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

to see her⁠—bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered cable of dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder⁠—the evident result of haste.

He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was now, he felt the contrast between them, and thought his appearance distasteful to her.

“Tess!” he said huskily, “can you forgive me for going away? Can’t you⁠—come to me? How do you get to be⁠—like this?”

“It is too late,” said she, her voice sounding hard through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally.

“I did not think rightly of you⁠—I did not see you as you were!” he continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine!”

“Too late, too late!” she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don’t come close to me, Angel! No⁠—you must not. Keep away.”

“But don’t you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled down by illness? You are not so fickle⁠—I am come on purpose for you⁠—my mother and father will welcome you now!”

“Yes⁠—O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.”

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away, but cannot. “Don’t you know all⁠—don’t you know it? Yet how do you come here if you do not know?”

“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.”

“I waited and waited for you,” she went on, her tones suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and to all of us after father’s death. He⁠—”

“I don’t understand.”

“He has won me back to him.”

Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.

She continued⁠—

“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie⁠—that you would not come again; and you have come! These clothes are what he’s put upon me: I didn’t care what he did wi’ me! But⁠—will you go away, Angel, please, and never come any more?”

They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality.

“Ah⁠—it is my fault!” said Clare.

But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers⁠—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.

A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after, he found himself in the street, walking along he did not know whither.

LVI

Mrs. Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The Herons and owner of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible lodgers’ pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr. and Mrs. d’Urberville, as she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which had been stifled down as useless save in its bearings to the letting trade.

Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the dining-room, and Mrs. Brooks, who stood within the partly-closed door of her own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments of the conversation⁠—if conversation it could be called⁠—between those two wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut, and Mrs. Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs. Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some time.

She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of the front room⁠—a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately behind it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner. This first floor, containing Mrs. Brooks’s best apartments, had been taken by the week by the d’Urbervilles. The back room was now in silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.

All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable, continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some Ixionian wheel⁠—

“O⁠—O⁠—O!”

Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again⁠—

“O⁠—O⁠—O!”

The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the room inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the breakfast table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside. Over the seat of the chair Tess’s face was bowed, her posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped over her head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of her nightgown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless feet,