 CHAPTER 27 An upheal and down-dale ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish mid-day atmosphere, brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green trough of sappiness and humidity, the veil of the vaar or frume. Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat deluvial soil below. The atmosphere grew heavier. The languid perfume of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Claire was now so familiar with the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names, when, a long distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury that he recognised his power of viewing life here from its inner side in a way that had been quite forgotten to him in his student days, and much as he loved his parents, he could not help being aware that to come here as now, after an experience of home life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages, even the one customary curb on the humours of English rural society being absent in this place. The denizens were all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so, which the exceedingly early hours kept in summertime rendered a necessity. At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak, fixed there for that purpose. All of them ready and dry for the evening milking. Angel entered and went through the silent passages of the house to the back-quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down. The grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage-plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas. He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour, and, with the stroke, Claire heard the creaking of the floorboards above, and then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's who, in another moment, came down before his eyes. She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the organ. Her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim fullness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time, when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh, and sex takes the outside place in the presentation. Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed, �Oh, Mr. Claire, how you frightened me? I� There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed relations which his declaration had introduced, but the full sense of the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Claire's tender look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair. �Dear darling Tessie� he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his face to her flushed cheek. �Don�t, for heaven�s sake, mister me any more. I�ve hastened back so soon because of you.� Tess�s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply, and there they stood upon the red brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast, upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been dying down in her clothes, she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue and black and gray and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second wakening might have regarded Adam. �I�ve got to go a skimming,� she pleaded, �and I�ve only owed Deb to help me today. Mrs. Crick is gone to market with Mr. Crick, and Retty is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won�t be home till milking. As they retreated to the milk-house, Deborah Fyander appeared on the stairs. �I�ve come back, Deborah,� said Mr. Clare, upwards, �so I can help Tess with the skimming, and as you�re very tired, I am sure, you needn�t come down till milking time.� Possibly Talbothe's milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that afternoon. Tess was in a dream, wherein familiar objects appeared as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work, her hand trembled. The ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in two burning a sun. Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it in nature�s way, for the unconstrained manners of Talbothe�s dairy came convenient now. �I might as well say it now as later, dearest� he resumed gently. �I wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been thinking of ever since that day last week in the Meads. �I shall soon want to marry, and being a farmer, you see, I shall require for my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be that woman, Tessie?� He put it in that way that she might not think he had yielded to an impulse of which his head would disapprove. She turned, quite care-worn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of proximity, the necessity of loving him, but she had not calculated upon this sudden corollary, which indeed Clare had put before her without quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the bitterness of dissolution, she murmured the words of her indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman. �Oh, Mr. Clare, I cannot be your wife. I cannot be.� The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and she bowed her face in her grief. �But Tess,� he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more greedily close, �do you say no?� �Surely you love me.� �Oh, yes, yes, and I would rather be yours than anybody's in the world,� returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl, �but I cannot marry you.� �Tess,� he said, holding her at arm's length, �you are engaged to marry someone else. �Oh, no! Then why do you refuse me? �I don't want to marry. I have not thought of doing it. I cannot. I only want to love you.� �But why?� Driven to sub-diffuse, she stammered, �Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn't like you to marry such as me. She will want you to marry a lady.� �Nonsense! I have spoken to them both. That is partly why I went home. �I feel I cannot. Never, never!� she echoed. �Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my pretty? Yes, I did not expect it. �If you will let it pass, please, Tessie, I will give you time,� he said. �It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once. I'll not allude to it again for a while.� She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as she might. Sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring tears drawn forth by a grief-witch to this her best friend and dear advocate she could never explain. �I can't, skim, I can't� she said, turning away from him. Not to agitate and hinder her longer, but considerate Clare began talking in a more general way. �You quite misapprehend, my parents. They are the most simple-mannered people alive and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining evangelical school. Tessie, are you an evangelical? I don't know. You go to church very regularly, and our passon here is not very high, they tell me. Tessie's ideas on the view of the parish clergyman, whom she'd heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard him at all. �I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do� she remarked as a safe generality. �It is often a great sorrow to me� She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she did not know whether her principles were high, low or broad. He himself knew that in reality the confused beliefs which she held apparently imbibed in childhood were, if anything, tractarian as to phraseology, and pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise to disturb them was his last desire. �Leave thou thy sister when she prays, her early heaven her happy views, nor thou with shadowed hint confuse a life that leads melodious days.� He had occasionally thought the council lest honest the musical, but he gladly conformed to it now. He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode of life, of his zeal for his principles. She grew serena, and the undulations disappeared from her skimming. As she finished one lead after another he followed her and drew the plugs for letting down the milk. �I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in.� She ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of herself. �Yes, well, my father has been talking a good deal to me of his troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me. He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffettings from people in a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy to some missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there, son of some land-owner up that way, and who has a mother afflicted with blindness. My father addressed himself to the gentleman point blank, and there was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless. But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season, and of course he makes many enemies not only among the absolutely vicious, but among the easy going who hate to be bothered. He says he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly, but I wish he would not so wear himself out now he's getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing. Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical, and she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clairs revived thoughts of his father prevented his noticing her particularly, and so they went on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished and drained them off, when the other maids returned and took their pales, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows, he said to her softly, and my question, Tessy? Oh, no, no, replied she, with grave hopelessness, as one who had heard and knew the turmoil of her own past in the illusion of Alec Derbeville. It can't be. She went out toward the mead, joining the other milk-maids with a bound, as if to try to make the open air drive away her sad constraint. All the goals drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in the further mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild animals, the reckless unchastened motion of women accustomed to unlimited space in which they abandoned themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained nature and not from the abodes of art. CHAPTER XXVIII Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative, and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness. As she had already permitted him to make love to her, he reared as an additional assurance. Not fully trowing that in the fields and pastures to sigh gratis is by no means deemed waste. Love-making being here more often accepted inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake than in the carking, anxious homes of the ambitious, where a girl's craving for an establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion. Tess, why did you say no in such a positive way? He asked her in the course of a few days. She started. Don't ask me. I told you why, partly. I'm not good enough, not worthy enough. How? Not fine lady enough? Yes, something like that. Did she? Your friends would scorn me. Indeed, you'll mistake them, my father and mother. As for my brothers, I don't care. He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her from slipping away. Now, you did not mean it, sweet. I'm sure you did not. You have made me so restless that I cannot read or play or do anything. I'm in no hurry, Tess. But I want to know to hear from your own warm lips that you will some day be mine any time you may choose, but some day she could only shake her head and look away from him. Claire regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as if they had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real. Then I ought not to hold you in this way, ought I? I have no right to you, no right to seek out where you are or to walk with you. Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man? How can you ask? She said with continued self-suppression. I almost know that you do not, but then why do you repulse me? I don't repulse you. I'd like you to tell me you love me, and you may always tell me so as you go about with me and never offend me. But why will you not accept me as a husband? Ah, that's different. It is for your own good indeed, my dearest. Oh, believe me, it is only for your sake. I don't like to give myself the great happiness of promising to be yours in that way, because I'm sure I ought not to do it. But you will make me happy. Ah, you think so, but you don't know. In such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile, which was certainly true. Her natural quickness and her admiration for him, having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge to a surprising extent. After these contests and her victory, she would go away by herself under the remotest cow if at milking-time, or into the sedge, or into her room if at leisure-interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an apparently flagmatic negative. The struggle was so fearful. Her own heart was so strongly on the side of his two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power. She had come to Talbothize with a made-up mind. In no account could she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter ruin to her husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her conscience had decided for her when her mind was unbiased ought not to be overruled now. Why don't someone tell him all about me? She said. It was only forty miles off. Why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know. And nobody seemed to know. Nobody told him. For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad countenances of her chamber-companions that they regarded her not only as the favourite, but as the chosen. But they could see for themselves that she did not put herself in his way. Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands. Positive pleasure and positive pain. At the next cheese-making the pair were again left alone together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand, but Mr. Crick as well as his wife seemed latterly to have acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these two, though they walked so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the fatist. Anyhow the dairyman left them to themselves. They were breaking up the masses of curds before putting them into the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a large scale, and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Derbyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was filling the vats with his handfuls, suddenly ceased and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft arm. Although the early September weather was sultry her arm from her dabbling in the curds was as cold and damp to his mouth as a new gathered mushroom, and tasted of the way. But she was such a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the touch, her blood driven to her finger ends, and the cool arms flushed hot. Then, as though her heart had said, is coyness longer necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman as between man and man. She lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his as her lip rose in a tender half-smile. Do you know why I did that, Tess? he said. Because you love me very much. Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty. Not again! She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under her own desire. Oh, Tessie! he went on. I cannot think why you are so tantalising. Why do you disappoint me so? You seem almost like a coquette upon my life you do, a coquette of the first urban water. They blow hot and blow cold just as you do, and it is the very last sort of thing to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothay's. And yet, dearest, he quickly added, observing how the remark had cut her, I know you to be the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived. So how can I suppose you are flirt? Yes, why don't you like the idea of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do? I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it because it isn't true. The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip quivered, and she was obliged to go away. Claire was so pained and perplexed that he ran after and caught her in the passage. Tell me, tell me, he said, passionately clasping her in forgetfulness of his curd-y hands. Do tell me that you won't belong to anyone but me. I will, I will tell you, she exclaimed, and I will give you a complete answer if you will let go now. I will tell you my experiences all about myself, all. Your experiences, dear yes, certainly any number, he expressed a scent in loving satire looking into her face. My test has no doubt almost as many experiences as that wild convulvulus out there on the garden hedge that opened itself this morning for the first time. Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more about not being worthy of me. I will try not, and I'll give you my reasons tomorrow, next week. Say on Sunday? Yes, on Sunday. At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in the thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the Barton, where she could be quite unseen. Here Tess flung herself down upon the rustling undergrowth of spear-grass as upon her bed, and remained crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy which her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress. In reality she was drifting into acquiescence. Every seesaw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears was a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness, reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him, to close with him at the altar, revealing nothing and chanceing discovery, to snatch ripe pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon her. That was what love counselled. And in almost a terror of ecstasy, Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement, wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere isolation, love's counsel would prevail. The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows. She heard the rattle of taking down the pales from the fort stands. The wa-wa which accompanied the getting-together of the cows, but she did not go to the milking. They would see her agitation, and the dairyman thinking the cause to be love alone would good-naturedly tease her, and that harassment could not be borne. Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made, or calls given. At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels, with the aspect of a great forge in the heavens, and presently a monstrous, pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in, and upstairs, without a light. It was now Wednesday, Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully at her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her. The indoor milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something definite was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in the bed-chamber. Friday passed, Saturday, tomorrow was the day. I shall give way, I shall say yes, I shall let myself marry him, I cannot help it! She jealously panted with her hot face in the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep. I cannot bear to let anybody have him but me. Yes, it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows, oh, my heart, oh, oh, oh!" CHAPTER XXIX of Tests of the Durbervilles 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 Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Read by Adrian Pretzellus. CHAPTER XXIX Now, who midgy think I've heard newser this morning? said Derryman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling gaze round the munching men and maids. Now, just do midgy think. One guest and another guest. Mrs. Crick did not guess, because she knew already. Wow, said the Derryman, tis that slack-twisted or as bird of a fella Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman. Not Jack Dollop, a villain to think of that, said a milker. The name entered quickly into Tests Durbervilles' consciousness, for it was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the butter-churn. And has he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised? asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was reading at the little table, to which he was always banished by Mrs. Crick in her sense of his gentility. Not he, sir, never meant to, replied the Derryman. As I say, tis a widow-woman, and she had money, it seems, fifty pound a year or so, and that was all he was after. They were married in a great hurry, and then she told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty pound a year. Just fancy the state of my gentleman's mind at the news, never such a cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since. Serves him well, be right, but unlucky the poor woman gets the worst aunt. Well, the silly buddy should have told him sooner that the ghost of her first man would trouble him, said Mrs. Crick. Aye, aye, responded the Derryman indecisively. Still, you can see exactly how twas she wanted a home, and didn't like to run the wrist of losing him. Don't you think that was something like it, maidens? He glanced toward the royal girls. She art told him just before they went out to church, when he could hardly have backed out, exclaimed Marion. Yes, she art, agreed is. She must have seen what he was after, and should have refused him, said Retty sposmatically. And what do you say, my dear? asked the Derryman of Tess. I think she ought to have told him the true state of things, or else refused him. I don't know, replied Tess, the bread-and-butter choking her. Because if I'd done either aunt, said Beck Nibbs, a married helper from one of the cottages, all's fair in love and war, I'd have married him just as she did, and if either said two words to me about not telling him before and anything whatsoever about my first chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd have knotted him down with a rolling pin, a scram little fella like he any woman could do it. The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry smile for form's sake from Tess. What was comedy to them was tragedy to her, and she could hardly bear the mirth. She soon rose from table, and with an impression that Clare would follow her, went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main stream of the va. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up the river, and masses of them were floating past her, moving islands of green crow-foot, whereupon she might almost have ridden, long locks of which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows from crossing. Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her story, the heaviest of crosses to herself, seemed but amusement to others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom. Tessie came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully, alighting beside her feet. My wife, soon? No, no, I cannot. For your sake, oh, Mr. Clare, for your sake, I say no. Tess, still I say no, she repeated. Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist, the moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. The younger dairy-maids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending church, a style which they could not adopt when milking with their heads against the cows. If she had said yes instead of no, he would have kissed her. It had evidently been his intention, but her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released her momentarily imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss. It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse him this time was solely the tail of the widow told by the dairy-man, and that would have been overcome in another moment. But Angel said no more. His face was perplexed. He went away. Day after day they met, somewhat less constantly than before, and thus two or three weeks went by. The end of September drew near, and she could see in his eye that he might ask her again. The procedure was different now, as though he had made up his mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth, startled by the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of her manner when the subject was under discussion countenanced the idea, so he played a more coaxing game, and while never going beyond words or attempting the renewal of caresses he did his utmost orally. In this way Claire persistently wooed her in undertones like that of the pearling milk, at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs, as no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man. Tess knew that she must break down. Under a religious sense of a certain moral validity in the previous union, nor a conscientious wish for candour could hold out against it much longer. She loved him so passionately, and he was so godly in her eyes, and being, though untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary guidance, and thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, I can never be his wife. The words were in vain. A proof of her weakness lay in the very utterance of what calm strength would not have taken the trouble to formulate. Every sound of his voice, beginning on the cold subject, stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the recantation she feared. His manner was, what man's is not, so much that of one who would love and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes, charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it. The season, meanwhile, was drawing onward to the equinox, and though it was still fine, the days were much shorter. The dairy had again worked by morning candlelight for a long time, and a fresh renewal of Claire's pleading occurred one morning between three and four. She had run up in her bed-gown to his door to call him as usual, then had gone back to dress and called the others, and in ten minutes was walking to the head of the stairs with a candle in her hand. At the same moment he came down the steps from above in his shirt-sleeves, and put his arm across the stairway. Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down, he said preemptorily, it is a fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer. You must tell me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house. My door was ajar just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You don't know. Well, is it to be yes at last? I'm only just up, Mr. Claire, and it's too early to take me to task. She pouted. You need not call me Flirt. It is cruel and untrue. Wait till boy and boy. Please wait till boy and boy. I will really think seriously about it between now and then. Let me go downstairs. She looked a little like what she said she was, as, holding the candle sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words. Call me Angel then, and not Mr. Claire. Angel? Angel dearest, why not? It wouldn't mean that I agree, wouldn't it? It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me, and you were so good as to own that long ago. Very well then. Angel dearest, if I must? She murmured, looking at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, not withstanding her suspense. Claire had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her promise. But somehow, as Tess stood there in her pretty tucked-up milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there should be leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done. He broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one moment. She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at him or saying another word. The other maids were already down, and the subject was not pursued. Except Marion they all looked wistfully and suspiciously at the pair in the sad yellow rays which the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals of the dawn without. When skimming was done, which, as the milk diminished with the approach of Altam, was a lessening process day by day, Retty and the rest went out. The lovers followed them. Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not? He musingly observed to her as he regarded the three figures tripping before him through the frigid pallor of opening day. Not so very different, I think, she said. Why do you think that? There are very few women's lives that are not tremulous, Tess replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. There's more in those three than you think. What is in them? Almost either of them, she began, would make—perhaps would make—a properer wife than I, and perhaps they love you as well as I—almost. Oh, Tessy! There were signs that it was almost an exquisite relief to her to hear the impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly not to let generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she had not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more was said on that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that this day would decide it. In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and assistants went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where many of the cows were milked without being driven home. The supply was getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed. The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall cans that stood in a large spring wagon which had been brought upon the scene, and when they were milked the cows trailed away. Dairyman Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming miraculously white against the leaden evening sky, suddenly looked at his heavy watch. "'Why, it is later than I thought,' he said. "'Be, Gad, we shan't be soon enough with this milk at the station if we don't mind. There's no time to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulker for a send-in-off. It must go to station straight from here. Who'll drive it across?' Mr. Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business, taking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless, certainly not dressed for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her scant havelments. But Clare gently urged her. She assented by relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairy-man to take home, and mounted the spring-wagon beside Clare. CHAPTER XXXV In the diminishing daylight he went along the level roadway through the meads, which stretched away into grey miles, and were backed into the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of egged-and-heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir trees, whose notched tips appeared like battle-mented towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment. They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that they did not begin talking for a long while, and the silence being broken only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them. The lane they followed was so solitary that the hazelnuts had remained on the boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung in heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would fling the lash of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give it to his companion. The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down herald drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into a fitful breeze which played about their faces. The quick silvery glaze on the rivers and pools vanished. In broad mirrors of light they changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a rasp. But that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her countenance, a natural carnation slightly embround by the season, had deepened its tinge with the beating of the raindrops, and her hair, which the pressure of the cow's flanks had as usual caused a tumble down from its fastenings, and stray beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was made clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was better than seaweed. "'I art not to have come, I suppose,' she murmured, looking at the sky. "'I'm sorry for the rain,' said he, but how glad I am to have you here!' Root-egdan disappeared by degrees behind the liquid gauze. The evening grew darker, and roads being crossed by gates it was not safe to drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather chill. "'I'm so afraid you will get cold with nothing upon your arms and shoulders,' he said, "'creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle won't hurt you much. I should be sorry astill if I did not think that the rain might be helping me.' She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off the milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as herself, Clare's hands being occupied. "'Now we are all right again. Oh, no, we are not. It runs down into my neck a little, and it must still be more into yours. That's better. Your arms are like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now if you want to stay quiet you will not get another drop. Well dear, about that question of mine, that longstanding question.' The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in the cans behind them. "'Do you remember what I said?' "'I do,' she replied. "'Before we get home, mind.' "'I'll try.' He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor-house of Caroline Date rose against the sky, and was in due course past and left behind. "'That,' he observed, to entertain her, is an interesting old place, one of the several seats which belong to an ancient Norman family, formerly of great influence in this country, the Durbervilles. I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them. There's something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it was fierce, domineering, feudal renown.' "'Yes,' said Tess. They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of stream at intervals beyond the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its stream-feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched their native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial. They reached the feeble light which came from the smoky lamp of a little railway station, a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more importance to Talbothay's dairy and mankind than the celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter from a neighbouring holly-tree. Then there was the hissing of a train which drew up almost silently upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung, can by can, into the truck. The lights of the engine flashed for a second of on Tess Derbyfield's finger, motionless under the great holly-tree. No object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at paws, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow. She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had wrapped themselves up overhead and ears in the sail-cloth again, they plunged back into the now-thick night. Tess was so receptive that the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress lingered in her thought. "'Londoners will drink it at their breakfast tomorrow, won't they?' she asked. "'Strange people that we have never seen.' "'Yes, I suppose they will, though not as we send it, when its strength has been lowered, so that it might not get up into their heads.' "'Noble men, and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow.' "'Well, yes, perhaps, particularly centurions.' "'Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from, or think how we too drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain, that it might reach them in time?' We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners, and we drove a little on our own, on account of that anxious matter which you will, I'm sure, set at rest, dear Tess. "'Now, permit me to put it in this way. You belong to me already, you know. Your heart, I mean. Does it not?' "'You know as well as I. Oh, yes, yes. Even if your heart does, why not your hand?' "'My only reason was on account of you, on account of a question. I have something to tell you.' "'But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly convenience also?' "'Oh, yes, if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my life before I came here, I want—' "'Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable as a wife to me—better than a woman out of the largest mansion in the