It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might send for the parson.  The moment happened to be one at which her father’s sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze at Rolliver’s Inn.  No parson should come inside his door, he declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had become more necessary than ever to hide them.  He locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired also.  She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the night found that the baby was still worse.  It was obviously dying—­quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed.  The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.  She thought of the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the young in this Christian country.  The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.

The infant’s breathing grew more difficult, and the mother’s mental tension increased.  It was useless to devour the little thing with kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about the room.

“O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried.  “Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!”

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

“Ah! perhaps baby can be saved!  Perhaps it will be just the same!”

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have shone in the gloom surrounding her.  She lit a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room.  Pulling out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands together with fingers exactly vertical.  While the children, scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—­a child’s child—­so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its producer with the maternal title.  Tess then stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child.