"This happiness could not have lasted": "Tess of the D'urbervilles" concludes

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

Tess writes to Angel in Brazil in care of his parents, begging him to return to her and save her from temptation.

Hearing that her mother is very ill, Tess breaks her engagament at Flintcomb Ash and returns home. Laboring in her family's kitchen garden in the twilight, she discovers a stranger hoeing the soil next to her -- D'urberville.

The rake turned ranter turned would-be samaritan greets her breezily, not to say sacriligiously: "A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the form of an inferior animal." Tess spurns him once again.

Tess's mother rallies but her father suddenly dies -- a catastrophe for the Derbyfields as the leasehold is in his name. The disgraced Tess's return makes the family seem all the more morally problematic to the village landlord, so no pity is extended to the now headless household.

Old Lady Day. The common day on which farm laborers throughout England begin new contracts and thus are in transit from one farmstead to another. It is also the day upon which leases end, and thus on which Tess, her mother, and her six siblings find themselves dispossessed.

Alec D'urberville again comes to Tess offering to care for her and her family, saying with apparent sincerity "though I have been your enemy I am now your friend, even if you do not believe it."

With no place to live, Tess and her family camp in the graveyard that contains the decrepit ancestral tomb of the great D'urbervilles. Alec follows them and once again tempts Tess.

Angel returns a near-skeleton. He traces Tess's wanderings while he was away and finally finds her, dressed in expensive clothes, in an upscale resort lodging where Alec D'urberville has taken her.

The owner of the lodging house is said by Hardy to be in "enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon, Profit-and-Loss."

Tess, insane with sorrow that her giving-in to D'urberville has once again lost her the chance to be Angel's true wife, murders the rake in his bed. She flees the house, runs until she overtakes Angel, and confesses her deed. He vows to protect her and they go off together. Hardy reports that "their every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two chldren."

Tess and Angel finally find married bliss, first in an abandoned manor house and then, for a night, at a moonlit Stonehenge. When the police come to apprehend her, Tess is happy as all life has taught her is that "this happiness could not have lasted."


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