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.
The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve.
He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel; thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from her.
The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm.
Angel's companion was struck down with fever, and died by the week's end.
Clare waited a few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.
The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the philosophers.
His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.
His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood.
He had persistently elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in that civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem.
Surely then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state, which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at least open to correction when the result was due to treachery.
A remorse struck into him.
The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled in his memory, came back to him.
He had asked Izz if she loved him, and she had replied in the affirmative.
Did she love him more than Tess did?
No, she had replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do no more.
He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding.
How her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words as if they were a god's!
And during the terrible evening over the hearth, when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.
Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.
Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew them.
The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard of the particular instance.
But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over the ground before to-day.
Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it.
Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men.
And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.
The historic interest of her family-that masterful line of d'Urbervilles-whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his sentiments now.
Why had he not known the difference between the political value and the imaginative value of these things?
In the latter aspect her d'Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer, to the moralizer on declines and falls.
It was a fact that would soon be forgotten-that bit of distinction in poor Tess's blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere.
So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances.
In recalling her face again and again, he thought now that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which must have graced her grand-dames; and the vision sent that aura through his veins which he had formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of sickness.
Despite her not-inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows.
Was not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?
So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father; though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in reaching him.
Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would come in response to the entreaty was alternately great and small.
What lessened it was that the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not changed-could never change; and that, if her presence had not attenuated them, her absence could not.