But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached
home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
taken ill since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable,
so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
nevertheless. The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been
baptized. Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls,
she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard
to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.
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.