having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments
of his knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender
contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the
remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room,
if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an
apparently phlegmatic negative.
The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the
side of his--two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience--
that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power.
She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could
she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her
husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her
conscience had decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not
to be overruled now.
'Why don't somebody tell him all about me?' she said. 'It was only
forty miles off--why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know!'
Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not
only as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for
themselves that she did not put herself in his way.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life
was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and
positive pain. At the next cheese-making the pair were again left
alone together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but
Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a
suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they walked
so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the
dairyman left them to themselves.
They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into
the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a
large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess
Durbeyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased,
and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above
the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft
arm.
Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from
her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a
new-gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such
a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the
touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the cool arms
flushed hot. Then, as though her heart had said, 'Is coyness longer
necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman, as between man and
man,' she lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her
lip rose in a tender half-smile.
'Do you know why I did that, Tess?' he said.
'Because you love me very much!'
'Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty.'
'Not AGAIN!'
