An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that
green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or
Froom.  Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat
alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume
of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein
a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,
the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with
the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long
distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads.  It was with a
sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in
his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not
help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even
the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies
being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.  The denizens were
all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb
of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry
for the evening milking.  Angel entered, and went through the silent
passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
moment.  Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs
arose from the still further distance.  The large-leaved rhubarb and
cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the
sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three.  Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.  It was Tess's,
who in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it
had been a snake's.  She had stretched one arm so high above her
coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above
the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung
heavy over their pupils.  The brim-fulness of her nature breathed
from her.  It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than
at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself
flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,
before the remainder of her face was well awake.  With an oddly
compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O
Mr Clare!  How you frightened me--I--"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender
look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and
his face to her flushed cheek.  "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me
any more.  I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there
they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in
by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;
upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her
naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair.  Having
been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat.  At
first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon
lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
help me to-day.  Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty
is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home
till milking."

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.  "So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon.  Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared
as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.
Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the
work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable
that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned
it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy
came convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently.  "I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have
been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.  I shall
soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for
my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms.  Will
you be that woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated
upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With pain that was
like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close.  "Do you say no?  Surely you love me?"

"O yes, yes!  And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the
world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.
"But I CANNOT marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to
marry some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

"I don't want to marry!  I have not thought of doing it.  I cannot!
I only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
such as me.  She will want you to marry a lady."

"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.  That was partly why I went
home."

"I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.

"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"

"Yes--I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
said.  "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew.  But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try
as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two
blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
and dear advocate, she could never explain.

"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
talking in a more general way:

You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious.  They are two of the few
remaining Evangelical school.  Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very
High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard
every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had
never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
do," she remarked as a safe generality.  "It is often a great sorrow
to me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad.  He
himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,
apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to
phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence.  Confused or otherwise,
to disturb them was his last desire:

      Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
         Her early Heaven, her happy views;
         Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
      A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode
of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the
undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead
after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down
the milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she
ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of
herself.

"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his
troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress
me.  He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from
people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more
particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried
so far.  He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in
which he took part quite recently.  He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some
landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.
My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
was quite a disturbance.  It was very foolish of my father, I
must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the
probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.  But whatever
he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely
vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered.  He says
he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;
but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and
would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
she no longer showed any tremulousness.  Clare's revived thoughts of
his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went
on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their
pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk.  As
Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had
heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec
d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with
a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
constraint.  All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows
were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold
grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to
the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It seemed natural enough to him
now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained
Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.

When Angel returns to the dairy, Tess is waking up from the afternoon nap, required during the long summer working hours. Struck by her beauty, he asks her to marry him. She becomes visibly agitated, tells him that she loves him, but that it's out of the question for her to marry him: "Oh, Mr. Clare--I cannot be your wife". He dismisses her answer and tells her to take her time but never lets up in persuading her otherwise. Despite her protests, Tess knows that that she cannot ultimately refuse him


Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare.
His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that
the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the
affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in
the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to
the dallyings of coyness.  That she had already permitted him to
make love to her he read as an additional assurance, not fully
trowing that in the fields and pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no
means deemed waste; love-making being here more often accepted
inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake than in the carking,
anxious homes of the ambitious, where a girl's craving for an
establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion as an end.

"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?" he asked her in
the course of a few days.

She started.

"Don't ask me.  I told you why--partly.  I am not good enough--not
worthy enough."

"How?  Not fine lady enough?"

"Yes--something like that," murmured she.  "Your friends would scorn
me."

"Indeed, you mistake them--my father and mother.  As for my brothers,
I don't care--"  He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her
from slipping away.  "Now--you did not mean it, sweet?--I am sure you
did not!  You have made me so restless that I cannot read, or play,
or do anything.  I am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know--to hear
from your own warm lips--that you will some day be mine--any time you
may choose; but some day?"

She could only shake her head and look away from him.

Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as
if they had been hieroglyphics.  The denial seemed real.

"Then I ought not to hold you in this way--ought I?  I have no
right to you--no right to seek out where you are, or walk with you!
Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?"

"How can you ask?" she said, with continued self-suppression.

"I almost know that you do not.  But then, why do you repulse me?"

"I don't repulse you.  I like you to--tell me you love me; and you
may always tell me so as you go about with me--and never offend me."

"But you will not accept me as a husband?"

"Ah--that's different--it is for your good, indeed, my dearest!
O, believe me, it is only for your sake!  I don't like to give
myself the great happiness o' promising to be yours in that
way--because--because I am SURE I ought not to do it."

"But you will make me happy!"

"Ah--you think so, but you don't know!"

At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be
her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he
would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile--which
was certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him
having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments
of his knowledge, to a surprising extent.  After these tender
contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the
remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room,
if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an
apparently phlegmatic negative.

The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the
side of his--two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience--
that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power.
She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind.  On no account could
she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her
husband for his blindness in wedding her.  And she held that what her
conscience had decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not
to be overruled now.

