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Updated: June 16, 2025
"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking eyes off Tess. "How her face do show it!" "You BE going to marry him?" asked Marian. "Yes," said Tess. "When?" "Some day." They thought that this was evasiveness only. "YES going to MARRY him a gentleman!" repeated Izz Huett.
"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. "His thoughts be of other cheeks than thine!" Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again. "There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair and keenly cut lips. "You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty.
Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank. "Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were dry with emotion. "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look into his face as Marian did." "There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly. "There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding.
She felt certain that they were continuing the subject already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up and resumed work. Then Izz Huett broke down.
Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace. Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was something as if a sob had solidified there.
"Well I sometimes think that too." "But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett impatiently. "Of course he won't marry any one of us, or Tess either a gentleman's son, who's going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us to come wi'en as farm-hands at so much a year!" One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure sighed biggest of all.
Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from her husband probably through Izz Huett and the good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that she worked again as of old.
Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o' the old things we used to know, and make it all come back a'most, in seeming!" Marian's eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions returned. "I'll write to Izz Huett," she said.
The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in his memory, came back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved him, and she had replied in the affirmative. Did she love him more than Tess did? No, she had replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do no more. He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding.
Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle, Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation.
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