There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash
farm as a starve-acre place.  The single fat thing on the soil was
Marian herself; and she was an importation.  Of the three classes of
village, the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by
itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord
(in other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry, the
village of free- or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village,
farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work.  Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel
Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was
a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground
of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets--the outcrop of
siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes.  The upper half
of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the
business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole
field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse
of skin.  The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone.  So these two upper
and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the
white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls
crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical
regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian "wroppers"--
sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their
gowns from blowing about--scant skirts revealing boots that reached
high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.  The
pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of
the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect
they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice
of their lot.  Even in such a position as theirs it was possible
to exist in a dream.  In the afternoon the rain came on again, and
Marian said that they need not work any more.  But if they did not
work they would not be paid; so they worked on.  It was so high a
situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but
raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them
like glass splinters till they were wet through.  Tess had not
known till now what was really meant by that.  There are degrees of
dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common
talk.  But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of
rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then
at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light
diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum
of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed.  They
were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived
and loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of
land where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to
all, emotionally to these.  Tess would fain not have conversed with
Marian of the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband;
but the irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into
reciprocating Marian's remarks.  And thus, as has been said, though
the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces,
and their wrappers clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all
this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

"You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o' Froom Valley
from here when 'tis fine," said Marian.

"Ah!  Can you?" said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will
to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment.  Marian's
will had a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as
the afternoon wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which
she invited Tess to drink.  Tess's unassisted power of dreaming,
however, being enough for her sublimation at present, she declined
except the merest sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

"I've got used to it," she said, "and can't leave it off now.  'Tis
my only comfort--You see I lost him: you didn't; and you can do
without it perhaps."

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by the dignity
of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian's
differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in
the afternoon rains.  When it was not swede-grubbing it was
swede-trimming, in which process they sliced off the earth and the
fibres with a bill-hook before storing the roots for future use.  At
this occupation they could shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if
it rained; but if it was frosty even their thick leather gloves could
not prevent the frozen masses they handled from biting their fingers.
Still Tess hoped.  She had a conviction that sooner or later the
magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient
of Clare's character would lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped
flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely
obtuse.  They often looked across the country to where the Var or
Froom was know to stretch, even though they might not be able to see
it; and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the
old times they had spent out there.

"Ah," said Marian, "how I should like another or two of our old set
to come here!  Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here
afield, and talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o'
the old things we used to know, and make it all come back a'most, in
seeming!"  Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the
visions returned.  "I'll write to Izz Huett," she said.  "She's
biding at home doing nothing now, I know, and I'll tell her we be
here, and ask her to come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now."

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard
of this plan for importing old Talbothays' joys was two or three days
later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,
and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years.  It came on in stealthy
and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player.  One morning
the few lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if
they had put off a vegetable for an animal integument.  Every twig
was covered with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the
night, giving it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or
tree forming a staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray
of the sky and horizon.  Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds
and walls where none had ever been observed till brought out into
visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of
white worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and
gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost,
when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive
silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures
with tragical eyes--eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal
horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human
being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could
endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of
snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded
by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and
retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered.
These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of
all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no
account.  The traveller's ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with
dumb impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not
value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland--the trivial
movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers
so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as
food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.
There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not
of frost.  It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows
ache, penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the
body less than its core.  They knew that it meant snow, and in the
night the snow came.  Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with
the warm gable that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside
it, awoke in the night, and heard above the thatch noises which
seemed to signify that the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium
of all the winds.  When she lit her lamp to get up in the morning
she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement,
forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had
also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor,
on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about.  Without, the
storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as
yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by
the time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp,
Marian arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the
women at reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed.  As soon,
therefore, as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn
to a disordered medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped
themselves up in their thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats
round their necks and across their chests, and started for the barn.
The snow had followed the birds from the polar basin as a white
pillar of a cloud, and individual flakes could not be seen.  The
blast smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears,
carrying the snow so that it licked the land but did not deepen on
it.  They trudged onwards with slanted bodies through the flossy
fields, keeping as well as they could in the shelter of hedges,
which, however, acted as strainers rather than screens.  The air,
afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it,
twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos
of things.  But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such
weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

"Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming," said
Marian.  "Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from
the North Star.  Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having
scorching weather all this time.  Lord, if he could only see his
pretty wife now!  Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all--in
fact, it rather does it good."

