Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce
it in the Valley of the Froom.

Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in the darkened
farmhouse once the mansion of the d'Urbervilles.  Tess, who used the
upper chamber, heard it and awoke.  It had come from the corner step
of the staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed.  She saw the
door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the
stream of moonlight with a curiously careful tread.  He was in his
shirt and trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she
perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy.
When he reached the middle of the room he stood still and murmured in
tones of indescribable sadness--

"Dead! dead! dead!"

Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force, Clare would
occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such
as he had done on the night of their return from market just before
their marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the
man who had insulted her.  Tess saw that continued mental distress
had wrought him into that somnambulistic state now.

Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart, that,
awake or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear.  If
he had entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have
disturbed her trust in his protectiveness.

Clare came close, and bent over her. "Dead, dead, dead!" he murmured.

After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of
unmeasurable woe, he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled
her in the sheet as in a shroud.  Then lifting her from the bed with
as much respect as one would show to a dead body, he carried her
across the room, murmuring--

"My poor, poor Tess--my dearest, darling Tess!  So sweet, so good, so
true!"

The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours,
were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart.  If it had
been to save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling,
have put an end to the position she found herself in.  Thus she lay
in absolute stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering
what he was going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out
upon the landing.

"My wife--dead, dead!" he said.

He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the
banister.  Was he going to throw her down?  Self-solicitude was near
extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart
on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this
precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror.  If
they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit,
how desirable.

However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support
of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips--lips in the day-time
scorned.  Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and
descended the staircase.  The creak of the loose stair did not awaken
him, and they reached the ground-floor safely.  Freeing one of his
hands from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar
and passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge
of the door.  But this he seemed not to mind, and, having room for
extension in the open air, he lifted her against his shoulder, so
that he could carry her with ease, the absence of clothes taking much
from his burden.  Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction
of the river a few yards distant.

His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and
she found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might
have done.  So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him
that it pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute
possession, to dispose of as he should choose.  It was consoling,
under the hovering terror of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he
really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off,
even if in that recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself
the right of harming her.

Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of--that Sunday morning when he
had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who
had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which
Tess could hardly admit.  Clare did not cross the bridge with her,
but proceeding several paces on the same side towards the adjoining
mill, at length stood still on the brink of the river.

Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland, frequently
divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves
around little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying
themselves as a broad main stream further on.  Opposite the spot to
which he had brought her was such a general confluence, and the river
was proportionately voluminous and deep.  Across it was a narrow
foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the handrail away,
leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the
speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even steady heads; and
Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the day-time young
men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing.  Her husband had
possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the
plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.

Was he going to drown her?  Probably he was.  The spot was lonely,
the river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of
accomplishment.  He might drown her if he would; it would be better
than parting to-morrow to lead severed lives.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting,
and splitting the moon's reflected face.  Spots of froth travelled
past, and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles.  If they could
both fall together into the current now, their arms would be so
tightly clasped together that they could not be saved; they would
go out of the world almost painlessly, and there would be no more
reproach to her, or to him for marrying her.  His last half-hour with
her would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke,
his day-time aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be
contemplated only as a transient dream.

The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a
movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf.  How
she valued her own life had been proved; but his--she had no right to
tamper with it.  He reached the other side with her in safety.

Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds,
and taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they
reached the ruined choir of the Abbey-church.  Against the north wall
was the empty stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with
a turn for grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself.  In this
Clare carefully laid Tess.  Having kissed her lips a second time he
breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained.  Clare
then lay down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell into
the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a
log.  The spurt of mental excitement which had produced the effort
was now over.

Tess sat up in the coffin.  The night, though dry and mild for the
season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him
to remain here long, in his half-clothed state.  If he were left to
himself he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and
be chilled to certain death.  She had heard of such deaths after
sleep-walking.  But how could she dare to awaken him, and let him
know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him to discover
his folly in respect of her?  Tess, however, stepping out of her
stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to arouse him
without being violent.  It was indispensable to do something, for she
was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection.  Her
excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes'
adventure; but that beatific interval was over.

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she
whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could
summon--

"Let us walk on, darling," at the same time taking him suggestively
by the arm.  To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words
had apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward
seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a
spirit, and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the
arm to the stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which
they stood at the manor-house door.  Tess's feet were quite bare, and
the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare was in
his woollen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort.

There was no further difficulty.  She induced him to lie down on his
own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of
wood, to dry any dampness out of him.  The noise of these attentions
she thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might.
But the exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained
undisturbed.

As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew
little or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's
excursion, though, as regarded himself, he may have been aware that
he had not lain still.  In truth, he had awakened that morning from
a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments
in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its
strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding.
But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on the
other subject.

He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that
if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the
light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure
reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so
far, therefore, to be trusted.  He thus beheld in the pale morning
light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant
instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch
and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the
less there.  Clare no longer hesitated.

At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,
he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakeably that
Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the
reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know
that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his
common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised
his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her.  It was too much
like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during
intoxication.

It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint
recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to
it from a conviction that she would take amatory advantage of the
opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.

