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Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #27 · 793,109 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Far from the Madding Crowd

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: March 1, 1992 [eBook #27]
                Most recently updated: August 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27


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27     1874, First Edition; illustrated.

107    1895, Second Edition, extensively revised by Thomas Hardy.




Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

AUTHOR OF
“A PAIR OF BLUE EYES,” “UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE,” ETC.

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS.

IN TWO VOLUMES

LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE.
1874.


Contents

 VOLUME I.
 CHAPTER I. DESCRIPTION OF FARMER OAK—AN INCIDENT
 CHAPTER II. NIGHT—THE FLOCK—AN INTERIOR—ANOTHER INTERIOR
 CHAPTER III. A GIRL ON HORSEBACK—CONVERSATION
 CHAPTER IV. GABRIEL’S RESOLVE—THE VISIT—THE MISTAKE
 CHAPTER V. DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA—A PASTORAL TRAGEDY
 CHAPTER VI. THE FAIR—THE JOURNEY—THE FIRE
 CHAPTER VII. RECOGNITION—A TIMID GIRL
 CHAPTER VIII. THE MALTHOUSE—THE CHAT—NEWS
 CHAPTER IX. THE HOMESTEAD—A VISITOR—HALF CONFIDENCES
 CHAPTER X. MISTRESS AND MEN
 CHAPTER XI. MELCHESTER MOOR—SNOW—A MEETING
 CHAPTER XII. FARMERS—A RULE—AN EXCEPTION
 CHAPTER XIII. SORTES SANCTORUM—THE VALENTINE
 CHAPTER XIV. EFFECT OF THE LETTER—SUNRISE
 CHAPTER XV. A MORNING MEETING—THE LETTER AGAIN
 CHAPTER XVI. ALL SAINTS’ AND ALL SOULS’
 CHAPTER XVII. IN THE MARKET-PLACE
 CHAPTER XVIII. BOLDWOOD IN MEDITATION—A VISIT
 CHAPTER XIX. THE SHEEP-WASHING—THE OFFER
 CHAPTER XX. PERPLEXITY—GRINDING THE SHEARS—A QUARREL
 CHAPTER XXI. TROUBLES IN THE FOLD—A MESSAGE
 CHAPTER XXII. THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS
 CHAPTER XXIII. EVENTIDE—A SECOND DECLARATION
 CHAPTER XXIV. THE SAME NIGHT—THE FIR PLANTATION
 CHAPTER XXV. THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED
 CHAPTER XXVI. SCENE ON THE VERGE OF THE HAY-MEAD
 CHAPTER XXVII. HIVING THE BEES
 CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HOLLOW AMID THE FERNS
 CHAPTER XXIX. PARTICULARS OF A TWILIGHT WALK
 CHAPTER XXX. HOT CHEEKS AND TEARFUL EYES

 VOLUME II.
 CHAPTER I. BLAME—FURY
 CHAPTER II. NIGHT—HORSES TRAMPING
 CHAPTER III. IN THE SUN—A HARBINGER
 CHAPTER IV. HOME AGAIN—A JUGGLER
 CHAPTER V. AT AN UPPER WINDOW
 CHAPTER VI. WEALTH IN JEOPARDY—THE REVEL
 CHAPTER VII. THE STORM—THE TWO TOGETHER
 CHAPTER VIII. RAIN—ONE SOLITARY MEETS ANOTHER
 CHAPTER IX. COMING HOME—A CRY
 CHAPTER X. ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY
 CHAPTER XI. SUSPICION—FANNY IS SENT FOR
 CHAPTER XII. JOSEPH AND HIS BURDEN—BUCK’S HEAD
 CHAPTER XIII. FANNY’S REVENGE
 CHAPTER XIV. UNDER A TREE—REACTION
 CHAPTER XV. TROY’S ROMANTICISM
 CHAPTER XVI. THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS
 CHAPTER XVII. ADVENTURES BY THE SHORE
 CHAPTER XVIII. DOUBTS ARISE—DOUBTS VANISH
 CHAPTER XIX. OAK’S ADVANCEMENT—A GREAT HOPE
 CHAPTER XX. THE SHEEP FAIR—TROY TOUCHES HIS WIFE’S HAND
 CHAPTER XXI. BATHSHEBA TALKS WITH HER OUTRIDER
 CHAPTER XXII. CONVERGING COURSES
 CHAPTER XXIII. CONCURRITUR—HORÆ MOMENTO
 CHAPTER XXIV. AFTER THE SHOCK
 CHAPTER XXV. THE MARCH FOLLOWING—“BATHSHEBA BOLDWOOD”
 CHAPTER XXVI. BEAUTY IN LONELINESS—AFTER ALL
 CHAPTER XXVII. A FOGGY NIGHT AND MORNING—CONCLUSION