"You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian," said Tess severely.

"Well, but--surely you care for'n!  Do you?"

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,
putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

"Well, well, I know you do.  But 'pon my body, it is a rum life for
a married couple!  There--I won't say another word!  Well, as for
the weather, it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is
fearful hard work--worse than swede-hacking.  I can stand it because
I'm stout; but you be slimmer than I.  I can't think why maister
should have set 'ee at it."

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it.  One end of the long
structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was
carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the
evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for
the women to draw from during the day.

"Why, here's Izz!" said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward.  She had walked all the way from
her mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the
distance so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before
the snow began, and sleeping at the alehouse.  The farmer had agreed
with her mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she
had been afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a
neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start
remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the
Queen of Diamonds--those who had tried to fight with her in the
midnight quarrel at Trantridge.  They showed no recognition of her,
and possibly had none, for they had been under the influence of
liquor on that occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there
as here.  They did all kinds of men's work by preference, including
well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any sense of
fatigue.  Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the
other three with some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the
press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam,
under which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the
beam being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the
sheaves diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors
upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky.  The girls
pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the
presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian
and Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.
Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer
rode up to the barndoor.  When he had dismounted he came close to
Tess, and remained looking musingly at the side of her face.  She had
not turned at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round,
when she perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge
from whom she had taken flight on the high-road because of his
allusion to her history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,
when he said, "So you be the young woman who took my civility in such
ill part?  Be drowned if I didn't think you might be as soon as I
heard of your being hired!  Well, you thought you had got the better
of me the first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second
time on the road, when you bolted; but now I think I've got the
better you."  He concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a
clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw.  She
could read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she
had nothing to fear from her employer's gallantry; it was rather the
tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare's treatment of him.
Upon the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave
enough to endure it.

"You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose?  Some women are such
fools, to take every look as serious earnest.  But there's nothing
like a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o' young wenches'
heads; and you've signed and agreed till Lady-Day.  Now, are you
going to beg my pardon?"

"I think you ought to beg mine."

"Very well--as you like.  But we'll see which is master here.  Be
they all the sheaves you've done to-day?"

"Yes, sir."

"'Tis a very poor show.  Just see what they've done over there"
(pointing to the two stalwart women).  "The rest, too, have done
better than you."

"They've all practised it before, and I have not.  And I thought it
made no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid
for what we do."

"Oh, but it does.  I want the barn cleared."

"I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as
the others will do."

He looked sullenly at her and went away.  Tess felt that she could
not have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than
gallantry.  When two o'clock arrived the professional reed-drawers
tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,
tied their last sheaves, and went away.  Marian and Izz would have
done likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up
by longer hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her.
Looking out at the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, "Now,
we've got it all to ourselves."  And so at last the conversation
turned to their old experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the
incidents of their affection for Angel Clare.

"Izz and Marian," said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was
extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: "I
can't join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you
will see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for
the present, he is my husband."

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls
who had loved Clare.  "He was a very splendid lover, no doubt," she
said; "but I don't think he is a too fond husband to go away from you
so soon."

"He had to go--he was obliged to go, to see about the land over
there!" pleaded Tess.

"He might have tided 'ee over the winter."

"Ah--that's owing to an accident--a misunderstanding; and we won't
argue it," Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words.  "Perhaps
there's a good deal to be said for him!  He did not go away, like
some husbands, without telling me; and I can always find out where
he is."

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they
went on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering
it under their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks,
nothing sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the
crunch of the hook.  Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon
the heap of wheat-ears at her feet.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!" cried Marian.  "It wants
harder flesh than yours for this work."

Just then the farmer entered.  "Oh, that's how you get on when I am
away," he said to her.

"But it is my own loss," she pleaded.  "Not yours."

"I want it finished," he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and
went out at the other door.

"Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear," said Marian.  "I've worked here
before.  Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up
your number."

"I don't like to let you do that.  I'm taller than you, too."

