Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d'Urberville since
her departure from Trantridge.

The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated
to permit its impact with the least emotional shock.  But such was
unreasoning memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a
converted man, who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear
overcame her, paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated
nor advanced.

To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,
and to behold it now! ...  There was the same handsome unpleasantness
of mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the
sable moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical,
a modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to
abstract the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second
her belief in his identity.

To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_,
a grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture
out of such a mouth.  This too familiar intonation, less than four
years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent
purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the
contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration.  The former curves of
sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion.
The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to
express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be
translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour
of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism,
Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in
the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a
theolatry that was almost ferocious.  Those black angularities which
his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did
duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon
turning again to his wallowing in the mire.

The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain.  They had been diverted
from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which
Nature did not intend them.  Strange that their very elevation was a
misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.

Yet could it be so?  She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no
longer.  D'Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned
away from his wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she
deem it unnatural in him?  It was but the usage of thought which had
been jarred in her at hearing good new words in bad old notes.  The
greater the sinner, the greater the saint; it was not necessary to
dive far into Christian history to discover that.

Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict
definiteness.  As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would
allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight.  He
had obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.

But the moment that she moved again he recognized her.  The effect
upon her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his
presence upon her.  His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence,
seemed to go out of him.  His lip struggled and trembled under the
words that lay upon it; but deliver them it could not as long as she
faced him.  His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung
confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came back in a
desperate leap every few seconds.  This paralysis lasted, however,
but a short time; for Tess's energies returned with the atrophy of
his, and she walked as fast as she was able past the barn and onward.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their
relative platforms.  He who had wrought her undoing was now on the
side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate.  And, as in the
legend, it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared
upon his altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh
extinguished.

She went on without turning her head.  Her back seemed to be endowed
with a sensitiveness to ocular beams--even her clothing--so alive
was she to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the
outside of that barn.  All the way along to this point her heart
had been heavy with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in
the quality of its trouble.  That hunger for affection too long
withheld was for the time displaced by an almost physical sense
of an implacable past which still engirdled her.  It intensified
her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of
continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had
hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.  Bygones would never be
complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at
right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely
to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay.
Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single
figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings
which dotted its cold aridity here and there.  While slowly breasting
this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and
turning she saw approaching that well-known form--so strangely
accoutred as the Methodist--the one personage in all the world she
wished not to encounter alone on this side of the grave.

There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she
yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him
overtake her.  She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his
walk than by the feelings within him.

"Tess!" he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

"Tess!" he repeated.  "It is I--Alec d'Urberville."

She then looked back at him, and he came up.

"I see it is," she answered coldly.

"Well--is that all?  Yet I deserve no more!  Of course," he added,
with a slight laugh, "there is something of the ridiculous to your
eyes in seeing me like this.  But--I must put up with that. ...  I
heard you had gone away; nobody knew where.  Tess, you wonder why I
have followed you?"

"I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!"

"Yes--you may well say it," he returned grimly, as they moved onward
together, she with unwilling tread.  "But don't mistake me; I beg
this because you may have been led to do so in noticing--if you did
notice it--how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there.  It was
but a momentary faltering; and considering what you have been to me,
it was natural enough.  But will helped me through it--though perhaps
you think me a humbug for saying it--and immediately afterwards I
felt that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire
to save from the wrath to come--sneer if you like--the woman whom I
had so grievously wronged was that person.  I have come with that
sole purpose in view--nothing more."

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: "Have
you saved yourself?  Charity begins at home, they say."

"_I_ have done nothing!" said he indifferently. "Heaven, as I have
been telling my hearers, has done all.  No amount of contempt that
you can pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon
myself--the old Adam of my former years!  Well, it is a strange
story; believe it or not; but I can tell you the means by which my
conversion was brought about, and I hope you will be interested
enough at least to listen.  Have you ever heard the name of the
parson of Emminster--you must have done do?--old Mr Clare; one of the
most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left in the
Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of Christian believers
with which I have thrown in my lot, but quite an exception among the
Established clergy, the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the
true doctrines by their sophistries, till they are but the shadow of
what they were.  I only differ from him on the question of Church and
State--the interpretation of the text, 'Come out from among them and
be ye separate, saith the Lord'--that's all.  He is one who, I firmly
believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls in this
country than any other man you can name.  You have heard of him?"

"I have," she said.

"He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of
some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted
him when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and
show me the way.  He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that
some day I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit--that those
who came to scoff sometimes remained to pray.  There was a strange
magic in his words.  They sank into my mind.  But the loss of my
mother hit me most; and by degrees I was brought to see daylight.
Since then my one desire has been to hand on the true view to others,
and that is what I was trying to do to-day; though it is only lately
that I have preached hereabout.  The first months of my ministry have
been spent in the North of England among strangers, where I preferred
to make my earliest clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before
undergoing that severest of all tests of one's sincerity, addressing
those who have known one, and have been one's companions in the days
of darkness.  If you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a
good slap at yourself, I am sure--"

"Don't go on with it!" she cried passionately, as she turned away
from him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself.  "I
can't believe in such sudden things!  I feel indignant with you for
talking to me like this, when you know--when you know what harm
you've done me!  You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure
on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with
sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of
that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming
converted!  Out upon such--I don't believe in you--I hate it!"

"Tess," he insisted; "don't speak so!  It came to me like a jolly new
idea!  And you don't believe me?  What don't you believe?"

"Your conversion.  Your scheme of religion."

"Why?"

She dropped her voice.  "Because a better man than you does not
believe in such."

"What a woman's reason!  Who is this better man?"

"I cannot tell you."

"Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to
spring out at a moment's notice, "God forbid that I should say I am
a good man--and you know I don't say any such thing.  I am new to
goodness, truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes."

"Yes," she replied sadly.  "But I cannot believe in your conversion
to a new spirit.  Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don't last!"

Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been
leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon
the familiar countenance and form, remained contemplating her.  The
inferior man was quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted,
nor even entirely subdued.

"Don't look at me like that!" he said abruptly.

Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien,
instantly withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with
a flush, "I beg your pardon!"  And there was revived in her the
wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in
inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her
she was somehow doing wrong.

"No, no!  Don't beg my pardon.  But since you wear a veil to hide
your good looks, why don't you keep it down?"

She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, "It was mostly to keep off
the wind."

"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went on; "but
it is better that I should not look too often on you.  It might be
dangerous."

