“Indeed, then, I shall not fight!” said the latter majestically; “and if I had know you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down as to come with such a whorage as this is!”

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to d’Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter against the common enemy.  Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed.  Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed.  She no longer minded the loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away from the whole crew as soon as possible.  She knew well enough that the better among them would repent of their passion next day.  They were all now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the road, and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.

“What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?” he asked.

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not require any.  Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate.  He bent over towards her.  “Jump up behind me,” he whispered, “and we’ll get shot of the screaming cats in a jiffy!”

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis.  At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise.  But coming as the invitation did at the particular juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him.  The pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious revellers became aware of what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—­all with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was diminishing into silence on the road.

“What be ye looking at?” asked a man who had not observed the incident.

“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.

“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.