"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said. "But we have had a
difference--" "Angel--is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"
With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of
trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her
son. "She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to
eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.
"Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in
nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which
may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,
disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition."
Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the
secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this
marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the
disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his
career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on
account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the
candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on
sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and
a failure. When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with
his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to
practise deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his
anger, as if she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice,
plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch
of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air
the warmth of her breath.
This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how
great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a
deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the
shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of
judgement this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product
of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and
conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No
prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself,
that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the
praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same
dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by
achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand
suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without
shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their
distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering
what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the
defective can be more than the entire.