The marriage -- A cock crows in the afternoon

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Four

On the advice of her mother, Tess continues to conceal the truth of her past from her betrothed. Basking in the luminous glow of her love for Angel, she knew that the "gloomy specters" of "doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame" were "waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light."

"It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus by her past; but a girl of simple life, not yet one and twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe."

When Tess's engagement to Angel is revealed, her fellow milkmaids jealously confront her: "each girl was sitting up in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts." Yet, when she collapses in years, the milkmaids find they cannot hate Tess.

When Tess is spotted by a Tantridge man who knows her past, Angel defends her honor with his fists. With their wedding day approaching, she determines to write him a letter telling the truth and slips it under his door.

On their wedding morn, wondering at Angel's continued lack of concern, Tess discovers that the letter went awry -- that it slipped under the carpet. All the stress returning, she destroys the letter.

Multiple registers of ill-omens follow immediately upon Tess and Angel's wedding. Legendary: They ride off in an ancient coach resembling the infamous "coach and four" of the D'urbervilles, in which an unspeakable crime was said to have occured (and which D'urbervilles are said to see in their dreams at moments of ill-fortune). Mythic: Tess's three fellow milkmaids are aligned along a wall like the Fates; on the departure of the couple, Angel gives each a kiss at Tess's urging. Natural: an "afternoon crow" as a white cock loudly crows at the couple as they drive off.

Angel, with a truly deaf ear for the workings of fate, books their wedding night at a farmhouse that was formerly a mansion of the D'urbervilles.

He confesses, and asks Tess's forgiveness, for a sexual indiscretion earlier in his youth. And then Tess, in the light of a fire that has "a Last-Day luridness," begins to tell her story.

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