Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the dead.  Nearing the central part, her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.

His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn.  The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul.  This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician.  Although Tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been from its constant iteration—­

   “O foolish galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye
   should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ
   hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”

Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in finding that the preacher’s doctrine was a vehement form of the view of Angel’s father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.  He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners.  He had scoffed; he had wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd.  But a day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but whose parting words had sunk into his heart, and had remained there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this change in him, and made him what they saw him.

But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d’Urberville.  Her face fixed in painful suspense, she came round to the front of the barn, and passed before it.  The low winter sun beamed directly upon the great double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched far in over the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly sheltered from the northern breeze.  The listeners were entirely villagers, among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion.  But her attention was given to the central figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door.  The three o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed.

END OF PHASE THE FIFTH

Phase the Sixth:  The Convert

XLV