Tess of the dUrbervilles - Page 100/283

After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad

that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family--even

though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle

and become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as

she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the

d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she

bore. The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her

that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that

she had won interest in his eyes.

XX

The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of

flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral

creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had

stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and

inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and

stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams,

opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and

breathings. Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,

placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of

all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which

neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin

to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness

makes too little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one

thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied

each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently

keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an

irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,

possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,

physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The

sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of

its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and

Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection

and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections

have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend

to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand

towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,

warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of

persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be

occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a

philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting

specimen of womankind.