Far from the Madding Crowd
I left Weatherbury in a reckless way. I also return the money I owe
you, which you will excuse my not keeping as a gift. All has ended
well, and I am happy to say I am going to be married to the young man
who has courted me for some time—Sergeant Troy, of the 11th Dragoon
Guards, now quartered in this town. He would, I know, object to my
having received anything except as a loan, being a man of great
respectability and high honour—indeed, a nobleman by blood.
I should be much obliged to you if you would keep the contents of
this letter a secret for the present, dear friend. We mean to
surprise Weatherbury by coming there soon as husband and wife,
though I blush to state it to one nearly a stranger. The sergeant
grew up in Weatherbury. Thanking you again for your kindness,
I am, your sincere well-wisher,
FANNY ROBIN.
“Have you read it, Mr. Boldwood?” said Gabriel; “if not, you had better
do so. I know you are interested in Fanny Robin.”
Boldwood read the letter and looked grieved.
“Fanny—poor Fanny! the end she is so confident of has not yet come, she
should remember—and may never come. I see she gives no address.”
“What sort of a man is this Sergeant Troy?” said Gabriel.
“H’m—I’m afraid not one to build much hope upon in such a case as
this,” the farmer murmured, “though he’s a clever fellow, and up to
everything. A slight romance attaches to him, too. His mother was a
French governess, and it seems that a secret attachment existed between
her and the late Lord Severn. She was married to a poor medical man,
and soon after an infant was born; and while money was forthcoming all
went on well. Unfortunately for her boy, his best friends died; and he
got then a situation as second clerk at a lawyer’s in Casterbridge. He
stayed there for some time, and might have worked himself into a
dignified position of some sort had he not indulged in the wild freak
of enlisting. I have much doubt if ever little Fanny will surprise us
in the way she mentions—very much doubt. A silly girl!—silly girl!”
The door was hurriedly burst open again, and in came running Cainy Ball
out of breath, his mouth red and open, like the bell of a penny
trumpet, from which he coughed with noisy vigour and great distension
of face.
“Now, Cain Ball,” said Oak, sternly, “why will you run so fast and lose
your breath so? I’m always telling you of it.”
“Oh—I—a puff of mee breath—went—the—wrong way, please, Mister Oak, and
made me cough—hok—hok!”
“Well—what have you come for?”
“I’ve run to tell ye,” said the junior shepherd, supporting his
exhausted youthful frame against the doorpost, “that you must come
directly. Two more ewes have twinned—that’s what’s the matter, Shepherd
Oak.”
“Oh, that’s it,” said Oak, jumping up, and dimissing for the present
his thoughts on poor Fanny. “You are a good boy to run and tell me,
Cain, and you shall smell a large plum pudding some day as a treat.
But, before we go, Cainy, bring the tarpot, and we’ll mark this lot and
have done with ’em.”
Oak took from his illimitable pockets a marking iron, dipped it into
the pot, and imprinted on the buttocks of the infant sheep the initials
of her he delighted to muse on—“B. E.,” which signified to all the
region round that henceforth the lambs belonged to Farmer Bathsheba
Everdene, and to no one else.
“Now, Cainy, shoulder your two, and off. Good morning, Mr. Boldwood.”
The shepherd lifted the sixteen large legs and four small bodies he had
himself brought, and vanished with them in the direction of the lambing
field hard by—their frames being now in a sleek and hopeful state,
pleasantly contrasting with their death’s-door plight of half an hour
before.
Boldwood followed him a little way up the field, hesitated, and turned
back. He followed him again with a last resolve, annihilating return.
On approaching the nook in which the fold was constructed, the farmer
drew out his pocket-book, unfastened it, and allowed it to lie open on
his hand. A letter was revealed—Bathsheba’s.
“I was going to ask you, Oak,” he said, with unreal carelessness, “if
you know whose writing this is?”
Oak glanced into the book, and replied instantly, with a flushed face,
“Miss Everdene’s.”
Oak had coloured simply at the consciousness of sounding her name. He
now felt a strangely distressing qualm from a new thought. The letter
could of course be no other than anonymous, or the inquiry would not
have been necessary.
Boldwood mistook his confusion: sensitive persons are always ready with
their “Is it I?” in preference to objective reasoning.
“The question was perfectly fair,” he returned—and there was something
incongruous in the serious earnestness with which he applied himself to
an argument on a valentine. “You know it is always expected that privy
inquiries will be made: that’s where the—fun lies.” If the word “fun”
had been “torture,” it could not have been uttered with a more
constrained and restless countenance than was Boldwood’s then.
Soon parting from Gabriel, the lonely and reserved man returned to his
house to breakfast—feeling twinges of shame and regret at having so far
exposed his mood by those fevered questions to a stranger. He again
placed the letter on the mantelpiece, and sat down to think of the
circumstances attending it by the light of Gabriel’s information.
