according to our suffolk notions, grace gryce was a beauty: being strongly set up and full built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good looking man had a smile in them, and over all a head of bright-brown hair. had tess been out of the way she'd have had things all as she wanted them, not another girl in the village for looks coming near her; and so it was only human nature, i suppose, that she hated tess for crossing her—making her always go second, and a bad second, with the men.
it was about john heath, though, that the[191] heart of the matter was. all the village knew that grace fancied him, and that he half fancied her—and would have fancied her altogether had tess been out of the way. making up his mind between them—john always was a thick thinker—did not seem to come easy to him. the whims and the ways of tess—that made a dozen different sorts of girl of her in five minutes—seemed to set him off from her a-most as much as they set him on: being a sort of puzzle, i'm free to say, that other men beside john couldn't well understand. with grace it was different. she might blow hot or she might blow cold with him; or she might show her temper—she had a-plenty of it—and give him the rough side of her tongue: but what she meant and what she wanted always was plain and clear. to be sure, this is only my guess why he hung in the wind between them. maybe he set too little store on tess's love because it came to him too easily; maybe he thought that by seeming to love her lightly he best could hold her fast.
hold her fast he did, and that is certain. in spite of all her whimsies, he had her love; and it was his, as i have said, from the time when he man-mastered her by boxing the little ears of her—she being only ten years old. al[192]ways after that, even when she was at her sauciest and her airiest, he had only to speak short and sharp to her and she'd come to heel to him like a dog. sometimes, seeing her taking orders from him that way was close to setting me wild: i having my whole heart fixed on her, and ready to give the very hands of me to have from her the half of what she gave him. not but what she loved me too, in her own fashion, and dearly. she showed that by the way that she used to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles; and the sweetness and the comfortingness of her to me and to my mother always, but most when my poor father was drowned, was beyond any words that i have to put it in. but my pain was that the love which she had for me was of the same sort that she had for my mother—and i was not wanting from her love of that kind. and so it cut to the quick of me—i who would have kissed her shoe-soles—to see her so ready always to be meek and humble at a word from john. there were times, and a good many of them—seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he almost as careless of her as if she had been no more than a dog to him—that i saw red as i looked at him, and got burning hot in the insides of me, and was as close to murder[193]ing him as i well could be and he still go on alive.
like enough grace gryce—being of the same stock that i was, and made much as i was—had the same feeling for tess that i had for john; and grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop her from murdering tess in a woman's way. she would have done it sooner had her wits been quicker. time and again they had had their word-fights together, and tess always getting the better of her because grace's wits, like the rest of her, were heavy and slow.
it was down by the boats, under the gun hill, that they fought the round out in which grace drew blood at last. a lot of the girls were together there and tess, for a wonder, happened to be with them. they all were saying to her what hard things they could think of; and she, in her quick way, was hitting back at them and scoring off them all. poor sort of stuff it was that they were giving her: calling her "miss fine-airs" and "miss maypole," and scorning the black eyes and the pale face of her, and girding at her the best they could because in no way was she like themselves.
"it's a pity i'm so many kinds of ugliness!" says tess in her saucy way, and making it worse[194] by laughing. "it's a true pity that i'm not pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left lonely. if only i'd some of your good looks, you see, i might have, as the rest of you have, a lot of men at my heels."
that was a shot that hit all of them, but it hit grace the hardest and she answered it. "it's better," said she, "to go your whole life without a man at your heels than it is to spend your whole life dog-tagging at the heels of a man."
the girls laughed at that, knowing well what grace was driving at. but tess was ready with her answer and whipped back with it: "well, it's better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased with it than it is to want to tag there and he not letting you—liking a may-pole, maybe, better than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe, for grace by nature than for grace by name."
that turned the joke—only it was no joke—on grace again; and as the girls had not much more liking for her than they had for tess, seeing that she spoiled what few man-chances tess left them, they laughed at her as hard as they could laugh.
grace's slow anger had been getting hotter and hotter in her. that shot of tess's, and the girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.
[195]
"who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to me?" she jerked out, with a squeak in her voice and her blue eyes blazing. "who be'st thou, anyway? who knows the father or the mother of thee? who knows what foul folk in what foul land bore thee? dog-tag thou may'st, but—mark my words—naught will come of it: because thou'rt not fit for john heath or for any other honest man to have dealings with—thou rotten upcast of the sea!"
tess was holding her head high and was scornful-looking when this speech began; but the ending of it, so mary benacre told my mother, seemed like a knife in her heart. her face went a sort of a pasty white, so mary said; and she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her hand up to her throat in a fluttering kind of way as if her throat hurt her. and then she sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat she was standing by and leaned against it—looking, so mary said, as if she was like to die.
"mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit," grace said, with her hands on her fat hips and her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce at her, turned away. the other girls, all except mary, went along with grace; but not talking, and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like[196] enough, as men would feel standing by at the end of a knife-fight, when one man is down with a cut that has done for him and there is a smell of blood in the air.
mary staid behind—she was a good sort, was mary benacre—and went to tess and tried to comfort her. tess didn't answer her, but just looked at her with a pitiful sort of stare out of her black eyes that mary said was like the look of some poor dumb thing that had no other way of telling how bad its hurt was. and then, rousing herself up, tess pushed mary away from her and started for home on a run. mary did not follow her, but later on she came and told my mother just what had happened and gave her grace gryce's words.
it was well that mary came, that way, and told a clear story about it all. what tess told—when she came flying into the house and caught my mother around the neck and put her poor head on my mother's breast and went off into a passion of crying there—was such a muddle that my mother knew only that grace gryce had said something to her that was wickedly cruel. tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the very life out of her; and kept sobbing out that she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's daughter,[197] and that the sea would have done better by her had it drowned her, and that she hoped she'd die soon and be forgotten—until she drove my mother almost wild.
and so it went for a long while with her, my mother petting her and crying over her, until at last—the feel, i suppose, of my mother's warm love for her getting into her poor hurt heart and comforting her—she began to quiet down. then my mother got her to bed—she was as weak as water—and made a pot of bone-set tea for her; and pretty soon after she'd drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to sleep. she still was sleeping when mary benacre came and told the whole story; and so stirred up my mother's anger—and she was a very gentle-natured woman, my mother was—that it was all she could do, she said afterwards, not to go straight off to grace gryce and give her a beating with her own hands.
