Chương Chương 27 · Chapter XXVII A Misdemeanour

. Chapter XXVII A Misdemeanour

An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish

mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a

mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green

trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.

Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial

soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the

summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast

pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very

bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot

that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long distance

off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury

that he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side,

in a way that had been quite foreign to him in his student-days; and,

much as he loved his parents, he could not help being aware that to

come here, as now, after an experience of home-life, affected him like

throwing off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on the

humours of English rural societies being absent in this place,

Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were all

enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the exceedingly

early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the

wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung

like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed

there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening

milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of the

house to the back quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained

snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down;

the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further

distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their

broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the

clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with

the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and

then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess’s, who

in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had

been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up

cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn;

her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their

pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a

moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time;

when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the

outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before

the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look

of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed—“O Mr Clare! How you

frightened me—I—”

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed

relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of

the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare’s tender look

as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

“Dear, darling Tessy!” he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his

face to her flushed cheek. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, Mister me any

more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!”

Tess’s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they

stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the

window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her

inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm,

and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down

in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not

look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the

deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of

blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at

her second waking might have regarded Adam.

“I’ve got to go a-skimming,” she pleaded, “and I have on’y old Deb to

help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is

not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won’t be home till

milking.”

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

stairs.

“I have come back, Deborah,” said Mr Clare, upwards. “So I can help

Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you

needn’t come down till milking-time.”

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that

afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as

having light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every

time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her

hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she

seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running

her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it

in nature’s way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came

convenient now.

“I may as well say it now as later, dearest,” he resumed gently. “I

wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been

thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall soon

want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife

a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be that

woman, Tessy?”

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an

impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of

proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon

this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without

quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the

bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable

and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

“O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!”

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess’s very heart, and

she bowed her face in her grief.

“But, Tess!” he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more

greedily close. “Do you say no? Surely you love me?”

“O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody’s in the world,”

returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl. “But I

_cannot_ marry you!”

“Tess,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “you are engaged to marry

some one else!”

“No, no!”

“Then why do you refuse me?”

“I don’t want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot! I

only want to love you.”

“But why?”

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—

“Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn’ like you to marry

such as me. She will want you to marry a lady.”

“Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went home.”

“I feel I cannot—never, never!” she echoed.

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

“Yes—I did not expect it.”

“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he

said. “It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.

I’ll not allude to it again for a while.”

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and

began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact

under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as

she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in

the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring

tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear

advocate, she could never explain.

“I can’t skim—I can’t!” she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began

talking in a more general way:

“You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered

people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining

Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?”

“I don’t know.”

“You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High,

they tell me.”

Tess’s ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every

week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare’s, who had never heard

him at all.

“I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I

do,” she remarked as a safe generality. “It is often a great sorrow to

me.”

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his

father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she

did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad. He himself

knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently

imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology,

and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to disturb them

was his last desire:

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;

Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse

A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but

he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father’s mode of

life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the

undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead

after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the

milk.

“I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in,” she ventured

to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of herself.

“Yes—well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his troubles

and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me. He is so

zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a

different way of thinking from himself, and I don’t like to hear of

such humiliations to a man of his age, the more particularly as I don’t

think earnestness does any good when carried so far. He has been

telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite

recently. He went as the deputy of some missionary society to preach in

the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and

made it his business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with

somewhere about there—son of some landowner up that way—and who has a

mother afflicted with blindness. My father addressed himself to the

gentleman point-blank, and there was quite a disturbance. It was very

foolish of my father, I must say, to intrude his conversation upon a

stranger when the probabilities were so obvious that it would be

useless. But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he’ll do, in

season or out of season; and, of course, he makes many enemies, not

only among the absolutely vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate

being bothered. He says he glories in what happened, and that good may

be done indirectly; but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is

getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing.”

Tess’s look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but

she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare’s revived thoughts of his

father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went on

down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished and

drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their pails,

and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As Tess withdrew

to go afield to the cows he said to her softly—

“And my question, Tessy?”

“O no—no!” replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had heard

anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec d’Urberville.

“It _can’t_ be!”

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with a

bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad constraint.

All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in

the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild

animals—the reckless, unchastened motion of women accustomed to

unlimited space—in which they abandoned themselves to the air as a

swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was

again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained Nature, and not from

the abodes of Art.