"Ssh!" said Tess.

"Well, women's faces have had too much power over me already for me
not to fear them!  An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they;
and it reminds me of the old times that I would forget!"

After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and
then as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was
going with her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate.
Frequently when they came to a gate or stile they found painted
thereon in red or blue letters some text of Scripture, and she
asked him if he knew who had been at the pains to blazon these
announcements.  He told her that the man was employed by himself and
others who were working with him in that district, to paint these
reminders that no means might be left untried which might move the
hearts of a wicked generation.

At length the road touched the spot called "Cross-in-Hand."  Of all
spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn.
It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by
artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative
beauty of tragic tone.  The place took its name from a stone pillar
which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown
in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.
Differing accounts were given of its history and purport.  Some
authorities stated that a devotional cross had once formed the
complete erection thereon, of which the present relic was but the
stump; others that the stone as it stood was entire, and that it had
been fixed there to mark a boundary or place of meeting.  Anyhow,
whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something
sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it
stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.

"I think I must leave you now," he remarked, as they drew near to
this spot.  "I have to preach at Abbot's-Cernel at six this evening,
and my way lies across to the right from here.  And you upset me
somewhat too, Tessy--I cannot, will not, say why.  I must go away and
get strength. ...  How is it that you speak so fluently now?  Who has
taught you such good English?"

"I have learnt things in my troubles," she said evasively.

"What troubles have you had?"

She told him of the first one--the only one that related to him.

D'Urberville was struck mute.  "I knew nothing of this till now!"
he next murmured.  "Why didn't you write to me when you felt your
trouble coming on?"

She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: "Well--you
will see me again."

"No," she answered.  "Do not again come near me!"

"I will think.  But before we part come here."  He stepped up to the
pillar.  "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but
I fear you at moments--far more than you need fear me at present; and
to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that
you will never tempt me--by your charms or ways."

"Good God--how can you ask what is so unnecessary!  All that is
furthest from my thought!"

"Yes--but swear it."

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand
upon the stone and swore.

"I am sorry you are not a believer," he continued; "that some
unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind.  But
no more now.  At home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and
who knows what may not happen?  I'm off. Goodbye!"

He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without letting his
eyes again rest upon her, leapt over and struck out across the down
in the direction of Abbot's-Cernel.  As he walked his pace showed
perturbation, and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought,
he drew from his pocket a small book, between the leaves of which
was folded a letter, worn and soiled, as from much re-reading.
D'Urberville opened the letter.  It was dated several months before
this time, and was signed by Parson Clare.

The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned joy at
d'Urberville's conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in
communicating with the parson on the subject.  It expressed Mr
Clare's warm assurance of forgiveness for d'Urberville's former
conduct and his interest in the young man's plans for the future.
He, Mr Clare, would much have liked to see d'Urberville in the Church
to whose ministry he had devoted so many years of his own life, and
would have helped him to enter a theological college to that end; but
since his correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on account
of the delay it would have entailed, he was not the man to insist
upon its paramount importance.  Every man must work as he could best
work, and in the method towards which he felt impelled by the Spirit.

D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself
cynically.  He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked
till his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no
longer troubled his mind.

She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her
nearest way home.  Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary
shepherd.

"What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?" she asked of
him.  "Was it ever a Holy Cross?"

"Cross--no; 'twer not a cross!  'Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss.  It
was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was
tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung.
The bones lie underneath.  They say he sold his soul to the devil,
and that he walks at times."

She felt the _petite mort_ at this unexpectedly gruesome information,
and left the solitary man behind her.  It was dusk when she drew near
to Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she
approached a girl and her lover without their observing her.  They
were talking no secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young
woman, in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the
chilly air as the one soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full
of a stagnant obscurity upon which nothing else intruded.  For a
moment the voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that
this interview had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same
attraction which had been the prelude to her own tribulation.  When
she came close, the girl turned serenely and recognized her, the
young man walking off in embarrassment.  The woman was Izz Huett,
whose interest in Tess's excursion immediately superseded her own
proceedings.  Tess did not explain very clearly its results, and Izz,
who was a girl of tact, began to speak of her own little affair, a
phase of which Tess had just witnessed.

"He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at
Talbothays," she explained indifferently.  "He actually inquired and
found out that I had come here, and has followed me.  He says he's
been in love wi' me these two years.  But I've hardly answered him."

Several days had passed since her futile journey, and Tess was
afield.  The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched
hurdles erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her.
On the sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue
hue of new paint seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene.
Opposite its front was a long mound or "grave", in which the roots
had been preserved since early winter.  Tess was standing at the
uncovered end, chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth
from each root, and throwing it after the operation into the slicer.
A man was turning the handle of the machine, and from its trough
came the newly-cut swedes, the fresh smell of whose yellow chips
was accompanied by the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish
of the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in Tess's
leather-gloved hand.

The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where
the swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of
darker brown, gradually broadening to ribands.  Along the edge of
each of these something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste
and without rest up and down the whole length of the field; it was
two horses and a man, the plough going between them, turning up the
cleared ground for a spring sowing.

For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far
beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen.  It had come from
the corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was
up the incline, towards the swede-cutters.  From the proportions of
a mere point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon
perceived to be a man in black, arriving from the direction of
Flintcomb-Ash.  The man at the slicer, having nothing else to do with
his eyes, continually observed the comer, but Tess, who was occupied,
did not perceive him till her companion directed her attention to his
approach.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a
semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the
free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville.  Not being hot at his preaching
there was less enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the
grinder seemed to embarrass him.  A pale distress was already on
Tess's face, and she pulled her curtained hood further over it.

D'Urberville came up and said quietly--

"I want to speak to you, Tess."

"You have refused my last request, not to come near me!" said she.

"Yes, but I have a good reason."

"Well, tell it."

"It is more serious than you may think."

He glanced round to see if he were overheard.  They were at some
distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the
machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec's words reaching other
ears.  D'Urberville placed himself so as to screen Tess from the
labourer, turning his back to the latter.

"It is this," he continued, with capricious compunction.  "In
thinking of your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to
inquire as to your worldly condition.  You were well dressed, and I
did not think of it.  But I see now that it is hard--harder than it
used to be when I--knew you--harder than you deserve.  Perhaps a good
deal of it is owning to me!"

She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent
head, her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her
trimming of the swedes.  By going on with her work she felt better
able to keep him outside her emotions.

