Far from the Madding Crowd
nature whilst in a living state has dried, stiffened, and been washed
out—rendering it just now as superior to anything _woollen_ as cream is
superior to milk-and-water.
But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel’s happiness
of this morning. The rams, old ewes, and two-shear ewes had duly
undergone their stripping, and the men were proceeding with the
shearlings and hogs, when Oak’s belief that she was going to stand
pleasantly by and time him through another performance was painfully
interrupted by Farmer Boldwood’s appearance in the extremest corner of
the barn. Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there he
certainly was. Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere of
his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk, which
Bathsheba’s presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally
suspended.
He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a
carriage of perfect ease. He spoke to her in low tones, and she
instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice
ultimately even caught the inflection of his. She was far from having a
wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at the
impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her choice
of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades of tone
and humour, when the influence is great.
What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too
independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard. The issue
of their dialogue was the taking of her hand by the courteous farmer to
help her over the spreading-board into the bright June sunlight
outside. Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went on talking
again. Concerning the flock? Apparently not. Gabriel theorized, not
without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter within reach of
the speakers’ eyes, these are usually fixed upon it. Bathsheba demurely
regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the ground, in a way which
suggested less ovine criticism than womanly embarrassment. She became
more or less red in the cheek, the blood wavering in uncertain flux and
reflux over the sensitive space between ebb and flood. Gabriel sheared
on, constrained and sad.
She left Boldwood’s side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly a
quarter of an hour. Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of
myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit;
and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse
from the tree under which it had been tied.
Oak’s eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue his
shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood’s manner, he snipped
the sheep in the groin. The animal plunged; Bathsheba instantly gazed
towards it, and saw the blood.
“Oh, Gabriel!” she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, “you who are so
strict with the other men—see what you are doing yourself!”
To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but to
Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the cause
of the poor ewe’s wound, because she had wounded the ewe’s shearer in a
still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding sense of his
inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not calculated to heal.
But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he had no longer a lover’s
interest in her, helped him occasionally to conceal a feeling.
“Bottle!” he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine. Cainy Ball ran
up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.
Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they
turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and
tantalizing graciousness.
“I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood’s Leicesters. Take my place in the
barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work.”
The horses’ heads were put about, and they trotted away.
Boldwood’s deep attachment was a matter of great interest among all
around him; but, after having been pointed out for so many years as the
perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an anticlimax
somewhat resembling that of St. John Long’s death by consumption in the
midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease.
“That means matrimony,” said Temperance Miller, following them out of
sight with her eyes.
“I reckon that’s the size o’t,” said Coggan, working along without
looking up.
“Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor,” said Laban Tall,
turning his sheep.
Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same time: “I don’t
see why a maid should take a husband when she’s bold enough to fight
her own battles, and don’t want a home; for ’tis keeping another woman
out. But let it be, for ’tis a pity he and she should trouble two
houses.”
As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably provoked the
criticism of individuals like Henery Fray. Her emblazoned fault was to
be too pronounced in her objections, and not sufficiently overt in her
likings. We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but
those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by;
and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and
antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at
all.
Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: “I once hinted my mind to
her on a few things, as nearly as a battered frame dared to do so to
such a froward piece. You all know, neighbours, what a man I be, and
how I come down with my powerful words when my pride is boiling wi’
scarn?”
“We do, we do, Henery.”
“So I said, ‘Mistress Everdene, there’s places empty, and there’s
gifted men willing; but the spite’—no, not the spite—I didn’t say
spite—‘but the villainy of the contrarikind,’ I said (meaning
womankind), ‘keeps ’em out.’ That wasn’t too strong for her, say?”
“Passably well put.”
“Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me for
it. Such is my spirit when I have a mind.”
“A true man, and proud as a lucifer.”
“You see the artfulness? Why, ’twas about being baily really; but I
didn’t put it so plain that she could understand my meaning, so I could
lay it on all the stronger. That was my depth!... However, let her
marry an she will. Perhaps ’tis high time. I believe Farmer Boldwood
kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing t’other day—that I
do.”
“What a lie!” said Gabriel.
“Ah, neighbour Oak—how’st know?” said, Henery, mildly.
“Because she told me all that passed,” said Oak, with a pharisaical
sense that he was not as other shearers in this matter.
