TESS
OF THE D’URBERVILLES
PART
6
XIV
It was a
hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm
beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and
coverts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing.
The sun,
on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the
masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with
the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries
in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the
sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was
brimming with interest for him.
His light,
a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters, throwing stripes like
red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers, and other furniture within;
and awakening harvesters who were not already astir.
But of all
ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms of painted wood,
which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by Marlott village. They,
with two others below, formed the revolving Maltese cross of the
reaping-machine, which had been brought to the field on the previous evening to
be ready for operations this day. The paint with which they were smeared,
intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of having been
dipped in liquid fire.
The field
had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few feet wide had
been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference of the field for
the first passage of the horses and machine.
Two
groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the lane just at
the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge
midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying sunrise while their feet
were still in the dawn. They disappeared from the lane between the two stone
posts which flanked the nearest field-gate.
Presently
there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the grasshopper. The
machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three horses and the aforesaid
long rickety machine was visible over the gate, a driver sitting upon one of
the hauling horses, and an attendant on the seat of the implement. Along one
side of the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute
it came up on the other side of the field at the same equable pace; the
glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore horse first catching the eye
as it rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the whole
machine.
The narrow
lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each circuit, and the
standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the morning wore on. Rabbits,
hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the
ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the
day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright
wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one
put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.
The
reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps, each heap being
of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active binders in the rear laid
their hands—mainly women, but some of them men in print shirts, and trousers
supported round their waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two
buttons behind, which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of
each wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.
But those
of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of binders, by
reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel
of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein as at ordinary
times. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the
field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her
surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.
The
women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton bonnets with
great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent their hands
being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another
in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the
arms of the reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough
"wropper" or over-all—the old-established and most appropriate dress
of the field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning. This morning the eye
returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most
flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled so far
over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she binds, though her
complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends
below the curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often gaze around
them.
Her
binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last finished she
draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left palm to bring them
even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward, gathering the corn with both hands
against her knees, and pushing her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet
the right on the other side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a
lover. She brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A
bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet and
the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine smoothness becomes
scarified by the stubble and bleeds.
At
intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron, or to pull
her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a handsome young woman
with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a
beseeching way anything they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more
regular, the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
It is Tess
Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed—the same, but not the
same; at the present stage of her existence living as a stranger and an alien
here, though it was no strange land that she was in. After a long seclusion she
had come to a resolve to undertake outdoor work in her native village, the
busiest season of the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and
nothing that she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time
as harvesting in the fields.
The
movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's, the whole
bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at the completion of
a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end against those of the rest,
till a shock, or "stitch" as it was here called, of ten or a dozen
was formed.
They went
to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as before. As the hour of
eleven drew near a person watching her might have noticed that every now and
then Tess's glance flitted wistfully to the brow of the hill, though she did
not pause in her sheafing. On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of
children, of ages ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity
of the hill.
The face
of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.
The eldest
of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its corner draggling on the
stubble, carried in her arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll, but
proved to be an infant in long clothes. Another brought some lunch. The
harvesters ceased working, took their provisions, and sat down against one of
the shocks. Here they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing
round a cup.
Tess
Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She sat down at
the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from her companions. When
she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin cap, and with a red
handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of ale over the top of the
shock for her to drink. But she did not accept his offer. As soon as her lunch
was spread she called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her,
who, glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and joined
the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet
courageous movement, and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and
began suckling the child.
The men
who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the other end of the
field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with absent-minded fondness,
regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield a stream. All the women
but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their
hair.
When the
infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright in her lap, and
looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was
almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some
dozens of times, as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence
of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
"She's
fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and say she wishes
the baby and her too were in the churchyard," observed the woman in the
red petticoat.
"She'll
soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord, 'tis
wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"
"A
little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I reckon. There were
they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha' gone
hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along."
"Well,
a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that it should have
happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the comeliest! The plain ones
be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?" The speaker turned to one of the group
who certainly was not ill-defined as plain.
It was a
thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy to feel otherwise
on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her flower-like mouth and large
tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all those
shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen if one looked into
their irises—shade behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom;
an almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.