List of Illustrations


 HANDS WERE LOOSENING HIS NECKERCHIEF.
 “DO YOU HAPPEN TO WANT A SHEPPERD MA’AM?”
 “GET THE FRONT DOOR KEY.” LIDDY FETCHED IT.
 “I FEEL—ALMOST TOO MUCH—TO THINK,” HE SAID.
 SHE STOOD UP IN THE WINDOW-OPENING, FACING THE MEN.
 SHE TOOK UP HER POSITION AS DIRECTED.
 BATSHEBA FLUNG HER HANDS TO HER FACE.
 “THERE’S NOT A SOUL IN MY HOUSE BUT ME TO-NIGHT”.
 SHE OPENED A GATE WITHIN WHICH WAS A HAYSTACK. UNDER THIS SHE SAT DOWN.
 BENDING OVER FANNY ROBIN, HE GENTLY KISSED HER.
 HE SAW A BATHER CARRIED ALONG IN THE CURRENT.
 TROY NEXT ADVANCED INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM AND TOOK OFF HIS CAP.




VOLUME I.




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
mere 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 a
postponing treatment of things, whose best clothes and
seven-and-sixpenny umbrella were always hampering him: upon the whole,
one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of
Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Sacrament people of the
parish and the drunken division of its inhabitants—that is, he went to
church, but yawned privately by the time the congegation 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 always presenting him as dressed in
that way when their imaginations answered to the thought “Gabriel Oak.”
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 about it—their maker being a conscientious man
who always 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,
when it always went on again immediately, 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 when passing their houses, 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 extremely 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—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, quite distinct from
a bowing of the shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an
individual if he depends for his valuation as a total 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 life, 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 sloped steeply to a ridge called Norcombe Hill.
Through a spur of this hill ran the highway from Norcombe to
Casterbridge, sunk in a deep cutting. 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. Then 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
charm of rarity. 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 invested it with 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 direction, her expressions 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 at 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 grate 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.”

“Oh 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—forming part of Norcombe Ewelease—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 this dead multitude
had remained on the twigs which bore them till this very mid-winter
time, and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.

Between this half-wooded, half-naked hill, and the vague, still horizon
its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless
shade—the sounds only from which suggested that what it concealed bore
some humble 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 differing natures—one rubbing the blades heavily,
another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft
broom. The instinctive act of human-kind 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 it 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 kingly 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 a fancy that the better outlook upon space afforded by a hill
emphasizes terrestrial revolution, 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, first enlarging the consciousness with a
sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are
horizontal and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long
and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a
nocturnal reconnoitre among these astral clusters, aloft from the
customary haunts of thought and vision, some men may feel raised to a
capability for eternity at once.

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, but 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 toymakers—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 small 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 recognized 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 all 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, and 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
an unimportant 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 out 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 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 swung
itself 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
beauty 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 alone.

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 boards 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 up
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 aërial 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 her forehead coming in the way of what the cloak did
not cover, 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 looked 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 shoulder, 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 phenomena, 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 a soft spirt, alternating with a loud spirt, came in regular
succession from within the shed. They were the 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 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 recognized 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 Englishwomen 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 in examining details to return
to where it began, 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 it may be
stated that 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 hastily brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been
irritating its pink surface with a straw, 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 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 whiteness 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 yeaning ewes, he entered the hut and heaped more fuel upon
the stove. The wind came in at the bottom of the door, to prevent which
Oak 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 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.

[Illustration: 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 a sensation of mirth, but of too insignificant
a kind to start the capacity of enjoyment.

“Nothing now,” she answered, “since you are not dead. It was 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,
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, speaking 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 ye?” 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 dress. 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
harmonize 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 mapping out my mind upon my tongue, as I may say.
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, regretfully.

“What for?”

“Letting your hand go so quickly.”