"Tess," he added, with a sigh of discontent,--"yours was the very
worst case I ever was concerned in!  I had no idea of what had
resulted till you told me.  Scamp that I was to foul that innocent
life!  The whole blame was mine--the whole unconventional business
of our time at Trantridge.  You, too, the real blood of which I am
but the base imitation, what a blind young thing you were as to
possibilities!  I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for
parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the
gins and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive
be a good one or the result of simple indifference."

Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root
and taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour
of the mere fieldwoman alone marking her.

"But it is not that I came to say," d'Urberville went on.  "My
circumstances are these.  I have lost my mother since you were at
Trantridge, and the place is my own.  But I intend to sell it, and
devote myself to missionary work in Africa.  A devil of a poor hand
I shall make at the trade, no doubt.  However, what I want to ask
you is, will you put it in my power to do my duty--to make the only
reparation I can make for the trick played you: that is, will you be
my wife, and go with me? ...  I have already obtained this precious
document.  It was my old mother's dying wish."

He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling
of embarrassment.

"What is it?" said she.

"A marriage licence."

"O no, sir--no!" she said quickly, starting back.

"You will not?  Why is that?"

And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely
the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d'Urberville's face.  It
was unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her
had been revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

"Surely," he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked
round at the labourer who turned the slicer.

Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there.
Informing the man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she
wished to walk a little way, she moved off with d'Urberville across
the zebra-striped field.  When they reached the first newly-ploughed
section he held out his hand to help her over it; but she stepped
forward on the summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.

"You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?" he
repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.

"I cannot."

"But why?"

"You know I have no affection for you."

"But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps--as soon as you
really could forgive me?"

"Never!"

"Why so positive?"

"I love somebody else."

The words seemed to astonish him.

"You do?" he cried.  "Somebody else?  But has not a sense of what is
morally right and proper any weight with you?"

"No, no, no--don't say that!"

"Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing
feeling which you will overcome--"

"No--no."

"Yes, yes!  Why not?"

"I cannot tell you."

"You must in honour!"

"Well then ... I have married him."

"Ah!" he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at
her.

"I did not wish to tell--I did not mean to!" she pleaded.  "It is a
secret here, or at any rate but dimly known.  So will you, PLEASE
will you, keep from questioning me?  You must remember that we are
now strangers."

"Strangers--are we?  Strangers!"

For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he
determinedly chastened it down.

"Is that man your husband?" he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign
the labourer who turned the machine.

"That man!" she said proudly.  "I should think not!"

"Who, then?"

"Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!" she begged, and flashed her
appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.

D'Urberville was disturbed.

"But I only asked for your sake!" he retorted hotly.  "Angels of
heaven!--God forgive me for such an expression--I came here, I swear,
as I thought for your good.  Tess--don't look at me so--I cannot
stand your looks!  There never were such eyes, surely, before
Christianity or since!  There--I won't lose my head; I dare not.
I own that the sight of you had waked up my love for you, which, I
believed, was extinguished with all such feelings.  But I thought
that our marriage might be a sanctification for us both.  'The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving
wife is sanctified by the husband,' I said to myself.  But my plan
is dashed from me; and I must bear the disappointment!"

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

"Married.  Married! ...  Well, that being so," he added, quite
calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves and putting them in
his pocket; "that being prevented, I should like to do some good to
you and your husband, whoever he may be.  There are many questions
that I am tempted to ask, but I will not do so, of course, in
opposition to your wishes.  Though, if I could know your husband, I
might more easily benefit him and you.  Is he on this farm?"

"No," she murmured.  "He is far away."

"Far away?  From YOU?  What sort of husband can he be?"

"O, do not speak against him!  It was through you!  He found out--"

"Ah, is it so! ...  That's sad, Tess!"

"Yes."

"But to stay away from you--to leave you to work like this!"

"He does not leave me to work!" she cried, springing to the defence
of the absent one with all her fervour.  "He don't know it!  It is by
my own arrangement."

"Then, does he write?"

"I--I cannot tell you.  There are things which are private to
ourselves."

"Of course that means that he does not.  You are a deserted wife, my
fair Tess--"

In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was
on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not
express the life or shape of those within.

"You must not--you must not!" she cried fearfully, slipping her hand
from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp.  "O,
will you go away--for the sake of me and my husband--go, in the name
of your own Christianity!"

"Yes, yes; I will," he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to
her he turned to leave.  Facing round, however, he said, "Tess, as
God is my judge, I meant no humbug in taking your hand!"

A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not
noticed in their preoccupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice
reached her ear:

"What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o'
day?"

Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had
inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his
field.

"Don't speak like that to her!" said d'Urberville, his face
blackening with something that was not Christianity.

"Indeed, Mister!  And what mid Methodist pa'sons have to do with
she?"

"Who is the fellow?" asked d'Urberville, turning to Tess.

She went close up to him.

"Go--I do beg you!" she said.

"What!  And leave you to that tyrant?  I can see in his face what a
churl he is."

"He won't hurt me.  HE'S not in love with me.  I can leave at
Lady-Day."

"Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose.  But--well, goodbye!"

Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having
reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which
Tess took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being
independent of sex.  To have as a master this man of stone, who would
have cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former
experiences.  She silently walked back towards the summit of the
field that was the scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview
which had just taken place that she was hardly aware that the nose of
Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders.

"If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I'll
see that you carry it out," he growled.  "'Od rot the women--now
'tis one thing, and then 'tis another.  But I'll put up with it no
longer!"

Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the
farm as he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once
received, she did for one moment picture what might have been the
result if she had been free to accept the offer just made her of
being the monied Alec's wife.  It would have lifted her completely
out of subjection, not only to her present oppressive employer, but
to a whole world who seemed to despise her.  "But no, no!" she said
breathlessly; "I could not have married him now!  He is so unpleasant
to me."

That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing
from him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection.
Any one who had been in a position to read between the lines would
have seen that at the back of her great love was some monstrous
fear--almost a desperation--as to some secret contingencies which
were not disclosed.  But again she did not finish her effusion; he
had asked Izz to go with him, and perhaps he did not care for her at
all.  She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would ever
reach Angel's hands.

