Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but determined not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future distress, she walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all the windows.
Ah—the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the household, servants included, going to morning-service, and as a consequence, eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore, only necessary to wait till the service was over. She would not make herself conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past the church into the lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess found herself in the midst of them.
The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of small country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman out of the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her pace and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat between its hedges till the vicar’s family should have lunched, and it might be convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the church-goers, except two youngish men, who, linked arm in arm, were beating up behind her at a quick step.
As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest discourse and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation, did not fail to recognize in those voices the quality of her husband’s tones. The pedestrians were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans, Tess’s one dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront them; for though she felt that they could not identify her, she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly they walked, the more briskly walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking a short, quick stroll before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled with sitting through a long service.
Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill—a lady-like young woman, somewhat interesting, though perhaps a trifle guindée and prudish. Tess had nearly overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law brought them so nearly behind her back that she could hear every word of their conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly interested her till, observing the young lady still further in front, one of them remarked, “There is Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her.”
Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel’s life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much without previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the brothers proceeded to say: “Ah! Poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a queer business, apparently. Whether she has joined him yet or not I don’t know, but she had not done so some months ago when I heard from him.”
“I can’t say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was begun by his extraordinary opinions.”
Tess beat up the long hill still faster, but she could not out-walk them without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether and passed her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps and turned. Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the three went on together.
They soon reached the summit of the hill and, evidently intending this point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that time to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with his umbrella and dragged something to light.
“Here’s a pair of old boots,” he said. “Thrown away, I suppose, by some tramp or other.”
“Some impostor who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and so excite our sympathies,” said Miss Chant. “Yes, it must have been, for they are excellent walking-boots—by no means worn-out. What a wicked thing to do! I’ll carry them home for some poor person.”
Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for her with the crook of his stick; and Tess’s boots were appropriated.
She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen veil till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church-party had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.
Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own condemnation; nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not contravene in her own defenceless person all these untoward omens. It was impossible to think of returning to the vicarage. Angel’s wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they and had to the full the gift of charity. As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their owner.
“Ah!” she said, still sighing in pity of herself. “They didn’t know that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these pretty ones he bought for me—no—they did not know it! And they didn’t think that he chose the colour o’ my pretty frock—no—how could they? If they had known, perhaps they would not have cared, for they don’t care much for him, poor thing!”
Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of judgement had caused her all these latter sorrows, and she went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr. and Mrs. Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.
Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show. But it was done with a sorry shake of the head. “It is nothing—it is nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!”
Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by milestones.
She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she descended the steep, long hill below which lay the village or townlet of Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry Tess, looking down the street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.
“The people are gone to afternoon-service, I suppose?” she said.
“No, my dear,” said the old woman. “ ‘Tis too soon for that; the bells hain’t strook out yet. They
be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder barn. A ranter preaches there between the services—an excellent, fiery, Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don’t go to hear’n! What comes in the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.”
Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.
His voice became so distinct in the still, clear air that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St. Paul. This fixed idea of the rhap sodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician. Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration.
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”
Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the views of Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views. He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of awakening had come, and in a human sense it had been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted, but whose parting words had sunk into his heart and had remained there till, by the grace of Heaven, they had worked this change in him and made him what they saw him.
But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d‘Urberville. Her face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the barn and passed before it. The low, winter sun beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door. The three-o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange, enervating conviction that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed.
END OF PHASE THE FIFTH
PHASE THE SIXTH
The Convert
45
TILL THIS MOMENT she had never seen or heard from d‘Urber ville since her departure from Trantridge.
The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was unreasoning memory that though he stood there openly and palpably a converted man who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear overcame her, paralysing her movement so that she neither retreated nor advanced.
To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last, and to behold it now! ... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half clerical, a modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract the dandy-ism from his features and to hinder for a second her belief in his identity.
To Tess’s sense there was, just at first, a ghastly bizarrerie, a grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out of such a mouth. This too-familiar intonation, less than four years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; paganism, Paulinism; the bold, rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire.
The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which Nature did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a misapplication, that to raise seemed to falsify.
Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer. D‘Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural in him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner, the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that.
Such impressions as these moved her vaguely and without strict definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had obviously not discerned her yet in her position against the sun.
But the moment that she moved again, he recognized her. The effect upon her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his presence upon her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence, seemed to go out of him. His lip struggled and trembled under the words that lay upon it, but deliver them it could not as long as she faced him. His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came back in a desperate leap every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however, but a short time; for Tess’s energies returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as fast as she was able past the barn and onward.
As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their relative platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend, it had resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon his altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh extinguished.
She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her clothing—so alive was she to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of that barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy with an inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still engirdled her. It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place. Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.
Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at right angles and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely to the upland, along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its dry, pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly breasting this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning, she saw approaching that well-known form—so strangely accoutred as the Methodist—the one personage in all the world she wished not to encounter alone on this side of the grave.
There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she yielded as calmly as
she could to the necessity of letting him overtake her. She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by the feelings within him.
“Tess!” he said.
She slackened speed without looking round.
“Tess!” he repeated. “It is I—Alec d‘Urberville.”
She then looked back at him, and he came up.
“I see it is,” she answered coldly.
“Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,” he added with a slight laugh, “there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me like this. But—I must put up with that.... I heard you had gone away; nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed you?”
“I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart!”
“Yes—you may well say it,” he returned grimly as they moved onward together, she with unwilling tread. “But don’t mistake me; I beg this because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice it—how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a momentary faltering; and considering what you had been to me, it was natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in view—nothing more.”
There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: “Have you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.”
“I have done nothing!” said he indifferently. “Heaven, as I have been telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can pour upon me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself—the old Adam of my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was brought about, and I hope you will be interested enough at least to listen. Have you ever heard the name of the parson of Emminster—you must have done so?—old Mr. Clare; one of the most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left in the Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by their sophistries till they are but the shadow of what they were. I only differ from him on the question of Church and State—the interpretation of the text ‘Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord’—that’s all. He is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls in this country than any other man you can name. You have heard of him?”