He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and
soon after breakfast it arrived.  She saw in it the beginning of
the end--the temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his
tenderness by the incident of the night raised dreams of a possible
future with him.  The luggage was put on the top, and the man drove
them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman expressing some
surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to
his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he
wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went.
Beyond this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to
suggest a fiasco, or that they were not going together to visit
friends.

Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such
solemn joy in each other a few days back, and as Clare wished to wind
up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs
Crick a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of
their unhappy state.

To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left the carriage
by the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and
descended the track on foot, side by side.  The withy-bed had been
cut, and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had
followed her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the
enclosure in which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away
behind the cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of their
first embrace.  The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the
colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold.

Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward,
throwing into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate
in Talbothays and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the
newly-married.  Then Mrs Crick emerged from the house, and several
others of their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not
seem to be there.

Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which
affected her far otherwise than they supposed.  In the tacit
agreement of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret
they behaved as would have been ordinary.  And then, although she
would rather there had been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had
to hear in detail the story of Marian and Retty.  The later had gone
home to her father's, and Marian had left to look for employment
elsewhere.  They feared she would come to no good.

To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her
favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them with her hand, and as
she and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and
soul, there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their
aspect to one who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life,
as they outwardly were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching
him, facing one way, as against all the dairy facing the other,
speaking in their adieux as "we", and yet sundered like the poles.
Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in their attitude,
some awkwardness in acting up to their profession of unity, different
from the natural shyness of young couples, may have been apparent,
for when they were gone Mrs Crick said to her husband--

"How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they
stood like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream!
Didn't it strike 'ee that 'twas so?  Tess had always sommat strange
in her, and she's not now quite like the proud young bride of a
well-be-doing man."

They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards
Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where
Clare dismissed the fly and man.  They rested here a while, and
entering the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a
stranger who did not know their relations.  At a midway point, when
Nuttlebury had been passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare
stopped the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return
to her mother's house it was here that he would leave her.  As they
could not talk with freedom in the driver's presence he asked her to
accompany him for a few steps on foot along one of the branch roads;
she assented, and directing the man to wait a few minutes they
strolled away.

"Now, let us understand each other," he said gently.  "There is no
anger between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at
present.  I will try to bring myself to endure it.  I will let you
know where I go to as soon as I know myself.  And if I can bring
myself to bear it--if it is desirable, possible--I will come to you.
But until I come to you it will be better that you should not try to
come to me."

The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of
her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that
of one who had practised gross deceit upon him.  Yet could a woman
who had done even what she had done deserve all this?  But she could
contest the point with him no further.  She simply repeated after him
his own words.

"Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?"

"Just so."

"May I write to you?"

"O yes--if you are ill, or want anything at all.  I hope that will
not be the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you."

"I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my
punishment ought to be; only--only--don't make it more than I can
bear!"

That was all she said on the matter.  If Tess had been artful, had
she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane,
notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was
possessed, he would probably not have withstood her.  But her mood
of long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was
his best advocate.  Pride, too, entered into her submission--which
perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too
apparent in the whole d'Urberville family--and the many effective
chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.

The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only.  He
now handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which
he had obtained from his bankers for the purpose.  The brilliants,
the interest in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only (if he
understood the wording of the will), he advised her to let him send
to a bank for safety; and to this she readily agreed.

These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the carriage,
and handed her in.  The coachman was paid and told where to drive
her.  Taking next his own bag and umbrella--the sole articles he had
brought with him hitherwards--he bade her goodbye; and they parted
there and then.

The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an
unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one
moment.  But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured
to do, lying in a half-dead faint inside.  Thus he beheld her recede,
and in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with
peculiar emendations of his own--

    God's NOT in his heaven:
    All's WRONG with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his
own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.

The night before returning to Marlott, Tess awakens in the night to find Angel hovering over her while sleepwalking. Dead. dead. dead. he whispers, wraps her in a sheet, carries her outside over a narrow bridge to the churchyard, where he places her in a coffin. He remembers nothing. Angel gives Tess fifty pounds and tells her she can call on his father in case of emergency. She is not to come to him but to wait to hear from him after he learns to live with her past


As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her
youth began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor.
Her first thought was how would she be able to face her parents?

She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the
village.  It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who
had kept it for many years, and to whom she had been known; he had
probably left on New Year's Day, the date when such changes were
made.  Having received no intelligence lately from her home, she
asked the turnpike-keeper for news.

"Oh--nothing, miss," he answered.  "Marlott is Marlott still.  Folks
have died and that.  John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter
married this week to a gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house,
you know; they was married elsewhere; the gentleman being of that
high standing that John's own folk was not considered well-be-doing
enough to have any part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know
how't have been discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman
himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own vaults to
this day, but done out of his property in the time o' the Romans.
However, Sir John, as we call 'n now, kept up the wedding-day as well
as he could, and stood treat to everybody in the parish; and John's
wife sung songs at The Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock."

Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide
to go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings.  She
asked the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his
house for a while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed
her carriage, and went on to the village alone by a back lane.

At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how she could
possibly enter the house?  Inside that cottage her relations were
calmly supposing her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively
rich man, who was to conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here
she was, friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself,
with no better place to go to in the world.