After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and
brought on the day which was of great import to agriculturists--the
day of the Candlemas Fair.  It was at this fair that new engagements
were entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing
Lady-Day, and those of the farming population who thought of changing
their places duly attended at the county-town where the fair was
held.  Nearly all the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended
flight, and early in the morning there was a general exodus in the
direction of the town, which lay at a distance of from ten to a dozen
miles over hilly country.  Though Tess also meant to leave at the
quarter-day, she was one of the few who did not go to the fair,
having a vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to render
another outdoor engagement unnecessary.

It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time,
and one would almost have thought that winter was over.  She had
hardly finished her dinner when d'Urberville's figure darkened the
window of the cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to
herself to-day.

Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she
could hardly in reason run away.  D'Urberville's knock, his walk up
to the door, had some indescribable quality of difference from his
air when she last saw him.  They seemed to be acts of which the doer
was ashamed.  She thought that she would not open the door; but, as
there was no sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the
latch stepped back quickly.  He came in, saw her, and flung himself
down into a chair before speaking.

"Tess--I couldn't help it!" he began desperately, as he wiped his
heated face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement.  "I
felt that I must call at least to ask how you are.  I assure you I
had not been thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I
cannot get rid of your image, try how I may!  It is hard that a good
woman should do harm to a bad man; yet so it is.  If you would only
pray for me, Tess!"

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet
Tess did not pity him.

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe
that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my
account?"

"You really think that?"

"Yes.  I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise."

"Cured?  By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

"Ah--your husband--your husband!  How strange it seems!  I remember
you hinted something of the sort the other day.  What do you really
believe in these matters, Tess?" he asked.  "You seem to have no
religion--perhaps owing to me."

"But I have.  Though I don't believe in anything supernatural."

D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

"Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?"

"A good deal of it."

"H'm--and yet I've felt so sure about it," he said uneasily.

"I believe in the SPIRIT of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my
dear husband...  But I don't believe--"

Here she gave her negations.

"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your dear husband
believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the
least inquiry or reasoning on your own part.  That's just like you
women.  Your mind is enslaved to his."

"Ah, because he knew everything!" said she, with a triumphant
simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could
hardly have deserved, much less her husband.

"Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from
another person like that.  A pretty fellow he must be to teach you
such scepticism!"

"He never forced my judgement!  He would never argue on the subject
with me!  But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after
inquiring deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than
what I might believe, who hadn't looked into doctrines at all."

"What used he to say?  He must have said something?"

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel
Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she
recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him
use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of
thinking aloud with her at his side.  In delivering it she gave also
Clare's accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.

"Say that again," asked d'Urberville, who had listened with the
greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville thoughtfully murmured the
words after her.

"Anything else?" he presently asked.

"He said at another time something like this"; and she gave another,
which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the
pedigree ranging from the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ to Huxley's
_Essays_.

"Ah--ha!  How do you remember them?"

"I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't wish me to;
and I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts.  I can't
say I quite understand that one; but I know it is right."

"H'm.  Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't know
yourself!"

He fell into thought.

"And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his," she resumed.  "I
didn't wish it to be different.  What's good enough for him is good
enough for me."

"Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?"

"No--I never told him--if I am an infidel."

"Well--you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after all!  You
don't believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore,
do no despite to your conscience in abstaining.  I do believe I ought
to preach it, but, like the devils, I believe and tremble, for I
suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you."

"How?"

"Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to see you
to-day!  But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where
I have undertaken to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two
this afternoon, and where all the brethren are expecting me this
minute.  Here's the announcement."

He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day,
hour, and place of meeting, at which he, d'Urberville, would preach
the Gospel as aforesaid.

"But how can you get there?" said Tess, looking at the clock.

"I cannot get there!  I have come here."

"What, you have really arranged to preach, and--"

"I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there--by reason of my
burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised!--No, by my word
and truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now!
Why I did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in
spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely
when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so
there was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt,
and you are she.  But you may well despise me now!  I thought I
worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still serve in the groves!
Ha! ha!"

"O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean?  What have I done!"

"Done?" he said, with a soulless sneer in the word.  "Nothing
intentionally.  But you have been the means--the innocent means--of
my backsliding, as they call it.  I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of
those 'servants of corruption' who, 'after they have escaped the
pollutions of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome'--
whose latter end is worse than their beginning?"  He laid his hand on
her shoulder.  "Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social
salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly shaking her, as
if she were a child.  "And why then have you tempted me?  I was firm
as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again--surely
there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!"  His voice sank,
and a hot archness shot from his own black eyes.  "You temptress,
Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon--I could not resist you as
soon as I met you again!"

"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess, recoiling.

"I know it--I repeat that I do not blame you.  But the fact remains.
When I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to
think that I had no legal right to protect you--that I could not have
it; whilst he who has it seems to neglect you utterly!"

"Don't speak against him--he is absent!" she cried in much
excitement.  "Treat him honourably--he has never wronged you!  O
leave his wife before any scandal spreads that may do harm to his
honest name!"

"I will--I will," he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream.
"I have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies
at the fair--it is the first time I have played such a practical
joke.  A month ago I should have been horrified at such a
possibility.  I'll go away--to swear--and--ah, can I! to keep away."
Then, suddenly: "One clasp, Tessy--one!  Only for old friendship--"

"I am without defence. Alec!  A good man's honour is in my keeping--
think--be ashamed!"

"Pooh!  Well, yes--yes!"

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness.  His
eyes were equally barren of worldly and religious faith.  The corpses
of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines
of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come
together as in a resurrection.  He went out indeterminately.

Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement
to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess's words, as
echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and
continued to do so after he had left her.  He moved on in silence, as
if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility
that his position was untenable.  Reason had had nothing to do with
his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a
careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed
by his mother's death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm
served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.  He said to himself,
as he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she
had handed on to him, "That clever fellow little thought that, by
telling her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!"

It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The
dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is
nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies.  Against the twilight
rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly
here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a
rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the
light increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two
men on the summit.  They were busily "unhaling" the rick, that
is, stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down the
sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and Tess, with the
other women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting
and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on
the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the end of
the day.  Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely
visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve--a
timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining--
the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a
despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black,
with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve.
The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which
radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much
daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum
mobile_ of this little world.  By the engine stood a dark, motionless
being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance,
with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man.  The
isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a
creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness
of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had
nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt.  He was in the agricultural world, but not of
it.  He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served
vegetation, weather, frost, and sun.  He travelled with his engine
from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam
threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.  He spoke in
a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon
himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes
around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly
necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom
compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his
Plutonic master.  The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of
his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line
between agriculture and him.

