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Far From the Madding Crowd
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Far From The Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
February, 1994 [Etext #107]
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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
by Thomas Hardy
Preface
In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded
that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd"
as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that
I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages
of early English history, and give it a fictitious
significance as the existing name of the district once
included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I
projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed
to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend
unity to their scene. Finding that the area of a single
country did not afford a canvas large enough for this
purpose, and that there were objections to an invented name,
I disinterred the old one. The press and the public were
kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly
joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex
population living under Queen Victoria; -- a modern Wessex
of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines,
union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read
and write, and National school children. But I believe I am
correct in stating that, until the existence of this
contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story,
in 1874, it had never been heard of, and that the
expression, "a Wessex peasant" or "a Wessex custom" would
theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in
date than the Norman Conquest.
I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a
modern use would extend outside the chapters of my own
chronicles. But the name was soon taken up elsewhere as a
local designation. The first to do so was the now defunct
Examiner, which, in the impression bearing date July 15,
1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex Labourer,"
the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming
during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the
south-west counties, and his presentation in these stories.
Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to
the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-
country, has become more and more popular as a practical
definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees,
solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to,
take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask
all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to forget this,
and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any
inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of this
and the companion volumes in which they were first
discovered.
Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes
of the present story of the series are for the most part
laid, would perhaps be hardly discernible by the explorer,
without help, in any existing place nowadays; though at the
time, comparatively recent, at which the tale was written, a
sufficient reality to meet the descriptions, both of
backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily
enough. The church remains, by great good fortune,
unrestored and intact, and a few of the old houses; but the
ancient malt-house, which was formerly so characteristic of
the parish, has been pulled down these twenty years; also
most of the thatched and dormered cottages that were once
lifeholds. The game of prisoner's base, which not so long
ago seemed to enjoy a perennial vitality in front of the
worn-out stocks, may, so far as I can say, be entirely
unknown to the rising generation of schoolboys there. The
practice of divination by Bible and key, the regarding of
valentines as things of serious import, the shearing-supper,
and the harvest-home, have, too, nearly disappeared in the
wake of the old houses; and with them have gone, it is said,
much of that love of fuddling to which the village at one
time was notoriously prone. The change at the root of this
has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary
cottagers, who carried on the local traditions and humours,
by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which
has led to a break of continuity in local history, more
fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend,
folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric
individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of
existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot
by generation after generation.
T.H.
February 1895
CHAPTER I
DESCRIPTION OF FARMER OAK -- AN INCIDENT
WHEN Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till
they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his
eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared
round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in
a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a
young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and
general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty
views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best
clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself
to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean
neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the
parish and the drunken section, -- that is, he went to
church, but yawned privately by the time the con-gegation
reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be
for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.
Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public
opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he
was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he
was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man
whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays,
Oak's appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his
own -- the mental picture formed by his neighbours in
imagining him being always dressed in that way. He wore a
low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight
jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat
like Dr. Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased in
ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large,
affording to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that
any wearer might stand in a river all day long and know
nothing of damp -- their maker being a conscientious man who
endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by
unstinted dimension and solidity.
Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be
called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch
as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size.
This instrument being several years older than Oak's
grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or
not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally
slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes
were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of
the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his
watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any
evil consequences from the other two defects by constant
comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and
by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours'
windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-
faced timekeepers within. It may be mentioned that Oak's
fob being difficult of access, by reason of its somewhat
high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which also
lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was
as a necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side,
compressing the mouth and face to a mere mass of ruddy flesh
on account of the exertion required, and drawing up the
watch by its chain, like a bucket from a well.
But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across
one of his fields on a certain December morning -- sunny and
exceedingly mild -- might have regarded Gabriel Oak in other
aspects than these. In his face one might notice that many
of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on to manhood:
there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of
the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient
to make his presence imposing, had they been exhibited with
due consideration. But there is a way some men have, rural
and urban alike, for which the mind is more responsible than
flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing their dimensions
by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet modesty
that would have become a vestal which seemed continually to
impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world's
room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible
bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders. This may
be said to be a defect in an individual if he depends for
his valuation more upon his appearance than upon his
capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.
He had just reached the time of life at which "young" is
ceasing to be the prefix of "man" in speaking of one.
He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his
intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: he had
passed the time during which the influence of youth
indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse,
and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become
united again, in the character of prejudice, by the
influence of a wife and family. In short, he was
twenty-eight, and a bachelor.
The field he was in this morning sloped to a ridge called
Norcombe Hill. Through a spur of this hill ran the highway
between Emminster and Chalk-Newton. Casually glancing over
the hedge, Oak saw coming down the incline before him an
ornamental spring waggon, painted yellow and gaily marked,
drawn by two horses, a waggoner walking alongside bearing a
whip perpendicularly. The waggon was laden with household
goods and window plants, and on the apex of the whole sat a
woman, young and attractive. Gabriel had not beheld the
sight for more than half a minute, when the vehicle was
brought to a standstill just beneath his eyes.
"The tailboard of the waggon is gone, Miss," said the
waggoner.
"Then I heard it fall," said the girl, in a soft, though not
particularly low voice. "I heard a noise I could not
account for when we were coming up the hill."
"I'll run back."
"Do," she answered.
The sensible horses stood -- perfectly still, and the
waggoner's steps sank fainter and fainter in the distance.
The girl on the summit of the load sat motionless,
surrounded by tables and chairs with their legs upwards,
backed by an oak settle, and ornamented in front by pots of
geraniums, myrtles, and cactuses, together with a caged
canary -- all probably from the windows of the house just
vacated. There was also a cat in a willow basket, from the
partly-opened lid of which she gazed with half-closed eyes,
and affectionately-surveyed the small birds around.
The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place,
and the only sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of
the canary up and down the perches of its prison. Then she
looked attentively downwards. It was not at the bird, nor
at the cat; it was at an oblong package tied in paper, and
lying between them. She turned her head to learn if the
waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight; and her eyes
crept back to the package, her thoughts seeming to run upon
what was inside it. At length she drew the article into her
lap, and untied the paper covering; a small swing looking-
glass was disclosed, in which she proceeded to survey
herself attentively. She parted her lips and smiled.
It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet
glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre
upon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums,
and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at
such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of
horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal
charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance
in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived
farmer who were alone its spectators, -- whether the smile
began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art,
-- nobody knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She
blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed
the more.
The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of
such an act -- from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time
of travelling out of doors -- lent to the idle deed a
novelty it did not intrinsically possess. The picture was a
delicate one. Woman's prescriptive infirmity had stalked
into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the freshness of
an originality. A cynical inference was irresistible by
Gabriel Oak as he regarded the scene, generous though he
fain would have been. There was no necessity whatever for
her looking in the glass. She did not adjust her hat, or
pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one thing
to signify that any such intention had been her motive in
taking up the glass. She simply observed herself as a fair
product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming
to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men
would play a part -- vistas of probable triumphs -- the
smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined
as lost and won. Still, this was but conjecture, and the
whole series of actions was so idly put forth as to make it
rash to assert that intention had any part in them at all.
The waggoner's steps were heard returning. She put the
glass in the paper, and the whole again into its place.
When the waggon had passed on, Gabriel withdrew from his
point of espial, and descending into the road, followed the
vehicle to the turnpike-gate some way beyond the bottom of
the hill, where the object of his contemplation now halted
for the payment of toll. About twenty steps still remained
between him and the gate, when he heard a dispute. It was a
difference concerning twopence between the persons with the
waggon and the man at the toll-bar.
"Mis'ess's niece is upon the top of the things, and she says
that's enough that I've offered ye, you great miser, and she
won't pay any more." These were the waggoner's words.
"Very well; then mis'ess's niece can't pass," said the
turnpike-keeper, closing the gate.
Oak looked from one to the other of the disputants, and fell
into a reverie. There was something in the tone of twopence
remarkably insignificant. Threepence had a definite value
as money -- it was an appreciable infringement on a day's
wages, and, as such, a higgling matter; but twopence --
"Here," he said, stepping forward and handing twopence to
the gatekeeper; "let the young woman pass." He looked up at
her then; she heard his words, and looked down.
Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly
to the middle line between the beauty of St. John and the
ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of
the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be
selected and called worthy either of distinction or
notoriety. The red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden seemed
to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and
told her man to drive on. She might have looked her thanks
to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them;
more probably she felt none, for in gaining her a passage he
had lost her her point, and we know how women take a favour
of that kind.
The gatekeeper surveyed the retreating vehicle. "That's a
handsome maid," he said to Oak.
"But she has her faults," said Gabriel.
"True, farmer."
"And the greatest of them is -- well, what it is always."
"Beating people down? ay, 'tis so."
"O no."
"What, then?"
Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller's
indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her
performance over the hedge, and said, "Vanity."
CHAPTER II
NIGHT -- THE FLOCK -- AN INTERIOR -- ANOTHER INTERIOR
IT was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas's, the
shortest day in the year. A desolating wind wandered from
the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow
waggon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days
earlier.
Norcombe Hill -- not far from lonely Toller-Down -- was one
of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the
presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly
as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity
of chalk and soil -- an ordinary specimen of those smoothly-
outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain
undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander
heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.
The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and
decaying plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a
line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the
sky, like a mane. To-night these trees sheltered the
southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood
and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or
gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry
leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes,
a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and
sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of
the latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained
till this very mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them
and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.
Between this half-wooded half naked hill, and the vague
still horizon that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a
mysterious sheet of fathomless shade -- the sounds from
which suggested that what it concealed bore some reduced
resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or
less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes
of differing powers, and almost of differing natures -- one
rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly,
another brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive
act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the
trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or
chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a
cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then
caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how
the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard
no more.
The sky was clear -- remarkably clear -- and the twinkling
of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed
by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the
wind's eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it
outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle with
the meridian. A difference of colour in the stars --
oftener read of than seen in England -- was really
perceptible here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius
pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called
Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a
fiery red.
To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight
such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a
palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the
panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is
perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better
outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or
by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression
of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion
is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that
gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small
hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense
of difference from the mass of civilised mankind, who are
dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this
time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through
the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to
get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of
such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in
this place up against the sky. They had a clearness which
was to be found nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which
was to be found nowhere in nature. They were the notes of
Farmer Oak's flute.
The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it
seemed muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed
in power to spread high or wide. It came from the direction
of a small dark object under the plantation hedge -- a
shepherd's hut -- now presenting an outline to which an
uninitiated person might have been puzzled to attach either
meaning or use.
The image as a whole was that of a small Noah's Ark on a
small Ararat, allowing the traditionary outlines and general
form of the Ark which are followed by toy-makers -- and by
these means are established in men's imaginations among
their firmest, because earliest impressions -- to pass as
an approximate pattern. The hut stood on little wheels,
which raised its floor about a foot from the ground. Such
shepherds' huts are dragged into the fields when the lambing
season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced
nightly attendance.
It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel
"Farmer" Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he
had been enabled by sustained efforts of industry and
chronic good spirits to lease the small sheep-farm of which
Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock it with two hundred
sheep. Previously he had been a bailiff for a short time,
and earlier still a shepherd only, having from his childhood
assisted his father in tending the flocks of large
proprietors, till old Gabriel sank to rest.
This venture, unaided and alone, into the paths of farming
as master and not as man, with an advance of sheep not yet
paid for, was a critical juncture with Gabriel Oak, and he
recognised his position clearly. The first movement in his
new progress was the lambing of his ewes, and sheep having
been his speciality from his youth, he wisely refrained from
deputing the task of tending them at this season to a
hireling or a novice.
The wind continued to beat about the corners of the hut, but
the flute-playing ceased. A rectangular space of light
appeared in the side of the hut, and in the opening the
outline of Farmer Oak's figure. He carried a lantern in his
hand, and closing the door behind him, came forward and
busied himself about this nook of the field for nearly
twenty minutes, the lantern light appearing and disappearing
here and there, and brightening him or darkening him as he
stood before or behind it.
Oak's motions, though they had a quiet-energy, were slow,
and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation.
Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied
that his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had
elements of grace, Yet, although if occasion demanded he
could do or think a thing with as mercurial a dash as can
the men of towns who are more to the manner born, his
special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was
static, owing little or nothing to momentum as a rule.
A close examination of the ground hereabout, even by the wan
starlight only, revealed how a portion of what would have
been casually called a wild slope had been appropriated by
Farmer Oak for his great purpose this winter. Detached
hurdles thatched with straw were stuck into the ground at
various scattered points, amid and under which the whitish
forms of his meek ewes moved and rustled. The ring of the
sheep-bell, which had been silent during his absence,
recommenced, in tones that had more mellowness than
clearness, owing to an increasing growth of surrounding
wool. This continued till Oak withdrew again from the
flock. He returned to the hut, bringing in his arms a new-
born lamb, consisting of four legs large enough for a full-
grown sheep, united by a seemingly inconsiderable membrane
about half the substance of the legs collectively, which
constituted the animal's entire body just at present.
The little speck of life he placed on a wisp of hay before
the small stove, where a can of milk was simmering. Oak
extinguished the lantern by blowing into it and then
pinching the snuff, the cot being lighted by a candle
suspended by a twisted wire. A rather hard couch, formed of
a few corn sacks thrown carelessly down, covered half the
floor of this little habitation, and here the young man
stretched himself along, loosened his woollen cravat, and
closed his eyes. In about the time a person unaccustomed to
bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie,
Farmer Oak was asleep.
The inside of the hut, as it now presented itself, was cosy
and alluring, and the scarlet handful of fire in addition to
the candle, reflecting its own genial colour upon whatever
it could reach, flung associations of enjoyment even over
utensils and tools. In the corner stood the sheep-crook,
and along a shelf at one side were ranged bottles and
canisters of the simple preparations pertaining to ovine
surgery and physic; spirits of wine, turpentine, tar,
magnesia, ginger, and castor-oil being the chief. On a
triangular shelf across the corner stood bread, bacon,
cheese, and a cup for ale or cider, which was supplied from
a flagon beneath. Beside the provisions lay the flute,
whose notes had lately been called forth by the lonely
watcher to beguile a tedious hour. The house was ventilated
by two round holes, like the lights of a ship's cabin, with
wood slides.
The lamb, revived by the warmth began to bleat, and the
sound entered Gabriel's ears and brain with an instant
meaning, as expected sounds will. Passing from the
profoundest sleep to the most alert wakefulness with the
same ease that had accompanied the reverse operation, he
looked at his watch, found that the hour-hand had shifted
again, put on his hat, took the lamb in his arms, and
carried it into the darkness. After placing the little
creature with its mother, he stood and carefully examined
the sky, to ascertain the time of night from the altitudes
of the stars.
The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless
Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between
them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt
more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of
the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine
were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of
Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away
through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended
amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood
daintily poised on the uppermost boughs.
"One o'clock," said Gabriel.
Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there
was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after
looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it
in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively
beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the
speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the
complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and
sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and
joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on
the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save
himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny
side.
Occupied thus, with eyes stretched afar, Oak gradually
perceived that what he had previously taken to be a star low
down behind the outskirts of the plantation was in reality
no such thing. It was an artificial light, almost close at
hand.
To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is
desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case
more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some
mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory,
analogy, testimony, probability, induction -- every kind of
evidence in the logician's list -- have united to persuade
consciousness that it is quite in isolation.
Farmer Oak went towards the plantation and pushed through
its lower boughs to the windy side. A dim mass under the
slope reminded him that a shed occupied a place here, the
site being a cutting into the slope of the hill, so that at
its back part the roof was almost level with the ground. In
front it was formed of board nailed to posts and covered
with tar as a preservative. Through crevices in the roof
and side spread streaks and dots of light, a combination of
which made the radiance that had attracted him. Oak stepped
up behind, where,leaning down upon the roof and putting his
eye close to a hole, he could see into the interior clearly.
The place contained two women and two cows. By the side of
the latter a steaming bran-mash stood in a bucket. One of
the women was past middle age. Her companion was apparently
young and graceful; he could form no decided opinion upon
her looks, her position being almost beneath his eye, so
that he saw her in a bird's-eye view, as Milton's Satan
first saw Paradise. She wore no bonnet or hat, but had
enveloped herself in a large cloak, which was carelessly
flung over her head as a covering.
"There, now we'll go home," said the elder of the two,
resting her knuckles upon her hips, and looking at their
goings-on as a whole. "I do hope Daisy will fetch round
again now. I have never been more frightened in my life,
but I don't mind breaking my rest if she recovers."
The young woman, whose eyelids were apparently inclined to
fall together on the smallest provocation of silence, yawned
without parting her lips to any inconvenient extent,
whereupon Gabriel caught the infection and slightly yawned
in sympathy.
"I wish we were rich enough to pay a man to do these
things," she said.
"As we are not, we must do them ourselves," said the other;
"for you must help me if you stay."
"Well, my hat is gone, however," continued the younger.
"It went over the hedge, I think. The idea of such a slight
wind catching it."
The cow standing erect was of the Devon breed, and was
encased in a tight warm hide of rich Indian red, as
absolutely uniform from eyes to tail as if the animal had
been dipped in a dye of that colour, her long back being
mathematically level. The other was spotted, grey and
white. Beside her Oak now noticed a little calf about a day
old, looking idiotically at the two women, which showed that
it had not long been accustomed to the phenomenon of
eyesight, and often turning to the lantern, which it
apparently mistook for the moon, inherited instinct having
as yet had little time for correction by experience.
Between the sheep and the cows Lucina had been busy on
Norcombe Hill lately.
"I think we had better send for some oatmeal," said the
elder woman; "there's no more bran."
"Yes, aunt; and I'll ride over for it as soon as it is
light."
"But there's no side-saddle."
"I can ride on the other: trust me."
Oak, upon hearing these remarks, became more curious to
observe her features, but this prospect being denied him by
the hooding effect of the cloak, and by his aerial position,
he felt himself drawing upon his fancy for their details.
In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour
and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes
bring in. Had Gabriel been able from the first to get a
distinct view of her countenance, his estimate of it as very
handsome or slightly so would have been as his soul required
a divinity at the moment or was ready supplied with one.
Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form
to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover
affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her a
beauty.
By one of those whimsical coincidences in which Nature, like
a busy mother, seems to spare a moment from her unremitting
labours to turn and make her children smile, the girl now
dropped the cloak, and forth tumbled ropes of black hair
over a red jacket. Oak knew her instantly as the heroine of
the yellow waggon, myrtles, and looking-glass: prosily, as
the woman who owed him twopence.
They placed the calf beside its mother again, took up the
lantern, and went out, the light sinking down the hill till
it was no more than a nebula. Gabriel Oak returned to his
flock.
CHAPTER III
A GIRL ON HORSEBACK -- CONVERSATION
THE sluggish day began to break. Even its position
terrestrially is one of the elements of a new interest, and
for no particular reason save that the incident of the night
had occurred there Oak went again into the plantation.
Lingering and musing here, he heard the steps of a horse at
the foot of the hill, and soon there appeared in view an
auburn pony with a girl on its back, ascending by the path
leading past the cattle-shed. She was the young woman of
the night before. Gabriel instantly thought of the hat she
had mentioned as having lost in the wind; possibly she had
come to look for it. He hastily scanned the ditch and after
walking about ten yards along it found the hat among the
leaves. Gabriel took it in his hand and returned to his
hut. Here he ensconced himself, and peeped through the
loophole in the direction of the rider's approach.
She came up and looked around -- then on the other side of
the hedge. Gabriel was about to advance and restore the
missing article when an unexpected performance induced him
to suspend the action for the present. The path, after
passing the cowshed, bisected the plantation. It was not a
bridle-path -- merely a pedestrian's track, and the boughs
spread horizontally at a height not greater than seven feet
above the ground, which made it impossible to ride erect
beneath them. The girl, who wore no riding-habit, looked
around for a moment, as if to assure herself that all
humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards
flat upon the pony's back, her head over its tail, her feet
against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky. The
rapidity of her glide into this position was that of a
kingfisher -- its noiselessness that of a hawk. Gabriel's
eyes had scarcely been able to follow her. The tall lank
pony seemed used to such doings, and ambled along
unconcerned. Thus she passed under the level boughs.
The performer seemed quite at home anywhere between a
horse's head and its tail, and the necessity for this
abnormal attitude having ceased with the passage of the
plantation, she began to adopt another, even more obviously
convenient than the first. She had no side-saddle, and it
was very apparent that a firm seat upon the smooth leather
beneath her was unattainable sideways. Springing to her
accustomed perpendicular like a bowed sapling, and
satisfying herself that nobody was in sight, she seated
herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly
expected of the woman, and trotted off in the direction of
Tewnell Mill.
Oak was amused, perhaps a little astonished, and hanging up
the hat in his hut, went again among his ewes. An hour
passed, the girl returned, properly seated now, with a bag
of bran in front of her. On nearing the cattle-shed she was
met by a boy bringing a milking-pail, who held the reins of
the pony whilst she slid off. The boy led away the horse,
leaving the pail with the young woman.
Soon soft spirts alternating with loud spirts came in
regular succession from within the shed, the obvious sounds
of a person milking a cow. Gabriel took the lost hat in his
hand, and waited beside the path she would follow in leaving
the hill.
She came, the pail in one hand, hanging against her knee.
The left arm was extended as a balance, enough of it being
shown bare to make Oak wish that the event had happened in
the summer, when the whole would have been revealed. There
was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she
seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could
not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed
in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon
the whole, true. Like exceptional emphasis in the tone of a
genius, that which would have made mediocrity ridiculous was
an addition to recognised power. It was with some surprise
that she saw Gabriel's face rising like the moon behind the
hedge.
The adjustment of the farmer's hazy conceptions of her
charms to the portrait of herself she now presented him with
was less a diminution than a difference. The starting-point
selected by the judgment was her height. She seemed tall,
but the pail was a small one, and the hedge diminutive;
hence, making allowance for error by comparison with these,
she could have been not above the height to be chosen by
women as best. All features of consequence were severe and
regular. It may have been observed by persons who go about
the shires with eyes for beauty, that in Englishwoman a
classically-formed face is seldom found to be united with a
figure of the same pattern, the highly-finished features
being generally too large for the remainder of the frame;
that a graceful and proportionate figure of eight heads
usually goes off into random facial curves. Without
throwing a Nymphean tissue over a milkmaid, let it be said
that here criticism checked itself as out of place, and
looked at her proportions with a long consciousness of
pleasure. From the contours of her figure in its upper
part, she must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders; but
since her infancy nobody had ever seen them. Had she been
put into a low dress she would have run and thrust her head
into a bush. Yet she was not a shy girl by any means; it
was merely her instinct to draw the line dividing the seen
from the unseen higher than they do it in towns.
That the girl's thoughts hovered about her face and form as
soon as she caught Oak's eyes conning the same page was
natural, and almost certain. The self-consciousness shown
would have been vanity if a little more pronounced, dignity
if a little less. Rays of male vision seem to have a
tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; she
brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been
irritating its pink surface by actual touch, and the free
air of her previous movements was reduced at the same time
to a chastened phase of itself. Yet it was the man who
blushed, the maid not at all.
"I found a hat," said Oak.
"It is mine," said she, and, from a sense of proportion,
kept down to a small smile an inclination to laugh
distinctly: "it flew away last night."
"One o'clock this morning?"
"Well -- it was." She was surprised. "How did you know?"
she said.
"I was here."
"You are Farmer Oak, are you not?"
"That or thereabouts. I'm lately come to this place."
"A large farm?" she inquired, casting her eyes round, and
swinging back her hair, which was black in the shaded
hollows of its mass; but it being now an hour past sunrise the
rays touched its prominent curves with a colour of their own.
"No; not large. About a hundred." (In speaking of farms
the word "acres" is omitted by the natives, by analogy to
such old expressions as "a stag of ten.")
"I wanted my hat this morning." she went on. "I had to ride
to Tewnell Mill."
"Yes you had."
"How do you know?"
"I saw you."
"Where?" she inquired, a misgiving bringing every muscle of
her lineaments and frame to a standstill.
"Here -- going through the plantation, and all down the
hill," said Farmer Oak, with an aspect excessively knowing
with regard to some matter in his mind, as he gazed at a
remote point in the direction named, and then turned back to
meet his colloquist's eyes.
A perception caused him to withdraw his own eyes from hers
as suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft.
Recollection of the strange antics she had indulged in when
passing through the trees was succeeded in the girl by a
nettled palpitation, and that by a hot face. It was a time
to see a woman redden who was not given to reddening as a
rule; not a point in the milkmaid but was of the deepest
rose-colour. From the Maiden's Blush, through all varieties
of the Provence down to the Crimson Tuscany, the countenance
of Oak's acquaintance quickly graduated; whereupon he, in
considerateness, turned away his head.
The sympathetic man still looked the other way, and wondered
when she would recover coolness sufficient to justify him in
facing her again. He heard what seemed to be the flitting
of a dead leaf upon the breeze, and looked. She had gone
away.
With an air between that of Tragedy and Comedy Gabriel
returned to his work.
Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came
regularly to milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick
one, but never allowed her vision to stray in the direction
of Oak's person. His want of tact had deeply offended her --
not by seeing what he could not help, but by letting her
know that he had seen it. For, as without law there is no
sin, without eyes there is no indecorum; and she appeared to
feel that Gabriel's espial had made her an indecorous woman
without her own connivance. It was food for great regret
with him; it was also a CONTRETEMPS which touched into life
a latent heat he had experienced in that direction.
The acquaintanceship might, however, have ended in a slow
forgetting, but for an incident which occurred at the end of
the same week. One afternoon it began to freeze, and the
frost increased with evening, which drew on like a stealthy
tightening of bonds. It was a time when in cottages the
breath of the sleepers freezes to the sheets; when round the
drawing-room fire of a thick-walled mansion the sitters'
backs are cold, even whilst their faces are all aglow. Many
a small bird went to bed supperless that night among the
bare boughs.
As the milking-hour drew near, Oak kept his usual watch upon
the cowshed. At last he felt cold, and shaking an extra
quantity of bedding round the yearling ewes he entered the
hut and heaped more fuel upon the stove. The wind came in
at the bottom of the door, and to prevent it Oak laid a sack
there and wheeled the cot round a little more to the south.
Then the wind spouted in at a ventilating hole -- of which
there was one on each side of the hut.
Gabriel had always known that when the fire was lighted and
the door closed one of these must be kept open -- that
chosen being always on the side away from the wind. Closing
the slide to windward, he turned to open the other; on
second thoughts the farmer considered that he would first
sit down leaving both closed for a minute or two, till the
temperature of the hut was a little raised. He sat down.
His head began to ache in an unwonted manner, and, fancying
himself weary by reason of the broken rests of the preceding
nights, Oak decided to get up, open the slide, and then
allow himself to fall asleep. He fell asleep, however,
without having performed the necessary preliminary.
How long he remained unconscious Gabriel never knew. During
the first stages of his return to perception peculiar deeds
seemed to be in course of enactment. His dog was howling,
his head was aching fearfully -- somebody was pulling him
about, hands were loosening his neckerchief.
On opening his eyes he found that evening had sunk to dusk
in a strange manner of unexpectedness. The young girl with
the remarkably pleasant lips and white teeth was beside him.
More than this -- astonishingly more -- his head was upon
her lap, his face and neck were disagreeably wet, and her
fingers were unbuttoning his collar.
"Whatever is the matter?" said Oak, vacantly.
She seemed to experience mirth, but of too insignificant a
kind to start enjoyment.
"Nothing now,' she answered, "since you are not dead. It is
a wonder you were not suffocated in this hut of yours."
"Ah, the hut!" murmured Gabriel. "I gave ten pounds for
that hut. But I'll sell it, and sit under thatched hurdles
as they did in old times, and curl up to sleep in a lock of
straw! It played me nearly the same trick the other day!"
Gabriel, by way of emphasis, brought down his fist upon the
floor.
"It was not exactly the fault of the hut," she observed in a
tone which showed her to be that novelty among women -- one
who finished a thought before beginning the sentence which
was to convey it. "You should, I think, have considered,
and not have been so foolish as to leave the slides closed."
"Yes I suppose I should," said Oak, absently. He was
endeavouring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being
thus with her, his head upon her dress, before the event
passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she
knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of
carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the
intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of
language. So he remained silent.
She made him sit up, and then Oak began wiping his face and
shaking himself like a Samson. "How can I thank 'ee?" he
said at last, gratefully, some of the natural rusty red
having returned to his face.
"Oh, never mind that," said the girl, smiling, and allowing
her smile to hold good for Gabriel's next remark, whatever
that might prove to be.
"How did you find me?"
"I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the
hut when I came to the milking (it was so lucky, Daisy's
milking is almost over for the season, and I shall not come
here after this week or the next). The dog saw me, and
jumped over to me, and laid hold of my skirt. I came across
and looked round the hut the very first thing to see if the
slides were closed. My uncle has a hut like this one, and I
have heard him tell his shepherd not to go to sleep without
leaving a slide open. I opened the door, and there you were
like dead. I threw the milk over you, as there was no
water, forgetting it was warm, and no use."
"I wonder if I should have died?" Gabriel said, in a low
voice, which was rather meant to travel back to himself than
to her.
"Oh no!" the girl replied. She seemed to prefer a less
tragic probability; to have saved a man from death involved
talk that should harmonise with the dignity of such a deed --
and she shunned it.
"I believe you saved my life, Miss ---- I don't know your
name. I know your aunt's, but not yours."
"I would just as soon not tell it -- rather not. There is
no reason either why I should, as you probably will never
have much to do with me."
"Still, I should like to know."
"You can inquire at my aunt's -- she will tell you."
"My name is Gabriel Oak."
"And mine isn't. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so
decisively, Gabriel Oak."
"You see, it is the only one I shall ever have, and I must
make the most of it."
"I always think mine sounds odd and disagreeable."
"I should think you might soon get a new one."
"Mercy! -- how many opinions you keep about you concerning
other people, Gabriel Oak."
"Well, Miss -- excuse the words -- I thought you would like
them. But I can't match you, I know, in napping out my mind
upon my tongue. I never was very clever in my inside. But
I thank you. Come, give me your hand."
She hesitated, somewhat disconcerted at Oak's old-fashioned
earnest conclusion to a dialogue lightly carried on. "Very
well," she said, and gave him her hand, compressing her lips
to a demure impassivity. He held it but an instant, and in
his fear of being too demonstrative, swerved to the opposite
extreme, touching her fingers with the lightness of a small-
hearted person.
"I am sorry," he said the instant after.
"What for?"
"Letting your hand go so quick"
"You may have it again if you like; there it is." She gave
him her hand again.
Oak held it longer this time -- indeed, curiously long.
"How soft it is -- being winter time, too -- not chapped or
rough or anything!" he said.
"There -- that's long enough," said she, though without
pulling it away. "But I suppose you are thinking you would
like to kiss it? You may if you want to."
"I wasn't thinking of any such thing," said Gabriel, simply;
"but I will ----"
"That you won't!" She snatched back her hand.
Gabriel felt himself guilty of another want of tact.
"Now find out my name," she said, teasingly; and withdrew.
CHAPTER IV
GABRIEL'S RESOLVE -- THE VISIT -- THE MISTAKE
THE only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival
sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a
superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by
suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man.
This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable
inroads upon the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.
Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of
exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts,
being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant
profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of
lower atmosphere), every morning Oak's feelings were as
sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his
chances. His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that
in which Oak waited for the girl's presence, that the farmer
was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and
would not look at the dog. However, he continued to watch
through the hedge for her regular coming, and thus his
sentiments towards her were deepened without any
corresponding effect being produced upon herself. Oak had
nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able
to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate
tales --
-- Full of sound and fury
-- signifying nothing --
he said no word at all.
By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was
Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about
seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.
At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give
milk for that year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill
no more. Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never
could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying
"Bathsheba" as a private enjoyment instead of whistling;
turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by
brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the
space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small.
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage
transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which
should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the
degree of imbecility it supplants. Oak began now to see
light in this direction, and said to himself, "I'll make her
my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!"
All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on
which he might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba's
aunt.
He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a
living lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter
constitution -- a fine January morning, when there was just
enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people
wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine,
Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and
stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the
aunt -- George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance
of great concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed
to be taking.
Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the
chimney with strange meditation. At evening he had
fancifully traced it down the chimney to the spot of its
origin -- seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside it -- beside
it in her out-door dress; for the clothes she had worn on
the hill were by association equally with her person
included in the compass of his affection; they seemed at
this early time of his love a necessary ingredient of the
sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene.
He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind -- of a
nature between the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate
-- of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday
selection. He thoroughly cleaned his silver watch-chain
with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots, looked to
the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the
plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it
vigorously on his way back; took a new handkerchief from the
bottom of his clothes-box, put on the light waistcoat
patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant flower uniting
the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects of
either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his
usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had
deepened it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of
guano and Roman cement, making it stick to his head like
mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a boulder after
the ebb.
Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the
chatter of a knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy
scandal and rumour to be no less the staple topic of these
little coteries on roofs than of those under them. It
seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for, as the
rather untoward commencement of Oak's overtures, just as he
arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into
various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight
of his dog George. The dog took no notice , for he had
arrived at an age at which all superfluous barking was
cynically avoided as a waste of breath -- in fact, he never
barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done
with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of
Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone
through once now and then to frighten the flock for their
own good.
A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the
cat had run:
"Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it; --
did he, poor dear!"
"I beg your pardon," said Oak to the voice, "but George was
walking on behind me with a temper as mild as milk."
Almost before he had ceased speaking, Oak was seized with a
misgiving as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer.
Nobody appeared, and he heard the person retreat among the
bushes.
Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small
furrows into his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where
the issue of an interview is as likely to be a vast change
for the worse as for the better, any initial difference from
expectation causes nipping sensations of failure. Oak went
up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal and
the reality had had no common grounds of opening.
Bathsheba's aunt was indoors. "Will you tell Miss Everdene
that somebody would be glad to speak to her?" said Mr. Oak.
(Calling one's self merely Somebody, without giving a name,
is not to be taken as an example of the ill-breeding of the
rural world: it springs from a refined modesty, of which
townspeople, with their cards and announcements, have no
notion whatever.)
Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.
"Will you come in, Mr. Oak?"
"Oh, thank 'ee," said Gabriel, following her to the
fireplace. "I've brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I
thought she might like one to rear; girls do."
"She might," said Mrs. Hurst, musingly; "though she's only a
visitor here. If you will wait a minute, Bathsheba will be
in."
"Yes, I will wait," said Gabriel, sitting down. "The lamb
isn't really the business I came about, Mrs. Hurst. In
short, I was going to ask her if she'd like to be married."
"And were you indeed?"
"Yes. Because if she would, I should be very glad to marry
her. D'ye know if she's got any other young man hanging
about her at all?"
"Let me think," said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire
superfluously.... "Yes -- bless you, ever so many young
men. You see, Farmer Oak, she's so good-looking, and an
excellent scholar besides -- she was going to be a governess
once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young
men ever come here -- but, Lord, in the nature of women, she
must have a dozen!"
"That's unfortunate," said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack
in the stone floor with sorrow. "I'm only an every-day sort
of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer...
Well, there's no use in my waiting, for that was all I came
about: so I'll take myself off home-along, Mrs. Hurst."
When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the
down, he heard a "hoi-hoi!" uttered behind him, in a piping
note of more treble quality than that in which the
exclamation usually embodies itself when shouted across a
field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after him,
waving a white handkerchief.
Oak stood still -- and the runner drew nearer. It was
Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel's colour deepened: hers was
already deep, not, as it appeared, from emotion, but from
running.
"Farmer Oak -- I ----" she said, pausing for want of breath
pulling up in front of him with a slanted face and putting
her hand to her side.
"I have just called to see you," said Gabriel, pending her
further speech.
"Yes -- I know that," she said panting like a robin, her
face red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal
before the sun dries off the dew. "I didn't know you had
come to ask to have me, or I should have come in from the
garden instantly. I ran after you to say -- that my aunt
made a mistake in sending you away from courting me ----"
Gabriel expanded. "I'm sorry to have made you run so fast,
my dear," he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come.
"Wait a bit till you've found your breath."
"-- It was quite a mistake-aunt's telling you I had a young
man already," Bathsheba went on. "I haven't a sweetheart at
all -- and I never had one, and I thought that, as times go
with women, it was SUCH a pity to send you away thinking
that I had several."
"Really and truly I am glad to hear that!" said Farmer Oak,
smiling one of his long special smiles, and blushing with
gladness. He held out his hand to take hers, which, when
she had eased her side by pressing it there, was prettily
extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating heart.
Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it
slipped through his fingers like an eel."
"I have a nice snug little farm," said Gabriel, with half a
degree less assurance than when he had seized her hand.
"Yes; you have."
"A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it
will soon be paid off and though I am only an every-day sort
of man, I have got on a little since I was a boy." Gabriel
uttered "a little" in a tone to show her that it was the
complacent form of "a great deal." He continued: "When we
be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as hard as I do
now."
He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba
had overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low
stunted holly bush, now laden with red berries. Seeing his
advance take the form of an attitude threatening a possible
enclosure, if not compression, of her person, she edged off
round the bush.
"Why, Farmer Oak," she said, over the top, looking at him
with rounded eyes, "I never said I was going to marry you."
"Well -- that IS a tale!" said Oak, with dismay." To run
after anybody like this, and then say you don't want him!"
"What I meant to tell you was only this," she said eagerly,
and yet half conscious of the absurdity of the position she
had made for herself -- "that nobody has got me yet as a
sweetheart, instead of my having a dozen, as my aunt said;
I HATE to be thought men's property in that way, though
possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I'd wanted you I
shouldn't have run after you like this; 'twould have been
the FORWARDEST thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to
correct a piece of false news that had been told you."
"Oh, no -- no harm at all." But there is such a thing as
being too generous in expressing a judgment impulsively, and
Oak added with a more appreciative sense of all the
circumstances -- "Well, I am not quite certain it was no
harm."
"Indeed, I hadn't time to think before starting whether I
wanted to marry or not, for you'd have been gone over the
hill."