She did not reach the house unobserved.  Just by the garden-hedge she
was met by a girl who knew her--one of the two or three with whom she
had been intimate at school.  After making a few inquiries as to how
Tess came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted
with--

"But where's thy gentleman, Tess?"

Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,
leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus
made her way to the house.

As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the
back door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on
the doorstep in the act of wringing a sheet.  Having performed this
without observing Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed
her.

The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old
quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was
about to plunge her arms in anew.

"Why--Tess!--my chil'--I thought you was married!--married really and
truly this time--we sent the cider--"

"Yes, mother; so I am."

"Going to be?"

"No--I am married."

"Married!  Then where's thy husband?"

"Oh, he's gone away for a time."

"Gone away!  When was you married, then?  The day you said?"

"Yes, Tuesday, mother."

"And now 'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?"

"Yes, he's gone."

"What's the meaning o' that?  'Nation seize such husbands as you seem
to get, say I!"

"Mother!"  Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon
the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs.  "I don't know how to tell
'ee, mother!  You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell
him.  But I did tell him--I couldn't help it--and he went away!"

"O you little fool--you little fool!" burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,
splashing Tess and herself in her agitation.  "My good God! that ever
I should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having
relaxed at last.

"I know it--I know--I know!" she gasped through her sobs.  "But,
O my mother, I could not help it!  He was so good--and I felt
the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had happened!
If--if--it were to be done again--I should do the same.  I could
not--I dared not--so sin--against him!"

"But you sinned enough to marry him first!"

"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie!  But I thought he could get
rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it.  And O, if
you knew--if you could only half know how I loved him--how anxious I
was to have him--and how wrung I was between caring so much for him
and my wish to be fair to him!"

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a
helpless thing, into a chair.

"Well, well; what's done can't be undone!  I'm sure I don't know why
children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than
other people's--not to know better than to blab such a thing as
that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!"  Here Mrs
Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to
be pitied.  "What your father will say I don't know," she continued;
"for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The
Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their
rightful position through you--poor silly man!--and now you've made
this mess of it!  The Lord-a-Lord!"

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard
approaching at that moment.  He did not, however, enter immediately,
and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him
herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present.  After her first
burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had
taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday
or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them
irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be
borne with; not a lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made.  Her old bed had been adapted for
two younger children.  There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on
there.  Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live
hen.  He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his
second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm.  The hen
had been carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show
people that he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs
tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

"We've just had up a story about--" Durbeyfield began, and thereupon
related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the
inn about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having
married into a clerical family. "They was formerly styled 'sir',
like my own ancestry," he said, "though nowadays their true style,
strictly speaking, is 'clerk' only."  As Tess had wished that no
great publicity should be given to the event, he had mentioned no
particulars.  He hoped she would remove that prohibition soon.  He
proposed that the couple should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville,
as uncorrupted.  It was better than her husbands's.  He asked if any
letter had come from her that day.

Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess
unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen
mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence
of the cheering glass.  Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved
his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the
minds of others.

"To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!" said Sir John.
"And I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as
big as Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes
and sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in
history.  And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The
Pure Drop will say to me!  How they'll squint and glane, and say,
'This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true
level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!' I feel this is too
much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and all--I can bear
it no longer! ...  But she can make him keep her if he's married
her?"

"Why, yes. But she won't think o' doing that."

"D'ye think he really have married her?--or is it like the first--"

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.
The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own
parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could
have done.  How unexpected were the attacks of destiny!  And if her
father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance
doubt her much?  O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at
the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing
her that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm.  In
her craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to
hide from her parents the vast extent of the division between them,
she made use of this letter as her reason for again departing,
leaving them under the impression that she was setting out to join
him.  Still further to screen her husband from any imputation of
unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare
had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife
of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a
slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon
them in years past.  With this assertion of her dignity she bade them
farewell; and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield
household for some time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother
saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which had arisen
between the young husband and wife had adjusted itself under their
strong feeling that they could not live apart from each other.

The cart driver tells Tess that Durbeyfield has been boasting of his family's regained grandeur through Tess's marriage to a gentleman. Devastated, she runs to her mother for comfort, only to receive further rebuke for being a fool about telling her husband the truth of her past. The neighbors scorn her. After she receives a letter from Angel informing her that he is searching for land, she lies about going to live with him and gives her parents half her money


It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself
descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his
father.  With his downward course the tower of the church rose into
the evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no
living person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less
to expect him.  He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his
own footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.

The picture of life had changed for him.  Before this time he had
known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical
man; though perhaps he did not, even yet.  Nevertheless humanity
stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art,
but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with
the leer of a study by Van Beers.

His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond
description.  After mechanically attempting to pursue his
agricultural plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in
the manner recommended by the great and wise men of all ages, he
concluded that very few of those great and wise men had ever gone so
far outside themselves as to test the feasibility of their counsel.
"This is the chief thing: be not perturbed," said the Pagan moralist.
That was just Clare's own opinion.  But he was perturbed.  "Let not
your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," said the Nazarene.
Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart was troubled all the same.
How he would have liked to confront those two great thinkers, and
earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them
to tell him their method!

