“I am without defence. Alec! A good
man’s honour is in my keeping— think—be
ashamed!”
“Pooh! Well, yes—yes!”
He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his
weakness. His eyes were equally barren of worldly
and religious faith. The corpses of those old
fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines
of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake
and come together as in a resurrection. He went
out indeterminately.
Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach
of his engagement to-day was the simple backsliding
of a believer, Tess’s words, as echoed from
Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and
continued to do so after he had left her. He
moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed
by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position
was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with
his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere
freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation,
and temporarily impressed by his mother’s death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea
of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence
to stagnation. He said to himself, as he pondered
again and again over the crystallized phrases that
she had handed on to him, “That clever fellow
little thought that, by telling her those things,
he might be paving my way back to her!”
It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash
farm. The dawn of the March morning is singularly
inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where the
eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises
the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly
here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry
weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations
only a rustling denoted that others had preceded them;
to which, as the light increased, there were presently
added the silhouettes of two men on the summit.
They were busily “unhaling” the rick,
that is, stripping off the thatch before beginning
to throw down the sheaves; and while this was in progress
Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their
whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering,
Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on the
spot thus early to get the job over if possible by
the end of the day. Close under the eaves of
the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red
tyrant that the women had come to serve—a
timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels
appertaining— the threshing-machine which,
whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon
the endurance of their muscles and nerves.