"Come," said Gabriel, freshening again; "think a minute or
two. I'll wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me?
Do, Bathsheba. I love you far more than common!"
"I'll try to think," she observed, rather more timorously;
"if I can think out of doors; my mind spreads away so."
"But you can give a guess."
"Then give me time." Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the
distance, away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.
"I can make you happy," said he to the back of her head,
across the bush. "You shall have a piano in a year or two --
farmers' wives are getting to have pianos now -- and I'll
practise up the flute right well to play with you in the
evenings."
"Yes; I should like that."
"And have one of those little ten-pound" gigs for market --
and nice flowers, and birds -- cocks and hens I mean,
because they be useful," continued Gabriel, feeling balanced
between poetry and practicality.
"I should like it very much."
"And a frame for cucumbers -- like a gentleman and lady.
"Yes."
"And when the wedding was over, we'd have it put in the
newspaper list of marriages."
"Dearly I should like that!"
"And the babies in the births -- every man jack of 'em! And
at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be
-- and whenever I look up there will be you."
"Wait, wait, and don't be improper!"
Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He
regarded the red berries between them over and over again,
to such an extent, that holly seemed in his after life to be
a cypher signifying a proposal of marriage. Bathsheba
decisively turned to him.
"No;" 'tis no use," she said. "I don't want to marry you."
"Try."
"I have tried hard all the time I've been thinking; for a
marriage would be very nice in one sense. People would talk
about me, and think I had won my battle, and I should feel
triumphant, and all that, But a husband ----
"Well!"
"Why, he'd always be there, as you say; whenever I looked
up, there he'd be."
"Of course he would -- I, that is."
"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at
a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But
since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I
shan't marry -- at least yet."
"That's a terrible wooden story."
At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an
addition to her dignity by a slight sweep away from him.
"Upon my heart and soul, I don't know what a maid can say
stupider than that," said Oak. "But dearest," he continued
in a palliative voice, "don't be like it!" Oak sighed a deep
honest sigh -- none the less so in that, being like the sigh
of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a
disturbance of the atmosphere. "Why won't you have me?" he
appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.
"I cannot," she said, retreating.
"But why?" he persisted, standing still at last in despair
of ever reaching her, and facing over the bush.
"Because I don't love you."
"Yes, but ----"
She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that
it was hardly ill-mannered at all. "I don't love you," she
said."
"But I love you -- and, as for myself, I am content to be
liked."
"Oh Mr. Oak -- that's very fine! You'd get to despise me."
"Never," said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be
coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush
and into her arms. "I shall do one thing in this life --
one thing certain -- that is, love you, and long for you,
and KEEP WANTING YOU till I die." His voice had a genuine
pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.
"It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so
much!" she said with a little distress, and looking
hopelessly around for some means of escape from her moral
dilemma. "How I wish I hadn't run after you!" However she
seemed to have a short cut for getting back to cheerfulness,
and set her face to signify archness. "It wouldn't do, Mr
Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and
you would never be able to, I know."
Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it
was useless to attempt argument.
"Mr. Oak," she said, with luminous distinctness and common
sense, "you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in
the world -- I am staying with my aunt for my bare
sustenance. I am better educated than you -- and I don't
love you a bit: that's my side of the case. Now yours: you
are a farmer just begining; and you ought in common
prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly
not think of doing at present), to marry a woman with money,
who would stock a larger farm for you than you have now."
Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much
admiration.
"That's the very thing I had been thinking myself!" he
naively said.
Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too
many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a
superfluous moiety of honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly
disconcerted.
"Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?" she said,
almost angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising
in each cheek.
"I can't do what I think would be -- would be ----"
"Right?"
"No: wise."
"You have made an admission NOW, Mr. Oak," she exclaimed,
with even more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully.
"After that, do you think I could marry you? Not if I know
it."
He broke in passionately. "But don't mistake me like that!
Because I am open enough to own what every man in my shoes
would have thought of, you make your colours come up your
face, and get crabbed with me. That about your not being
good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a lady --
all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is,
I have heerd, a large farmer -- much larger than ever I
shall be. May I call in the evening, or will you walk along
with me o' Sundays? I don't want you to make-up your mind
at once, if you'd rather not."
"No -- no -- I cannot. Don't press me any more -- don't. I
don't love you -- so 'twould be ridiculous," she said, with
a laugh.
No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-
round of skittishness. "Very well," said Oak, firmly, with
the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights
to Ecclesiastes for ever. "Then I'll ask you no more."
CHAPTER V
DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA -- A PASTORAL TRAGEDY
THE news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba
Everdene had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon
him which might have surprised any who never suspected that
the more emphatic the renunciation the less absolute its
character.
It may have been observed that there is no regulal path for
getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people
look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been
known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance
offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba's disappearance though
effectual with people of certain humours is apt to idealize
the removed object with others -- notably those whose
affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and
long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity,
and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be
burning with a finer flame now that she was gone -- that was
all.
His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by
the failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of
Bathsheba's movements was done indirectly. It appeared that
she had gone to a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty
miles off, but in what capacity -- whether as a visitor, or
permanently, he could not discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an
ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink
flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating
in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years
of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the
more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if
the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo
from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures. In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with
sheep seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor
quality and staple.
This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior
morals and dreadful temper, and the result was that George
knew the exact degrees of condemnation signified by cursing
and swearing of all descriptions better than the wickedest
old man in the neighbourhood. Long experience had so
precisely taught the animal the difference between such
exclamations as "Come in!" and "D ---- ye, come in!" that he
knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the
ewes' tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the
sheep crook was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever
and trustworthy still.
The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the
image of his mother, for there was not much resemblance
between him and George. He was learning the sheep-keeping
business, so as to follow on at the flock when the other
should die, but had got no further than the rudiments as yet
-- still finding an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing
between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well. So
earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no, name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness
to any pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock
to help them on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have
chased them across the whole county with the greatest
pleasure if not called off or reminded when to stop by the
example of old George.
Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe
Hill was a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for
generations, and spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges
converged upon it in the form of a V, but without quite
meeting. The narrow opening left, which was immediately
over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.
One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to, his house,
believing there would be no further necessity for his
attendance on the down, he called as usual to the dogs,
previously to shutting them up in the outhouse till next
morning. Only one responded -- old George; the other could
not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden. Gabriel
then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from
them, except when other food ran short), and concluding that
the young one had not finished his meal, he went indoors to
the luxury of a bed, which latterly he had only enjoyed on
Sundays.
It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was
assisted in waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar
music. To the shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like
the ticking of the clock to other people, is a chronic sound
that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or altering in
some unusual manner from the well-known idle twinkle which
signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that all
is well in the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening
morn that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual
violence and rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be
caused in two ways -- by the rapid feeding of the sheep
bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture,
which gives it an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep
starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he
now heard to be caused by the running of the flock with
great velocity.
He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a
foggy dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were
kept apart from those among which the fall of lambs would be
later, there being two hundred of the latter class in
Gabriel's flock. These two hundred seemed to have
absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the fifty
with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were
nowhere. Gabriel called at the top of his voice the
shepherd's call.
"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"
Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been
broken through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the
sheep. Rather surprised to find them break fence at this
season, yet putting it down instantly to their great
fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal grew
in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were
not in the plantation. He called again: the valleys and
farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed
through the trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the
extreme summit, where the ends of the two converging hedges
of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the
brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing
against the sky -- dark and motionless as Napoleon at St.
Helena.
A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation
of bodily faintness he advanced: at one point the rails
were broken through, and there he saw the footprints of his
ewes. The dog came up, licked his hand, and made signs
implying that he expected some great reward for signal
services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes
lay dead and dying at its foot -- a heap of two hundred
mangled carcasses, representing in their condition just now
at least two hundred more.
Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often
tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered
on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow
in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton --
that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor
to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was one of
pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their
unborn lambs.
It was a second to remember another phase of the matter.
The sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal
life had been dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an
independent farmer were laid low -- possibly for ever.
Gabriel's energies, patience, and industry had been so
severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen
and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress
that no more seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a
rail, and covered his face with his hands.
Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak
recovered from his. It was as remarkable as it was
characteristic that the one sentence he uttered was in
thankfulness: --
"Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in
the poverty now coming upon me!"
Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do,
listlessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the
Pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated
skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which had only a few days
to last -- the morning star dogging her on the left hand.
The pool glittered like a dead man's eye, and as the world
awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection
of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of
the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All this
Oak saw and remembered.
As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young
dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for
running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better,
had at the end of his meal off the dead lamb, which may have
given him additional energy and spirits, collected all the
ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the
hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying
had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of
the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was
considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact,
taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day --
another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends
dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of
reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly
consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of
compromise.
Gabriel's farm had been stocked by a dealer -- on the
strength of Oak's promising look and character -- who was
receiving a percentage from the farmer till such time as the
advance should be cleared off. Oak found that the value of
stock, plant, and implements which were really his own would
be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a free
man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.
CHAPTER VI
THE FAIR -- THE JOURNEY -- THE FIRE
TWO months passed away. We are brought on to a day in
February, on which was held the yearly statute or hiring
fair in the county-town of Casterbridge.
At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred
blithe and hearty labourers waiting upon Chance -- all men
of the stamp to whom labour suggests nothing worse than a
wrestle with gravitation, and pleasure nothing better than a
renunciation of the same. Among these, carters and waggoners
were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted
round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw;
shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus
the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.
In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of some-what
superior appearance to the rest -- in fact, his superiority
was marked enough to lead several ruddy peasants standing by
to speak to him inquiringly, as to a farmer, and to use
'Sir' as a finishing word. His answer always was, --
"I am looking for a place myself -- a bailiff's. Do ye know
of anybody who wants one?"
Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and
his expression was more sad. He had passed through an
ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had
taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as
pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there
was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known,
and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a
villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does
not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the
loss gain.
In the morning a regiment of cavalry had left the town, and
a sergeant and his party had been beating up for recruits
through the four streets. As the end of the day drew on,
and he found himself not hired, Gabriel almost wished that
he had joined them, and gone off to serve his country.
Weary of standing in the market-place, and not much minding
the kind of work he turned his hand to, he decided to offer
himself in some other capacity than that of bailiff.
All the farmers seemed to be wanting shepherds. Sheep-
tending was Gabriel's speciality. Turning down an obscure
street and entering an obscurer lane, he went up to a
smith's shop.
"How long would it take you to make a shepherd's crook?"
"Twenty minutes."
"How much?"
"Two shillings."
He sat on a bench and the crook was made, a stem being given
him into the bargain.
He then went to a ready-made clothes' shop, the owner of
which had a large rural connection. As the crook had
absorbed most of Gabriel's money, he attempted, and carried
out, an exchange of his overcoat for a shepherd's regulation
smock-frock.
This transaction having been completed, he again hurried off
to the centre of the town, and stood on the kerb of the
pavement, as a shepherd, crook in hand.
Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd, it seemed
that bailifs were most in demand. However, two or three
farmers noticed him and drew near. Dialogues followed, more
or less in the subjoined form: --
"Where do you come from?"
"Norcombe."
"That's a long way.
"Fifteen miles."
"Who's farm were you upon last?"
"My own."
This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera.
The inquiring farmer would edge away and shake his head
dubiously. Gabriel, like his dog, was too good to be
trustworthy, and he never made advance beyond this point.
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and
extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good
shepherd, but had laid himself out for anything in the whole
cycle of labour that was required in the fair. It grew
dusk. Some merry men were whistling and singing by the
corn-exchange. Gabriel's hand, which had lain for some time
idle in his smock-frock pocket, touched his flute which he
carried there. Here was an opportunity for putting his
dearly bought wisdom into practice.
He drew out his flute and began to play "Jockey to the Fair"
in the style of a man who had never known moment's sorrow.
Oak could pipe with Arcadian sweetness and the sound of the
well-known notes cheered his own heart as well as those of
the loungers. He played on with spirit, and in half an hour
had earned in pence what was a small fortune to a destitute
man.
By making inquiries he learnt that there was another fair at
Shottsford the next day.
"How far is Shottsford?"
"Ten miles t'other side of Weatherbury."
Weatherbury! It was where Bathsheba had gone two months
before. This information was like coming from night into
noon.
"How far is it to Weatherbury?"
"Five or six miles."
Bathsheba had probably left Weatherbury long before this
time, but the place had enough interest attaching to it to
lead Oak to choose Shottsford fair as his next field of
inquiry, because it lay in the Weatherbury quarter.
Moreover, the Weatherbury folk were by no means
uninteresting intrinsically. If report spoke truly they
were as hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any in the
whole county. Oak resolved to sleep at Weatherbury that
night on his way to Shottsford, and struck out at once into
the high road which had been recommended as the direct route
to the village in question.
The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little
brooks, whose quivering surfaces were braided along their
centres, and folded into creases at the sides; or, where the
flow was more rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white
froth, which rode on in undisturbed serenity. On the higher
levels the dead and dry carcasses of leaves tapped the
ground as they bowled along helter-skelter upon the
shoulders of the wind, and little birds in the hedges were
rustling their feathers and tucking themselves in
comfortably for the night, retaining their places if Oak
kept moving, but flying away if he stopped to look at them.
He passed by Yalbury Wood where the game-birds were rising
to their roosts, and heard the crack-voiced cock-pheasants
"cu-uck, cuck," and the wheezy whistle of the hens.
By the time he had walked three or four miles every shape in
the landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness. He
descended Yalbury Hill and could just discern ahead of him a
waggon, drawn up under a great over-hanging tree by the
roadside.
On coming close, he found there were no horses attached to
it, the spot being apparently quite deserted. The waggon,
from its position, seemed to have been left there for the
night, for beyond about half a truss of hay which was heaped
in the bottom, it was quite empty. Gabriel sat down on the
shafts of the vehicle and considered his position. He
calculated that he had walked a very fair proportion of the
journey; and having been on foot since daybreak, he felt
tempted to lie down upon the hay in the waggon instead of
pushing on to the village of Weatherbury, and having to pay
for a lodging.
Eating his last slices of bread and ham, and drinking from
the bottle of cider he had taken the precaution to bring
with him, he got into the lonely waggon. Here he spread
half of the hay as a bed, and, as well as he could in the
darkness, pulled the other half over him by way of bed-
clothes, covering himself entirely, and feeling, physically,
as comfortable as ever he had been in his life. Inward
melancholy it was impossible for a man like Oak,
introspective far beyond his neighbours, to banish quite,
whilst conning the present untoward page of his history.
So, thinking of his misfortunes, amorous and pastoral he
fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common with sailors, the
privilege of being able to summon the god instead of having
to wait for him.
On somewhat suddenly awaking, after a sleep of whose length
he had no idea, Oak found that the waggon was in motion. He
was being carried along the road at a rate rather
considerable for a vehicle without springs, and under
circumstances of physical uneasiness, his head being dandled
up and down on the bed of the waggon like a kettledrum-
stick. He then distinguished voices in conversation, coming
from the forpart of the waggon. His concern at this dilemma
(which would have been alarm, had he been a thriving man;
but misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror) led him
to peer cautiously from the hay, and the first sight he
beheld was the stars above him. Charles's Wain was getting
towards a right angle with the Pole star, and Gabriel
concluded that it must be about nine o'clock -- in other
words, that he had slept two hours. This small astronomical
calculation was made without any positive effort, and whilst
he was stealthily turning to discover, if possible, into
whose hands he had fallen.
Two figures were dimly visible in front, sitting with their
legs outside the waggon, one of whom was driving. Gabriel
soon found that this was the waggoner, and it appeared they
had come from Casterbridge fair, like himself.
A conversation was in progress, which continued thus: --
"Be as 'twill, she's a fine handsome body as far's looks be
concerned. But that's only the skin of the woman, and these
dandy cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides."
"Ay -- so 'a do seem, Billy Smallbury -- so 'a do seem."
This utterance was very shaky by nature, and more so by
circumstance, the jolting of the waggon not being without
its effect upon the speaker's larynx. It came from the man
who held the reins.
"She's a very vain feymell -- so 'tis said here and there."
"Ah, now. If so be 'tis like that, I can't look her in the
face. Lord, no: not I -- heh-heh-heh! Such a shy man as I
be!"
"Yes -- she's very vain. 'Tis said that every night at
going to bed she looks in the glass to put on her night-cap
properly."
"And not a married woman. Oh, the world!"
"And 'a can play the peanner, so 'tis said. Can play so
clever that 'a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the
merriest loose song a man can wish for."
"D'ye tell o't! A happy time for us, and I feel quite a new
man! And how do she play?"
"That I don't know, Master Poorgrass."
On hearing these and other similar remarks, a wild thought
flashed into Gabriel's mind that they might be speaking of
Bathsheba. There were, however, no ground for retaining
such a supposition, for the waggon, though going in the
direction of Weatherbury, might be going beyond it, and the
woman alluded to seemed to be the mistress of some estate.
They were now apparently close upon Weatherbury and not to
alarm the speakers unnecessarily, Gabriel slipped out of the
waggon unseen.
He turned to an opening in the hedge, which he found to be a
gate, and mounting thereon, he sat meditating whether to
seek a cheap lodging in the village, or to ensure a cheaper
one by lying under some hay or corn-stack. The crunching
jangle of the waggon died upon his ear. He was about to
walk on, when he noticed on his left hand an unusual light --
appearing about half a mile distant. Oak watched it, and
the glow increased. Something was on fire.
Gabriel again mounted the gate, and, leaping down on the
other side upon what he found to be ploughed soil, made
across the field in the exact direction of the fire. The
blaze, enlarging in a double ratio by his approach and its
own increase, showed him as he drew nearer the outlines of
ricks beside it, lighted up to great distinctness. A rick-
yard was the source of the fire. His weary face now began
to be painted over with a rich orange glow, and the whole
front of his smock-frock and gaiters was covered with a
dancing shadow pattern of thorn-twigs -- the light reaching
him through a leafless intervening hedge -- and the metallic
curve of his sheep-crook shone silver-bright in the same
abounding rays. He came up to the boundary fence, and stood
to regain breath. It seemed as if the spot was unoccupied
by a living soul.
The fire was issuing from a long straw-stack, which was so
far gone as to preclude a possibility of saving it. A rick
burns differently from a house. As the wind blows the fire
inwards, the portion in flames completely disappears like
melting sugar, and the outline is lost to the eye. However,
a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together, will resist
combustion for a length of time, if it begins on the
outside.
This before Gabriel's eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put
together, and the flames darted into it with lightning
swiftness. It glowed on the windward side, rising and
falling in intensity, like the coal of a cigar. Then a
superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking noise;
flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet
roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally
at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned
hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of
smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in
the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy
heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone
imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring
eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks
flew in clusters like birds from a nest.
Oak suddenly ceased from being a mere spectator by
discovering the case to be more serious than he had at first
imagined. A scroll of smoke blew aside and revealed to him
a wheat-rick in startling juxtaposition with the decaying
one, and behind this a series of others, composing the main
corn produce of the farm; so that instead of the straw-stack
standing, as he had imagined comparatively isolated, there
was a regular connection between it and the remaining stacks
of the group.
Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone.
The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry,
as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his
body, which they could never drag on fast enough.
"O, man -- fire, fire! A good master and a bad servant is
fire, fire! -- I mane a bad servant and a good master. Oh,
Mark Clark -- come! And you, Billy Smallbury -- and you,
Maryann Money -- and you, Jan Coggan, and Matthew there!"
Other figures now appeared behind this shouting man and
among the smoke, and Gabriel found that, far from being
alone he was in a great company -- whose shadows danced
merrily up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and
not at all by their owners' movements. The assemblage --
belonging to that class of society which casts its thoughts
into the form of feeling, and its feelings into the form of
commotion -- set to work with a remarkable confusion of
purpose.
"Stop the draught under the wheat-rick!" cried Gabriel to
those nearest to him. The corn stood on stone staddles, and
between these, tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw
licked and darted playfully. If the fire once got UNDER
this stack, all would be lost.
"Get a tarpaulin -- quick!" said Gabriel.
A rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain
across the channel. The flames immediately ceased to go
under the bottom of the corn-stack, and stood up vertical.
"Stand here with a bucket of water and keep the cloth wet."
said Gabriel again.
The flames, now driven upwards, began to attack the angles
of the huge roof covering the wheat-stack.
"A ladder," cried Gabriel.
"The ladder was against the straw-rick and is burnt to a
cinder," said a spectre-like form in the smoke.
Oak seized the cut ends of the sheaves, as if he were going
to engage in the operation of "reed-drawing," and digging in
his feet, and occasionally sticking in the stem of his
sheep-crook, he clambered up the beetling face. He at once
sat astride the very apex, and began with his crook to beat
off the fiery fragments which had lodged thereon, shouting
to the others to get him a bough and a ladder, and some
water.
Billy Smallbury -- one of the men who had been on the waggon
-- by this time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark
ascended, holding on beside Oak upon the thatch. The smoke
at this corner was stifling, and Clark, a nimble fellow,
having been handed a bucket of water, bathed Oak's face and
sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a long
beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the
other, kept sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery
particles.
On the ground the groups of villagers were still occupied in
doing all they could to keep down the conflagration, which
was not much. They were all tinged orange, and backed up by
shadows of varying pattern. Round the corner of the largest
stack, out of the direct rays of the fire, stood a pony,
bearing a young woman on its back. By her side was another
woman, on foot. These two seemed to keep at a distance from
the fire, that the horse might not become restive.
"He's a shepherd," said the woman on foot. "Yes -- he is.
See how his crook shines as he beats the rick with it. And
his smock-frock is burnt in two holes, I declare! A fine
young shepherd he is too, ma'am."
"Whose shepherd is he?" said the equestrian in a clear
voice.
"Don't know, ma'am."
"Don't any of the others know?"
"Nobody at all -- I've asked 'em. Quite a stranger, they
say."
The young woman on the pony rode out from the shade and
looked anxiously around.
"Do you think the barn is safe?" she said.
"D'ye think the barn is safe, Jan Coggan?" said the second
woman, passing on the question to the nearest man in that
direction.
"Safe-now -- leastwise I think so. If this rick had gone
the barn would have followed. 'Tis that bold shepherd up
there that have done the most good -- he sitting on the top
o' rick, whizzing his great long-arms about like a
windmill."
"He does work hard," said the young woman on horseback,
looking up at Gabriel through her thick woollen veil. "I
wish he was shepherd here. Don't any of you know his name."
"Never heard the man's name in my life, or seed his form
afore."
The fire began to get worsted, and Gabriel's elevated
position being no longer required of him, he made as if to
descend.
"Maryann," said the girl on horseback, "go to him as he
comes down, and say that the farmer wishes to thank him for
the great service he has done."
Maryann stalked off towards the rick and met Oak at the foot
of the ladder. She delivered her message.
"Where is your master the farmer?" asked Gabriel, kindling
with the idea of getting employment that seemed to strike
him now.
"'Tisn't a master; 'tis a mistress, shepherd."
"A woman farmer?"
"Ay, 'a b'lieve, and a rich one too!" said a bystander.
"Lately 'a came here from a distance. Took on her uncle's
farm, who died suddenly. Used to measure his money in half-
pint cups. They say now that she've business in every bank
in Casterbridge, and thinks no more of playing pitch-and-
toss sovereign than you and I, do pitch-halfpenny -- not a
bit in the world, shepherd."
"That's she, back there upon the pony," said Maryann. "wi'
her face a-covered up in that black cloth with holes in it."
Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from
the smoke and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and
dripping with water, the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred
six inches shorter, advansed with the humility stern
adversity had thrust upon him up to the slight female form
in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect, and not
without gallantry: stepping close to her hanging feet he
said in a hesitating voice, --
"Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?"
She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all
astonishment. Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling,
Bathsheba Everdene, were face to face.
Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an
abashed and sad voice, --
"Do you want a shepherd, ma'am?"
CHAPTER VII
RECOGNITION -- A TIMID GIRL
BATHSHEBA withdrew into the shade. She scarcely knew
whether most to be amused at the singularity of the meeting,
or to be concerned at its awkwardness. There was room for a
little pity, also for a very little exultation: the former
at his position, the latter at her own. Embarrassed she was
not, and she remembered Gabriel's declaration of love to her
at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.
"Yes," she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and
turning again to him with a little warmth of cheek; "I do
want a shepherd. But ----"
"He's the very man, ma'am," said one of the villagers,
quietly.
Conviction breeds conviction. "Ay, that 'a is," said a
second, decisively.
"The man, truly!" said a third, with heartiness."
"He's all there!" said number four, fervidly.
"Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff, said
Bathsheba.
All was practical again now. A summer eve and loneliness
would have been necessary to give the meeting its proper
fulness of romance.
The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the
palpitation within his breast at discovering that this
Ashtoreth of strange report was only a modification of Venus
the well-known and admired, retired with him to talk over
the necessary preliminaries of hiring.
The fire before them wasted away. "Men," said Bathsheba,
"you shall take a little refreshment after this extra work.
Will you come to the house?"
"We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, Miss,
if so be ye'd send it to Warren's Malthouse," replied the
spokesman.
Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men
straggled on to the village in twos and threes -- Oak and
the bailiff being left by the rick alone.
"And now," said the bailiff, finally, "all is settled, I
think, about your coming, and I am going home-along. Good-
night to ye, shepherd."
"Can you get me a lodging?" inquired Gabriel.
"That I can't, indeed," he said, moving past Oak as a
Christian edges past an offertory-plate when he does not
mean to contribute. "If you follow on the road till you
come to Warren's Malthouse, where they are all gone to have
their snap of victuals, I daresay some of 'em will tell you
of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd."
The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his
neighbour as himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to
the village, still astonished at the rencounter with
Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to her, and perplexed at the
rapidity with which the unpractised girl of Norcombe had
developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But
some women only require an emergency to make them fit for
one.
Obliged, to some extent, to forgo dreaming in order to find
the way, he reached the churchyard, and passed round it
under the wall where several ancient trees grew. There was
a wide margin of grass along here, and Gabriel's footsteps
were deadened by its softness, even at this indurating
period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which appeared
to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure
was standing behind it. Gabriel did not pause in his walk,
and in another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone.
The noise was enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who
started and assumed a careless position.
It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.
"Good-night to you," said Gabriel, heartily.
"Good-night," said the girl to Gabriel.
The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and
dulcet note suggestive of romance; common in descriptions,
rare in experience.
"I'll thank you to tell me if I'm in the way for Warren's
Malthouse?" Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the
information, indirectly to get more of the music.
"Quite right. It's at the bottom of the hill. And do you
know ----" The girl hesitated and then went on again. "Do
you know how late they keep open the Buck's Head Inn?" She
seemed to be won by Gabriel's heartiness, as Gabriel had
been won by her modulations.
"I don't know where the Buck's Head is, or anything about
it. Do you think of going there to-night?"
"Yes ----" The woman again paused. There was no necessity
for any continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add
more seemed to proceed from an unconscious desire to show
unconcern by making a remark, which is noticeable in the
ingenuous when they are acting by stealth. "You are not a
Weatherbury man?" she said, timorously.
"I am not. I am the new shepherd -- just arrived."
"Only a shepherd -- and you seem almost a farmer by your
ways."
"Only a shepherd," Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of
finality. "His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes
to the feet of the girl; and for the first time he saw lying
there a bundle of some sort. She may have perceived the
direction of his face, for she said coaxingly, --
"You won't say anything in the parish about having seen me
here, will you -- at least, not for a day or two?"
"I won't if you wish me not to," said Oak.
"Thank you, indeed," the other replied. "I am rather poor,
and I don't want people to know anything about me." Then
she was silent and shivered.
"You ought to have a cloak on such a cold night," Gabriel
observed. "I would advise 'ee to get indoors."
"O no! Would you mind going on and leaving me? I thank you
much for what you have told me."
"I will go on," he said; adding hesitatingly, -- "Since you
are not very well off, perhaps you would accept this trifle
from me. It is only a shilling, but it is all I have to
spare."
"Yes, I will take it," said the stranger gratefully.
She extended her hand; Gabriel his. In feeling for each
other's palm in the gloom before the money could be passed,
a minute incident occurred which told much. Gabriel's
fingers alighted on the young woman's wrist. It was beating
with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt
the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery of -- his
lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great
of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature,
was already too little.
"What is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"But there is?"
"No, no, no! Let your having seen me be a secret!"
"Very well; I will. Good-night, again."
"Good-night."
The young girl remained motionless by the tree, and Gabriel
descended into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower
Longpuddle as it was sometimes called. He fancied that he
had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when
touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies
in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to
think little of this.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MALTHOUSE -- THE CHAT -- NEWS
WARREN'S Malthouse was enclosed by an old wall inwrapped
with ivy, and though not much of the exterior was visible at
this hour, the character and purposes of the building were
clearly enough shown by its outline upon the sky. From the
walls an overhanging thatched roof sloped up to a point in
the centre, upon which rose a small wooden lantern, fitted
with louvre-boards on all the four sides, and from these
openings a mist was dimly perceived to be escaping into the
night air. There was no window in front; but a square hole
in the door was glazed with a single pane, through which
red, comfortable rays now stretched out upon the ivied wall
in front. Voices were to be heard inside.
Oak's hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers
extended to an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern, till he found a
leathern strap, which he pulled. This lifted a wooden
latch, and the door swung open.
The room inside was lighted only by the, ruddy glow from the
kiln mouth, which shone over the floor with the streaming,
horizontality of the setting sun, and threw upwards the
shadows of all facial irregularities in those assembled
around. The stone-flag floor was worn into a path from the
doorway to the kiln, and into undulations everywhere. A
curved settle of unplaned oak stretched along one side, and
in a remote corner was a small bed and bedstead, the owner
and frequent occupier of which was the maltster.
This aged man was now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty
white hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the
grey moss and lichen upon a leafless apple-tree. He wore
breeches and the laced-up shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept
his eyes fixed upon the fire.
Gabriel's nose was greeted by an atmosphere laden with the
sweet smell of new malt. The conversation (which seemed to
have been concerning the origin of the fire) immediately
ceased, and every one ocularly criticised him to the degree
expressed by contracting the flesh of their foreheads and
looking at him with narrowed eyelids, as if he had been a
light too strong for their sight. Several exclaimed
meditatively, after this operation had been completed: --
"Oh, 'tis the new shepherd, 'a b'lieve."
"We thought we heard a hand pawing about the door for the
bobbin, but weren't sure 'twere not a dead leaf blowed
across," said another. "Come in, shepherd; sure ye be
welcome, though we don't know yer name."
"Gabriel Oak, that's my name, neighbours."
The ancient maltster sitting in the midst turned up this --
his turning being as the turning of a rusty crane.
"That's never Gable Oak's grandson over at Norcombe --
never!" he said, as a formula expressive of surprise, which
nobody was supposed for a moment to take literally.
"My father and my grandfather were old men of the name of
Gabriel," said the shepherd, placidly.
"Thought I knowed the man's face as I seed him on the rick!
-- thought I did! And where be ye trading o't to now,
shepherd?"
"I'm thinking of biding here," said Mr. Oak.
"Knowed yer grandfather for years and years!" continued the
maltster, the words coming forth of their own accord as if
the momentum previously imparted had been sufficient.
"Ah -- and did you!"
"Knowed yer grandmother."
"And her too!"
"Likewise knowed yer father when he was a child. Why, my
boy Jacob there and your father were sworn brothers -- that
they were sure -- weren't ye, Jacob?"
"Ay, sure," said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with
a semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his
upper jaw, which made much of itself by standing prominent,
like a milestone in a bank. "But 'twas Joe had most to do
with him. However, my son William must have knowed the very
man afore us -- didn't ye, Billy, afore ye left Norcombe?"
"No, 'twas Andrew," said Jacob's son Billy, a child of
forty, or thereabouts, who manifested the peculiarity of
possessing a cheerful soul in a gloomy body, and whose
whiskers were assuming a chinchilla shade here and there.
"I can mind Andrew," said Oak, "as being a man in the place
when I was quite a child."
"Ay -- the other day I and my youngest daughter, Liddy, were
over at my grandson's christening," continued Billy. "We
were talking about this very family, and 'twas only last
Purification Day in this very world, when the use-money is
gied away to the second-best poor folk, you know, shepherd,
and I can mind the day because they all had to traypse up to
the vestry -- yes, this very man's family."
"Come, shepherd, and drink. 'Tis gape and swaller with us --
a drap of sommit, but not of much account," said the
maltster, removing from the fire his eyes, which were
vermilion-red and bleared by gazing into it for so many
years. "Take up the God-forgive-me, Jacob. See if 'tis
warm, Jacob."
Jacob stooped to the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled
tall mug standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with
heat: it was rather furred with extraneous matter about the
outside, especially in the crevices of the handles, the
innermost curves of which may not have seen daylight for
several years by reason of this encrustation thereon --
formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked
hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no
worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and
about the rim. It may be observed that such a class of mug
is called a God-forgive-me in Weatherbury and its vicinity
for uncertain reasons; probably because its size makes any
given toper feel ashamed of himself when he sees its bottom
in drinking it empty.
Jacob, on receiving the order to see if the liquor was warm
enough, placidly dipped his forefinger into it by way of
thermometer, and having pronounced it nearly of the proper
degree, raised the cup and very civilly attempted to dust
some of the ashes from the bottom with the skirt of his
smock-frock, because Shepherd Oak was a stranger.
"A clane cup for the shepherd," said the maltster
commandingly.
"No -- not at all," said Gabriel, in a reproving tone of
considerateness. "I never fuss about dirt in its pure
state, and when I know what sort it is." Taking the mug he
drank an inch or more from the depth of its contents, and
duly passed it to the next man. "I wouldn't think of giving
such trouble to neighbours in washing up when there's so
much work to be done in the world already." continued Oak in
a moister tone, after recovering from the stoppage of breath
which is occasioned by pulls at large mugs.
"A right sensible man," said Jacob.
"True, true; it can't be gainsaid!" observed a brisk young
man -- Mark Clark by name, a genial and pleasant gentleman,
whom to meet anywhere in your travels was to know, to know
was to drink with, and to drink with was, unfortunately, to
pay for.
"And here's a mouthful of bread and bacon that mis'ess have
sent, shepherd. The cider will go down better with a bit of
victuals. Don't ye chaw quite close, shepherd, for I let
the bacon fall in the road outside as I was bringing it
along, and may be 'tis rather gritty. There, 'tis clane
dirt; and we all know what that is, as you say, and you
bain't a particular man we see, shepherd."
"True, true -- not at all," said the friendly Oak.
"Don't let your teeth quite meet, and you won't feel the
sandiness at all. Ah! 'tis wonderful what can be done by
contrivance!"
"My own mind exactly, neighbour."
"Ah, he's his grandfer's own grandsonn! -- his grandfer were
just such a nice unparticular man!" said the maltster.
"Drink, Henry Fray -- drink," magnanimously said Jan Coggan,
a person who held Saint-Simonian notions of share and share
alike where liquor was concerned, as the vessel showed signs
of approaching him in its gradual revolution among them.
Having at this moment reached the end of a wistful gaze into
mid-air, Henry did not refuse. He was a man of more than
middle age, with eyebrows high up in his forehead, who laid
it down that the law of the world was bad, with a long-
suffering look through his listeners at the world alluded
to, as it presented itself to his imagination. He always
signed his name "Henery" -- strenuously insisting upon that
spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark
that the second "e" was superfluous and old-fashioned, he
received the reply that "H-e-n-e-r-y" was the name he was
christened and the name he would stick to -- in the tone of
one to whom orthographical differences were matters which
had a great deal to do with personal character.
Mr. Jan Coggan, who had passed the cup to Henery, was a
crimson man with a spacious countenance, and private glimmer
in his eye, whose name had appeared on the marriage register
of Weatherbury and neighbouring parishes as best man and
chief witness in countless unions of the previous twenty
years; he also very frequently filled the post of head
godfather in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind.
"Come, Mark Clark -- come. Ther's plenty more in the
barrel," said Jan.
"Ay -- that I will, 'tis my only doctor," replied Mr. Clark,
who, twenty years younger than Jan Coggan, revolved in the
same orbit. He secreted mirth on all occasions for special
discharge at popular parties.
"Why, Joseph Poorgrass, ye han't had a drop!" said Mr.
Coggan to a self-conscious man in the background, thrusting
the cup towards him.
"Such a modest man as he is!" said Jacob Smallbury. "Why,
ye've hardly had strength of eye enough to look in our young
mis'ess's face, so I hear, Joseph?"
All looked at Joseph Poorgrass with pitying reproach.
"No -- I've hardly looked at her at all," simpered Joseph,
reducing his body smaller whilst talking, apparently from a
meek sense of undue prominence. "And when I seed her, 'twas
nothing but blushes with me!"
"Poor feller," said Mr. Clark.
"'Tis a curious nature for a man," said Jan Coggan.
"Yes," continued Joseph Poorgrass -- his shyness, which was
so painful as a defect, filling him with a mild complacency
now that it was regarded as an interesting study. "'Twere
blush, blush, blush with me every minute of the time, when
she was speaking to me."
"I believe ye, Joseph Poorgrass, for we all know ye to be a
very bashful man."
"'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul," said the
maltster. "And how long have ye have suffered from it,
Joseph?"
[Alternate text: appears in all three additions on hand:
"'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul," said the
maltster. "And ye have suffered from it a long time, we
know."
"Ay, ever since..."]
"Oh, ever since I was a boy. Yes -- mother was concerned to
her heart about it -- yes. But 'twas all nought."
"Did ye ever go into the world to try and stop it, Joseph
Poorgrass?"
"Oh ay, tried all sorts o' company. They took me to
Greenhill Fair, and into a great gay jerry-go-nimble show,
where there were women-folk riding round -- standing upon
horses, with hardly anything on but their smocks; but it
didn't cure me a morsel. And then I was put errand-man at
the Women's Skittle Alley at the back of the Tailor's Arms
in Casterbridge. 'Twas a horrible sinful situation, and a
very curious place for a good man. I had to stand and look
ba'dy people in the face from morning till night; but 'twas
no use -- I was just as-bad as ever after all. Blushes hev
been in the family for generations. There, 'tis a happy
providence that I be no worse."
