She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs
d'Urberville's room was no such onerous business when she had
regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous
airs that suited those songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory
time than when she practised in the garden was this whistling by the
cages each morning. Unrestrained by the young man's presence she
threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in
easeful grace to the attentive listeners.
Mrs d'Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy
damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment,
where they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little
white spots on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at
the window where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual,
she thought she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was
not present, and turning round the girl had an impression that
the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of the
curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the
listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of
his presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that,
but never found anybody within them. Alec d'Urberville had evidently
thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.
X
Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own
code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and
about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the
choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had
also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation
on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and
smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would
enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief
was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could
result from savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.
The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday
night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two
or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next
morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the
curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the
once-independent inns.
For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But
under pressure from matrons not much older than herself--for a
field-man's wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage
was early here--Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience
of the journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected,
the hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her
monotonous attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again
and again. Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the
momentary threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her
some sly regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence,
though sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she
always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection
of their companionship homeward.