"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said.  "It was only
forty miles off--why hasn't it reached here?  Somebody must know!"

Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.

For two or three days no more was said.  She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not
only as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for
themselves that she did not put herself in his way.

Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life
was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and
positive pain.  At the next cheese-making the pair were again left
alone together.  The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but
Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a
suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they walked
so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the
dairyman left them to themselves.

They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into
the vats.  The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a
large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess
Durbeyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased,
and laid his hands flat upon hers.  Her sleeves were rolled far above
the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft
arm.

Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from
her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a
new-gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey.  But she was such
a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the
touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the cool arms
flushed hot.  Then, as though her heart had said, "Is coyness longer
necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman, as between man and
man," she lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her
lip rose in a tender half-smile.

"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said.

"Because you love me very much!"

"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty."

"Not AGAIN!"

She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under
her own desire.

"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I CANNOT think why you are so tantalizing.
Why do you disappoint me so?  You seem almost like a coquette, upon
my life you do--a coquette of the first urban water!  They blow
hot and blow cold, just as you do, and it is the very last sort of
thing to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothays. ...  And yet,
dearest," he quickly added, observing now the remark had cut her, "I
know you to be the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived.
So how can I suppose you a flirt?  Tess, why don't you like the idea
of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?"

"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it;
because--it isn't true!"

The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip quivered, and she
was obliged to go away.  Clare was so pained and perplexed that he
ran after and caught her in the passage.

"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her, in
forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you won't belong
to anybody but me!"

"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed.  "And I will give you a
complete answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my
experiences--all about myself--all!"

"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number."  He expressed
assent in loving satire, looking into her face.  "My Tess, no doubt,
almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the
garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time.
Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more
about not being worthy of me."

"I will try--not!  And I'll give you my reasons to-morrow--next
week."

"Say on Sunday?"

"Yes, on Sunday."

At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in
the thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where
she could be quite unseen.  Here Tess flung herself down upon the
rustling undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed, and remained
crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy,
which her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.

In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence.  Every see-saw of her
breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was
a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.
Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the
altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe
pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon
her: that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy
Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement,
wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere
isolation, love's counsel would prevail.

The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows.
She heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands;
the "waow-waow!" which accompanied the getting together of the cows.
But she did not go to the milking.  They would see her agitation;
and the dairyman, thinking the cause to be love alone, would
good-naturedly tease her; and that harassment could not be borne.

Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some
excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls
given.  At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with
the aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous
pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand.  The pollard willows,
tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became
spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it.  She went in and
upstairs without a light.

It was now Wednesday.  Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully
at her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her.  The indoor
milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something
definite was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in
the bedchamber.  Friday passed; Saturday.  To-morrow was the day.

"I shall give way--I shall say yes--I shall let myself marry
him--I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to
the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his
name in her sleep.  "I can't bear to let anybody have him but me!
Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows!  O my
heart--O--O--O!"

Angel will not take no for an answer because he had no doubts of Tess's love for him: "he was so godlike in her eyes". She puts him off, however, by telling him that any of the other milkmaids would make him a better wife. She is torn up about her past with Alec d'Urberville and feels ashamed, soiled and simply not good enough for Angel. He believes that she thinks his marriage to a countrywoman would harm his social status


"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?" said
Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling
gaze round upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye
think?"

One guessed, and another guessed.  Mrs Crick did not guess, because
she knew already.

"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted 'hore's-bird of a
feller, Jack Dollop.  He's lately got married to a widow-woman."

"Not Jack Dollop?  A villain--to think o' that!" said a milker.

The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for
it was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had
afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the
butter-churn.

"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?"
asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was
reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs
Crick, in her sense of his gentility.

"Not he, sir.  Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As I say, 'tis
a widow-woman, and she had money, it seems--fifty poun' a year or so;
and that was all he was after.  They were married in a great hurry;
and then she told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty poun'
a year.  Just fancy the state o' my gentleman's mind at that news!
Never such a cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since!
Serves him well beright.  But onluckily the poor woman gets the worst
o't."

"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of
her first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.

"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively.  "Still, you can see
exactly how 'twas.  She wanted a home, and didn't like to run the
risk of losing him.  Don't ye think that was something like it,
maidens?"

He glanced towards the row of girls.

"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to church, when he
could hardly have backed out," exclaimed Marian.

"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.

"She must have seen what he was after, and should ha' refused him,"
cried Retty spasmodically.

"And what do you say, my dear?" asked the dairyman of Tess.

"I think she ought--to have told him the true state of things--or
else refused him--I don't know," replied Tess, the bread-and-butter
choking her.

"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck Knibbs, a married
helper from one of the cottages.  "All's fair in love and war.  I'd
ha' married en just as she did, and if he'd said two words to me
about not telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first
chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the
rolling-pin--a scram little feller like he!  Any woman could do it."

