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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
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About This Book
A young woman struggles against tradition and circumstance in this novel of love, class, and deceit from the author of Far from the Madding Crowd. Convinced that his impoverished family has noble connections, John Durbeyfield implores his daughter, Tess, to visit the wealthy Mrs. D'Urberville and claim kin. Reluctantly, Tess agrees, but when she falls prey to the manipulations of Alec D'Urberville, the widow's dissolute son, her search for love and happiness takes a disastrous turn. An earnest suitor named Angel Clare offers hope for salvation, but Tess must decide whether to confess her sins to the minister's sonāor bury them forever. First published in 1891, Tess of the D'Urbervilles scandalized Victorian readers with its frank depictions of female sexuality and its impassioned criticism of social conventions. Now widely recognized as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece, this tragic story of virtue destroyed is one of the most moving and unforgettable novels in English literature. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
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Phase the Fifth:
The Woman Pays, XXXV-XLIV
XXXV
Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations were done. Tessās voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she had not wept.
But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate looked impishādemoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had changed.
When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness.
Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted itself now. His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague movement. When he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she had heard from him.
āTess!ā
āYes, dearest.ā
āAm I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true. O you cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are notā¦ My wife, my Tessānothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?ā
āI am not out of my mind,ā she said.
āAnd yetāā He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses: āWhy didnāt you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a wayābut I hindered you, I remember!ā
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep. Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this position she crouched in a heap.
āIn the name of our love, forgive me!ā she whispered with a dry mouth. āI have forgiven you for the same!ā
And, as he did not answer, she said againā
āForgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel.ā
āYouāyes, you do.ā
āBut you do not forgive me?ā
āO Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another. My Godāhow can forgiveness meet such a grotesqueāprestidigitation as that!ā
He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into horrible laughterāas unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.
āDonātādonāt! It kills me quite, that!ā she shrieked. āO have mercy upon meāhave mercy!ā
He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.
āAngel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?ā she cried out. āDo you know what this is to me?ā
He shook his head.
āI have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be if I do not! Thatās what I have felt, Angel!ā
āI know that.ā
āI thought, Angel, that you loved meāme, my very self! If it is I you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me! Having begun to love you, I love you for everāin all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me?ā
āI repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.ā
āBut who?ā
āAnother woman in your shape.ā
She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding in former times. He looked upon her as a species of imposter; 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.
āSit down, sit down,ā he said gently. āYou are ill; and it is natural that you should be.ā
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.
āI donāt belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?ā she asked helplessly. āIt is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.ā
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.
āAngel,ā she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice of terror having left her now. āAngel, am I too wicked for you and me to live together?ā
āI have not been able to think what we can do.ā
āI shanāt 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 shanāt finish the good-hussifā I cut out and meant to make while we were in lodgings.ā
āShanāt you?ā
āNo, I shanāt do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away from me I shall not follow āee; and if you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.ā
āAnd if I order you to do anything?ā
āI will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down and die.ā
āYou 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.ā
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?
āTess,ā he said, as gently as he could speak, āI cannot stayāin this roomājust now. I will walk out a little way.ā
He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured out for their supperāone for her, one for himāremained 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 gray 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 to 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 thereāthe 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 irradiationāin all her bareness; that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then ā
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.
āWhat have I doneāwhat have I done! I have not told of anything that interferes with or belies my love for you. You donāt think I planned it, do you? It ...