第93章

`I know it - I know - I know!' she gasped through her sobs.`But, Omy mother, I could not help it! He was so good - and I felt the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If - if - it were to be done again - I should do the same.I could not - I dared not - so sin -against him!'

`But you sinned enough to marry him first!'

`Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it.And O, if you knew - if you could only half know how I loved him how anxious I was to have him - and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my wish to be fair to him!'

Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank a helpless thing into a chair.

`Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than other people's - not to know better than to blab such a thing as that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!' Here Mrs Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied.`What your father will say I don't know,' she continued: `for he's been talking about the wedding up at Roliver's and The Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their rightful position through you - poor silly man! -and now you've made this mess of it! The Lord-a-Lord!'

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard approaching at that moment.He did not however, enter immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present.After her first burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a lesson.

Tess retreated upstairs, and beheld casually that the beds had been shifted, and new arrangements made.Her old bed had been adapted for two younger children.There was no place here for her now.

The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on there.

Presently her father entered, apparently carrying a live hen.He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm.The hen had been carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show people that he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.

`We've just had up a story about--' Durbeyfield began, and thereupon related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married into a clerical family.`They was formerly styled "sir", like my own ancestry,'

he said, `though nowadays their true style, strictly speaking, is "clerk"only.' As Tess had wished that no great publicity should be given to the event, he had mentioned no particulars.He hoped she would remove that prohibition soon.He proposed that the couple should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville, as uncorrupted.It was better than her husband's.He asked if any letter had come from her that day.

Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess unfortunately had come herself.

When at length the collapse was explained to him a sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.

Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of others.

`To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!' said Sir John.`And I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history.And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop will say to me! How they'll squint and glane, and say, "This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!"I feel this is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and all - I can bear it no longer!....But she can make him keep her if he's married her?'

`Why, yes.But she won't think o' doing that.'

`D'ye think he really have married her? - or is it like the first--'

Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.

The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could have done.How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home!

A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm.In her craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them under the impression that she was setting out to join him.Still further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past.With this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell;and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for some time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed, believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could not live apart from each other.