Their hands were still joined.The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste.Imagination might have beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath.A large shadow of her shape rose upon the wall and ceiling.She bent forward, at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's; and pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on her story of her acquaintance with Alec d'Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.END OF PHASE THE FOURTH PHASE THE FIFTH The Woman Pays Chapter 35 Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations were done.Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she had not wept.
But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed.The fire in the grate looked impish - demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait.The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care.The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem.All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration.And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things.But the essence of things had changed.
When she ceased the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corners of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness.
Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him.After stirring the embers he rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted itself now.
His face had withered.In the strenuousness of his concentration he treadled fitfully on the floor.He could not, by any contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of his vague movement.When he spoke it was in the most inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she had heard from him.
`Tess!'
`Yes, dearest.'
`Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true.O you cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are not....My wife, my Tess - nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?'
`I am not out of my mind,' she said.
`And yet--' He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses:
`Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a way - but I hindered you, I remember!'
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed.He turned away, and bent over a chair.Tess followed him to the middle of the room where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this position she crouched in a heap.
`In the name of our love, forgive me!' she whispered with a dry mouth.
`I have forgiven you for the same!'
And, as he did not answer, she said again--`Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you , Angel.'
`You - yes, you do.'
`But you do not forgive me?'
`O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;now you are another.My God - how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque - prestidigitation as that!'
He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into horrible laughter - as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.
`Don't - don't! It kills me quite, that!' she shrieked.`O have mercy upon me - have mercy!'
He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.
`Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?' she cried out.
`Do you know what this is to me?'
He shook his head.
`I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have thought what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be if I do not! That's what I have felt, Angel!'
`I know that.'
`I thought, Angel, that you loved me - me, my very self! If it is Iyou do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me!
Having begun to love you, I love you for ever - in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.I ask no more.Then how can you, Omy own husband, stop loving me?'
`I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.'
`But who?'
`Another woman in your shape.'
She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding in former times.He looked upon her as a species of impostor; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one.Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered; and he stepped forward, thinking she was going to fall.
`Sit down, sit down,' he said gently.`You are ill; and it is natural that you should be.'
She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.
`I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?, she asked helplessly.
`It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.'
The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was ill-used.Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she turned round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.
Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of the disclosure itself.He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had lessened to a catching gasp at intervals.
`Angel,' she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice of terror having left her now.`Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to live together?'
`I have not been able to think what we can do.'