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile,
and reclined on a heap of pull-tails--the refuse after the straight
straw had been drawn--thrown up at the further side of the barn.  Her
succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening
the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work.
She lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of
the straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of
bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the
murmur of their voices.  She felt certain that they were continuing
the subject already broached, but their voices were so low that she
could not catch the words.  At last Tess grew more and more anxious
to know what they were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt
better, she got up and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down.  She had walked more than a dozen miles
the previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen
again at five o'clock.  Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor
and her stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms
without suffering.  Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she
felt better, to finish the day without her, and make equal division
of the number of sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great
door into the snowy track to her lodging.  Marian, as was the case
every afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel
in a romantic vein.

"I should not have thought it of him--never!" she said in a dreamy
tone.  "And I loved him so!  I didn't mind his having YOU.  But this
about Izz is too bad!"

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger
with the bill-hook.

"Is it about my husband?" she stammered.

"Well, yes.  Izz said, 'Don't 'ee tell her'; but I am sure I can't
help it!  It was what he wanted Izz to do.  He wanted her to go off
to Brazil with him."

Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves
straightened.  "And did Izz refuse to go?" she asked.

"I don't know.  Anyhow he changed his mind."

"Pooh--then he didn't mean it!  'Twas just a man's jest!"

"Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station."

"He didn't take her!"

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory
symptoms, burst out crying.

"There!" said Marian.  "Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!"

"No.  It is a very good thing that you have done!  I have been living
on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead
to!  I ought to have sent him a letter oftener.  He said I could not
go to him, but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I liked.
I won't dally like this any longer!  I have been very wrong and
neglectful in leaving everything to be done by him!"

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no
longer.  When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered
into the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began
impetuously writing a letter to Clare.  But falling into doubt, she
could not finish it.  Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on
which she wore it next her heart, and retained it on her finger all
night, as if to fortify herself in the sensation that she was really
the wife of this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz
should go with him abroad, so shortly after he had left her.  Knowing
that, how could she write entreaties to him, or show that she cared
for him any more?

The two women work side by side, digging up turnips from the near frozen ground. Soon, Izz Huett arrives. After the full winter sets in, the women work in the barn where, to Tess's dismay, the owner of the farm appears. He turns out to be the man who insulted Tess, and he takes vicious delight in having the upper hand. Tess has to work even harder. One afternoon, a drunken Marian tells Tess that Angel invited Izz to accompany him to Brazil


By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the
direction which they had taken more than once of late--to the distant
Emminster Vicarage.  It was through her husband's parents that she
had been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to
write to them direct if in difficulty.  But that sense of her having
morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse
to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore,
as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually
non-existent.  This self-effacement in both directions had been quite
in consonance with her independent character of desiring nothing
by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair
consideration of her deserts.  She had set herself to stand or fall
by her qualities, and to waive such merely technical claims upon a
strange family as had been established for her by the flimsy fact of
a member of that family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in
a church-book beside hers.

But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale, there was a
limit to her powers of renunciation.  Why had her husband not written
to her?  He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her
know of the locality to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a
line to notify his address.  Was he really indifferent?  But was he
ill?  Was it for her to make some advance?  Surely she might summon
the courage of solicitude, call at the Vicarage for intelligence, and
express her grief at his silence.  If Angel's father were the good
man she had heard him represented to be, he would be able to enter
into her heart-starved situation.  Her social hardships she could
conceal.

To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was
the only possible opportunity.  Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle
of the cretaceous tableland over which no railway had climbed as
yet, it would be necessary to walk.  And the distance being fifteen
miles each way she would have to allow herself a long day for the
undertaking by rising early.

A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by
a hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to
try the experiment.  At four o'clock that Sunday morning she came
downstairs and stepped out into the starlight.  The weather was still
favourable, the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that
the journey concerned her husband.  Their lodgings were in a cottage
a little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess
in her departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very
prettiest guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though
she, knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare,
was indifferent, and even doubtful.  A year had now elapsed since
her sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from
the wreck of her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as
a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft
gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of
her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

"'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now--you do look
a real beauty!" said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on
the threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow
candlelight within.  Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of
herself to the situation; she could not be--no woman with a heart
bigger than a hazel-nut could be--antagonistic to Tess in her
presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex
being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering
the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let
her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn.
They heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out
to her full pace.  Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without
any particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had
been prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and
only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her.
Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a
dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky
hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream
at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole
history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the
truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which
stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still
in the dawn.  Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the
atmosphere down there was a deep blue.  Instead of the great
enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to
toil, there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen
acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes
of a net.  Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in
Froom Valley, it was always green.  Yet it was in that vale that her
sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly.  Beauty
to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what
the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing
above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from
Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and
High-Stoy, with the dell between them called "The Devil's Kitchen".
Still following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where
the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a
miracle, or murder, or both.  Three miles further she cut across the
straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which
as soon as she reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane
into the small town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway
over the distance.  She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second
time, heartily enough--not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided
inns, but at a cottage by the church.

