“Where was she?”
“Well, she is not there now.”
In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger
children had by this time crept to the door, where,
pulling at his mother’s skirts, the youngest
murmured—
“Is this the gentleman who is going to marry
Tess?”
“He has married her,” Joan whispered.
“Go inside.”
Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked—
“Do you think Tess would wish me to try and
find her? If not, of course—”
“I don’t think she would.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure she wouldn’t.”
He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess’s
tender letter.
“I am sure she would!” he retorted passionately.
“I know her better than you do.”
“That’s very likely, sir; for I have never
really known her.”
“Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield,
in kindness to a lonely wretched man!” Tess’s
mother again restlessly swept her cheek with her vertical
hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said,
is a low voice—
“She is at Sandbourne.”
“Ah—where there? Sandbourne
has become a large place, they say.”
“I don’t know more particularly than I
have said—Sandbourne. For myself,
I was never there.”
It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this,
and he pressed her no further.
“Are you in want of anything?” he said
gently.
“No, sir,” she replied. “We
are fairly well provided for.”
Without entering the house Clare turned away.
There was a station three miles ahead, and paying
off his coachman, he walked thither. The last
train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore
Clare on its wheels.
At eleven o’clock that night, having secured
a bed at one of the hotels and telegraphed his address
to his father immediately on his arrival, he walked
out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too
late to call on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly
postponed his purpose till the morning. But
he could not retire to rest just yet.
This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern
and its western stations, its piers, its groves of
pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was,
to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly created
by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little
dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous
Egdon Waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge
of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering
novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring
up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts
every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every
channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod
having been turned there since the days of the Caesars.
Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s
gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.
By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding
way of this new world in an old one, and could discern
between the trees and against the stars the lofty
roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
fanciful residences of which the place was composed.
It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean
lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen
now by night it seemed even more imposing than it
was.
