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

of work in past days, and can’t have anything left in ’em now. There’s the Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St. Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy ’em all up now for an old song a’most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paridelles⁠—the old family that used to own lots o’ the lands out by King’s Hintock, now owned by the Earl o’ Wessex, afore even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr. Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength for more deeds!’ A boy came here t’other day asking for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he’d never heard that ’a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he supposed his folks hadn’t been ’stablished long enough. ‘Ah! you’re the very boy I want!’ says Mr. Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi’en; ‘I’ve great hopes of you’; and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can’t stomach old families!”

After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion poor Tess was glad that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family⁠—even though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight afforded into Clare’s character suggested to her that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes.

XX

The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?”

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet⁠—a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to Angel’s, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray halftones of daybreak are not the gray halftones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often⁠—possibly not always by chance⁠—the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation,