Part 10
It was well that Mary came, that way, and told a clear story about it all. What Tess told--when she came flying into the house and caught my mother around the neck and put her poor head on my mother's breast and went off into a passion of crying there--was such a muddle that my mother knew only that Grace Gryce had said something to her that was wickedly cruel. Tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the very life out of her; and kept sobbing out that she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's daughter, and that the sea would have done better by her had it drowned her, and that she hoped she'd die soon and be forgotten--until she drove my mother almost wild.
And so it went for a long while with her, my mother petting her and crying over her, until at last--the feel, I suppose, of my mother's warm love for her getting into her poor hurt heart and comforting her--she began to quiet down. Then my mother got her to bed--she was as weak as water--and made a pot of bone-set tea for her; and pretty soon after she'd drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to sleep. She still was sleeping when Mary Benacre came and told the whole story; and so stirred up my mother's anger--and she was a very gentle-natured woman, my mother was--that it was all she could do, she said afterwards, not to go straight off to Grace Gryce and give her a beating with her own hands.
VI
When Tess came to breakfast the next morning it gave me a real turn to look at her. Somehow, at a single jump, she seemed to have changed from a girl to a woman--and to an old woman at that. Suddenly she had got to be all withered like, and the airs that she used to give herself and all the pretty ways of her were gone. She just moped in a chair in a corner--she who'd never been quiet for five minutes together, any more than a bird--with a far-away look in her beautiful eyes, and the glint of tears in them. Sorrow had got into the very bones of her. "Dost think I really am come of such foul folk that I'm not fit for honest company?" she asked my mother--and if she asked that question once that morning she asked it a dozen times.
In a way, of course, she had known what she was all her life long. "My sea-baby" was my mother's pet name for her at the first; and by that pet-name, when most tender with her, my mother called her till the last. How she had come to us, how I had found her where the waves had left her and had carried her home in my little tired arms, she had been told over and over again. Sometimes she used to make up stories about herself in her light-fancied way: telling us that she was a great lady of Spain, and that some fine morning the great Spanish lord her father would come to Southwold by some chance or other, and would know her by the chain and the locket, and would take her home with him and marry her to a duke--or to a prince, even--in her own land. We'd see that she'd be pretending to herself while she told them to us that these stories were true, and I think that she did half believe in them. But it was not real believing that she had in them; it was the sort of believing that you have in things in dreams. Her love was given to my mother and to my father--and to me, too, though not in the way that I wanted it--and we were the true kinsfolk of her heart. On our side, we all so loved her, and made her feel so truly that she was our very own, that the thought of her being a nobody's child never had a chance to get into her mind. And her own fancies about herself--always that her own dream people were great people in the dream land where they lived--kept her from seeing the other chance of the matter: that they as well might be mean people, who would put shame on her should ever she come to know who they were. Into her head that cruel thought never got until Grace Gryce put it there; and put there with it the crueller thought that her being a nobody's child was what made John stand off from her, he thinking her not fit to be his wife.
Tess was fearing, maybe, that even if John had not had that feeling about her he was like to have it after Grace had set him in the way of it. And maybe she was thinking, too, that if she had been hurt for the sake of him, and so deserved loving pity from him, it was Grace who for the sake of him had done the hurting--and that it was Grace who had won. Our girls are best pleased with the lover who fights to a finish some other man in love with them and well thrashes him. Tess may have fancied that John would take it that way; and so end by settling that Grace, having the most fire and fight in her, was the most to his mind. But what really came of it all with John, as far as I can make out, was that his getting them fairly set the one against the other cleared his thick wits up and brought him to a choice.
And so, being in every way sorrowful, Tess was like a dead girl that day; and my heart was just breaking for her. When dinner time came she roused up a bit and helped my mother, as she always did--though my mother wanted her to keep resting--and tried in a pitiful sort of way to talk a little and to pretend that she was not in bitter pain; but those pretty feet of hers, so light always, dragged after her in her walking, and she was all wizened-looking, and there were black marks under her beautiful sorrowing eyes. My mother helped to make talk with her, though my mother was wiping her own tears away when she got the chance; but as for me, I was tongue-tied by the hurt and the anger in me and could not say a word. What I was thinking was, how glad I'd be to wring Grace Gryce's neck for her if only she was a man!
