Tess of the d'Urbervilles eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the journey concerned her husband.  Their lodgings were in a cottage a little further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her departure, and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest guise to captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she, knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was indifferent, and even doubtful.  A year had now elapsed since her sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient draperies from the wreck of her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.

“’Tis a thousand pities your husband can’t see ’ee now—­you do look a real beauty!” said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow candlelight within.  Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the situation; she could not be—­no woman with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could be—­antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry.

With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn.  They heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out to her full pace.  Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without any particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.

It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her.  Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs’-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the truant.

In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the dawn.  Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the atmosphere down there was a deep blue.  Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to toil, there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes of a net.  Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green.  Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly.  Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

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Tess of the d'Urbervilles from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.