"True," said Jacob Smallbury, deepening his thoughts to a
profounder view of the subject. "'Tis a thought to look at,
that ye might have been worse; but even as you be, 'tis a
very bad affliction for 'ee, Joseph. For ye see, shepherd,
though 'tis very well for a woman, dang it all, 'tis awkward
for a man like him, poor feller?"
"'Tis -- 'tis," said Gabriel, recovering from a meditation.
"Yes, very awkward for the man."
"Ay, and he's very timid, too," observed Jan Coggan. "Once
he had been working late at Yalbury Bottom, and had had a
drap of drink, and lost his way as he was coming home-along
through Yalbury Wood, didn't ye, Master Poorgrass?"
"No, no, no; not that story!" expostulated the modest man,
forcing a laugh to bury his concern.
"---- And so 'a lost himself quite," continued Mr. Coggan,
with an impassive face, implying that a true narrative, like
time and tide, must run its course and would respect no man.
"And as he was coming along in the middle of the night, much
afeared, and not able to find his way out of the trees
nohow, 'a cried out, 'Man-a-lost! man-a-lost!' A owl in a
tree happened to be crying "Whoo-whoo-whoo!" as owls do, you
know, shepherd" (Gabriel nodded), "and Joseph, all in a
tremble, said, 'Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury, sir!'"
"No, no, now -- that's too much!" said the timid man,
becoming a man of brazen courage all of a sudden. "I didn't
say sir. I'll tike my oath I didn't say 'Joseph Poorgrass
o' Weatherbury, sir.' No, no; what's right is right, and I
never said sir to the bird, knowing very well that no man of
a gentleman's rank would be hollering there at that time o'
night. 'Joseph Poorgrass of Weatherbury,' -- that's every
word I said, and I shouldn't ha' said that if 't hadn't been
for Keeper Day's metheglin.... There, 'twas a merciful
thing it ended where it did."
The question of which was right being tacitly waived by the
company, Jan went on meditatively: --
"And he's the fearfullest man, bain't ye, Joseph? Ay,
another time ye were lost by Lambing-Down Gate, weren't ye,
Joseph?"
"I was," replied Poorgrass, as if there were some conditions
too serious even for modesty to remember itself under, this
being one.
"Yes; that were the middle of the night, too. The gate
would not open, try how he would, and knowing there was the
Devil's hand in it, he kneeled down."
"Ay," said Joseph, acquiring confidence from the warmth of
the fire, the cider, and a perception of the narrative
capabilities of the experience alluded to. "My heart died
within me, that time; but I kneeled down and said the Lord's
Prayer, and then the Belief right through, and then the Ten
Commandments, in earnest prayer. But no, the gate wouldn't
open; and then I went on with Dearly Beloved Brethren, and,
thinks I, this makes four, and 'tis all I know out of book,
and if this don't do it nothing will, and I'm a lost man.
Well, when I got to Saying After Me, I rose from my knees
and found the gate would open -- yes, neighbours, the gate
opened the same as ever."
A meditation on the obvious inference was indulged in by
all, and during its continuance each directed his vision
into the ashpit, which glowed like a desert in the tropics
under a vertical sun, shaping their eyes long and liny,
partly because of the light, partly from the depth of the
subject discussed.
Gabriel broke the silence. "What sort of a place is this to
live at, and what sort of a mis'ess is she to work under?"
Gabriel's bosom thrilled gently as he thus slipped under the
notice of the assembly the inner-most subject of his heart.
"We d' know little of her -- nothing. She only showed
herself a few days ago. Her uncle was took bad, and the
doctor was called with his world-wide skill; but he couldn't
save the man. As I take it, she's going to keep on the
farm.
"That's about the shape o't, 'a b'lieve," said Jan Coggan.
"Ay, 'tis a very good family. I'd as soon be under 'em as
under one here and there. Her uncle was a very fair sort of
man. Did ye know en, shepherd -- a bachelor-man?"
"Not at all."
"I used to go to his house a-courting my first wife,
Charlotte, who was his dairymaid. Well, a very good-hearted
man were Farmer Everdene, and I being a respectable young
fellow was allowed to call and see her and drink as much ale
as I liked, but not to carry away any -- outside my skin I
mane of course."
"Ay, ay, Jan Coggan; we know yer maning."
"And so you see 'twas beautiful ale, and I wished to value
his kindness as much as I could, and not to be so ill-
mannered as to drink only a thimbleful, which would have
been insulting the man's generosity ----"
"True, Master Coggan, 'twould so," corroborated Mark Clark.
"---- And so I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going,
and then by the time I got there I were as dry as a lime-
basket -- so thorough dry that that ale would slip down --
ah, 'twould slip down sweet! Happy times! heavenly times!
Such lovely drunks as I used to have at that house! You can
mind, Jacob? You used to go wi' me sometimes."
"I can -- I can," said Jacob. "That one, too, that we had
at Buck's Head on a White Monday was a pretty tipple."
"'Twas. But for a wet of the better class, that brought you
no nearer to the horned man than you were afore you begun,
there was none like those in Farmer Everdene's kitchen. Not
a single damn allowed; no, not a bare poor one, even at the
most cheerful moment when all were blindest, though the good
old word of sin thrown in here and there at such times is a
great relief to a merry soul."
"True," said the maltster. "Nater requires her swearing at
the regular times, or she's not herself; and unholy
exclamations is a necessity of life."
"But Charlotte," continued Coggan -- "not a word of the sort
would Charlotte allow, nor the smallest item of taking in
vain.... Ay, poor Charlotte, I wonder if she had the good
fortune to get into Heaven when 'a died! But 'a was never
much in luck's way, and perhaps 'a went downwards after all,
poor soul."
"And did any of you know Miss Everdene's father and mother?"
inquired the shepherd, who found some difficulty in keeping
the conversation in the desired channel.
"I knew them a little," said Jacob Smallbury; "but they were
townsfolk, and didn't live here. They've been dead for
years. Father, what sort of people were mis'ess' father and
mother?"
"Well," said the maltster, "he wasn't much to look at; but
she was a lovely woman. He was fond enough of her as his
sweetheart."
"Used to kiss her scores and long-hundreds o' times, so
'twas said," observed Coggan.
"He was very proud of her, too, when they were married, as
I've been told," said the maltster.
"Ay," said Coggan. "He admired her so much that he used to
light the candle three time a night to look at her."
"Boundless love; I shouldn't have supposed it in the
universe!" murmered Joseph Poorgrass, who habitually spoke
on a large scale in his moral reflections.
"Well, to be sure," said Gabriel.
"Oh, 'tis true enough. I knowed the man and woman both
well. Levi Everdene -- that was the man's name, sure.
"Man," saith I in my hurry, but he were of a higher circle
of life than that -- 'a was a gentleman-tailor really, worth
scores of pounds. And he became a very celebrated bankrupt
two or three times."
"Oh, I thought he was quite a common man!" said Joseph.
"Oh no, no! That man failed for heaps of money; hundreds in
gold and silver."
The maltster being rather short of breath, Mr. Coggan, after
absently scrutinising a coal which had fallen among the
ashes, took up the narrative, with a private twirl of his
eye: --
"Well, now, you'd hardly believe it, but that man -- our
Miss Everdene's father -- was one of the ficklest husbands
alive, after a while. Understand? 'a didn't want to be
fickle, but he couldn't help it. The pore feller were
faithful and true enough to her in his wish, but his heart
would rove, do what he would. He spoke to me in real
tribulation about it once. "Coggan," he said, "I could
never wish for a handsomer woman than I've got, but feeling
she's ticketed as my lawful wife, I can't help my wicked
heart wandering, do what I will." But at last I believe he
cured it by making her take off her wedding-ring and calling
her by her maiden name as they sat together after the shop
was shut, and so 'a would get to fancy she was only his
sweetheart, and not married to him at all. And as soon as
he could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing
the seventh, 'a got to like her as well as ever, and they
lived on a perfect picture of mutel love."
"Well, 'twas a most ungodly remedy," murmured Joseph
Poorgrass; "but we ought to feel deep cheerfulness that a
happy Providence kept it from being any worse. You see, he
might have gone the bad road and given his eyes to
unlawfulness entirely -- yes, gross unlawfulness, so to say
it."
"You see," said Billy Smallbury, "The man's will was to do
right, sure enough, but his heart didn't chime in."
"He got so much better, that he was quite godly in his later
years, wasn't he, Jan?" said Joseph Poorgrass. "He got
himself confirmed over again in a more serious way, and took
to saying 'Amen' almost as loud as the clerk, and he liked
to copy comforting verses from the tombstones. He used,
too, to hold the money-plate at Let Your Light so Shine, and
stand godfather to poor little come-by-chance children; and
he kept a missionary box upon his table to nab folks
unawares when they called; yes, and he would box the
charity-boys' ears, if they laughed in church, till they
could hardly stand upright, and do other deeds of piety
natural to the saintly inclined."
"Ay, at that time he thought of nothing but high things,"
added Billy Smallbury. "One day Parson Thirdly met him and
said, 'Good-Morning, Mister Everdene; 'tis a fine day!'
'Amen' said Everdene, quite absent-like, thinking only of
religion when he seed a parson. Yes, he was a very
Christian man."
"Their daughter was not at all a pretty chiel at that time,"
said Henery Fray. "Never should have thought she'd have
growed up such a handsome body as she is."
"'Tis to be hoped her temper is as good as her face."
"Well, yes; but the baily will have most to do with the
business and ourselves. Ah!" Henery gazed into the ashpit,
and smiled volumes of ironical knowledge.
"A queer Christian, like the Devil's head in a cowl,[1] as
the saying is," volunteered Mark Clark.
[1] This phrase is a conjectural emendation of the
unintelligible expression, "as the Devil said to the Owl,"
used by the natives.
"He is," said Henery, implying that irony must cease at a
certain point. "Between we two, man and man, I believe that
man would as soon tell a lie Sundays as working-days -- that
I do so."
"Good faith, you do talk!" said Gabriel.
"True enough," said the man of bitter moods, looking round
upon the company with the antithetic laughter that comes
from a keener appreciation of the miseries of life than
ordinary men are capable of. 'Ah, there's people of one
sort, and people of another, but that man -- bless your
souls!"
Gabriel thought fit to change the subject. "You must be a
very aged man, malter, to have sons growed mild and ancient"
he remarked.
"Father's so old that 'a can't mind his age, can ye,
father?" interposed Jacob. "And he's growed terrible
crooked too, lately," Jacob continued, surveying his
father's figure, which was rather more bowed than his own.
"Really one may say that father there is three-double."
"Crooked folk will last a long while," said the maltster,
grimly, and not in the best humour.
"Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer life,
father -- wouldn't ye, shepherd?"
"Ay that I should," said Gabriel with the heartiness of a
man who had longed to hear it for several months. "What may
your age be, malter?"
The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated form for
emphasis, and elongating his gaze to the remotest point of
the ashpit, said, in the slow speech justifiable when the
importance of a subject is so generally felt that any
mannerism must be tolerated in getting at it, "Well, I don't
mind the year I were born in, but perhaps I can reckon up
the places I've lived at, and so get it that way. I bode at
Upper Longpuddle across there" (nodding to the north) "till
I were eleven. I bode seven at Kingsbere" (nodding to the
east) "where I took to malting. I went therefrom to
Norcombe, and malted there two-and-twenty years, and-two-
and-twenty years I was there turnip-hoeing and harvesting.
Ah, I knowed that old place, Norcombe, years afore you were
thought of, Master Oak" (Oak smiled sincere belief in the
fact). "Then I malted at Durnover four year, and four year
turnip-hoeing; and I was fourteen times eleven months at
Millpond St. Jude's" (nodding north-west-by-north). "Old
Twills wouldn't hire me for more than eleven months at a
time, to keep me from being chargeable to the parish if so
be I was disabled. Then I was three year at Mellstock,
and I've been here one-and-thirty year come Candlemas. How
much is that?"
"Hundred and seventeen," chuckled another old gentleman,
given to mental arithmetic and little conversation, who had
hitherto sat unobserved in a corner.
"Well, then, that's my age," said the maltster,
emphatically.
"O no, father!" said Jacob. "Your turnip-hoeing were in the
summer and your malting in the winter of the same years, and
ye don't ought to count-both halves father."
"Chok' it all! I lived through the summers, didn't I? That's
my question. I suppose ye'll say next I be no age at all to
speak of?"
"Sure we shan't," said Gabriel, soothingly.
"Ye be a very old aged person, malter," attested Jan Coggan,
also soothingly. "We all know that, and ye must have a
wonderful talented constitution to be able to live so long,
mustn't he, neighbours?"
"True, true; ye must, malter, wonderful," said the meeting
unanimously.
The maltster, being know pacified, was even generous enough
to voluntarily disparage in a slight degree the virtue of
having lived a great many years, by mentioning that the cup
they were drinking out of was three years older than he.
While the cup was being examined, the end of Gabriel Oak's
flute became visible over his smock-frock pocket, and Henery
Fray exclaimed, "Surely, shepherd, I seed you blowing into a
great flute by now at Casterbridge?"
"You did," said Gabriel, blushing faintly. "I've been in
great trouble, neighbours, and was driven to it. I used not
to be so poor as I be now."
"Never mind, heart!" said Mark Clark. You should take it
careless-like, shepherd, and your time will come. But we
could thank ye for a tune, if ye bain't too tired?"
"Neither drum nor trumpet have I heard since Christmas,"
said Jan Coggan. "Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!"
"Ay, that I will," said Gabriel, pulling out his flute and
putting it together. "A poor tool, neighbours; but such as
I can do ye shall have and welcome."
Oak then struck up "Jockey to the Fair," and played that
sparkling melody three times through accenting the notes in
the third round in a most artistic and lively manner by
bending his body in small jerks and tapping with his foot to
beat time.
"He can blow the flute very well -- that 'a can," said a
young married man, who having no individuality worth
mentioning was known as "Susan Tall's husband." He
continued, "I'd as lief as not be able to blow into a flute
as well as that."
"He's a clever man, and 'tis a true comfort for us to have
such a shepherd," murmured Joseph Poorgrass, in a soft
cadence. "We ought to feel full o' thanksgiving that he's
not a player of ba'dy songs 'instead of these merry tunes;
for 'twould have been just as easy for God to have made the
shepherd a loose low man -- a man of iniquity, so to speak
it -- as what he is. Yes, for our wives' and daughters'
sakes we should feel real thanks giving."
"True, true, -- real thanksgiving!" dashed in Mark Clark
conclusively, not feeling it to be of any consequence to his
opinion that he had only heard about a word and three-
quarters of what Joseph had said.
"Yes," added Joseph, beginning to feel like a man in the
Bible; "for evil do thrive so in these times that ye may be
as much deceived in the cleanest shaved and whitest shirted
man as in the raggedest tramp upon the turnpike, if I may
term it so."
"Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd," said Henery Fray,
criticising Gabriel with misty eyes as he entered upon his
second tune. "Yes -- now I see 'ee blowing into the flute I
know 'ee to be the same man I see play at Casterbridge, for
yer mouth were scrimped up and yer eyes a-staring out like a
strangled man's -- just as they be now."
"'Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look
such a scarecrow," observed Mr. Mark Clark, with additional
criticism of Gabriel's countenance, the latter person
jerking out, with the ghastly grimace required by the
instrument, the chorus of "Dame Durden:" --
'Twas Moll' and Bet', and Doll' and Kate',
And Dor'-othy Drag'-gle Tail'.
"I hope you don't mind that young man's bad manners in
naming your features?" whispered Joseph to Gabriel.
"Not at all," said Mr. Oak.
"For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd,"
continued Joseph Poorgrass, with winning sauvity.
"Ay, that ye be, shepard," said the company.
"Thank you very much," said Oak, in the modest tone good
manners demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let
Bathsheba see him playing the flute; in this resolve showing
a discretion equal to that related to its sagacious
inventress, the divine Minerva herself.
"Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church,"
said the old maltster, not pleased at finding himself left
out of the subject "we were called the handsomest couple in
the neighbourhood -- everybody said so."
"Danged if ye bain't altered now, malter," said a voice with
the vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkably
evident truism. It came from the old man in the background,
whose offensiveness and spiteful ways were barely atoned for
by the occasional chuckle he contributed to general laughs.
"O no, no," said Gabriel.
"Don't ye play no more shepherd" said Susan Tall's husband,
the young married man who had spoken once before. "I must
be moving and when there's tunes going on I seem as if hung
in wires. If I thought after I'd left that music was still
playing, and I not there, I should be quite melancholy-
like."
"What's yer hurry then, Laban?" inquired Coggan. "You used
to bide as late as the latest."
"Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman,
and she's my vocation now, and so ye see ----" The young
man halted lamely.
"New Lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose," remarked
Coggan.
"Ay, 'a b'lieve -- ha, ha!" said Susan Tall's husband, in a
tone intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes
without minding them at all. The young man then wished them
good-night and withdrew.
Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and
went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A
few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their
legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry.
Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming
with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident, which
happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.
"O -- what's the matter, what's the matter, Henery?" said
Joseph, starting back.
"What's a-brewing, Henrey?" asked Jacob and Mark Clark.
"Baily Pennyways -- Baily Pennyways -- I said so; yes, I
said so!"
"What, found out stealing anything?"
"Stealing it is. The news is, that after Miss Everdene got
home she went out again to see all was safe, as she usually
do, and coming in found Baily Pennyways creeping down the
granary steps with half a a bushel of barley. She fleed at
him like a cat -- never such a tomboy as she is -- of course
I speak with closed doors?"
"You do -- you do, Henery."
"She fleed at him, and, to cut a long story short, he owned
to having carried off five sack altogether, upon her
promising not to persecute him. Well, he's turned out neck
and crop, and my question is, who's going to be baily now?"
The question was such a profound one that Henery was obliged
to drink there and then from the large cup till the bottom
was distinctly visible inside. Before he had replaced it on
the table, in came the young man, Susan Tall's husband, in a
still greater hurry.
"Have ye heard the news that's all over parish?"
"About Baily Pennyways?"
"But besides that?"
"No -- not a morsel of it!" they replied, looking into the
very midst of Laban Tall as if to meet his words half-way
down his throat.
"What a night of horrors!" murmured Joseph Poorgrass, waving
his hands spasmodically. "I've had the news-bell ringing in
my left ear quite bad enough for a murder, and I've seen a
magpie all alone!"
"Fanny Robin -- Miss everdene's youngest servant -- can't be
found. They've been wanting to lock up the door these two
hours, but she isn't come in. And they don't know what to
do about going to hed for fear of locking her out. They
wouldn't be so concerned if she hadn't been noticed in such
low spirits these last few days, and Maryann d' think the
beginning of a crowner's inquest has happened to the poor
girl."
"Oh -- 'tis burned -- 'tis burned!" came from Joseph
Poorgrass's dry lips.
"No -- 'tis drowned!" said Tall.
"Or 'tis her father's razor!" suggested Billy Smallbury,
with a vivid sense of detail.
"Well -- Miss Everdene wants to speak to one or two of us
before we go to bed. What with this trouble about the
baily, and now about the girl, mis'ess is almost wild."
They all hastened up the lane to the farmhouse, excepting
the old maltster, whom neither news, fire, rain, nor thunder
could draw from his hole. There, as the others' footsteps
died away he sat down again and continued gazing as usual
into the furnace with his red, bleared eyes.
From the bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba's head
and shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen
extended into the air.
"Are any of my men among you?" she said anxiously.
"Yes, ma'am, several," said Susan Tall's husband.
"To-morrow morning I wish two or three of you to make
inquiries in the villages round if they have seen such a
person as Fanny Robin. Do it quietly; there is no reason
for alarm as yet. She must have left whilst we were all at
the fire."
"I beg yer pardon, but had she any young man courting her in
the parish, ma'am?" asked Jacob Smallbury.
"I don't know," said Bathsheba.
"I've never heard of any such thing, ma'am," said two or
three.
"It is hardly likely, either," continued Bathsheba. "For
any lover of hers might have come to the house if he had
been a respectable lad. The most mysterious matter
connected with her absence -- indeed, the only thing which
gives me serious alarm -- is that she was seen to go out of
the house by Maryann with only her indoor working gown on --
not even a bonnet."
"And you mean, ma'am, excusing my words, that a young woman
would hardly go to see her young man without dressing up,"
said Jacob, turning his mental vision upon past experiences.
"That's true -- she would not, ma'am."
"She had, I think, a bundle, though I couldn't see very
well," said a female voice from another window, which seemed
that of Maryann. "But she had no young man about here.
Hers lives in Casterbridge, and I believe he's a soldier."
"Do you know his name?" Bathsheba said.
"No, mistress; she was very close about it."
"Perhaps I might be able to find out if I went to
Casterbridge barracks," said William Smallbury.
"Very well; if she doesn't return tomorrow, mind you go
there and try to discover which man it is, and see him. I
feel more responsible than I should if she had had any
friends or relations alive. I do hope she has come to no
harm through a man of that kind.... And then there's this
disgraceful affair of the bailiff -- but I can't speak of
him now."
Bathsheba had so many reasons for uneasiness that it seemed
she did not think it worth while to dwell upon any
particular one. "Do as I told you, then," she said in
conclusion, closing the casement.
"Ay, ay, mistress; we will," they replied, and moved away.
That night at Coggan's, Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of
closed eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement,
like a river flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had
always been the time at which he saw Bathsheba most vividly,
and through the slow hours of shadow he tenderly regarded
her image now. It is rarely that the pleasures of the
imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,
but they possibly did with Oak to-night, for the delight of
merely seeing her effaced for the time his perception of the
great difference between seeing and possessing.
He also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and
books from Norcombe. THE YOUNG MAN'S BEST COMPANION, THE
FARRIER'S SURE GUIDE, THE VETERINARY SURGEON, PARADISE LOST,
THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, ROBINSON CRUSOE, ASH'S DICTIONARY,
the Walkingame's ARITHMETIC, constituted his library; and
though a limited series, it was one from which he had
acquired more sound information by diligent perusal than
many a man of opportunities has done from a furlong of laden
shelves.
CHAPTER IX
THE HOMESTEAD -- A VISITOR -- HALF-CONFIDENCES
BY daylight, the Bower of Oak's new-found mistress,
Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of
the early stage of Classic Renaissance as regards its
architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance
that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the
memorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether
effaced as a distinct property, and merged in the vast tract
of a non-resident landlord, which comprised several such
modest demesnes.
Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its
front, and above the roof the chimneys were panelled or
columnar, some coped gables with finials and like features
still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction. Soft
brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the
stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen
sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings. A
gravel walk leading from the door to the road in front was
encrusted at the sides with more moss -- here it was a
silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel being
visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre.
This circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole
prospect here, together with the animated and contrasting
state of the reverse facade, suggested to the imagination
that on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes
the vital principle of the house had turned round inside its
body to face the other way. Reversals of this kind, strange
deformities, tremendous paralyses, are often seen to be
inflicted by trade upon edifices -- either individual or in
the aggregate as streets and towns -- which were originally
planned for pleasure alone.
Lively voices were heard this morning in the upper rooms,
the main staircase to which was of hard oak, the balusters,
heavy as bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint
fashion of their century, the handrail as stout as a
parapet-top, and the stairs themselves continually twisting
round like a person trying to look over his shoulder. Going
up, the floors above were found to have a very irregular
surface, rising to ridges, sinking into valleys; and being
just then uncarpeted, the face of the boards was seen to be
eaten into innumerable vermiculations. Every window replied
by a clang to the opening and shutting of every door, a
tremble followed every bustling movement, and a creak
accompanied a walker about the house, like a spirit,
wherever he went.
In the room from which the conversation proceeded Bathsheba
and her servant-companion, Liddy Smallbury were to be
discovered sitting upon the floor, and sorting a
complication of papers, books, bottles, and rubbish spread
out thereon -- remnants from the household stores of the
late occupier. Liddy, the maltster's great-granddaughter,
was about Bathsheba's equal in age, and her face was a
prominent advertisement of the light-hearted English country
girl. The beauty her features might have lacked in form was
amply made up for by perfection of hue, which at this
winter-time was the softened ruddiness on a surface of high
rotundity that we meet with in a Terburg or a Gerard Douw;
and, like the presentations of those great colourists, it
was a face which kept well back from the boundary between
comeliness and the ideal. Though elastic in nature she was
less daring than Bathsheba, and occasionally showed some
earnestness, which consisted half of genuine feeling, and
half of mannerliness superadded by way of duty.
Through a partly-opened door the noise of a scrubbing-brush
led up to the charwoman, Maryann Money, a person who for a
face had a circular disc, furrowed less by age than by long
gazes of perplexity at distant objects. To think of her was
to get good-humoured; to speak of her was to raise the image
of a dried Normandy pippin.
"Stop your scrubbing a moment," said Bathsheba through the
door to her. "I hear something."
Maryann suspended the brush.
The tramp of a horse was apparent, approaching the front of
the building. The paces slackened, turned in at the wicket,
and, what was most unusual, came up the mossy path close to
the door. The door was tapped with the end of a crop or
stick.
"What impertinence!" said Liddy, in a low voice. "To ride
up the footpath like that! Why didn't he stop at the gate?
Lord! 'Tis a gentleman! I see the top of his hat."
"Be quiet!" said Bathsheba.
The further expression of Liddy's concern was continued by
aspect instead of narrative.
"Why doesn't Mrs. Coggan go to the door?" Bath-sheba
continued.
Rat-tat-tat-tat resounded more decisively from Bath-sheba's
oak.
"Maryann, you go!" said she, fluttering under the onset of
a crowd of romantic possibilities.
"Oh ma'am -- see, here's a mess!"
The argument was unanswerable after a glance at Maryann.
"Liddy -- you must," said Bathsheba.
Liddy held up her hands and arms, coated with dust from the
rubbish they were sorting, and looked imploringly at her
mistress.
"There -- Mrs. Coggan is going!" said Bathsheba, exhaling
her relief in the form of a long breath which had lain in
her bosom a minute or more.
The door opened, and a deep voice said --
"Is Miss Everdene at home?"
"I'll see, sir," said Mrs. Coggan, and in a minute appeared
in the room.
"Dear, what a thirtover place this world is!" continued Mrs.
Coggan (a wholesome-looking lady who had a voice for each
class of remark according to the emotion involved; who could
toss a pancake or twirl a mop with the accuracy of pure
mathematics, and who at this moment showed hands shaggy with
fragments of dough and arms encrusted with flour). "I am
never up to my elbows, Miss, in making a pudding but one of
two things do happen -- either my nose must needs begin
tickling, and I can't live without scratching it, or
somebody knocks at the door. Here's Mr. Boldwood wanting to
see you, Miss Everdne."
A woman's dress being a part of her countenance, and any
disorder in the one being of the same nature with a
malformation or wound in the other, Bathsheba said at once -
-
"I can't see him in this state. Whatever shall I do?"
Not-at-homes were hardly naturalized in Weatherbury
farmhouses, so Liddy suggested -- "Say you're a fright with
dust, and can't come down."
"Yes -- that sounds very well," said Mrs. Coggan,
critically.
"Say I can't see him -- that will do."
Mrs. Coggan went downstairs, and returned the answer as
requested, adding, however, on her own responsibility, "Miss
is dusting bottles, sir, and is quite a object -- that's why
'tis."
"Oh, very well," said the deep voice indifferently. "All I
wanted to ask was, if anything had been heard of Fanny
Robin?"
"Nothing, sir -- but we may know to-night. William
Smallbury is gone to Casterbridge, where her young man
lives, as is supposed, and the other men be inquiring about
everywhere."
The horse's tramp then recommenced and retreated, and the
door closed.
"Who is Mr. Boldwood?" said Bathsheba.
"A gentleman-farmer at Little Weatherbury."
"Married?"
"No, miss."
"How old is he?"
"Forty, I should say -- very handsome -- rather stern-
looking -- and rich."
"What a bother this dusting is! I am always in some
unfortunate plight or other," Bathsheba said, complainingly.
"Why should he inquire about Fanny?"
"Oh, because, as she had no friends in her childhood, he
took her and put her to school, and got her her place here
under your uncle. He's a very kind man that way, but Lord --
there!"
"What?"
"Never was such a hopeless man for a woman! He's been
courted by sixes and sevens -- all the girls, gentle and
simple, for miles round, have tried him. Jane Perkins
worked at him for two months like a slave, and the two Miss
Taylors spent a year upon him, and he cost Farmer Ives's
daughter nights of tears and twenty pounds' worth of new
clothes; but Lord -- the money might as well have been
thrown out of the window."
A little boy came up at this moment and looked in upon them.
This child was one of the Coggans, who, with the Smallburys,
were as common among the families of this district as the
Avons and Derwents among our rivers. He always had a
loosened tooth or a cut finger to show to particular
friends, which he did with an air of being thereby elevated
above the common herd of afflictionless humanity -- to which
exhibition people were expected to say "Poor child!" with a
dash of congratulation as well as pity.
"I've got a pen-nee!" said Master Coggan in a scanning
measure.
"Well -- who gave it you, Teddy?" said Liddy.
"Mis-terr Bold-wood! He gave it to me for opening the gate."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Where are you going, my little man?' and I said,
'To Miss Everdene's please,' and he said, 'She is a staid
woman, isn't she, my little man?' and I said, 'Yes.'"
"You naughty child! What did you say that for?"
"'Cause he gave me the penny!"
"What a pucker everything is in!" said Bathsheba,
discontentedly when the child had gone. "Get away, Maryann,
or go on with your scrubbing, or do something! You ought to
be married by this time, and not here troubling me!"
"Ay, mistress -- so I did. But what between the poor men I
won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a
pelicon in the wilderness!"
"Did anybody ever want to marry you miss?" Liddy ventured to
ask when they were again alone. "Lots of 'em, I daresay?"
Bathsheba paused, as if about to refuse a reply, but the
temptation to say yes, since it was really in her power was
irresistible by aspiring virginity, in spite of her spleen
at having been published as old.
"A man wanted to once," she said, in a highly experienced
tone and the image of Gabriel Oak, as the farmer, rose
before her.
"How nice it must seem!" said Liddy, with the fixed features
of mental realization. "And you wouldn't have him?"
"He wasn't quite good enough for me."
"How sweet to be able to disdain, when most of us are glad
to say, 'Thank you!' I seem I hear it. 'No, sir -- I'm your
better.' or 'Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of
consequence.' And did you love him, miss?"
"Oh, no. But I rather liked him."
"Do you now?"
"Of course not -- what footsteps are those I hear?"
Liddy looked from a back window into the courtyard behind,
which was now getting low-toned and dim with the earliest
films of night. A crooked file of men was approaching the
back door. The whole string of trailing individuals
advanced in the completest balance of intention, like the
remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpae, which,
distinctly organized in other respects, have one will common
to a whole family. Some were, as usual, in snow-white
smock-frocks of Russia duck, and some in whitey-brown ones
of drabbet -- marked on the wrists, breasts, backs, and
sleeves with honeycomb-work. Two or three women in pattens
brought up the rear.
"The Philistines be upon us," said Liddy, making her nose
white against the glass.
"Oh, very well. Maryann, go down and keep them in the
kitchen till I am dressed, and then show them in to me in
the hall."
CHAPTER X
MISTRESS AND MEN
HALF-AN-HOUR later Bathsheba, in finished dress, and
followed by Liddy, entered the upper end of the old hall to
find that her men had all deposited themselves on a long
form and a settle at the lower extremity. She sat down at a
table and opened the time-book, pen in her hand, with a
canvas money-bag beside her. From this she poured a small
heap of coin. Liddy chose a position at her elbow and began
to sew, sometimes pausing and looking round, or with the air
of a privileged person, taking up one of the half-sovereigns
lying before her and surveying it merely as a work of art,
while strictly preventing her countenance from expressing
any wish to possess it as money.
"Now before I begin, men," said Bathsheba, "I have two
matters to speak of. The first is that the bailiff is
dismissed for thieving, and that I have formed a resolution
to have no bailiff at all, but to manage everything with my
own head and hands."
The men breathed an audible breath of amazement.
"The next matter is, have you heard anything of Fanny?"
"Nothing, ma'am."
"Have you done anything?"
"I met Farmer Boldwood," said Jacob Smallbury, "and I went
with him and two of his men, and dragged Newmill Pond, but
we found nothing."
"And the new shepherd have been to Buck's Head, by Yalbury,
thinking she had gone there, but nobody had seed her," said
Laban Tall.
"Hasn't William Smallbury been to Casterbridge?"
"Yes, ma'am, but he's not yet come home. He promised to be
back by six."
"It wants a quarter to six at present," said Bathsheba,
looking at her watch. "I daresay he'll be in directly.
Well, now then" -- she looked into the book -- "Joseph
Poorgrass, are you there?"
"Yes, sir -- ma'am I mane," said the person addressed. "I
be the personal name of Poorgrass."
"And what are you?"
"Nothing in my own eye. In the eye of other people -- well,
I don't say it; though public thought will out."
"What do you do on the farm?"
"I do do carting things all the year, and in seed time I
shoots the rooks and sparrows, and helps at pig-killing,
sir."
"How much to you?"
"Please nine and ninepence and a good halfpenny where 'twas
a bad one, sir -- ma'am I mane."
"Quite correct. Now here are ten shillings in addition as a
small present, as I am a new comer."
Bathsheba blushed slightly at the sense of being generous in
public, and Henery Fray, who had drawn up towards her chair,
lifted his eyebrows and fingers to express amazement on a
small scale.
"How much do I owe you -- that man in the corner -- what's
your name?" continued Bathsheba.
"Matthew Moon, ma'am," said a singular framework of clothes
with nothing of any consequence inside them, which advanced
with the toes in no definite direction forwards, but turned
in or out as they chanced to swing.
"Matthew Mark, did you say? -- speak out -- I shall not hurt
you," inquired the young farmer, kindly.
"Matthew Moon, mem," said Henery Fray, correctingly, from
behind her chair, to which point he had edged himself.
"Matthew Moon," murmured Bathsheba, turning her bright eyes
to the book. "Ten and twopence halfpenny is the sum put
down to you, I see?"
"Yes, mis'ess," said Matthew, as the rustle of wind among
dead leaves.
"Here it is, and ten shillings. Now the next -- Andrew
Randle, you are a new man, I hear. How come you to leave
your last farm?"
"P-p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-l-l-l-l-ease, ma'am, p-p-p-p-pl-pl-
pl-pl-please, ma'am-please'm-please'm ----"
"'A's a stammering man, mem," said Henery Fray in an
undertone, "and they turned him away because the only time
he ever did speak plain he said his soul was his own, and
other iniquities, to the squire. 'A can cuss, mem, as well
as you or I, but 'a can't speak a common speech to save his
life."
"Andrew Randle, here's yours -- finish thanking me in a day
or two. Temperance Miller -- oh, here's another, Soberness
-- both women I suppose?"
"Yes'm. Here we be, 'a b'lieve," was echoed in shrill
unison.
"What have you been doing?"
"Tending thrashing-machine and wimbling haybonds, and saying
'Hoosh!' to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds
and planting Early Flourballs and Thompson's Wonderfuls with
a dibble."
"Yes -- I see. Are they satisfactory women?" she inquired
softly of Henery Fray.
"Oh mem -- don't ask me! Yielding women -- as scarlet a pair
as ever was!" groaned Henery under his breath.
"Sit down.
"Who, mem?"
"Sit down,"
Joseph Poorgrass, in the background twitched, and his lips
became dry with fear of some terrible consequences, as he
saw Bathsheba summarily speaking, and Henery slinking off to
a corner.
"Now the next. Laban Tall, you'll stay on working for me?"
"For you or anybody that pays me well, ma'am," replied the
young married man.
"True -- the man must live!" said a woman in the back
quarter, who had just entered with clicking pattens.
"What woman is that?" Bathsheba asked.
"I be his lawful wife!" continued the voice with greater
prominence of manner and tone. This lady called herself
five-and-twenty, looked thirty, passed as thirty-five, and
was forty. She was a woman who never, like some newly
married, showed conjugal tenderness in public, perhaps
because she had none to show.
"Oh, you are," said Bathsheba. "Well, Laban, will you stay
on?"
"Yes, he'll stay, ma'am!" said again the shrill tongue of
Laban's lawful wife.
"Well, he can speak for himself, I suppose."
"Oh Lord, not he, ma'am! A simple tool. Well enough, but a
poor gawkhammer mortal," the wife replied
"Heh-heh-heh!" laughed the married man with a hideous effort
of appreciation, for he was as irrepressibly good-humoured
under ghastly snubs as a parliamentary candidate on the
hustings.
The names remaining were called in the same manner.
"Now I think I have done with you," said Bathsheba, closing
the book and shaking back a stray twine of hair. "Has
William Smallbury returned?"
"No, ma'am."
"The new shepherd will want a man under him," suggested
Henery Fray, trying to make himself official again by a
sideway approach towards her chair.
"Oh -- he will. Who can he have?"
"Young Cain Ball is a very good lad," Henery said, "and
Shepherd Oak don't mind his youth?" he added, turning with
an apologetic smile to the shepherd, who had just appeared
on the scene, and was now leaning against the doorpost with
his arms folded.
"No, I don't mind that," said Gabriel.
"How did Cain come by such a name?" asked Bathsheba.
"Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-
read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking
'twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, but 'twas too
late, for the name could never be got rid of in the parish.
'Tis very unfortunate for the boy."
"It is rather unfortunate."
"Yes. However, we soften it down as much as we can, and
call him Cainy. Ah, pore widow-woman! she cried her heart
out about it almost. She was brought up by a very heathen
father and mother, who never sent her to church or school,
and it shows how the sins of the parents are visited upon
the children, mem."
Mr. Fray here drew up his features to the mild degree of
melancholy required when the persons involved in the given
misfortune do not belong to your own family.
"Very well then, Cainey Ball to be under-shepherd. And you
quite understand your duties? -- you I mean, Gabriel Oak?"
"Quite well, I thank you, Miss Everdene," said Shepard Oak
from the doorpost. "If I don't, I'll inquire." Gabriel was
rather staggered by the remarkable coolness of her manner.