While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his
portable repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning
air quivered.  He had nothing to do with preparatory labour.  His
fire was waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in
a few seconds he could make the long strap move at an invisible
velocity.  Beyond its extent the environment might be corn, straw,
or chaos; it was all the same to him.  If any of the autochthonous
idlers asked him what he called himself, he replied shortly, "an
engineer."

The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their
places, the women mounted, and the work began.  Farmer Groby--or, as
they called him, "he"--had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess
was placed on the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed
it, her business being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her
by Izz Huett, who stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder
could seize it and spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked
out every grain in one moment.

They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two,
which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery.  The work
sped on till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for half
an hour; and on starting again after the meal the whole supplementary
strength of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the
straw-rick, which began to grow beside the stack of corn.  A hasty
lunch was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions, and
then another couple of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the
inexorable wheel continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the
thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were near the revolving
wire-cage.

The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days
when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken
barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by
hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better
results.  Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the
perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten
their duties by the exchange of many words.  It was the ceaselessness
of the work which tried her so severely, and began to make her
wish that she had never some to Flintcomb-Ash.  The women on the
corn-rick--Marian, who was one of them, in particular--could stop to
drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now and then, or to exchange
a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the
fragments of straw and husk from their clothing; but for Tess there
was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the man who fed
it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied
sheaves, could not stop either, unless Marian changed places with
her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby's
objections that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.

For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was
chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in
selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength
with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may
have been true.  The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech,
increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the
regular quantity.  As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their
heads she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had
come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under
a second rick watching the scene and Tess in particular.  He was
dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay
walking-cane.

"Who is that?" said Izz Huett to Marian.  She had at first addressed
the inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.

"Somebody's fancy-man, I s'pose," said Marian laconically.

"I'll lay a guinea he's after Tess."

"O no.  'Tis a ranter pa'son who's been sniffing after her lately;
not a dandy like this."

"Well--this is the same man."

"The same man as the preacher?  But he's quite different!"

"He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off
his whiskers; but he's the same man for all that."

"D'ye really think so?  Then I'll tell her," said Marian.

"Don't.  She'll see him soon enough, good-now."

"Well, I don't think it at all right for him to join his preaching to
courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and
she, in a sense, a widow."

"Oh--he can do her no harm," said Izz drily.  "Her mind can no more
be heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon
from the hole he's in.  Lord love 'ee, neither court-paying, nor
preaching, nor the seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when
'twould be better for her that she should be weaned."

Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her
post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the
machine that she could scarcely walk.

"You ought to het a quart o' drink into 'ee, as I've done," said
Marian.  "You wouldn't look so white then.  Why, souls above us,
your face is as if you'd been hagrode!"

It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired,
her discovery of her visitor's presence might have the bad effect of
taking away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess
to descend by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the
gentleman came forward and looked up.

Tess uttered a short little "Oh!"  And a moment after she said,
quickly, "I shall eat my dinner here--right on the rick."

Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did
this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and
the rest descended, and sat under the straw-stack.

The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d'Urberville, the late Evangelist,
despite his changed attire and aspect.  It was obvious at a glance
that the original _Weltlust_ had come back; that he had restored
himself, as nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four
years older, to the old jaunty, slapdash guise under which Tess
had first known her admirer, and cousin so-called.  Having decided
to remain where she was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of
sight of the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by, she heard
footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after Alec appeared upon the
stack--now an oblong and level platform of sheaves.  He strode across
them, and sat down opposite of her without a word.

Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake
which she had brought with her.  The other workfolk were by this
time all gathered under the rick, where the loose straw formed a
comfortable retreat.

"I am here again, as you see," said d'Urberville.

"Why do you trouble me so!" she cried, reproach flashing from her
very finger-ends.

"I trouble YOU?  I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?"

"Sure, I don't trouble you any-when!"

"You say you don't?  But you do!  You haunt me.  Those very eyes that
you turned upon me with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come
to me just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day!
Tess, ever since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if
my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream,
had suddenly found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at
once gushed through.  The religious channel is left dry forthwith;
and it is you who have done it!"

She gazed in silence.

"What--you have given up your preaching entirely?" she asked.  She
had gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modern
thought to despise flash enthusiasm; but, as a woman, she was
somewhat appalled.

In affected severity d'Urberville continued--

"Entirely.  I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was
to address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair.  The deuce only knows
what I am thought of by the brethren.  Ah-ha!  The brethren!  No
doubt they pray for me--weep for me; for they are kind people in
their way.  But what do I care?  How could I go on with the thing
when I had lost my faith in it?--it would have been hypocrisy of
the basest kind!  Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus and
Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they might learn
not to blaspheme.  What a grand revenge you have taken!  I saw you
innocent, and I deceived you.  Four years after, you find me a
Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete
perdition!  But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you, this is only
my way of talking, and you must not look so horribly concerned.
Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty face and
shapely figure.  I saw it on the rick before you saw me--that tight
pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet--you field-girls
should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger."
He regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical
laugh resumed: "I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy
I thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would
have let go the plough for her sake as I do!"

Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency
failed her, and without heeding he added:

"Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other,
after all.  But to speak seriously, Tess."  D'Urberville rose and
came nearer, reclining sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon
his elbow.  "Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what
you said that HE said.  I have come to the conclusion that there
does seem rather a want of common-sense in these threadbare old
propositions; how I could have been so fired by poor Parson Clare's
enthusiasm, and have gone so madly to work, transcending even him, I
cannot make out!  As for what you said last time, on the strength of
your wonderful husband's intelligence--whose name you have never told
me--about having what they call an ethical system without any dogma,
I don't see my way to that at all."

"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at
least, if you can't have--what do you call it--dogma."

"O no!  I'm a different sort of fellow from that!  If there's nobody
to say, 'Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are
dead; do that, and if will be a bad thing for you,' I can't warm up.
Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions
if there's nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear,
I wouldn't either!"

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull
brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days
of mankind had been quite distinct.  But owing to Angel Clare's
reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a
vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on.

"Well, never mind," he resumed.  "Here I am, my love, as in the old
times!"

"Not as then--never as then--'tis different!" she entreated.  "And
there was never warmth with me!  O why didn't you keep your faith,
if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!"

"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet
head!  Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon
him!  Ha-ha--I'm awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the
same!  Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too.
For all your closeness, I see you are in a bad way--neglected by one
who ought to cherish you."

