`Here's a pair of old boots,' he said.`Thrown away, I suppose, by some tramp or other.'
`Some impostor who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and so excite our sympathies,' said Miss Chant.`Yes, it must have been, for they are excellent walking-boots - by no means worn out.What a wicked thing to do! I'll carry them home for some poor person.'
Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated.
She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen veil, till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.
Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk.Tears, blinding tears, were running down her face.She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own condemnation;nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not contravene in her own defenceless person all these untoward omens.It was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage.Angel's wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by those - to her - super-fine clerics.Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their owner.
`Ah!' she said, still sighing in pity of herself, ` they didn't know that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these pretty ones he bought for me - no - they did not know it! And they didn't think that he chose the colour o' my pretty frock - no -how could they? If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they don't care much for him, poor thing!'
Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of judgment had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons.Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare.Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed to win their interest or regard.In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.
Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in her life was approaching.No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and there was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that starve-acre farm till she could again summon courage to face the vicarage.She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in herself to throw up her veil on this return journey, as if to let the world see that she could at least exhibit a face such as Mercy Chant could not show.But it was done with a sorry shake of the head.`it is nothing - it is nothing!' she said.`Nobody loves it;nobody sees it.Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!'
Her journey back was rather a meander than a march.It had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency.Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by milestones.
She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting expectations.The cottage by the church, in which she again sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village, and while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the street, perceived that the place seemed quite deserted.
`The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?' she said.
`No, my dear,'said the old woman.`'Tis too soon for that; the bells hain't strook out yet.They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder barn.A ranter preaches there between the services - an excellent, fiery, Christian man, they say.But, Lord, I don't go to hear'n! What comes in the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.'
Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the dead.Nearing the central part her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.
His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn.The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on `justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul.This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician.
Although tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text had been fro its constant iteration--'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?'
Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the views of Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.
