Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D’Urbervilles

‘Then will you give him a Christian burial?’ she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby’s illness, he had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess’s father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its irregular administration.

‘Ah—that’s another matter,’ he said.

‘Another matter—why?’ asked Tess, rather warmly.

‘Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I must not—for certain reasons.’

‘Just for once, sir!’

‘Really I must not.’

‘O sir!’ She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

‘Then I don’t like you!’ she burst out, ‘and I’ll never come to your church no more!’

‘Don’t talk so rashly.’

‘Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t?…Will it be just the same? Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself—poor me!’

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman’s power to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—

‘It will be just the same.’

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words ‘Keelwell’s Marmalade’? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.

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