With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he
met the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the
brethren. "You go to the devil!" said d'Urberville.
Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious
sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the
rush of hot tears thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had,
like others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had! She had
never before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never
in her life--she could swear it from the bottom of her soul--had
she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had
come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of
inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?
She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand,
and scribbled the following lines:
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully,
and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I
did not intend to wrong you--why have you so wronged
me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget
you. It is all injustice I have received at your
hands!
T.
She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with
her epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the
window-panes. It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How
could he give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was
no new event to alter his opinion.
It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two
biggest of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the
four smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to
eleven, all in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling
their own little subjects. Tess at length joined them, without
lighting a candle. "This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house
where we were born," she said quickly. "We ought to think of it,
oughtn't we?" They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they
were ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had
conjured up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in
the idea of a new place. Tess changed the subject.
"Sing to me, dears," she said. "What shall we sing?"
"Anything you know; I don't mind."