"
"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones suddenly
resuming their old fluty pathos. "But you did not come! And I wrote
to you, and you did not come! He kept on saying you would never come
any more, and that I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me,
and to mother, and to all of us after father's death. He--"
"I don't understand."
"He has won me back to him."
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged
like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands,
which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate.
She continued--
"He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie--that you
would not come again; and you HAVE come! These clothes are what he's
put upon me: I didn't care what he did wi' me! But--will you go
away, Angel, please, and never come any more?"
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with
a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to
shelter them from reality.
"Ah--it is my fault!" said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But
he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear
to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to
recognize the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like a
corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living
will.
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