... I must cry to you in my trouble—I
have no one else! ... I think I must die
if you do not come soon, or tell me to come to
you... please, please, not to be just—only
a little kind to me ... If you would come,
I could die in your arms! I would be well
content to do that if so be you had forgiven me!
... if you will send me one little line, and say,
“I am coming soon,” I will bide on,
Angel—O, so cheerfully! ... think how
it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—ever!
Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache
one little minute of each day as mine does every
day and all day long, it might lead you to show
pity to your poor lonely one. ... I would be
content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant,
if I may not as your wife; so that I could only
be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think
of you as mine. ... I long for only one thing
in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet
you, my own dear! Come to me—come
to me, and save me from what threatens me!
Clare determined that he would no longer believe in
her more recent and severer regard of him, but would
go and find her immediately. He asked his father
if she had applied for any money during his absence.
His father returned a negative, and then for the first
time it occurred to Angel that her pride had stood
in her way, and that she had suffered privation.
From his remarks his parents now gathered the real
reason of the separation; and their Christianity was
such that, reprobates being their especial care, the
tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity,
even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly
excited by her sin.
Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles
for his journey he glanced over a poor plain missive
also lately come to hand—the one from Marian
and Izz Huett, beginning—
“Honour’d Sir, Look to your Wife if you
do love her as much as she do love you,” and
signed, “From Two Well-Wishers.”
In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house,
whence his mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared
into the street. He had declined to borrow his
father’s old mare, well knowing of its necessity
to the household. He went to the inn, where he
hired a trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing.
In a very few minutes after, he was driving up the
hill out of the town which, three or four months earlier
in the year, Tess had descended with such hopes and
ascended with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges
and trees purple with buds; but he was looking at
other things, and only recalled himself to the scene
sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In
something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted
the south of the King’s Hintock estates and
ascended to the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand,
the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by
Alec d’Urberville, in his whim of reformation,
to swear the strange oath that she would never wilfully
tempt him again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems
of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly in
the banks, young green nettles of the present spring
growing from their roots.
