Angel rejects Tess

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 I you 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, O my 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 imposter; 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."

"I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel,
because I have no right to! I shall not write to
mother and sisters to say we be married, as I said I
would do; and I shan't finish the good-hussif' I cut
out and meant to make while we were in lodgings."

"Shan't you?"

"No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and
if you go away from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if
you never speak to me any more I shall not ask why,
unless you tell me I may."

"And if I order you to do anything?"

"I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it
is to lie down and die."

"You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a
want of harmony between your present mood of
self-sacrifice and your past mood of
self-preservation."

These were the first words of antagonism.