Certainly nobody without previous information would have
dreamt that Oak and the handsome woman before whom he stood
had ever been other than strangers. But perhaps her air was
the inevitable result of the social rise which had advanced
her from a cottage to a large house and fields. The case is
not unexampled in high places. When, in the writings of the
later poets, Jove and his family are found to have moved
from their cramped quarters on the peak of Olympus into the
wide sky above it, their words show a proportionate increase
of arrogance and reserve.
Footsteps were heard in the passage, combining in their
character the qualities both of weight and measure, rather
at the expense of velocity.
(All.) "Here's Billy Smallbury come from Casterbridge."
"And what's the news?" said Bathsheba, as William, after
marching to the middle of the hall, took a handkerchief from
his hat and wiped his forehead from its centre to its
remoter boundaries.
"I should have been sooner, miss," he said, "if it hadn't
been for the weather." He then stamped with each foot
severely, and on looking down his boots were perceived to be
clogged with snow.
"Come at last, is it?" said Henery.
"Well, what about Fanny?" said Bathsheba.
"Well, ma'am, in round numbers, she's run away with the
soldiers," said William.
"No; not a steady girl like Fanny!"
"I'll tell ye all particulars. When I got to Casterbridge
Barracks, they said, 'The Eleventh Dragoon-Guards be gone
away, and new troops have come.' The Eleventh left last week
for Melchester and onwards. The Route came from Government
like a thief in the night, as is his nature to, and afore
the Eleventh knew it almost, they were on the march. They
passed near here."
Gabriel had listened with interest. "I saw them go," he
said.
"Yes," continued William, "they pranced down the street
playing 'The Girl I Left Behind Me,' so 'tis said, in
glorious notes of triumph. Every looker-on's inside shook
with the blows of the great drum to his deepest vitals, and
there was not a dry eye throughout the town among the
public-house people and the nameless women!"
"But they're not gone to any war?"
"No, ma'am; but they be gone to take the places of them who
may, which is very close connected. And so I said to
myself, Fanny's young man was one of the regiment, and she's
gone after him. There, ma'am, that's it in black and
white."
"Did you find out his name?"
"No; nobody knew it. I believe he was higher in rank than a
private."
Gabriel remained musing and said nothing, for he was in
doubt.
"Well, we are not likely to know more to-night, at any
rate," said Bathsheba. "But one of you had better run
across to Farmer Boldwood's and tell him that much."
She then rose; but before retiring, addressed a few words to
them with a pretty dignity, to which her mourning dress
added a soberness that was hardly to be found in the words
themselves.
"Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don't
yet know my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do
my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you.
Don't any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but
I hope not) suppose that because I'm a woman I don't
understand the difference between bad goings-on and good."
(All.) "No'm!"
(Liddy.) "Excellent well said."
"I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield
before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you
are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
(All.) "Yes'm!"
"And so good-night."
(All.) "Good-night, ma'am."
Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table, and
surged out of the hall, her black silk dress licking up a
few straws and dragging them along with a scratching noise
upon the floor. Liddy, elevating her feelings to the
occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off behind
Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from
travesty, and the door was closed.
CHAPTER XI
OUTSIDE THE BARRACKS -- SNOW -- A MEETING
FOR dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the
outskirts of a certain town and military station, many miles
north of Weatherbury, at a later hour on this same snowy
evening -- if that may be called a prospect of which the
chief constituent was darkness.
It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without
causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with
impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks
to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of
memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for
ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not
prompt to enterprise.
The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a
river, behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a
tract of land, partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at
its remote verge, to a wide undulating uplan.
The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of
this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close
observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is
that their media of manifestation are less trite and
familiar than such well-known ones as the bursting of the
buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are not so stealthy and
gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering the
general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to
the country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages,
wherein might have been successively observed the retreat of
the snakes, the transformation of the ferns, the filling of
the pools, a rising of fogs, the embrowning by frost, the
collapse of the fungi, and an obliteration by snow.
This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the
aforesaid moor, and for the first time in the season its
irregularities were forms without features; suggestive of
anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more character
than that of being the limit of something else -- the lowest
layer of a firmament of snow. From this chaotic skyful of
crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received
additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked
thereby. The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low,
and formed as it were the roof of a large dark cavern,
gradually sinking in upon its floor; for the instinctive
thought was that the snow lining the heavens and that
encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without
any intervening stratum of air at all.
We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics;
which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in
respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both.
These features made up the mass. If anything could be
darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any thing could
be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The
indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by
chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly
signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the
upper part. Below, down to the water's edge, the flat was
unbroken by hole or projection.
An indescribable succession of dull blows, perplexing in
their regularity, sent their sound with difficulty through
the fluffy atmosphere. It was a neighbouring clock striking
ten. The bell was in the open air, and being overlaid with
several inches of muffling snow, had lost its voice for the
time.
About this hour the snow abated: ten flakes fell where
twenty had fallen, then one had the room of ten. Not long
after a form moved by the brink of the river.
By its outline upon the colourless background, a close
observer might have seen that it was small. This was all
that was positively discoverable, though it seemed human.
The shape went slowly along, but without much exertion, for
the snow, though sudden, was not as yet more than two inches
deep. At this time some words were spoken aloud: --
"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."
Between each utterance the little shape advanced about half
a dozen yards. It was evident now that the windows high in
the wall were being counted. The word "Five" represented
the fifth window from the end of the wall.
Here the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller. The figure was
stooping. Then a morsel of snow flew across the river
towards the fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a
point several yards from its mark. The throw was the idea
of a man conjoined with the execution of a woman. No man
who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or squirrel in his
childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter
imbecility as was shown here.
Another attempt, and another; till by degrees the wall must
have become pimpled with the adhering lumps of snow At last
one fragment struck the fifth window.
The river would have been seen by day to be of that deep
smooth sort which races middle and sides with the same
gliding precision, any irregularities of speed being
immediately corrected by a small whirlpool. Nothing was
heard in reply to the signal but the gurgle and cluck of one
of these invisible wheels -- together with a few small
sounds which a sad man would have called moans, and a happy
man laughter -- caused by the flapping of the waters against
trifling objects in other parts of the stream.
The window was struck again in the same manner.
Then a noise was heard, apparently produced by the opening
of the window. This was followed by a voice from the same
quarter.
"Who's there?"
The tones were masculine, and not those of surprise. The
high wall being that of a barrack, and marriage being looked
upon with disfavour in the army, assignations and
communications had probably been made across the river
before tonight.
"Is it Sergeant Troy?" said the blurred spot in the snow,
tremulously.
This person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth,
and the other speaker so much a part of the building, that
one would have said the wall was holding a conversation with
the snow.
"Yes," came suspiciously from the shadow. "What girl are
you?"
"Oh, Frank -- don't you know me?" said the spot. "Your
wife, Fanny Robin."
"Fanny!" said the wall, in utter astonishment.
"Yes," said the girl, with a half-suppressed gasp of
emotion.
There was something in the woman's tone which is not that of
the wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely
a husband's. The dialogue went on:
"How did you come here?"
"I asked which was your window. Forgive me!"
"I did not expect you to-night. Indeed, I did not think you
would come at all. It was a wonder you found me here. I am
orderly to-morrow."
"You said I was to come."
"Well -- I said that you might."
"Yes, I mean that I might. You are glad to see me, Frank?"
"Oh yes -- of course."
"Can you -- come to me!"
My dear Fan, no! The bugle has sounded, the barrack gates
are closed, and I have no leave. We are all of us as good
as in the county gaol till to-morrow morning."
"Then I shan't see you till then!" The words were in a
faltering tone of disappointment.
"How did you get here from Weatherbury?"
"I walked -- some part of the way -- the rest by the
carriers."
"I am surprised."
"Yes -- so am I. And Frank, when will it be?"
"What?"
"That you promised."
"I don't quite recollect."
"O you do! Don't speak like that. It weighs me to the
earth. It makes me say what ought to be said first by you."
"Never mind -- say it."
"O, must I? -- it is, when shall we be married, Frank?"
"Oh, I see. Well -- you have to get proper clothes."
"I have money. Will it be by banns or license?"
"Banns, I should think."
"And we live in two parishes."
"Do we? What then?"
"My lodgings are in St. Mary's, and this is not. So they
will have to be published in both."
"Is that the law?"
"Yes. O Frank -- you think me forward, I am afraid! Don't,
dear Frank -- will you -- for I love you so. And you said
lots of times you would marry me, and and -- I -- I -- I ---
-"
"Don't cry, now! It is foolish. If I said so, of course I
will."
"And shall I put up the banns in my parish, and will you in
yours?"
"Yes"
"To-morrow?"
"Not tomorrow. We'll settle in a few days."
"You have the permission of the officers?"
"No, not yet."
"O -- how is it? You said you almost had before you left
Casterbridge."
"The fact is, I forgot to ask. Your coming like this is so
sudden and unexpected."
"Yes -- yes -- it is. It was wrong of me to worry you.
I'll go away now. Will you come and see me to-morrow, at
Mrs. Twills's, in North Street? I don't like to come to the
Barracks. There are bad women about, and they think me
one."
"Quite, so. I'll come to you, my dear. Good-night."
"Good-night, Frank -- good-night!"
And the noise was again heard of a window closing. The
little spot moved away. When she passed the corner a
subdued exclamation was heard inside the wall.
"Ho -- ho -- Sergeant -- ho -- ho!" An expostulation
followed, but it was indistinct; and it became lost amid a
low peal of laughter, which was hardly distinguishable from
the gurgle of the tiny whirlpools outside.
CHAPTER XII
FARMERS -- A RULE -- IN EXCEPTION
THE first public evidence of Bathsheba's decision to be a
farmer in her own person and by proxy no more was her
appearance the following market-day in the cornmarket at
Casterbridge.
The low though extensive hall, supported by beams and
pillars, and latterly dignified by the name of Corn
Exchange, was thronged with hot men who talked among each
other in twos and threes, the speaker of the minute looking
sideways into his auditor's face and concentrating his
argument by a contraction of one eyelid during delivery.
The greater number carried in their hands ground-ash
saplings, using them partly as walking-sticks and partly for
poking up pigs, sheep, neighbours with their backs turned,
and restful things in general, which seemed to require such
treatment in the course of their peregrinations. During
conversations each subjected his sapling to great varieties
of usage -- bending it round his back, forming an arch of it
between his two hands, overweighting it on the ground till
it reached nearly a semicircle; or perhaps it was hastily
tucked under the arm whilst the sample-bag was pulled forth
and a handful of corn poured into the palm, which, after
criticism, was flung upon the floor, an issue of events
perfectly well known to half-a-dozen acute town-bred fowls
which had as usual crept into the building unobserved, and
waited the fulfilment of their anticipations with a high-
stretched neck and oblique eye.
Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the
single one of her sex that the room contained. She was
prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them
as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance
after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among
furnaces. It had required a little determination -- far
more than she had at first imagined -- to take up a position
here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had
ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and
those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.
Two or three only of the farmers were personally known to
Bathsheba, and to these she had made her way. But if she
was to be the practical woman she had intended to show
herself, business must be carried on, introductions or none,
and she ultimately acquired confidence enough to speak and
reply boldly to men merely known to her by hearsay.
Bathsheba too had her sample-bags, and by degrees adopted
the professional pour into the hand -- holding up the grains
in her narrow palm for inspection, in perfect Casterbridge
manner.
Something in the exact arch of her upper unbroken row of
teeth, and in the keenly pointed corners of her red mouth
when, with parted lips, she somewhat defiantly turned up her
face to argue a point with a tall man, suggested that there
was potentiality enough in that lithe slip of humanity for
alarming exploits of sex, and daring enough to carry them
out. But her eyes had a softness -- invariably a softness --
which, had they not been dark, would have seemed
mistiness; as they were, it lowered an expression that might
have been piercing to simple clearness.
Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigor, she
always allowed her interlocutors to finish their statements
before rejoining with hers. In arguing on prices, she held
to her own firmly, as was natural in a dealer, and reduced
theirs persistently, as was inevitable in a woman. But
there was an elasticity in her firmness which removed it
from obstinacy, as there was a naivete in her cheapening
which saved it from meanness.
Those of the farmers with whom she had no dealings by far
the greater part) were continually asking each other, "Who
is she?" The reply would be --
"Farmer Everdene's niece; took on Weatherbury Upper Farm;
turned away the baily, and swears she'll do everything
herself."
The other man would then shake his head.
"Yes, 'tis a pity she's so headstrong," the first would say.
"But we ought to be proud of her here -- she lightens up the
old place. 'Tis such a shapely maid, however, that she'll
soon get picked up."
It would be ungallant to suggest that the novelty of her
engagement in such an occupation had almost as much to do
with the magnetism as had the beauty of her face and
movements. However, the interest was general, and this
Saturday's DEBUT in the forum, whatever it may have been to
Bathsheba as the buying and selling farmer, was
unquestionably a triumph to her as the maiden. Indeed, the
sensation was so pronounced that her instinct on two or
three occasions was merely to walk as a queen among these
gods of the fallow, like a little sister of a little Jove,
and to neglect closing prices altogether.
The numerous evidences of her power to attract were only
thrown into greater relief by a marked exception. Women
seem to have eyes in their ribbons for such matters as
these. Bathsheba, without looking within a right angle of
him, was conscious of a black sheep among the flock.
It perplexed her first. If there had been a respectable
minority on either side, the case would have been most
natural. If nobody had regarded her, she would have --
taken the matter indifferently -- such cases had occurred.
If everybody, this man included, she would have taken it as
a matter of course -- people had done so before. But the
smallness of the exception made the mystery.
She soon knew thus much of the recusant's appearance. He
was a gentlemanly man, with full and distinctly outlined
Roman features, the prominences of which glowed in the sun
with a bronze-like richness of tone. He was erect in
attitude, and quiet in demeanour. One characteristic pre-
eminently marked him -- dignity.
Apparently he had some time ago reached that entrance to
middle age at which a man's aspect naturally ceases to alter
for the term of a dozen years or so; and, artificially, a
woman's does likewise. Thirty-five and fifty were his
limits of variation -- he might have been either, or
anywhere between the two.
It may be said that married men of forty are usually ready
and generous enough to fling passing glances at any specimen
of moderate beauty they may discern by the way. Probably,
as with persons playing whist for love, the consciousness of
a certain immunity under any circumstances from that worst
possible ultimate, the having to pay, makes them unduly
speculative. Bathsheba was convinced that this unmoved
person was not a married man.
When marketing was over, she rushed off to Liddy, who was
waiting for her -- beside the yellowing in which they had
driven to town. The horse was put in, and on they trotted
Bathsheba's sugar, tea, and drapery parcels being packed
behind, and expressing in some indescribable manner, by
their colour, shape, and general lineaments, that they were
that young lady-farmer's property, and the grocer's and
drapers no more.
"I've been through it, Liddy, and it is over. I shan't mind
it again, for they will all have grown accustomed to seeing
me there; but this morning it was as bad as being married --
eyes everywhere!"
"I knowed it would be," Liddy said. "Men be such a terrible
class of society to look at a body."
"But there was one man who had more sense than to waste his
time upon me." The information was put in this form that
Liddy might not for a moment suppose her mistress was at all
piqued. "A very good-looking man," she continued, "upright;
about forty, I should think. Do you know at all who he
could be?"
Liddy couldn't think.
"Can't you guess at all?" said Bathsheba with some
disappointment.
"I haven't a notion; besides, 'tis no difference, since he
took less notice of you than any of the rest. Now, if he'd
taken more, it would have mattered a great deal."
Bathsheba was suffering from the reverse feeling just then,
and they bowled along in silence. A low carriage, bowling
along still more rapidly behind a horse of unimpeachable
breed, overtook and passed them.
"Why, there he is!" she said.
Liddy looked. "That! That's Farmer Boldwood -- of course
'tis -- the man you couldn't see the other day when he
called."
"Oh, Farmer Boldwood," murmured Bathsheba, and looked at him
as he outstripped them. The farmer had never turned his
head once, but with eyes fixed on the most advanced point
along the road, passed as unconsciously and abstractedly as
if Bathsheba and her charms were thin air.
"He's an interesting man -- don't you think so?" she
remarked.
"O yes, very. Everybody owns it," replied Liddy.
"I wonder why he is so wrapt up and indifferent, and
seemingly so far away from all he sees around him."
"It is said -- but not known for certain -- that he met with
some bitter disappointment when he was a young man and
merry. A woman jilted him, they say."
"People always say that -- and we know very well women
scarcely ever jilt men; 'tis the men who jilt us. I expect
it is simply his nature to be so reserved."
"Simply his nature -- I expect so, miss -- nothing else in
the world."
"Still, 'tis more romantic to think he has been served
cruelly, poor thing'! Perhaps, after all, he has!"
"Depend upon it he has. Oh yes, miss, he has! I feel he
must have."
"However, we are very apt to think extremes of people. I --
shouldn't wonder after all if it wasn't a little of both --
just between the two -- rather cruelly used and rather
reserved."
"Oh dear no, miss -- I can't think it between the two!"
"That's most likely."
"Well, yes, so it is. I am convinced it is most likely.
You may -- take my word, miss, that that's what's the matter
with him."
CHAPTER XIII
SORTES SANCTORUM -- THE VALENTINE
IT was Sunday afternoon in the farmhouse, on the thirteenth
of February. Dinner being over, Bathsheba, for want of a
better companion, had asked Liddy to come and sit with her.
The mouldy pile was dreary in winter-time before the candles
were lighted and the shutters closed; the atmosphere of the
place seemed as old as the walls; every nook behind the
furniture had a temperature of its own, for the fire was not
kindled in this part of the house early in the day; and
Bathsheba's new piano, which was an old one in other annals,
looked particularly sloping and out of level on the warped
floor before night threw a shade over its less prominent
angles and hid the unpleasantness. Liddy, like a little
brook, though shallow, was always rippling; her presence had
not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to
exercise it.
On the table lay an old quarto Bible, bound in leather.
Liddy looking at it said, --
"Did you ever find out, miss, who you are going to marry by
means of the Bible and key?"
"Don't be so foolish, Liddy. As if such things could be."
"Well, there's a good deal in it, all the same."
"Nonsense, child."
"And it makes your heart beat fearful. Some believe in it;
some don't; I do."
"Very well, let's try it," said Bathsheba, bounding from her
seat with that total disregard of consistency which can be
indulged in towards a dependent, and entering into the
spirit of divination at once. "Go and get the front door
key."
Liddy fetched it. "I wish it wasn't Sunday," she said, on
returning." Perhaps 'tis wrong."
"What's right week days is right Sundays," replied her
mistress in a tone which was a proof in itself.
The book was opened -- the leaves, drab with age, being
quite worn away at much-read verses by the forefingers of
unpractised readers in former days, where they were moved
along under the line as an aid to the vision. The special
verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, and
the sublime words met her eye. They slightly thrilled and
abashed her. It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in
the concrete. Folly in the concrete blushed, persisted in
her intention, and placed the key on the book. A rusty
patch immediately upon the verse, caused by previous
pressure of an iron substance thereon, told that this was
not the first time the old volume had been used for the
purpose.
"Now keep steady, and be silent," said Bathsheba.
The verse was repeated; the book turned round; Bathsheba
blushed guiltily.
"Who did you try?" said Liddy curiously.
"I shall not tell you."
"Did you notice Mr. Boldwood's doings in church this
morning, miss?" Liddy continued, adumbrating by the remark
the track her thoughts had taken.
"No, indeed," said Bathsheba, with serene indifference.
"His pew is exactly opposite yours, miss."
"I know it."
"And you did not see his goings on!"
"Certainly I did not, I tell you."
Liddy assumed a smaller physiognomy, and shut her lips
decisively.
This move was unexpected, and proportionately disconcerting.
"What did he do?" Bathsheba said perforce.
"Didn't turn his head to look at you once all the service.
"Why should he?" again demanded her mistress, wearing a
nettled look. "I didn't ask him to.
"Oh no. But everybody else was noticing you; and it was odd
he didn't. There, 'tis like him. Rich and gentlemanly,
what does he care?"
Bathsheba dropped into a silence intended to express that
she had opinions on the matter too abstruse for Liddy's
comprehension, rather than that she had nothing to say.
"Dear me -- I had nearly forgotten the valentine I bought
yesterday," she exclaimed at length.
"Valentine! who for, miss?" said Liddy. "Farmer Boldwood?"
It was the single name among all possible wrong ones that
just at this moment seemed to Bathsheba more pertinent than
the right.
"Well, no. It is only for little Teddy Coggan. I have
promised him something, and this will be a pretty surprise
for him. Liddy, you may as well bring me my desk and I'll
direct it at once."
Bathsheba took from her desk a gorgeously illuminated and
embossed design in post-octavo, which had been bought on the
previous market-day at the chief stationer's in
Casterbridge. In the centre was a small oval enclosure;
this was left blank, that the sender might insert tender
words more appropriate to the special occasion than any
generalities by a printer could possibly be.
"Here's a place for writing," said Bathsheba. "What shall I
put?"
"Something of this sort, I should think', returned Liddy
promptly: --
"The rose is red,
The violet blue,
Carnation's sweet,
And so are you."
"Yes, that shall be it. It just suits itself to a chubby-
faced child like him," said Bathsheba. She inserted the
words in a small though legible handwriting; enclosed the
sheet in an envelope, and dipped her pen for the direction.
"What fun it would be to send it to the stupid old Boldwood,
and how he would wonder!" said the irrepressible Liddy,
lifting her eyebrows, and indulging in an awful mirth on the
verge of fear as she thought of the moral and social
magnitude of the man contemplated.
Bathsheba paused to regard the idea at full length.
Boldwood's had begun to be a troublesome image -- a species
of Daniel in her kingdom who persisted in kneeling eastward
when reason and common sense said that he might just as well
follow suit with the rest, and afford her the official
glance of admiration which cost nothing at all. She was far
from being seriously concerned about his nonconformity.
Still, it was faintly depressing that the most dignified and
valuable man in the parish should withhold his eyes, and
that a girl like Liddy should talk about it. So Liddy's
idea was at first rather harassing than piquant.
"No, I won't do that. He wouldn't see any humour in it."
"He'd worry to death," said the persistent Liddy.
"Really, I don't care particularly to send it to Teddy,"
remarked her mistress. "He's rather a naughty child
sometimes."
"Yes -- that he is."
"Let's toss as men do," said Bathsheba, idly. "Now then,
head, Boldwood; tail, Teddy. No, we won't toss money on a
Sunday that would be tempting the devil indeed."
"Toss this hymn-book; there can't be no sinfulness in that,
miss."
"Very well. Open, Boldwood -- shut, Teddy. No; it's more
likely to fall open. Open, Teddy -- shut, Boldwood."
The book went fluttering in the air and came down shut.
Bathsheba, a small yawn upon her mouth, took the pen, and
with off-hand serenity directed the missive to Boldwood.
"Now light a candle, Liddy. Which seal shall we use?
Here's a unicorn's head -- there's nothing in that. What's
this? -- two doves -- no. It ought to be something
extraordinary, ought it not, Liddy? Here's one with a motto
-- I remember it is some funny one, but I can't read it.
We'll try this, and if it doesn't do we'll have another."
A large red seal was duly affixed. Bathsheba looked closely
at the hot wax to discover the words.
"Capital!" she exclaimed, throwing down the letter
frolicsomely. "'Twould upset the solemnity of a parson and
clerke too."
Liddy looked at the words of the seal, and read --
"MARRY ME."
The same evening the letter was sent, and was duly sorted in
Casterbridge post-office that night, to be returned to
Weatherbury again in the morning.
So very idly and unreflectingly was this deed done. Of love
as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love
subjectively she knew nothing.
CHAPTER XIV
EFFECT OF THE LETTER -- SUNRISE
AT dusk, on the evening of St. Valentine's Day, Bold-wood
sat down to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs.
Upon the mantel-shelf before him was a time-piece,
surmounted by a spread eagle, and upon the eagle's wings was
the letter Bathsheba had sent. Here the bachelor's gaze was
continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became
as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye; and as he ate
and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although
they were too remote for his sight --
"MARRY ME."
The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which,
colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about
them. Here, in the quiet of Boldwood's parlour, where
everything that was not grave was extraneous, and where the
atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the
week, the letter and its dictum changed their tenor from the
thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity, imbibed
from their accessories now.
Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood
had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting
distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The
disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus --
the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the
infinitely great.
The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the
latter was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its
existence at all, Boldwood, of course, did not know. And
such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility
even. It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to
realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a
course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a
course from inner impulse, would look the same in the
result. The vast difference between starting a train of
events, and directing into a particular groove a series
already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded
by the issue.
When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the
corner of the looking-glass. He was conscious of its
presence, even when his back was turned upon it. It was the
first time in Boldwood's life that such an event had
occurred. The same fascination that caused him to think it
an act which had a deliberate motive prevented him from
regarding it as an impertinence. He looked again at the
direction. The mysterious influences of night invested the
writing with the presence of the unknown writer. Somebody's
some WOMAN'S -- hand had travelled softly over the paper
bearing his name; her unrevealed eyes had watched every
curve as she formed it; her brain had seen him in
imagination the while. Why should she have imagined him?
Her mouth -- were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? --
had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went on
-- the corners had moved with all their natural
tremulousness: what had been the expression?
The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the
words written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape,
and well she might be, considering that her original was at
that moment sound asleep and oblivious of all love and
letter-writing under the sky. Whenever Boldwood dozed she
took a form, and comparatively ceased to be a vision: when
he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.
The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a
customary kind. His window admitted only a reflection of
its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction
which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling
in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and
putting lights where shadows had used to be.
The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in
comparison with the fact of its arrival. He suddenly
wondered if anything more might be found in the envelope
than what he had withdrawn. He jumped out of bed in the
weird light, took the letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet,
shook the envelope -- searched it. Nothing more was there.
Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times the preceding
day, at the insistent red seal: "Marry me," he said aloud.
The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and
stuck it in the frame of the glass. In doing so he caught
sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and
insubstantial in form. He saw how closely compressed was
his mouth, and that his eyes were wide-spread and vacant.
Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself for this
nervous excitability, he returned to bed.
Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven
was not equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood
arose and dressed himself. He descended the stairs and went
out towards the gate of a field to the east, leaning over
which he paused and looked around.
It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the
year, and the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to
the northward, and murky to the east, where, over the snowy
down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently
resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible
burnt rayless, like a red and flameless fire shining over a
white hearthstone. The whole effect resembled a sunset as
childhood resembles age.
In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one
colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance
to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general
there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural
inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when
the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the
earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over the
west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow,
like tarnished brass.
Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened
and glazed the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red
eastern light with the polish of marble; how, in some
portions of the slope, withered grass-bents, encased in
icicles, bristled through the smooth wan coverlet in the
twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and how the
footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow
whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen
to a short permanency. A half-muffled noise of light wheels
interrupted him. Boldwood turned back into the road. It
was the mail-cart -- a crazy, two-wheeled vehicle, hardly
heavy enough to resist a puff of wind. The driver held out
a letter. Boldwood seized it and opened it, expecting
another anonymous one -- so greatly are people's ideas of
probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.
"I don't think it is for you, sir," said the man, when he
saw Boldwood's action. "Though there is no name I think it
is for your shepherd."
Boldwood looked then at the address --
To the New Shepherd,
Weatherbury Farm,
Near Casterbridge.
"Oh -- what a mistake! -- it is not mine. Nor is it for my
shepherd. It is for Miss Everdene's. "You had better take
it on to him -- Gabriel Oak -- and say I opened it in
mistake."
At this moment, on the ridge, up against the blazing sky, a
figure was visible, like the black snuff in the midst of a
candle-flame. Then it moved and began to bustle about
vigorously from place to place, carrying square skeleton
masses, which were riddled by the same rays. A small figure
on all fours followed behind. The tall form was that of
Gabriel Oak; the small one that of George; the articles in
course of transit were hurdles.
"Wait," said Boldwood. "That's the man on the hill. I'll
take the letter to him myself."
To Boldwood it was now no longer merely a letter to I
another man. It was an opportunity. Exhibiting a face
pregnant with intention, he entered the snowy field.
Gabriel, at that minute, descended the hill towards the
right. The glow stretched down in this direction now, and
touched the distant roof of Warren's Malthouse -- whither
the shepherd was apparently bent: Boldwood followed at a
distance.
CHAPTER XV
A MORNING MEETING -- THE LETTER AGAIN
THE scarlet and orange light outside the malthouse did not
penetrate to its interior, which was, as usual, lighted by a
rival glow of similar hue, radiating from the hearth.
The maltster, after having lain down in his clothes for a
few hours, was now sitting beside a three-legged table,
breakfasting of bread and bacon. This was eaten on the
plateless system, which is performed by placing a slice of
bread upon the table, the meat flat upon the bread, a
mustard plaster upon the meat, and a pinch of salt upon the
whole, then cutting them vertically downwards with a large
pocket-knife till wood is reached, when the severed lamp is
impaled on the knife, elevated, and sent the proper way of
food.
The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly
diminish his powers as a mill. He had been without them for
so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a
defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed, he seemed to
approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a
straight line -- less directly as he got nearer, till it was
doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.
In the ashpit was a heap of potatoes roasting, and a boiling
pipkin of charred bread, called "coffee." for the benefit of
whomsoever should call, for Warren's was a sort of
clubhouse, used as an alternative to the inn.
"I say, says I, we get a fine day, and then down comes a
snapper at night," was a remark now suddenly heard spreading
into the malthouse from the door, which had been opened the
previous moment. The form of Henery Fray advanced to the
fire, stamping the snow from his boots when about half-way
there. The speech and entry had not seemed to be at all an
abrupt beginning to the maltster, introductory matter being
often omitted in this neighbourhood, both from word and
deed, and the maltster having the same latitude allowed him,
did not hurry to reply. He picked up a fragment of cheese,
by pecking upon it with his knife, as a butcher picks up
skewers.
Henery appeared in a drab kerseymere great-coat, buttoned
over his smock-frock, the white skirts of the latter being
visible to the distance of about a foot below the coat-
tails, which, when you got used to the style of dress,
looked natural enough, and even ornamental -- it certainly
was comfortable.
Matthew Moon, Joseph Poorgrass, and other carters and
waggoners followed at his heels, with great lanterns
dangling from their hands, which showed that they had just
come from the cart-horse stables, where they had been busily
engaged since four o'clock that morning.
"And how is she getting on without a baily?" the maltster
inquired. Henery shook his head, and smiled one of the
bitter smiles, dragging all the flesh of his forehead into a
corrugated heap in the centre.
"She'll rue it -- surely, surely!" he said "Benjy Pennyways
were not a true man or an honest baily -- as big a betrayer
as Judas Iscariot himself. But to think she can carr' on
alone!" He allowed his head to swing laterally three or four
times in silence. "Never in all my creeping up -- never!"
This was recognized by all as the conclusion of some gloomy
speech which had been expressed in thought alone during the
shake of the head; Henery meanwhile retained several marks
of despair upon his face, to imply that they would be
required for use again directly he should go on speaking.
"All will be ruined, and ourselves too, or there's no meat
in gentlemen's houses!" said Mark Clark.
"A headstrong maid, that's what she is -- and won't listen
to no advice at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a
cobbler's dog. Dear, dear, when I think o' it, I sorrows
like a man in travel!"
"True, Henery, you do, I've heard ye," said Joseph Poorgrass
in a voice of thorough attestation, and with a wire-drawn
smile of misery.
"'Twould do a martel man no harm to have what's under her
bonnet," said Billy Smallbury, who had just entered, bearing
his one tooth before him. "She can spaik real language, and
must have some sense somewhere. Do ye foller me?"
"I do, I do; but no baily -- I deserved that place," wailed
Henery, signifying wasted genius by gazing blankly at
visions of a high destiny apparently visible to him on Billy
Smallbury's smock-frock. "There, 'twas to be, I suppose.
Your lot is your lot, and Scripture is nothing; for if you
do good you don't get rewarded according to your works, but
be cheated in some mean way out of your recompense."
"No, no; I don't agree with'ee there," said Mark Clark.
God's a perfect gentleman in that respect."
"Good works good pay, so to speak it," attested Joseph
Poorgrass.
A short pause ensued, and as a sort of ENTR'ACTE Henery
turned and blew out the lanterns, which the increase of
daylight rendered no longer necessary even in the malthouse,
with its one pane of glass.
"I wonder what a farmer-woman can want with a harpsichord,
dulcimer, pianner, or whatever 'tis they d'call it?" said
the maltster. "Liddy saith she've a new one."
"Got a pianner?"
"Ay. Seems her old uncle's things were not good enough for
her. She've bought all but everything new. There's heavy
chairs for the stout, weak and wiry ones for the slender;
great watches, getting on to the size of clocks, to stand
upon the chimbley-piece."
Pictures, for the most part wonderful frames."
"And long horse-hair settles for the drunk, with horse-hair
pillows at each end," said Mr. Clark. "Likewise looking-
glasses for the pretty, and lying books for the wicked."
A firm loud tread was now heard stamping outside; the door
was opened about six inches, and somebody on the other side
exclaimed --
"Neighbours, have ye got room for a few new-born lambs?"
Ay, sure, shepherd," said the conclave.
The door was flung back till it kicked the wall and trembled
from top to bottom with the blow. Mr. Oak appeared in the
entry with a steaming face, hay-bands wound about his ankles
to keep out the snow, a leather strap round his waist
outside the smock-frock, and looking altogether an epitome
of the world's health and vigour. Four lambs hung in
various embarrassing attitudes over his shoulders, and the
dog George, whom Gabriel had contrived to fetch from
Norcombe, stalked solemnly behind.
"Well, Shepherd Oak, and how's lambing this year, if I mid
say it?" inquired Joseph Poorgrass.
"Terrible trying," said Oak. "I've been wet through twice
a-day, either in snow or rain, this last fortnight. Cainy
and I haven't tined our eyes to-night."
"A good few twins, too, I hear?"
"Too many by half. Yes; 'tis a very queer lambing this
year. We shan't have done by Lady Day."
"And last year 'twer all over by Sexajessamine Sunday,"
Joseph remarked.
"Bring on the rest Cain," said Gabriel, " and then run back
to the ewes. I'll follow you soon."
Cainy Ball -- a cheery-faced young lad, with a small
circular orifice by way of mouth, advanced and deposited two
others, and retired as he was bidden. Oak lowered the lambs
from their unnatural elevation, wrapped them in hay, and
placed them round the fire.
"We've no lambing-hut here, as I used to have at Norcombe,"
said Gabriel, " and 'tis such a plague to bring the weakly
ones to a house. If 'twasn't for your place here, malter, I
don't know what I should do! this keen weather. And how is
it with you to-day, malter?"
"Oh, neither sick nor sorry, shepherd; but no younger."
"Ay -- I understand."
"Sit down, Shepherd Oak," continued the ancient man of malt.
"And how was the old place at Norcombe, when ye went for
your dog? I should like to see the old familiar spot; but
faith, I shouldn't know a soul there now."
"I suppose you wouldn't. 'Tis altered very much."
"Is it true that Dicky Hill's wooden cider-house is pulled
down?"
"Oh yes -- years ago, and Dicky's cottage just above it."
"Well, to be sure!"
"Yes; and Tompkins's old apple-tree is rooted that used to
bear two hogsheads of cider; and no help from other trees."
"Rooted? -- you don't say it! Ah! stirring times we live in
-- stirring times."
"And you can mind the old well that used to be in the middle
of the place? That's turned into a solid iron pump with a
large stone trough, and all complete."
"Dear, dear -- how the face of nations alter, and what we
live to see nowadays! Yes -- and 'tis the same here.
They've been talking but now of the mis'ess's strange
doings."
"What have you been saying about her?" inquired Oak, sharply
turning to the rest, and getting very warm.
"These middle-aged men have been pulling her over the coals
for pride and vanity," said Mark Clark; "but I say, let her
have rope enough. Bless her pretty face shouldn't I like to
do so -- upon her cherry lips!" The gallant Mark Clark here
made a peculiar and well known sound with his own.
"Mark," said Gabriel, sternly, "now you mind this! none of
that dalliance-talk -- that smack-and-coddle style of yours
-- about Miss Everdene. I don't allow it. Do you hear?"
"With all my heart, as I've got no chance," replied Mr.
Clark, cordially.
"I suppose you've been speaking against her?" said Oak,
turning to Joseph Poorgrass with a very grim look.
"No, no -- not a word I -- 'tis a real joyful thing that
she's no worse, that's what I say," said Joseph, trembling
and blushing with terror. "Matthew just said ----"
"Matthew Moon, what have you been saying?" asked Oak.
"I? Why ye know I wouldn't harm a worm -- no, not one
underground worm?" said Matthew Moon, looking very uneasy.
"Well, somebody has -- and look here, neighbours," Gabriel,
though one of the quietest and most gentle men on earth,
rose to the occasion, with martial promptness and vigour.
"That's my fist." Here he placed his fist, rather smaller in
size than a common loaf, in the mathematical centre of the
maltster's little table, and with it gave a bump or two
thereon, as if to ensure that their eyes all thoroughly took
in the idea of fistiness before he went further. "Now --
the first man in the parish that I hear prophesying bad of
our mistress, why" (here the fist was raised and let fall as
Thor might have done with his hammer in assaying it) --
"he'll smell and taste that -- or I'm a Dutchman."
All earnestly expressed by their features that their minds
did not wander to Holland for a moment on account of this
statement, but were deploring the difference which gave rise
to the figure; and Mark Clark cried "Hear, hear; just what I
should ha' said." The dog George looked up at the same time
after the shepherd's menace, and though he understood
English but imperfectly, began to growl.
"Now, don't ye take on so, shepherd, and sit down!" said
Henery, with a deprecating peacefulness equal to anything of
the kind in Christianity.
"We hear that ye be a extraordinary good and clever man,
shepherd," said Joseph Poorgrass with considerable anxiety
from behind the maltster's bedstead whither he had retired
for safety. "'Tis a great thing to be clever, I'm sure," he
added, making movements associated with states of mind
rather than body; "we wish we were, don't we, neighbours?"
"Ay, that we do, sure," said Matthew Moon, with a small
anxious laugh towards Oak, to show how very friendly
disposed he was likewise.