The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a
sorry smile, for form's sake, from Tess.  What was comedy to them was
tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth.  She soon rose
from table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her,
went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the
irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main
stream of the Var.  Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up
the river, and masses of them were floating past her--moving islands
of green crow-foot, whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks
of which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows
from crossing.

Yes, there was the pain of it.  This question of a woman telling her
story--the heaviest of crosses to herself--seemed but amusement to
others.  It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.

"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,
alighting beside her feet.  "My wife--soon!"

"No, no; I cannot.  For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say
no!"

"Tess!"

"Still I say no!" she repeated.

Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the
moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair.  (The
younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose
on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending
church, a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads
against the cows.)  If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he
would have kissed her; it had evidently been his intention; but
her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart.  Their
condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such
disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to
her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have
honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him.  He released
her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.

It all turned on that release.  What had given her strength to refuse
him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman;
and that would have been overcome in another moment.  But Angel said
no more; his face was perplexed; he went away.

Day after day they met--somewhat less constantly than before; and
thus two or three weeks went by.  The end of September drew near, and
she could see in his eye that he might ask her again.

His plan of procedure was different now--as though he had made up
his mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth
startled by the novelty of the proposal.  The fitful evasiveness of
her manner when the subject was under discussion countenanced the
idea.  So he played a more coaxing game; and while never going beyond
words, or attempting the renewal of caresses, he did his utmost
orally.

In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of
the purling milk--at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings,
at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs--as
no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.

Tess knew that she must break down.  Neither a religious sense of a
certain moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious wish
for candour could hold out against it much longer.  She loved him so
passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though
untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary
guidance.  And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can
never be his wife," the words were vain.  A proof of her weakness lay
in the very utterance of what calm strength would not have taken the
trouble to formulate.  Every sound of his voice beginning on the old
subject stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the
recantation she feared.

His manner was--what man's is not?--so much that of one who would
love and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes,
charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it.
The season meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though
it was still fine, the days were much shorter.  The dairy had again
worked by morning candlelight for a long time; and a fresh renewal
of Clare's pleading occurred one morning between three and four.

She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as usual;
then had gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes
was walking to the head of the stairs with the candle in her
hand.  At the same moment he came down his steps from above in his
shirt-sleeves and put his arm across the stairway.

"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said peremptorily. "It is a
fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer.  You MUST tell
me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house.  My door was
ajar just now, and I saw you.  For your own safety I must go.  You
don't know.  Well?  Is it to be yes at last?"

"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take me to
task!" she pouted.  "You need not call me Flirt.  'Tis cruel and
untrue.  Wait till by and by.  Please wait till by and by!  I will
really think seriously about it between now and then.  Let me go
downstairs!"

She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle
sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words.

"Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare."

"Angel."

"Angel dearest--why not?"

"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?"

"It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me;
and you were so good as to own that long ago."

"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I MUST," she murmured, looking
at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding
her suspense.

Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her
promise; but somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up
milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there
should be leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done,
he broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one
moment.  She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at
him or saying another word.  The other maids were already down,
and the subject was not pursued.  Except Marian, they all looked
wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the sad yellow rays which
the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals
of the dawn without.

When skimming was done--which, as the milk diminished with the
approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by day--Retty and
the rest went out.  The lovers followed them.

"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?" he
musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping
before him through the frigid pallor of opening day.

"Not so very different, I think," she said.

"Why do you think that?"

"There are very few women's lives that are not--tremulous," Tess
replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her.  "There's
more in those three than you think."

"What is in them?"

"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make--perhaps would
make--a properer wife than I.  And perhaps they love you as well
as I--almost."

"O, Tessy!"

There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the
impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let
generosity make one bid against herself.  That was now done, and she
had not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then.
They were joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more
was said on that which concerned them so deeply.  But Tess knew that
this day would decide it.

In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and assistants
went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where
many of the cows were milked without being driven home.  The
supply was getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the
supernumerary milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.

The work progressed leisurely.  Each pailful was poured into tall
cans that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought
upon the scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away.
Dairyman Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming
miraculously white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked
at his heavy watch.

"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said.  "Begad!  We shan't be
soon enough with this milk at the station, if we don't mind.  There's
no time to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending
off.  It must go to station straight from here.  Who'll drive it
across?"

Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business,
asking Tess to accompany him.  The evening, though sunless, had
been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with
her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not
dressed for a drive.  She therefore replied by glancing over her
scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her.  She assented by
relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and
mounted the spring-waggon beside Clare.

A local farm man named Jack Dollop, the same man who escaped an aspiring mother-in-law by hiding in the dairy's churn, marries a local wealthy widow but finds that her wealth evaporated upon her remarriage. All at Talbothays laugh at this tidbit of gossip and side with the despicable Dollop against the scheming widow. But Tess takes the story to heart and worries more and more about sharing her past with Angel


In the diminishing daylight they went along the level roadway through
the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed in
the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of
Egdon Heath.  On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees,
whose notched tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning
black-fronted castles of enchantment.

