Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LIII

It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were
burning under their green shades in the Vicar’s study, but he had not
been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire
which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went out
again; sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the
drawing-room, then returning again to the front door.

It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still
light enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been
sitting in the drawing-room, followed him hither.

“Plenty of time yet,” said the Vicar. “He doesn’t reach Chalk-Newton
till six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of
country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in
a hurry by our old horse.”

“But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear.”

“Years ago.”

Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only
waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.

At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old pony-chaise
appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight therefrom a form
which they affected to recognize, but would actually have passed by in
the street without identifying had he not got out of their carriage at
the particular moment when a particular person was due.

Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her husband
came more slowly after her.

The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces
in the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because
they confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his shape
against the light.

“O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!” cried Mrs Clare, who cared no
more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused all
this separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed,
among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises
and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own
children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed
against their happiness? As soon as they reached the room where the
candles were lighted she looked at his face.

“O, it is not Angel—not my son—the Angel who went away!” she cried in
all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.

His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure
from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had
experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his
first aversion to the mockery of events at home. You could see the
skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He
matched Crivelli’s dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid
hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines
of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty
years before their time.

“I was ill over there, you know,” he said. “I am all right now.”

As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give way,
and he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was only a
slight attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day’s journey,
and the excitement of arrival.

“Has any letter come for me lately?” he asked. “I received the last you
sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay through
being inland; or I might have come sooner.”

“It was from your wife, we supposed?”

“It was.”

Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,
knowing he would start for home so soon.

He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbed to read
in Tess’s handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried
scrawl to him.

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve
it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never
forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have
you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to
forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!

T.

“It is quite true!” said Angel, throwing down the letter. “Perhaps she
will never be reconciled to me!”

“Don’t, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the soil!” said his
mother.

“Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the soil. I wish she
were so in the sense you mean; but let me now explain to you what I
have never explained before, that her father is a descendant in the
male line of one of the oldest Norman houses, like a good many others
who lead obscure agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed
‘sons of the soil.’”

He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling exceedingly
unwell, he remained in his room pondering. The circumstances amid which
he had left Tess were such that though, while on the south of the
Equator and just in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the
easiest thing in the world to rush back into her arms the moment he
chose to forgive her, now that he had arrived it was not so easy as it
had seemed. She was passionate, and her present letter, showing that
her estimate of him had changed under his delay—too justly changed, he
sadly owned,—made him ask himself if it would be wise to confront her
unannounced in the presence of her parents. Supposing that her love had
indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of separation, a sudden
meeting might lead to bitter words.

Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess and her family
by sending a line to Marlott announcing his return, and his hope that
she was still living with them there, as he had arranged for her to do
when he left England. He despatched the inquiry that very day, and
before the week was out there came a short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield
which did not remove his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though
to his surprise it was not written from Marlott.

Sir,

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away from me at
present, and J am not sure when she will return, but J will let you
know as Soon as she do. J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where
she is temperly biding. J should say that me and my Family have
left Marlott for some Time.—

Yours,

J. Durbeyfield

It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least
apparently well that her mother’s stiff reticence as to her whereabouts
did not long distress him. They were all angry with him, evidently. He
would wait till Mrs Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess’s return,
which her letter implied to be soon. He deserved no more. His had been
a love “which alters when it alteration finds”. He had undergone some
strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in
the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne; he
had thought of the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to
be stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen; and he had
asked himself why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than
biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?

A day or two passed while he waited at his father’s house for the
promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a
little more strength. The strength showed signs of coming back, but
there was no sign of Joan’s letter. Then he hunted up the old letter
sent on to him in Brazil, which Tess had written from Flintcomb-Ash,
and re-read it. The sentences touched him now as much as when he had
first perused them.

...I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else!... I think I
must die if you do not come soon, or tell me to come to you... please,
please, not to be just—only a little kind to me.... If you would come,
I could die in your arms! I would be well content to do that if so be
you had forgiven me!... if you will send me one little line, and say,
I am coming soon, I will bide on, Angel—O, so cheerfully!... think
how it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—ever! Ah, if I could only
make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does
every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor
lonely one.... I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your
servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you,
and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.... I long for only
one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own
dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what threatens me!

Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and
severer regard of him, but would go and find her immediately. He asked
his father if she had applied for any money during his absence. His
father returned a negative, and then for the first time it occurred to
Angel that her pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered
privation. From his remarks his parents now gathered the real reason of
the separation; and their Christianity was such that, reprobates being
their especial care, the tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her
simplicity, even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited
by her sin.

Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey
he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand—the one
from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—

“Honour’d Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do
love you,” and signed, “From Two Well-Wishers.”