"Who's been telling you I'm clever?" said Oak.
"'Tis blowed about from pillar to post quite common," said
Matthew. "We hear that ye can tell the time as well by the
stars as we can by the sun and moon, shepherd."
"Yes, I can do a little that way," said Gabriel, as a man of
medium sentiments on the subject.
And that ye can make sun-dials and prent folks' names upon
their waggons almost like copper-plate, with beautiful
flourishes, and great long tails. A excellent fine thing
for ye to be such a clever man, shepherd. Joseph Poorgrass
used to prent to Farmer James Everdene's waggons before you
came, and 'a could never mind which way to turn the J's and
E's -- could ye, Joseph?" Joseph shook his head to express
how absolute was the fact that he couldn't. "And so you
used to do 'em the wrong way, like this, didn't ye, Joseph?"
Matthew marked on the dusty floor with his whip-handle.
[the word J A M E S appears here with the "J" and "E"
printed as mirror images]
"And how Farmer James would cuss, and call thee a fool,
wouldn't he, Joseph, when 'a seed his name looking so
inside-out-like?" continued Matthew Moon with feeling.
"Ay -- 'a would," said Joseph, meekly. "But, you see, I
wasn't so much to blame, for them J's and E's be such trying
sons o' witches for the memory to mind whether they face
backward or forward; and I always had such a forgetful
memory, too."
"'Tis a very bad afiction for ye, being such a man of
calamities in other ways."
"Well, 'tis; but a happy Providence ordered that it should
be no worse, and I feel my thanks. As to shepherd, there,
I'm sure mis'ess ought to have made ye her baily -- such a
fitting man for't as you be."
"I don't mind owning that I expected it," said Oak, frankly.
"Indeed, I hoped for the place. At the same time, Miss
Everdene has a right to be her own baily if she choose --
and to keep me down to be a common shepherd only." Oak drew
a slow breath, looked sadly into the bright ashpit, and
seemed lost in thoughts not of the most hopeful hue.
The genial warmth of the fire now began to stimulate the
nearly lifeless lambs to bleat and move their limbs briskly
upon the hay, and to recognize for the first time the fact
that they were born. Their noise increased to a chorus of
baas, upon which Oak pulled the milk-can from before the
fire, and taking a small tea-pot from the pocket of his
smock-frock, filled it with milk, and taught those of the
helpless creatures which were not to be restored to their
dams how to drink from the spout -- a trick they acquired
with astonishing aptitude.
"And she don't even let ye have the skins of the dead lambs,
I hear?" resumed Joseph Poorgrass, his eyes lingering on the
operations of Oak with the necessary melancholy.
"I don't have them," said Gabriel.
"Ye be very badly used, shepherd," hazarded Joseph again, in
the hope of getting Oak as an ally in lamentation after all.
"I think she's took against ye -- that I do."
"Oh no -- not at all," replied Gabriel, hastily, and a sigh
escaped him, which the deprivation of lamb skins could
hardly have caused.
Before any further remark had been added a shade darkened
the door, and Boldwood entered the malthouse, bestowing upon
each a nod of a quality between friendliness and
condescension.
"Ah! Oak, I thought you were here," he said. "I met the
mail-cart ten minutes ago, and a letter was put into my
hand, which I opened without reading the address. I believe
it is yours. You must excuse the accident please."
"Oh yes -- not a bit of difference, Mr. Boldwood -- not a
bit," said Gabriel, readily. He had not a correspondent on
earth, nor was there a possible letter coming to him whose
contents the whole parish would not have been welcome to
persue.
Oak stepped aside, and read the following in an unknown
hand: --
"DEAR FRIEND, -- I do not know your name, but l think these
few lines will reach you, which I wrote to thank you for
your kindness to me the night I left Weatherbury in a
reckless way. I also return the money I owe you, which you
will excuse my not keeping as a gift. All has ended well,
and I am happy to say I am going to be married to the young
man who has courted me for some time -- Sergeant Troy, of
the 11th Dragoon Guards, now quartered in this town. He
would, I know, object to my having received anything except
as a loan, being a man of great respectability and high
honour -- indeed, a nobleman by blood.
"I should be much obliged to you if you would keep the
contents of this letter a secret for the present, dear
friend. We mean to surprise Weatherbury by coming there
soon as husband and wife, though l blush to state it to one
nearly a stranger. The sergeant grew up in Weatherbury.
Thanking you again for your kindness,
I am, your sincere well-wisher,
FANNY ROBIN."
"Have you read it, Mr. Boldwood?" said Gabriel; "if not, you
had better do so. I know you are interested in Fanny
Robin."
Boldwood read the letter and looked grieved.
"Fanny -- poor Fanny! the end she is so confident of has not
yet come, she should remember -- and may never come. I see
she gives no address."
"What sort of a man is this Sergeant Troy?" said Gabriel.
"H'm -- I'm afraid not one to build much hope upon in such a
case as this," the farmer murmured, "though he's a clever
fellow, and up to everything. A slight romance attaches to
him, too. His mother was a French governess, and it seems
that a secret attachment existed between her and the late
Lord Severn. She was married to a poor medical man, and
soon after an infant was horn; and while money was
forthcoming all went on well. Unfortunately for her boy,
his best friends died; and he got then a situation as second
clerk at a lawyer's in Casterbridge. He stayed there for
some time, and might have worked himself into a dignified
position of some sort had he not indulged in the wild freak
of enlisting. I have much doubt if ever little Fanny will
surprise us in the way she mentions -- very much doubt. A
silly girl! -- silly girl!"
The door was hurriedly burst open again, and in came running
Cainy Ball out of breath, his mouth red and open, like the
bell of a penny trumpet, from which he coughed with noisy
vigour and great distension of face.
"Now, Cain Ball," said Oak, sternly, "why will you run so
fast and lose your breath so? I'm always telling you of it."
"Oh -- I -- a puff of mee breath -- went -- the -- wrong
way, please, Mister Oak, and made me cough -- hok -- hok!"
"Well -- what have you come for?"
"I've run to tell ye," said the junior shepherd, supporting
his exhausted youthful frame against the doorpost, "that you
must come directly. Two more ewes have twinned -- that's
what's the matter, Shepherd Oak."
"Oh, that's it," said Oak, jumping up, and dimissing for the
present his thoughts on poor Fanny. "You are a good boy to
run and tell me, Cain, and you shall smell a large plum
pudding some day as a treat. But, before we go, Cainy,
bring the tarpot, and we'll mark this lot and have done with
'em."
Oak took from his illimitable pockets a marking iron, dipped
it into the pot, and imprintcd on the buttocks of the infant
sheep the initials of her he delighted to muse on -- "B.
E.," which signified to all the region round that henceforth
the lambs belonged to Farmer Bathsheba Everdene, and to no
one else.
"Now, Cainy, shoulder your two, and off. Good morning, Mr.
Boldwood." The shepherd lifted the sixteen large legs and
four small bodies he had himself brought, and vanished with
them in the direction of the lambing field hard by -- their
frames being now in a sleek and hopeful state, pleasantly
contrasting with their death's-door plight of half an hour
before.
Boldwood followed him a little way up the field, hesitated,
and turned back. He followed him again with a last resolve,
annihilating return. On approaching the nook in which the
fold was constructed, the farmer drew out his pocket-book,
unfastened-it, and allowed it to lie open on his hand. A
letter was revealed -- Bathsheba's.
"I was going to ask you, Oak," he said, with unreal
carelessness, "if you know whose writing this is?"
Oak glanced into the book, and replied instantly, with a
flushed face, "Miss Everdene's."
Oak had coloured simply at the consciousness of sounding her
name. He now felt a strangely distressing qualm from a new
thought. "The letter could of course be no other than
anonymous, or the inquiry would not have been necessary.
Boldwood mistook his confusion: sensitive persons are
always ready with their "Is it I?" in preference to
objective reasoning.
"The question was perfectly fair," he returned -- and there
was something incongruous in the serious earnestness with
which he applied himself to an argument on a valentine.
"You know it is always expected that privy inquiries will be
made: that's where the -- fun lies." If the word "fun" had
been "torture." it could not have been uttered with a more
constrained and restless countenance than was Boldwood's
then."
Soon parting from Gabriel, the lonely and reserved man
returned to his house to breakfast -- feeling twinges of
shame and regret at having so far exposed his mood by those
fevered questions to a stranger. He again placed the letter
on the mantelpiece, and sat down to think of the
circumstances attending it by the light of Gabriel's
information.
CHAPTER XVI
ALL SAINTS' AND ALL SOULS'
ON a week-day morning a small congregation, consisting
mainly of women and girls, rose from its knees in the mouldy
nave of a church called All Saints', in the distant barrack-
town before mentioned, at the end of a service without a
sermon. They were about to disperse, when a smart footstep,
entering the porch and coming up the central passage,
arrested their attention. The step echoed with a ring
unusual in a church; it was the clink of spurs. Everybody
looked. A young cavalry soldier in a red uniform, with the
three chevrons of a sergeant upon his sleeve, strode up the
aisle, with an embarrassment which was only the more marked
by the intense vigour of his step, and by the determination
upon his face to show none. A slight flush had mounted his
cheek by the time he had run the gauntlet between these
women; but, passing on through the chancel arch, he never
paused till he came close to the altar railing. Here for a
moment he stood alone.
The officiating curate, who had not yet doffed his surplice,
perceived the new-comer, and followed him to the communion-
space. He whispered to the soldier, and then beckoned to
the clerk, who in his turn whispered to an elderly woman,
apparently his wife, and they also went up the chancel
steps.
"'Tis a wedding!" murmured some of the women, brightening.
"Let's wait!"
The majority again sat down.
There was a creaking of machinery behind, and some of the
young ones turned their heads. From the interior face of
the west wall of the tower projected a little canopy with a
quarter-jack and small bell beneath it, the automaton being
driven by the same clock machinery that struck the large
bell in the tower. Between the tower and the church was a
close screen, the door of which was kept shut during
services, hiding this grotesque clockwork from sight. At
present, however, the door was open, and the egress of the
jack, the blows on the bell, and the mannikin's retreat into
the nook again, were visible to many, and audible through-
out the church.
The jack had struck half-past eleven.
"Where's the woman?" whispered some of the spectators.
The young sergeant stood still with the abnormal rigidity of
the old pillars around. He faced the south-east, and was as
silent as he was still.
The silence grew to be a noticeable thing as the minutes
went on, and nobody else appeared, and not a soul moved.
The rattle of the quarter-jack again from its niche, its
blows for three-quarters, its fussy retreat, were almost
painfully abrupt, and caused many of the congregation to
start palpably.
"I wonder where the woman is!" a voice whispered again.
There began now that slight shifting of feet, that
artificial coughing among several, which betrays a nervous
suspense. At length there was a titter. But the soldier
never moved. There he stood, his face to the south-east,
upright as a column, his cap in his hand.
The clock ticked on. The women threw off their nervousness,
and titters and giggling became more frequent. Then came a
dead silence. Every one was waiting for the end. Some
persons may have noticed how extraordinarily the striking of
quarters. seems to quicken the flight of time. It was
hardly credible that the jack had not got wrong with the
minutes when the rattle began again, the puppet emerged, and
the four quarters were struck fitfully as before: One could
almost be positive that there was a malicious leer upon the
hideous creature's face, and a mischievous delight in its
twitchings. Then, followed the dull and remote resonance of
the twelve heavy strokes in the tower above. The women were
impressed, and there was no giggle this time.
The clergyman glided into the vestry, and the clerk
vanished. The sergeant had not yet turned; every woman in
the church was waiting to see his face, and he appeared to
know it. At last he did turn, and stalked resolutely down
the nave, braving them all, with a compressed lip. Two
bowed and toothless old almsmen then looked at each other
and chuckled, innocently enough; but the sound had a strange
weird effect in that place.
Opposite to the church was a paved square, around which
several overhanging wood buildings of old time cast a
picturesque shade. The young man on leaving the door went
to cross the square, when, in the middle, he met a little
woman. The expression of her face, which had been one of
intense anxiety, sank at the sight of his nearly to terror.
"Well?" he said, in a suppressed passion, fixedly looking at
her.
"Oh, Frank -- I made a mistake! -- I thought that church
with the spire was All Saints', and I was at the door at
half-past eleven to a minute as you said. I waited till a
quarter to twelve, and found then that I was in All Souls'.
But I wasn't much frightened, for I thought it could be to-
morrow as well."
"You fool, for so fooling me! But say no more."
"Shall it be to-morrow, Frank?" she asked blankly.
"To-morrow!" and he gave vent to a hoarse laugh. "I don't
go through that experience again for some time, I warrant
you!"
"But after all," she expostulated in a trembling voice, "the
mistake was not such a terrible thing! Now, dear Frank, when
shall it be?"
"Ah, when? God knows!" he said, with a light irony, and
turning from her walked rapidly away.
CHAPTER XVII
IN THE MARKET-PLACE
ON Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as
usual, when the disturber of his dreams entered and became
visible to him. Adam had awakened from his deep sleep, and
behold! there was Eve. The farmer took courage, and for the
first time really looked at her.
Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged
in regular equation. The result from capital employed in
the production of any movement of a mental nature is
sometimes as tremendous as the cause itself is absurdly
minute. When women are in a freakish mood, their usual
intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect,
seemingly fails to teach them this, and hence it was that
Bathsheba was fated to be astonished today.
Boldwood looked at her -- not slily, critically, or
understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper
looks up at a passing train -- as something foreign to his
element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had
been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements --
comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence,
that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable,
and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic
as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his
duty to consider.
He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and
profile, and the roundness of her chin and throat. He saw
then the side of her eyelids, eyes, and lashes, and the
shape of her ear. Next he noticed her figure, her skirt,
and the very soles of her shoes.
Boldwood thought her beautiful, but wondered whether he was
right in his thought, for it seemed impossible that this
romance in the flesh, if so sweet as he imagined, could have
been going on long without creating a commotion of delight
among men, and provoking more inquiry than Bathsheba had
done, even though that was not a little. To the best of his
judgement neither nature nor art could improve this perfect
one of an imperfect many. His heart began to move within
him. Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of
age, had never before inspected a woman with the very centre
and force of his glance; they had struck upon all his senses
at wide angles.
Was she really beautiful? He could not assure himself that
his opinion was true even now. He furtively said to a
neighbour, "Is Miss Everdene considered handsome?"
"Oh yes; she was a good deal noticed the first time she
came, if you remember. A very handsome girl indeed."
A man is never more credulous than in receiving favourable
opinions on the beauty of a woman he is half, or quite, in
love with; a mere child's word on the point has the weight
of an R.A.'s. Boldwood was satisfied now.
And this charming woman had in effect said to him, "Marry
me." Why should she have done that strange thing?
Boldwood's blindness to the difference between approving of
what circumstances suggest, and originating what they do not
suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba's insensibility to
the possibly great issues of little beginnings.
She was at this moment coolly dealing with a dashing young
farmer, adding up accounts with him as indifferently as if
his face had been the pages of a ledger. It was evident
that such a nature as his had no attraction for a woman of
Bathsheba's taste. But Boldwood grew hot down to his hands
with an incipient jealousy; he trod for the first time the
threshold of "the injured lover's hell." His first impulse
was to go and thrust himself between them. This could be
done, but only in one way -- by asking to see a sample of
her corn. Boldwood renounced the idea. He could not make
the request; it was debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and
sell, and jarred with his conceptions of her.
All this time Bathsheba was conscious of having broken into
that dignified stronghold at last. His eyes, she knew, were
following her everywhere. This was a triumph; and had it
come naturally, such a triumph would have been the sweeter
to her for this piquing delay. But it had been brought
about by misdirected ingenuity, and she valued it only as
she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit.
Being a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects
wherein her heart was not involved, Bathsheba genuinely
repented that a freak which had owed its existence as much
to Liddy as to herself, should ever have been undertaken, to
disturb the placidity of a man she respected too highly to
deliberately tease.
She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his
pardon on the very next occasion of their meeting. The
worst features of this arrangement were that, if he thought
she ridiculed him, an apology would increase the offence by
being disbelieved; and if he thought she wanted him to woo
her, it would read like additional evidence of her
forwardness.
CHAPTER XVIII
BOLDWOOD IN MEDITATION -- REGRET
BOLDWOOD was tenant of what was called Little Weatherbury
Farm, and his person was the nearest approach to aristocracy
that this remoter quarter of the parish could boast of.
Genteel strangers, whose god was their town, who might
happen to be compelled to linger about this nook for a day,
heard the sound of light wheels, and prayed to see good
society, to the degree of a solitary lord, or squire at the
very least, but it was only Mr. Boldwood going out for the
day. They heard the sound of wheels yet once more, and were
re-animated to expectancy: it was only Mr. Boldwood coming
home again.
His house stood recessed from the road, and the stables,
which are to a farm what a fireplace is to a room, were
behind, their lower portions being lost amid bushes of
laurel. Inside the blue door, open half-way down, were to
be seen at this time the backs and tails of half-a-dozen
warm and contented horses standing in their stalls; and as
thus viewed, they presented alternations of roan and bay, in
shapes like a Moorish arch, the tail being a streak down the
midst of each. Over these, and lost to the eye gazing in
from the outer light, the mouths of the same animals could
be heard busily sustaining the above-named warmth and
plumpness by quantities of oats and hay. The restless and
shadowy figure of a colt wandered about a loose-box at the
end, whilst the steady grind of all the eaters was
occasionally diversified by the rattle of a rope or the
stamp of a foot.
Pacing up and down at the heels of the animals was Farmer
Boldwood himself. This place was his almonry and cloister
in one: here, after looking to the feeding of his four-
footed dependants, the celibate would walk and meditate of
an evening till the moon's rays streamed in through the
cobwebbed windows, or total darkness enveloped the scene.
His square-framed perpendicularity showed more fully now
than in the crowd and bustle of the market-house. In this
meditative walk his foot met the floor with heel and toe
simultaneously, and his fine reddish-fleshed face was bent
downwards just enough to render obscure the still mouth and
the well-rounded though rather prominent and broad chin. A
few clear and thread-like horizontal lines were the only
interruption to the otherwise smooth surface of his large
forehead.
The phases of Boldwood's life were ordinary enough, but his
was not an ordinary nature. That stillness, which struck
casual observers more than anything else in his character
and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest of
inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous
antagonistic forces -- positives and negatives in fine
adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity
at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him;
a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. Stagnant
or rapid, it was never slow. He was always hit mortally, or
he was missed.
He had no light and careless touches in his constitution,
either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of
action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all.
He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus,
though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and
scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest,
he was not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted
with grief. Being a man-who read all the dramas of life
seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies,
there was no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when
they chanced to end tragically.
Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent
shape upon which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a
hotbed of tropic intensity. Had she known Boldwood's moods,
her blame would have been fearful, and the stain upon her
heart ineradicable. Moreover, had she known her present
power for good or evil over this man, she would have
trembled at her responsibility. Luckily for her present,
unluckily for her future tranquillity, her understanding had
not yet told her what Boldwood was. Nobody knew entirely;
for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his
wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he
had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.
Farmer Boldwood came to the stable-door and looked forth
across the level fields. Beyond the first enclosure was a
hedge, and on the other side of this a meadow belonging to
Bathsheba's farm.
It was now early spring -- the time of going to grass with
the sheep, when they have the first feed of the meadows,
before these are laid up for mowing. The wind, which had
been blowing east for several weeks, had veered to the
southward, and the middle of spring had come abruptly --
almost without a beginning. It was that period in the
vernal quarter when we map suppose the Dryads to be waking
for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and
swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence
of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything
seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of
frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and
pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful
tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy
efforts.
Boldwood, looking into the distant meadows, saw there three
figures. They were those of Miss Everdene, Shepherd Oak,
and Cainy Ball.
When Bathsheba's figure shone upon the farmer's eyes it
lighted him up as the moon lights up a great tower. A man's
body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is
reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. There
was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former
impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living
outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful
sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong
natures when they love.
At last he arrived at a conclusion. It was to go across and
inquire boldly of her.
The insulation of his heart by reserve during these many
years, without a channel of any kind for disposable emotion,
had worked its effect. It has been observed more than once
that the causes of love are chiefly subjective, and Boldwood
was a living testimony to the truth of the proposition. No
mother existed to absorb his devotion, no sister for his
tenderness, no idle ties for sense. He became surcharged
with the compound, which was genuine lover's love.
He approached the gate of the meadow. Beyond it the ground
was melodious with ripples, and the sky with larks; the low
bleating of the flock mingling with both. Mistress and man
were engaged in the operation of making a lamb "take," which
is performed whenever an ewe has lost her own offspring, one
of the twins of another ewe being given her as a substitute.
Gabriel had skinned the dead lamb, and was tying the skin
over the body of the live lamb, in the customary manner,
whilst Bathsheba was holding open a little pen of four
hurdles, into which the Mother and foisted lamb were driven,
where they would remain till the old sheep conceived an
affection for the young one.
Bathsheba looked up at the completion of the manouvre, and
saw the farmer by the gate, where he was overhung by a
willow tree in full bloom. Gabriel, to whom her face was as
the uncertain glory of an April day, was ever regardful of
its faintest changes, and instantly discerned thereon the
mark of some influence from without, in the form of a keenly
self-conscious reddening. He also turned and beheld
Boldwood.
At once connecting these signs with the letter Boldwood had
shown him, Gabriel suspected her of some coquettish
procedure begun by that means, and carried on since, he knew
not how.
Farmer Boldwood had read the pantomime denoting that they
were aware of his presence, and the perception was as too
much light turned upon his new sensibility. He was still in
the road, and by moving on he hoped that neither would
recognize that he had originally intended to enter the
field. He passed by with an utter and overwhelming
sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt. Perhaps in her
manner there were signs that she wished to see him --
perhaps not -- he could not read a woman. The cabala of
this erotic philosophy seemed to consist of the subtlest
meanings expressed in misleading ways. Every turn, look,
word, and accent contained a mystery quite distinct from its
obvious import, and not one had ever been pondered by him
until now.
As for Bathsheba, she was not deceived into the belief that
Farmer Boldwood had walked by on business or in idleness.
She collected the probabilities of the case, and concluded
that she was herself responsible for Boldwood's appearance
there. It troubled her much to see what a great flame a
little wildfire was likely to kindle. Bathsheba was no
schemer for marriage, nor was she deliberately a trifler
with the affections of men, and a censor's experience on
seeing an actual flirt after observing her would have been a
feeling of surprise that Bathsheba could be so different
from such a one, and yet so like what a flirt is supposed to
be.
She resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt
the steady flow of this man's life. But a resolution to
avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far
advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SHEEP-WASHING -- THE OFFER
BOLDWOOD did eventually call upon her. She was not at home.
"Of course not," he murmured. In contemplating Bathsheba as
a woman, he had forgotten the accidents of her position as
an agriculturist -- that being as much of a farmer, and as
extensive a farmer, as himself, her probable whereabouts was
out-of-doors at this time of the year. This, and the other
oversights Boldwood was guilty of, were natural to the mood,
and still more natural to the circumstances. The great aids
to idealization in love were present here: occasional
observation of her from a distance, and the absence of
social intercourse with her -- visual familiarity, oral
strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of
sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all
earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of
lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there
was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry
household realities appertained to her, or that she, like
all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least
plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered. Thus a
mild sort of apotheosis took place in his fancy, whilst she
still lived and breathed within his own horizon, a troubled
creature like himself.
It was the end of May when the farmer determined to be no
longer repulsed by trivialities or distracted by suspense.
He had by this time grown used to being in love; the passion
now startled him less even when it tortured him more, and he
felt himself adequate to the situation. On inquiring for
her at her house they had told him she was at the
sheepwashing, and he went off to seek her there.
The sheep-washing pool was a perfectly circular basin of
brickwork in the meadows, full of the clearest water. To
birds on the wing its glassy surface, reflecting the light
sky, must have been visible for miles around as a glistening
Cyclops' eye in a green face. The grass about the margin at
this season was a sight to remember long -- in a minor sort
of way. Its activity in sucking the moisture from the rich
damp sod was almost a process observable by the eye. The
outskirts of this level water-meadow were diversified by
rounded and hollow pastures, where just now every flower
that was not a buttercup was a daisy. The river slid along
noiselessly as a shade, the swelling reeds and sedge forming
a flexible palisade upon its moist brink. To the north of
the mead were trees, the leaves of which were new, soft, and
moist, not yet having stiffened and darkened under summer
sun and drought, their colour being yellow beside a green --
green beside a yellow. From the recesses of this knot of
foliage the loud notes of three cuckoos were resounding
through the still air.
Boldwood went meditating down the slopes with his eyes on
his boots, which the yellow pollen from the buttercups had
bronzed in artistic gradations. A tributary of the main
stream flowed through the basin of the pool by an inlet and
outlet at opposite points of its diameter. Shepherd Oak,
Jan Coggan, Moon, Poorgrass, Cain Ball, and several others
were assembled here, all dripping wet to the very roots of
their hair, and Bathsheba was standing by in a new riding-
habit -- the most elegant she had ever worn -- the reins of
her horse being looped over her arm. Flagons of cider were
rolling about upon the green. The meek sheep were pushed
into the pool by Coggan and Matthew Moon, who stood by the
lower hatch, immersed to their waists; then Gabriel, who
stood on the brink, thrust them under as they swam along,
with an instrument like a crutch, formed for the purpose,
and also for assisting the exhausted animals when the wool
became saturated and they began to sink. They were let out
against the stream, and through the upper opening, all
impurities flowing away below. Cainy Ball and Joseph, who
performed this latter operation, were if possible wetter
than the rest; they resembled dolphins under a fountain,
every protuberance and angle of their clothes dribbling
forth a small rill.
Boldwood came close and bade her good morning, with such
constraint that she could not but think he had stepped
across to the washing for its own sake, hoping not to find
her there; more, she fancied his brow severe and his eye
slighting. Bathsheba immediately contrived to withdraw, and
glided along by the river till she was a stone's throw off.
She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a
consciousness that love was encircling her like a perfume.
Instead of turning or waiting, Bathsheba went further among
the high sedges, but Boldwood seemed determined, and pressed
on till they were completely past the bend of the river.
Here, without being seen, they could hear the splashing and
shouts of the washers above.
"Miss Everdene!" said the farmer.
She trembled, turned, and said "Good morning." His tone was
so utterly removed from all she had expected as a beginning.
It was lowness and quiet accentuated: an emphasis of deep
meanings, their form, at the same time, being scarcely
expressed. Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of
showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering
without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than
speech. In the same way, to say a little is often to tell
more than to say a great deal. Boldwood told everything in
that word.
As the consciousness expands on learning that what was
fancied to be the rumble of wheels is the reverberation of
thunder, so did Bathsheba's at her intuitive conviction.
"I feel -- almost too much -- to think," he said, with a
solemn simplicity. "I have come to speak to you without
preface. My life is not my own since I have beheld you
clearly, Miss Everdene -- I come to make you an offer of
marriage."
Bathsheba tried to preserve an absolutely neutral
countenance, and all the motion she made was that of closing
lips which had previously been a little parted.
"I am now forty-one years old," he went on. "I may have
been called a confirmed bachelor, and I was a confirmed
bachelor. I had never any views of myself as a husband in
my earlier days, nor have I made any calculation on the
subject since I have been older. But we all change, and my
change, in this matter, came with seeing you. I have felt
lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad
in every respect. Beyond all things, I want you as my
wife."
"I feel, Mr. Boldwood, that though I respect you much, I do
not feel -- what would justify me to -- in accepting your
offer," she stammered.
This giving back of dignity for dignity seemed to open the
sluices of feeling that Boldwood had as yet kept closed.
"My life is a burden without you," he exclaimed, in a low
voice. "I want you -- I want you to let me say I love you
again and again!"
Bathsheba answered nothing, and the horse upon her arm
seemed so impressed that instead of cropping the herbage she
looked up.
"I think and hope you care enough for me to listen to what I
have to tell!"
Bathsheba's momentary impulse at hearing this was to ask why
he thought that, till she remembered that, far from being a
conceited assumption on Boldwood's part, it was but the
natural conclusion of serious reflection based on deceptive
premises of her own offering.
"I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you," the farmer
continued in an easier tone, "and put my rugged feeling into
a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to
learn such things. I want you for my wife -- so wildly that
no other feeling can abide in me; but I should not have
spoken out had I not been led to hope."
"The valentine again! O that valentine!" she said to
herself, but not a word to him.
"If you can love me say so, Miss Everdene. If not -- don't
say no!"
"Mr. Boldwood, it is painful to have to say I am surprised,
so that I don't know how to answer you with propriety and
respect -- but am only just able to speak out my feeling --
I mean my meaning; that I am afraid I can't marry you, much
as I respect you. You are too dignified for me to suit you,
sir."
"But, Miss Everdene!"
"I -- I didn't -- I know I ought never to have dreamt of
sending that valentine -- forgive me, sir -- it was a wanton
thing which no woman with any self-respect should have done.
If you will only pardon my thoughtlessness, I promise never
to ----"
"No, no, no. Don't say thoughtlessness! Make me think it
was something more -- that it was a sort of prophetic
instinct -- the beginning of a feeling that you would like
me. You torture me to say it was done in thoughtlessness --
I never thought of it in that light, and I can't endure it.
Ah! I wish I knew how to win you! but that I can't do -- I
can only ask if I have already got you. If I have not, and
it is not true that you have come unwittingly to me as I
have to you, I can say no more."
"I have not fallen in love with you, Mr. Boldwood --
certainly I must say that." She allowed a very small smile
to creep for the first time over her serious face in saying
this, and the white row of upper teeth, and keenly-cut lips
already noticed, suggested an idea of heartlessness, which
was immediately contradicted by the pleasant eyes.
"But you will just think -- in kindness and condescension
think -- if you cannot bear with me as a husband! I fear I
am too old for you, but believe me I will take more care of
you than would many a man of your own age. I will protect
and cherish you with all my strength -- I will indeed! You
shall have no cares -- be worried by no household affairs,
and live quite at ease, Miss Everdene. The dairy
superintendence shall be done by a man -- I can afford it
will -- you shall never have so much as to look out of doors
at haymaking time, or to think of weather in the harvest. I
rather cling; to the chaise, because it is he same my poor
father and mother drove, but if you don't like it I will
sell it, and you shall have a pony-carriage of your own. I
cannot say how far above every other idea and object on
earth you seem to me -- nobody knows -- God only knows --
how much you are to me!"
Bathsheba's heart was young, and it swelled with sympathy
for the deep-natured man who spoke so simply.
"Don't say it! don't! I cannot bear you to feel so much, and
me to feel nothing. And I am afraid they will notice us,
Mr. Boldwood. Will you let the matter rest now? I cannot
think collectedly. I did not know you were going to say
this to me. Oh, I am wicked to have made you suffer so!"
She was frightened as well as agitated at his vehemence.
"Say then, that you don't absolutely refuse. Do not quite
refuse?"
"I can do nothing. I cannot answer.
"I may speak to you again on the subject?"
"Yes."
"I may think of you?"
"Yes, I suppose you may think of me."
"And hope to obtain you?"
"No -- do not hope! Let us go on."
"I will call upon you again to-morrow."
"No -- please not. Give me time."
"Yes -- I will give you any time," he said earnestly and
gratefully. "I am happier now."
"No -- I beg you! Don't be happier if happiness only comes
from my agreeing. Be neutral, Mr. Boldwood! I must think."
"I will wait," he said.
And then she turned away. Boldwood dropped his gaze to the
ground, and stood long like a man who did not know where he
was. Realities then returned upon him like the pain of a
wound received in an excitement which eclipses it, and he,
too, then went on.
CHAPTER XX
PERPLEXITY -- GRINDING THE SHEARS -- A QUARREL
"HE is so disinterested and kind to offer me all that I can
desire," Bathsheba mused.
Yet Farmer Boldwood, whether by nature kind or the reverse
to kind, did not exercise kindness, here. The rarest
offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and
no generosity at all.
Bathsheba, not being the least in love with him, was
eventually able to look calmly at his offer. It was one
which many women of her own station in the neighbourhood,
and not a few of higher rank, would have been wild to accept
and proud to publish. In every point of view, ranging from
politic to passionate, it was desirable that she, a lonely
girl, should marry, and marry this earnest, well-to-do, and
respected man. He was close to her doors: his standing was
sufficient: his qualities were even supererogatory. Had
she felt, which she did not, any wish whatever for the
married state in the abstract, she could not reasonably have
rejected him, being a woman who frequently appealed to her
understanding for deliverance from her whims. Boldwood as a
means to marriage was unexceptionable: she esteemed and
liked him, yet she did not want him. It appears that
ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible
without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands
because marriage is not possible without possession; with
totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.
But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting
here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of
a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not
yet begun to wear off.
But a disquiet filled her which was somewhat to her credit,
for it would have affected few. Beyond the mentioned
reasons with which she combated her objections, she had a
strong feeling that, having been the one who began the game,
she ought in honesty to accept the consequences. Still the
reluctance remained. She said in the same breath that it
would be ungenerous not to marry Boldwood, and that she
couldn't do it to save her life.
Bathsheba's was an impulsive nature under a deliberative
aspect. An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit,
she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a
manner of extreme discretion. Many of her thoughts were
perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts.
Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately,
they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.
The next day to that of the declaration she found Gabriel
Oak at the bottom of her garden, grinding his shears for the
sheep-shearing. All the surrounding cottages were more or
less scenes of the same operation; the scurr of whetting
spread into the sky from all parts of the village as from an
armoury previous to a campaign. Peace and war kiss each
other at their hours of preparation -- sickles, scythes,
shears, and pruning-hooks, ranking with swords, bayonets,
and lances, in their common necessity for point and edge.
Cainy Ball turned the handle of Gabriel's grindstone, his
head performing a melancholy see-saw up and down with each
turn of the wheel. Oak stood somewhat as Eros is
represented when in the act of sharpening his arrows: his
figure slightly bent, the weight of his body thrown over on
the shears, and his head balanced side-ways, with a critical
compression of the lips and contraction of the eyelids to
crown the attitude.
His mistress came up and looked upon them in silence for a
minute or two; then she said --
"Cain, go to the lower mead and catch the bay mare. I'll
turn the winch of the grindstone. I want to speak to you,
Gabriel.
Cain departed, and Bathsheba took the handle. Gabriel had
glanced up in intense surprise, quelled its expression, and
looked down again. Bathsheba turned the winch, and Gabriel
applied the shears.
The peculiar motion involved in turning a wheel has a
wonderful tendency to benumb the mind. It is a sort of
attenuated variety of Ixion's punishment, and contributes a
dismal chapter to the history of goals. The brain gets
muddled, the head grows heavy, and the body's centre of
gravity seems to settle by degrees in a leaden lump
somewhere between the eyebrows and the crown. Bathsheba
felt the unpleasant symptoms after two or three dozen turns.
"Will you turn, Gabriel, and let me hold the shears?" she
said. "My head is in a whirl, and I can't talk.
Gabriel turned. Bathsheba then began, with some
awkwardness, allowing her thoughts to stray occasionally
from her story to attend to the shears, which required a
little nicety in sharpening.
"I wanted to ask you if the men made any observations on my
going behind the sedge with Mr. Boldwood yesterday?"
"Yes, they did," said Gabriel. "You don't hold the shears
right, miss -- I knew you wouldn't know the way -- hold like
this."
He relinquished the winch, and inclosing her two hands
completely in his own (taking each as we sometimes slap a
child's hand in teaching him to write), grasped the shears
with her. "Incline the edge so," he said.
Hands and shears were inclined to suit the words, and held
thus for a peculiarly long time by the instructor as he
spoke.
"That will do," exclaimed Bathsheba. "Loose my hands. I
won't have them held! Turn the winch."
Gabriel freed her hands quietly, retired to his handle, and
the grinding went on.
"Did the men think it odd?" she said again.
"Odd was not the idea, miss."
"What did they say?"
"That Farmer Boldwood's name and your own were likely to be
flung over pulpit together before the year was out."
"I thought so by the look of them! Why, there's nothing in
it. A more foolish remark was never made, and I want you to
contradict it! that's what I came for."
Gabriel looked incredulous and sad, but between his moments
of incredulity, relieved.
"They must have heard our conversation," she continued.
"Well, then, Bathsheba!" said Oak, stopping the handle, and
gazing into her face with astonishment.
"Miss Everdene, you mean," she said, with dignity.
"I mean this, that if Mr. Boldwood really spoke of marriage,
I bain't going to tell a story and say he didn't to please
you. I have already tried to please you too much for my own
good!"
Bathsheba regarded him with round-eyed perplexity. She did
not know whether to pity him for disappointed love of her,
or to be angry with him for having got over it -- his tone
being ambiguous.
"I said I wanted you just to mention that it was not true I
was going to be married to him," she murmured, with a slight
decline in her assurance.
"I can say that to them if you wish, Miss Everdene. And I
could likewise give an opinion to 'ee on what you have
done."
"I daresay. But I don't want your opinion."
I suppose not," said Gabriel bitterly, and going on with his
turning, his words rising and falling in a regular swell and
cadence as he stooped or rose with the winch, which directed
them, according to his position, perpendicularly into the
earth, or horizontally along the garden, his eyes being
fixed on a leaf upon the ground.
With Bathsheba a hastened act was a rash act; but, as does
not always happen, time gained was prudence insured. It
must be added, however, that time was very seldom gained.
At this period the single opinion in the parish on herself
and her doings that she valued as sounder than her own was
Gabriel Oak's. And the outspoken honesty of his character
was such that on any subject even that of her love for, or
marriage with, another man, the same disinterestedness of
opinion might be calculated on, and be had for the asking.
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a
high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another.
This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is
a lover's most venial sin. Knowing he would reply truly she
asked the question, painful as she must have known the
subject would be. Such is the selfishness of some charming
women. Perhaps it was some excuse for her thus torturing
honesty to her own advantage, that she had absolutely no
other sound judgment within easy reach.
"Well, what is your opinion of my conduct," she said,
quietly.
"That it is unworthy of any thoughtful, and meek, and comely
woman."
In an instant Bathsheba's face coloured with the angry
crimson of a danby sunset. But she forbore to utter this
feeling, and the reticence of her tongue only made the
loquacity of her face the more noticeable.
