Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy [best large ereader TXT] 📗

saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I mightn’t be noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”

“But I like doing it⁠—it is for my father.”

“Your engagement at the other place is ended?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?”

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

“O⁠—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”

“It is quite true⁠—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself. When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there for you.”

“O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it from you! I don’t like⁠—it is not right!”

“It is right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to help her.”

“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about⁠—about⁠—not about living at all!”

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.

“About the children⁠—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking of them.”

Tess’s heart quivered⁠—he was touching her in a weak place. He had divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.

“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”

“He can with my assistance. He must!”

“And with mine.”

“No, sir!”

“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!”

“He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”

“The more fool you!”

D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling it up and pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless; she wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house; and taking the fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

“O, Tessy⁠—what do you think! ’Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they think father is dead!”

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till, beholding the effect produced upon her, she said⁠—

“What, Tess, shan’t we talk to father never no more?”

“But father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.

’Liza-Lu came up.

“He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother said there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in.”

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was out of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even more than it sounded. Her father’s life had a value apart from his personal achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It was the last of the three lives for whose duration the house and premises were held under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage accommodation. Moreover, “liviers” were disapproved of in villages almost as much as little freeholders, because of their independence of manner, and when a lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d’Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now. So do flux and reflux⁠—the rhythm of change⁠—alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

LI

At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular date of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now carried out. The labourers⁠—or “work-folk,” as they used to call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from without⁠—who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to the new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here. When Tess’s mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an advantage. The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A depopulation was also going on. The village had formerly contained, side by side with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the former⁠—the class to which Tess’s father and mother had belonged⁠—and including the carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of their being lifeholders like Tess’s father, or copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of others, who were thus