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.
The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here,
and I don't like to see the rooks and starlings in the
field, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to
see them with me. 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!--
Your faithful heartbroken
TESS
XLIX
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