They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that
they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken
only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them.
The lane they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had
remained on the boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the
blackberries hung in heavy clusters.  Every now and then Angel would
fling the lash of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give
it to his companion.

The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down
herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into
a fitful breeze which played about their faces.  The quick-silvery
glaze on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light
they changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a
rasp.  But that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation.  Her
countenance, a natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season,
had deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her
hair, which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual, caused to
tumble down from its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her
calico bonnet, was made clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was
better than seaweed.

"I ought not to have come, I suppose," she murmured, looking at the
sky.

"I am sorry for the rain," said he.  "But how glad I am to have you
here!"

Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid gauze.  The
evening grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates, it was
not safe to drive faster than at a walking pace.  The air was rather
chill.

"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and
shoulders," he said.  "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle
won't hurt you much.  I should be sorrier still if I did not think
that the rain might be helping me."

She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a
large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun
off the milk-cans.  Tess held it from slipping off him as well as
herself, Clare's hands being occupied.

"Now we are all right again.  Ah--no we are not!  It runs down into
my neck a little, and it must still more into yours.  That's better.
Your arms are like wet marble, Tess.  Wipe them in the cloth.  Now,
if you stay quiet, you will not get another drop.  Well, dear--about
that question of mine--that long-standing question?"

The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of
the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk
in the cans behind them.

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I do," she replied.

"Before we get home, mind."

"I'll try."

He said no more then.  As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course
passed and left behind.

"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old
place--one of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman
family formerly of great influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles.
I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them.  There
is something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even
if it was fierce, domineering, feudal renown."

"Yes," said Tess.

They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand
at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot
where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the
dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between
their secluded world and modern life.  Modern life stretched out its
steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the
native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what
it touched had been uncongenial.

They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a
little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one
sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the
celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast.  The
cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little
shelter from a neighbouring holly tree.

Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently
upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into
the truck.  The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess
Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree.  No
object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and
wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the
rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at
pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet
drooping on her brow.

She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience
characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had
wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they
plunged back into the now thick night.  Tess was so receptive that
the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress
lingered in her thought.

"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won't they?"
she asked.  "Strange people that we have never seen."

"Yes--I suppose they will.  Though not as we send it.  When its
strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their
heads."

"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and
tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."

"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."

"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how
we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might
reach 'em in time?"

"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we
drove a little on our own--on account of that anxious matter which
you will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess.  Now, permit me to put
it in this way.  You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I
mean. Does it not?"

"You know as well as I.  O yes--yes!"

"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?"

"My only reason was on account of you--on account of a question.  I
have something to tell you--"

"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly
convenience also?"

"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience.  But my
life before I came here--I want--"

"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness.  If I have a
very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable
as a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in
the country.  So please--please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of
the feeling that you will stand in my way."

"But my history.  I want you to know it--you must let me tell
you--you will not like me so well!"

"Tell it if you wish to, dearest.  This precious history then.  Yes,
I was born at so and so, Anno Domini--"

"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words as a help,
lightly as they were spoken.  "And I grew up there. And I was in the
Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness,
and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should
be one.  But there was trouble in my family; father was not very
industrious, and he drank a little."

"Yes, yes.  Poor child!  Nothing new."  He pressed her more closely
to his side.

"And then--there is something very unusual about it--about me.  I--I
was--"

Tess's breath quickened.

"Yes, dearest.  Never mind."

"I--I--am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville--a descendant of the
same family as those that owned the old house we passed.  And--we are
all gone to nothing!"

"A d'Urberville!--Indeed!  And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?"

"Yes," she answered faintly.

"Well--why should I love you less after knowing this?"

"I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families."

He laughed.

"Well, it is true, in one sense.  I do hate the aristocratic
principle of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners
the only pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of
the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity.  But
I am extremely interested in this news--you can have no idea how
interested I am!  Are you not interested yourself in being one of
that well-known line?"

"No.  I have thought it sad--especially since coming here, and
knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to
my father's people.  But other hills and field belonged to Retty's
people, and perhaps others to Marian's, so that I don't value it
particularly."

"Yes--it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil
were once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school
of politicians don't make capital of the circumstance; but they don't
seem to know it...  I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of
your name to d'Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption.  And
this was the carking secret!"

She had not told.  At the last moment her courage had failed her;
she feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct
of self-preservation was stronger than her candour.

"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should have been glad
to know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering,
dumb, unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from
the self-seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense of
the rest.  But I am corrupted away from that by my affection for you,
Tess (he laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise.  For your
own sake I rejoice in your descent.  Society is hopelessly snobbish,
and this fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference
to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I have made you the
well-read woman that I mean to make you.  My mother too, poor soul,
will think so much better of you on account of it.  Tess, you must
spell your name correctly--d'Urberville--from this very day."

"I like the other way rather best."

"But you MUST, dearest!  Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom
millionaires would jump at such a possession!  By the bye, there's
one of that kidney who has taken the name--where have I heard of
him?--Up in the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think.  Why, he is the
very man who had that rumpus with my father I told you of.  What an
odd coincidence!"