His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length
he fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive
interest of an outsider.

He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been
brought about by the accident of her being a d'Urberville.  When he
found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of
the new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not
stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles?  This was what
he had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.

Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased.  He
wondered if he had treated her unfairly.  He ate without knowing that
he ate, and drank without tasting.  As the hours dropped past, as the
motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself
to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as
a dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and
ways.

In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small
town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of
the Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist.
Land was offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms.  Brazil
somewhat attracted him as a new idea.  Tess could eventually join him
there, and perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions
and habits the conventions would not be so operative which made life
with her seem impracticable to him here.  In brief he was strongly
inclined to try Brazil, especially as the season for going thither
was just at hand.

With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan
to his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of
arriving without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated
them.  As he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just
as the old one had done in the small hours of that morning when he
had carried his wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard
of the monks; but his face was thinner now.

Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival
stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher
stirs a quiet pool.  His father and mother were both in the
drawing-room, but neither of his brothers was now at home.  Angel
entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.

"But--where's your wife, dear Angel?" cried his mother.  "How you
surprise us!"

"She is at her mother's--temporarily.  I have come home rather in a
hurry because I've decided to go to Brazil."

"Brazil!  Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!"

"Are they?  I hadn't thought of that."

But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical
land could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare's natural interest
in their son's marriage.

"We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken
place," said Mrs Clare, "and your father sent your godmother's gift
to her, as you know.  Of course it was best that none of us should be
present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and
not at her home, wherever that may be.  It would have embarrassed
you, and given us no pleasure.  Your bothers felt that very strongly.
Now it is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits you for
the business you have chosen to follow instead of the ministry of the
Gospel. ...  Yet I wish I could have seen her first, Angel, or have
known a little more about her.  We sent her no present of our own,
not knowing what would best give her pleasure, but you must suppose
it only delayed.  Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your
father's against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much
better to reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her.
And now you have not brought her.  It seems strange.  What has
happened?"

He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should to
go her parents' home for the present, whilst he came there.

"I don't mind telling you, dear mother," he said, "that I always
meant to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could
come with credit to you.  But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent
one.  If I do go it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my
first journey.  She will remain at her mother's till I come back."

"And I shall not see her before you start?"

He was afraid they would not.  His original plan had been, as he had
said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while--not
to wound their prejudices--feelings--in any way; and for other
reasons he had adhered to it.  He would have to visit home in the
course of a year, if he went out at once; and it would be possible
for them to see her before he started a second time--with her.

A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further
exposition of his plans.  His mother's disappointment at not seeing
the bride still remained with her.  Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess
had infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she had almost
fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth--a charming
woman out of Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate.

"Cannot you describe her?  I am sure she is very pretty, Angel."

"Of that there can be no question!" he said, with a zest which
covered its bitterness.

"And that she is pure and virtuous goes without question?"

"Pure and virtuous, of course, she is."

"I can see her quite distinctly.  You said the other day that she was
fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid's bow;
dark eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's
cable; and large eyes violety-bluey-blackish."

"I did, mother."

"I quite see her.  And living in such seclusion she naturally had
scarce ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw
you."

"Scarcely."

"You were her first love?"

"Of course."

"There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls
of the farm.  Certainly I could have wished--well, since my son is to
be an agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should
have been accustomed to an outdoor life."

His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the
chapter from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers,
the Vicar observed to Mrs Clare--

"I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to
read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should
have had in the usual course of our reading?"

"Yes, certainly," said Mrs Clare.  "The words of King Lemuel" (she
could cite chapter and verse as well as her husband).  "My dear son,
your father has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise
of a virtuous wife.  We shall not need to be reminded to apply the
words to the absent one.  May Heaven shield her in all her ways!"

A lump rose in Clare's throat.  The portable lectern was taken out
from the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old
servants came in, and Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse
of the aforesaid chapter--

   "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far
   above rubies.  She riseth while it is yet night, and
   giveth meat to her household.  She girdeth her loins
   with strength and strengtheneth her arms.  She
   perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle
   goeth not out by night.  She looketh well to the ways
   of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
   Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband
   also, and he praiseth her.  Many daughters have done
   virtuously, but thou excellest them all."

When prayers were over, his mother said--

"I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear
father read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you
have chosen.  The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an
idler; not a fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and
her heart for the good of others.  'Her children arise up and call
her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.  Many daughters
have done virtuously, but she excelleth them all.'  Well, I wish I
could have seen her, Angel.  Since she is pure and chaste, she would
have been refined enough for me."

Clare could bear this no longer.  His eyes were full of tears, which
seemed like drops of molten lead.  He bade a quick good night to
these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew
neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts, only
as something vague and external to themselves.  He went to his own
chamber.

His mother followed him, and tapped at his door.  Clare opened it to
discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.

"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you go away so
soon?  I am quite sure you are not yourself."

"I am not, quite, mother," said he.

"About her?  Now, my son, I know it is that--I know it is about her!
Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?"

"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said.  "But we have had a
difference--"

"Angel--is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of
trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her
son.