The next thing Gabriel did was to make a mistake.
"Perhaps you don't like the rudeness of my reprimanding you,
for I know it is rudeness; but I thought it would do good."
She instantly replied sarcastically --
"On the contrary, my opinion of you is so low, that I see in
your abuse the praise of discerning people!"
"I am glad you don't mind it, for I said it honestly and
with every serious meaning."
"I see. But, unfortunately, when you try not to speak in
jest you are amusing -- just as when you wish to avoid
seriousness you sometimes say a sensible word."
It was a hard hit, but Bathsheba had unmistakably lost her
temper, and on that account Gabriel had never in his life
kept his own better. He said nothing. She then broke out -
-
"I may ask, I suppose, where in particular my unworthiness
lies? In my not marrying you, perhaps!
"Not by any means," said Gabriel quietly. "I have long
given up thinking of that matter."
"Or wishing it, I suppose," she said; and it was apparent
that she expected an unhesitating denial of this
supposition.
Whatever Gabriel felt, he coolly echoed her words --
"Or wishing it either."
A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to
her, and with a rudeness which is not offensive. Bathsheba
would have submitted to an indignant chastisement for her
levity had Gabriel protested that he was loving her at the
same time; the impetuosity of passion unrequited is
bearable, even if it stings and anathematizes there is a
triumph in the humiliation, and a tenderness in the strife.
This was what she had been expecting, and what she had not
got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the
cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was
exasperating. He had not finished, either. He continued in
a more agitated voice: --
"My opinion is (since you ask it) that you are greatly to
blame for playing pranks upon a man like Mr. Boldwood,
merely as a pastime. Leading on a man you don't care for is
not a praiseworthy action. And even, Miss Everdene, if you
seriously inclined towards him, you might have let him find
it out in some way of true loving-kindness, and not by
sending him a valentine's letter."
Bathsheba laid down the shears.
"I cannot allow any man to -- to criticise my private
Conduct!" she exclaimed. "Nor will I for a minute. So
you'll please leave the farm at the end of the week!"
It may have been a peculiarity -- at any rate it was a fact
-- that when Bathsheba was swayed by an emotion of an
earthly sort her lower lip trembled: when by a refined
emotion, her upper or heavenward one. Her nether lip
quivered now.
"Very well, so I will," said Gabriel calmly. He had been
held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to
spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not
break. "I should be even better pleased to go at once," he
added.
"Go at once then, in Heaven's name!" said she, her eyes
flashing at his, though never meeting them. "Don't let me
see your face any more."
"Very well, Miss Everdene -- so it shall be."
And he took his shears and went away from her in placid
dignity, as Moses left the presence of Pharaoh.
CHAPTER XXI
TROUBLES IN THE FOLD -- A MESSAGE
GABRIEL OAK had ceased to feed the Weatherbury flock for
about four-and-twenty hours, when on Sunday afternoon the
elderly gentlemen Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Fray, and
half-a-dozen others, came running up to the house of the
mistress of the Upper Farm.
"Whatever IS the matter, men?" she said, meeting them at the
door just as she was coming out on her way to church, and
ceasing in a moment from the close compression of her two
red lips, with which she had accompanied the exertion of
pulling on a tight glove. "Sixty!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"Seventy!" said Moon.
"Fifty-nine!" said Susan Tall's husband.
"-- Sheep have broke fence," said Fray.
"-- And got into a field of young clover," said Tall.
"-- Young clover!" said Moon. "-- Clover!" said Joseph
Poorgrass.
"And they be getting blasted," said Henery Fray.
"That they be," said Joseph.
"And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out
and cured!" said Tall.
Joseph's countenance was drawn into lines and puckers by his
concern. Fray's forehead was wrinkled both perpendicularly
and crosswise, after the pattern of a portcullis, expressive
of a double despair. Laban Tall's lips were thin, and his
face was rigid. Matthew's jaws sank, and his eyes turned
whichever way the strongest muscle happened to pull them.
"Yes," said Joseph, "and I was sitting at home, looking for
Ephesians, and says I to myself, ''Tis nothing but
Corinthians and Thessalonians in this danged Testament,'
when who should come in but Henery there: 'Joseph,' he
said, 'the sheep have blasted theirselves ----'"
With Bathsheba it was a moment when thought was speech and
speech exclamation. Moreover, she had hardly recovered her
equanimity since the disturbance which she had suffered from
Oak's remarks.
"That's enough -- that's enough! -- oh, you fools!" she
cried, throwing the parasol and Prayer-book into the
passage, and running out of doors in the direction
signified. "To come to me, and not go and get them out
directly! Oh, the stupid numskulls!"
Her eyes were at their darkest and brightest now.
Bathsheba's beauty belonged rather to the demonian than to
the angelic school, she never looked so well as when she was
angry -- and particularly when the effect was heightened by
a rather dashing velvet dress, carefully put on before a
glass.
All the ancient men ran in a jumbled throng after her to the
clover-field, Joseph sinking down in the midst when about
half-way, like an individual withering in a world which was
more and more insupportable. Having once received the
stimulus that her presence always gave them they went round
among the sheep with a will. The majority of the afflicted
animals were lying down, and could not be stirred. These
were bodily lifted out, and the others driven into the
adjoining field. Here, after the lapse of a few minutes,
several more fell down, and lay helpless and livid as the
rest.
Bathsheba, with a sad, bursting heart, looked at these
primest specimens of her prime flock as they rolled there --
Swoln with wind and the rank mist they drew.
Many of them foamed at the mouth, their breathing being
quick and short, whilst the bodies of all were fearfully
distended.
"Oh, what can I do, what can I do!" said Bathsheba,
helplessly. "Sheep are such unfortunate animals! -- there's
always something happening to them! I never knew a flock
pass a year without getting into some scrape or other."
"There's only one way of saving them," said Tall.
"What way? Tell me quick!"
"They must be pierced in the side with a thing made on
purpose."
"Can you do it? Can I?"
"No, ma'am. We can't, nor you neither. It must be done in
a particular spot. If ye go to the right or left but an
inch you stab the ewe and kill her. Not even a shepherd can
do it, as a rule."
"Then they must die," she said, in a resigned tone.
"Only one man in the neighbourhood knows the way," said
Joseph, now just come up. "He could cure 'em all if he were
here."
"Who is he? Let's get him!"
"Shepherd Oak," said Matthew. "Ah, he's a clever man in
talents!"
"Ah, that he is so!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"True -- he's the man," said Laban Tall.
"How dare you name that man in my presence!" she said
excitedly. "I told you never to allude to him, nor shall
you if you stay with me. Ah!" she added, brightening,
"Farmer Boldwood knows!"
"O no, ma'am" said Matthew. "Two of his store ewes got into
some vetches t'other day, and were just like these. He sent
a man on horseback here post-haste for Gable, and Gable went
and saved 'em, Farmer Boldwood hev got the thing they do it
with. 'Tis a holler pipe, with a sharp pricker inside.
Isn't it, Joseph?"
"Ay -- a holler pipe," echoed Joseph. "That's what 'tis."
"Ay, sure -- that's the machine," chimed in Henery Fray,
reflectively, with an Oriental indifference to the flight of
time.
"Well," burst out Bathsheba, "don't stand there with your
'ayes' and your 'sures' talking at me! Get somebody to cure
the sheep instantly!"
All then stalked off in consternation, to get somebody as
directed, without any idea of who it was to be. In a minute
they had vanished through the gate, and she stood alone with
the dying flock.
"Never will I send for him never!" she said firmly.
One of the ewes here contracted its muscles horribly,
extended itself, and jumped high into the air. The leap was
an astonishing one. The ewe fell heavily, and lay still.
Bathsheba went up to it. The sheep was dead.
"Oh, what shall I do -- what shall I do!" she again
exclaimed, wringing her hands. "I won't send for him. No,
I won't!"
The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always
coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.
It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a
decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no
enunciation to prove it so. The "No, I won't" of Bathsheba
meant virtually, "I think I must."
She followed her assistants through the gate, and lifted her
hand to one of them. Laban answered to her signal.
"Where is Oak staying?"
"Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"
"Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he must
return instantly -- that I say so."
Tall scrambled off to the field, and in two minutes was on
Poll, the bay, bare-backed, and with only a halter by way of
rein. He diminished down the hill.
Bathsheba watched. So did all the rest. Tall cantered
along the bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands,
Middle Field, The Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a
point, crossed the bridge, and ascended from the valley
through Springmead and Whitepits on the other side. The
cottage to which Gabriel had retired before taking his final
departure from the locality was visible as a white spot on
the opposite hill, backed by blue firs. Bathsheba walked up
and down. The men entered the field and endeavoured to ease
the anguish of the dumb creatures by rubbing them. Nothing
availed.
Bathsheba continued walking. The horse was seen descending
the hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in
reverse order: Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The
Flats, Middle Field, Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres. She hoped
Tall had had presence of mind enough to give the mare up to
Gabriel, and return himself on foot. The rider neared them.
It was Tall.
"Oh, what folly!" said Bathsheba.
Gabriel was not visible anywhere.
"Perhaps he is already gone!" she said.
Tall came into the inclosure, and leapt off, his face tragic
as Morton's after the battle of Shrewsbury.
"Well?" said Bathsheba, unwilling to believe that her verbal
LETTRE-DE-CACHET could possibly have miscarried.
"He says BEGGARS MUSTN'T BE CHOOSERS," replied Laban.
"What!" said the young farmer, opening her eyes and drawing
in her breath for an outburst. Joseph Poorgrass retired a
few steps behind a hurdle.
"He says he shall not come unless you request en to come
civilly and in a proper manner, as becomes any 'ooman
begging a favour."
"Oh, oh, that's his answer! Where does he get his airs? Who
am I, then, to be treated like that? Shall I beg to a man
who has begged to me?"
Another of the flock sprang into the air, and fell dead.
The men looked grave, as if they suppressed opinion.
Bathsheba turned aside, her eyes full of tears. The strait
she was in through pride and shrewishness could not be
disguised longer: she burst out crying bitterly; they all
saw it; and she attempted no further concealment.
"I wouldn't cry about it, miss," said William Small-bury,
compassionately. "Why not ask him softer like? I'm sure
he'd come then. Gable is a true man in that way."
Bathsheba checked her grief and wiped her eyes. "Oh, it is
a wicked cruelty to me -- it is -- it is!" she murmured.
"And he drives me to do what I wouldn't; yes, he does! --
Tall, come indoors."
After this collapse, not very dignified for the head of an
establishment, she went into the house, Tall at her heels.
Here she sat down and hastily scribbled a note between the
small convulsive sobs of convalescence which follow a fit of
crying as a ground-swell follows a storm. The note was none
the less polite for being written in a hurry. She held it
at a distance, was about to fold it, then added these words
at the bottom: --
"DO NOT DESERT ME, GABRIEL!"
She looked a little redder in refolding it, and closed her
lips, as if thereby to suspend till too late the action of
conscience in examining whether such strategy were
justifiable. The note was despatched as the message had
been, and Bathsheba waited indoors for the result.
It was an anxious quarter of an hour that intervened between
the messenger's departure and the sound of the horse's tramp
again outside. She could not watch this time, but, leaning
over the old bureau at which she had written the letter,
closed her eyes, as if to keep out both hope and fear.
The case, however, was a promising one. Gabriel was not
angry: he was simply neutral, although her first command had
been so haughty. Such imperiousness would have damned a
little less beauty; and on the other hand, such beauty would
have redeemed a little less imperiousness.
She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up. A
mounted figure passed between her and the sky, and drew on
towards the field of sheep, the rider turning his face in
receding. Gabriel looked at her. It was a moment when a
woman's eyes and tongue tell distinctly opposite tales.
Bathsheba looked full of gratitude, and she said: --
"Oh, Gabriel, how could you serve me so unkindly!"
Such a tenderly-shaped reproach for his previous delay was
the one speech in the language that he could pardon for not
being commendation of his readiness now.
Gabriel murmured a confused reply, and hastened on. She
knew from the look which sentence in her note had brought
him. Bathsheba followed to the field.
Gabriel was already among the turgid, prostrate forms. He
had flung off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and
taken from his pocket the instrument of salvation. It was a
small tube or trochar, with a lance passing down the inside;
and Gabriel began to use it with a dexterity that would have
graced a hospital surgeon. Passing his hand over the
sheep's left flank, and selecting the proper point, he
punctured the skin and rumen with the lance as it stood in
the tube; then he suddenly withdrew the lance, retaining the
tube in its place. A current of air rushed up the tube,
forcible enough to have extinguished a candle held at the
orifice.
It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for
a time; and the countenances of these poor creatures
expressed it now. Forty-nine operations were successfully
performed. Owing to the great hurry necessitated by the
far-gone state of some of the flock, Gabriel missed his aim
in one case, and in one only -- striking wide of the mark,
and inflicting a mortal blow at once upon the suffering ewe.
Four had died; three recovered without an operation. The
total number of sheep which had thus strayed and injured
themselves so dangerously was fifty-seven.
When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba
came and looked him in the face.
"Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling
winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite
together again at the end, because there was going to be
another smile soon.
"I will," said Gabriel.
And she smiled on him again.
CHAPTER XXII
THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS
MEN thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often
by not making the most of good spirits when they have them
as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration by
misfortune, had been independent in thought and vigorous in
action to a marked extent -- conditions which, powerless
without an opportunity as an opportunity without them is
barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the
favourable conjunction should have occurred. But this
incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time
ruinously. The spring tides were going by without floating
him off, and the neap might soon come which could not.
It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season
culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture,
being all health and colour. Every green was young, every
pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing
currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country,
and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy
catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops'
croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,
-- like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite, --
snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to
human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-
petaled doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of
the vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming
time; and of the animal, the metamorphosed figures of Mr.
Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the second and third
shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their calling,
and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the
fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph
Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer,
and Gabriel Oak as general supervisor. None of these were
clothed to any extent worth mentioning, each appearing to
have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean between a
high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of lineament, and
a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed that
serious work was the order of the day.
They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the
Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with
transepts. It not only emulated the form of the
neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in
antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group
of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware; no trace
of such surroundings remained. The vast porches at the
sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest
with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches
of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was
the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where
more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed,
chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves,
and diagonals, was far nobler in design, because more
wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern
churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding
buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between
them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in
their proportions the precise requirements both of beauty
and ventilation.
One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of
either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and
style, that the purpose which had dictated its original
erection was the same with that to which it was still
applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical
remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices
which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here
at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with
the spirit of the modern beholder. Standing before this
abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind
dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of
functional continuity throughout -- a feeling almost of
gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea
which had heaped it up. The fact that four centuries had
neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any
hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that
had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of
old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too
curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical
and military compeers. For once medievalism and modernism
had a common stand-point. The lanceolate windows, the time-
eaten arch-stones and chamfers, the orientation of the axis,
the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no
exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed. The
defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a
study, a religion, and a desire.
To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun
to admit a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the
shearers' operations, which was the wood threshing-floor in
the centre, formed of thick oak, black with age and polished
by the beating of flails for many generations, till it had
grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state-room
floors of an Elizabethan mansion. Here the shearers knelt,
the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms,
and the polished shears they flourished, causing these to
bristle with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-
eyed man. Beneath them a captive sheep lay panting,
quickening its pants as misgiving merged in terror, till it
quivered like the hot landscape outside.
This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years
ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and
modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In
comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The
citizen's THEN is the rustic's NOW. In London, twenty or
thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five;
in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in
the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark
on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut
of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth
of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a
single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's
ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his
present is futurity.
So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers
were in harmony with the barn.
The spacious ends of the building, answering
ecclesiastically to nave and chancel extremities, were
fenced off with hurdles, the sheep being all collected in a
crowd within these two enclosures; and in one angle a
catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep were
continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without
loss of time. In the background, mellowed by tawny shade,
were the three women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and
Soberness Miller, gathering up the fleeces and twisting
ropes of wool with a wimble for tying them round. They were
indifferently well assisted by the old maltster, who, when
the malting season from October to April had passed, made
himself useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads.
Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men to see
that there was no cutting or wounding through carelessness,
and that the animals were shorn close. Gabriel, who flitted
and hovered under her bright eyes like a moth, did not shear
continuously, half his time being spent in attending to the
others and selecting the sheep for them. At the present
moment he was engaged in handing round a mug of mild liquor,
supplied from a barrel in the corner, and cut pieces of
bread and cheese.
Bathsheba, after throwing a glance here, a caution there,
and lecturing one of the younger operators who had allowed
his last finished sheep to go off among the flock without
re-stamping it with her initials, came again to Gabriel, as
he put down the luncheon to drag a frightened ewe to his
shear-station, flinging it over upon its back with a
dexterous twist of the arm. He lopped off the tresses about
its head, and opened up the neck and collar, his mistress
quietly looking on.
"She blushes at the insult," murmured Bathsheba, watching
the pink flush which arose and overspread the neck and
shoulders of the ewe where they were left bare by the
clicking shears -- a flush which was enviable, for its
delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would have been
creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.
Poor Gabriel's soul was fed with a luxury of content by
having her over him, her eyes critically regarding his
skilful shears, which apparently were going to gather up a
piece of the flesh at every close, and yet never did so.
Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in that he was not over
happy. He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright
lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own,
and containing no others in the world, was enough.
So the chatter was all on her side. There is a loquacity
that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a
silence which says much: that was Gabriel's. Full of this
dim and temperate bliss, he went on to fling the ewe over
upon her other side, covering her head with his knee,
gradually running the shears line after line round her
dewlap; thence about her flank and back, and finishing over
the tail.
"Well done, and done quickly!" said Bathsheba, looking at
her watch as the last snip resounded.
"How long, miss?" said Gabriel, wiping his brow.
"Three-and-twenty minutes and a half since you took the
first lock from its forehead. It is the first time that I
have ever seen one done in less than half an hour."
The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece -- how
perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have
been seen to be realized -- looking startled and shy at the
loss of its garment, which lay on the floor in one soft
cloud, united throughout, the portion visible being the
inner surface only, which, never before exposed, was white
as snow, and without flaw or blemish of the minutest kind.
"Cain Ball!"
"Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!"
Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot. "B. E." is newly
stamped upon the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps,
panting, over the board into the shirtless flock outside.
Then up comes Maryann; throws the loose locks into the
middle of the fleece, rolls it up, and carries it into the
background as three-and-a-half pounds of unadulterated
warmth for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and far
away, who will, however, never experience the superlative
comfort derivable from the wool as it here exists, new and
pure -- before the unctuousness of its nature whilst in a
living state has dried, stiffened, and been washed out --
rendering it just now as superior to anything WOOLLEN as
cream is superior to milk-and-water.
But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel's
happiness of this morning. The rams, old ewes, and two-
shear ewes had duly undergone their stripping, and the men
were proceeding with the shear-lings and hogs, when Oak's
belief that she was going to stand pleasantly by and time
him through another performance was painfully interrupted by
Farmer Boldwood's appearance in the extremest corner of the
barn. Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there
he certainly was. Boldwood always carried with him a social
atmosphere of his own, which everybody felt who came near
him; and the talk, which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat
suppressed, was now totally suspended.
He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him
with a carriage of perfect ease. He spoke to her in low
tones, and she instinctively modulated her own to the same
pitch, and her voice ultimately even caught the inflection
of his. She was far from having a wish to appear
mysteriously connected with him; but woman at the
impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in
her choice of words, which is apparent every day, but even
in her shades of tone and humour, when the influence is
great.
What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who
was too independent to get near, though too concerned to
disregard. The issue of their dialogue was the taking of
her hand by the courteous farmer to help her over the
spreading-board into the bright June sunlight outside.
Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went on
talking again. Concerning the flock? Apparently not.
Gabriel theorized, not without truth, that in quiet
discussion of any matter within reach of the speakers' eyes,
these are usually fixed upon it. Bathsheba demurely
regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the ground, in a
way which suggested less ovine criticism than womanly
embarrassment. She became more or less red in the cheek,
the blood wavering in uncertain flux and reflux over the
sensitive space between ebb and flood. Gabriel sheared on,
constrained and sad.
She left Boldwood's side, and he walked up and down alone
for nearly a quarter of an hour. Then she reappeared in her
new riding-habit of myrtle-green, which fitted her to the
waist as a rind fits its fruit; and young Bob Coggan led on
her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse from the tree
under which it had been tied.
Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to
continue his shearing at the same time that he watched
Boldwood's manner, he snipped the sheep in the groin. The
animal plunged; Bathsheba instantly gazed towards it, and
saw the blood.
"Oh, Gabriel!" she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, "you
who are so strict with the other men -- see what you are
doing yourself!"
To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this
remark; but to Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that
she herself was the cause of the poor ewe's wound, because
she had wounded the ewe's shearer in a -- still more vital
part, it had a sting which the abiding sense of his
inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not calculated
to heal. But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he
had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him
occasionally to conceal a feeling.
"Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine. Cainy
Ball ran up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing
continued.
Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before
they turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same
dominative and tantalizing graciousness.
"I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood's Leicesters. Take my
place in the barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to
their work."
The horses' heads were put about, and they trotted away.
Boldwood's deep attachment was a matter of great interest
among all around him; but, after having been pointed out for
so many years as the perfect exemplar of thriving
bachelorship, his lapse was an anticlimax somewhat
resembling that of St. John Long's death by consumption in
the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease.
"That means matrimony," said Temperance Miller, following
them out of sight with her eyes.
"I reckon that's the size o't," said Coggan, working along
without looking up.
"Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor," said
Laban Tall, turning his sheep.
Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same
time: "I don't see why a maid should take a husband when
she's bold enough to fight her own battles, and don't want a
home; for 'tis keeping another woman out. But let it be,
for 'tis a pity he and she should trouble two houses."
As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably
provoked the criticism of individuals like Henery Fray. Her
emblazoned fault was to be too pronounced in her objections,
and not sufficiently overt in her likings. We learn that it
is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they
reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in
the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and
antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no
attribute at all.
Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: "I once hinted
my mind to her on a few things, as nearly as a battered
frame dared to do so to such a froward piece. You all know,
neighbours, what a man I be, and how I come down with my
powerful words when my pride is boiling wi' scarn?"
"We do, we do, Henery."
"So I said, 'Mistress Everdene, there's places empty, and
there's gifted men willing; but the spite' -- no, not the
spite -- I didn't say spite -- 'but the villainy of the
contrarikind,' I said (meaning womankind), 'keeps 'em out.'
That wasn't too strong for her, say?"
"Passably well put."
"Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation
overtook me for it. Such is my spirit when I have a mind."
"A true man, and proud as a lucifer."
"You see the artfulness? Why, 'twas about being baily
really; but I didn't put it so plain that she could
understand my meaning, so I could lay it on all the
stronger. That was my depth! ... However, let her marry an
she will. Perhaps 'tis high time. I believe Farmer
Boldwood kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-
washing t'other day -- that I do."
"What a lie!" said Gabriel.
"Ah, neighbour Oak -- how'st know?" said, Henery, mildly.
"Because she told me all that passed," said Oak, with a
pharisaical sense that he was not as other shearers in this
matter.
"Ye have a right to believe it," said Henery, with dudgeon;
"a very true right. But I mid see a little distance into
things! To be long-headed enough for a baily's place is a
poor mere trifle -- yet a trifle more than nothing.
However, I look round upon life quite cool. Do you heed me,
neighbours? My words, though made as simple as I can, mid be
rather deep for some heads."
"O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye."
"A strange old piece, goodmen -- whirled about from here to
yonder, as if I were nothing! A little warped, too. But I
have my depths; ha, and even my great depths! I might gird
at a certain shepherd, brain to brain. But no -- O no!"
"A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster, in a
querulous voice. "At the same time ye be no old man worth
naming -- no old man at all. Yer teeth bain't half gone
yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of
arms? 'Tis a poor thing to be sixty, when there's people far
past four-score -- a boast'weak as water."
It was the unvaying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor
differences when the maltster had to be pacified.
"Weak as-water! yes," said Jan Coggan. "Malter, we feel ye
to be a wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it."
"Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass. "Ye be a very rare old
spectacle, malter, and we all admire ye for that gift. "
"Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity,
I was likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me," said the
maltster.
"'Ithout doubt you was -- 'ithout doubt."
The bent and hoary 'man was satisfied, and so apparently was
Henery Frag. That matters should continue pleasant Maryann
spoke, who, what with her brown complexion, and the working
wrapper of rusty linsey, had at present the mellow hue of an
old sketch in oils -- notably some of Nicholas Poussin's: --
"Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-
hand fellow at all that would do for poor me?" said Maryann.
"A perfect one I don't expect to at my time of life. If I
could hear of such a thing twould do me more good than toast
and ale."
Coggan furnished a suitable reply. Oak went on with his
shearing, and said not another word. Pestilent moods had
come, and teased away his quiet. Bathsheba had shown
indications of anointing him above his fellows by installing
him as the bailiff that the farm imperatively required. He
did not covet the post relatively to the farm: in relation
to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to another, he
had coveted it. His readings of her seemed now to be
vapoury and indistinct. His lecture to her was, he thought,
one of the absurdest mistakes. Far from coquetting with
Boldwood, she had trifled with himself in thus feigning that
she had trifled with another. He was inwardly convinced
that, in accordance with the anticipations of his easy-going
and worse-educated comrades, that day would see Boldwood the
accepted husband of Miss Everdene. Gabriel at this time of
his life had out-grown the instinctive dislike which every
Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now
quite frequently, and he inwardly said, "I find more bitter
than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!" This
was mere exclamation -- the froth of the storm. He adored
Bathsheba just the same.
"We workfolk shall have some lordly-junketing to-night,"
said Cainy Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new
direction. "This morning I see'em making the great puddens
in the milking-pails -- lumps of fat as big as yer thumb,
Mister Oak! I've never seed such splendid large
knobs of fat before in the days of my life -- they never
used to be bigger then a horse-bean. And there was a great
black crock upon the brandish with his legs a-sticking out,
but I don't know what was in within."
"And there's two bushels of biffins for apple-pies," said
Maryann.
"Well, I hope to do my duty by it all," said Joseph
Poorgrass, in a pleasant, masticating manner of
anticipation. "Yes; victuals and drink is a cheerful thing,
and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the form of words may
be used. 'Tis the gospel of the body, without which we
perish, so to speak it."
CHAPTER XXIII
EVENTIDE -- A SECOND DECLARATION
FOR the shearing-supper a long table was placed on the
grass-plot beside the house, the end of the table being
thrust over the sill of the wide parlour window and a foot
or two into the room. Miss Everdene sat inside the window,
facing down the table. She was thus at the head without
mingling with the men.
This evening Bathsheba was unusually excited, her red cheeks
and lips contrasting lustrously with the mazy skeins of her
shadowy hair. She seemed to expect assistance, and the seat
at the bottom of the table was at her request left vacant
until after they had begun the meal. She then asked Gabriel
to take the place and the duties appertaining to that end,
which he did with great readiness.
At this moment Mr. Boldwood came in at the gate, and crossed
the green to Bathsheba at the window. He apologized for his
lateness: his arrival was evidently by arrangement.
"Gabriel," said she, "will you move again, please, and let
Mr. Boldwood come there?"
Oak moved in silence back to his original seat.
The gentleman-farmer was dressed in cheerful style, in a new
coat and white waistcoat, quite contrasting with his usual
sober suits of grey. Inwardy, too, he was blithe, and
consequently chatty to an exceptional degree. So also was
Bathsheba now that he had come, though the uninvited
presence of Pennyways, the bailiff who had been dismissed
for theft, disturbed her equanimity for a while.
Supper being ended, Coggan began on his own private account,
without reference to listeners: --
I've lost my love, and l care not,
I've lost my love, and l care not;
I shall soon have another
That's better than t'other;
I've lost my love, and I care not.
This lyric, when concluded, was received with a silently
appreciative gaze at the table, implying that the
performance, like a work by those established authors who
are independent of notices in the papers, was a well-known
delight which required no applause.
"Now, Master Poorgrass, your song!" said Coggan.
"I be all but in liquor, and the gift is wanting in me,"
said Joseph, diminishing himself.
"Nonsense; wou'st never be so ungrateful, Joseph -- never!"
said Coggan, expressing hurt feelings by an inflection of
voice. "And mistress is looking hard at ye, as much as to
say, "Sing at once, Joseph Poorgrass."
"Faith, so she is; well, I must suffer it! ... Just eye my
features, and see if the tell-tale blood overheats me much,
neighbours?"
"No, yer blushes be quite reasonable," said Coggan.
"I always tries to keep my colours from rising when a
beauty's eyes get fixed on me," said Joseph, differently;
"but if so be 'tis willed they do, they must."
"Now, Joseph, your song, please," said Bathsheba, from the
window.
"Well, really, ma'am," he replied, in a yielding tone, "I
don't know what to say. It would be a poor plain ballet of
my own composure."
"Hear, hear!" said the supper-party.
Poorgrass, thus assured, trilled forth a flickering yet
commendable piece of sentiment, the tune of which consisted
of the key-note and another, the latter being the sound
chiefly dwelt upon. This was so successful that he rashly
plunged into a second in the same breath, after a few false
starts: --
I sow'-ed th'-e .....
I sow'-ed .....
I sow'-ed the'-e seeds' of love',
I-it was' all' i'-in the'-e spring',
I-in A'-pril', Ma'-ay, a'-nd sun'-ny' June',
When sma'-all bi'-irds they' do' sing.
"Well put out of hand," said Coggan, at the end of the
verse. 'They do sing' was a very taking paragraph."
"Ay; and there was a pretty place at "seeds of love." and
'twas well heaved out. Though "love" is a nasty high corner
when a man's voice is getting crazed. Next verse, Master
Poorgrass."
But during this rendering young Bob Coggan exhibited one of
those anomalies which will afflict little people when other
persons are particularly serious: in trying to check his
laughter, he pushed down his throat as much of the
tablecloth as he could get hold of, when, after continuing
hermetically sealed for a short time, his mirth burst out
through his nose. Joseph perceived it, and with hectic
cheeks of indignation instantly ceased singing. Coggan
boxed Bob's ears immediately.
"Go on, Joseph -- go on, and never mind the young scamp,"
said Coggan. "'Tis a very catching ballet. Now then again
-- the next bar; I'll help ye to flourish up the shrill
notes where yer wind is rather wheezy: --
Oh the wi'-il-lo'-ow tree' will' twist',
And the wil'-low' tre'-ee wi'ill twine'.
But the singer could not be set going again. Bob Coggan was
sent home for his ill manners, and tranquility was restored
by Jacob Smallbury, who volunteered a ballad as inclusive
and interminable as that with which the worthy toper old
Silenus amused on a similar occasion the swains Chromis and
Mnasylus, and other jolly dogs of his day.
It was still the beaming time of evening, though night was
stealthily making itself visible low down upon the ground,
the western lines of light taking the earth without
alighting upon it to any extent, or illuminating the dead
levels at all. The sun had crept round the tree as a last
effort before death, and then began to sink, the shearers'
lower parts becoming steeped in embrowning twilight, whilst
their heads and shoulders were still enjoying day, touched
with a yellow of self-sustained brilliancy that seemed
inherent rather than acquired.
The sun went down in an ochreous mist; but they sat, and
talked on, and grew as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven.
Bathsheba still remained enthroned inside the window, and
occupied herself in knitting, from which she sometimes
looked up to view the fading scene outside. The slow
twilight expanded and enveloped them completely before the
signs of moving were shown.
Gabriel suddenly missed Farmer Boldwood from his place at
the bottom of the table. How long he had been gone Oak did
not know; but he had apparently withdrawn into the
encircling dusk. Whilst he was thinking of this, Liddy
brought candles into the back part of the room overlooking
the shearers, and their lively new flames shone down the
table and over the men, and dispersed among the green
shadows behind. Bathsheba's form, still in its original
position, was now again distinct between their eyes and the
light, which revealed that Boldwood had gone inside the
room, and was sitting near her.
Next came the question of the evening. Would Miss Everdene
sing to them the song she always sang so charmingly -- "The
Banks of Allan Water" -- before they went home?
After a moment's consideration Bathsheba assented, beckoning
to Gabriel, who hastened up into the coveted atmosphere.
"Have you brought your flute?" she whispered.
"Yes, miss."
"Play to my singing, then."
She stood up in the window-opening, facing the men, the
candles behind her, Gabriel on her right hand, immediately
outside the sash-frame. Boldwood had drawn up on her left,
within the room. Her singing was soft and rather tremulous
at first, but it soon swelled to a steady clearness.
Subsequent events caused one of the verses to be remembered
for many months, and even years, by more than one of those
who were gathered there: --
For his bride a soldier sought her,
And a winning tongue had he:
On the banks of Allan Water
None was gay as she!
In addition to the dulcet piping of Gabriel's flute,
Boldwood supplied a bass in his customary profound voice,
uttering his notes so softly, however, as to abstain
entirely from making anything like an ordinary duet of the
song; they rather formed a rich unexplored shadow, which
threw her tones into relief. The shearers reclined against
each other as at suppers in the early ages of the world, and
so silent and absorbed were they that her breathing could
almost be heard between the bars; and at the end of the
ballad, when the last tone loitered on to an inexpressible
close, there arose that buzz of pleasure which is the attar
of applause.
It is scarcely necessary to state that Gabriel could not
avoid noting the farmer's bearing to-night towards their
entertainer. Yet there was nothing exceptional in his
actions beyond what appertained to his time of performing
them. It was when the rest were all looking away that
Boldwood observed her; when they regarded her he turned
aside; when they thanked or praised he was silent; when they
were inattentive he murmured his thanks. The meaning lay in
the difference between actions, none of which had any
meaning of itself; and the necessity of being jealous, which
lovers are troubled with, did not lead Oak to underestimate
these signs.
Bathsheba then wished them good-night, withdrew from the
window, and retired to the back part of the room, Boldwood
thereupon closing the sash and the shutters, and remaining
inside with her. Oak wandered away under the quiet and
scented trees. Recovering from the softer impressions
produced by Bathsheba's voice, the shearers rose to leave,
Coggan turning to Pennyways as he pushed back the bench to
pass out: --
"I like to give praise where praise is due, and the man
deserves it -- that 'a do so," he remarked, looking at the
worthy thief, as if he were the masterpiece of some world-
renowned artist.
"I'm sure I should never have believed it if we hadn't
proved it, so to allude," hiccupped Joseph Poorgrass, "that
every cup, every one of the best knives and forks, and every
empty bottle be in their place as perfect now as at the
beginning, and not one stole at all."
"I'm sure I don't deserve half the praise you give me," said
the virtuous thief, grimly.
"Well, I'll say this for Pennyways," added Coggan, "that
whenever he do really make up his mind to do a noble thing
in the shape of a good action, as I could see by his face he
did to-night afore sitting down, he's generally able to
carry it out. Yes, I'm proud to say. neighbours, that he's
stole nothing at all."
"Well, 'tis an honest deed, and we thank ye for it,
Pennyways," said Joseph; to which opinion the remainder of
the company subscribed unanimously.
At this time of departure, when nothing more was visible of
the inside of the parlour than a thin and still chink of
light between the shutters, a passionate scene was in course
of enactment there.
Miss Everdene and Boldwood were alone. Her cheeks had lost
a great deal of their healthful fire from the very
seriousness of her position; but her eye was bright with the
excitement of a triumph -- though it was a triumph which had
rather been contemplated than desired.
She was standing behind a low arm-chair, from which she had
just risen, and he was kneeling in it -- inclining himself
over its back towards her, and holding her hand in both his
own. His body moved restlessly, and it was with what Keats
daintily calls a too happy happiness. This unwonted
abstraction by love of all dignity from a man of whom it had
ever seemed the chief component, was, in its distressing
incongruity, a pain to her which quenched much of the
pleasure she derived from the proof that she was idolized.
"I will try to love you," she was saying, in a trembling
voice quite unlike her usual self-confidence. "And if I can
believe in any way that I shall make you a good wife I shall
indeed be willing to marry you. But, Mr. Boldwood,
hesitation on so high a matter is honourable in any woman,
and I don't want to give a solemn promise to-night. I would
rather ask you to wait a few weeks till I can see my
situation better.
"But you have every reason to believe that THEN ----"
"I have every reason to hope that at the end of the five or
six weeks, between this time and harvest, that you say you
are going to be away from home, I shall be able to promise
to be your wife," she said, firmly. "But remember this
distinctly, I don't promise yet."
"It is enough I don't ask more. I can wait on those dear
words. And now, Miss Everdene, good-night!"
"Good-night," she said, graciously -- almost tenderly; and
Boldwood withdrew with a serene smile.
Bathsheba knew more of him now; he had entirely bared his
heart before her, even until he had almost worn in her eyes
the sorry look of a grand bird without the feathers that
make it grand. She had been awe-struck at her past
temerity, and was struggling to make amends without thinking
whether the sin quite deserved the penalty she was schooling
herself to pay. To have brought all this about her ears was
terrible; but after a while the situation was not without a
fearful joy. The facility with which even the most timid
woman sometimes acquire a relish for the dreadful when that
is amalgamated with a little triumph, is marvellous.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE SAME NIGHT -- THE FIR PLANTATION
AMONG the multifarious duties which Bathsheba had
voluntarily imposed upon herself by dispensing with the
services of a bailiff, was the particular one of looking
round the homestead before going to bed, to see that all was
right and safe for the night. Gabriel had almost constantly
preceded her in this tour every evening, watching her
affairs as carefully as any specially appointed officer of
surveillance could have done; but this tender devotion was
to a great extent unknown to his mistress, and as much as
was known was somewhat thanklessly received. Women are
never tired of bewailing man's fickleness in love, but they
only seem to snub his constancy.
As watching is best done invisibly, she usually carried a
dark lantern in her hand, and every now and then turned on
the light to examine nooks and corners with the coolness of
a metropolitan policeman. This coolness may have owed its
existence not so much to her fearlessness of expected danger
as to her freedom from the suspicion of any; her worst
anticipated discovery being that a horse might not be well
bedded, the fowls not all in, or a door not closed.
