Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Phase the Sixth

It was less a reform than a transfiguration.

The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized today into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism Paulinism, the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious.

Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire.

As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this change in their relative platforms.

That hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time displaced by an almost physical sense of an implacable past which still engirdled her.

But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the wrath to come—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was that person.

There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: "Have you saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say."

He is one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of saving more souls in this country than any other man you can name.

I feel indignant with you for talking to me like this, when you know—when you know what harm you've done me!

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand upon the stone and swore.

For a moment the voices cheered the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same attraction which had been the prelude to her own tribulation.

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her at his side.

He moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.

The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d'Urberville, the late Evangelist, despite his changed attire and aspect.

As for what you said last time, on the strength of your wonderful husband's intelligence—whose name you have never told me—about having what they call an ethical system without any dogma, I don't see my way to that at all.

"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at least, if you can't have—what do you call it—dogma."

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

Ha-ha—I'm awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the same!

"Now, punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its captor twists its neck.

The incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently of her consciousness.

But Tess still kept going: if she could not fill her part she would have to leave; and this contingency, which she would have regarded with equanimity and even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a terror since d'Urberville had begun to hover round her.

If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist you.

It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be faithful to you in every thought and look, that even when a man speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you.

But if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last state will be worse than my first.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began to oppress him.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve.

Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew them.

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father; though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would come in response to the entreaty was alternately great and small.

What lessened it was that the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not changed—could never change; and that, if her presence had not attenuated them, her absence could not.

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing.

But d'Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen him so determined; he would not take a negative.

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure.

If he could on'y know what straits she's put to, and what's hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.

Upon that, agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet honourably disposed to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few lines were concocted between the two girls.

A woman should not be try'd beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear away a Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.