After dinner I went out to a bench in front of our house, but a bit away from it, and sat there trying to comfort myself with a pipe--and not finding much even in a pipe to comfort me--until the sun, all yellow, began to drop down toward the Gun Hill into a bad looking yellow sky. All the while I had the tail of my eye bearing on our door, and at last I saw Tess come out of it. She took a quick look at the back of me, sitting quiet there; and then, I not turning toward her, off she walked along the edge of the cliff to the northward. At first I didn't know what to do--thinking that if she wanted to be alone I ought to leave her to her loneliness--and I sat on and smoked another pipe before I could make up my mind. But the longer I sat there the stronger my drawing was to go to her. What was hurting her most, as I well enough knew, was the thought of having neither kith nor kin for herself, along with the dread that even if she found her people they might only be a shame to her--and that was a hurt that having a husband would cure for her, seeing that she would get a new and a good rating in the world when she got her husband's name. And so, at last, I started after her to tell her all that was in the heart of me; and thinking more, and this is the truth, of what I could do to comfort her by taking the sting out of Grace Gryce's words than of how in that same way I could win my own happiness.
I walked on so far--across the dip in the land where the old river was, and up on the cliffs again--that I began to think she had turned about inland and so had gone that way home. But at last I came up with her, on the very top of Covehithe Ness.
She was sitting at the cliff-edge, bent forward a little with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands; and as I came close to her I saw that she was crying in that quiet sort of way that people cry in when they have touched despair. I walked so softly on the grass that she did not hear my footsteps; but she was not put out when she looked up and saw me standing over her--by which I think, and am the happier for thinking it, that she had not gone there of set purpose to meet with John.
"Sit thee down here, George. I'm glad thou'rt come," she said, and she reached me her hand.
When I was on the grass beside her--she still keeping her hand in mine, as if the touch of something that loved her was a comfort to her--she had nothing to say for a bit, but just leaned her head against my shoulder and cried softly there.
The tide was out and a long stretch of the Barnard Bank lay bared below us, with here and there the black bones of some dead ship lying buried in them sticking up from the sands. Slicing deep in the bank was the Wreck Gat, with the last of the ebb running out through it from the Covehithe Channel and the undercut sides of it falling down into the water and melting away. At the edge of it was the sunken ship that had made it: the ship that had brought Tess to us from her birth-land beyond the seas. As I have said, no more of the wreck showed than her broken stern-post: a bit of black timber, all jagged with twisted iron bolts and weed-grown and barnacled, upstanding at one side of the channel from the water and not high out of it even at low tide. When the tide was in, and any sort of a sea was running, you stood a good chance of finding just where it was by having your boat stove on it: for then it did not show at all, except now and then in the hollow of the waves.
Tess was looking down on it, her head still resting on my shoulder, and after a while she said: "If only we could dig that ship up, George, we might find what would tell that I'm not come of foul folk, after all"--and then she began to cry again in the same silent sort of way. I couldn't get an answer for her--what she said hurt me so, and she crying on my shoulder, and I feeling the beating of her heart.
"It was good of thee, George," she went on again, presently, "to save the baby life of me; but it's a true truth thou'dst have done me more of a kindness hadst thou just thrown me back into the sea. I'd be glad to be there now, George. Down there under the water it would make no difference what sort of folk I come of. And I'd be resting there as I can't rest here--for down there my pain would be gone."
My throat was so choked up that I had hard work to get my words out of it, and when they did come they sounded queer. "Tess! Tess!" I said. "Thou'lt kill me dead talking that way. As if the like of thee could come of foul folk! A lord duke would be the least to be fit father to thee--and proud of thee he well might be! But what does it matter, Tess, what thy folk were who owned thee at the beginning? They gave thee to the sea's keeping--and the sea gave thee to me. By right of finding, thou'rt mine. It was I who found thee, down on the shingle there, and from the first minute that ever I laid eyes on thee I loved thee--and the only change in me has been that always I've loved thee more and more. Whether thy people were foul folk or fair folk is all one to me. It's thyself that I'm loving--and with every bit of the love that is in my heart. Let me make thee the wife of me, Tess--and then thou'lt have no need to fret about who thy forbears were for thou'lt have no more to do with them, being made a part of me and mine."
I talked at such a rate, when I did get set a-going, that my own words ran away with me; and I got the feeling that they ran away with Tess too. But when I had ended, and she lifted up her head from my shoulder and looked straight into the eyes of me, I knew by what her eyes had in them--before ever she said a word back to me--that what I wanted most in the whole world for myself I could not have.
It seemed to me an hour before she spoke, she all the time looking straight into my eyes and her own eyes full of tears. At last she did speak. "George," said she, "if I could be wife to thee, as thou'dst have me be, I'd go down on my knees and thank God! But it can't be, George. It can't be! I've set my heart."
There was no doubting what she said. In the sound of her voice there was something that seemed as much as her words to settle the matter for good and all. Whenever I am at a funeral and hear the reading of the burial service it brings back to me the sound of her voice that day. Only there is a promise of hope in the burial service--and that there was not for me in Tess's words.
