To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time, Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and not Palestine; and his father’s grief was of that blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much less a half-truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after. But the kindness of his heart was such that he never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a smile which was as candidly sweet as a child’s.
Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the vicarage life, it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations—still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell—were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet. Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncon torted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.
On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.
After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, nonevan gelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre; such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eye-glass and string they wore a single eye-glass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies, and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio’s holy families were admired, they admired Correg gio’s holy families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.
If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church, Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither university men nor church-men; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.
They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.
As they walked along the hill-side Angel’s former feeling revived in him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw nor set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.
“I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,” Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother as he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity. “And, therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals. Farming, of course, means roughing it externally, but high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless.”
“Of course it may,” said Angel. “Was it not proved nineteen hundred years ago—if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals?”
“Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation—it may be fancy only—that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp. Hasn’t it struck you, Cuthbert?”
“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogma tist, had better leave mine alone and inquire what has become of yours.”
They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at which their father’s and mother’s morning work in the parish usually concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr. and Mrs. Clare; though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.
The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse dapes inemptae of the dairyman’s somewhat coarsely laden table. But neither of the old people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they somewhat in-consistently tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.
The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands was deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs. Crick’s black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled, as they did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did himself.
“Ah! You are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy,” observed Clare’s mother. “But I am sure you will not mind doing without them, as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I suggested to him that we should take Mrs. Crick’s kind present to the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great pleasure to them; so we did.”
“Of course,” said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.
“I found the mead so extremely alcoholic,” continued his mother, “that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet.” 161
“We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,” added his father.
“But what shall I tell the dairyman’s wife?” said Angel.
“The truth, of course,” said his father.
“I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly I return.”
“You cannot if we did not,” Mr. Clare answered lucidly.
“Ah—no, though that mead was a drop of pret
ty tipple.”
“A what?” said Cuthbert and Felix both.
“Oh—‘tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,” replied Angel, blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.
26
IT WAS NOT till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of their walking boots. When the service was over, they went out of the room with their mother, and Mr. Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale—either in England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that as he had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel himself unduly slighted.
“As far as worldly wealth goes,” continued his father, “you will no doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years.”
This considerateness on old Mr. Clare’s part led Angel onward to the other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming business, he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all matters—some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel put the question: “What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty, hard-working farmer?”
“A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and neighbour Dr. Chant—”
“But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys, and rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency and estimate the value of sheep and calves?”
“Yes; a farmer’s wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable.” Mr. Clare the elder had plainly never thought of these points before. “I was going to add,” he said, “that for a pure and saintly woman you will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more to your mother’s mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour Chant’s daughter has lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table—altar, as I was shocked to hear her call it one day—with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish outbreak, which I am sure will not be permanent.”
“Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, Father, don’t you think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant but one who, in place of that lady’s ecclesiastical accomplishments, understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself would suit me infinitely better?”
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer’s wife’s duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father’s feelings and to advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that Fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist, and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church school of his father, but she would probably be open to conviction on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and in personal appearance exceptionally beautiful.
“Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into—a lady, in short?” asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study during the conversation.
“She is not what in common parlance is called a lady,” said Angel unflinchingly, “for she is a cottager’s daughter, as I am proud to say. But she is a lady, nevertheless—in feeling and nature.”
“Mercy Chant is of a very good family.”
“Pooh! What’s the advantage of that, Mother?” said Angel quickly. “How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have and shall have to do?”
“Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,” returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
“As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the life I am going to lead? While as to her reading, I can take that in hand. She’ll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her. She’s brim full of poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper-poets only write.... And she is an unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus, and species you desire to propagate.”
“Oh, Angel, you are mocking!”
“Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend church almost every Sunday morning and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality and feel that I may do worse than choose her.” Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr. and Mrs. Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that she at least was sound in her views, especially as the conjunction of the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome. For though legally at liberty to do as he chose and though their daughter-in-law’s qualifications could make no practical difference to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them, he wished for affection’s sake not to wound their sentiment in the most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess’s life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess—her soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple, formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It was probable that in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been extended from the cultivated middle class into the rural community, had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social stratum than between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the nor
th, whence one was to return to his college and the other to his cu racy. Angel might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward member of the party, for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him on his own mare a little way along the road. Having fairly well advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father’s account of his parish difficulties and the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.
“Pernicious!” said Mr. Clare with genial scorn, and he proceeded to recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea. He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart squire named d‘Urberville, living some forty miles off in the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
“Not one of the ancient d‘Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?” asked his son. “That curiously historic, worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?”