"Angel, I think I would rather not take the name!  It is unlucky,
perhaps!"

She was agitated.

"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you.  Take my name,
and so you will escape yours!  The secret is out, so why should you
any longer refuse me?"

"If it is SURE to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you
feel that you do wish to marry me, VERY, VERY much--"

"I do, dearest, of course!"

"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly
able to keep alive without me, whatever my offences, that would make
me feel I ought to say I will."

"You will--you do say it, I know!  You will be mine for ever and
ever."

He clasped her close and kissed her.

"Yes!"

She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so
violent that it seemed to rend her.  Tess was not a hysterical girl
by any means, and he was surprised.

"Why do you cry, dearest?"

"I can't tell--quite!--I am so glad to think--of being yours, and
making you happy!"

"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!"

"I mean--I cry because I have broken down in my vow!  I said I would
die unmarried!"

"But, if you love me you would like me to be your husband?"

"Yes, yes, yes!  But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!"

"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited,
and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very
complimentary.  How came you to wish that if you care for me?  Do you
care for me?  I wish you would prove it in some way."

"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a
distraction of tenderness.  "Will this prove it more?"

She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an
impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she
loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.

"There--now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.

"Yes. I never really doubted--never, never!"

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the
sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them.  She had consented.  She might as well have agreed at first.
The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous
force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the
helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over
the social rubric.

"I must write to my mother," she said.  "You don't mind my doing
that?"

"Of course not, dear child.  You are a child to me, Tess, not to know
how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how
wrong it would be in me to object.  Where does she live?"

"At the same place--Marlott.  On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."

"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer--"

"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me.
O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"

Mrs. Crick arranges for Tess and Angel to be alone by asking them to deliver the milk in the very early morning. When Angel tells Tess they are passing near the ancestral home of the ancient d'Urbervilles family, she tells him that she herself is a descendent of the noble family. He is pleased and realizes that this will make her much more appealing to his family. Tess finally agrees to his proposal and tells him about her family. After she mentions the village of Marlott, Angel suddenly remembers her and that he did not ask her to be his partner in the May Day dance. Tess says "but you would not dance with me. Oh, I hope that will not be an ill omen to us now"


Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very
next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.

   DEAR TESS,--

   J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well,
   as they leave me at Present, thank God for it.  Dear
   Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are going really
   to be married soon.  But with respect to your question,
   Tess, J say between ourselves, quite private but very
   strong, that on no account do you say a word of your
   Bygone Trouble to him.  J did not tell everything
   to your Father, he being so Proud on account of his
   Respectability, which, perhaps, your Intended is
   the same.  Many a woman--some of the Highest in the
   Land--have had a Trouble in their time; and why should
   you Trumpet yours when others don't Trumpet theirs?  No
   girl would be such a Fool, specially as it is so long
   ago, and not your Fault at all.  J shall answer the
   same if you ask me fifty times.  Besides, you must bear
   in mind that, knowing it to be your Childish Nature to
   tell all that's in your heart--so simple!--J made you
   promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having
   your Welfare in my Mind; and you most solemnly did
   promise it going from this Door.  J have not named
   either that Question or your coming marriage to your
   Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple
   Man.

   Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send
   you a Hogshead of Cyder for you Wedding, knowing there
   is not much in your parts, and thin Sour Stuff what
   there is.  So no more at present, and with kind love
   to your Young Man.--From your affectte. Mother,

   J. DURBEYFIELD

"O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.

She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most
oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's elastic spirit.  Her mother did not
see life as Tess saw it.  That haunting episode of bygone days was
to her mother but a passing accident.  But perhaps her mother was
right as to the course to be followed, whatever she might be in her
reasons.  Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her adored
one's happiness: silence it should be.

Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had
any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calmer.  The
responsibility was shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had
been for weeks.  The days of declining autumn which followed her
assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a season through
which she lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching
ecstasy than any other period of her life.

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare.  To her
sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be--knew all that
a guide, philosopher, and friend should know.  She thought every line
in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his
soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer.  The wisdom
of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be
wearing a crown.  The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it,
made her lift up her heart to him in devotion.  He would sometimes
catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking
at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before
her.

She dismissed the past--trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on
a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous,
protective, in their love for women as he.  Angel Clare was far from
all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed;
but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself
well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness.  Though not
cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot--less Byronic than
Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially
inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion
which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.
This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so
infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against
the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.

They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her honest faith
she did not disguise her desire to be with him.  The sum of her
instincts on this matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the
elusive quality of her sex which attracts men in general might be
distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it
must in its very nature carry with it a suspicion of art.

The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during
betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no
strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he
saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk,
regarded it.  Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons
they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the
brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden
bridges to the other side, and back again.  They were never out of
the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own
murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the
mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape.  They
saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time
that there was bright sunshine elsewhere.  The sun was so near the
ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess
would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long
fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted
against the sloping sides of the vale.

