This hope she still fostered.
To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the clat of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed.
The set of brilliants returned to her mind.
Where Clare had deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she could only use and not sell them.
Even were they absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which was not essentially hers at all.
Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial.
At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains.
To return.
Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get employment.
Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural.
From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.
Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience of it.
But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.
The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required no further aid.
Room would probably have been made for her at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized husband.
She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness wince.
Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.
She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county, to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had reached her from Marian.
Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from her husband-probably through Izz Huett-and the good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that she worked again as of old.
With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on-disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs.
Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her natural attractiveness.
Whilst the clothes lasted which had been prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November afternoon.
She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure.
But having once decided to try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night.
The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware.
She had reached the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few moments she was overtaken by a man.
He stepped up alongside Tess and said-"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.
The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the landscape was nearly dark.
The man turned and stared hard at her.
"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile-young Squire d'Urberville's friend?
I was there at that time, though I don't live there now."
She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down at the inn for addressing her coarsely.
A spasm of anguish shot through her, and she returned him no answer.
"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true, though your fancy-man was so up about it-hey, my sly one?
You ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."
Still no answer came from Tess.
There seemed only one escape for her hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation.
Into this she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe against any possibility of discovery.
Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off draughts.
She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess crept.
Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the breeze.
She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold.
Was there another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity."
She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days.
Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further.
If all were only vanity, who would mind it?
All was, alas, worse than vanity-injustice, punishment, exaction, death.
The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare.
"I wish it were now," she said.
In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound among the leaves.