“Ye have a right to believe it,” said Henery, with dudgeon; “a very
true right. But I mid see a little distance into things! To be
long-headed enough for a baily’s place is a poor mere trifle—yet a
trifle more than nothing. However, I look round upon life quite cool.
Do you heed me, neighbours? My words, though made as simple as I can,
mid be rather deep for some heads.”
“O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye.”
“A strange old piece, goodmen—whirled about from here to yonder, as if
I were nothing! A little warped, too. But I have my depths; ha, and
even my great depths! I might gird at a certain shepherd, brain to
brain. But no—O no!”
“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster, in a querulous
voice. “At the same time ye be no old man worth naming—no old man at
all. Yer teeth bain’t half gone yet; and what’s a old man’s standing if
so be his teeth bain’t gone? Weren’t I stale in wedlock afore ye were
out of arms? ’Tis a poor thing to be sixty, when there’s people far
past four-score—a boast weak as water.”
It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor differences
when the maltster had to be pacified.
“Weak as water! yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”
“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
malter, and we all admire ye for that gift.”
“Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity, I was
likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me,” said the maltster.
“’Ithout doubt you was—’ithout doubt.”
The bent and hoary man was satisfied, and so apparently was Henery
Fray. That matters should continue pleasant Maryann spoke, who, what
with her brown complexion, and the working wrapper of rusty linsey, had
at present the mellow hue of an old sketch in oils—notably some of
Nicholas Poussin’s:—
“Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-hand fellow
at all that would do for poor me?” said Maryann. “A perfect one I don’t
expect to get at my time of life. If I could hear of such a thing
’twould do me more good than toast and ale.”
Coggan furnished a suitable reply. Oak went on with his shearing, and
said not another word. Pestilent moods had come, and teased away his
quiet. Bathsheba had shown indications of anointing him above his
fellows by installing him as the bailiff that the farm imperatively
required. He did not covet the post relatively to the farm: in relation
to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to another, he had coveted
it. His readings of her seemed now to be vapoury and indistinct. His
lecture to her was, he thought, one of the absurdest mistakes. Far from
coquetting with Boldwood, she had trifled with himself in thus feigning
that she had trifled with another. He was inwardly convinced that, in
accordance with the anticipations of his easy-going and worse-educated
comrades, that day would see Boldwood the accepted husband of Miss
Everdene. Gabriel at this time of his life had out-grown the
instinctive dislike which every Christian boy has for reading the
Bible, perusing it now quite frequently, and he inwardly said, “‘I find
more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!’” This
was mere exclamation—the froth of the storm. He adored Bathsheba just
the same.
“We workfolk shall have some lordly junketing to-night,” said Cainy
Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction. “This morning I
see ’em making the great puddens in the milking-pails—lumps of fat as
big as yer thumb, Mister Oak! I’ve never seed such splendid large knobs
of fat before in the days of my life—they never used to be bigger then
a horse-bean. And there was a great black crock upon the brandish with
his legs a-sticking out, but I don’t know what was in within.”
“And there’s two bushels of biffins for apple-pies,” said Maryann.
“Well, I hope to do my duty by it all,” said Joseph Poorgrass, in a
pleasant, masticating manner of anticipation. “Yes; victuals and drink
is a cheerful thing, and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the form of
words may be used. ’Tis the gospel of the body, without which we
perish, so to speak it.”
CHAPTER XXIII
EVENTIDE—A SECOND DECLARATION
For the shearing-supper a long table was placed on the grass-plot
beside the house, the end of the table being thrust over the sill of
the wide parlour window and a foot or two into the room. Miss Everdene
sat inside the window, facing down the table. She was thus at the head
without mingling with the men.
This evening Bathsheba was unusually excited, her red cheeks and lips
contrasting lustrously with the mazy skeins of her shadowy hair. She
seemed to expect assistance, and the seat at the bottom of the table
was at her request left vacant until after they had begun the meal. She
then asked Gabriel to take the place and the duties appertaining to
that end, which he did with great readiness.
At this moment Mr. Boldwood came in at the gate, and crossed the green
to Bathsheba at the window. He apologized for his lateness: his arrival
was evidently by arrangement.
“Gabriel,” said she, “will you move again, please, and let Mr. Boldwood
come there?”