This night the buildings were inspected as usual, and she
went round to the farm paddock. Here the only sounds
disturbing the stillness were steady munchings of many
mouths, and stentorian breathings from all but invisible
noses, ending in snores and puffs like the blowing of
bellows slowly. Then the munching would recommence, when
the lively imagination might assist the eye to discern a
group of pink-white nostrils, shaped as caverns, and very
clammy and humid on their surfaces, not exactly pleasant to
the touch until one got used to them; the mouths beneath
having a great partiality for closing upon any loose end of
Bathsheba's apparel which came within reach of their
tongues. Above each of these a still keener vision
suggested a brown forehead and two staring though not
unfriendly eyes, and above all a pair of whitish crescent-
shaped horns like two particularly new moons, an occasional
stolid "moo!" proclaiming beyond the shade of a doubt that
these phenomena were the features and persons of Daisy,
Whitefoot, Bonny-lass, Jolly-O, Spot, Twinkle-eye, etc.,
etc. -- the respectable dairy of Devon cows belonging to
Bathsheba aforesaid.
Her way back to the house was by a path through a young
plantation of tapering firs, which had been planted some
years earlier to shelter the premises from the north wind.
By reason of the density of the interwoven foliage overhead,
it was gloomy there at cloudless noontide, twilight in the
evening, dark as midnight at dusk, and black as the ninth
plague of Egypt at midnight. To describe the spot is to
call it a vast, low, naturally formed hall, the plumy
ceiling of which was supported by slender pillars of living
wood, the floor being covered with a soft dun carpet of dead
spikelets and mildewed cones, with a tuft of grass-blades
here and there.
This bit of the path was always the crux of the night's
ramble, though, before starting, her apprehensions of danger
were not vivid enough to lead her to take a companion.
Slipping along here covertly as Time, Bathsheba fancied she
could hear footsteps entering the track at the opposite end.
It was certainly a rustle of footsteps. Her own instantly
fell as gently as snowflakes. She reassured herself by a
remembrance that the path was public, and that the traveller
was probably some villager returning home; regetting, at the
same time, that the meeting should be about to occur in the
darkest point of her route, even though only just outside
her own door.
The noise approached, came close, and a figure was
apparently on the point of gliding past her when something
tugged at her skirt and pinned it forcibly to the ground.
The instantaneous check nearly threw Bathsheba off her
balance. In recovering she struck against warm clothes and
buttons.
"A rum start, upon my soul!" said a masculine voice, a foot
or so above her head. "Have I hurt you, mate?"
"No," said Bathsheba, attempting to shrink a way.
"We have got hitched together somehow, I think."
"Yes."
"Are you a woman?"
"Yes."
"A lady, I should have said."
"It doesn't matter."
"I am a man."
"Oh!"
Bathsheba softly tugged again, but to no purpose.
"Is that a dark lantern you have? I fancy so," said the man.
"Yes."
"If you'll allow me I'll open it, and set you free."
A hand seized the lantern, the door was opened, the rays
burst out from their prison, and Bathsheba beheld her
position with astonishment.
The man to whom she was hooked was brilliant in brass and
scarlet. He was a soldier. His sudden appearance was to
darkness what the sound of a trumpet is to silense. Gloom,
the genius loci at all times hitherto, was now totally
overthrown, less by the lantern-light than by what the
lantern lighted. The contrast of this revelation with her
anticipations of some sinister figure in sombre garb was so
great that it had upon her the effect of a fairy
transformation.
It was immediately apparent that the military man's spur had
become entangled in the gimp which decorated the skirt of
her dress. He caught a view of her face.
"I'll unfasten you in one moment, miss," he said, with new-
born gallantry.
"Oh no -- I can do it, thank you," she hastily replied, and
stooped for the performance.
The unfastening was not such a trifling affair. The rowel
of the spur had so wound itself among the gimp cords in
those few moments, that separation was likely to be a matter
of time.
He too stooped, and the lantern standing on the ground
betwixt them threw the gleam from its open side among the
fir-tree needles and the blades of long damp grass with the
effect of a large glowworm. It radiated upwards into their
faces, and sent over half the plantation gigantic shadows of
both man and woman, each dusky shape becoming distorted and
mangled upon the tree-trunks till it wasted to nothing.
He looked hard into her eyes when she raised them for a
moment; Bathsheba looked down again, for his gaze was too
strong to be received point-blank with her own. But she had
obliquely noticed that he was young and slim, and that he
wore three chevrons upon his sleeve.
Bathsheba pulled again.
"You are a prisoner, miss; it is no use blinking the
matter," said the soldier, drily. "I must cut your dress if
you are in such a hurry."
"Yes -- please do!" she exclaimed, helplessly."
"It wouldn't be necessary if you could wait a moment," and
he unwound a cord from the little wheel. She withdrew her
own hand, but, whether by accident or design, he touched it.
Bathsheba was vexed; she hardly knew why.
His unravelling went on, but it nevertheless seemed coming
to no end. She looked at him again.
"Thank you for the sight of such a beautiful face!" said the
young sergeant, without ceremony.
She coloured with embarrassment. "'Twas un-willingly
shown," she replied, stiffly, and with as much dignity --
which was very little -- as she could infuse into a position
of captivity.
"I like you the better for that incivility, miss," he said.
"I should have liked -- I wish -- you had never shown
yourself to me by intruding here!" She pulled again, and the
gathers of her dress began to give way like liliputian
musketry.
"I deserve the chastisement your words give me. But why
should such a fair and dutiful girl have such an aversion to
her father's sex?"
"Go on your way, please."
"What, Beauty, and drag you after me? Do but look; I never
saw such a tangle!"
"Oh, 'tis shameful of you; you have been making it worse on
purpose to keep me here -- you have!"
"Indeed, I don't think so," said the sergeant, with a merry
twinkle.
"I tell you you have!" she exclaimed, in high temper. I
insist upon undoing it. Now, allow me!"
"Certainly, miss; I am not of steel." He added a sigh which
had as much archness in it as a sigh could possess without
losing its nature altogether. "I am thankful for beauty,
even when 'tis thrown to me like a bone to a dog. These
moments will be over too soon!"
She closed her lips in a determined silence.
Bathsheba was revolving in her mind whether by a bold and
desperate rush she could free herself at the risk of leaving
her skirt bodily behind her. The thought was too dreadful.
The dress -- which she had put on to appear stately at the
supper -- was the head and front of her wardrobe; not
another in her stock became her so well. What woman in
Bathsheba's position, not naturally timid, and within call
of her retainers, would have bought escape from a dashing
soldier at so dear a price?
"All in good time; it will soon be done, I perceive," said
her cool friend.
"This trifling provokes, and -- and ----"
"Not too cruel!"
"-- Insults me!"
"It is done in order that I may have the pleasure of
apologizing to so charming a woman, which I straightway do
most humbly, madam," he said, bowing low.
Bathsheba really knew not what to say.
"I've seen a good many women in my time," continued the
young man in a murmur, and more thoughtfully than hitherto,
critically regarding her bent head at the same time; "but
I've never seen a woman so beautiful as you. Take it or
leave it -- be offended or like it -- I don't care."
"Who are you, then, who can so well afford to despise
opinion?"
"No stranger. Sergeant Troy. I am staying in this place. --
There! it is undone at last, you see. Your light fingers
were more eager than mine. I wish it had been the knot of
knots, which there's no untying!"
This was worse and worse. She started up, and so did he.
How to decently get away from him -- that was her difficulty
now. She sidled off inch by inch, the lantern in her hand,
till she could see the redness of his coat no longer.
"Ah, Beauty; good-bye!" he said.
She made no reply, and, reaching a distance of twenty or
thirty yards, turned about, and ran indoors.
Liddy had just retired to rest. In ascending to her own
chamber, Bathsheba opened the girl's door an inch or two,
and, panting, said --
"Liddy, is any soldier staying in the village -- sergeant
somebody -- rather gentlemanly for a sergeant, and good
looking -- a red coat with blue facings?"
"No, miss ... No, I say; but really it might be Sergeant
Troy home on furlough, though I have not seen him. He was
here once in that way when the regiment was at
Casterbridge."
"Yes; that's the name. Had he a moustache -- no whiskers or
beard?"
"He had."
"What kind of a person is he?"
"Oh! miss -- I blush to name it -- a gay man! But I know him
to be very quick and trim, who might have made his
thousands, like a squire. Such a clever young dandy as he
is! He's a doctor's son by name, which is a great deal; and
he's an earl's son by nature!"
"Which is a great deal more. Fancy! Is it true?"
"Yes. And, he was brought up so well, and sent to
Casterbridge Grammar School for years and years. Learnt all
languages while he was there; and it was said he got on so
far that he could take down Chinese in shorthand; but that I
don't answer for, as it was only reported. However, he
wasted his gifted lot, and listed a soldier; but even then
he rose to be a sergeant without trying at all. Ah! such a
blessing it is to be high-born; nobility of blood will shine
out even in the ranks and files. And is he really come
home, miss?"
"I believe so. Good-night, Liddy."
After all, how could a cheerful wearer of skirts be
permanently offended with the man? There are occasions when
girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of
unconventional behaviour. When they want to be praised,
which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is
sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.
Just now the first feeling was in the ascendant with
Bathsheba, with a dash of the second. Moreover, by chance
or by devilry, the ministrant was antecedently made
interesting by being a handsome stranger who had evidently
seen better days.
So she could not clearly decide whether it was her opinion
that he had insulted her or not. "
"Was ever anything so odd!" she at last exclaimed to
herself, in her own room. "And was ever anything so meanly
done as what I did do to sulk away like that from a man who
was only civil and kind!" Clearly she did not think his
barefaced praise of her person an insult now.
It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once
told her she was beautiful.
CHAPTER XXV
THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED
IDIOSYNCRASY and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant
Troy as an exceptional being.
He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and
anticipations a superfluity. Simply feeling, considering,
and caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable
only in the present. His outlook upon time was as a
transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of
consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the
past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for
circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was
yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.
On this account he might, in certain lights, have been
regarded as one of the most fortunate of his order. For it
may be argued with great plausibility that reminiscence is
less an endowment than a disease, and that expectation in
its only comfortable form -- that of absolute faith -- is
practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and
the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve,
curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and
pain.
Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of
expectation, was never disappointed. To set against this
negative gain there may have been some positive losses from
a certain narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations
which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity is never
recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this
attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts plausibly
with material, since those who suffer do not mind it, whilst
those who mind it soon cease to suffer. It is not a denial
of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy
had never enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully
conscious that what sober people missed he enjoyed, his
capacity, though really less, seemed greater than theirs.
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied
like a Cretan -- a system of ethics above all others
calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission
into lively society; and the possibility of the favour
gained being transitory had reference only to the future.
He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from
the ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been
applauded, disapproval of them had frequently been tempered
with a smile. This treatment had led to his becoming a sort
of regrater of other men's gallantries, to his own
aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than to the moral
profit of his hearers.
His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating
influence, having separated by mutual consent long ago:
thence it sometimes happened that, while his intentions were
as honourable as could be wished, any particular deed formed
a dark background which threw them into fine relief. The
sergeant's vicious phases being the offspring of impulse,
and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the latter had a
modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.
Troy was full of activity, but his activities were less of a
locomotive than a vegetative nature; and, never being based
upon any original choice of foundation or direction, they
were exercised on whatever object chance might place in
their way. Hence, whilst he sometimes reached the brilliant
in speech because that was spontaneous, he fell below the
commonplace in action, from inability to guide incipient
effort. He had a quick comprehension and considerable force
of character; but, being without the power to combine them,
the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst
waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted
itself in useless grooves through unheeding the
comprehension.
He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class --
exceptionally well educated for a common soldier. He spoke
fluently and unceasingly. He could in this way be one thing
and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and
think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife; be
eager to pay and intend to owe.
The wondrous power of flattery in PASSADOS at woman is a
perception so universal as to be remarked upon by many
people almost as automatically as they repeat a proverb, or
say that they are Christians and the like, without thinking
much of the enormous corollaries which spring from the
proposition. Still less is it acted upon for the good of
the complemental being alluded to. With the majority such
an opinion is shelved with all those trite aphorisms which
require some catastrophe to bring their tremendous meanings
thoroughly home. When expressed with some amount of
reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with a belief that this
flattery must be reasonable to be effective. It is to the
credit of men that few attempt to settle the question by
experiment, and it is for their happiness, perhaps, that
accident has never settled it for them. Nevertheless, that
a male dissembler who by deluging her with untenable
fictions charms the female wisely, may acquire powers
reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth taught to
many by unsought and wringing occurrences. And some profess
to have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as
aforesaid, and jauntily continue their indulgence in such
experiments with terrible effect. Sergeant Troy was one.
He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with
womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and
swearing. There was no third method. "Treat them fairly,
and you are a lost man." he would say.
This person's public appearance in Weatherbury promptly
followed his arrival there. A week or two after the
shearing Bathsheba, feeling a nameless relief of spirits on
account of Boldwood's absence, approached her hayfields and
looked over the hedge towards the haymakers. They consisted
in about equal proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms,
the former being the men, the latter the women, who wore
tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain
upon their shoulders. Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in
a less forward meadow, Clark humming a tune to the strokes
of his scythe, to which Jan made no attempt to keep time
with his. In the first mead they were already loading hay,
the women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men
tossing it upon the waggon.
From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and
went on loading unconcernedly with the rest. It was the
gallant sergeant, who had come haymaking for pleasure; and
nobody could deny that he was doing the mistress of the farm
real knight-service by this voluntary contribution of his
labour at a busy time.
As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and
sticking his pitchfork into the ground and picking up his
crop or cane, he came forward. Bathsheba blushed with half-
angry embarrassment, and adjusted her eyes as well as her
feet to the direct line of her path.
CHAPTER XXVI
SCENE ON THE VERGE OF THE HAY-MEAD
"AH, Miss Everdene!" said the sergeant, touching his
diminutive cap. "Little did I think it was you I was
speaking to the other night. And yet, if I had reflected,
the "Queen of the Corn-market" (truth is truth at any hour
of the day or night, and I heard you so named in
Casterbridge yesterday), the "Queen of the Corn-market." I
say, could be no other woman. I step across now to beg your
forgiveness a thousand times for having been led by my
feelings to express myself too strongly for a stranger. To
be sure I am no stranger to the place -- I am Sergeant Troy,
as I told you, and I have assisted your uncle in these
fields no end of times when I was a lad. I have been doing
the same for you today."
"I suppose I must thank you for that, Sergeant Troy," said
the Queen of the Corn-market, in an indifferently grateful
tone.
The sergeant looked hurt and sad. "Indeed you must not,
Miss Everdene," he said. "Why could you think such a thing
necessary?"
"I am glad it is not."
"Why? if I may ask without offence."
"Because I don't much want to thank you for anything."
"I am afraid I have made a hole with my tongue that my heart
will never mend. O these intolerable times: that ill-luck
should follow a man for honestly telling a woman she is
beautiful! 'Twas the most I said -- you must own that; and
the least I could say -- that I own myself."
"There is some talk I could do without more easily than
money."
"Indeed. That remark is a sort of digression."
"No. It means that I would rather have your room than your
company."
"And I would rather have curses from you than kisses from
any other woman; so I'll stay here."
Bathsheba was absolutely speechless. And yet she could not
help feeling that the assistance he was rendering forbade a
harsh repulse.
"Well," continued Troy, "I suppose there is a praise which
is rudeness, and that may be mine. At the same time there
is a treatment which is injustice, and that may be yours.
Because a plain blunt man, who has never been taught
concealment, speaks out his mind without exactly intending
it, he's to be snapped off like the son of a sinner."
"Indeed there's no such case between us," she said, turning
away. "I don't allow strangers to be bold and impudent --
even in praise of me."
"Ah -- it is not the fact but the method which offends you,"
he said, carelessly. "But I have the sad satisfaction of
knowing that my words, whether pleasing or offensive, are
unmistakably true. Would you have had me look at you, and
tell my acquaintance that you are quite a common-place
woman, to save you the embarrassment of being stared at if
they come near you? Not I. I couldn't tell any such
ridiculous lie about a beauty to encourage a single woman in
England in too excessive a modesty."
"It is all pretence -- what you are saying!" exclaimed
Bathsheba, laughing in spite of herself at the sly method.
"You have a rare invention, Sergeant Troy. Why couldn't you
have passed by me that night, and said nothing? -- that was
all I meant to reproach you for."
"Because I wasn't going to. Half the pleasure of a feeling
lies in being able to express it on the spur of the moment,
and I let out mine. It would have been just the same if you
had been the reverse person -- ugly and old -- I should have
exclaimed about it in the same way."
"How long is it since you have been so afflicted with strong
feeling, then?"
"Oh, ever since I was big enough to know loveliness from
deformity."
"'Tis to be hoped your sense of the difference you speak of
doesn't stop at faces, but extends to morals as well."
"I won't speak of morals or religion -- my own or anybody
else's. Though perhaps I should have been a very good
Christian if you pretty women hadn't made me an idolater."
Bathsheba moved on to hide the irrepressible dimplings of
merriment. Troy followed, whirling his crop.
"But -- Miss Everdene -- you do forgive me?"
"Hardly."
"Why?"
"You say such things."
"I said you were beautiful, and I'll say so still; for, by --
so you are! The most beautiful ever I saw, or may I fall
dead this instant! Why, upon my ----"
"Don't -- don't! I won't listen to you -- you are so
profane!" she said, in a restless state between distress at
hearing him and a PENCHANT to hear more.
"I again say you are a most fascinating woman. There's
nothing remarkable in my saying so, is there? I'm sure the
fact is evident enough. Miss Everdene, my opinion may be
too forcibly let out to please you, and, for the matter of
that, too insignificant to convince you, but surely it is
honest, and why can't it be excused?"
"Because it -- it isn't a correct one," she femininely
murmured.
"Oh, fie -- fie! Am I any worse for breaking the third of
that Terrible Ten than you for breaking the ninth?"
"Well, it doesn't seem QUITE true to me that I am
fascinating," she replied evasively.
"Not so to you: then I say with all respect that, if so, it
is owing to your modesty, Miss Everdene. But surely you
must have been told by everybody of what everybody notices?
and you should take their words for it."
"They don't say so exactly."
"Oh yes, they must!"
"Well, I mean to my face, as you do," she went on, allowing
herself to be further lured into a conversation that
intention had rigorously forbidden.
"But you know they think so?"
"No -- that is -- I certainly have heard Liddy say they do,
but ----" She paused.
Capitulation -- that was the purport of the simple reply,
guarded as it was -- capitulation, unknown to her-self.
Never did a fragile tailless sentence convey a more perfect
meaning. The careless sergeant smiled within himself, and
probably too the devil smiled from a loop-hole in Tophet,
for the moment was the turning-point of a career. Her tone
and mien signified beyond mistake that the seed which was to
lift the foundation had taken root in the chink: the
remainder was a mere question of time and natural changes.
"There the truth comes out!" said the soldier, in reply.
"Never tell me that a young lady can live in a buzz of
admiration without knowing something about it. Ah, well,
Miss Everdene, you are -- pardon my blunt way -- you are
rather an injury to our race than other-wise.
"How -- indeed?" she said, opening her eyes.
"Oh, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep
as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but
it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my
mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or
intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in
this manner that your good looks may do more harm than good
in the world." The sergeant looked down the mead in
critical abstracion. "Probably some one man on an average
falls in love, with each ordinary woman. She can marry him:
he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a
hundred men always covet -- your eyes will bewitch scores on
scores into an unavailing fancy for you -- you can only
marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will
endeavour to drown the bitterness of espised love in drink;
twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or
attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no
ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more --
the susceptible person myself possibly among them -- will be
always draggling after you, getting where they may just see
you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools!
The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less
success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only
those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might
have married are saddened with them. There's my tale.
That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss
Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race."
The handsome sergeant's features were during this speech as
rigid and stern as John Knox's in addressing his gay young
queen.
Seeing she made no reply, he said, "Do you read French?"
"No; I began, but when I got to the verbs, father died," she
said simply.
"I do -- when I have an opportunity, which latterly has not
been often (my mother was a Parisienne) -- and there's a
proverb they have, QUI AIME BIEN CHATIE BIEN -- "He chastens
who loves well." Do you understand me?
"Ah!" she replied, and there was even a little tremulousness
in the usually cool girl's voice; "if you can only fight
half as winningly as you can talk, you are able to make a
pleasure of a bayonet wound!" And then poor Bathsheba
instantly perceived her slip in making this admission: in
hastily trying to retrieve it, she went from bad to worse.
"Don't, however, suppose that I derive any pleasure from
what you tell me."
"I know you do not -- I know it perfectly," said Troy, with
much hearty conviction on the exterior of his face: and
altering the expression to moodiness; "when a dozen men are
ready to speak tenderly to you, and give the admiration you
deserve without adding the warning you need, it stands to
reason that my poor rough-and-ready mixture of praise and
blame cannot convey much pleasure. Fool as I may be, I am
not so conceited as to suppose that!"
"I think you -- are conceited, nevertheless," said
Bathsheba, looking askance at a reed she was fitfully
pulling with one hand, having lately grown feverish under
the soldier's system of procedure -- not because the nature
of his cajolery was entirely unperceived, but because its
vigour was overwhelming.
"I would not own it to anybody else -- nor do I exactly to
you. Still, there might have been some self-conceit in my
foolish supposition the other night. I knew that what I
said in admiration might be an opinion too often forced upon
you to give any pleasure but I certainly did think that the
kindness of your nature might prevent you judging an
uncontrolled tongue harshly -- which you have done -- and
thinking badly of me and wounding me this morning, when I am
working hard to save your hay."
"Well, you need not think more of that: perhaps you did not
mean to be rude to me by speaking out your mind: indeed, I
believe you did not," said the shrewd woman, in painfully
innocent earnest. "And I thank you for giving help here.
But -- but mind you don't speak to me again in that way, or
in any other, unless I speak to you."
"Oh, Miss Bathsheba! That is too hard!"
"No, it isn't. Why is it?"
"You will never speak to me; for I shall not be here long.
I am soon going back again to the miserable monotony of
drill -- and perhaps our regiment will be ordered out soon.
And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure
that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps
generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic."
"When are you going from here?" she asked, with some
interest.
"In a month."
"But how can it give you pleasure to speak to me?"
"Can you ask Miss Everdene -- knowing as you do -- what my
offence is based on?"
"If you do care so much for a silly trifle of that kind,
then, I don't mind doing it," she uncertainly and doubtingly
answered. "But you can't really care for a word from me?
you only say so -- I think you only say so."
"That's unjust -- but I won't repeat the remark. I am too
gratified to get such a mark of your friendship at any price
to cavil at the tone. I DO Miss Everdene, care for it. You
may think a man foolish to want a mere word -- just a good
morning. Perhaps he is -- I don't know. But you have never
been a man looking upon a woman, and that woman yourself."
"Well."
"Then you know nothing of what such an experience is like --
and Heaven forbid that you ever should!"
"Nonsense, flatterer! What is it like? I am interested in
knowing."
"Put shortly, it is not being able to think, hear, or look
in any direction except one without wretchedness, nor there
without torture."
"Ah, sergeant, it won't do -- you are pretending!" she said,
shaking her head." Your words are too dashing to be true."
"I am not, upon the honour of a soldier"
"But WHY is it so? -- Of course I ask for mere pastime."
Because you are so distracting -- and I am so distracted."
"You look like it."
"I am indeed."
"Why, you only saw me the other night!"
"That makes no difference. The lightning works
instantaneously. I loved you then, at once -- as I do now."
Bathsheba surveyed him curiously, from the feet upward, as
high as she liked to venture her glance, which was not quite
so high as his eyes.
"You cannot and you don"t," she said demurely. "There is-no
such sudden feeling in people. I won't listen to you any
longer. Hear me, I wish I knew what o'clock it is -- I am
going -- I have wasted too much time here already!"
The sergeant looked at his watch and told her. "What,
haven't you a watch, miss?" he inquired.
"I have not just at present -- I am about to get a new one."
"No. You shall be given one. Yes -- you shall. A gift,
Miss Everdene -- a gift."
And before she knew what the young -- man was intending, a
heavy gold watch was in her hand.
"It is an unusually good one for a man like me to possess,"
he quietly said. "That watch has a history. Press the
spring and open the back."
She did so.
"What do you see?"
"A crest and a motto."
"A coronet with five points, and beneath, CEDIT AMOR REBUS --
"Love yields to circumstance." It's the motto of the Earls
of Severn. That watch belonged to the last lord, and was
given to my mother's husband, a medical man, for his use
till I came of age, when it was to be given to me. It was
all the fortune that ever I inherited. That watch has
regulated imperial interests in its time -- the stately
ceremonial, the courtly assignation, pompous travels, and
lordly sleeps. Now it is yours.
"But, Sergeant Troy, I cannot take this -- I cannot!" she
exclaimed, with round-eyed wonder. "A gold watch! What are
you doing? Don't be such a dissembler!"
The sergeant retreated to avoid receiving back his gift,
which she held out persistently towards him. Bathsheba
followed as he retired.
"Keep it -- do, Miss Everdene -- keep it!" said the erratic
child of impulse. "The fact of your possessing it makes it
worth ten times as much to me. A more plebeian one will
answer my purpose just as well, and the pleasure of knowing
whose heart my old one beats against -- well, I won't speak
of that. It is in far worthier hands than ever it has been
in before."
"But indeed I can't have it!" she said, in a perfect simmer
of distress. "Oh, how can you do such a thing; that is if
you really mean it! Give me your dead father's watch, and
such a valuable one! You should not be so reckless, indeed,
Sergeant Troy!"
"I loved my father: good; but better, I love you more.
That's how I can do it," said the sergeant, with an
intonation of such exquisite fidelity to nature that it was
evidently not all acted now. Her beauty, which, whilst it
had been quiescent, he had praised in jest, had in its
animated phases moved him to earnest; and though his
seriousness was less than she imagined, it was probably more
than he imagined himself.
Bathsheba was brimming with agitated bewilderment, and she
said, in half-suspicious accents of feeling, "Can it be! Oh,
how can it be, that you care for me, and so suddenly! You
have seen so little of me: I may not be really so -- so
nice-looking as I seem to you. Please, do take it; Oh, do!
I cannot and will not have it. Believe me, your generosity
is too great. I have never done you a single kindness, and
why should you be so kind to me?"
A factitious reply had been again upon his lips, but it was
again suspended, and he looked at her with an arrested eye.
The truth was, that as she now stood -- excited, wild, and
honest as the day -- her alluring beauty bore out so fully
the epithets he had bestowed upon it that he was quite
startled at his temerity in advancing them as false. He
said mechanically, "Ah, why?" and continued to look at her.
"And my workfolk see me following you about the field, and
are wondering. Oh, this is dreadful!" she went on,
unconscious of the transmutation she was effecting.
"I did not quite mean you to accept it at first, for it was
my one poor patent of nobility," he broke out, bluntly;
"but, upon my soul, I wish you would now. Without any
shamming, come! Don't deny me the happiness of wearing it
for my sake? But you are too lovely even to care to be kind
as others are."
"No, no; don't say so! I have reasons for reserve which I
cannot explain."
"Let it be, then, let it be," he said, receiving back the
watch at last; "I must be leaving you now. And will you
speak to me for these few weeks of my stay?"
"Indeed I will. Yet, I don't know if I will! Oh, why did
you come and disturb me so!"
"Perhaps in setting a gin, I have caught myself. Such
things have happened. Well, will you let me work in your
fields?" he coaxed.
"Yes, I suppose so; if it is any pleasure to you."
"Miss Everdene, I thank you."
"No, no."
"Good-bye!"
The sergeant brought his hand to the cap on the slope of his
head, saluted, and returned to the distant group of
haymakers.
Bathsheba could not face the haymakers now. Her heart
erratically flitting hither and thither from perplexed
excitement, hot, and almost tearful, she retreated homeward,
murmuring, Oh, what have I done! What does it mean! I wish I
knew how much of it was true!
CHAPTER XXVII
HIVING THE BEES
THE Weatherbury bees were late in their swarming this year.
It was in the latter part of June, and the day after the
interview with Troy in the hayfield, that Bathsheba was
standing in her garden, watching a swarm in the air and
guessing their probable settling place. Not only were they
late this year, but unruly. Sometimes throughout a whole
season all the swarms would alight on the lowest attainable
bough -- such as part of a currant-bush or espalier apple-
tree; next year they would, with just the same unanimity,
make straight off to the uppermost member of some tall,
gaunt costard, or quarrenden, and there defy all invaders
who did not come armed with ladders and staves to take them.
This was the case at present. Bathsheba's eyes, shaded by
one hand, were following the ascending multitude against the
unexplorable stretch of blue till they ultimately halted by
one of the unwieldy trees spoken of. A process somewhat
analogous to that of alleged formations of the universe,
time and times ago, was observable. The bustling swarm had
swept the sky in a scattered and uniform haze, which now
thickened to a nebulous centre: this glided on to a bough
and grew still denser, till it formed a solid black spot
upon the light.
The men and women being all busily engaged in saving the hay
-- even Liddy had left the house for the purpose of lending
a hand -- Bathsheba resolved to hive the bees herself, if
possible. She had dressed the hive with herbs and honey,
fetched a ladder, brush, and crook, made herself impregnable
with armour of leather gloves, straw hat, and large gauze
veil -- once green but now faded to snuff colour -- and
ascended a dozen rungs of the ladder. At once she heard,
not ten yards off, a voice that was beginning to have a
strange power in agitating her.
"Miss Everdene, let me assist you; you should not attempt
such a thing alone."
Troy was just opening the garden gate.
Bathsheba flung down the brush, crook, and empty hive,
pulled the skirt of her dress tightly round her ankles in a
tremendous flurry, and as well as she could slid down the
ladder. By the time she reached the bottom Troy was there
also, and he stooped to pick up the hive.
"How fortunate I am to have dropped in at this moment!"
exclaimed the sergeant.
She found her voice in a minute. "What! and will you shake
them in for me?" she asked, in what, for a defiant girl, was
a faltering way; though, for a timid girl, it would have
seemed a brave way enough.
"Will I!" said Troy. "Why, of course I will. How blooming
you are to-day!" Troy flung down his cane and put his foot
on the ladder to ascend.
"But you must have on the veil and gloves, or you'll be
stung fearfully!"
"Ah, yes. I must put on the veil and gloves. Will you
kindly show me how to fix them properly?"
"And you must have the broad-brimmed hat, too, for your cap
has no brim to keep the veil off, and they'd reach your
face."
"The broad-brimmed hat, too, by all means."
So a whimsical fate ordered that her hat should be taken off
-- veil and all attached -- and placed upon his head, Troy
tossing his own into a gooseberry bush. Then the veil had
to be tied at its lower edge round his collar and the gloves
put on him.
He looked such an extraordinary object in this guise that,
flurried as she was, she could not avoid laughing outright.
It was the removal of yet another stake from the palisade of
cold manners which had kept him off.
Bathsheba looked on from the ground whilst he was busy
sweeping and shaking the bees from the tree, holding up the
hive with the other hand for them to fall into. She made
use of an unobserved minute whilst his attention was
absorbed in the operation to arrange her plumes a little.
He came down holding the hive at arm's length, behind which
trailed a cloud of bees.
"Upon my life," said Troy, through the veil, "holding up
this hive makes one's arm ache worse than a week of sword-
exercise." When the manoeuvre was complete he approached
her. "Would you be good enough to untie me and let me out?
I am nearly stifled inside this silk cage."
To hide her embarrassment during the unwonted process of
untying the string about his neck, she said: --
"I have never seen that you spoke of."
"What?"
"The sword-exercise."
"Ah! would you like to?" said Troy.
Bathsheba hesitated. She had heard wondrous reports from
time to time by dwellers in Weatherbury, who had by chance
sojourned awhile in Casterbridge, near the barracks, of this
strange and glorious performance, the sword-exercise. Men
and boys who had peeped through chinks or over walls into
the barrack-yard returned with accounts of its being the
most flashing affair conceivable; accoutrements and weapons
glistening like stars -- here, there, around -- yet all by
rule and compass. So she said mildly what she felt
strongly.
"Yes; I should like to see it very much."
"And so you shall; you shall see me go through it."
"No! How?"
"Let me consider."
"Not with a walking-stick -- I don't care to see that. It
must be a real sword."
"Yes, I know; and I have no sword here; but I think I could
get one by the evening. Now, will you do this?"
Troy bent over her and murmured some suggestion in a low
voice.
"Oh no, indeed!" said Bathsheba, blushing." Thank you very
much, but I couldn't on any account.
"Surely you might? Nobody would know."
She shook her head, but with a weakened negation. "If I
were to," she said, "I must bring Liddy too. Might I not?"
Troy looked far away. "I don't see why you want to bring
her," he said coldly.
An unconscious look of assent in Bathsheba's eyes betrayed
that something more than his coldness had made her also feel
that Liddy Would be superfluous in the suggested scene. She
had felt it, even whilst making the proposal.
"Well, I won't bring Liddy -- and I'll come. But only for a
very short time," she added; "a very short time."
"It will not take five minutes," said Troy.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HOLLOW AMID THE FERNS
THE hill opposite Bathsheba's dwelling extended, a mile off,
into an uncultivated tract of land, dotted at this season
with tall thickets of brake fern, plump and diaphanous from
recent rapid growth, and radiant in hues of clear and
untainted green.
At eight o'clock this midsummer evening, whilst the
bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of
the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays, a soft brushing-by
of garments might have been heard among them, and Bathsheba
appeared in their midst, their soft, feathery arms caressing
her up to her shoulders. She paused, turned, went back over
the hill and half-way to her own door, whence she cast a
farewell glance upon the spot she had just left, having
resolved not to remain near the place after all.
She saw a dim spot of artificial red moving round the
shoulder of the rise. It disappeared on the other side.
She waited one minute -- two minutes -- thought of Troy's
disappointment at her non-fulfilment of a promised
engagement, till she again ran along the field, clambered
over the bank, and followed the original direction. She was
now literally trembling and panting at this her temerity in
such an errant undertaking; her breath came and went
quickly, and her eyes shone with an in-frequent light. Yet
go she must. She reached the verge of a pit in the middle
of the ferns. Troy stood in the bottom, looking up towards
her.
"I heard you rustling through the fern before I saw you," he
said, coming up and giving her his hand to help her down the
slope.
The pit was a saucer-shaped concave, naturally formed, with
a top diameter of about thirty feet, and shallow enough to
allow the sunshine to reach their heads. Standing in the
centre, the sky overhead was met by a circular horizon of
fern: this grew nearly to the bottom of the slope and then
abruptly ceased. The middle within the belt of verdure was
floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass
intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half-buried
within it.
"Now," said Troy, producing the sword, which, as he raised
it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like a
living thing, "first, we have four right and four left cuts;
four right and four left thrusts. Infantry cuts and guards
are more interesting than ours, to my mind; but they are not
so swashing. They have seven cuts and three thrusts. So
much as a preliminary. Well, next, our cut one is as if you
were sowing your corn -- so." Bathsheba saw a sort of
rainbow, upside down in the air, and Troy's arm was still
again. "Cut two, as if you were hedging -- so. Three, as
if you were reaping -- so. Four, as if you were threshing --
in that way. Then the same on the left. The thrusts are
these: one, two, three, four, right; one, two, three, four,
left." He repeated them. "Have 'em again?" he said. "One,
two ----"
She hurriedly interrupted: "I'd rather not; though I don't
mind your twos and fours; but your ones and threes are
terrible!"
"Very well. I'll let you off the ones and threes. Next,
cuts, points and guards altogether," Troy duly exhibited
them. "Then there's pursuing practice, in this way." He
gave the movements as before. "There, those are the
stereotyped forms. The infantry have two most diabolical
upward cuts, which we are too humane to use. Like this --
three, four."
"How murderous and bloodthirsty!"
"They are rather deathy. Now I'll be more interesting, and
let you see some loose play -- giving all the cuts and
points, infantry and cavalry, quicker than lightning, and as
promiscuously -- with just enough rule to regulate instinct
and yet not to fetter it. You are my antagonist, with this
difference from real warfare, that I shall miss you every
time by one hair's breadth, or perhaps two. Mind you don't
flinch, whatever you do."
I'll be sure not to!" she said invincibly.
He pointed to about a yard in front of him.
Bathsheba's adventurous spirit was beginning to find some
grains of relish in these highly novel proceedings. She
took up her position as directed, facing Troy.
"Now just to learn whether you have pluck enough to let me
do what I wish, I'll give you a preliminary test."
He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two,
and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the
point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam
towards her left side, just above her hip; then of their
reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were from
between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body.
The third item of consciousness was that of seeing the same
sword, perfectly clean and free from blood held vertically
in Troy's hand (in the position technically called "recover
swords"). All was as quick as electricity.
"Oh!" she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her
side." Have you run me through? -- no, you have not!
Whatever have you done!"
"I have not touched you," said Troy, quietly. "It was mere
sleight of hand. The sword passed behind you. Now you are
not afraid, are you? Because if you are l can't perform. I
give my word that l will not only not hurt you, but not once
touch you."
"I don't think I am afraid. You are quite sure you will not
hurt me?"
"Quite sure."
"Is the Sword very sharp?"
"O no -- only stand as still as a statue. Now!"
In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba's
eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun's rays, above,
around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven
-- all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy's
reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet
nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied
by a keen rush that was almost a whistling -- also springing
from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed
in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a
sky-full of meteors close at hand.
Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had
there been more dexterity shown in its management than by
the hands of Sergeant Troy, and never had he been in such
splendid temper for the performance as now in the evening
sunshine among the ferns with Bathsheba. It may safely be
asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had
it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the
air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space
left untouched would have been almost a mould of Bathsheba's
figure.
Behind the luminous streams of this AURORA MILITARIS, she
could see the hue of Troy's sword arm, spread in a scarlet
haze over the space covered by its motions, like a twanged
harpstring, and behind all Troy himself, mostly facing her;
sometimes, to show the rear cuts, half turned away, his eye
nevertheless always keenly measuring her breadth and
outline, and his lips tightly closed in sustained effort.
Next, his movements lapsed slower, and she could see them
individually. The hissing of the sword had ceased, and he
stopped entirely.
