The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.
When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
observed the woman in the red petticoat.
"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"
"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
come along."
"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
it should have happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the
comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?" The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
as plain. I
t was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.
A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months. After
wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever
it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had
not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.