a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft
gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of
her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.
''Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now--you do look
a real beauty!' said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on
the threshold between the steely starlight without and the yellow
candlelight within. Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of
herself to the situation; she could not be--no woman with a heart
bigger than a hazel-nut could be--antagonistic to Tess in her
presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex
being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering
the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry.
With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let
her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn.
They heard her footsteps tap along the hard road as she stepped out
to her full pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without
any particular respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had
been prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.
It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and
only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her.
Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a
dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky
hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream
at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole
history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so gain back the
truant.
In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which
stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still
in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the uplands, the
atmosphere down there was a deep blue. Instead of the great
enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to
toil, there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen
acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes
of a net. Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in
Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her
sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty
to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what
the thing symbolized.
Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing
above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from
Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and
High-Stoy, with the dell between them called 'The Devil's Kitchen'.
Still following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where
the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a
miracle, or murder, or both. Three miles further she cut across the
straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash Lane; leaving which
as soon as she reached it she dipped down a hill by a transverse lane
into the small town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway
over the distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second
