Far from the Madding Crowd
Liddy closed the door, and went on: “People always say such foolery,
miss. I’ll make answer hencefor’ard, ‘Of course a lady like Miss
Everdene can’t love him’; I’ll say it out in plain black and white.”
Bathsheba burst out: “O Liddy, are you such a simpleton? Can’t you read
riddles? Can’t you see? Are you a woman yourself?”
Liddy’s clear eyes rounded with wonderment.
“Yes; you must be a blind thing, Liddy!” she said, in reckless
abandonment and grief. “Oh, I love him to very distraction and misery
and agony! Don’t be frightened at me, though perhaps I am enough to
frighten any innocent woman. Come closer—closer.” She put her arms
round Liddy’s neck. “I must let it out to somebody; it is wearing me
away! Don’t you yet know enough of me to see through that miserable
denial of mine? O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and my Love forgive
me. And don’t you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of
perjury when it is balanced against her love? There, go out of the
room; I want to be quite alone.”
Liddy went towards the door.
“Liddy, come here. Solemnly swear to me that he’s not a fast man; that
it is all lies they say about him!”
“But, miss, how can I say he is not if—”
“You graceless girl! How can you have the cruel heart to repeat what
they say? Unfeeling thing that you are.... But _I’ll_ see if you or
anybody else in the village, or town either, dare do such a thing!” She
started off, pacing from fireplace to door, and back again.
“No, miss. I don’t—I know it is not true!” said Liddy, frightened at
Bathsheba’s unwonted vehemence.
“I suppose you only agree with me like that to please me. But, Liddy,
he _cannot be_ bad, as is said. Do you hear?”
“Yes, miss, yes.”
“And you don’t believe he is?”
“I don’t know what to say, miss,” said Liddy, beginning to cry. “If I
say No, you don’t believe me; and if I say Yes, you rage at me!”
“Say you don’t believe it—say you don’t!”
“I don’t believe him to be so bad as they make out.”
“He is not bad at all.... My poor life and heart, how weak I am!” she
moaned, in a relaxed, desultory way, heedless of Liddy’s presence. “Oh,
how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always. I
shall never forgive God for making me a woman, and dearly am I
beginning to pay for the honour of owning a pretty face.” She freshened
and turned to Liddy suddenly. “Mind this, Lydia Smallbury, if you
repeat anywhere a single word of what I have said to you inside this
closed door, I’ll never trust you, or love you, or have you with me a
moment longer—not a moment!”
“I don’t want to repeat anything,” said Liddy, with womanly dignity of
a diminutive order; “but I don’t wish to stay with you. And, if you
please, I’ll go at the end of the harvest, or this week, or to-day....
I don’t see that I deserve to be put upon and stormed at for nothing!”
concluded the small woman, bigly.
“No, no, Liddy; you must stay!” said Bathsheba, dropping from
haughtiness to entreaty with capricious inconsequence. “You must not
notice my being in a taking just now. You are not as a servant—you are
a companion to me. Dear, dear—I don’t know what I am doing since this
miserable ache of my heart has weighted and worn upon me so! What shall
I come to! I suppose I shall get further and further into troubles. I
wonder sometimes if I am doomed to die in the Union. I am friendless
enough, God knows!”
“I won’t notice anything, nor will I leave you!” sobbed Liddy,
impulsively putting up her lips to Bathsheba’s, and kissing her.
Then Bathsheba kissed Liddy, and all was smooth again.
“I don’t often cry, do I, Lidd? but you have made tears come into my
eyes,” she said, a smile shining through the moisture. “Try to think
him a good man, won’t you, dear Liddy?”
“I will, miss, indeed.”
“He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That’s better than
to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am afraid that’s how I am.
And promise me to keep my secret—do, Liddy! And do not let them know
that I have been crying about him, because it will be dreadful for me,
and no good to him, poor thing!”
“Death’s head himself shan’t wring it from me, mistress, if I’ve a mind
to keep anything; and I’ll always be your friend,” replied Liddy,
emphatically, at the same time bringing a few more tears into her own
eyes, not from any particular necessity, but from an artistic sense of
making herself in keeping with the remainder of the picture, which
seems to influence women at such times. “I think God likes us to be
good friends, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do.”
“And, dear miss, you won’t harry me and storm at me, will you? because
you seem to swell so tall as a lion then, and it frightens me! Do you
know, I fancy you would be a match for any man when you are in one o’
your takings.”
“Never! do you?” said Bathsheba, slightly laughing, though somewhat
seriously alarmed by this Amazonian picture of herself. “I hope I am
not a bold sort of maid—mannish?” she continued with some anxiety.
“Oh no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that ’tis getting on that
way sometimes. Ah! miss,” she said, after having drawn her breath very
sadly in and sent it very sadly out, “I wish I had half your failing
that way. ’Tis a great protection to a poor maid in these illegit’mate
days!”
