He withdrew it, shaking his head.
“Then I don’t like you!” she burst
out, “and I’ll never come to your church
no more!”
“Don’t talk so rashly.”
“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if
you don’t? ... Will it be just the same?
Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to
sinner, but as you yourself to me myself—poor
me!”
How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict
notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects
it is beyond a layman’s power to tell, though
not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this
case also—
“It will be just the same.”
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under
an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard
that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost
of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in
that shabby corner of God’s allotment where
He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized
infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others
of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite
of the untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely
made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string,
and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up
at the head of the grave one evening when she could
enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at
the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little
jar of water to keep them alive. What matter
was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere
observation noted the words “Keelwell’s
Marmalade”? The eye of maternal affection
did not see them in its vision of higher things.
“By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we
find out a short way by a long wandering.”
Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further
travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
Tess Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating
kind. At last she had learned what to do; but
who would now accept her doing?
If before going to the d’Urbervilles’
she had vigorously moved under the guidance of sundry
gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world
in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed
on. But it had not been in Tess’s power—nor
is it in anybody’s power—to feel
the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible
to profit by them. She—and how many
more—might have ironically said to God
with Saint Augustine: “Thou hast counselled
a better course than Thou hast permitted.”
She remained at her father’s house during the
winter months, plucking fowls, or cramming turkeys
and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and brothers
out of some finery which d’Urberville had given
her, and she had put by with contempt. Apply
to him she would not. But she would often clasp
her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed
to be working hard.
