by Thomas Hardy
He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast between them and thought his appearance distasteful to her.
“Tess!” he said huskily. “Can you forgive me for going away? Can’t you—come to me? How do you get to be—like this?”
“It is too late,” said she, her voice sounding hard through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally.
“I did not think rightly of you—I did not see you as you were!” he continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!”
“Too late, too late!” she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don’t come close to me, Angel! No—you must not. Keep away.”
“But don’t you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come on purpose for you—my mother and father will welcome you now!”
“Yes—oh, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.”
She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream who tries to move away, but cannot. “Don’t you know all—don’t you know it? Yet how do you come here if you do not know?”
“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.”
“I waited and waited for you,” she want on, her tones suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to Mother, and to all of us after Father’s death. He—”
“I don’t understand.”
“He has won me back to him.”
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.
She continued: “He is upstairs. I hate him now because he told me a lie—that you would not come again; and you have come! These clothes are what he’s put upon me: I didn’t care what he did wi’ me! But—will you go away, Angel, please, and never come any more?”
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality.
“Ah—it is my fault!” said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later, that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.
A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking along he did not know whither.
56
MRS. BROOKS, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss to retain much curiosity for its own sake, and apart from possible lodgers’ pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr. and Mrs. d‘Urberville, as she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which had been stifled down as useless save in its bearings on the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the dining-room, and Mrs. Brooks, who stood within the partly closed door of her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments of the conversation—if conversation it could be called—between those two wretched souls. She heard Tess reascend the stairs to the first floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut, and Mrs. Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs. Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly and stood at the door of the front room—a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner. This first floor, containing Mrs. Brooks’s best apartments, had been taken by the week by the d‘Urbervilles. The back room was now in silence, but from the drawing-room there came sounds.
All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable, continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some Ixionian wheel: “Oh—oh—oh!”
Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again: “Oh—oh—oh!”
The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the room inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess’s face was bowed, her posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of her nightgown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded upon the carpet. It was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair.
Then a man’s voice from the adjoining bedroom: “What’s the matter?”
She did not answer, but went on in a tone which was a soliloquy rather than an exclamation, and a dirge rather than a soliloquy. Mrs. Brooks could only catch a portion:
“And then my dear, dear husband came home to me—and I did not know it! ... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me—you did not stop using it—no—you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and my mother’s needs—they were the things you moved me by—and you said my husband would never come back—never; and you taunted me and said what a simpleton I was to expect him! ... And at last I believed you and gave way! ... And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second time, and I have lost him now forever—and he will not love me the littlest bit ever any more—only hate me! ... Oh yes, I have lost him now—again because of—you!” In writhing, with her head on the chair, she turned her face towards the door, and Mrs. Brooks could see the pain upon it, and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet tags to her cheeks. She continued: “And he is dying—he looks as if he is dying! ... And my sin will kill him and not kill me! ... Oh, you have torn my life all to pieces—made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again! ... My own true husband will never, never—oh, God—I can’t bear this! I cannot!”
There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle; she had sprung to her feet. Mrs. Brooks, thinking that the speaker was coming to rush out of the door, hastily retreated down the stairs.
She need not have done so, however, for the door of the sitting-room was not opened. But Mrs. Brooks felt it unsafe to watch on the landing again and entered her own parlour below.
Sbe could hear nothing through the floor although she listened intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to finish her interrupted breakfast. Coming up presently to the front room on the ground-floor, she took up some sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to discover what was the matter if possible. Overhead, as she sat, she could now hear the floor-boards slightly creak, as if some one were walking about, and presently the movement was explained by the rustle of garments against the banisters, the opening and closing of the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the gate on her way into the street. She was fully dressed now in the walking-costume of a well-to-do young lady in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.
Mrs. Brooks had not been able to catch any word of farewell, temporary or otherwise, between her tenants at t
he door above. They might have quarrelled or Mr. d‘Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an early riser.
She went into the back room, which was more especially her own apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady lodger did not return, nor did the gentleman ring his bell. Mrs. Brooks pondered on the delay and on what probable relation the visitor who had called so early bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting, she leant back in her chair.
As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it was red. The oblong white ceiling with this scarlet blot in the midst had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.
Mrs. Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon the table and touched the spot in the ceiling with her fingers. It was damp, and she fancied that it was a blood-stain.
