Tess of the dUrbervilles - Page 80/283

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the

dance they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did

she retain but the old seal and spoon. "Pooh--I have as much of

mother as father in me!" she said. "All my prettiness comes from

her, and she was only a dairymaid."

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon,

when she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had

anticipated, the distance being actually but a few miles. It was

two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself

on a summit commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the

Great Dairies, the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness,

and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her

home--the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies,

Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at

Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now. The world was drawn

to a larger pattern here. The enclosures numbered fifty acres

instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of

cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families. These myriads

of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west

outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before. The green

lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot

or Sallaert with burghers. The ripe hue of the red and dun kine

absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals

returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant

elevation on which she stood.

The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly

beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it

was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the

rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear,

bracing, ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass

and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in

Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over

beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish

unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life

shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with

pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the

water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or

the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes

upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with

the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she

bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant

voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a

joy. Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind,

continually fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as

the thoughts were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless;

another pale and tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less

than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded with her less

elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.

It was her best face physically that was now set against the south

wind. The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet

pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the

highest, had at length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young

woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished

growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her

an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.