an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase the war.
Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the road, and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.
“What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?” he asked.
The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.
Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over towards her. “Jump up behind me,” he whispered, “and we’ll get shot of the screaming cats in a jiffy!”
She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis. At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious revellers became aware of what had happened.
The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was diminishing into silence on the road.
“What be ye looking at?” asked a man who had not observed the incident.
“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.
“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.
“Heu-heu-heu!” laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she explained laconically: “Out of the frying-pan into the fire!”
Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night’s mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.
Chapter 11
The twain cantered along for some time without speech, Tess as she clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects dubious. She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he sometimes rose, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow the animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.
“Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?” he said by and by.
“Yes!” said she. “I am sure I ought to be much obliged to you.”
“And are you?”
She did not reply.
“Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?”
“I suppose—because I don’t love you.”
“You are quite sure?”
“I am angry with you sometimes!”
“Ah, I half feared as much.” Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that confession. He knew that anything was better then frigidity. “Why haven’t you told me when I have made you angry?”
“You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself here.”
“I haven’t offended you often by love-making?”
“You have sometimes.”
“How many times?”
“You know as well as I—too many times.”
“Every time I have tried?”
She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance, till a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the evening, became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air. Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness, she did not perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her conductor had not taken the Trantridge track.
She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o’clock every morning of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough, waited three hours for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her impatience to start them preventing either; she had then walked a mile of the way home, and had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till, with the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one o’clock. Only once, however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.
D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to support her.
This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.
“That is devilish unkind!” he said. “I mean no harm—only to keep you from falling.”
She pondered suspiciously, till, thinking that this might after all be true, she relented, and said quite humbly, “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God!” he burst out, “what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chit like you? For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded me, and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!”
“I’ll leave you to-morrow, sir.”
“No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are. Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?”
She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, “I don’t
