“I am without defence.  Alec!  A good man’s honour is in my keeping—­ think—­be ashamed!”

“Pooh!  Well, yes—­yes!”

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness.  His eyes were equally barren of worldly and religious faith.  The corpses of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection.  He went out indeterminately.

Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so after he had left her.  He moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable.  Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his mother’s death.

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.  He said to himself, as he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had handed on to him, “That clever fellow little thought that, by telling her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!”

XLVII

It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm.  The dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies.  Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the summit.  They were busily “unhaling” the rick, that is, stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the end of the day.  Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—­a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—­ the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.