“Call me Tess,” she would say askance;
and he did.
Then it would grow lighter, and her features would
become simply feminine; they had changed from those
of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a
being who craved it.
At these non-human hours they could get quite close
to the waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold
noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the
boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the
side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily
maintained their standing in the water as the pair
walked by, watching them by moving their heads round
in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the
turn of puppets by clockwork.
They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers,
woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes,
spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small
extent. On the gray moisture of the grass were
marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green
islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses,
in the general sea of dew. From each island proceeded
a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away
to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail
they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils,
when she recognized them, making an intenser little
fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then
they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat
down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require.
Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the
meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered
trees rose like dangerous rocks. Birds would
soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang
on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet
rails subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass
rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist
hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops
upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day
grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off
her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal
beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in
the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair
dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the
other women of the world.
About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s
voice, lecturing the non-resident milkers for arriving
late, and speaking sharply to old Deborah Fyander
for not washing her hands.
“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under
the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if the London folk
only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they
do a’ready; and that’s saying a good deal.”
The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess
and Clare, in common with the rest, could hear the
heavy breakfast table dragged out from the wall in
the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable
preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape
accompanying its return journey when the table had
been cleared.
