Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 inconsistently, 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.”
“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 pretty 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.
XXVI
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 had lately caught up the fashion of the younger clergy round
about us for decorating the Communion-table—alter, 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.”
“O 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; but 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 north, whence one was to
return to his college, and the other to his curacy. 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.