The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by
way of Benvill Lane.  But as the mileage lessened between her and the
spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her
enterprise loom out more formidably.  She saw her purpose in such
staring lines, and the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes
in danger of losing her way.  However, about noon she paused by a
gate on the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage
lay.

The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the
Vicar and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in
her eyes.  She wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a
week-day.  Such a good man might be prejudiced against a woman who
had chosen Sunday, never realizing the necessities of her case.
But it was incumbent upon her to go on now.  She took off the thick
boots in which she had walked thus far, put on her pretty thin ones
of patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge by the
gatepost where she might readily find them again, descended the hill;
the freshness of colour she had derived from the keen air thinning
away in spite of her as she drew near the parsonage.

Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing
favoured her.  The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably
in the frosty breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of
imagination, dressed to her highest as she was, that the house was
the residence of near relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature
or emotion, divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts,
birth, death, and after-death, they were the same.

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang
the door-bell.  The thing was done; there could be no retreat.  No;
the thing was not done.  Nobody answered to her ringing.  The effort
had to be risen to and made again.  She rang a second time, and the
agitation of the act, coupled with her weariness after the fifteen
miles' walk, led her to support herself while she waited by resting
her hand on her hip and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The
wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray,
each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir
of her nerves.  A piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some
meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the gate;
too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it
company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came.  Then she
walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through.  And
though she looked dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to
return, it was with a breath of relied that she closed the gate.  A
feeling haunted her that she might have been recognized (though how
she could not tell), and orders been given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner.  She had done all she could do; but
determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future
distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at
all the windows.

Ah--the explanation was that they were all at church, every one.  She
remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon
the household, servants included, going to morning-service, and,
as a consequence, eating cold food when they came home.  It was,
therefore, only necessary to wait till the service was over.  She
would not make herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she
started to get past the church into the lane.  But as she reached the
churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess found herself
in the midst of them.

The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of
small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a
woman out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger.  She
quickened her pace, and ascended the road by which she had come,
to find a retreat between its hedges till the Vicar's family should
have lunched, and it might be convenient for them to receive her.
She soon distanced the churchgoers, except two youngish men, who,
linked arm-in-arm, were beating up behind her at a quick step.

As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest
discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her
situation, did not fail to recognize in those noises the quality
of her husband's tones.  The pedestrians were his two brothers.
Forgetting all her plans, Tess's one dread was lest they should
overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before she was
prepared to confront them; for though she felt that they could not
identify her, she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny.  The more
briskly they walked, the more briskly walked she.  They were plainly
bent upon taking a short quick stroll before going indoors to lunch
or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled with sitting through a
long service.

Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill--a ladylike young
woman, somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle _guindee_
and prudish.  Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her
brothers-in-law brought them so nearly behind her back that she could
hear every word of their conversation.  They said nothing, however,
which particularly interested her till, observing the young lady
still further in front, one of them remarked, "There is Mercy Chant.
Let us overtake her."

Tess knew the name.  It was the woman who had been destined for
Angel's life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably
would have married but for her intrusive self.  She would have known
as much without previous information if she had waited a moment, for
one of the brothers proceeded to say: "Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel!
I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting his
precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever
she may be.  It is a queer business, apparently.  Whether she has
joined him yet or not I don't know; but she had not done so some
months ago when I heard from him."

"I can't say.  He never tells me anything nowadays.  His
ill-considered marriage seems to have completed that estrangement
from me which was begun by his extraordinary opinions."

Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk
them without exciting notice.  At last they outsped her altogether,
and passed her by.  The young lady still further ahead heard their
footsteps and turned.  Then there was a greeting and a shaking of
hands, and the three went on together.

They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending
this point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and
turned all three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour
before that time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it.
During their discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge
carefully with his umbrella, and dragged something to light.

"Here's a pair of old boots," he said.  "Thrown away, I suppose, by
some tramp or other."

"Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps,
and so excite our sympathies," said Miss Chant.  "Yes, it must have
been, for they are excellent walking-boots--by no means worn out.
What a wicked thing to do!  I'll carry them home for some poor
person."

Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for
her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated.

She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen
veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church
party had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.

Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk.  Tears, blinding tears, were
running down her face.  She knew that it was all sentiment, all
baseless impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as
her own condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she
could not contravene in her own defenceless person all those untoward
omens.  It was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage.
Angel's wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like
a scorned thing by those--to her--superfine clerics.  Innocently
as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that
she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his
narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to
the full the gift of charity.  As she again thought of her dusty
boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which
they had been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their
owner.

"Ah!" she said, still sighing in pity of herself, "THEY didn't know
that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these
pretty ones HE bought for me--no--they did not know it!  And they
didn't think that HE chose the colour o' my pretty frock--no--how
could they?  If they had known perhaps they would not have cared,
for they don't care much for him, poor thing!"

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of
judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her
way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this
feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons.  Her present condition was
precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and
Mrs Clare.  Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme
cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among
mankind failed to win their interest or regard.  In jumping at
Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for
the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation
might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this
moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come
not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis
in her life was approaching.  No crisis, apparently, had supervened;
and there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that
starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the
Vicarage.  She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to
throw up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see
that she could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could
not show.  But it was done with a sorry shake of the head. "It is
nothing--it is nothing!" she said.  "Nobody loves it; nobody sees it.
Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!"

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march.  It had no
sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency.  Along the tedious length
of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and
paused by milestones.

She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she
descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet
of Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such
contrasting expectations.  The cottage by the church, in which she
again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and
while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking
down the street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.

"The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?" she said.

"No, my dear," said the old woman.  "'Tis too soon for that; the
bells hain't strook out yet.  They be all gone to hear the preaching
in yonder barn.  A ranter preaches there between the services--an
excellent, fiery, Christian man, they say.  But, Lord, I don't go to
hear'n!  What comes in the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough
for I."

Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against
the houses as though it were a place of the dead.  Nearing the
central part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing
the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances
of the preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could
soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of
the barn.  The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest
antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the
theology of St Paul.  This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered
with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he
had plainly no skill as a dialectician.  Although Tess had not heard
the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from
its constant iteration--

   "O foolish galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye
   should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ
   hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?"

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in
finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the view
of Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker
began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by
those views.  He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners.  He had
scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd.
But a day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been
brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he
had at first grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into
his heart, and had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they
had worked this change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice,
which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec
d'Urberville.  Her face fixed in painful suspense, she came round
to the front of the barn, and passed before it.  The low winter sun
beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side;
one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over
the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly
sheltered from the northern breeze.  The listeners were entirely
villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the
red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion.  But her attention
was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn,
facing the people and the door.  The three o'clock sun shone full
upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer
confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she
had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact
indeed.

END OF PHASE THE FIFTH

Phase the Sixth: The Convert

Tess decides to pay Angel's parents a visit in hopes of information about Angel. She wears boots for the fifteen-mile walk and hides them in a bush. She mingles with village people leaving church, and discovers that the two men behind her are Angel's brothers. She overhears their remarks about Angel's marriage. Then they find Tess's boots and take them to give to a poor parishioner. On her dejected walk home "full in the conviction that a crisis in her life was approaching," she stops at a barn to rest. Inside she hears a clergyman preaching passionately and recognizes the voice of Alec d'Urberville.

