“Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of her first man would trouble him,” said Mrs Crick.
“Ay, ay,” responded the dairyman indecisively. “Still, you can see exactly how ’twas. She wanted a home, and didn’t like to run the risk of losing him. Don’t ye think that was something like it, maidens?”
“She ought to ha’ told him just before they went to church, when he could hardly have backed out,” exclaimed Marian.
“She must have seen what he was after, and should ha’ refused him,” cried Retty spasmodically.
“And what do you say, my dear?” asked the dairyman of Tess.
“I think she ought—to have told him the true state of things—or else refused him—I don’t know,” replied Tess, the bread-and-butter choking her.
“Be cust if I’d have done either o’t,” said Beck Knibbs, a married helper from one of the cottages. “All’s fair in love and war. I’d ha’ married en just as she did, and if he’d said two words to me about not telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first chap that I hadn’t chose to tell, I’d ha’ knocked him down wi’ the rolling-pin—a scram little feller like he! Any woman could do it.”
The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry smile, for form’s sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose from table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her, went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main stream of the Var. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up the river, and masses of them were floating past her—moving islands of green crow-foot, whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks of which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows from crossing.
Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but amusement to others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
“Tessy!” came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully, alighting beside her feet. “My wife—soon!”
“No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say no!”
Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending church, a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads against the cows.) If she had said “Yes” instead of “No” he would have kissed her; it had evidently been his intention; but her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.