"It's John that's between us?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, speaking slow, "it's John." She was quiet for a minute and then went on again, still speaking slow: "I don't understand it myself, George. Thou'rt a better-hearted man than he is, and I truly think I love him less than I do thee. But--but I love him in another way."
"Damn him!" said I.
That got out before I could stop it, but when it had got out I wasn't sorry. It told what I felt then--and it tells what I feel now. John's taking her from me was stealing, and nothing less. We were together when I found her, he and I; but I first saw her and I first touched her--and he gave me his share in her, though he had no real share in her, when he knew what my finding was. And so his taking her from me was stealing: and that is God's truth!
Tess said nothing back to me. She only looked at me sorrowful for a minute, and then looked down again at the bit of wreck on the sands. By the sigh she gave I knew pretty well what was in her mind.
I'd had my answer, and that was the end of it. "I'll be going now, Tess," I said; and I got up and she got up with me. I was not feeling steady on my legs, and like enough I had a queer look on me. As for Tess, she was near as white as a dead woman, though some of her whiteness may have come from the yellow sunshine on her out of the western sky. Up there on top of the Ness we still had the sun with us, though he was almost gone among the foul weather yellow clouds.
"Thou'lt try to forgive me, George," she said, speaking low, and her mouth sort of twitching.
"I love thee, Tess," I said; "and where there's love there can be no talk of forgiveness. But John has the hate of me, and I tell thee fairly I'll hurt him if I can!"
With that I left her--there on Covehithe Ness, over the very spot where the sea brought her to me--and went walking back along the cliff-edge: and not seeing anything clearly because I was thinking about John, and what I'd like to do to him, and there was a sort of red blur before my eyes.
After a while I turned and looked back. My eyes had cleared a bit, but what I saw made them red again. Tess was not alone on the Ness. John was with her. The two stood out strong in the last of the yellow sunshine against a cloud-bank on the far edge of the sky. I suppose that Tess being hurt that way for him brought John to his bearings--making him love her the more for sorrow's sake, and for anger's sake making him ready to throw Grace Gryce over. Like enough he had been watching for his chance to get to her, waiting till I was gone. Anyway, there he was--and I knew what he was saying to her as well as if I'd heard the words. It is no wonder that the blood got into my eyes again as I started back along the path. But I did not go far. Somehow I managed to pull myself together and turn again. What I had to settle with John Heath could be settled best when he and I were alone.
VII
When Tess came home to supper that night she was all changed again: her looks gay once more, and her step light, and a sort of flutter about her lips--as if she was wanting to smile and was trying not to--and a soft look in her eyes that I never had seen there, but knew the meaning of and found the worst of all.
I couldn't eat my supper; and got up presently and went out leaving it--my mother looking after me wondering--and walked up and down on the cliff-edge in the darkness with my heart all in a blaze of hate for John. For a good while I had been looking for what I knew was in the way of coming to me; but it was different, and worse, and hurt more than I had counted on, when at last it came. Out there in the darkness I staid until the night was well on--not wanting for a while to hear the sound of Tess's voice nor to lay eyes on her. Not until I was sure, by the lights being out in the house, that she'd gone to bed, did I go in again. My mother was waiting waking for me. She came to me in the dark and put her arms around me and kissed me; by which I knew that Tess had been telling her--and knew, too, she always having looked to the wedding of us, that her heart was sore along with mine. But I could not bear even her soft touch on the hurt that I had. I just kissed her back again and broke away from her and went to bed. And in the very early morning, not having slept much, I slipped out of the house before either she or Tess was stirring and down to my boat and so away to sea.
What I was after was to get some quiet time to myself that would steady me before I had things out with John. I was not clear in my mind how I meant to settle with him. I did know, though, that I meant to have some sort of a fair fight with him that would end in my killing him or in him killing me--and I knew that to tackle him with my head all in a buzz would be to throw too many chances his way. And so I got away in my boat, at the day-dawn, to the sea's quietness: where I could clear my head of the buzzing that was in it and put some sort of shape to my plans.
Had I been in my sober senses that morning I never should have gone away seaward at all. Backing up the promise of the yellow sunset of the night before, pink clouds were showing in the eastern sky as I started; and as I sailed on in loneliness--standing straight out from the land on a soft leading wind from the south-west westerly--the pink turned to a pale red and then to a deep red, and at last the sun came up out of the water a great ball of fire. The look of the sea, too, all in an oily bubble, and the set of the ground-swell, told me plain enough--even without the sunrise fairly shouting it in the ears of me--that a change of wind was coming before mid-day, and that pretty soon after the wind shifted it would be blowing a gale.
