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[198] 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[199] 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.
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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[201] 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[202] 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 stand[203]ing 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 ............