Far from the Madding Crowd
visible over his smock-frock pocket, and Henery Fray exclaimed,
“Surely, shepherd, I seed you blowing into a great flute by now at
Casterbridge?”
“You did,” said Gabriel, blushing faintly. “I’ve been in great trouble,
neighbours, and was driven to it. I used not to be so poor as I be
now.”
“Never mind, heart!” said Mark Clark. “You should take it
careless-like, shepherd, and your time will come. But we could thank ye
for a tune, if ye bain’t too tired?”
“Neither drum nor trumpet have I heard since Christmas,” said Jan
Coggan. “Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!”
“Ay, that I will,” said Gabriel, pulling out his flute and putting it
together. “A poor tool, neighbours; but such as I can do ye shall have
and welcome.”
Oak then struck up “Jockey to the Fair,” and played that sparkling
melody three times through, accenting the notes in the third round in a
most artistic and lively manner by bending his body in small jerks and
tapping with his foot to beat time.
“He can blow the flute very well—that ’a can,” said a young married
man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as “Susan
Tall’s husband.” He continued, “I’d as lief as not be able to blow into
a flute as well as that.”
“He’s a clever man, and ’tis a true comfort for us to have such a
shepherd,” murmured Joseph Poorgrass, in a soft cadence. “We ought to
feel full o’ thanksgiving that he’s not a player of ba’dy songs instead
of these merry tunes; for ’twould have been just as easy for God to
have made the shepherd a loose low man—a man of iniquity, so to speak
it—as what he is. Yes, for our wives’ and daughters’ sakes we should
feel real thanksgiving.”
“True, true,—real thanksgiving!” dashed in Mark Clark conclusively, not
feeling it to be of any consequence to his opinion that he had only
heard about a word and three-quarters of what Joseph had said.
“Yes,” added Joseph, beginning to feel like a man in the Bible; “for
evil do thrive so in these times that ye may be as much deceived in the
cleanest shaved and whitest shirted man as in the raggedest tramp upon
the turnpike, if I may term it so.”
“Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd,” said Henery Fray, criticising
Gabriel with misty eyes as he entered upon his second tune. “Yes—now I
see ’ee blowing into the flute I know ’ee to be the same man I see play
at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were scrimped up and yer eyes a-staring
out like a strangled man’s—just as they be now.”
“’Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look such a
scarecrow,” observed Mr. Mark Clark, with additional criticism of
Gabriel’s countenance, the latter person jerking out, with the ghastly
grimace required by the instrument, the chorus of “Dame Durden:”—
’Twas Moll’ and Bet’, and Doll’ and Kate’,
And Dor’-othy Drag’-gle Tail’.
“I hope you don’t mind that young man’s bad manners in naming your
features?” whispered Joseph to Gabriel.
“Not at all,” said Mr. Oak.
“For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd,” continued Joseph
Poorgrass, with winning sauvity.
“Ay, that ye be, shepard,” said the company.
“Thank you very much,” said Oak, in the modest tone good manners
demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let Bathsheba see him
playing the flute; in this resolve showing a discretion equal to that
related to its sagacious inventress, the divine Minerva herself.
“Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church,” said the old
maltster, not pleased at finding himself left out of the subject, “we
were called the handsomest couple in the neighbourhood—everybody said
so.”
“Danged if ye bain’t altered now, malter,” said a voice with the vigour
natural to the enunciation of a remarkably evident truism. It came from
the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and spiteful ways
were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he contributed to
general laughs.
“O no, no,” said Gabriel.
“Don’t ye play no more shepherd” said Susan Tall’s husband, the young
married man who had spoken once before. “I must be moving and when
there’s tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires. If I thought after
I’d left that music was still playing, and I not there, I should be
quite melancholy-like.”
“What’s yer hurry then, Laban?” inquired Coggan. “You used to bide as
late as the latest.”
“Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she’s
my vocation now, and so ye see—” The young man halted lamely.