Descending from the table, she left the parlour and went upstairs, intending to enter the room overhead, which was the bed-chamber at the back of the drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now become, she could not bring herself to attempt the handle. She listened. The dead silence within was broken only by a regular beat.
Drip, drip, drip.
Mrs. Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door, and ran into the street. A man she knew, one of the workmen employed at an adjoining villa, was passing by, and she begged him to come in and go upstairs with her; she feared something had happened to one of her lodgers. The workman assented and followed her to the landing.
She opened the door of the drawing-room and stood back for him to pass in, entering herself behind him. The room was empty; the breakfast—a substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham—lay spread upon the table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to go through the folding-doors into the adjoining room.
He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost instantly with a rigid face. “My good God, the gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife—a lot of blood has run down upon the floor!”
The alarm was soon given, and the house, which had lately been so quiet, resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the rest. The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the blow. In a quarter of an hour, the news that a gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street and villa of the popular watering-place.
57
MEANWHILE Angel Clare had walked automatically along the way by which he had come, and entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and went out.
At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him—a few words from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his address and informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted by Mercy Chant.
Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the station; reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an hour and more. He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour, felt that he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and numbed, he had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had been the scene of such an experience, and turned to walk to the first station onward, and let the train pick him up there.
The highway that he followed was open and at a little distance dipped into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge to edge. He had traversed the greater part of this depression and was climbing the western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked back. Why he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel him to the act. The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.
It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a dim sense that somebody was trying to overtake him.
The form descending the incline was a woman‘s, yet so entirely was his mind blinded to the idea of his wife’s following him that even when she came nearer, he did not recognize her under the totally changed attire in which he now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close that he could believe her to be Tess.
“I saw you—turn away from the station—just before I got there—and I have been following you all this way!”
She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle, that he did not ask her a single question, but seizing her hand and pulling it within his arm, he led her along. To avoid meeting any possible wayfarers, he left the high road and took a foot-path under some fir-trees. When they were deep among the moaning boughs, he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.
“Angel,” she said as if waiting for this, “do you know what I have been running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!” A pitiful white smile lit her face as she spoke.
“What!” said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she was in some delirium.
“I have done it—I don’t know how,” she continued. “Still, I owed it to you and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set for me in my simple youth and his wrong to you through me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it don’t you? You believe it? You didn’t come back to me, and I was obliged to go back to him. Why did you go away—why did you—when I loved you so? I can’t think why you did it. But I don’t blame you; only, Angel, will you forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a shining light that I should get you back that way. I could not bear the loss of you any longer—you don’t know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I have killed him!”
“I do love you, Tess—oh, I do—it is all come back!” he said, tightening his arms round her with fervid pressure. “But how do you mean—you have killed him?”
“I mean that I have,” she murmured in a reverie.
“What, bodily? Is he dead?”
“Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me and called you by a foul name; and then I did it. My heart could not bear it. He had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed myself and came away to find you.”
By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted, at least, what she said she had done; and his horror at her impulse was mixed with amazement at the strength of her affection for himself and at the strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct, she seemed at last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d‘Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were an aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the d’Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad grief of which she spoke, her mind had lost its balance and plunged her into this abyss.
It was very terrible if true; if a temporary hallucination, sad. But, anyhow, here was this deserted wife of his, this passionately fond woman, clinging to him without a suspicion that he would be anything to her but a protector. He saw that for him to be otherwise was not, in her mind, within the region of the possible. Tenderness was
absolutely dominant in Clare at last. He kissed her endlessly with his white lips, and held her hand, and said, “I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done!”
They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her head every now and then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome as he had become, it was plain that she did not discern the least fault in his appearance. To her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely and who had believed in her as pure?
With an instinct as to possibilities, he did not now, as he had intended, make for the first station beyond the town, but plunged still farther under the firs, which here abounded for miles. Each clasping the other round the waist, they promenaded over the dry bed of fir-needles, thrown into a vague, intoxicating atmosphere at the consciousness of being together at last, with no living soul between them; ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for several miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her and said timidly, “Are we going anywhere in particular?”
“I don’t know, dearest. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is evening find lodgings somewhere or other—in a lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you walk well, Tessy?”
“Oh yes! I could walk forever and ever with your arm round me!”
Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads and following obscure paths tending more or less northward. But there was an unpractical vagueness in their movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their every idea was temporary and unforfending, like the plans of two children.