She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room
was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came
to the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a
breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother's chamber.
In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a
curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than
a year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying
herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.
Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in
his chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually
bright. He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what
it was. "I'm thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this
part of England," he said, "asking them to subscribe to a fund to
maintain me. I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical,
and proper thing to do. They spend lots o' money in keeping up old
ruins, and finding the bones o' things, and such like; and living
remains must be more interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed
of me. Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what there
is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa'son
Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."
Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had
grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved
by her remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she
turned her attention to external things. It was now the season for
planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers
had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the
allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her
dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,--that last lapse of the improvident. At the earliest
moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few
days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's
persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot
which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the
village. She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where
she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.
Violent motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high,
dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the
day had ended. Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead
weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
favouring their combustion.