CHAPTER XVI
ALL SAINTS’ AND ALL SOULS’
On a week-day morning a small congregation, consisting mainly of women
and girls, rose from its knees in the mouldy nave of a church called
All Saints’, in the distant barrack-town before-mentioned, at the end
of a service without a sermon. They were about to disperse, when a
smart footstep, entering the porch and coming up the central passage,
arrested their attention. The step echoed with a ring unusual in a
church; it was the clink of spurs. Everybody looked. A young cavalry
soldier in a red uniform, with the three chevrons of a sergeant upon
his sleeve, strode up the aisle, with an embarrassment which was only
the more marked by the intense vigour of his step, and by the
determination upon his face to show none. A slight flush had mounted
his cheek by the time he had run the gauntlet between these women; but,
passing on through the chancel arch, he never paused till he came close
to the altar railing. Here for a moment he stood alone.
The officiating curate, who had not yet doffed his surplice, perceived
the new-comer, and followed him to the communion-space. He whispered to
the soldier, and then beckoned to the clerk, who in his turn whispered
to an elderly woman, apparently his wife, and they also went up the
chancel steps.
“’Tis a wedding!” murmured some of the women, brightening. “Let’s
wait!”
The majority again sat down.
There was a creaking of machinery behind, and some of the young ones
turned their heads. From the interior face of the west wall of the
tower projected a little canopy with a quarter-jack and small bell
beneath it, the automaton being driven by the same clock machinery that
struck the large bell in the tower. Between the tower and the church
was a close screen, the door of which was kept shut during services,
hiding this grotesque clockwork from sight. At present, however, the
door was open, and the egress of the jack, the blows on the bell, and
the mannikin’s retreat into the nook again, were visible to many, and
audible throughout the church.
The jack had struck half-past eleven.
“Where’s the woman?” whispered some of the spectators.
The young sergeant stood still with the abnormal rigidity of the old
pillars around. He faced the south-east, and was as silent as he was
still.
The silence grew to be a noticeable thing as the minutes went on, and
nobody else appeared, and not a soul moved. The rattle of the
quarter-jack again from its niche, its blows for three-quarters, its
fussy retreat, were almost painfully abrupt, and caused many of the
congregation to start palpably.
“I wonder where the woman is!” a voice whispered again.
There began now that slight shifting of feet, that artificial coughing
among several, which betrays a nervous suspense. At length there was a
titter. But the soldier never moved. There he stood, his face to the
south-east, upright as a column, his cap in his hand.
The clock ticked on. The women threw off their nervousness, and titters
and giggling became more frequent. Then came a dead silence. Every one
was waiting for the end. Some persons may have noticed how
extraordinarily the striking of quarters seems to quicken the flight of
time. It was hardly credible that the jack had not got wrong with the
minutes when the rattle began again, the puppet emerged, and the four
quarters were struck fitfully as before. One could almost be positive
that there was a malicious leer upon the hideous creature’s face, and a
mischievous delight in its twitchings. Then followed the dull and
remote resonance of the twelve heavy strokes in the tower above. The
women were impressed, and there was no giggle this time.
The clergyman glided into the vestry, and the clerk vanished. The
sergeant had not yet turned; every woman in the church was waiting to
see his face, and he appeared to know it. At last he did turn, and
stalked resolutely down the nave, braving them all, with a compressed
lip. Two bowed and toothless old almsmen then looked at each other and
chuckled, innocently enough; but the sound had a strange weird effect
in that place.
Opposite to the church was a paved square, around which several
overhanging wood buildings of old time cast a picturesque shade. The
young man on leaving the door went to cross the square, when, in the
middle, he met a little woman. The expression of her face, which had
been one of intense anxiety, sank at the sight of his nearly to terror.
“Well?” he said, in a suppressed passion, fixedly looking at her.
“Oh, Frank—I made a mistake!—I thought that church with the spire was
All Saints’, and I was at the door at half-past eleven to a minute as
you said. I waited till a quarter to twelve, and found then that I was
in All Souls’. But I wasn’t much frightened, for I thought it could be
to-morrow as well.”
“You fool, for so fooling me! But say no more.”
“Shall it be to-morrow, Frank?” she asked blankly.
“To-morrow!” and he gave vent to a hoarse laugh. “I don’t go through
that experience again for some time, I warrant you!”
“But after all,” she expostulated in a trembling voice, “the mistake
was not such a terrible thing! Now, dear Frank, when shall it be?”
“Ah, when? God knows!” he said, with a light irony, and turning from
her walked rapidly away.
CHAPTER XVII
IN THE MARKET-PLACE
On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as usual, when
the disturber of his dreams entered and became visible to him. Adam had
awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. The farmer
took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.
Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in regular
equation. The result from capital employed in the production of any
movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the cause
itself is absurdly minute. When women are in a freakish mood, their
usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect, seemingly
fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba was fated to
be astonished to-day.
Boldwood looked at her—not slily, critically, or understandingly, but
blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train—as
something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood
women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary
complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence,
that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as