“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 at the same time
possibilities of impropriation 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 his 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 eight 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 sunshiny
gleam of silvery whiteness, 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
_tracasseries_ to be no less the staple subject 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 liturgical
form of Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone
through once now and then just 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 yer 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
yourself merely Somebody, and not giving a name, is not by any means to
be taken as an example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it
springs from a refined sense of 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 ye,” 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 (pant) to ask to have me, or I
should have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say
(pant) that my aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me
(pant)——”

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 (pant), 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 trewly 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 are 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 me!”

“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 awhile, 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; but 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 are useful,”
continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and verse.

“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 contemplated 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 elegant 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 said appealingly, 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 naïvely 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 position 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
heard, a large farmer—much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in
the evening, or will you walk along with me on 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 regular 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 tinkle 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 furthest 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 bordering 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 right 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 per-centage 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 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 somewhat 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 terminational word. His answer
always was,—

“I am looking for a place myself—a bailiff’s. Do you 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
bailiffs 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.

“Twenty 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 better to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a
procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a
chance of using it. Gabriel wished he had not nailed up his colours as
a shepherd, but had instead 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.

“Where is Shottsford?”

“Eight 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 a footpath which had been recommended as a short cut
to the village in question.

The path wended 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 high-road 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
through a 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 on the
landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness. He ascended a hill
and could just discern ahead of him a waggon, drawn up under a great
overhanging 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 forepart
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 seem, Billy Smallbury—so ’a 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 nightcap 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 mercy for us, and I feel quite unspeakable! And
how do she pay?”

“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 grounds 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 stile, 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 stile, 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, Joseph Poorgrass, and
Matthew there, for his mercy endureth for ever!” 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 hues 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 as tall as fir-trees.
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 female, 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 a cloth with holes in it.”

Oak, his features black, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke and
heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes, dripping with water, the
ash-stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter than it had
been, advanced 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 Shetland 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?”

[Illustration: “DO YOU HAPPEN TO WANT A SHEPPERD 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
yer 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 dare say some of ’em will
tell you of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd.”

The bailiff, who showed this nervous dread of loving his neighbours as
himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still
astonished at the rencontre 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 old chestnuts 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 on the other side. 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 female 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 you 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 palms
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. 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 inclosed 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, with the effect of the footlights upon the
features of her Majesty’s servants when they approach too near the
front. 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
criticized 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 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 remember 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, 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:
this idea is, however, a mere guess.

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 natural 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 ever occasioned by
proper pulls at large mugs.

“A right sensible man,” said Jacob.

“True, true, as the old woman said,” 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 yer 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 grandson!—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
god-father in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind.

“Come, Mark Clark—come. Ther’s plenty more in the barrel,” said Jan.

“Ay—that I will, as the doctor said,” 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—his
productions of this class being more noticeably advanced than Coggan’s,
inflicting a faint sense of reduplication and similitude upon the elder
members of such companies.

“Why, Joseph Poorgrass, ye ha’n’t had a drop!” said Mr. Coggan to a
very shrinking man in the background, thrusting the cup towards him.

“Such a shy 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,” faltered 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, just beginning to fill him with a mild complacency now that
it was regarded in the light of 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 terrible bad for a man, poor soul,” said the maltster. “And how
long have ye suffered from it, Joseph?”

“Oh, ever since I was a boy. Yes—mother was concerned to her heart
about it—yes. But ’twas all nought.”

“Did ye ever take anything to try and stop it, Joseph Poorgrass?”

“Oh ay, tried all sorts. They took me to Greenhill Fair, and into a
grate large 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 gross situation, and altogether a very
curious place for a good man. I had to stand and look wicked 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, so to speak it—yes, a happy
thing, and I feel my few poor gratitudes.”

“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 ye,
Joseph. For ye see, shepherd, though ’tis very well for a woman, dang
it all, ’tis awkward for a man like him, poor feller.” He appealed to
the shepherd by a heart-feeling glance.

“’Tis—’tis,” said Gabriel, recovering from a meditation as to whether
the saving to a man’s soul in the run of a twelvemonth by saying “dang”
instead of what it stood for, made it worth while to use the word.
“Yes, very awkward for the man.”

“Ay, and he’s very timid, too,” observed Jan Coggan. “Once he had been
working late at Windleton, 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 forcing out too much for the
purpose—laughing over the greater part of his skin, round to his ears,
and up among his hair, insomuch that Shepherd Oak, who was rather
sensitive himself, was surfeited, and felt that he would never adopt
that plan for hiding trepidation any more.

“——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 wait for 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 take 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, as I
may say,” continued Joseph, swallowing his breath in content.

