad than a polyad to his intelligence, less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a remunerative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhäuser and Lepardi. He despised the cannons and the rubric, swore by the articles, and deemed himself consistent through the whole category, which in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly was. Sincere. To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood, which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Vare Vale, his temper would have been quite antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time, Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father in a moment of irritation that it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilisation and not Palestine. And his father's grief was of that blank description which could not realise that there might lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much less a half-truth or a whole-truth in such a proposition. He had simply preached Osteally at Angel for some time after. But the kindness of his heart was such that he never resented anything for long and welcomed his son to-day with a smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's. Angel sat down, and the place felt like home. Yet he did not so much as formally feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations, still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, and nadereal hell was foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet. Lately he had seen only life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammeled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate. On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence from the angel-clear of former times. It was chiefly a difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer. He flunked his legs about, the muscles of his face had grown more expressive his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared, still more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothoi's nymphs and swains. After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-educated, hallmarked young men, correct to their remotest fibre. Such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and a string, they wore a single eyeglass and a string. When it was the custom to wear a double-glass, they wore a double-glass. When it was the custom to wear spectacles, they wore spectacle straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned, they carried pocket copies, and when Shelley was belittled, they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Corregio's holy families were admired, they admired Corregio's holy families. When he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection. If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all church, cuthbert, all college. His diocesan synod and visitations were the mainspring of the world to the one, Cambridge, to the other. Each brother candidly recognised that there were a few unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither university men nor church men, but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected. They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching. Cuthbert was, on the whole, the more liberal-minded, though with a greater subtlety. He had not so much heart. As they walked along the hillside, Angel's former feeling revived in him, that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw nor set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth, that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking. I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow. Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity. And therefore we must make the best of it. But I do intrigue you to endeavor to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideas. Farming, of course, means roughing it externally, but high thinking may go with plain living nevertheless. Of course it may, said Angel. Was it not proven 1900 years ago, if I made trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals? Well, I fancied from the tone of your letters and our conversation. It may be fancy only, that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp. Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert? Now, Felix, said Angel dryly, we are very good friends, you know, each of us treading our allotted circles. But if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone and inquire at what has become of yours. They returned down the hill to dinner, which were fixed at any time at which their fathers and mother's morning work in the parish usually concluded. Convenience, as regarded afternoon callers, was the last thing to enter into the consideration of selfish Mr. and Mrs. Clare. Though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions. The walk had made them hungry. Angel, in particular, who was now an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse darpays in empty of the dairyman's somewhat coarsely laden table. But neither of the old people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh. Their own appetites being quite forgotten. The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold vians was deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs. Crick's black puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother to appreciate the marvellous herbal savers as highly as he did himself. Ah, you are looking for the black puddings, my dear boy, observed Clare's mother, but I am sure you will not mind doing without them, as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I suggested to him that we should take Mrs. Crick's kind present to the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his tax of delirium tremens, and he agreed that it would be a great pleasure to them, so we did. Of course, said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead. I found the mead so extremely alcoholic, continued his mother, that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or brandy in an emergency, so I have put it in my medicine-chest. We never drink spirits at this table on principle, added his father. But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife, said Angel? The truth, of course, said his father. I rather wanted to say we had enjoyed the mead and the black puddings very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly I return. You cannot, if we did not, Mr. Clare answered lucidly. Ah, no, though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple. Oh, what? said Cuthbert and Felix both. Oh, it is an expression they used down at Talbothe's, replied Angel, blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice, if wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more. End of Chapter 25. Chapter 26 of Tests of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy Chapter 26 It was not until the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found opportunity approaching to his father one or two subjects near his heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of their walking boots. When the service was over, they went out of the room with their mother, and Mr. Clare and himself were left alone. The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale, either in England or in the colonies. His father then told him that, as he had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had felt at his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the purchase or lease of land for him someday, that he might not feel himself unduly slighted. As far as world wealth goes, continued his father, you will no doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years. This considerateness on old Mr. Clare's part led Angel onward to the other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then six and twenty, and that when he would start in the farming business, he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all matters. Someone would be necessary to superintend the domestic labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be well, therefore, for him to marry? His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable, and then Angel put the question, What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty, hardworking farmer? A truly Christian woman who would be of help and a comfort to you in your goings out and your comings in. Beyond that it really matters little. Such a one can be found. Indeed, my earnest-minded friend and neighbour, Dr. Chance, but ought she not primarily be able to milk cows, churn good butter, make immense cheeses, know how to sit hens and turkeys and rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate the value of sheep and calves? As a farmer's wife, yes, certainly it would be desirable. Mr. Clare the Elder had plainly never thought of these points before. I was going to add, he said, that for a pure and saintly woman you will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more to your mother's mind and my own than your friend Mercy, whom you used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour Chance's daughter has lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round