“I don’t understand.”
“He has won me back to him.”
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning,
flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank;
it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white
and more delicate.
She continued—
“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because
he told me a lie—that you would not come
again; and you HAVE come! These clothes are what
he’s put upon me: I didn’t care what
he did wi’ me! But—will you
go away, Angel, please, and never come any more?”
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out
of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see.
Both seemed to implore something to shelter them
from reality.
“Ah—it is my fault!” said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive
as silence. But he had a vague consciousness
of one thing, though it was not clear to him till
later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased
to recognize the body before him as hers—allowing
it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a
direction dissociated from its living will.
A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was
gone. His face grew colder and more shrunken
as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a minute
or two after, he found himself in the street, walking
along he did not know whither.
Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The
Herons and owner of all the handsome furniture, was
not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her
long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon
Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its
own sake, and apart from possible lodgers’ pockets.
Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her well-paying
tenants, Mr and Mrs d’Urberville, as she deemed
them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of time
and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity
which had been stifled down as useless save in its
bearings to the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without
entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood
within the partly-closed door of her own sitting-room
at the back of the passage, could hear fragments of
the conversation—if conversation it could
be called—between those two wretched souls.
She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first
floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing
of the front door behind him. Then the door of
the room above was shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that
Tess had re-entered her apartment. As the young
lady was not fully dressed, Mrs Brooks knew that she
would not emerge again for some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood
at the door of the front room—a drawing-room,
connected with the room immediately behind it (which
was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.
This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks’s best
apartments, had been taken by the week by the d’Urbervilles.
The back room was now in silence; but from the drawing-room
there came sounds.
