Both Uses of

ordeal
in
Tess of the d'Urbervilles

His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention, he judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal—her presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.†
Chpt 4

ordeal = very difficult or painful experience

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.†
Chpt 6 *

Definitions:

(1) (ordeal)
a very difficult or painful experience
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Much more rarely, ordeal can refer to a primitive method of determining a person's guilt or innocence by subjecting the accused person to dangerous or painful tests believed to be under divine control. Escape or survival was usually taken as a sign of innocence.