"She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to
eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

"Then never mind the rest.  After all, there are few purer things in
nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which
may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,
disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition."

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the
secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this
marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the
disclosure.  True, on his own account he cared very little about his
career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on
account of his parents and brothers.  And now as he looked into the
candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on
sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and
a failure.

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with
his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to
practise deception on his parents.  He almost talked to her in his
anger, as if she had been in the room.  And then her cooing voice,
plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch
of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air
the warmth of her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how
great and good her husband was.  But over them both there hung a
deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the
shade of his own limitations.  With all his attempted independence of
judgement this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product
of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and
conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings.  No
prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself,
that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the
praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same
dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by
achievement but by tendency.  Moreover, the figure near at hand
suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without
shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their
distance makes artistic virtues of their stains.  In considering
what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the
defective can be more than the entire.

Angel visits his puzzled parents and tells them he is leaving for Brazil without his wife. He finds his parents have changed their earlier opinion of Tess and now compare her with the mother of Jesus, a pure woman of modest means. His father reads a biblical verse extolling the virtues of a pure woman whose "price is far above rubies". Tears come to Angel's eyes and his mother guesses something is amiss concerning Tess. He denies it


At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a
hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil,
notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm-labourers who
had emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months.
After breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such
trifling matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from
the local bank all the money he possessed.  On his way back he
encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose walls she
seemed to be a sort of emanation.  She was carrying an armful of
Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which
produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her--an
enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained
by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what
an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

"Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,"
he replied.  "But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of
existence.  Perhaps a cloister would be preferable."

"A cloister!  O, Angel Clare!"

"Well?"

"Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman
Catholicism."

"And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation.  Thou art in a parlous
state, Angel Clare."

"_I_ glory in my Protestantism!" she said severely.

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods
in which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close
to him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas
he could think of.  His momentary laughter at the horror which
appeared on her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety
for his welfare.

"Dear Mercy," he said, "you must forgive me.  I think I am going
crazy!"

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare
re-entered the Vicarage.  With the local banker he deposited the
jewels till happier days should arise.  He also paid into the bank
thirty pounds--to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might
require; and wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to
inform her of what he had done.  This amount, with the sum he had
already placed in her hands--about fifty pounds--he hoped would be
amply sufficient for her wants just at present, particularly as in
an emergency she had been directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her
by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had
really happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his
mother suggested that he should do so.  During the day he left the
parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary
for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent
with Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent
having to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied,
and two or three small articles fetched away that they had left
behind.  It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown
upon his life had stretched its gloom over him.  Yet when he had
unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the memory
which returned first upon him was that of their happy arrival on a
similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing a habitation
conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire with
joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment of his visit,
and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time.  Inwardly swollen
with a renewal of sentiment that he had not quite reckoned with, he
went upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his.  The bed
was smooth as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of
leaving.  The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed
it.  Having been there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and
the leaves and berries were wrinkled.  Angel took it down and crushed
it into the grate.  Standing there, he for the first time doubted
whether his course in this conjecture had been a wise, much less
a generous, one.  But had he not been cruelly blinded?  In the
incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside
wet-eyed.  "O Tess!  If you had only told me sooner, I would have
forgiven you!" he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of the stairs.
At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her
turning up her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.

"Mr Clare," she said, "I've called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to
inquire if ye be well.  I thought you might be back here again."

This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet
guessed his; an honest girl who loved him--one who would have made as
good, or nearly as good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess.

"I am here alone," he said; "we are not living here now."  Explaining
why he had come, he asked, "Which way are you going home, Izz?"

"I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir," she said.

"Why is that?"

Izz looked down.

"It was so dismal there that I left!  I am staying out this way."
She pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was
journeying.

"Well--are you going there now?  I can take you if you
wish for a lift."

Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.

"Thank 'ee, Mr Clare," she said.

He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and
the few other items which had to be considered by reason of the
sudden abandonment of the lodgings.  On Clare's return to his horse
and gig, Izz jumped up beside him.

"I am going to leave England, Izz," he said, as they drove on.
"Going to Brazil."

"And do Mrs Clare like the notion of such a journey?" she asked.

"She is not going at present--say for a year or so.  I am going out
to reconnoitre--to see what life there is like."

They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making
no observation.

"How are the others?" he inquired.  "How is Retty?"

"She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin
and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline.  Nobody will ever
fall in love wi' her any more," said Izz absently.

"And Marian?"

Izz lowered her voice.

"Marian drinks."

"Indeed!"

"Yes.  The dairyman has got rid of her."

"And you!"

"I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline.  But--I am no great things
at singing afore breakfast now!"

"How is that?  Do you remember how neatly you used to turn ''Twas
down in Cupid's Gardens' and 'The Tailor's Breeches' at morning
milking?"

"Ah, yes!  When you first came, sir, that was.  Not when you had been
there a bit."

"Why was that falling-off?"

Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by way of
answer.

"Izz!--how weak of you--for such as I!" he said, and fell into
reverie.  "Then--suppose I had asked YOU to marry me?"

"If you had I should have said 'Yes', and you would have married a
woman who loved 'ee!"

"Really!"

"Down to the ground!" she whispered vehemently.  "O my God! did you
never guess it till now!"

By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.

"I must get down.  I live out there," said Izz abruptly, never having
spoken since her avowal.

Clare slowed the horse.  He was incensed against his fate, bitterly
disposed towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a
corner, out of which there was no legitimate pathway.  Why not be
revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely,
instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring
manner?

"I am going to Brazil alone, Izz," said he.  "I have separated from
my wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons.  I may never live with
her again.  I may not be able to love you; but--will you go with me
instead of her?"

"You truly wish me to go?"

"I do.  I have been badly used enough to wish for relief.  And you at
least love me disinterestedly."

"Yes--I will go," said Izz, after a pause.

"You will?  You know what it means, Izz?"

"It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over
there--that's good enough for me."

"Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now.  But I ought
to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of
civilization--Western civilization, that is to say."

"I don't mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and
there's no other way!"

"Then don't get down, but sit where you are."

He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing
any signs of affection.

"You love me very, very much, Izz?" he suddenly asked.

"I do--I have said I do!  I loved you all the time we was at the
dairy together!"

"More than Tess?"

She shook her head.

"No," she murmured, "not more than she."

"How's that?"

"Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! ...  She would
have laid down her life for 'ee.  I could do no more."

Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken
perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her
rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace.

Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words
from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter.  In his throat was
something as if a sob had solidified there.  His ears repeated, "SHE
WOULD HAVE LAID DOWN HER LIFE FOR 'EE.  I COULD DO NO MORE!"

"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the horse's head
suddenly.  "I don't know what I've been saying!  I will now drive
you back to where your lane branches off."

"So much for honesty towards 'ee!  O--how can I bear it--how can
I--how can I!"

Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw
what she had done.

"Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one?
O, Izz, don't spoil it by regret!"

She stilled herself by degrees.

"Very well, sir.  Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying, either,
wh--when I agreed to go!  I wish--what cannot be!"

"Because I have a loving wife already."

"Yes, yes!  You have!"

They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an
hour earlier, and she hopped down.

"Izz--please, please forget my momentary levity!" he cried.  "It was
so ill-considered, so ill-advised!"

"Forget it?  Never, never!  O, it was no levity to me!"

He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry
conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and
took her hand.

"Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow?  You don't know what
I've had to bear!"

She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to
mar their adieux.

"I forgive 'ee, sir!" she said.

"Now, Izz," he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing
himself to the mentor's part he was far from feeling; "I want you to
tell Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not
to give way to folly.  Promise that, and tell Retty that there are
more worthy men than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act
wisely and well--remember the words--wisely and well--for my sake.
I send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall
never see them again.  And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your
honest words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards folly
and treachery.  Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in
these things!  On that one account I can never forget you.  Be always
the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as
a worthless lover, but a faithful friend.  Promise."

She gave the promise.

"Heaven bless and keep you, sir.  Goodbye!"

He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare
was out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of
racking anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she
entered her mother's cottage late that night.  Nobody ever was told
how Izz spent the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's
parting from her and her arrival home.

Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching
thoughts and quivering lips.  But his sorrow was not for Izz.  That
evening he was within a feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road
to the nearest station, and driving across that elevated dorsal line
of South Wessex which divided him from his Tess's home.  It was
neither a contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her
heart, which deterred him.

No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz's
admission, the facts had not changed.  If he was right at first,
he was right now.  And the momentum of the course on which he
had embarked tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by
a stronger, more sustained force than had played upon him this
afternoon.  He could soon come back to her.  He took the train that
night for London, and five days after shook hands in farewell of his
brothers at the port of embarkation.

After depositing the diamonds in the bank, Angel sends Tess more money. He meets the former Talbothays milkmaid Izz Huett who tells him of her love for him. He asks her to go to Brazil will him, and she agrees. When he asks if she loves him more than Tess does, she answers "nobody could love'ee more than Tess did. Angel apologizes and goes to Brazil, and yet again, Izz is devastated


