by Thomas Hardy
“I know that.”
“I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self! If it is I you do love, oh how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me! Having begun to love you, I love you forever—in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me?”
“I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.”
“But who?”
“Another woman in your shape.”
She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of impostor, a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped forward, thinking she was going to fall.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said gently. “You are ill, and it is natural that you should be.”
She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.
“I don’t belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?” she asked helplessly. “It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.”
The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.
Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence of her grief had worn itself out and her rush of weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.
“Angel,” she said suddenly in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice of terror having left her now. “Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to live together?”
“I have not been able to think what we can do.”
“I shan’t ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no right to! I shall not write to Mother and sisters to say we be married, as I said I would do; and I shan’t finish the good-hussif’ I cut out and meant to make while we were in lodgings.”
“Shan’t you?”
“No, I shan’t do anything unless you order me to; and if you go away from me I shall not follow ‘ee; and if you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why unless you tell me I may.”
“And if I do order you to do anything?”
“I will obey you like your wretched slave even if it is to lie down and die.”
“You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.”
These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat. The charms of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only received them as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled. She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled like the object lens of a microscope. Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change that her confession had wrought in his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some consequent action was necessary; yet what?
“Tess,” he said as gently as he could speak, “I cannot stay—in this room—just now. I will walk out a little way.”
He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured out for their supper—one for her, one for him—remained on the table untasted. This was what their agape had come to. At tea, two or three hours earlier, they had in the freakishness of affection drunk from one cup.
The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily flinging her cloak around her, she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear.
She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without purpose. His form beside her light-grey figure looked black, sinister, and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of which she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her footsteps, but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no difference in him, and he went on over the five yawning arches of the great bridge in front of the house.
The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.
The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings being open, she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the road wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare without any attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with dumb and vacant fidelity.
At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she knew that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness; that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then:Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee
shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown
shall be pain.
He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a weak thing her presence must have become to him! She could not help addressing Clare.
“What have I done—what have I done! I have not told of anything that interferes with or belies my love for you. You don’t think I planned it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is not in me. Oh, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think me!”
“H‘m—well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same. But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not and I will do everything to avoid it.”
But she went on pleading in her distraction, and perhaps said things that would have been better left to silence.
“Angel! Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men.”
“You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.”
“Then will you not forgive me?”
“I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.”
“And love me?”
To this question he did not answer.
“Oh, Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so! She knows several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it much—has got over it at least. And yet the woman has not loved him as I do you!”
“Don‘t, Tess; don’t argue. Different societies, different manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant-woman, who have never been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don’t know what you say.”
“I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!”
She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.
“So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your pedigree would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit cond
uct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!”
“Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty’s family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett’s. And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I everywhere; ‘tis a feature of our county, and I can’t help it.”
“So much the worse for the county.”
She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to all else she was indifferent.
They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met two lovers in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field, progressing just as slowly and as regardless of the hour and of the cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he recalled a long while after.
During the interval of the cottager’s going and coming, she had said to her husband, “I don’t see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I am not afraid.”
“I don’t wish to add murder to my other follies,” he said.
“I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on account of my shame. They will not blame you then.”
“Don’t speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to have such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical laughter than for tragedy. You don’t in the least understand the quality of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by nine-tenths of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by returning to the house and going to bed.”
“I will,” said she dutifully.
They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having in centuries past been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the main river and follow the road for a few yards. When she got back, everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still burning. She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute, but proceeded to her chamber, whither the luggage had been taken. Here she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking blankly around, and presently began to undress. In removing the light towards the bed-stead its rays fell upon the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe. Angel had put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation of that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and bring, whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked now.
Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully. When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which welcomed it and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence, surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once, possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.
Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house. Entering softly to the sitting-room, he obtained a light, and with the manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a sleeping-couch. Before lying down, he crept, shoeless, upstairs and listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that she was sleeping profoundly.
“Thank God!” murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of bitterness at the thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that having shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders, she was now reposing without care.
He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d‘Urber ville dames, whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bed-chamber. In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of revenge on the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance between them.
The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.
His air remained calm and cold, his small, compressed mouth indexing his powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terribly sterile expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave, yet who found no advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things. Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; butThe little less, and what worlds away!
He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not indexed in the honest freshness of her face, but Tess had no advocate to set him right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was telling were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one, discordant and contrasting?
He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room and extinguished the light. The night came in and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.
36
CLARE AROSE in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above there was no sound, but in a few minutes there came a knock at the door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager’s wife, who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.
The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door. When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the house for fuel and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly married couple, and envied their happiness.
Angel cast a final glance round and then, going to the foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice: “Breakfast is ready!”
He opened the front door and took a few steps in the morning air. When after a short space he came back, she was already in the sitting-room, mechanically readjusting the breakfast th
ings. As she was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale-blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare’s tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her for the moment with a new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemon strativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object also.
“Angel!” she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.
“Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!”
“It is true.”
“Every word?”
“Every word.”
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it by some sort of sophistry a valid denial. However, she only repeated: “It is true.”