CHAPTER XXXI
BLAME—FURY
The next evening Bathsheba, with the idea of getting out of the way of
Mr. Boldwood in the event of his returning to answer her note in
person, proceeded to fulfil an engagement made with Liddy some few
hours earlier. Bathsheba’s companion, as a gauge of their
reconciliation, had been granted a week’s holiday to visit her sister,
who was married to a thriving hurdler and cattle-crib-maker living in a
delightful labyrinth of hazel copse not far beyond Yalbury. The
arrangement was that Miss Everdene should honour them by coming there
for a day or two to inspect some ingenious contrivances which this man
of the woods had introduced into his wares.
Leaving her instructions with Gabriel and Maryann, that they were to
see everything carefully locked up for the night, she went out of the
house just at the close of a timely thunder-shower, which had refined
the air, and daintily bathed the coat of the land, though all beneath
was dry as ever. Freshness was exhaled in an essence from the varied
contours of bank and hollow, as if the earth breathed maiden breath;
and the pleased birds were hymning to the scene. Before her, among the
clouds, there was a contrast in the shape of lairs of fierce light
which showed themselves in the neighbourhood of a hidden sun, lingering
on to the farthest north-west corner of the heavens that this midsummer
season allowed.
She had walked nearly two miles of her journey, watching how the day
was retreating, and thinking how the time of deeds was quietly melting
into the time of thought, to give place in its turn to the time of
prayer and sleep, when she beheld advancing over Yalbury hill the very
man she sought so anxiously to elude. Boldwood was stepping on, not
with that quiet tread of reserved strength which was his customary
gait, in which he always seemed to be balancing two thoughts. His
manner was stunned and sluggish now.
Boldwood had for the first time been awakened to woman’s privileges in
tergiversation even when it involves another person’s possible blight.
That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than
her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that
these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for
consistency’s sake, and accept him, though her fancy might not flood
him with the iridescent hues of uncritical love. But the argument now
came back as sorry gleams from a broken mirror. The discovery was no
less a scourge than a surprise.
He came on looking upon the ground, and did not see Bathsheba till they
were less than a stone’s throw apart. He looked up at the sound of her
pit-pat, and his changed appearance sufficiently denoted to her the
depth and strength of the feelings paralyzed by her letter.
“Oh; is it you, Mr. Boldwood?” she faltered, a guilty warmth pulsing in
her face.
Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means
more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not
on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an
ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that
they avoid the pathway of sound. Boldwood’s look was unanswerable.
Seeing she turned a little aside, he said, “What, are you afraid of
me?”
“Why should you say that?” said Bathsheba.
“I fancied you looked so,” said he. “And it is most strange, because of
its contrast with my feeling for you.”
She regained self-possession, fixed her eyes calmly, and waited.
“You know what that feeling is,” continued Boldwood, deliberately. “A
thing strong as death. No dismissal by a hasty letter affects that.”
“I wish you did not feel so strongly about me,” she murmured. “It is
generous of you, and more than I deserve, but I must not hear it now.”
“Hear it? What do you think I have to say, then? I am not to marry you,
and that’s enough. Your letter was excellently plain. I want you to
hear nothing—not I.”
Bathsheba was unable to direct her will into any definite groove for
freeing herself from this fearfully awkward position. She confusedly
said, “Good evening,” and was moving on. Boldwood walked up to her
heavily and dully.
“Bathsheba—darling—is it final indeed?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Oh, Bathsheba—have pity upon me!” Boldwood burst out. “God’s sake,
yes—I am come to that low, lowest stage—to ask a woman for pity! Still,
she is you—she is you.”
Bathsheba commanded herself well. But she could hardly get a clear
voice for what came instinctively to her lips: “There is little honour
to the woman in that speech.” It was only whispered, for something
unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this spectacle of a
man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated
the feminine instinct for punctilios.
“I am beyond myself about this, and am mad,” he said. “I am no stoic at
all to be supplicating here; but I do supplicate to you. I wish you
knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible, that. In
bare human mercy to a lonely man, don’t throw me off now!”
“I don’t throw you off—indeed, how can I? I never had you.” In her
noon-clear sense that she had never loved him she forgot for a moment
her thoughtless angle on that day in February.
“But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! I
don’t reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold
darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by
that letter—valentine you call it—would have been worse than my
knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say, there
was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing for you, and
yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no encouragement, I
cannot but contradict you.”
“What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute. I
have bitterly repented of it—ay, bitterly, and in tears. Can you still
go on reminding me?”
“I don’t accuse you of it—I deplore it. I took for earnest what you
insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful,
wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling
was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I but have
foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how
I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I
cannot do that, for I love you too well! But it is weak, idle
drivelling to go on like this.... Bathsheba, you are the first woman of