"Nothing intentionally.
But you have been the means-the innocent means-of my backsliding, as they call it.
I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those 'servants of corruption' who, 'after they have escaped the pollutions of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome'-whose latter end is worse than their beginning?"
He laid his hand on her shoulder.
"Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly shaking her, as if she were a child.
"And why then have you tempted me?
I was firm as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again-surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!"
His voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black eyes.
"You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon-I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!"
"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess, recoiling.
"I know it-I repeat that I do not blame you.
But the fact remains.
When I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to think that I had no legal right to protect you-that I could not have it; whilst he who has it seems to neglect you utterly!"
"Don't speak against him-he is absent!" she cried in much excitement.
"Treat him honourably-he has never wronged you!
O leave his wife before any scandal spreads that may do harm to his honest name!"
"I will-I will," he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream.
"I have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies at the fair-it is the first time I have played such a practical joke.
A month ago I should have been horrified at such a possibility.
I'll go away-to swear-and-ah, can I! to keep away."
Then, suddenly:
"One clasp, Tessy-one!
Only for old friendship-"
"I am without defence. Alec!
A good man's honour is in my keeping-think-be ashamed!"
"Pooh! Well, yes-yes!"
He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness.
His eyes were equally barren of worldly and religious faith.
The corpses of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection.
He went out indeterminately.
Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess's words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so after he had left her.
He moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable.
Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his mother's death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.
He said to himself, as he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had handed on to him,
"That clever fellow little thought that, by telling her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!"
XLVII
It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm.
The dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies.
Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the summit.
They were busily "unhaling" the rick, that is, stripping off the thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being on the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the end of the day.
Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve-a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining-the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.
A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum mobile_ of this little world.
By the engine stood a dark, motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man.
The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.
What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it.
He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun.
He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.
He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master.