country. So please, please, dear Tessie, disabuse your mind of the feeling that you will stand in my way. "'But, my history, I want you to know it. You must let me tell you, you will not like me so well.' "'Tell it, if you wish to, dearest—this precious history, then. Yes, I was born at so-and-so, and Odom and I.' "'I was born at Marlott,' she said, catching at his words as a help, lightly as they were spoken. And I grew up there, and I was in the sixth standard when I left school. And they said I had a great aptness, and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should be one. But there was trouble in my family. Father was not very industrious, and he drank a little. "'Yes, yes, poor child, nothing new.' He pressed her more closely to his side. "'And then there is something very unusual about it—about me. I—I was—' Tess's breath quickened. "'Yes, dearest, never mind. I—I am not a Derby-field, but a Derbyville, a descendant of the same family as those that occupied the old house we passed, and we are all gone to nothing.' "'A Derbyville, indeed. And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?' "'Yes,' she answered faintly. "'Well, why should I love you less after knowing this?' I was told by the Dairy-man that you hated old families. "'Well, it is true, in one sense, I do hate the aristocratic principle of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporeal paternity. But I am extremely interested in this news. You can have no idea how interested I am. Are you not interested yourself in being one of that well-known line?' "'No. I have thought it's sad, especially since coming here, and knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once belong to my father's people, but other hills and fields belong to Retty's people, and perhaps others to Marion's, so that I don't value it particularly.' Yes, it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil were once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school of politicians don't make capital out of the circumstance, but they don't seem to know it. I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of your name to Derbyville and trace the manifest corruption. This was the carking secret. She had not told. At the last moment her courage had failed her. She feared his blame for not telling him sooner. Her instinct of self-preservation was stronger than her candour. Of course, continued the unwitting Claire, I should have been glad to know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering, numb, unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from the self-seeking few who have made themselves powerful at the expense of the rest, but I am corrupted away from that by my affection for you, Tess." He laughed as he spoke, and made selfish likewise. For your own sake I rejoice in your dissent. Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I have made you the well-read woman that I mean to make you. My mother, too, poor soul, will think so much better of you on account of it. Tess, you must spell your name correctly, Derbyville, from this very day. I like the other way rather best. But you must, dearest! Lord Heavens, why dozens of mushroom-millionaires would jump at such a possession! By the by there's one of that kidney who has taken the name, where have I heard of him? Up in the neighbourhood of the Chase, I think. Why, he is the very man who had that rumpus with my father, I told you of. What an odd coincidence! Angel, I think I would rather not take the name. It is unlucky, perhaps. She was agitated. Now then, mistress Teresa Derbyville, I have you. Take my name, and so you will escape yours. The secret is out, so why should you any longer refuse me? If it is sure to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you feel that you do wish to marry me very, very much, I do, dearest, of course. I mean that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly able to keep alive without me, whatever my offence is, that would make me feel I ought to say I will. You will, you do say it, I know, you will be mine for ever and ever. He clasped her close, and kissed her. Yes. She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry, hard sobbing, so violent that it seemed to rend her. This was not a hysterical girl by any means, and he was surprised. Why do you cry, dearest? I can't tell quite. I'm so glad to think of being your isn't making you happy. But this does not seem very much like gladness, my tessie. I mean I cry because I've broken down in my vow. I said I would die unmarried. But if you love me, you would like me to be your husband? Yes, yes, yes, but oh, I sometimes wish I had never been born. Now, my dear tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very complimentary. How came you to wish that if you care for me? Do you care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way. How can I prove it more than I have done? She cried in a distraction of tenderness. Will this prove it more? She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learned what an impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved with all her heart and soul, as tess loved him. There, now do you believe? She asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes. Yes, I never really doubted, never, never. So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the sailcloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first. The appetite for joy which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric. I must write to my mother, she said. You don't mind me doing that? Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live? In the same place, Marlott? On the furthest side of Blackmore Vale? Ah, then I have seen you before this summer. Yes, at that dance on the green, but you would not dance with me. Oh, I hope that is not of ill omen for us now. End of chapter 30. Chapter 31 of Tess of the Durbervilles. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Tess of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy, read by Adrian Pretzelis. Chapter 31 Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication arrived in Joan Durbervilles' wandering last century hand. Dear Tess, I write these few lines hoping they will find you well as they leave me at present. Thank God for it. Dear Tess, we are all glad to hear that you are going really to be married soon, but with respect to your question, Tess, I say between ourselves, quite private but very strong, that on no account do you say a word of your boy gone trouble to him. I did not tell everything to your father, he being so proud on account of his respectability, which perhaps your intended is the same. Many a woman, some of the highest in the land, have had a trouble in their time, and why should you trumpet yours when others don't trumpet theirs? No girl would be such a fool, especially as it is a long time ago, and not your fault at all. I shall answer the same if you ask me fifty times. Besides, you must bear in mind that knowing it to be your childish nature to tell that's in your heart, so simple, I made you promise me never to let it out by word or deed having your welfare in mind, and you most solemnly did promise it going from this door. We have not named either that question or your coming marriage to your father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor simple man. Dear Tess, keep up your spirits, and we mean to send you a hugs head of cider for your wedding, knowing there is not much in your parts, and thin so stuff there is, so no more at present, and with coin love to your young man, from your affectionate mother, J. Derbyfield. Oh mother, mother, murmured Tess. She was recognising how light was the touch of events, the most oppressive upon Mrs. Derbyfield's elastic spirit. Her mother did not see life as Tess saw it. That haunting episode of bygone days was to her mother, but a passing accident. But perhaps her mother was right as to the course to be followed, whatever she might be in her reasons. Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her adored one's happiness. Silence it should be. Thus, steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calmer. The responsibility was shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had been for weeks. The day of declining autumn which followed her assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a season through which she lived in spiritual attitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period of her life. There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Claire. