The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the
service proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each
other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart,
and felt that she could come to church no more.
The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards
of thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets,
and successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length
almost everybody thought she had gone away.
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She
knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather that
cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is
so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece
with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure
became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy
would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part
of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is
only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The
midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and
bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet
day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the
mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely
as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds
of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,
was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral
hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they
that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking
among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits
on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she
looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts
of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where
there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was
quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law,
but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such
an anomaly. XIV It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
should be dried away to nothing.