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.

One fine day Tess and ’Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots.  As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the wind.  When a fire glowed, banks of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud”, which was a wall by day and a light by night, could be understood.