She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.
“Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too
painful as it is for the occasion—and talk
of something lighter.”
“O, Angel—I am almost glad—because
now YOU can forgive ME! I have not made my confession.
I have a confession, too—remember, I said
so.”
“Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked
little one.”
“Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious
as yours, or more so.”
“It can hardly be more serious, dearest.”
“It cannot—O no, it cannot!”
She jumped up joyfully at the hope. “No,
it cannot be more serious, certainly,” she cried,
“because ’tis just the same! I will
tell you now.”
She sat down again.
Their hands were still joined. The ashes under
the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a
torrid waste. Imagination might have beheld
a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which
fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into
the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate
skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape
rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward,
at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister
wink like a toad’s; and pressing her forehead
against his temple she entered on her story of her
acquaintance with Alec d’Urberville and its results,
murmuring the words without flinching, and with her
eyelids drooping down.
Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays
Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary
explanations were done. Tess’s 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 impish—demoniacally
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.
