In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his
mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street.
He had declined to borrow his father's old mare, well knowing of
its necessity to the household. He went to the inn, where he hired
a trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing. In a very few
minutes after, he was driving up the hill out of the town which,
three or four months earlier in the year, Tess had descended with
such hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple
with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled
himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In
something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of
the King's Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of
Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by
Alec d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange
oath that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and
blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly
in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from
their roots.
Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other
Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing
calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had
written to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to be
the place of sojourn referred to by her mother. Here, of course, he
did not find her; and what added to his depression was the discovery
that no 'Mrs Clare' had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by
the farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by her
Christian name. His name she had obviously never used during their
separation, and her dignified sense of their total severance was
shown not much less by this abstention than by the hardships she had
chosen to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time) rather
than apply to his father for more funds.
From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due
notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor,
and it therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had
told him she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent
as to her actual address, and the only course was to go to Marlott
and inquire for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with Tess
was quite smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man to
drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in being sent back
to Emminster; for the limit of a day's journey with that horse was
reached.
Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle for a further
distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with
the man who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered
on foot the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's birth.
It was as yet too early in the year for much colour to appear in the
gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter overlaid
with a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his
