“You ought to have been more careful if you
didn’t mean to get him to make you his wife!”
“O mother, my mother!” cried the agonized
girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her
poor heart would break. “How could I be
expected to know? I was a child when I left this
house four months ago. Why didn’t you
tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t
you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against,
because they read novels that tell them of these tricks;
but I never had the chance o’ learning in that
way, and you did not help me!”
Her mother was subdued.
“I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and
what they might lead to, you would be hontish wi’
him and lose your chance,” she murmured, wiping
her eyes with her apron. “Well, we must
make the best of it, I suppose. ’Tis nater,
after all, and what do please God!”
The event of Tess Durbeyfield’s return from
the manor of her bogus kinsfolk was rumoured abroad,
if rumour be not too large a word for a space of a
square mile. In the afternoon several young girls
of Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances
of Tess, called to see her, arriving dressed in their
best starched and ironed, as became visitors to a
person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they
supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with
great curiosity. For the fact that it was this
said thirty-first cousin, Mr d’Urberville, who
had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not altogether
local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate
boundaries of Trantridge, lent Tess’s supposed
position, by its fearsomeness, a far higher fascination
that it would have exercised if unhazardous.
Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered
when her back was turned—
“How pretty she is; and how that best frock
do set her off! I believe it cost an immense
deal, and that it was a gift from him.”
Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from
the corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries.
If she had heard them, she might soon have set her
friends right on the matter. But her mother
heard, and Joan’s simple vanity, having been
denied the hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself
as well as it could upon the sensation of a dashing
flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified,
even though such a limited and evanescent triumph should
involve her daughter’s reputation; it might end
in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her responsiveness
to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay
to tea.
Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured
innuendoes, above all, their flashes and flickerings
of envy, revived Tess’s spirits also; and, as
the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness
left her face, she moved with something of her old
bounding step, and flushed in all her young beauty.