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be. Knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty. His soul, the soul of a saint. His intellect, that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him as love sustained her dignity. She seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her as she saw it made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large worshipful eyes that had no bottom to them, looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her. She dismissed the past, trod upon it, and put it out, as one treads upon a coal that is smoldering and dangerous. She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous, protective in their love for women as he. Angel Claire was far from all that she thought him in this respect, absurdly far indeed, but he was in truth more spiritual than animal. He had himself well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot, less bironic than shelly in, could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal. It was a fastidious emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self. This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so infelicitous till now, and in her reaction from indignation against the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Claire. They unaffectedly sought each other's company. In her honest faith she did not disguise her desire to be with him. The sum of her instincts in this matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the elusive quality in her sex which attracts men in general might be distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it must, in its very nature, carry with it a suspicion of art. The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no strangeness, though it seemed oddly anticipated to Claire till he saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons, they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the bricks of trickling, tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side and back again. They were never out of the sound of some pearling weir whose bars accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so flat that the shadows of Claire and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers, pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches are butted against the sloping sides of the vale. Men were at work here and there, for it was the season for taking up the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter irrigation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The shovel falls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide as the whole valley, or an essence of soils, pounded champagnes of the past, steeped, refined, and subtleised to extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the mead and of the cattle grazing there. Claire hardly kept his arm round her waist in sight of these watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance, though actually as shy as she, who, with lips parted and eyes ascant on the labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the while. You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them, she said gladly. Oh, no! But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Irminster, that you were walking a boat like this with me, a milkmaid? The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen! They might feel it a hurt to their dignity. My dear girl, a Durberville hurt the dignity of a Claire? It is a grand card to play that of your belonging to such a family, and I am reserving it for a grand effect when we were married, and have the proofs of your descent from Parson Tringham. Apart from that, my future is to be totally foreign to my family. It will not affect even the surface of their lives. We shall leave this part of England, perhaps England itself, and what does it matter how people regard us here? You will like going, will you not? She can answer no more than a bear affirmative. So great was the emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with him as her own familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears like a babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in his, and thus they went on to a place where the reflected sun glared up from the river under a bridge with a molten metallic glow that dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the bridge. They stood still, whereupon little furred and feathered heads popped up from the smooth surface of the water, but finding that the disturbing presences had paused and not passed by, they disappeared again. Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog began to close round them, which was very early in the evening at this time of the year. Settling on the lashes of her eyes, were it rested like crystals, and on his brows and hair. They walked later on Sundays when it was quite dark. Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches ecstaticize to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discourced. Noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into symbols by the leapings of her heart as she walked leaning on his arm. Her contented pauses, the occasional little laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride, the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves, and as one from all other women, unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which is not quite alighted. Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being. It enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her, doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like walls just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there. A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little, every day. One evening Tess and Clare obliged to sit indoors keeping house, all the other occupants of the domicile being away. As they talked she looked thoughtfully up at him and met his two appreciative eyes. I am not worthy of you. No, I am not. She burst out, jumping up from her low stool as though appalled at his homage and the fullness of her own joy there at. Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was only the smaller part of it, said, I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess. Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true and honest and just and pure and lovely and of good report as you are, my Tess. She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had that string of excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years? And how strange that he should have cited them now. Why didn't you stay and love me when I, I was sixteen, living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? Oh, why didn't you, why didn't you? She said impetuously, clasping her hands. Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself truly enough what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely upon him. Ah, why didn't I stay? he said. That is just what I feel. If I had only known, but you must not be so bitter in your regard, why should you be? With the woman's instinct to hide, she diverged hastily. I should have had four more years of your heart than I can ever have now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done. I should have had so much longer happiness. It was no mature woman with a dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tomented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one and twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe. To calm herself the more completely she rose from her little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts as she went. He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green ash sticks laid across the dogs. The sticks snapped pleasantly and his stout bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she was herself again. Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess? He said, good-humidly, as he spread a cushion for her on the stool and seated himself in the settle beside her. I wanted to ask you something, and just then you ran away. Yes, perhaps I am capricious, she murmured. She suddenly approached him and put a hand upon each of his arms. No, angel, I am not really so, by nature, I mean. The more particularly to assure him that she was not, she placed herself close to him on the settle and allowed her head to find a resting place against Clare's shoulder. What did you want to ask me? I am sure I will answer it, she continued humbly. Well, you love me and have agreed to marry me, and hence there follows a thirdly. When shall the day be? I like living like this. But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the new year or a little later, and before I get involved in the multifarious details of my new position, I should like to have secured my partner. But, she timidly answered, to talk quite practically, wouldn't it be best not to marry till after all that, though I can't bear the thought of you going away and leaving me here? Of course you cannot, and it is not best in this case. I want you to help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be? Why not a fortnight from now? No, she said, becoming grave. I have so many things to think of first. But he drew her gently near to him. The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near. Before discussion of the question had proceeded further, there walked around the corner of the settle into the full fire-light of the apartment, Mr. Dairyman Crick, Mrs. Crick, and two of the milk-maids. Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her face flushed and her eyes shone in the fire-light. I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him, she cried with vexation. I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us, and he wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might have seemed as if I was almost. Well, if so, be you, and I told us, I'm sure we shouldn't have noticed that you had been sitting anywhere at all in this light, replied Dairyman. He continued to his wife, with the solid mean of a man who understood nothing of the emotions related to matrimony. Now, Christianer, that shows that folks should never fancy other folks be supposing things when they bane. Oh, no, I should never have thought a word of where she was a-sittin' to if she hadn't a-told me, not I. We're going to be married soon, said Claire, with improvised phlegm. Ah, and be ye. Well, I'm truly glad to hear it, sir. I thought you may do such a thing for some time. She's too good for a Dairymaid. I said so the very first day I zitter, and appraised for any man, and what's more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman farmer's wife. He won't be at the mercy of his bailey with her, his side. Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck with the look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick's blunt praise. After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present. A light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts. But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood. They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to have. Their condition was objective, contemplative. He's going to marry her, murmured Retty, never taking her eyes off Tess. How her face do show it? You be going to marry him? asked Marion. Yes, said Tess. When? Someday. They thought this was evasiveness only. Yes, going to marry him, a gentleman, repeated, is Hewitt, and by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another, crept out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted around Tess. Retty put her hands upon Tess's shoulders, as if to realise her friend's corporality after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms around her waist, all looking into her face. Now it do seem, almost more than I can think of, said his Hewitt. Marion kissed Tess. Yes, she murmured as she withdrew her lips. Was that because of love of her, or because other lips have touched thereby now, continued his dryly to Marion? I wasn't thinking of that, said Marion simply. I was only feeling all the strangeness on't, that she is to be his wife, and nobody else. I don't say nay to it, nor either of us, because we did not think of it, only loved him. Still, nobody else is to Marion in the world, no fine lady, nobody in socks and satins, but she, who do live like we. Are you sure you don't dislike me for it? said Tess in a low voice. They hung about her in their white nightgowns before replying, as if they considered their answer might lie in her look. I don't know, I don't know, murmured Retty Priddle. I want to hate ye, but I cannot. That's how I feel, echoed is, and Marion. I can't hate her, somehow she hinders me. He ought to marry one of you, murmured Tess. Why? You're all better than I. We better than you? said the girls in a low, slow whisper. No, no, dear Tess. You are, she contradicted, impetuously, and suddenly tearing away from their clinging arms, she burst into a hysterical fit of tears, bowing herself on the chest of drawers, and repeating incessantly, oh yes, yes, yes. Having once given way, she could not stop her weeping. He ought to have had one of you, she cried. I think I ought to make him even now. You would be better for him than, I don't know what I'm saying, oh, oh. They went up to her, and clasped her round, but still her sobs tore her. Get some water, said Marion. She's upset by us, poor thing, poor thing. They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where they kissed her warmly. You are best foreign, said Marion, more ladylike and a better scholar than we, especially since he has taught you so much, but even you ought to be proud. You be proud, I'm sure. Yes, I am, she said, and I am ashamed at so breaking down. When they were all in bed and the light out, Marion whispered across to her, You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and how we told you that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and we never hoped to be chose by him. They were not aware that, at these words, salt-stinging tears trickled down upon Tess's pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a bursting heart, to tell all her history to Angel Clare, despite her mother's command, to let him, for whom she lived and breathed, despise her, if he would, and her mother regard her as a fool, rather than preserve a silence which might be deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow seemed a wrong to these. 32 This penitential mood kept her from naming the wedding day. The beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he asked her at the most tempting times, but Tess's desire seemed to be for a perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was then. The meads were changing now, but it was still warm enough in the early afternoons before milking to idle there a while, and the state of dairy work at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling. Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea. Nats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out of its line and were quite extinct. In the presence of these things he would remind her that the date was still the question, or he would ask her at night when he accompanied her on some mission invented by Mrs. Crick to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the Vale to inquire how the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barten to which they were relegated. It was a time of the year that brought great changes to the world of kine. Baches of the animals were sent away daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the calf could walk, mother and offspring were driven back to the dairy. In the interval which enlapsed before the calves were sold there was of course little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been taken away the milk-maids would have to set to work as usual. Returning from one of these dark walks they reached the great gravel cliff immediately over the levels, where they stood and listened. The water was now high in the streams, squirting through the weirs, and tinkling under culverts. The smallest gullies were all full, there was no taking shortcuts anywhere, and foot-passengers were compelled to follow the permanent ways. From the whole extent of the invisible Vale came a multitudinous intonation. It forced upon their fancy that a great city lay beneath them, and that the murmur was the vociferation of its populace. It seems like tens of thousands of them, said Tess, holding public meetings in their marketplaces, arguing, preaching, quarrelling, subbing, rowning, praying and cursing. Claire was not particularly heeding. Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much assistance during the winter months? No. The cows are going dry rapidly. Yes, six or seven went to the straw-barten yesterday, and three the day before making nearly twenty in the straw ready. Ah, is it that the farmer don't want my help for the carving? Oh, I'm not wanted here any more, and I've tried so hard to- Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require you. But knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-mannered and respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at Christmas I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would do without you he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a time of year when he could do with very little female help. I'm afraid I was sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this way forcing your hand. I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel, because his all was mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time it is convenient. Well, it is convenient you have admitted that. He put his finger upon her cheek. Ah, he said. What? I feel the red rising up at her having been caught. But why should I trifle so? We will not trifle. Life is too serious. It is. Perhaps I saw that before you did. She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him, after all, in obedience to her emotion of last night, and leave the dairy, meant to go to some strange place, not a dairy, for milkmaids were not in request now, carving time was coming on, to go to some arable farm where no divine being like Angel Clare was. She hated the thought, and she hated more the thought of going home. So that seriously, dear Tess, he continued, since you will probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and convenient so that I should carry off then as my property. Besides, if you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world, you would know that we could not go unlike this forever. I wish we could, that it would always be summer and autumn, and you always caught in me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summer time. I always shall. Oh, I know you will, she cried with a sudden fervour of faith in him. Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for always. Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk home amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left. When they reached the dairy, Mr. and Mrs. Crick were promptly told, with injunctions to secrecy, for each of the lovers was desirous that the marriage should be kept as private as possible. The dairyman, though he had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about losing her. What should he do about his skimming? Who would make the ornamental butter-pats for the angleberry and sand-borne ladies? Mrs. Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shelling, having at last come to an end, and said that directly she had set eyes on Tess, she divined that she was to be the chosen one of somebody who was no common outdoor man. Tess had looked so superior as she walked across the bath and on that afternoon of her arrival that she was of a good family she could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs. Crick did remember thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she approached, but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination added by subsequent knowledge. Tess was now carried along on the wings of the hours, without a sense of a will. The word had been given, the number of the day written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had began to admit the fatalistic convictions common to fieldfolk and those who associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their fellow creatures, and she accordingly drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things her lover suggested characteristic of the frame of mind. But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the wedding-day, really to again implore her advice. It was a gentleman who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently considered. A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received with the same feeling by him. But this communication brought no reply from Mrs. Derbyfield. Despite Angel Clare's plausible representations to himself, and to Tess of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in truth an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a later date. He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him. He had entertained no notion, when doomed he had thought to an unintellectual blue-collic life, that such charms as he beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes. Unsophistication was a thing to talk of, but he had not known how it really struck one until he came here. Yet he was very far from seeing his future attract clearly, and it might be a year or two before he was able to consider himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness imparted his career and character by the sense that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family. Don't you think it would have been better for us to wait till you were quite settled in your middland farm, she once asked timidly? A middland farm was the idea just then. To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere away from my protection and sympathy. The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His influence over had been so marked that she had caught his manners and habits, his speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. And to leave her in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with him. He wished to have her under his charge for another reason. His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial, and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention, he judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings, whilst seeking for an advantageous opening, would be of some social assistance to her and what she might feel to be a trying ordeal, her presentation to his mother at the vicarage. Next he wished to see a little of the working of a flour mill, having an idea that he might combine the use of one with corn growing. The proprietor of an old water mill at Wellbridge, once the mill of an abbey, had offered him the inspection of his time-honoured mode of procedure, and a hand in the operations for a few days whenever he should choose to come. Claire paid a visit to the place some few miles distant, one day at this time, to inquire particulars and return to Talbothays in the evening. She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge flour mills, and what had determined him, lest the opportunity of an insight into grinding and bolting, then the casual fact that lodgings were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the Durberville family. This was always how Claire settled practical questions, by a sentiment which had nothing to do with them. They decided to go immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead of journeying to towns and inns. Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of London that I have heard of, he said, and by March or April we will pay a visit to my father and mother. Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day, the incredible day on which she was to become his, loomed large in the near future. The 31st of December, New Year's Eve, was the date. His wife, she said to herself, could it ever be? They're two selves together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared by them? Why not? And yet, why? One Sunday morning, is Hewitt returned from church, and spoke privately to Tess. You was not called home this morning. Footnote, called home, local phrase, called home, local phrase for publication of bands. And a footnote. What? It should have been the first time of asking today, she answered, looking quietly at Tess. You went to be married, New Year's Eve, dearie. The other returned a quick affirmative. Then there must be three times of asking, and now there be only two Sundays left between. Tess felt her cheek paling. Is was right. Of course, there must be three. Perhaps he had forgotten. If so, there must be a week's postponement. And that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover? She who had been so backward, was suddenly fired with impatience and alarm, lest she should lose her dear prize. A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Is mentioned the omission of the bands to Mrs. Crick, and Mrs. Crick assumed a matron's privilege of speaking to Angel on the point. Have you forgotten, Mr. Clare, the bands, I mean? No, I have not forgotten, said Clare. As soon as he caught Tess alone, he assured her. Don't let them tease you about the bands. A licence will be quieter for us, and so I have decided on a licence without consulting you. So if you go to church on Sunday morning, you will not hear your own name, if you wished to. I didn't wish to hear it, dearest, she said proudly. But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess, notwithstanding, who had been well-knife feared that someone would stand up and forbid the bands on the ground of her history. How events were favouring her. I don't feel easy, she said to herself. All this good fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill. That's how heaven mostly does. I wish I could have had common bands. But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to buy a new one. The question was set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by the arrival of some large packages addressed to her. Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to shoes, including a perfect morning costume, such as would well support the simple wedding they planned. He entered the house shortly after the arrival of the packages and heard her upstairs undoing them. A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in her eyes. How thoughtful you've been, she murmured, her cheek upon his shoulder, even to the gloves and handkerchief. My own love, how good, how kind! No, no, Tess, just an order to a tradeswoman in London, nothing more. And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go upstairs and take her time and see if it all fitted, and if not to get the village seem stressed to make a few alterations. She did return upstairs and put on the gown. Alone she stood for a moment before the glass, looking at the effect of her silk attire. And then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic robe that never would become that wife that had once done a miss. Which Mrs. Derbyfield used to sing to her as a child, so blithely and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune. Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe had betrayed Queen Guinevere. Since she had been at the Dairy she had not once thought of the lines, till now.