Tess of the d'Urbervilles eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 557 pages of information about Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

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.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt herself at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances or her feelings.  He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire.  Thus her silence of docility was misinterpreted.  How much it really said if he had understood!—­that she adhered with literal exactness to orders which he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural fearlessness she asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in every respect the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the country, another man rode beside him.  Angel’s companion was also an Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part of the island.  They were both in a state of mental depression, and they spoke of home affairs.  Confidence begat confidence.  With that curious tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant lands, to entrust to strangers details of their lives which they would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man as they rode along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

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Tess of the d'Urbervilles from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.