第85章

His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing his powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terribly sterile expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure.It was the face of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no advantage in his enfranchisement.He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but The little less, and what worlds away! He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate to set him right.Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which as they gazed never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was telling, were yet ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one, discordant and contrasting.

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.

The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.

Chapter 36 Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime.The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers;the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above there was no sound;but in a few minutes there came a knock at the door.He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager's wife, who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning.She had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire.There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in domestic preparations.The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column;local people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice--`Breakfast is ready!'

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the sitting-room, mechanically readjusting the breakfast things.As she was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her.Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks - a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white.Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire.The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope.But it soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires.To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemonstrativeness.

At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object also.

`Angel!' she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once her lover.Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her cheek.Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly, that a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure.Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.

`Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!'

`It is true.' `Every word?'

`Every word.'

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid denial.However, she only repeated--`It is true.'

`Is he living?' Angel then asked.

`The baby died.'

`But the man?'

`He is alive.'

A last despair passed over Clare's face.

`Is he in England?'

`Yes.'

He took a few vague steps.

`My position - is this,' he said abruptly.`I thought - any man would have thought - that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but - However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.'

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been needed.

Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost all round.

`Angel - I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I hoped you would never------'

Her voice grew husky.

`A last way?'

`I mean, to get rid of me.You can get rid of me.'

`How?'

`By divorcing me.'