about us, for decorating the communion table. Altar, as I was shocked to hear her call it one day, with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as I, said that it can be cured. It is a mere girlish outbreak, which I am sure will not be permanent. Yes, yes, Mercy is good and devout, I know, but, father, don't you think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant, but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments, understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself would suit me infinitely better? His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's wife's duties came second at to a poor line view of humanity, and the impulsive angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that fate or providence had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturalist, and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had attached herself to the sound low church school of his father, but she would probably be open to conviction on that point. She was a regular churchgoer of simple faith, honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vessel, and in personal appearance exceptionally beautiful. Is she of a family such that you would care to marry into a lady in short? asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study during the conversation. She is not what in common parlance is called a lady, said Angel unflinchingly, for she is a cottage's daughter, as I am proud to say, but she is a lady nevertheless in feeling and nature. Mercy Chant is of a very good family. Poo, what's the advantage of that mother? said Angel quickly. How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have, and shall have to do? Mercy is accomplished, and accomplishments have their charm. Returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles. As to external accomplishments, what will be the use in them in the life I am going to lead? While as to her reading, I can take that in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her. She's brim full of poetry, actualised poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper poets only write, and she's an unimpeachable Christian, I'm sure, perhaps of the very tribe, genus, and species you desire to propagate. Oh, Angel, you are mocking. Mother, I beg pardon, but as she really does attend church almost every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I'm sure you will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel that I may do worse than choose her. Angel waxed quite earnest in that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess, which, never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead, he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially naturalistic. In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right whatsoever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr. and Mrs. Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked, that she at least was sound in her views, especially as the conjunction of the pair must have risen by an act of providence, for Angel would never have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would not object to see her. Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt that single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people, which would require some tact to overcome, for though legally at liberty to do as he choose, and though their daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference in their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them, he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the most important decision of his life. He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess's life, as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess, her soul, her heart, her substance, not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple, formal faith professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He held that education had as yet, but little affected the beats of emotion and impulse, on which domestic happiness depends. It was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involuntary, and even the unconscious instincts of human nature. But up to the present-day culture, as far as he can see, might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having laterally been extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social stratum than between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class. It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to return to his college and the other to his curacy. Angel might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweet heart at Halberthays. He would have been an awkward member of the party, for though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed Christiologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him, to neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess. His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him on his own mare a little way along the road. Having fairly well advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence as they jogged on together through the shady lanes to his father's account of his parish difficulties and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine. Pernicious! said Mr. Clare with genial scorn, and he proceeded to recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea. He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and well to do, and he also candidly admitted many failures. As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart squire named Durberville, living some forty miles off in the neighbourhood of Trantridge. Not one of the ancient Durbervilles of Kingsborough and other places, asked his son, that curiously historic worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the coach and fore. Oh, no! the original Durbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty or eighty years ago, at least, I believe so. This seems to be a new family which has taken the name. For the credit of the former nightly line, I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd to hear you express interest in old families, I thought you set less store by them even than I. You misapprehend me, father. You often do, said Angel, with a little impatience. Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves acclaim against their own succession, as Hamlet puts it, but lyrically, dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them. This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too subtle for Mr. Clare the Elder, and he went on with the story he had been about to relate, which was that, after the death of the senior so-called Durbervilles, the young man developed the most culpable passions, though he had a blind mother whose condition should have made him no better. A knowledge of his career having come to the ears of Mr. Clare, when he was in that part of the country preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and took for his text the words from St. Luke, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. The young man much resented this directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed, when they met, he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr. Clare without respect for his gray hairs. Angel flushed with distress. Dear Father, he said sadly, I wish you would not expose yourself to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels. Pain, said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of self-abdication. The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor, foolish young man. Do you supposed his incensed words could give me any pain, or even his blows? Be reviled, we bless, being persecuted, we suffer it. Being defamed, we entreat. We are made as the filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things until this day. Those ancient and noble words of the Corinthians are strictly true at this present hour. Not blows, Father. He did not proceed to blows. No, he did not, though I have borne blows from men in a mad state of intoxication. No. A dozen times, my boy, what then? I have saved them from the guilt of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby, and they have lived to thank me and praise God. May this young man do the same, said Angel fervently, but I fear otherwise from what you say. We'll hope nevertheless, said Mr. Clare, and I continue to pray for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never meet again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in his heart as a good seed some day. Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child, and, though the younger could not accept his parents' narrow dogma, he revered his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that, in the question of making Tessie his wife, his father had not once thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless. The same unworldliness would what had necessitated Angel's getting a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the position of poor Parsons for the term of their activities. Yet Angel admired it nonetheless. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren. End of Chapter 26