"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only
one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the
question. The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung
upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian
with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at
the meads. "Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.
"And even that may be altered a bit. He'll bide to get a little
practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain. He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."
Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure
girdled about with pain". After that the blackness of unutterable
night. At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow
lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of
his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,
a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of
mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The
white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they
were staring into next year, and not at the lane. He loved her;
ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother
and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years
after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch
comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a
sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.
His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of
red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into
view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.
Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his
home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of
ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of
some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat
older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her
hand. Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go
and speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.
The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his
father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism and
Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now. Clare's
mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var
Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one
the most impassioned of them all.