doomed Isaac while they went up the hill together. His silent
self-generated regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which
his wife rendered audible.
They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never
been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with
agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated
him and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken
place. At first they had supposed it must be something of the nature
of a serious aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally
alluded to the intention of coming home to fetch her; from which
expressions they hoped the division might not owe its origin to
anything so hopelessly permanent as that. He had told them that she
was with her relatives, and in their doubts they had decided not to
intrude into a situation which they knew no way of bettering.
The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were gazing at this
time on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which
was bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent
towards the coast. His experiences of this strange land had been
sad. The severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after
his arrival had never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost
decided to relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as
the bare possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change
of view a secret from his parents.
The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country
in his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had
suffered, died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English
farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child
would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause
to dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the
babe therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and
again trudge on.
Angel's original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a
northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this
place in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English
agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape
from his past existence.
During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.
What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than
its pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism,
he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He
thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more
pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of
a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and
impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.
How, then, about Tess?
Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began
to oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He
could no longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say
that was in spirit to accept her now.
