the sound of footsteps, as glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the stairs. “Oh, ’tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”
Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder of the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill, and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”
“I’ve something to tell ’ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?” She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane, went on with his recitative.
“Hush! Don’t ’ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my licends.”
“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs Durbeyfield.
“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”
“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ’tis well to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of d’Urberville.”
“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.
She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”
“There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield. “Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”
While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.
“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued Mrs Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”
“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”
“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away, and play on the stairs till father and mother be ready! … Well, Tess ought to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the lady—Tess would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman marrying her. In short, I know it.”
“How?”
“I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it brought out that very thing! … You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is as sumple as a duchess’.”
“What says the maid herself to going?”
“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and she won’t say nay to going.”
“Tess is queer.”
“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”
Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in store.
“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar meaning, and there was no reply.
The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were heard crossing the room below.
“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was Tess.
Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.
“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”
They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield, their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—
“I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”
“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”
“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your nater ’tis my belief you’ve disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens outright at one time.”
Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—“I am afraid father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so early.”
“I? I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield.
IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK BEFORE the family were all in bed, and two o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.
“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.
Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this information.
“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already. Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be thrown on our hands.”
Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller, perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee yesterday,”