Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station
three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither.
The last train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare
on its wheels.
LV
At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at one of the
hotels and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his
arrival, he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too
late to call on or inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed
his purpose till the morning. But he could not retire to rest just
yet.
This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western
stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its
covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly
created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.
An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at
hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a
glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up.
Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity
of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British
trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the
Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's
gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.
By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way of this new
world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against
the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the
numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It
was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on
the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more
imposing than it was.
The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he
thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same
tones, and he thought they were the sea.
Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst
all this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered, the more was he
puzzled. Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were
no fields to till. She was most probably engaged to do something in
one of these large houses; and he sauntered along, looking at the
chamber-windows and their lights going out one by one, and wondered
which of them might be hers.
Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o'clock he entered
and went to bed. Before putting out his light he re-read Tess's
impassioned letter. Sleep, however, he could not--so near her, yet
so far from her--and he continually lifted the window-blind and
regarded the backs of the opposite houses, and wondered behind which
of the sashes she reposed at that moment.
He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the morning he
arose at seven, and shortly after went out, taking the direction of
the chief post-office. At the door he met an intelligent postman
coming out with letters for the morning delivery.