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 matters 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 growing 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—each man severally drawing upon the tablet of
his imagination a clear and correct picture of Joseph Poorgrass under
the remarkable conditions he had related, and surveying the position in
all its bearings with critical exactness.

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
innermost 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, 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.”

The inquirer paused a moment, and then continued his relation, which,
as did every remark he made, instead of being casual, seemed the result
of a slow convergence of forces that had commenced their operation, in
times far remote.

“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! Ay, ’twere like drinking blessedness itself. Pints and
pints! 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, indeed.”

“’Twas. But for a drunk of really a noble class and on the highest
princliples, that brought you no nearer to the dark 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 would have been a great relief to
a merry soul.”

“True,” said the maltster. “Nature 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 in scores and long-hundreds, so ’twas said here and
there,” 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 his wife so much, that he used to light
the candle three time every night to look at her.”

“Boundless love; I shouldn’t have supposed it in the world’s 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 enough. ‘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.

“O 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
scrutinizing 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. Ay, ’a 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 so 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, as I may say, 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, with testimonial emphasis, “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 religious 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 that
had no father at all in the eye of matrimony, 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 common to the
saintly inclined.”

“Ay, at that time he thought of nothing but righteousness,” 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.”

“His second-cousin, John, was the most religious of the family,
however,” said the old malster. “None of the others were so pious as
he, for they never went past us Church people in their Christianity,
but John’s feelings growed as strong as a chapel member’s. ’A was a
watch and clock maker by trade, and thought of nothing but godliness,
poor man. ‘I judge every clock according to his works,’ he used to say
when he were  in his holy frame of mind. Ay, he likewise 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 shook his head, gazed into the ashpit, and
smiled volumes of ironical knowledge.

“A queer Christian, as the D—— said of the owl,” volunteered Mark
Clark,

“He is,” said Henery, with a manner implying that irony must
necessarily 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, with apprehension.

“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 untold 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!”

The company suspended consideration of whether they wanted their souls
blessed that moment, as the shortest way to the end of the story.

“I believe that if so be that Baily Pennyways’ heart were put inside a
nutshell, he’d rattle,” continued Henery. “He’ll strain for money as a
salmon will strain for the river’s head. ’Tis a thief and a robber,
that’s what ’tis.”

Gabriel thought fit to change the subject. “You must be a very aged
man, malster, 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 growled 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, malster?”

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 Juddle
Farm across there” (nodding to the north) “till I were eleven. I bode
seven at Lower Twifford” (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 a corroboration of the fact). “Then
I malted at Snoodly-under-Drool four year, and four year turnip-hoeing;
and I was fourteen times eleven months at Moreford 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.

“Oh, no, father!” Jacob remonstrated. “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 sha’n’t,” said Gabriel, soothingly.

“Ye be a very old-aged person, malster,” 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, malster, a wonderful talented constitution,” 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 grate 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 this Christmas,” said Jan
Coggan. “Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!”

“Ay, that I will,” said Gabriel readily, pulling out his flute and
putting it together. “A poor tool, neighbours; an everyday chap; 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 admiringly, “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 and complacent cadence.
“We ought to feel real thanksgiving that he’s not a player of loose
songs instead of these merry tunes; for ’twould have been just as easy
for God to have made the shepherd a lewd 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 thanksgiving.”

“True, true, as the old woman said,” 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 does thrive so in these times that ye may be as much deceived in
the clanest 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 ye blowing into the flute I know ye 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 unconcernedly,
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 Mark Clark’s bad manners in
naming your features?” whispered Joseph to Gabriel privately.

“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, sheperd,” said the company.

“Thank you very much,” said Oak, in the modest tone good manners
demanded, privately 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, malster,” 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,
with a very compressed countenance; that the frigidity implied by this
arrangement of facial muscles was not the true mood of his soul being
only discernible from a private glimmer in the outer corner of one of
his eyes—this eye being nearly closed, and the other only half open.

“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 glance alighted by accident,
which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass’s face.

“Oh—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
bushel of barley. She flewed at him like a cat—never such a tom-boy as
she is—of course I speak with closed doors?”

“You do—you do, Henery.”

“She flewed 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?”

“Ah—but besides that?”

