Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays
38. CHAPTER XXXVIII (continued)
As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was
heard approaching at that moment. He did not, however,
enter immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she
would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping
out of sight for the present. After her first burst of
disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had
taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken
a wet holiday or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing
which had come upon them irrespective of desert or
folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with;
not a lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the
beds had been shifted, and new arrangements made. Her
old bed had been adapted for two younger children.
There was no place here for her now.
The room below being unceiled she could hear most of
what went on there. Presently her father entered,
apparently carrying in a live hen. He was a
foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his
second horse, and he travelled with his basket on his
arm. The hen had been carried about this morning as it
was often carried, to show people that he was in his
work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the
table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.
"We've just had up a story about----" Durbeyfield
began, and thereupon related in detail to his wife a
discussion which had arisen at the inn about the
clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having
married into a clerical family. "They was formerly
styled 'sir', like my own ancestry," he said, "though
nowadays their true style, strictly speaking, is
'clerk' only." As Tess had wished that no great
publicity should be given to the event, he had
mentioned no particulars. He hoped she would remove
that prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple
should take Tess's own name, d'Urberville, as
uncorrupted. It was better than her husbands's. He
asked if any letter had come from her that day.
Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had
come, but Tess unfortunately had come herself.
When at length the collapse was explained to him a
sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield,
overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.
Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy
sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the
minds of others.
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