She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips
were dry, and she was ready to choke.  The voices and laughs of the
workfolk eating and drinking under the rick came to her as if they
were a quarter of a mile off.

"It is cruelty to me!" she said.  "How--how can you treat me to this
talk, if you care ever so little for me?"

"True, true," he said, wincing a little.  "I did not come to reproach
you for my deeds.  I came Tess, to say that I don't like you to be
working like this, and I have come on purpose for you.  You say you
have a husband who is not I.  Well, perhaps you have; but I've never
seen him, and you've not told me his name; and altogether he seems
rather a mythological personage.  However, even if you have one, I
think I am nearer to you than he is.  I, at any rate, try to help you
out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face!  The words
of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me.
Don't you know them, Tess?--'And she shall follow after her lover,
but she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall
not find him; then shall she say, I will go and return to my first
husband; for then was it better with me than now!' ...  Tess, my trap
is waiting just under the hill, and--darling mine, not his!--you know
the rest."

Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but
she did not answer.

"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he continued, stretching
his arm towards her waist; "you should be willing to share it, and
leave that mule you call husband for ever."

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her
skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she
passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face.
It was heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the
mouth.  Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of
a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised.  Alec
fiercely started up from his reclining position.  A scarlet oozing
appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began
dropping from his mouth upon the straw.  But he soon controlled
himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped
his bleeding lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now, punish me!" she
said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the
sparrow's gaze before its captor twists its neck.  "Whip me, crush
me; you need not mind those people under the rick!  I shall not cry
out.  Once victim, always victim--that's the law!"

"O no, no, Tess," he said blandly.  "I can make full allowance for
this.  Yet you most unjustly forget one thing, that I would have
married you if you had not put it out of my power to do so.  Did I
not ask you flatly to be my wife--hey?  Answer me."

"You did."

"And you cannot be.  But remember one thing!"  His voice hardened
as his temper got the better of him with the recollection of his
sincerity in asking her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped
across to her side and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook
under his grasp.  "Remember, my lady, I was your master once!  I will
be your master again.  If you are any man's wife you are mine!"

The threshers now began to stir below.

"So much for our quarrel," he said, letting her go.  "Now I shall
leave you, and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon.
You don't know me yet!  But I know you."

She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned.  D'Urberville
retreated over the sheaves, and descended the ladder, while the
workers below rose and stretched their arms, and shook down the beer
they had drunk.  Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid
the renewed rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the
buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless
succession.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTESPHASE THE SIXTH -- THE CONVERT CHAPTER 45 Summary Tess is shocked to see Alec and hear him preaching about his regret over his past mistakes. Trembling with fear at his image, she turns to leave, but not quickly enough. Alec recognizes her and is equally as shocked as Tess has been, but he does not try to flee from her. Instead, he approaches her on the pretense of trying to save her soul. He tells Tess that his mother's death and a pious clergyman named Clare were responsible for his conversion. Tess does not believe he is genuine. Tess tells Alec the troubles that she has endured because of his misdoing. He is unhappy about the revelation and makes Tess promise never to tempt or charm him again. Notes Tess is unnerved by the image of Alec preaching in the barn. When Alec spies her, he is equally unnerved, for he immediately feels his passion rising. He approaches Tess and tells her that women continue to attract him. He makes Tess swear on an assumed holy cross that she will never tempt him again. Later Tess is horrified to learn that the "cross-in-hand" on which she swore is a really a symbol of ill omen. Alec is obviously a sinner trying to cover up his past in an effort to gain salvation, but his religion does not run very deep. As soon as Alec's eyes fall on Tess, the look on his face and in his eyes clearly reveal he has changed little in the intervening years. CHAPTER 46 Summary Alec finds Tess in the fields and shows concern for the ill fortune he has caused her. To make up for his past sins, he asks her to marry him and go with him to Africa on a mission. Alec is surprised when Tess tells him that she is married to someone else and even more shocked to learn that her husband is away. Alec departs when Tess begs him to leave. Alec calls on Tess at her cottage and states that he is unable to rid the image of her from his mind. He asks her to pray for him. Tess, quoting words from Angel, tells Alec that she will not pray for him and expect God to alter his plans on his account. She again begs him to leave, fearing that his presence may cause a scandal and harm Angel's name. Notes Alec's pathetic nature is clearly revealed in this chapter. He finds Tess in the fields and begs her to marry him in order to ease his conscience and guarantee his salvation. He is so unsure of himself that he calls on her again at her cottage and begs Tess to pray for him so that he is not allured by her charm. But it is clearly obvious that Alec again feels passion for Tess, and he wants to possess her again. It is important to note Tess's main reaction to Alec during the two visits. She has no thought of her own well being in his presence. She begs him to leave because she does not want any scandal to be attached to Angel's name. Even though her husband has deserted her for Brazil, it is obvious that Tess still loves him deeply. CHAPTER 47 Summary By March Alec has shed his acquired image of a preacher and comes to share the news with Tess. He tells her that he is in love with her and again asks her to come away with him. Since she is the reason he has renounced the ministry, he says she should "leave that mule you call husband forever" and share her life with him. Unwilling to hear a single bad word spoken against Angel, she slaps Alec's face with a leather glove. Infuriated at her boldness, he grabs Tess by the shoulders and screams, " I will be your master again." Notes In this chapter, Tess's supreme love for Angel is again depicted. It is unbearable for her to hear anyone speak ill of him. When Alec dares to call him a mule, Tess's temper flares and she strikes him across the face. In the entire book, it is only Alec who has caused Tess to lose control. Alec is also losing control. He confesses to Tess that "ever since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as my feelings. . . had suddenly found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at once gushed through." He blames Tess for arousing his passion again and swears that he will master her. Tess's already stressful existence simply grows more stressful.


