Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LIX

The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet
Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and
the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid
by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the
human world seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was
purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to send her
communications through his father, whom he kept pretty well informed of
his changing addresses in the country he had gone to exploit for
himself with a heavy heart.

“Now,” said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope,
“if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next
month, as he told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his
plans; for I believe it to be from his wife.” He breathed deeply at the
thought of her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent on to
Angel.

“Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely,” murmured Mrs Clare. “To
my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used. You should have
sent him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith and given him the
same chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out of it under
proper influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders after all. Church
or no Church, it would have been fairer to him.”

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her
husband’s peace in respect to their sons. And she did not vent this
often; for she was as considerate as she was devout, and knew that his
mind too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this matter. Only
too often had she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs for
Angel with prayers. But the uncompromising Evangelical did not even now
hold that he would have been justified in giving his son, an
unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had given to the two
others, when it was possible, if not probable, that those very
advantages might have been used to decry the doctrines which he had
made it his life’s mission and desire to propagate, and the mission of
his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a pedestal under the
feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt the
unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike
inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.
Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned over
this treatment of him as Abraham might have mourned over the doomed
Isaac while they went up the hill together. His silent self-generated
regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which his wife rendered
audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never
been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with
agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated him
and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken place. At
first they had supposed it must be something of the nature of a serious
aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally alluded to the
intention of coming home to fetch her; from which expressions they
hoped the division might not owe its origin to anything so hopelessly
permanent as that. He had told them that she was with her relatives,
and in their doubts they had decided not to intrude into a situation
which they knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess’s letter was intended were gazing at this time
on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which was
bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent towards
the coast. His experiences of this strange land had been sad. The
severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after his arrival had
never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost decided to
relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as the bare
possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change of view a
secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country in
his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had
suffered, died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English
farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child
would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause to
dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the babe
therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and again
trudge on.

Angel’s original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a
northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this place
in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English
agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape
from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years. What
arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its
pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now
began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they
wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who
was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only
in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history
lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began to
oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He could no
longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say that was in
spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time with
her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt herself
at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances or her
feelings. He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her
motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus her
silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really said if he
had understood!—that she adhered with literal exactness to orders which
he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural fearlessness she
asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect the
true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the
country, another man rode beside him. Angel’s companion was also an
Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part
of the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and they
spoke of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that curious
tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant lands, to
entrust to strangers details of their lives which they would on no
account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man as they rode
along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more
peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the
social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial
curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;
thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she
would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from
her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm. Angel’s companion
was struck down with fever, and died by the week’s end. Clare waited a
few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew
absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his
death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the
philosophers. His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.
His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had persistently
elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in that
civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem. Surely
then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state,
which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at least open to
correction when the result was due to treachery. A remorse struck into
him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in his memory, came
back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved him, and she had replied in
the affirmative. Did she love him more than Tess did? No, she had
replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do
no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding. How
her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words as if
they were a god’s! And during the terrible evening over the hearth,
when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had
looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his
love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical things
he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic
and live; and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing them had
arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles
to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over
the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no
doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they love or have
loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself
when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the
harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards
the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The historic interest of her family—that masterful line of
d’Urbervilles—whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his
sentiments now. Why had he not known the difference between the
political value and the imaginative value of these things? In the
latter aspect her d’Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions;
worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer,
to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a fact that would soon
be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name, and
oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments
and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his
own romances. In recalling her face again and again, he thought now
that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which must have graced
her grand-dames; and the vision sent that aura through his veins
which he had formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of
sickness.

Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as
Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of
the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess’s devoted
outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father;
though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in
reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer’s expectation that Angel would come in response to
the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it was that
the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not
changed—could never change; and that, if her presence had not
attenuated them, her absence could not. Nevertheless she addressed her
mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him best if
he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she had taken
more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she had inquired
more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads among those the
country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling, who had
followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby remembered that,
amongst the snatches of melody in which they had indulged at the
dairyman’s, to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed
to like “Cupid’s Gardens”, “I have parks, I have hounds”, and “The
break o’ the day”; and had seemed not to care for “The Tailor’s
Breeches” and “Such a beauty I did grow”, excellent ditties as they
were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised them
privately at odd moments, especially “The break o’ the day”:

Arise, arise, arise!
And pick your love a posy,
All o’ the sweetest flowers
That in the garden grow.
The turtle doves and sma’ birds
In every bough a-building,
So early in the May-time
At the break o’ the day!

It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these
ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this
cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the
thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the
simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the
aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to know
how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that
Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the
end of her term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which
made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as
usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the
family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess.
Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure with
the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish
creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the girl said
“Tess!”

“What—is it ’Liza-Lu?” asked Tess, in startled accents. Her sister,
whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had
sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as
yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin
legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her growing, and
her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and inexperience.

“Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess,” said Lu, with
unemotional gravity, “a-trying to find ’ee; and I’m very tired.”

“What is the matter at home?”

“Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she’s dying, and as
father is not very well neither, and says ’tis wrong for a man of such
a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring work, we
don’t know what to do.”

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking ’Liza-Lu
to come in and sit down. When she had done so, and ’Liza-Lu was having
some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that she should go
home. Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth of April,
but as the interval thereto was not a long one she resolved to run the
risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her sister was
too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess ran down
to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had happened, and
begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she
got Lu a supper, and after that, having tucked the younger into her own
bed, packed up as many of her belongings as would go into a withy
basket, and started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.