From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to
an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting
of Clare and Tess.  We discover the latter in changed conditions;
instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see
her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage,
as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample
means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through
this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the
spring and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers,
the time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service
at dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley,
equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays.  She
preferred this to living on his allowance.  Mentally she remained in
utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather
fostered than checked.  Her consciousness was at that other dairy,
at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had
confronted her there--he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep
for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she
had not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but
had done duty as a supernumerary only.  However, as harvest was now
beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble
to find plenty of further occupation, and this continued till harvest
was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a
contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which
she had put them, she had as yet spent but little.  But there now
followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was
obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go.  Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself--they appeared to have had
as yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own
experiences--and to disperse them was like giving away relics.  But
she had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to
time, but she concealed her circumstances.  When her money had almost
gone a letter from her mother reached her.  Joan stated that they
were in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the
thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but this could
not be done because the previous thatching had never been paid for.
New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which,
with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds.  As
her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by this
time, could she not send them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was
received she sent the twenty as requested.  Part of the remainder
she was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal
sum for the whole inclement season at hand.  When the last pound
had gone, a remark of Angel's that whenever she required further
resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to
take it.  The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be
called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to
his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.
They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise
her in the character of a mendicant!  The consequence was that by no
effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him
know her state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might,
she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the
reverse obtained.  On her leaving their house after the short visit
subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she
was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the
present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was
awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey
to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would
come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any
case that they would soon present a united front to their families
and the world.  This hope she still fostered.  To let her parents
know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had
relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the
_eclat_ of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first
attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind.  Where Clare had
deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were
true that she could only use and not sell them.  Even were they
absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal
title to them which was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial.
At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near
Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and
persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers
and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going
thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the
baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on
English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they
had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which
they were surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return.  Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns
had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place,
while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult
to get employment.  Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence,
energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained
from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses,
people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other
than rural.  From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.
Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience
of it.  But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the
circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she
had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer
required no further aid.  Room would probably have been made for her
at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as
her life had been there, she could not go back.  The anti-climax
would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon
her idolized husband.  She could not have borne their pity, and their
whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though
she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every
individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the
mind of each.  It was the interchange of ideas about her that made
her sensitiveness wince.  Tess could not account for this
distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had
reached her from Marian.  Marian had somehow heard that Tess was
separated from her husband--probably through Izz Huett--and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had
hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to
this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true
that she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the
habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which
she rambled on--disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful
past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to
accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her
whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to
theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was
the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of
distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her
natural attractiveness.  Whilst the clothes lasted which had been
prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused
her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the
wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than
once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular
November afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland
farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was
nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that
region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at
the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure.  But having once decided to
try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching
afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass
the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware.  She had reached
the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length
in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few
moments she was overtaken by a man.  He stepped up alongside Tess and
said--

"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the
landscape was nearly dark.  The man turned and stared hard at her.

"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile--
young Squire d'Urberville's friend?  I was there at that time, though
I don't live there now."

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely.  A spasm of anguish shot
through her, and she returned him no answer.

"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was
true, though your fancy-man was so up about it--hey, my sly one?  You
ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."

Still no answer came from Tess.  There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul.  She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the
wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she
came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation.  Into this
she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade
to be safe against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off
draughts.  She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed
them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle.  Into
this Tess crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard
strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the
breeze.  She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the
other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold.  Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world?  Tess asked
herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity."
She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this
was a most inadequate thought for modern days.  Solomon had thought
as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself,
though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further.  If all
were only vanity, who would mind it?  All was, alas, worse than
vanity--injustice, punishment, exaction, death.  The wife of Angel
Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of
her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she
did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare.  "I wish
it were now," she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves.  It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any
wind.  Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes
it was a sort of gasp or gurgle.  Soon she was certain that the
noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when,
originating in the boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall
of a heavy body upon the ground.  Had she been ensconced here under
other and more pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed;
but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear.

Day at length broke in the sky.  When it had been day aloft for some
little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours
had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and
looked around boldly.  Then she perceived what had been going on to
disturb her.  The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down
at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the
hedge being arable ground.  Under the trees several pheasants lay
about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some
feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating
quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of them writhing in
agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the
night by the inability of nature to bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this.  The birds had been driven
down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and
while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before
nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the
thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew
weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one
by one as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood,
looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their
guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.  She
had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they
were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil
persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like
the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made
it their purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless feathered
creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify
these propensities--at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards
their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as
much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living
birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she
broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie
where she had found them till the game-keepers should come--as they
probably would come--to look for them a second time.

"Poor darlings--to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth
in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears
running down as she killed the birds tenderly.  "And not a twinge of
bodily pain about me!  I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and
I have two hands to feed and clothe me."  She was ashamed of herself
for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a
sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no
foundation in Nature.

Despite a variety of agricultural jobs, Tess runs short of money but sends her parents the money Angel gave her to repair their roof. She doesn't know that Angel is ill in Brazil. Marian, another milkmaid from Talbothays, has written telling Tess about a job, and Tess travels to join her. She meets the man whom Angel attacked for insulting her. She runs to hide and takes refuge for the night in a thicket of bushes. In the morning she discovers a flock of dying pheasants who sought refuge in the bushes during a hunt. Tearfully, she breaks their necks to put them out of their misery. She feels a personal affinity for the tortured birds and "in the sight of such misery," realizes that comparatively she is not so bad off


It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon
the highway.  But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at
hand, and Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the
birds' silent endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her
the relativity of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she
could once rise high enough to despise opinion.  But that she could
not do so long as it was held by Clare.

She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several
young men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks.
Somehow she felt hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband
also might say these same things to her even yet?  She was bound to
take care of herself on the chance of it, and keep off these casual
lovers.  To this end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her
appearance.  As soon as she got out of the village she entered a
thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which
she had never put on even at the dairy--never since she had worked
among the stubble at Marlott.  She also, by a felicitous thought,
took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face under
her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as if
she were suffering from toothache. Then with her little scissors,
by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her
eyebrows off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration, she
went on her uneven way.

"What a mommet of a maid!" said the next man who met her to a
companion.

Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she heard him.