At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world
was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular
date of the year.  It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor
service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to
be now carried out.  The labourers--or "work-folk", as they used to
call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from
without--who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to
the new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.
When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about
Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the
home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire
for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch.  With the younger
families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an
advantage.  The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the
family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became
it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village
life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest.  A
depopulation was also going on.  The village had formerly contained,
side by side with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and
better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the former--the class
to which Tess's father and mother had belonged--and including the
carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with
nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people
who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of
their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or copyholders, or
occasionally, small freeholders.  But as the long holdings fell
in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly
pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.
Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked
upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of
others, who were thus obliged to follow.  These families, who had
formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the
depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the
large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as
"the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns", being
really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this manner
considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house which remained
standing was required by the agriculturist for his work-people.  Ever
since the occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow over
Tess's life, the Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited)
had been tacitly looked on as one which would have to go when their
lease ended, if only in the interests of morality.  It was, indeed,
quite true that the household had not been shining examples either of
temperance, soberness, or chastity.  The father, and even the mother,
had got drunk at times, the younger children seldom had gone to
church, and the eldest daughter had made queer unions.  By some means
the village had to be kept pure.  So on this, the first Lady-Day
on which the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy,
was required for a carter with a large family; and Widow Joan,
her daughters Tess and 'Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham, and the younger
children had to go elsewhere.

On the evening preceding their removal it was getting dark betimes by
reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the sky.  As it was the last
night they would spend in the village which had been their home and
birthplace, Mrs Durbeyfield, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to
bid some friends goodbye, and Tess was keeping house till they should
return.

She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement,
where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of
glass.  Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long
ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies
ever came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement.
Tess was reflecting on the position of the household, in which she
perceived her own evil influence.  Had she not come home, her mother
and the children might probably have been allowed to stay on as
weekly tenants.  But she had been observed almost immediately on her
return by some people of scrupulous character and great influence:
they had seen her idling in the churchyard, restoring as well as she
could with a little trowel a baby's obliterated grave.  By this means
they had found that she was living here again; her mother was scolded
for "harbouring" her; sharp retorts had ensued from Joan, who had
independently offered to leave at once; she had been taken at her
word; and here was the result.

"I ought never to have come home," said Tess to herself, bitterly.

She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at first took
note of a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw riding down the
street.  Possibly it was owing to her face being near to the pane
that he saw her so quickly, and directed his horse so close to the
cottage-front that his hoofs were almost upon the narrow border for
plants growing under the wall.  It was not till he touched the window
with his riding-crop that she observed him.  The rain had nearly
ceased, and she opened the casement in obedience to his gesture.

"Didn't you see me?" asked d'Urberville.

"I was not attending," she said.  "I heard you, I believe, though I
fancied it was a carriage and horses. I was in a sort of dream."

"Ah! you heard the d'Urberville Coach, perhaps.  You know the legend,
I suppose?"

"No.  My--somebody was going to tell it me once, but didn't."

"If you are a genuine d'Urberville I ought not to tell you either,
I suppose.  As for me, I'm a sham one, so it doesn't matter.  It is
rather dismal.  It is that this sound of a non-existent coach can
only be heard by one of d'Urberville blood, and it is held to be
of ill-omen to the one who hears it.  It has to do with a murder,
committed by one of the family, centuries ago."

"Now you have begun it, finish it."

"Very well.  One of the family is said to have abducted some
beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was
carrying her off, and in the struggle he killed her--or she killed
him--I forget which.  Such is one version of the tale...  I see that
your tubs and buckets are packed.  Going away, aren't you?"

"Yes, to-morrow--Old Lady Day."

"I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems so sudden.
Why is it?"

"Father's was the last life on the property, and when that dropped we
had no further right to stay.  Though we might, perhaps, have stayed
as weekly tenants--if it had not been for me."

"What about you?"

"I am not a--proper woman."

D'Urberville's face flushed.

"What a blasted shame!  Miserable snobs!  May their dirty souls
be burnt to cinders!" he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment.
"That's why you are going, is it?  Turned out?"

"We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we should have to go
soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are
better chances."

"Where are you going to?"

"Kingsbere.  We have taken rooms there.  Mother is so foolish about
father's people that she will go there."

"But your mother's family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little
hole of a town like that.  Now why not come to my garden-house at
Trantridge?  There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother's
death; but there's the house, as you know it, and the garden.  It
can be whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite
comfortably; and I will put the children to a good school.  Really
I ought to do something for you!"

"But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!" she declared.
"And we can wait there--"

"Wait--what for?  For that nice husband, no doubt.  Now look here,
Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in mind the _grounds_ of
your separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with
you.  Now, though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even
if you won't believe it.  Come to this cottage of mine. We'll get
up a regular colony of fowls, and your mother can attend to them
excellently; and the children can go to school."

Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said--

"How do I know that you would do all this?  Your views may
change--and then--we should be--my mother would be--homeless
again."

"O no--no.  I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if
necessary.  Think it over."

Tess shook her head.  But d'Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen
him so determined; he would not take a negative.

"Please just tell your mother," he said, in emphatic tones.  "It is
her business to judge--not yours.  I shall get the house swept out
and whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by
the evening, so that you can come straight there.  Now mind, I shall
expect you."

Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with complicated
emotion.  She could not look up at d'Urberville.

"I owe you something for the past, you know," he resumed.  "And you
cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad--"

"I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the
practice which went with it!"

"I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little.  To-morrow I
shall expect to hear your mother's goods unloading...  Give me your
hand on it now--dear, beautiful Tess!"

With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put
his hand in at the half-open casement.  With stormy eyes she pulled
the stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the
casement and the stone mullion.

"Damnation--you are very cruel!" he said, snatching out his arm.
"No, no!--I know you didn't do it on purpose.  Well I shall expect
you, or your mother and children at least."

"I shall not come--I have plenty of money!" she cried.

"Where?"

"At my father-in-law's, if I ask for it."

"IF you ask for it.  But you won't, Tess; I know you; you'll never
ask for it--you'll starve first!"

With these words he rode off.  Just at the corner of the street he
met the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the
brethren.

"You go to the devil!" said d'Urberville.

Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious
sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the
rush of hot tears thither.  Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had,
like others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had!  She had
never before admitted such a thought; but he had surely!  Never
in her life--she could swear it from the bottom of her soul--had
she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had
come.  Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of
inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand,
and scribbled the following lines:

   O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
   not deserve it.  I have thought it all over carefully,
   and I can never, never forgive you!  You know that I
   did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
   me?  You are cruel, cruel indeed!  I will try to forget
   you.  It is all injustice I have received at your
   hands!
                                  T.

She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with
her epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the
window-panes.

It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly.  How
could he give way to entreaty?  The facts had not changed: there was
no new event to alter his opinion.

It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room.  The two
biggest of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the
four smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to
eleven, all in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling
their own little subjects.  Tess at length joined them, without
lighting a candle.

"This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house
where we were born," she said quickly.  "We ought to think of it,
oughtn't we?"

