She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs

d'Urberville's room was no such onerous business when she had

regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous

airs that suited those songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory

time than when she practised in the garden was this whistling by the

cages each morning. Unrestrained by the young man's presence she

threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in

easeful grace to the attentive listeners.

Mrs d'Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy

damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment,

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where they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little

white spots on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at

the window where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual,

she thought she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was

not present, and turning round the girl had an impression that

the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of the

curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the

listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of

his presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that,

but never found anybody within them. Alec d'Urberville had evidently

thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.

X

Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own

code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and

about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the

choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had

also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation

on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and

smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would

enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief

was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could

result from savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.

The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday

night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two

or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next

morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the

curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the

once-independent inns.

For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But

under pressure from matrons not much older than herself--for a

field-man's wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage

was early here--Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience

of the journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected,

the hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her

monotonous attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again

and again. Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the

momentary threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her

some sly regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence,

though sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she

always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection

of their companionship homeward.




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