“I forgive ’ee, sir!” she said.
“Now, Izz,” he said, while she stood beside
him there, forcing himself to the mentor’s part
he was far from feeling; “I want you to tell
Marian when you see her that she is to be a good woman,
and not to give way to folly. Promise that,
and tell Retty that there are more worthy men than
I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely
and well—remember the words—wisely
and well—for my sake. I send this
message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I
shall never see them again. And you, Izzy, you
have saved me by your honest words about my wife from
an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery.
Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in
these things! On that one account I can never
forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl
you have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless
lover, but a faithful friend. Promise.”
She gave the promise.
“Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!”
He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the
lane, and Clare was out of sight, than she flung herself
down on the bank in a fit of racking anguish; and
it was with a strained unnatural face that she entered
her mother’s cottage late that night. Nobody
ever was told how Izz spent the dark hours that intervened
between Angel Clare’s parting from her and her
arrival home.
Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought
to aching thoughts and quivering lips. But his
sorrow was not for Izz. That evening he was
within a feather-weight’s turn of abandoning
his road to the nearest station, and driving across
that elevated dorsal line of South Wessex which divided
him from his Tess’s home. It was neither
a contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of
her heart, which deterred him.
No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated
by Izz’s admission, the facts had not changed.
If he was right at first, he was right now.
And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked
tended to keep him going in it, unless diverted by
a stronger, more sustained force than had played upon
him this afternoon. He could soon come back
to her. He took the train that night for London,
and five days after shook hands in farewell of his
brothers at the port of embarkation.
From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us
press on to an October day, more than eight months
subsequent to the parting of Clare and Tess.
We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead
of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore,
we see her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle
in her own porterage, as at an earlier time when she
was no bride; instead of the ample means that were
projected by her husband for her comfort through this
probationary period, she can produce only a flattened
purse.
