Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.  Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of others.

“To think, now, that this was to be the end o’t!” said Sir John.  “And I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as Squire Jollard’s ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history.  And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver’s and The Pure Drop will say to me!  How they’ll squint and glane, and say, ’This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer forefathers in King Norman’s time!’ I feel this is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and all—­I can bear it no longer! ...  But she can make him keep her if he’s married her?”

“Why, yes.  But she won’t think o’ doing that.”

“D’ye think he really have married her?—­or is it like the first—­”

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.  The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could have done.  How unexpected were the attacks of destiny!  And if her father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance doubt her much?  O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm.  In her craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them under the impression that she was setting out to join him.  Still further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past.  With this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell; and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for some time on the strength of Tess’s bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could not live apart from each other.

XXXIX

It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his father.  With his downward course the tower of the church rose into the evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to expect him.  He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.