第56章

She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted him - palpitating, contemplative being that he was.He could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be before third parties thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, How curious you are to me!--resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew.But, behold, the absorbing scene had been imported hither.What had been the engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this apparently dim and un-impassioned place, novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open Clare could hear across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring household.That dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now?

The aged and lichened brick gables breathed forth `Stay!' The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy.A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.

Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him.And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this it was not solely so.Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences.The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.Looking at it thus he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience.Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss;but a woman living her precious life - a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her.The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause -her all; her every and only chance.How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her - so fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve; in order that it might not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop what had begun.Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and, having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which they would be mutually engaged.

As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach her.

He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends.It might be possible to sound them upon this.In less than five months his term here would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge, and in a position to start on his own account.Would not a farmer want a wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who understood farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned to him by the silence he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

`O no,' said Dairyman Crick.`Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk.'

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness.

`He's getting on towards the end of his time wi' me,' added the dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; `and so I suppose he is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere.'

`How much longer is he to bide here?' asked Izz Huett, the only one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the table-cloth, Marian with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at the meads.

`Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my memorandum-book,'

replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.`And even that may be altered a bit.He'll bide to get a little practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain.He'll hang on till the end of the year I should say.'

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society - of `pleasure girdled about with pain'.After that the blackness of unutterable night.