Men were at work here and there--for it was the season for "taking
up" the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter
irrigation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows.
The shovelfuls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river
when it was as wide as the whole valley, were an essence of soils,
pounded champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized to
extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the
mead, and of the cattle grazing there.

Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these
watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to public
dalliance, though actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and
eyes askance on the labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the
while.

"You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!" she said
gladly.

"O no!"

"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that
you are walking about like this with me, a milkmaid--"

"The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen."

"They might feel it a hurt to their dignity."

"My dear girl--a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare!  It is a
grand card to play--that of your belonging to such a family, and I
am reserving it for a grand effect when we are married, and have
the proofs of your descent from Parson Tringham.  Apart from that,
my future is to be totally foreign to my family--it will not affect
even the surface of their lives.  We shall leave this part of
England--perhaps England itself--and what does it matter how people
regard us here?  You will like going, will you not?"

She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so great was the
emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with
him as his own familiar friend.  Her feelings almost filled her ears
like a babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes.  She put her hand
in his, and thus they went on, to a place where the reflected sun
glared up from the river, under a bridge, with a molten-metallic glow
that dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by the
bridge.  They stood still, whereupon little furred and feathered
heads popped up from the smooth surface of the water; but, finding
that the disturbing presences had paused, and not passed by, they
disappeared again.  Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog
began to close round them--which was very early in the evening at
this time of the year--settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it
rested like crystals, and on his brows and hair.

They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark.  Some of the
dairy-people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening
after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to
fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed;
noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by
the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her
contented pauses, the occasional little laugh upon which her soul
seemed to ride--the laugh of a woman in company with the man she
loves and has won from all other women--unlike anything else in
nature.  They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a
bird which has not quite alighted.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being;
it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness
of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would
persist in their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness, care,
shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the
circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them
in hungry subjection there.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual
remembrance.  She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the
background those shapes of darkness were always spread.  They might
be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little
every day.

One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors keeping house,
all the other occupants of the domicile being away.  As they talked
she looked thoughtfully up at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.

"I am not worthy of you--no, I am not!" she burst out, jumping up
from her low stool as though appalled at his homage, and the fulness
of her own joy thereat.

Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was
only the smaller part of it, said--

"I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess!  Distinction does not
consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but
in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and
pure, and lovely, and of good report--as you are, my Tess."

She struggled with the sob in her throat.  How often had that string
of excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years, and
how strange that he should have cited them now.

"Why didn't you stay and love me when I--was sixteen; living with my
little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green?  O, why
didn't you, why didn't you!" she said, impetuously clasping her
hands.

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly
enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would
have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on
him.

"Ah--why didn't I stay!" he said.  "That is just what I feel.  If I
had only known!  But you must not be so bitter in your regret--why
should you be?"

With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged hastily--

"I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have
now.  Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done--I should
have had so much longer happiness!"

It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her
who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and
twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird
in a springe.  To calm herself the more completely, she rose from her
little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts
as she went.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green
ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and
hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends.  When she came back she
was herself again.

"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?"
he said, good-humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the
stool, and seated himself in the settle beside her.  "I wanted to
ask you something, and just then you ran away."

"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured.  She suddenly
approached him, and put a hand upon each of his arms.  "No, Angel,
I am not really so--by nature, I mean!"  The more particularly to
assure him that she was not, she placed herself close to him in the
settle, and allowed her head to find a resting-place against Clare's
shoulder.  "What did you want to ask me--I am sure I will answer it,"
she continued humbly.

"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and hence there
follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day be?'"

"I like living like this."

"But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the
new year, or a little later.  And before I get involved in the
multifarious details of my new position, I should like to have
secured my partner."

"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite practically, wouldn't it
be best not to marry till after all that?--Though I can't bear the
thought o' your going away and leaving me here!"

"Of course you cannot--and it is not best in this case.  I want you
to help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be?  Why
not a fortnight from now?"

"No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so many things to think of
first."

"But--"

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near.  Before
discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round
the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr
Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her
face flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.

"I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she cried, with
vexation.  "I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us!
But I wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might ha' seemed
as if I was almost!"

"Well--if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we shouldn't ha'
noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,"
replied the dairyman.  He continued to his wife, with the stolid
mien of a man who understood nothing of the emotions relating to
matrimony--"Now, Christianer, that shows that folks should never
fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain't.  O no, I
should never ha' thought a word of where she was a sitting to, if
she hadn't told me--not I."

"We are going to be married soon," said Clare, with improvised
phlegm.

"Ah--and be ye!  Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir.  I've
thought you mid do such a thing for some time.  She's too good for a
dairymaid--I said so the very first day I zid her--and a prize for
any man; and what's more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer's
wife; he won't be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at his side."

Somehow Tess disappeared.  She had been even more struck with the
look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick's blunt
praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present.  A
light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed,
awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.
They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to
have.  Their condition was objective, contemplative.

"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking eyes off
Tess.  "How her face do show it!"

"You BE going to marry him?" asked Marian.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When?"

"Some day."

They thought that this was evasiveness only.

