Phase the Sixth: The Convert
50. CHAPTER L (continued)
Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till
she had grappled with pressing matters in hand, which
seemed little improved by her remittances. When indoor
necessities had been eased she turned her attention to
external things. It was now the season for planting
and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the
villagers had already received their spring tillage;
but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields
were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this
was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,----that last lapse of the improvident.
At the earliest moment she obtained what others she could
procure, and in a few days her father was well enough
to see to the garden, under Tess's persuasive efforts:
while she herself undertook the allotment-plot which
they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of
the village.
She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick
chamber, where she was not now required by reason of
her mother's improvement. Violent motion relieved
thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open
enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired
labour of the day had ended. Digging began usually at
six o'clock, and extended indefinitely into the dusk or
moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were
burning on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring
their combustion.
One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with
their neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote
flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots. As
soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the
couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up
the allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and
disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the
wind. When a fire glowed, banks of smoke, blown level
along the ground, would themselves become illuminated
to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which
was a wall by day and a light by night, could be
understood.
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