'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 you 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
