第96章

When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to practise deception on his parents.He almost talked to her in his anger, as if she had been in the room.And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how great and good her husband was.But over them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations.With all his attempted independence of judgment this advanced and well meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings.No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency.Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains.In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

Chapter 40 At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil, notwithstanding the discouraging reports of some farm labourers who had emigrated thither and returned home within the twelve months.After breakfast Clare went into the little town to wind up such trifling matters as he was concerned with there, and to get from the local bank all the money he possessed.

On his way back he encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose walls she seemed to be a sort of emanation.She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her - an enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.

She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.

`Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,'

he replied.`But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of existence.

Perhaps a cloister would be preferable.'

`A cloister! O, Angel Clare!'

`Well?'

`Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman Catholicism.'

`And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation.Thou art in a parlous state, Angel Clare.'

`I glory in my Protestantism!' she said severely.

Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods in which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close to him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he could think of.His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for his welfare.

`Dear Mercy,'he said, `you must forgive me.I think I am going crazy!'

She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare re-entered the Vicarage.With the local banker he deposited the jewels till happier days should arise.He also paid into the bank thirty pounds - to be sent to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and wrote to her at her parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of what he had done.This amount, with the sum he had already placed in her hands - about fifty pounds - he hoped would be amply sufficient for her wants just at present, particularly as in an emergency she had been directed to apply to his father.

He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother suggested that he should do so.During the day he left the parsonage, for what he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.

As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or three small articles fetched away that they had left behind.It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had stretched its gloom over him.Yet when he had unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon him was that of their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.

The farmer and his wife were in the fields at the moment of his visit, and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time.Inwardly swollen with a renewal of sentiments that he had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs to her chamber, which had never been his.The bed was smooth as she had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving.The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed it.Having been there three or four weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and berries were wrinkled.

Angel took it down and crushed it into the grate.Standing there he for the first time doubted whether his course in this conjuncture had been a wise, much less a generous, one.But had he not been cruelly blinded?

In the incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed.`O Tess! If you had only told me sooner, I would have forgiven you! `he mourned.

Hearing a footstep below he rose and went to the top of the stairs.