"O you little fool--you little fool!" burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,

splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. "My good God! that ever

I should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"

Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having

relaxed at last. "I know it--I know--I know!" she gasped through her sobs. "But,

O my 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

Advertisement..

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 Rolliver'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.




Most Popular