“New Lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose,” remarked Coggan.
“Ay, ’a b’lieve—ha, ha!” said Susan Tall’s husband, in a tone intended
to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding them at all.
The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.
Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off
with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later,
when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray
came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a
gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident,
which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass’s face.
“O—what’s the matter, what’s the matter, Henery?” said Joseph, starting
back.
“What’s a-brewing, Henery?” 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 fleed at him like a cat—never such a tomboy as
she is—of course I speak with closed doors?”
“You do—you do, Henery.”
“She fleed at him, and, to cut a long story short, he owned to having
carried off five sack altogether, upon her promising not to persecute
him. Well, he’s turned out neck and crop, and my question is, who’s
going to be baily now?”
The question was such a profound one that Henery was obliged to drink
there and then from the large cup till the bottom was distinctly
visible inside. Before he had replaced it on the table, in came the
young man, Susan Tall’s husband, in a still greater hurry.
“Have ye heard the news that’s all over parish?”
“About Baily Pennyways?”
“But besides that?”
“No—not a morsel of it!” they replied, looking into the very midst of
Laban Tall as if to meet his words half-way down his throat.
“What a night of horrors!” murmured Joseph Poorgrass, waving his hands
spasmodically. “I’ve had the news-bell ringing in my left ear quite bad
enough for a murder, and I’ve seen a magpie all alone!”
“Fanny Robin—Miss Everdene’s youngest servant—can’t be found. They’ve
been wanting to lock up the door these two hours, but she isn’t come
in. And they don’t know what to do about going to 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’s dry lips.
“No—’tis drowned!” said Tall.
“Or ’tis her father’s razor!” suggested Billy Smallbury, with a vivid
sense of detail.
“Well—Miss Everdene wants to speak to one or two of us before we go to
bed. What with this trouble about the baily, and now about the girl,
mis’ess is almost wild.”
They all hastened up the lane to the farmhouse, excepting the old
maltster, whom neither news, fire, rain, nor thunder could draw from
his hole. There, as the others’ footsteps died away he sat down again
and continued gazing as usual into the furnace with his red, bleared
eyes.
From the bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba’s head and
shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen extended into the
air.
“Are any of my men among you?” she said anxiously.
“Yes, ma’am, several,” said Susan Tall’s husband.
“To-morrow morning I wish two or three of you to make inquiries in the
villages round if they have seen such a person as Fanny Robin. Do it
quietly; there is no reason for alarm as yet. She must have left whilst
we were all at the fire.”
“I beg yer pardon, but had she any young man courting her in the
parish, ma’am?” asked Jacob Smallbury.
“I don’t know,” said Bathsheba.
“I’ve never heard of any such thing, ma’am,” said two or three.
“It is hardly likely, either,” continued Bathsheba. “For any lover of
hers might have come to the house if he had been a respectable lad. The
most mysterious matter connected with her absence—indeed, the only
thing which gives me serious alarm—is that she was seen to go out of
the house by Maryann with only her indoor working gown on—not even a
bonnet.”
“And you mean, ma’am, excusing my words, that a young woman would
hardly go to see her young man without dressing up,” said Jacob,
turning his mental vision upon past experiences. “That’s true—she would
not, ma’am.”
“She had, I think, a bundle, though I couldn’t see very well,” said a
female voice from another window, which seemed that of Maryann. “But
she had no young man about here. Hers lives in Casterbridge, and I
believe he’s a soldier.”
“Do you know his name?” Bathsheba said.
“No, mistress; she was very close about it.”
“Perhaps I might be able to find out if I went to Casterbridge
barracks,” said William Smallbury.
“Very well; if she doesn’t return 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 early stage of Classic
Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told
at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the
memorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as
a distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident
landlord, which comprised several such modest demesnes.
Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and
above the roof the chimneys were panelled or columnar, some coped
gables with finials and like features still retaining traces of their