If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to
you? I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will
not do. It cannot be that I shall yield one inch, yet I am
in terror as to what an accident might lead to, and I so
defenceless on account of my first error. I cannot say more
about this--it makes me too miserable. But if I break down
by falling into some fearful snare, my last state will be
worse than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me
come at once, or at once come to me!
I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your
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."