"O you little fool--you little fool!" burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,
splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. "My good God! that ever
I should ha' lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!"
Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having
relaxed at last. "I know it--I know--I know!" she gasped through her sobs. "But,
O my mother, I could not help it! He was so good--and I felt
the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had happened!
If--if--it were to be done again--I should do the same. I could
not--I dared not--so sin--against him!" "But you sinned enough to marry him first!"
"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get
rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if
you knew--if you could only half know how I loved him--how anxious I
was to have him--and how wrung I was between caring so much for him
and my wish to be fair to him!"
Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a
helpless thing, into a chair. "Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why
children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than
other people's--not to know better than to blab such a thing as
that, when he couldn't ha' found it out till too late!" Here Mrs
Durbeyfield began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to
be pitied. "What your father will say I don't know," she continued;
"for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's and The
Pure Drop every day since, and about his family getting back to their
rightful position through you--poor silly man!--and now you've made
this mess of it! The Lord-a-Lord!" As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard
approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately,
and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him
herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present. After her first
burst of disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had
taken Tess's original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday
or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them
irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be
borne with; not a lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for
two younger children. There was no place here for her now.