Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day.  She guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not divine that it solely concerned herself.  Dismissing this, however, she busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “’Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones being put to bed.  There was an interval of four years and more between Tess and the next of the family, the two who had filled the gap having died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude when she was alone with her juniors.  Next in juvenility to Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the baby, who had just completed his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—­entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence.  If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—­six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield.  Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan.”

It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared.  Tess looked out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott.  The village was shutting its eyes.  Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere:  she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch.  Tess began to perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this late hour celebrating his ancient blood.

“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—­you bain’t afraid?—­and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’ father and mother.”

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the night swallowed him up.  Half an hour passed yet again; neither man, woman, nor child returned.  Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

“I must go myself,” she said.

’Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.