"But I don't care!" she said.  "O no--I don't care!  I'll always be
ugly now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care
of me.  My husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any
more; but I love him just the same, and hate all other men, and like
to make 'em think scornfully of me!"

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a
fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a
red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough
wrapper, and buff-leather gloves.  Every thread of that old attire
has become faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of
sunbeams, and the stress of winds.  There is no sign of young passion
in her now--

     The maiden's mouth is cold
     . . .
     Fold over simple fold
     Binding her head.

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a
thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of
a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust
and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of
love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty,
directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her
but little.  Her object being a winter's occupation and a winter's
home, there was no time to lose.  Her experience of short hirings
had been such that she was determined to accept no more.

Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place
whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of
as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of
tempting.  First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment,
and, as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied
next for the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry
tendance that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and course
pursuits which she liked least--work on arable land: work of such
roughness, indeed, as she would never have deliberately voluteered
for.

Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land
or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli--as if Cybele the
Many-breasted were supinely extended there--which stretched between
the valley of her birth and the valley of her love.

Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown
white and dusty within a few hours after rain.  There were few trees,
or none, those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly
plashed down with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural
enemies of tree, bush, and brake.  In the middle distance ahead of
her she could see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout,
and they seemed friendly.  They had a low and unassuming aspect from
this upland, though as approached on the other side from Blackmoor
in her childhood they were as lofty bastions against the sky.
Southerly, at many miles' distance, and over the hills and ridges
coastward, she could discern a surface like polished steel: it was
the English Channel at a point far out towards France.

Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village.
She had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian's
sojourn.  There seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to
come.  The stubborn soil around her showed plainly enough that the
kind of labour in demand here was of the roughest kind; but it was
time to rest from searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly
as it began to rain.  At the entrance to the village was a cottage
whose gable jutted into the road, and before applying for a lodging
she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening close in.

"Who would think I was Mrs Angel Clare!" she said.

The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that
immediately within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of
which came through the bricks.  She warmed her hands upon them, and
also put her cheek--red and moist with the drizzle--against their
comforting surface.  The wall seemed to be the only friend she had.
She had so little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there
all night.

Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage--gathered together after
their day's labour--talking to each other within, and the rattle of
their supper-plates was also audible.  But in the village-street she
had seen no soul as yet.  The solitude was at last broken by the
approach of one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold,
wore the print gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time.  Tess
instinctively thought it might be Marian, and when she came near
enough to be distinguishable in the gloom, surely enough it was
she.  Marian was even stouter and redder in the face than formerly,
and decidedly shabbier in attire.  At any previous period of her
existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew the acquaintance in
such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive, and she responded
readily to Marian's greeting.

Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved
by the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition
than at first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.

"Tess--Mrs Clare--the dear wife of dear he!  And is it really so bad
as this, my child?  Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way?
Anybody been beating 'ee?  Not HE?"

"No, no, no!  I merely did it not to be clipsed or colled, Marian."

She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest such wild
thoughts.

"And you've got no collar on" (Tess had been accustomed to wear a
little white collar at the dairy).

"I know it, Marian."

"You've lost it travelling."

"I've not lost it.  The truth is, I don't care anything about my
looks; and so I didn't put it on."

"And you don't wear your wedding-ring?"

"Yes, I do; but not in public.  I wear it round my neck on a ribbon.
I don't wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am
married at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life."

Marian paused.

"But you BE a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly fair that you
should live like this!"

"O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy."

"Well, well.  HE married you--and you can be unhappy!"

"Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands--from
their own."

"You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of.  And he's none.  So it
must be something outside ye both."

"Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking
questions?  My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my
allowance, so that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time.
Do not call me Mrs Clare, but Tess, as before.  Do they want a hand
here?"

"O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to come.  'Tis a
starve-acre place.  Corn and swedes are all they grow.  Though I be
here myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such as you to come."

"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."

"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink.  Lord, that's
the only comfort I've got now!  If you engage, you'll be set
swede-hacking.  That's what I be doing; but you won't like it."

"O--anything!  Will you speak for me?"

"You will do better by speaking for yourself."

"Very well.  Now, Marian, remember--nothing about HIM if I get the
place.  I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt."

Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain
than Tess, promised anything she asked.

"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come with me you
would know at once.  I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis
because he's away, I know.  You couldn't be unhappy if he were here,
even if he gie'd ye no money--even if he used you like a drudge."

"That's true; I could not!"

They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse, which was
almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight;
there was not, at this season, a green pasture--nothing but fallow
and turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to
unrelieved levels.

Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of
workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her.
The farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who
represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on
her agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day.  Female field-labour was
seldom offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks
which women could perform as readily as men.

Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do
at present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at
whose gable-wall she had warmed herself.  It was a poor subsistence
that she had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter
at any rate.

That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in
case a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband.  But she
did not tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have
brought reproach upon him.

To counter the constant advances of men, on her journey to Flintcomb-Ash to join Marian Tess wears ugly clothes, covers her face and clips her eyebrows. The farm is hard with poor soil and Tess does not want to talk to the curious Marian, who now drinks habitually, about her husband