I will say this, though: If I'd missed seeing the red sunrise--and all the more if I'd been full of happiness and my wits gone a wool-gathering--I might have thought from the look and the feel of the water, and from the set of the high clouds, that the wind would not blow to hurt anything for a good twelve hours. That much I'll say by way of excuse for John. Like enough he slept late that morning--through lying awake the night before thinking what he'd be likely to think--and so missed seeing the sun's warning. When he did get away in his boat it was well past eight o'clock; and there was no man on the beach when he started, so they told me, to counsel him. And, all being said, even a good sailor--and that John was--starting off as he was to buy a wedding-ring might not look as sharp as he ought to look at the sea and at the sky.
As to my own sailing seaward--I seeing the storm-signals and knowing the meaning of them--I have no more to say than that I was hot for a fight with anything that morning, and didn't care much what I had it with or how it came. Anybody who knows how to sail a boat, and to sail one well, knows what joy there is in getting the better of foul winds and rough seas for the mere fun of the thing; but there is still more joy in a tussle of that sort when you are in a towering rage. Then you are ready to push the fight farther by taking more and bigger death-chances: since a man in bitter anger--at least in such bitter anger as I was in then--does not care much whether he pulls through safely or gets drowned. And so I went on my course seaward, on that soft wind blowing more and more lazily, until the coast line was lost in the water behind me: knowing well enough, and glad to have it that way, that the wind would lull and lull until it failed me, and that then I would get a blow out of the northeast that would give me all the fight I wanted, and perhaps a bit to spare!
But because I meant my fight to be a good one, and meant to win it, I got myself ready for it. When the wind did fail--the sun was put out by that time, and from high up in the northeast the scud was flying over me--I took in and snugged away everything but my mainsail, and put a double reef in that with the reef-points knotted to hold. Then I waited, drifting south a little--the flood having made half an hour before, and the set of the ebb taking me that way.
I did not have to wait long. Out of the mist, banked thick to the north-eastward, came the moaning that a strong wind makes when it's rushing down on you; then from under the mist swept out a dark riffle that broke the oily bubble of the water and put life into it; and then the wind got to me with a bang. There was more of it than I had counted on having at the first, showing that the gale behind it was a strong one and coming down fast; but I had the nose of my boat pointed up to meet it, and with no more than a bit of a rattle I got away close-hauled. There was no going back to Southwold, of course. What I was heading for was the Pakefield Gat into the Stanford Channel, and so to the harbour at Lowestoft; and I pretty well knew from the first that no matter how close I bit into the wind--and my boat was a weatherly one--I had my work cut out for me if I meant to keep from going to leeward of the Pakefield Gat in the gale that was coming on.
Go to leeward I did, and badly. When I raised the coast again, and a lift of the mist gave me my bearings, I saw that Kessingland tower was my landfall. As to working up from there to the Pakefield Gat--the edge of the gale by that time being fairly on me--I knew that it was clean impossible. I still had two chances left--one being to cross the Barnard by the Wreck Gat, and the other to round into Covehithe Channel across the tail of the bank. To the first of these the wind would help me; but I knew that even with the wind's help it would be ticklish work trying to squeeze through that narrow place at the half ebb--when the strong outset of the current would be meeting the inpour of the storm-driven sea. It would be better, so I settled after a minute's thinking, to pass that chance and take the other--which would be a fairly sure one, though a close one too. And so I wore around--with a bad wallow in the trough of the sea that set everything to shaking for a minute--and got on my new course pretty well on the wind.
Just as I was making ready for wearing, and so had my hands full, I glimpsed the sail of a boat in the mist up to windward; and when I was come about she was abeam to leeward, showing her high weather side to me, not twenty yards away. Then I saw that it was John Heath's boat, and that John was standing up alone in her at the helm. Why the fool had not staid safe in Lowestoft harbour, God only knows. But it's only fair to him, again, to say that he must have got away from Lowestoft a good while before the wind shifted; and like enough he would have worked down to Southwold, and got his boat safe beached there before trouble came, if the calm had not caught him sooner than it did me--he being all the time close under the land.
VIII
Some of my rage had gone out of me in my fight to windward in the gale's teeth; but when I saw John close by me there it all came back to me. For half a minute the thought was in my head to run him down and sink him--and I had the wind of him and could have done it. Even in my rage, though, I could not play a coward trick like that on him; and before I could make any other plan up he set me in the way of one himself.
"I'm making for the Wreck Gat," he sung out. "Give me a lead in, George--'tis better known to thee than to me."
Had I stopped to think about it, his asking me to lead him in would have been a puzzle to me, he being just as good a sailor as I was and just as well knowing every twist of the sea and the sands. But I didn't stop to think about the queerness of what he wanted--why he was for making things double safe by my leading him is clear enough to me now--because my wits were at work at something else.