"That outer loose lock of hair wants tidying, he said,
before she had moved or spoken. "Wait: I'll do it for you."
An arc of silver shone on her right side: the sword had
descended. The lock droped to the ground.
"Bravely borne!" said Troy. "You didn't flinch a shade's
thickness. Wonderful in a woman!"
"It was because I didn't expect it. Oh, you have spoilt my
hair!"
"Only once more."
"No -- no! I am afraid of you -- indeed I am!" she cried.
"I won't touch you at all -- not even your hair. I am only
going to kill that caterpillar settling on you. Now:
still!"
It appeared that a caterpillar had come from the fern and
chosen the front of her bodice as his resting place. She
saw the point glisten towards her bosom, and seemingly enter
it. Bathsheba closed her eyes in the full persuasion that
she was killed at last. However, feeling just as usual, she
opened them again.
"There it is, look," said the sargeant, holding his sword
before her eyes.
The caterpillar was spitted upon its point.
"Why, it is magic!" said Bathsheba, amazed.
"Oh no -- dexterity. I merely gave point to your bosom
where the caterpillar was, and instead of running you
through checked the extension a thousandth of an inch short
of your surface."
"But how could you chop off a curl of my hair with a sword
that has no edge?"
"No edge! This sword will shave like a razor. Look here."
He touched the palm of his hand with the blade, and then,
lifting it, showed her a thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling
therefrom.
"But you said before beginning that it was blunt and
couldn't cut me!"
"That was to get you to stand still, and so make sure of
your safety. The risk of injuring you through your moving
was too great not to force me to tell you a fib to escape
it."
She shuddered. "I have been within an inch of my life, and
didn't know it!"
"More precisely speaking, you have been within half an inch
of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times."
"Cruel, cruel, 'tis of you!"
"You have been perfectly safe, nevertheless. My sword never
errs." And Troy returned the weapon to the scabbard.
Bathsheba, overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings
resulting from the scene, abstractedly sat down on a tuft of
heather.
"I must leave you now," said Troy, softly. "And I'll
venture to take and keep this in remembrance of you."
She saw him stoop to the grass, pick up the winding lock
which he had severed from her manifold tresses, twist it
round his fingers, unfasten a button in the breast of his
coat, and carefully put it inside. She felt powerless to
withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her,
and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind,
finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath. He
drew near and said, "I must be leaving you."
He drew nearer still. A minute later and she saw his
scarlet form disappear amid the ferny thicket, almost in a
flash, like a brand swiftly waved.
That minute's interval had brought the blood beating into
her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows
of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite
swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke
resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream
-- here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned
a great sin.
The circumstance had been the gentle dip of Troy's mouth
downwards upon her own. He had kissed her.
CHAPTER XXIX
PARTICULARS OF A TWILIGHT WALK
WE now see the element of folly distinctly mingling with the
many varying particulars which made up the character of
Bathsheba Everdene. It was almost foreign to her intrinsic
nature. Introduced as lymph on the dart of Eros, it
eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution.
Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be
entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much
womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.
Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate
more than in the strange power she possesses of believing
cajoleries that she knows to be false -- except, indeed, in
that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows
to be true.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women
love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong
woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than
a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion.
She has never had practice in making the best of such a
condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
Bathsheba was not conscious of guile in this matter. Though
in one sense a woman of the world, it was, after all, that
world of daylight coteries and green carpets wherein cattle
form the passing crowd and winds the busy hum; where a quiet
family of rabbits or hares lives on the other side of your
party-wall, where your neighbour is everybody in the
tything, and where calculation is confined to market-days.
Of the fabricated tastes of good fashionable society she
knew but little, and of the formulated self-indulgence of
bad, nothing at all. Had her utmost thoughts in this
direction been distinctly worded (and by herself they never
were), they would only have amounted to such a matter as
that she felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her
discretion. Her love was entire as a child's, and though
warm as summer it was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay
in her making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and
careful inquiry into consciences. She could show others the
steep and thorny way, but "reck'd not her own rede."
And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision,
whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus
contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to
the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.
The difference between love and respect was markedly shown
in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in
Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she had
only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.
All this infatuation Gabriel saw, and was troubled thereby
from the time of his daily journey a-field to the time of
his return, and on to the small hours of many a night. That
he was not beloved had hitherto been his great sorrow; that
Bathsheba was getting into the toils was now a sorrow
greater than the first, and one which nearly obscured it.
It was a result which paralleled the oft-quoted observation
of Hippocrates concerning physical pains.
That is a noble though perhaps an unpromising love which not
even the fear of breeding aversion in the bosom of the one
beloved can deter from combating his or her errors. Oak
determined to speak to his mistress. He would base his
appeal on what he considered her unfair treatment of Farmer
Boldwood, now absent from home.
An opportunity occurred one evening when she had gone for a
short walk by a path through the neighbouring cornfields.
It was dusk when Oak, who had not been far a-field that day,
took the same path and met her returning, quite pensively,
as he thought.
The wheat was now tall, and the path was narrow; thus the
way was quite a sunken groove between the embowing thicket
on either side. Two persons could not walk abreast without
damaging the crop, and Oak stood aside to let her pass.
"Oh, is it Gabriel?" she said. "You are taking a walk too.
Good-night."
"I thought I would come to meet you, as it is rather late,"
said Oak, turning and following at her heels when she had
brushed somewhat quickly by him.
"Thank you, indeed, but I am not very fearful."
"Oh no; but there are bad characters about."
"I never meet them."
Now Oak, with marvellous ingenuity, had been going to
introduce the gallant sergeant through the channel of "bad
characters." But all at once the scheme broke down, it
suddenly occurring to him that this was rather a clumsy way,
and too barefaced to begin with. He tried another preamble.
"And as the man who would naturally come to meet you is away
from home, too -- I mean Farmer Boldwood -- why, thinks I,
I'll go," he said.
"Ah, yes." She walked on without turning her head, and for
many steps nothing further was heard from her quarter than
the rustle of her dress against the heavy corn-ears. Then
she resumed rather tartly --
"I don't quite understand what you meant by saying that Mr.
Boldwood would naturally come to meet me."
I meant on account of the wedding which they say is likely
to take place between you and him, miss. Forgive my
speaking plainly."
"They say what is not true." she returned quickly. No
marriage is likely to take place between us."
Gabriel now put forth his unobscured opinion, for the moment
had come. "Well, Miss Everdene," he said, "putting aside
what people say, I never in my life saw any courting if his
is not a courting of you."
Bathsheba would probably have terminated the conversation
there and then by flatly forbidding the subject, had not her
conscious weakness of position allured her to palter and
argue in endeavours to better it.
"Since this subject has been mentioned," she said very
emphatically, "I am glad of the opportunity of clearing up a
mistake which is very common and very provoking. I didn't
definitely promise Mr. Boldwood anything. I have never
cared for him. I respect him, and he has urged me to marry
him. But I have given him no distinct answer. As soon as
he returns I shall do so; and the answer will be that I
cannot think of marrying him."
"People are full of mistakes, seemingly."
"They are."
The other day they said you were trifling with him, and you
almost proved that you were not; lately they have said that
you be not, and you straightway begin to show ----"
"That I am, I suppose you mean."
"Well, I hope they speak the truth."
"They do, but wrongly applied. I don't trifle with him; but
then, I have nothing to do with him."
Oak was unfortunately led on to speak of Boldwood's rival in
a wrong tone to her after all. "I wish you had never met
that young Sergeant Troy, miss," he sighed.
Bathsheba's steps became faintly spasmodic. "Why?" she
asked.
"He is not good enough for 'ee."
"Did any one tell you to speak to me like this?"
"Nobody at all."
"Then it appears to me that Sergeant Troy does not concern
us here," she said, intractably." Yet I must say that
Sergeant Troy is an educated man, and quite worthy of any
woman. He is well born."
"His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o'
soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It show's
his course to be down'ard."
"I cannot see what this has to do with our conversation.
Mr. Troy's course is not by any means downward; and his
superiority IS a proof of his worth!"
"I believe him to have no conscience at all. And I cannot
help begging you, miss, to have nothing to do with him.
Listen to me this once -- only this once! I don't say he's
such a bad man as I have fancied -- I pray to God he is not.
But since we don't exactly know what he is, why not behave
as if he MIGHT be bad, simply for your own safety? Don't
trust him, mistress; I ask you not to trust him so."
"Why, pray?"
"I like soldiers, but this one I do not like," he said,
sturdily. "His cleverness in his calling may have tempted
him astray, and what is mirth to the neighbours is ruin to
the woman. When he tries to talk to 'ee again, why not turn
away with a short "Good day"; and when you see him coming
one way, turn the other. When he says anything laughable,
fail to see the point and don't smile, and speak of him
before those who will report your talk as "that fantastical
man," or "that Sergeant What's-his-name." "That man of a
family that has come to the dogs." Don't be unmannerly
towards en, but harmless-uncivil, and so get rid of the
man."
No Christmas robin detained by a window-pane ever pulsed as
did Bathsheba now.
"I say -- I say again -- that it doesn't become you to talk
about him. Why he should be mentioned passes me quite!" she
exclaimed desperately. "I know this, th-th-that he is a
thoroughly conscientious man -- blunt sometimes even to
rudeness -- but always speaking his mind about you plain to
your face!"
"Oh."
"He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very
particular, too, about going to church -- yes, he is!"
"I am afeard nobody saw him there. I never did, certainly."
"The reason of that is," she said eagerly, "that he goes in
privately by the old tower door, just when the service
commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me
so."
This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel
ears like the thirteenth stroke of crazy clock. It was not
only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but
threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.
Oak was grieved to find how entirely she trusted him. He
brimmed with deep feeling as he replied in a steady voice,
the steadiness of which was spoilt by the palpableness of
his great effort to keep it so: --
"You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you
always. I only mention this to bring to your mind that at
any rate I would wish to do you no harm: beyond that I put
it aside. I have lost in the race for money and good
things, and I am not such a fool as to pretend to 'ee now I
am poor, and you have got altogether above me. But
Bathsheba, dear mistress, this I beg you to consider --
that, both to keep yourself well honoured among the
workfolk, and in common generosity to an honourable man who
loves you as well as I, you should be more discreet in your
bearing towards this soldier."
"Don't, don't, don't!" she exclaimed, in a choking voice.
"Are ye not more to me than my own affairs, and even life!"
he went on. "Come, listen to me! I am six years older than
you, and Mr. Boldwood is ten years older than I, and
consider -- I do beg of 'ee to consider before it is too
late -- how safe you would be in his hands!"
Oak's allusion to his own love for her lessened, to some
extent, her anger at his interference; but she could not
really forgive him for letting his wish to marry her be
eclipsed by his wish to do her good, any more than for his
slighting treatment of Troy.
"I wish you to go elsewhere," she commanded, a paleness of
face invisible to the eye being suggested by the trembling
words. "Do not remain on this farm any longer. I don't
want you -- I beg you to go!"
"That's nonsense," said Oak, calmly. "This is the second
time you have pretended to dismiss me; and what's the use o'
it?"
"Pretended! You shall go, sir -- your lecturing I will not
hear! I am mistress here."
"Go, indeed -- what folly will you say next? Treating me
like Dick, Tom and Harry when you know that a short time ago
my position was as good as yours! Upon my life, Bathsheba,
it is too barefaced. You know, too, that I can't go without
putting things in such a strait as you wouldn't get out of I
can't tell when. Unless, indeed, you'll promise to have an
understanding man as bailiff, or manager, or something.
I'll go at once if you'll promise that."
"I shall have no bailiff; I shall continue to be my own
manager," she said decisively.
"Very well, then; you should be thankful to me for biding.
How would the farm go on with nobody to mind it but a woman?
But mind this, I don't wish 'ee to feel you owe me anything.
Not I. What I do, I do. Sometimes I say I should be as
glad as a bird to leave the place -- for don't suppose I'm
content to be a nobody. I was made for better things.
However, I don't like to see your concerns going to ruin, as
they must if you keep in this mind.... I hate taking my own
measure so plain, but, upon my life, your provoking ways
make a man say what he wouldn't dream of at other times! I
own to being rather interfering. But you know well enough
how it is, and who she is that I like too well, and feel too
much like a fool about to be civil to her!"
It is more than probable that she privately and
unconsciously respected him a little for this grim fidelity,
which had been shown in his tone even more than in his
words. At any rate she murmured something to the effect
that he might stay if he wished. She said more distinctly,
"Will you leave me alone now? I don't order it as a mistress
-- I ask it as a woman, and I expect you not to be so
uncourteous as to refuse."
"Certainly I will, Miss Everdene," said Gabriel, gently. He
wondered that the request should have come at this moment,
for the strife was over, and they were on a most desolate
hill, far from every human habitation, and the hour was
getting late. He stood still and allowed her to get far
ahead of him till he could only see her form upon the sky.
A distressing explanation of this anxiety to be rid of him
at that point now ensued. A figure apparently rose from the
earth beside her. The shape beyond all doubt was Troy's.
Oak would not be even a possible listener, and at once
turned back till a good two hundred yards were between the
lovers and himself.
Gabriel went home by way of the churchyard. In passing the
tower he thought of what she had said about the sergeant's
virtuous habit of entering the church unperceived at the
beginning of service. Believing that the little gallery
door alluded to was quite disused, he ascended the external
flight of steps at the top of which it stood, and examined
it. The pale lustre yet hanging in the north-western heaven
was sufficient to show that a sprig of ivy had grown from
the wall across the door to a length of more than a foot,
delicately tying the panel to the stone jamb. It was a
decisive proof that the door had not been opened at least
since Troy came back to Weatherbury.
CHAPTER XXX
HOT CHEEKS AND TEARFUL EYES
HALF an hour later Bathsheba entered her own house. There
burnt upon her face when she met the light of the candles
the flush and excitement which were little less than chronic
with her now. The farewell words of Troy, who had
accompanied her to the very door, still lingered in her
ears. He had bidden her adieu for two days, which were so
he stated, to be spent at Bath in visiting some friends. He
had also kissed her a second time.
It is only fair to Bathsheba to explain here a little fact
which did not come to light till a long time afterwards:
that Troy's presentation of himself so aptly at the roadside
this evening was not by any distinctly preconcerted
arrangement. He had hinted -- she had forbidden; and it was
only on the chance of his still coming that she had
dismissed Oak, fearing a meeting between them just then.
She now sank down into a chair, wild and perturbed by all
these new and fevering sequences. Then she jumped up with a
manner of decision, and fetched her desk from a side table.
In three minutes, without pause or modification, she had
written a letter to Boldwood, at his address beyond
Casterbridge, saying mildly but firmly that she had well
considered the whole subject he had brought before her and
kindly given her time to decide upon; that her final
decision was that she could not marry him. She had
expressed to Oak an intention to wait till Boldwood came
home before communicating to him her conclusive reply. But
Bathsheba found that she could not wait.
It was impossible to send this letter till the next day; yet
to quell her uneasiness by getting it out of her hands, and
so, as it were, setting the act in motion at once, she arose
to take it to any one of the women who might be in the
kitchen.
She paused in the passage. A dialogue was going on in the
kitchen, and Bathsheba and Troy were the subject of it.
"If he marry her, she'll gie up farming."
"'Twill be a gallant life, but may bring some trouble
between the mirth -- so say I."
"Well, I wish I had half such a husband."
Bathsheba had too much sense to mind seriously what her
servitors said about her; but too much womanly redundance of
speech to leave alone what was said till it died the natural
death of unminded things. She burst in upon them.
"Who are you speaking of?" she asked.
There was a pause before anybody replied. At last Liddy
said frankly, "What was passing was a bit of a word about
yourself, miss."
"I thought so! Maryann and Liddy and Temperance -- now I
forbid you to suppose such things. You know I don't care
the least for Mr. Troy -- not I. Everybody knows how much
I hate him. -- Yes," repeated the froward young person,
"HATE him!"
"We know you do, miss," said Liddy; "and so do we all."
"I hate him too," said Maryann.
"Maryann -- Oh you perjured woman! How can you speak that
wicked story!" said Bathsheba, excitedly. "You admired him
from your heart only this morning in the very world, you
did. Yes, Maryann, you know it!"
"Yes, miss, but so did you. He is a wild scamp now, and you
are right to hate him."
"He's NOT a wild scamp! How dare you to my face! I have no
right to hate him, nor you, nor anybody. But I am a silly
woman! What is it to me what he is? You know it is
nothing. I don't care for him; I don't mean to defend his
good name, not I. Mind this, if any of you say a word
against him you'll be dismissed instantly!"
She flung down the letter and surged back into the parlour,
with a big heart and tearful eyes, Liddy following her.
"Oh miss!" said mild Liddy, looking pitifully into
Bathsheba's face. "I am sorry we mistook you so! I did
think you cared for him; but I see you don't now."
"Shut the door, Liddy."
Liddy closed the door, and went on: "People always say such
foolery, miss. I'll make answer hencefor'ard, 'Of course a
lady like Miss Everdene can't love him'; I'll say it out in
plain black and white."
Bathsheba burst out: "O Liddy, are you such a simpleton?
Can't you read riddles? Can't you see? Are you a woman
yourself?"
Liddy's clear eyes rounded with wonderment.
"Yes; you must be a blind thing, Liddy!" she said, in
reckless abandonment and grief. "Oh, I love him to very
distraction and misery and agony! Don't be frightened at
me, though perhaps I am enough to frighten any innocent
woman. Come closer -- closer." She put her arms round
Liddy's neck. "I must let it out to somebody; it is wearing
me away! Don't you yet know enough of me to see through
that miserable denial of mine? O God, what a lie it was!
Heaven and my Love forgive me. And don't you know that a
woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is
balanced against her love? There, go out of the room; I
want to be quite alone."
Liddy went towards the door.
"Liddy, come here. Solemnly swear to me that he's not a
fast man; that it is all lies they say about him!"
"But, miss, how can I say he is not if ----"
"You graceless girl! How can you have the cruel heart to
repeat what they say? Unfeeling thing that you are.... But
I'LL see if you or anybody else in the village, or town
either, dare do such a thing!" She started off, pacing from
fireplace to door, and back again.
"No, miss. I don't -- I know it is not true!" said Liddy,
frightened at Bathsheba's unwonted vehemence.
I suppose you only agree with me like that to please me.
But, Liddy, he CANNOT BE had, as is said. Do you hear?"
"Yes, miss, yes."
"And you don't believe he is?"
"I don't know what to say, miss," said Liddy, beginning to
cry. "If I say No, you don't believe me; and if I say Yes,
you rage at me!"
"Say you don't believe it -- say you don't!"
"I don't believe him to be so had as they make out."
"He is not had at all.... My poor life and heart, how weak
I am!" she moaned, in a relaxed, desultory way, heedless of
Liddy's presence. "Oh, how I wish I had never seen him!
Loving is misery for women always. I shall never forgive
God for making me a woman, and dearly am I beginning to pay
for the honour of owning a pretty face." She freshened and
turned to Liddy suddenly. "Mind this, Lydia Smallbury, if
you repeat anywhere a single word of what I have said to you
inside this closed door, I'll never trust you, or love you,
or have you with me a moment longer -- not a moment!"
"I don't want to repeat anything," said Liddy, with womanly
dignity of a diminutive order; "but I don't wish to stay
with you. And, if you please, I'll go at the end of the
harvest, or this week, or to-day.... I don't see that I
deserve to be put upon and stormed at for nothing!"
concluded the small woman, bigly.
"No, no, Liddy; you must stay!" said Bathsheba, dropping
from haughtiness to entreaty with capricious inconsequence.
"You must not notice my being in a taking just now. You are
not as a servant -- you are a companion to me. Dear, dear --
I don't know what I am doing since this miserable ache o'!
my heart has weighted and worn upon me so! What shall I
come to! I suppose I shall get further and further into
troubles. I wonder sometimes if I am doomed to die in the
Union. I am friendless enough, God knows!"
"I won't notice anything, nor will I leave you!" sobbed
Liddy, impulsively putting up her lips to Bathsheba's, and
kissing her.
Then Bathsheba kissed Liddy, and all was smooth again.
"I don't often cry, do I, Lidd? but you have made tears come
into my eyes," she said, a smile shining through the
moisture. "Try to think him a good man, won't you, dear
Liddy?"
"I will, miss, indeed."
"He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That's
better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am
afraid that's how I am. And promise me to keep my secret --
do, Liddy! And do not let them know that I have been crying
about him, because it will be dreadful for me, and no good
to him, poor thing!"
"Death's head himself shan't wring it from me, mistress, if
I've a mind to keep anything; and I'll always be your
friend," replied Liddy, emphatically, at the same time
bringing a few more tears into her own eyes, not from any
particular necessity, but from an artistic sense of making
herself in keeping with the remainder of the picture, which
seems to influence women at such times. "I think God likes
us to be good friends, don't you?"
"Indeed I do."
"And, dear miss, you won't harry me and storm at me, will
you? because you seem to swell so tall as a lion then, and
it frightens me! Do you know, I fancy you would be a match
for any man when you are in one o' your takings."
"Never! do you?" said Bathsheba, slightly laughing, though
somewhat seriously alarmed by this Amazonian picture of
herself. "I hope I am not a bold sort of maid -- mannish?"
she continued with some anxiety.
"Oh no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis
getting on that way sometimes. Ah! miss," she said, after
having drawn her breath very sadly in and sent it very sadly
out, "I wish I had half your failing that way. 'Tis a great
protection to a poor maid in these illegit'mate days!"
CHAPTER XXXI
BLAME -- FURY
THE next evening Bathsheba, with the idea of getting out of
the way of Mr. Boldwood in the event of his returning to
answer her note in person, proceeded to fulfil an engagement
made with Liddy some few hours earlier. Bathsheba's
companion, as a gage of their reconciliation, had been
granted a week's holiday to visit her sister, who was
married to a thriving hurdler and cattle-crib-maker living
in a delightful labyrinth of hazel copse not far beyond
Yalbury. The arrangement was that Miss Everdene should
honour them by coming there for a day or two to inspect some
ingenious contrivances which this man of the woods had
introduced into his wares.
Leaving her instructions with Gabriel and Maryann, that they
were to see everything carefully locked up for the night,
she went out of the house just at the close of a timely
thunder-shower, which had refined the air, and daintily
bathed the coat of the land, though all beneath was dry as
ever. Freshness was exhaled in an essence from the varied
contours of bank and hollow, as if the earth breathed maiden
breath; and the pleased birds were hymning to the scene.
Before her, among the clouds, there was a contrast in the
shape of lairs of fierce light which showed themselves in
the neighbourhood of a hidden sun, lingering on to the
farthest north-west corner of the heavens that this
midsummer season allowed.
She had walked nearly two miles of her journey, watching how
the day was retreating, and thinking how the time of deeds
was quietly melting into the time of thought, to give place
in its turn to the time of prayer and sleep, when she beheld
advancing over Yalbury hill the very man she sought so
anxiously to elude. Boldwood was stepping on, not with that
quiet tread of reserved strength which was his customary
gait, in which he always seemed to be balancing two
thoughts. His manner was stunned and sluggish now.
Boldwood had for the first time been awakened to woman's
privileges in tergiversation even when it involves another
person's possible blight. That Bathsheba was a firm and
positive girl, far less inconsequent than her fellows, had
been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that these
qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for
consistency's sake, and accept him, though her fancy might
not flood him with the iridescent hues of uncritical love.
But the argument now came back as sorry gleams from a broken
mirror. The discovery was no less a scourge than a
surprise.
He came on looking upon the ground, and did not see
Bathsheba till they were less than a stone's throw apart.
He looked up at the sound of her pit-pat, and his changed
appearance sufficiently denoted to her the depth and
strength of the feelings paralyzed by her letter.
"Oh; is it you, Mr. Boldwood?" she faltered, a guilty warmth
pulsing in her face.
Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find
it a means more effective than words. There are accents in
the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come
from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the
grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid
the pathway of sound. Boldwood's look was unanswerable.
Seeing she turned a little aside, he said, "What, are you
afraid of me?"
"Why should you say that?" said Bathsheba.
"I fancied you looked so," said he. "And it is most
strange, because of its contrast with my feeling for you.
She regained self-possession, fixed her eyes calmly, and
waited.
"You know what that feeling is," continued Boldwood,
deliberately. "A thing strong as death. No dismissal by a
hasty letter affects that."
"I wish you did not feel so strongly about me," she
murmured. "It is generous of you, and more than I deserve,
but I must not hear it now."
"Hear it? What do you think I have to say, then? I am not
to marry you, and that's enough. Your letter was
excellently plain. I want you to hear nothing -- not I."
Bathsheba was unable to direct her will into any definite
groove for freeing herself from this fearfully and was
moving on. Boldwood walked up to her heavily and dully.
"Bathsheba -- darling -- is it final indeed?"
"Indeed it is."
"Oh, Bathsheba -- have pity upon me!" Boldwood burst out.
"God's sake, yes -- I am come to that low, lowest stage --
to ask a woman for pity! Still, she is you -- she is you."
Bathsheba commanded herself well. But she could hardly get
a clear voice for what came instinctively to her lips:
"There is little honour to the woman in that speech." It
was only whispered, for something unutterably mournful no
less than distressing in this spectacle of a man showing
himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated
the feminine instinct for punctilios.
"I am beyond myself about this, and am mad," he said. "I am
no stoic at all to he supplicating here; but I do supplicate
to you. I wish you knew what is in me of devotion to you;
but it is impossible, that. In bare human mercy to a lonely
man, don't throw me off now!"
"I don't throw you off -- indeed, how can I? I never had
you." In her noon-clear sense that she had never loved him
she forgot for a moment her thoughtless angle on that day in
February.
"But there was a time when you turned to me, before I
thought of you! I don't reproach you, for even now I feel
that the ignorant and cold darkness that I should have lived
in if you had not attracted me by that letter -- valentine
you call it -- would have been worse than my knowledge of
you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say, there
was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing for
you, and yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no
encouragement, I cannot but contradict you."
"What you call encouragement was the childish game of an
idle minute. I have bitterly repented of it -- ay,
bitterly, and in tears. Can you still go on reminding me?"
"I don't accuse you of it -- I deplore it. I took for
earnest what you insist was jest, and now this that I pray
to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest. Our moods
meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling was more like
mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I but have
foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead
me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been
able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too
well! But it is weak, idle drivelling to go on like this....
Bathsheba, you are the first woman of any shade or nature
that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having
been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial
so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don't
speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because of
my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would
get no less by paining you."
"But I do pity you -- deeply -- O, so deeply!" she earnestly
said.
"Do no such thing -- do no such thing. Your dear love,
Bathsheba, is such a vast thing beside your pity, that the
loss of your pity as well as your love is no great addition
to my sorrow, nor does the gain of your pity make it
sensibly less. O sweet -- how dearly you spoke to me behind
the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn at the
shearing, and that dearest last time in the evening at your
home! Where are your pleasant words all gone -- your
earnest hope to be able to love me? Where is your firm
conviction that you would get to care for me very much?
Really forgotten? -- really?"
She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the
face, and said in her low, firm voice, "Mr. Boldwood, I
promised you nothing. Would you have had me a woman of clay
when you paid me that furthest, highest compliment a man can
pay a woman -- telling her he loves her? I was bound to show
some feeling, if l would not be a graceless shrew. Yet each
of those pleasures was just for the day -- the day just for
the pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to
all other men was death to you? Have reason, do, and think
more kindly of me!"
"Well, never mind arguing -- never mind. One thing is sure:
you were all but mine, and now you are not nearly mine.
Everything is changed, and that by you alone, remember. You
were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now
nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is
from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up,
since it was only to throw me down!"
Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel un-
mistakable signs that she was inherently the weaker vessel.
She strove miserably against this feminity which would
insist upon supplying unbidden emotions in stronger and
stronger current. She had tried to elude agitation by
fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object before
her eyes, whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could
not save her now.
"I did not take you up -- surely I did not!" she answered as
heroically as she could. "But don't be in this mood with
me. I can endure being told I am in the wrong, if you will
only tell it me gently! O sir, will you not kindly forgive
me, and look at it cheerfully?"
"Cheerfully! Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a
reason for being merry? If I have lost, how can I be as if
I had won? Heavens you must be heartless quite! Had I
known what a fearfully bitter sweet this was to be, how
would I have avoided you, and never seen you, and been deaf
of you. I tell you all this, but what do you care! You
don't care."
She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and
swayed her head desperately, as if to thrust away the words
as they came showering about her ears from the lips of the
trembling man in the climax of life, with his bronzed Roman
face and fine frame.
"Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two
opposites of recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly
for you again. Forget that you have said No, and let it be
as it was! Say, Bathsheba, that you only wrote that refusal
to me in fun -- come, say it to me!"
"It would be untrue, and painful to both of us. You
overrate my capacity for love. I don't possess half the
warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected
childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me."
He immediately said with more resentment: "That may be true,
somewhat; but ah, Miss Everdene, it won't do as a reason!
You are not the cold woman you would have me believe. No,
no! It isn't because you have no feeling in you that you
don't love me. You naturally would have me think so -- you
would hide from me that you have a burning heart like mine.
You have love enough, but it is turned into a new channel.
I know where."
The swift music of her heart became hubbub now, and she
throbbed to extremity. He was coming to Troy. He did then
know what had occurred! And the name fell from his lips the
next moment.
"Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?" he asked,
fiercely. "When I had no thought of injuring him, why did
he force himself upon your notice! Before he worried you
your inclination was to have me; when next I should have
come to you your answer would have been Yes. Can you deny
it -- I ask, can you deny it?"
She delayed the reply, but was to honest to with hold it.
"I cannot," she whispered.
"I know you cannot. But he stole in in my absence and
robbed me. Why did't he win you away before, when nobody
would have been grieved? -- when nobody would have been set
tale-bearing. Now the people sneer at me -- the very hills
and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush shamefuly for my
folly. I have lost my respect, my good name, my standing --
lost it, never to get it again. Go and marry your man -- go
on!"
"Oh sir -- Mr. Boldwood!"
"You may as well. I have no further claim upon you. As for
me, I had better go somewhere alone, and hide -- and pray.
I loved a woman once. I am now ashamed. When I am dead
they'll say, Miserable love-sick man that he was. Heaven --
heaven -- if I had got jilted secretly, and the dishonour
not known, and my position kept! But no matter, it is gone,
and the woman not gained. Shame upon him -- shame!"
His unreasonable anger terrified her, and she glided from
him, without obviously moving, as she said, "I am only a
girl -- do not speak to me so!"
"All the time you knew -- how very well you knew -- that
your new freak was my misery. Dazzled by brass and scarlet
-- Oh, Bathsheba -- this is woman's folly indeed!"
She fired up at once. "You are taking too much upon
yourself!" she said, vehemently. "Everybody is upon me --
everybody. It is unmanly to attack a woman so! I have
nobody in the world to fight my battles for me; but no mercy
is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say things
against me, I WILL NOT be put down!"
"You'll chatter with him doubtless about me. Say to him,
"Boldwood would have died for me." Yes, and you have given
way to him, knowing him to be not the man for you. He has
kissed you -- claimed you as his. Do you hear -- he has
kissed you. Deny it!"
The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although
Boldwood was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self
rendered into another sex, Bathsheba's cheek quivered. She
gasped, "Leave me, sir -- leave me! I am nothing to you.
Let me go on!"
"Deny that he has kissed you."
"I shall not."
"Ha -- then he has!" came hoarsely from the farmer.
"He has," she said, slowly, and, in spite of her fear,
defiantly. "I am not ashamed to speak the truth."
"Then curse him; and curse him!" said Boldwood, breaking
into a whispered fury." Whilst I would have given worlds to
touch your hand, you have let a rake come in without right
or ceremony and -- kiss you! Heaven's mercy -- kiss you!
... Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to
repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused
another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and
yearn -- as I do now!"
"Don't, don't, oh, don't pray down evil upon him!" she
implored in a miserable cry. "Anything but that --
anything. Oh, be kind to him, sir, for I love him true!"
Boldwood's ideas had reached that point of fusion at which
outline and consistency entirely disappear. The impending
night appeared to concentrate in his eye. He did not hear
her at all now.
"I'll punish him -- by my soul, that will I! I'll meet him,
soldier or no, and I'll horsewhip the untimely stripling for
this reckless theft of my one delight. If he were a hundred
men I'd horsewhip him ----" He dropped his voice suddenly
and unnaturally. "Bathsheba, sweet, lost coquette, pardon
me! I've been blaming you, threatening you, behaving like a
churl to you, when he's the greatest sinner. He stole your
dear heart away with his unfathomable lies! ... It is a
fortunate thing for him that he's gone back to his regiment
-- that he's away up the country, and not here! I hope he
may not return here just yet. I pray God he may not come
into my sight, for I may be tempted beyond myself. Oh,
Bathsheba, keep him away -- yes, keep him away from me!"
For a moment Boldwood stood so inertly after this that his
soul seemed to have been entirely exhaled with the breath of
his passionate words. He turned his face away, and
withdrew, and his form was soon covered over by the twilight
as his footsteps mixed in with the low hiss of the leafy
trees.
Bathsheba, who had been standing motionless as a model all
this latter time, flung her hands to her face, and wildly
attempted to ponder on the exhibition which had just passed
away. Such astounding wells of fevered feeling in a still
man like Mr. Boldwood were incomprehensible, dreadful.
Instead of being a man trained to repression he was -- what
she had seen him.
The force of the farmer's threats lay in their relation to a
circumstance known at present only to herself: her lover was
coming back to Weatherbury in the course of the very next
day or two. Troy had not returned to his distant barracks
as Boldwood and others supposed, but had merely gone to
visit some acquaintance in Bath, and had yet a week or more
remaining to his furlough.
She felt wretchedly certain that if he revisited her just at
this nick of time, and came into contact with Boldwood, a
fierce quarrel would be the consequence. She panted with
solicitude when she thought of possible injury to Troy. The
least spark would kindle the farmer's swift feelings of rage
and jealousy; he would lose his self-mastery as he had this
evening; Troy's blitheness might become aggressive; it might
take the direction of derision, and Boldwood's anger might
then take the direction of revenge.
With almost a morbid dread of being thought a gushing girl,
this guileless woman too well concealed from the world under
a manner of carelessness the warm depths of her strong
emotions. But now there was no reserve. In her
distraction, instead of advancing further she walked up and
down, beating the air with her fingers, pressing on her
brow, and sobbing brokenly to herself. Then she sat down on
a heap of stones by the wayside to think. There she
remained long. Above the dark margin of the earth appeared
foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud, bounding a
green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine
glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled
her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape
of indecisive and palpitating stars. She gazed upon their
silent throes amid the shades of space, but realised none at
all. Her troubled spirit was far away with Troy.
CHAPTER XXXII
NIGHT -- HORSES TRAMPING
THE village of Weatherbury was quiet as the graveyard in its
midst, and the living were lying well-nigh as still as the
dead. The church clock struck eleven. The air was so empty
of other sounds that the whirr of the clock-work immediately
before the strokes was distinct, and so was also the click
of the same at their close. The notes flew forth with the
usual blind obtuseness of inanimate things -- flapping and
rebounding among walls, undulating against the scattered
clouds, spreading through their interstices into unexplored
miles of space.
Bathsheba's crannied and mouldy halls were to-night occupied
only by Maryann, Liddy being, as was stated, with her
sister, whom Bathsheba had set out to visit. A few minutes
after eleven had struck, Maryann turned in her bed with a
sense of being disturbed. She was totally unconscious of
the nature of the interruption to her sleep. It led to a
dream, and the dream to an awakening, with an uneasy
sensation that something had happened. She left her bed and
looked out of the window. The paddock abutted on this end
of the building, and in the paddock she could just discern
by the uncertain gray a moving figure approaching the horse
that was feeding there. The figure seized the horse by the
forelock, and led it to the corner of the field. Here she
could see some object which circumstances proved to be a
vehicle, for after a few minutes spent apparently in
harnessing, she heard the trot of the horse down the road,
mingled with the sound of light wheels.
Two varieties only of humanity could have entered the
paddock with the ghostlike glide of that mysterious figure.
They were a woman and a gipsy man. A woman was out of the
question in such an occupation at this hour, and the comer
could be no less than a thief, who might probably have known
the weakness of the household on this particular night, and
have chosen it on that account for his daring attempt.
Moreover, to raise suspicion to conviction itself, there
were gipsies in Weatherbury Bottom.
Maryann, who had been afraid to shout in the robber's
presence, having seen him depart had no fear. She hastily
slipped on her clothes, stumped down the disjointed
staircase with its hundred creaks, ran to Coggan's, the
nearest house, and raised an alarm. Coggan called Gabriel,
who now again lodged in his house as at first, and together
they went to the paddock. Beyond all doubt the horse was
gone.
"Hark!" said Gabriel.
They listened. Distinct upon the stagnant air came the
sounds of a trotting horse passing up Longpuddle Lane --
just beyond the gipsies' encampment in Weatherbury Bottom.
"That's our Dainty -- I'll swear to her step," said Jan.
"Mighty me! Won't mis'ess storm and call us stupids wen she
comes back!" moaned Maryann. "How I wish it had happened
when she was at home, and none of us had been answerable!"
"We must ride after," said Gabriel, decisively. "I'll be
responsible to Miss Everdene for what we do. Yes, we'll
follow."
"Faith, I don't see how," said Coggan. "All our horses are
too heavy for that trick except little Poppet, and what's
she between two of us? -- If we only had that pair over the
hedge we might do something."
"Which pair?"
"Mr. Boldwood's Tidy and Moll."
"Then wait here till I come hither again," said Gabriel. He
ran down the hill towards Farmer Boldwood's.
"Farmer Boldwood is not at home," said Maryann.
"All the better," said Coggan. "I know what he's gone for."
Less than five minutes brought up Oak again, running at the
same pace, with two halters dangling from his hand.
"Where did you find 'em?" said Coggan, turning round and
leaping upon the hedge without waiting for an answer.
"Under the eaves. I knew where they were kept," said
Gabriel, following him. "Coggan, you can ride bare-backed?
there's no time to look for saddles."
"Like a hero!" said Jan.
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