"YES--going to MARRY him--a gentleman!" repeated Izz Huett.

And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another,
crept out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess.
Retty put her hands upon Tess's shoulders, as if to realize her
friend's corporeality after such a miracle, and the other two laid
their arms round her waist, all looking into her face.

"How it do seem!  Almost more than I can think of!" said Izz Huett.

Marian kissed Tess.  "Yes," she murmured as she withdrew her lips.

"Was that because of love for her, or because other lips have touched
there by now?" continued Izz drily to Marian.

"I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply.  "I was on'y feeling
all the strangeness o't--that she is to be his wife, and nobody else.
I don't say nay to it, nor either of us, because we did not think
of it--only loved him.  Still, nobody else is to marry'n in the
world--no fine lady, nobody in silks and satins; but she who do live
like we."

"Are you sure you don't dislike me for it?" said Tess in a low voice.

They hung about her in their white nightgowns before replying, as if
they considered their answer might lie in her look.

"I don't know--I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle.  "I want to
hate 'ee; but I cannot!"

"That's how I feel," echoed Izz and Marian.  "I can't hate her.
Somehow she hinders me!"

"He ought to marry one of you," murmured Tess.

"Why?"

"You are all better than I."

"We better than you?" said the girls in a low, slow whisper.  "No,
no, dear Tess!"

"You are!" she contradicted impetuously.  And suddenly tearing away
from their clinging arms she burst into a hysterical fit of tears,
bowing herself on the chest of drawers and repeating incessantly,
"O yes, yes, yes!"

Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.

"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried.  "I think I ought to
make him even now!  You would be better for him than--I don't know
what I'm saying!  O!  O!"

They went up to her and clasped her round, but still her sobs tore
her.

"Get some water," said Marian,  "She's upset by us, poor thing, poor
thing!"

They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where they kissed
her warmly.

"You are best for'n," said Marian.  "More ladylike, and a better
scholar than we, especially since he had taught 'ee so much.  But
even you ought to be proud.  You BE proud, I'm sure!"

"Yes, I am," she said; "and I am ashamed at so breaking down."

When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian whispered
across to her--

"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told
'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not
hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and
we never hoped to be chose by him."

They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging tears
trickled down upon Tess's pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a
bursting heart, to tell all her history to Angel Clare, despite her
mother's command--to let him for whom she lived and breathed despise
her if he would, and her mother regard her as a fool, rather then
preserve a silence which might be deemed a treachery to him, and
which somehow seemed a wrong to these.

Tess receives a letter from her mother strongly advising her not to tell her future husband about her past. Throughout the rest of the fall, Tess enjoys Angel's company but resists setting a wedding date and continues to tell him she is not good enough for him. The Cricks are happy about their engagement but the other dairymaids are dismayed. They cover up their emotions and look at Tess in amazement


This penitential mood kept her from naming the wedding-day. The
beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he
asked her at the most tempting times.  But Tess's desire seemed to be
for a perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was
then.

The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early
afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and the state of
dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling.
Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening
ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary,
like the track of moonlight on the sea.  Gnats, knowing nothing
of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this
pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out
of its line, and were quite extinct.  In the presence of these things
he would remind her that the date was still the question.

Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission
invented by Mrs Crick to give him the opportunity.  This was mostly a
journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how
the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton to which they
were relegated.  For it was a time of the year that brought great
changes to the world of kine.  Batches of the animals were sent away
daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their
calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the calf could
walk, mother and offspring were driven back to the dairy.  In the
interval which elapsed before the calves were sold there was, of
course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been
taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.

Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great
gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where they stood still and
listened.  The water was now high in the streams, squirting through
the weirs, and tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all
full; there was no taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers
were compelled to follow the permanent ways.  From the whole extent
of the invisible vale came a multitudinous intonation; it forced upon
their fancy that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur was
the vociferation of its populace.

"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess; "holding
public-meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching,
quarrelling, sobbing, groaning, praying, and cursing."

Clare was not particularly heeding.

"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much
assistance during the winter months?"

"No."

"The cows are going dry rapidly."

"Yes.  Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the
day before, making nearly twenty in the straw already.  Ah--is it
that the farmer don't want my help for the calving?  O, I am not
wanted here any more!  And I have tried so hard to--"

"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require you.  But,
knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-natured
and respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at
Christmas I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would
do without you he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a
time of year when he could do with a very little female help.  I am
afraid I was sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this
way forcing your hand."

"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel.  Because 'tis
always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis
convenient."

"Well, it is convenient--you have admitted that."  He put his finger
upon her cheek.  "Ah!" he said.

"What?"

"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught!  But why should
I trifle so!  We will not trifle--life is too serious."

"It is.  Perhaps I saw that before you did."

She was seeing it then.  To decline to marry him after all--in
obedience to her emotion of last night--and leave the dairy, meant
to go to some strange place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in
request now calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm
where no divine being like Angel Clare was.  She hated the thought,
and she hated more the thought of going home.

