Mercy Chant

Mercy Chant is a young woman from Emminster whom Angel Clare’s parents had once imagined as his future wife. Though she appears only briefly, her chance meeting with Angel’s brothers brings that unrealized match into Tess’s view at the moment Tess is seeking help, making Mercy an emblem of the respectable alternative against which Tess believes herself to be measured—and a participant, without knowing it, in Tess’s retreat from the possibility of refuge.

Identity and Intended Match

The narrator presents Mercy as a ladylike young woman, somewhat interesting but perhaps a little constrained and prudish. She is walking ahead of Tess as Tess climbs the hill toward the Clare household. One of Angel’s brothers recognizes her and proposes that they catch up; the encounter is ordinary in itself, but Tess knows Mercy’s name and understands what it signifies. Mercy had been intended by Angel and his parents as his life-companion, and Tess believes that Angel probably would have married her had Tess not entered his life.

The account makes Mercy less a developed romantic rival than a measure of the social expectations surrounding Angel. She is associated with family approval and a conventional match, while Tess is described dismissively by Angel’s brother as a dairymaid. The contrast does not establish that Mercy and Angel were lovers or that Mercy herself sought the marriage; it shows that their parents had envisioned her for him and that his brothers continue to regard his marriage to Tess as a mistake.

Encounter on the Road to Emminster

Tess has come to Emminster hoping to approach the Vicarage, but she hesitates after churchgoers look at her as a conspicuous stranger. She walks faster when she recognizes the voices of Angel’s two brothers behind her and dreads being scrutinized before she is ready to confront them. Mercy is the only person ahead of Tess. As the brothers draw level, one names her, and the three greet one another and walk on together.

Their conversation makes the social judgment Tess fears explicit. One brother pities Angel and regrets that he has thrown himself away on a dairymaid; he wonders whether Tess has joined Angel in Brazil. The other says that Angel’s ill-considered marriage has deepened his estrangement from him, an estrangement that began with Angel’s unusual opinions. Mercy’s presence therefore connects Angel’s disputed marriage to the family’s prior expectations, even though the brothers’ conversation gives no indication that she is responsible for their view.

The Boots and Tess’s Retreat

At the hilltop, the party stops near the gate where Tess had earlier paused to survey the town. Cuthbert Clare finds a pair of boots hidden in the hedge. Mercy interprets them as the discarded footwear of an impostor who wished to enter the town barefoot and excite people’s sympathy. She calls the act wicked and offers to carry the apparently good walking-boots home for someone poor. Cuthbert lifts them from the hedge with his stick, and the boots are taken away.

Tess hears this exchange and continues past the group under her woollen veil. Looking back, she sees that the church party has left the gate with her boots. She reflects that the brothers and Mercy did not know she had worn the rough pair over the prettier boots Angel bought for her, preserving those shoes for the road. Nor, she thinks, could they know that Angel had chosen the colour of her dress. Her observation makes the recovered object more than a lost possession: the boots embody the traces of care and married life that the people judging her cannot see. Mercy’s charitable offer is sincere on its face, but her assumption that the boots belong to a sham beggar deepens Tess’s sense of being misread and exposed.

Consequence and Narrative Significance

The narrator stresses that Tess’s decisive loss of courage comes from judging her father-in-law by his sons. The irony is that the elderly Mr and Mrs Clare might have responded sympathetically to Tess’s desperate situation; their compassion is said to reach readily toward people in extreme difficulty. Yet Tess has heard the brothers’ contempt for Angel’s marriage and has watched Mercy, the woman once chosen for Angel, become part of their party. She leaves without testing the welcome she might have received.

On the return journey, Tess is not wholly without hope, but she feels that a crisis is approaching and has no immediate course except to continue working at Flintcomb-Ash until she can summon the courage to face the Vicarage again. She briefly lifts her veil, then concludes that nobody cares to see her or her appearance. Mercy has neither spoken to Tess nor knowingly rejected her; her importance lies in the scene’s arrangement of contrasts: respectable match and socially stigmatized wife, charitable intention and mistaken suspicion, visible boots and invisible history. That accidental encounter helps explain why Tess turns back from potential support and remains isolated in harsh agricultural labor.