“No—not a morsel of it!” they all replied, looking into the very midst
of Laban Tall, and, as at were, advancing their intelligence 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 seed 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 bed 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 with 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 rise to the farm-house, 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 bed-room 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 to belong to 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 to-morrow, 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_, and _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 Jacobean 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
manorial 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 pairs of chimneys were here and there linked by an arch,
some gables and other unmanageable 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 façade, 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, we find the floors above to have a very irregular
surface, rising to ridges, sinking into valleys, and being at present
uncarpeted, the face of the boards is shown to be eaten into
innumerable vermiculations. Every window replies by a clang to the
opening and shutting of every door, a tremble follows every bustling
movement, and a creak accompanies a walker about the house, like a
spirit, wherever he goes.

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 in a Terburg or a Gerard Douw, and like the
presentations of those great colourists, it was a face which always
kept on the natural side of the boundary between comeliness and the
ideal. Though elastic in bearing, 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 whip 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 exhibition
instead of relation.

“Why doesn’t Mrs. Coggan go to the door?” Bathsheba continued.

Rat-tat-tat-tat, resounded more decisively from Bathsheba’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 universe 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 appeared 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 happens—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 Everdene.”

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 farm-houses, 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 Lower 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 (Smallburys and Coggans were as common among the
families of this district as the Avons and Derwents among our rivers),
and he always had a loosened tooth or a cut finger to show to
particular friends, which he did with a complacent 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 forlorn as a pelican in the
wilderness. Ah, poor soul of me!”

“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 really was 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 Salpæ, 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 are 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, and a canvas money-bag beside her. From this she poured a small
heap of coin. Liddy took up 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 as a work of art merely, 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 Wood Pond, but we found nothing.”

“And the new shepherd have been to Buck’s Head, 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 am the personal
name of Poorgrass—a small matter who is nothing in his own eye. Perhaps
it is different in the eye of other people—but I don’t say it; though
public thought will out.”

“What do you do on the farm?”

“I does 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 two-pence 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 Candle, 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 Candle, 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.”

“O Lord, no, 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.

“Oh, 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, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, 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, Cainy 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 11th Dragoon-Guards be gone away, and new troops have
come.’ The Eleventh left last week for Melchester. 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.”

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.
MELCHESTER MOOR—SNOW—A MEETING


For dreariness, nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of
the city of Melchester 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 heath.

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 heath. Winter, in coming to the place under notice, advanced in
some such well-marked stages as the following:—

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.
An obliteration by snow.


This climax of the series had been reached to-night on Melchester 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 heath and moor momentarily received additional
clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked thereby. The vast dome
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. They were
flatness as regards the river, verticality as regards the wall behind
it, and darkness as regards both. These features made up the mass. If
anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall; and if anything
could be gloomier than the wall, it was the river beneath. The
indistinct summit of the façade 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. Human it seemed.

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 small. 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 a tone in the woman 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?”

“O 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 Melchester 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 carrier.”

“I am surprised.”

“Yes—so am I. And Frank, when will it be?”

“What?”

“That you promised.”

“I don’t quite recollect.”

“Oh 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.”

“Oh, 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 to-morrow. We’ll settle in a few days.”

“You have the permission of the officers?”

“No—not yet.”

“Oh—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—AN 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 corn-market at Casterbridge.

The low though extensive hall, supported by Tuscan 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
semi-circle; 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 depth enough in that lithe slip of humanity
for alarming potentialities of exploit, 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 vigour, 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 naïveté 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 _débût_ 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 to merely 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 exception,
added to its smallness, made the mystery—just as when the difference
between the state of an insignificant fleece and the state of all round
it, rather than any novelty in the states themselves, arrested the
attention of Gideon.

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 yellow gig 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 draper’s 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.

“Oh 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 fearfully. 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.”

[Illustration: “GET THE FRONT DOOR KEY.” LIDDY FETCHED IT.]

“What’s right week days is right Sundays,” replied her companion 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 non-conformity. 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, Lidd? 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 clerk 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, Boldwood 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
spherical completeness of his existence heretofore to be slowly
spreading into an abnormal distortion in the particular direction of an
ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to
Columbus—the eontemptibly 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 very dissimilar processes of
approving a course suggested by circumstance, and striking out a course
from inner impulse and intention purely, 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 only admitted a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had
that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up
his ceiling in a phenomenal 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 incandescent and 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
coverlit 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, that they often do not
stop to think whether the fact of an event having once occurred is not
in many cases the very circumstance which makes its repetition
unlikely.

“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 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 off 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 lump 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 line—sheering off 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 village clubhouse, there being no inn
in the place.

“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, and 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

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