finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_7_part_4.txt
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter lvi
chapter lvi
{"name": "Chapter LVI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase7-chapter53-59", "summary": "The landlady Mrs. Brooks looks in through the keyhole, sees Tess crying and hears her accusing d'Urberville: \"you used your cruel persuasion upon me\". Mrs. Brooks returns downstairs and sees Tess leaving in a hurry. Soon she wonders why d'Urberville doesn't ring to have the breakfast tray removed. Then she looks up to see a dark red spot spreading across the ceiling. She calls for help. Alec is discovered stabbed to death on the bed", "analysis": ""}


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 the 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.



Chapter LVI
The landlady Mrs. Brooks looks in through the keyhole, sees Tess crying and hears her accusing d'Urberville: "you used your cruel persuasion upon me". Mrs. Brooks returns downstairs and sees Tess leaving in a hurry. Soon she wonders why d'Urberville doesn't ring to have the breakfast tray removed. Then she looks up to see a dark red spot spreading across the ceiling. She calls for help. Alec is discovered stabbed to death on the bed