"How--how can you treat me to this
talk, if you care ever so little for me?"
"True, true," he said, wincing a little. "I did not come to reproach
you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say that I don't like you to be
working like this, and I have come on purpose for you. You say you
have a husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I've never
seen him, and you've not told me his name; and altogether he seems
rather a mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I
think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you
out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words
of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me.
Don't you know them, Tess?--'And she shall follow after her lover,
but she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall
not find him; then shall she say, I will go and return to my first
husband; for then was it better with me than now!' ... Tess, my trap
is waiting just under the hill, and--darling mine, not his!--you know
the rest." Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but
she did not answer.
"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he continued, stretching
his arm towards her waist; "you should be willing to share it, and
leave that mule you call husband for ever."
One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her
skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she
passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face.
It was heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the
mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of
a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec
fiercely started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing
appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began
dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon controlled
himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped
his bleeding lips. She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now, punish me!" she
said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the
sparrow's gaze before its captor twists its neck. "Whip me, crush
me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry
out. Once victim, always victim--that's the law!"