. While life at Talbothays Dairy in "Phase the Third" was Edenic, as the novel progresses the setting becomes ever gloomier. This contributes to Hardy's pervasive pessimistic sense of tragedy and enhances the characters and the plot. For instance, the site of the doomed honeymoon, the d'Urberville mansion, is gray and dark, and the presence of portraits add to the feeling of Gothic disquiet. All is shadow, with light used merely to contrast dark. Even the outside is shadowy and evil. The sleepwalking Angel carries the passive Tess to, what else, a graveyard, where he places her in a stone coffin. Hardy utilizes the Gothic conventions which were popular in the Victorian era, as witnessed by such popular novels as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the story of another pure woman in danger of being disgraced in an old mansion by a love affair. In this section, Hardy heightens his condemnation of society's double standard which shrugs its shoulders at men--boys will be boys--but that castigates women for the same behavior. Angel confides in Tess about a sexual indiscretion with an older woman but, instead of feeling horror, she is gladdened because now she feels she can confess to Angel about her own past without his passing judgment on her for actions that are "just the same". In this, Tess could not be more wrong: the double standard is fully in force. And, instead of standing up to her new husband for his pious judgmental position, she kneels in front of him and offers to be his slave, passively allows him to place her in a coffin and even to kill herself if he wishes. In short Hardy is adamant, "God's not in his heaven; all's wrong with the world". Angel's sleepwalking should be viewed as a metaphor. He lies in a dream world. He invents his own religion, so to speak, where he is one with mystical Nature and eschews his family's beliefs. He sees in Tess a pure pagan woman of Nature and not a real-life human being. He fails to give his parents a chance to meet Tess and judges them for rejecting their new daughter-in-law before they meet her. He condemns the aristocracy for its behavior towards the lower classes, yet no one could be as mean-spirited and cruel to an innocent woman. When he leaves for Brazil, he is in effect a coward, running away from the reality he cannot accept. His "was the face of a man who was no longer passion's slave". His pride overwhelms his judgment. His cruelty to Izz Huett, when he is in need of female adoration, should also not be overlooked. Here is another country woman who loves him purely and simply and who accepts his advances only to be thrown back wailing in the dirt. Tess is forced to leave Marlott to avoid the condemnation of her parents and her neighbors--proper society--to enter into the frozen world of Flintcomb-Ash, where she might as well be dead. Simply, there is no way she can ever regain her stolen virginity. Thus, as the novel progresses Hardy tightens his deterministic thesis--people are victims of fate and regardless of how they fight, they are doomed. From the foreshadowing regarding death and dying--biers, pheasants, portraits, graveyards and coffins--there is no way Tess can avoid an early death. She is powerless; her fate was divined before she was born. In this line of thinking, however, there is an inherent flaw. Hardy also condemns society for Tess's ills--church, aristocracy, a double-standard for men and women. How then how can fate be at issue


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tess!" he said.

She slackened speed without looking round.

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

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

"I see it is," she answered coldly.

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

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

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

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

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

"I have," she said.

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

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

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

"Your conversion.  Your scheme of religion."

"Why?"

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

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

"I cannot tell you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ssh!" said Tess.

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

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

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

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

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

"What troubles have you had?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes--but swear it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been four years since Tess has last seen Alec, and she is shocked and horrified when she sees him preaching in the barn. She runs away but Alec, just as shocked, runs after her. He has suffered since the death of his mother and thanks to Reverend Clare he has been converted and feels he must save her. Tess is speechless, attacks him for ruining women's lives and doesn't for a moment believe his conversion is authentic. Referring to her errant husband Angel, she tells him she knows a truly good man. Alec makes her swear on a stone monument called the Cross-in-Hand, rumored to be an evil omen, that she will never tempt him. She swears before learning it is "a thing of ill omen" and leaves in anger. To soothe his nerves, Alec re-reads a letter from Reverend Clare congratulating him on his conversion


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

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

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

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

D'Urberville came up and said quietly--

"I want to speak to you, Tess."

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

"Yes, but I have a good reason."

"Well, tell it."

"It is more serious than you may think."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it?" said she.

"A marriage licence."

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

"You will not?  Why is that?"

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

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

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

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

"I cannot."

"But why?"

"You know I have no affection for you."

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

"Never!"

"Why so positive?"

"I love somebody else."

The words seemed to astonish him.

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

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

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

"No--no."

"Yes, yes!  Why not?"

"I cannot tell you."

"You must in honour!"

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

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

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

"Strangers--are we?  Strangers!"

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

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

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

"Who, then?"

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

D'Urberville was disturbed.

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

He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

"Then, does he write?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went close up to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You really think that?"

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

"Cured?  By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

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

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

D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.

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

"A good deal of it."

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

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

Here she gave her negations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Anything else?" he presently asked.

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

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

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

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

He fell into thought.

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

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

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

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

"How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pooh!  Well, yes--yes!"

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

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

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

Once again smitten, Alec begins to hound Tess: "sight of you has waked up my love". At Flintcomb-Ash, he begs her to marry him and go with him as a missionary. Tess replies that she is already married, and he leaves but returns at Candlemas to beg for mercy. She responds that she does not believe in God. He belittles Angel for abandoning her