LVI
Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The
Herons, and owner of all the handsome furniture, was
not a person of an unusually curious turn of mind.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long
and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon
Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own
sake, and apart from possible lodgers' pockets.
Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her
well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville, as she
deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of
time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity
which had been stifled down as useless save in its
bearings to the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway,
without entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who
stood within the partly-closed door of her own
sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear
fragments of the conversation--if conversation it could
be called--between those two wretched souls. She heard
Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the
departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door
behind him. Then the door of the room above was shut,
and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her
apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed,
Mrs Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for
some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood
at the door of the front room--a drawing-room,
connected with the room immediately behind it (which
was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner.
This first floor, containing Mrs Brooks's best
apartments, had been taken by the week by the
d'Urbervilles. The back room was now in silence; but
from the drawing-room there came sounds.
All that she could at first distinguish of them was one
syllable, continually repeated in a low note of
moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some
Ixionian wheel----
"O--O--O!"
Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again----
"O--O--O!"
The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small
space of the room inside was visible, but within that
space came a corner of the breakfast table, which was
already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside.
Over the seat of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her
posture being a kneeling one in front of it; her hands
were clasped over her head, the skirts of her
dressing-gown and the embroidery of her night-gown
flowed upon the floor behind her, and her stockingless
feet, from which the slippers had fallen, protruded
upon the carpet. It was from her lips that came the
murmur of unspeakable despair.
Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom----
"What's a matter?"
She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a
soliloquy rather than an exclamation, and a dirge
rather than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks could only catch a
portion:
"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ...
and I did not know it! ... And you had used your cruel
persuasion upon me ... you did not stop using
it--no--you did not stop! My little sisters and
brothers and my mother's needs--they were the things
you moved me by ... and you said my husband would never
come back--never; and you taunted me, and said what a
simpleton I was to expect him! ... And at last I
believed you and gave way! ... And then he came back!
Now he is gone. Gone a second time, and I have lost
him now for ever ... and he will not love me the
littlest bit ever any more--only hate me! ... O yes,
I have lost him now--again because of--you!" In writhing,
with her head on the chair, she turned her face towards
the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it;
and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her
teeth upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed
eyes stuck in wet tags to her cheeks. She continued:
"And he is dying--he looks as if he is dying! ... And
my sin will kill him and not kill me! ... O, you have
torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed
you in pity not to make me be again! ... My own true
husband will never, never--O God--I can't bear this!--
I cannot!"
There were more and sharper words from the man; then a
sudden rustle; she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks,
thinking that the speaker was coming to rush out of the
door, hastily retreated down the stairs.
She need not have done so, however, for the door of the
sitting-room was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it
unsafe to watch on the landing again, and entered her
own parlour below.
She could hear nothing through the floor, although she
listened intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to
finish her interrupted breakfast. Coming up presently
to the front room on the ground floor she took up some
sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might
take away the breakfast, which she meant to do herself,
to discover what was the matter if possible. Overhead,
as she sat, she could now hear the floorboards slightly
creak, as if some one were walking about, and presently
the movement was explained by the rustle of garments
against the banisters, the opening and the closing of
the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the
gate on her way into the street. She was fully dressed
now in the walking costume of a well-to-do young lady
in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that
over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.
Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of
farewell, temporary or otherwise, between her tenants
at the door above. They might have quarrelled, or Mr
d'Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an
early riser.
She went into the back room which was more especially
her own apartment, and continued her sewing there. The
lady lodger did not return, nor did the gentleman ring
his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the delay, and on what
probable relation the visitor who had called so early
bore to the couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant
back in her chair.
As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the
ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle
of its white surface which she had never noticed there
before. It was about the size of a wafer when she
first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the
palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it
was red. The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet
blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace
of hearts.
Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got
upon the table, and touched the spot in the ceiling
with her fingers. It was damp, and she fancied that it
was a blood stain.
Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and
went upstairs, intending to enter the room overhead,
which was the bedchamber at the back of the
drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now
become, she could not bring herself to attempt the
handle. She listened. The dead silence within was
broken only by a regular beat.
Drip, drip, drip.
Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door,
and ran into the street. A man she knew, one of the
workmen employed at an adjoining villa, was passing by,
and she begged him to come in and go upstairs with her;
she feared something had happened to one of her
lodgers. The workman assented, and followed her to the
landing.
She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back
for him to pass in, entering herself behind him. The
room was empty; the breakfast--a substantial repast of
coffee, eggs, and a cold ham--lay spread upon the table
untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that
the carving-knife was missing. She asked the man to go
through the folding-doors into the adjoining room.
He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came
back almost instantly with a rigid face. "My good God,
the gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt
with a knife--a lot of blood had run down upon the
floor!"
The alarm was soon given, and the house which had
lately been so quiet resounded with the tramp of many
footsteps, a surgeon among the rest. The wound was
small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart
of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead,
as if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the
blow. In a quarter of an hour the news that a
gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had
been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street
and villa of the popular watering-place.