A
resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields this
week for the first time during many months. After wearing and wasting her palpitating
heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common
sense had illuminated her. She felt that she would do well to be useful
again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past;
whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time
would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never
been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just
as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever.
The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened
because of her pain.
She might
have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world's
concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence,
an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To
all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was
no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the
livelong night and day it was only this much to them—"Ah, she makes
herself unhappy." If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to
take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this
idea to them—"Ah, she bears it very well." Moreover, alone in a
desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not
greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a
spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a
nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would
have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been
generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.
Whatever
Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she
had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in
demand just then. This was why she had borne herself with dignity, and had
looked people calmly in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her
arms.
The
harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs, and
extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed and fed, were
again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal,
beckoned to her eldest sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her
dress, put on the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the
last completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
In the
afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were continued, Tess
staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then they all rode home in
one of the largest wagons, in the company of a broad tarnished moon that had
risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face resembling the outworn
gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang
songs, and showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few
verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood and came
back a changed state. There are counterpoises and compensations in life; and
the event which had made of her a social warning had also for the moment made
her the most interesting personage in the village to many. Their friendliness
won her still farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious,
and she became almost gay.
But now
that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on the natural side
of her which knew no social law. When she reached home it was to learn to her
grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill since the afternoon. Some such
collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was its frame; but the event
came as a shock nevertheless.
The baby's
offence against society in coming into the world was forgotten by the
girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that offence by preserving the
life of the child. However, it soon grew clear that the hour of emancipation
for that little prisoner of the flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst
misgiving had conjectured. And when she had discovered this she was plunged
into a misery which transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had
not been baptized.
Tess had
drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the consideration that if
she should have to burn for what she had done, burn she must, and there was an
end of it. Like all village girls, she was well grounded in the Holy
Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and
knew the inferences to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose
with regard to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.
It was
nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might send for the
parson. The moment happened to be one at which her father's sense of the
antique nobility of his family was highest, and his sensitiveness to the smudge
which Tess had set upon that nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned
from his weekly booze at Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door,
he declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had
become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door and put the
key in his pocket.
The
household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired also. She
was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the night found that
the baby was still worse. It was obviously dying—quietly and painlessly, but
none the less surely.
In her
misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the solemn hour of
one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities
stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the child consigned to the nethermost
corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy;
saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they
used for heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other
quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the young in this
Christian country. The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination
in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp with
perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.
The
infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental tension
increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with kisses; she could
stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about the room.
"O
merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"
She leant
against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent supplications for a long
while, till she suddenly started up.
"Ah!
perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!"
She spoke
so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have shone in the gloom
surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under
the wall, where she awoke her young sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied
the same room. Pulling out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it,
she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children, scarcely
awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and larger,
remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a child's child—so
immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its producer with
the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the
basin; the next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at
church held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
child.
Her figure
looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long white nightgown, a
thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist.
The kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted from her form and features the
little blemishes which sunlight might have revealed—the stubble scratches upon
her wrists, and the weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a
transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a
thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal. The
little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red, awaited her
preparations full of a suspended wonder which their physical heaviness at that
hour would not allow to become active.
The most
impressed of them said:
"Be
you really going to christen him, Tess?"
The
girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
"What's
his name going to be?"
She had
not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the book of Genesis
came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal service, and now she
pronounced it:
"SORROW,
I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost."
She
sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
"Say
'Amen,' children."
The tiny
voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"
Tess went
on:
"We
receive this child"—and so forth—"and do sign him with the sign of
the Cross."
Here she
dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense cross upon the
baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary sentences as to his
manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the devil, and being a faithful
soldier and servant unto his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's
Prayer, the children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at
the conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped into
silence, "Amen!"
Then their
sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of the sacrament, poured
forth from the bottom of her heart the thanksgiving that follows, uttering it
boldly and triumphantly in the stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired
when her heart was in her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those
who knew her. The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her
face a glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils shone like a
diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no
longer had a will for questioning. She did not look like Sissy to them now, but
as a being large, towering, and awful—a divine personage with whom they had
nothing in common.