"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued, "since you will
probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and
convenient that I should carry you off then as my property.  Besides,
if you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you would
know that we could not go on like this for ever."

"I wish we could.  That it would always be summer and autumn, and you
always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have
done through the past summer-time!"

"I always shall."

"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour of faith
in him.  "Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for
always!"

Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk
home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.

When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told--with
injunctions of secrecy; for each of the lovers was desirous that the
marriage should be kept as private as possible.  The dairyman, though
he had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about
losing her.  What should he do about his skimming?  Who would make
the ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies?
Mrs Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last
come to an end, and said that directly she set eyes on Tess she
divined that she was to be the chosen one of somebody who was no
common outdoor man; Tess had looked so superior as she walked across
the barton on that afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good
family she could have sworn.  In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember
thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she approached;
but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination aided
by subsequent knowledge.

Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the
sense of a will.  The word had been given; the number of the day
written down.  Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit
the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who
associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their
fellow-creatures; and she accordingly drifted into that passive
responsiveness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic of
the frame of mind.

But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the
wedding-day; really to again implore her advice.  It was a gentleman
who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently
considered.  A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with
a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received with the same
feeling by him.  But this communication brought no reply from Mrs
Durbeyfield.

Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself and to Tess
of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in
truth an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a
later date.  He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and
fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for
him.  He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to
an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this
idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes.  Unsophistication
was a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one
until he came here.  Yet he was very far from seeing his future track
clearly, and it might be a year or two before he would be able to
consider himself fairly started in life.  The secret lay in the tinge
of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense
that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices
of his family.

"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait till you
were quite settled in your midland farm?" she once asked timidly.
(A midland farm was the idea just then.)

"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere
away from my protection and sympathy."

The reason was a good one, so far as it went.  His influence over her
had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his
speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions.  And to leave her
in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with
him.  He wished to have her under his charge for another reason.
His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he
carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and
as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention,
he judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings
whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social
assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal--her
presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.

Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill,
having an idea that he might combine the use of one with
corn-growing.  The proprietor of a large old water-mill at
Wellbridge--once the mill of an Abbey--had offered him the inspection
of his time-honoured mode of procedure, and a hand in the operations
for a few days, whenever he should choose to come.  Clare paid a
visit to the place, some few miles distant, one day at this time,
to inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in the evening.
She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge
flour-mills. And what had determined him?  Less the opportunity of an
insight into grinding and bolting than the casual fact that lodgings
were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its
mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville
family.  This was always how Clare settled practical questions; by
a sentiment which had nothing to do with them.  They decided to go
immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead
of journeying to towns and inns.

"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of
London that I have heard of," he said, "and by March or April we will
pay a visit to my father and mother."

Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day,
the incredible day, on which she was to become his, loomed large in
the near future.  The thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was
the date.  His wife, she said to herself.  Could it ever be?  Their
two selves together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared
by them; why not?  And yet why?

One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and spoke
privately to Tess.

"You was not called home this morning."

"What?"

"It should ha' been the first time of asking to-day," she answered,
looking quietly at Tess.  "You meant to be married New Year's Eve,
deary?"

The other returned a quick affirmative.

"And there must be three times of asking.  And now there be only two
Sundays left between."

Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be
three.  Perhaps he had forgotten!  If so, there must be a week's
postponement, and that was unlucky.  How could she remind her lover?
She who had been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and
alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.

A natural incident relieved her anxiety.  Izz mentioned the omission
of the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron's privilege
of speaking to Angel on the point.

"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare?  The banns, I mean."

"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare.

As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:

"Don't let them tease you about the banns.  A licence will be quieter
for us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you.
So if you go to church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own
name, if you wished to."

"I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said proudly.

But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess
notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would stand
up and forbid the banns on the ground of her history.  How events
were favouring her!

"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself.  "All this good
fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill.  That's
how Heaven mostly does.  I wish I could have had common banns!"

But everything went smoothly.  She wondered whether he would like her
to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to
buy a new one.  The question was set at rest by his forethought,
disclosed by the arrival of some large packages addressed to her.
Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to
shoes, including a perfect morning costume, such as would well suit
the simple wedding they planned.  He entered the house shortly after
the arrival of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing them.

A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in
her eyes.

"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek upon his
shoulder.  "Even to the gloves and handkerchief!  My own love--how
good, how kind!"

"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London--nothing
more."

And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go
upstairs, and take her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not,
to get the village sempstress to make a few alterations.

She did return upstairs, and put on the gown.  Alone, she stood for a
moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and
then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic
robe--

     That never would become that wife
       That had once done amiss,

which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely
and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune.
Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe
had betrayed Queen Guinevere.  Since she had been at the dairy she
had not once thought of the lines till now.

The young couple grows more and more in love and Tess finally agrees to set a date for New Year's Eve. He is to go to another farm to study the workings of a flour mill which was once the site of one of the d'Urberville's family's many houses. Angel surprises Tess with a silk wedding gown and traveling suit and requests a license instead of having the banns read out publicly in the church