They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they
were ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had
conjured up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in
the idea of a new place.  Tess changed the subject.

"Sing to me, dears," she said.

"What shall we sing?"

"Anything you know; I don't mind."

There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one little
tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third
and a fourth chimed in unison, with words they had learnt at the
Sunday-school--

     Here we suffer grief and pain,
     Here we meet to part again;
       In Heaven we part no more.

The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had
long ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it,
felt that further thought was not required.  With features strained
hard to enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the centre
of the flickering fire, the notes of the youngest straying over into
the pauses of the rest.

Tess turned from them, and went to the window again.  Darkness had
now fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to
peer into the gloom.  It was really to hide her tears.  If she could
only believe what the children were singing; if she were only sure,
how different all would now be; how confidently she would leave them
to Providence and their future kingdom!  But, in default of that, it
behoved her to do something; to be their Providence; for to Tess,
as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the
poet's lines--

                      Not in utter nakedness
     But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal
compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to
justify, and at best could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall
'Liza-Lu and Abraham.  Mrs Durbeyfield's pattens clicked up to the
door, and Tess opened it.

"I see the tracks of a horse outside the window," said Joan.  "Hev
somebody called?"

"No," said Tess.

The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured--

"Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!"

"He didn't call," said Tess.  "He spoke to me in passing."

"Who was the gentleman?" asked the mother.  "Your husband?"

"No.  He'll never, never come," answered Tess in stony hopelessness.

"Then who was it?"

"Oh, you needn't ask.  You've seen him before, and so have I."

"Ah!  What did he say?" said Joan curiously.

"I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at Kingsbere
to-morrow--every word."

It was not her husband, she had said.  Yet a consciousness that in a
physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her
more and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah--but I did see him!" Tess murmured.  "He found me."

"And do he know where you be going?"

"I think so."

"Husband come back?"

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Very well--unload it here," said Joan recklessly.  "I'll get shelter
somewhere."

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Alec d'Urberville.  "Where is Tess?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

   OSTIUM SEPULCHRI ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE

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

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

He leapt off the slab and supported her.

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

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

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

"Go away!" she murmured.

"I will--I'll look for your mother," said he blandly.  But in passing
her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be civil yet!"

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

"Why am I on the wrong side of this door!"

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

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

"Could we let him know?"

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

   HONOUR'D SIR--

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

   FROM TWO WELL-WISHERS

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

END OF PHASE THE SIXTH

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment

CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTESCHAPTER 51 Summary Since the Durbeyfield family has to leave their old house, they find rooms at a lodge in Kingsbere. As they are preparing to leave Marlott, Alec arrives once more to offer help and presses Tess to give into his desires. He offers the family shelter in his garden house at Trantridge, promises to provide a good education for her brothers and sisters, and offers to buy Mrs. Durbeyfield a flock of birds to tend. Tess is touched by his generosity, but still refuses the offer. Alec is very annoyed with her stubbornness and pride and quickly departs. In an emotional state and filled with self-pity, Tess writes the last letter to Angel, accusing him of cruelty and injustice. She says she will try to forget him, but she will never be able to forgive him for deserting her. Notes Alec knows Tess very well and realizes that he must wiggle his way into her heart. He tries to argue that as the father of their deceased child, he is really her true husband. Such logic upsets Tess. Then Alec tries to get to Tess through her family, for whom she cares greatly. He tells Tess that he will provide the family lodging, education, and employment, certainly a great temptation in their present plight. But Tess, at this point, is still strong enough to refuse. She is genuinely touched by Alec's generosity, but she cannot accept it. At the end of the chapter, it is obvious that Tess's determination is beginning to weaken. For the first time in a long time, she is angry and filled with self-pity. She writes a letter to Angel stating that she is trying to forget him and will never be able to forgive him of the cruel and unjust way in which he has treated her. It is the first time she has ever had such negative thoughts about her husband. Obviously, Alec has gotten under her skin, for no one seems to be able to upset Tess like he does. It is important to notice the presence of two re-occurring symbols in this chapter. Alec tells Tess about the D'Urberville coach, which is supposed to be an ill omen. The sign painter also reappears and reminds Alec of his drifting away from the scriptures and from his life as a preacher. CHAPTER 52 Summary The Durbeyfield family sets out to Kingsbere in a wagon carrying all their belongings. During a rest stop, Tess sees Marian and Izz, who are off to find new employment. Tess confides in them that Alec has found her and that Angel has not returned. The former milkmaids feel terrible for their friend and want to help in some way. They exchange addresses with Tess and promise to keep in touch. As the Durbeyfields approach Kingsbere, they are shocked to learn that the rooms they are planning to move into are already let out to another family. Despite an ardent search, they meet Izz and Marian on the way. They are unable to locate another lodging. As a result, Joan tells the driver to unload their furniture in the churchyard. They set up a makeshift tent in the graveyard, directly under the D'Urberville window and close to the tombs of the D'Urberville ancestors. Tess goes into the church and sees the D'Urberville vaults for the first time. As she looks closely at one of the tombs, she spies Alec. He tells her again that he wants to help her. In spite of the miserable situation she and the family find themselves in, she still tells Alec to go away. As he departs, Alec tells Tess that "you'll be civil yet!" After he leaves, Tess wonders why she cannot join her ancestors in the tomb in order to find relief from her misery, pain, and sorrow. Marian and Izz have settled into their new jobs and think about Tess. In a compassionate gesture, they write to Angel informing him about the critical situation Tess is in and beg him to come back to his wife. They send the letter to his parents in Emminster, hoping it will be sent on to Angel. Notes Hardy masterfully tries to prepare the reader for the shock of the next phase in Tess's life. In this chapter, he depicts his protagonist as a beaten woman, begging for the relief of the grave. Her family, which is all she has left, is reduced to living in a temporary tent in the graveyard of the church of the D'Urberville ancestors. Tess has no means of helping them on her own, and she is still too proud to approach the Clare family. The evil Alec, who has been cast throughout the book as an evil Satan tempting the innocent Tess, sees his golden opportunity and lies in wait for Tess. He appropriately hides amongst the tombs of the ancient D'Urbervilles and makes the last temptation to Tess. When she refuses him one more time, he sees her weakening and says, "You'll be civil yet." He knows Tess cannot hold out much longer. The tragic irony of the chapter is that Tess's letters and the letter from Marian and Izz arrive in Angel's hands too late to prevent cruel fate from taking the upper hand.