Poor
Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was doomed to be of
limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps for himself, considering his beginnings. In
the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and servant breathed his last, and
when the other children awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have
another pretty baby.
The
calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained with her in
the infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her terrors about his soul
to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well founded or not, she had no
uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence would not ratify such an act of
approximation she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity—either for herself or for her child.
So passed
away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of
shameless Nature, who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time
had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and
centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's
weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck
human knowledge.
Tess, who
mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were doctrinally
sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child. Nobody could tell this
but the parson of the parish, and he was a new-comer, and did not know her. She
went to his house after dusk, and stood by the gate, but could not summon
courage to go in. The enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by
accident met him coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.
"I
should like to ask you something, sir."
He
expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the baby's
illness and the extemporized ordinance. "And now, sir," she added
earnestly, "can you tell me this—will it be just the same for him as if
you had baptized him?"
Having the
natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he should have been called
in for had been unskilfully botched by his customers among themselves, he was
disposed to say no. Yet the dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her
voice, combined to affect his nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left
in him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory
fell to the man.
"My
dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."
"Then
will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.
The Vicar
felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he had conscientiously
gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite, and, unaware that the
refusal to admit him had come from Tess's father and not from Tess, he could not
allow the plea of necessity for its irregular administration.
"Ah—that's
another matter," he said.
"Another
matter—why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.
"Well—I
would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I must not—for certain
reasons."
"Just
for once, sir!"
"Really
I must not."
"O
sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.
He
withdrew it, shaking his head.
"Then
I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your church
no more!"
"Don't
talk so rashly."
"Perhaps
it will be just the same to him if you don't? … Will it be just the same? Don't
for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself—poor
me!"
How the
Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed himself to hold
on these subjects it is beyond a layman's power to tell, though not to excuse.
Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—
"It
will be just the same."
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an
ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby
corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all
unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the
conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings, however,
Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having
bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening
when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot
also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive.
What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation
noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of maternal affection
did not see them in its vision of higher things.
XV
"By
experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long
wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel,
and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbeyfield's experience was
of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to do; but who would
now accept her doing?
If before
going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under the guidance of
sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no
doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it had not been in Tess's
power—nor is it in anybody's power—to feel the whole truth of golden opinions
while it is possible to profit by them. She—and how many more—might have ironically
said to God with Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course
than Thou hast permitted."
She
remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking fowls, or
cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and brothers out
of some finery which d'Urberville had given her, and she had put by with
contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would often clasp her hands
behind her head and muse when she was supposed to be working hard.
She
philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year;
the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of
The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth and death; also her own birthday;
and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some
share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her
fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than
those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a
day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no
sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there.
When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such
a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future
those who had known her would say: "It is the –––th, the day that poor
Tess Durbeyfield died"; and there would be nothing singular to their minds
in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all
the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year.
Almost at
a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman. Symbols of
reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her
voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been
called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and arresting; her soul that of a
woman whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two had quite failed
to demoralize. But for the world's opinion those experiences would have been
simply a liberal education.
She had
held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known, was nearly
forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she could never be
really comfortable again in a place which had seen the collapse of her family's
attempt to "claim kin"—and, through her, even closer union—with the
rich d'Urbervilles. At least she could not be comfortable there till long years
should have obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt
the pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be happy in some
nook which had no memories. To escape the past and all that appertained thereto
was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.
Was once
lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask herself. She might
prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded
organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone.
She waited
a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure. A particularly
fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible in the
buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to
go. At last, one day in early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of
her mother's, to whom she had addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she
had never seen—that a skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles
to the southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the
summer months.
It was not
quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably far enough, her
radius of movement and repute having been so small. To persons of limited
spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as
provinces and kingdoms.
On one
point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville air-castles in the
dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing
more. Her mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so well, though no words had
passed between them on the subject, that she never alluded to the knightly
ancestry now.
Yet such
is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new place to her was
the accidental virtues of its lying near her forefathers' country (for they
were not Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy
called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the
former estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her
granddames and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and
think not only that d'Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that the
individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as silently. All the
while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her
ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the
twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and
bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
End of Phase the Second
To be continued
