Far from the Madding Crowd
any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the
having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so
hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don’t speak now to move
your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that.
I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you.”
“But I do pity you—deeply—O, so deeply!” she earnestly said.
“Do no such thing—do no such thing. Your dear love, Bathsheba, is such
a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as well as
your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the gain of your
pity make it sensibly less. O sweet—how dearly you spoke to me behind
the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn at the shearing, and
that dearest last time in the evening at your home! Where are your
pleasant words all gone—your earnest hope to be able to love me? Where
is your firm conviction that you would get to care for me very much?
Really forgotten?—really?”
She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the face, and
said in her low, firm voice, “Mr. Boldwood, I promised you nothing.
Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest,
highest compliment a man can pay a woman—telling her he loves her? I
was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless shrew.
Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day—the day just for the
pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to all other men was
death to you? Have reason, do, and think more kindly of me!”
“Well, never mind arguing—never mind. One thing is sure: you were all
but mine, and now you are not nearly mine. Everything is changed, and
that by you alone, remember. You were nothing to me once, and I was
contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the
second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me
up, since it was only to throw me down!”
Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel unmistakable signs
that she was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably against
this femininity which would insist upon supplying unbidden emotions in
stronger and stronger current. She had tried to elude agitation by
fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object before her eyes,
whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not save her now.
“I did not take you up—surely I did not!” she answered as heroically as
she could. “But don’t be in this mood with me. I can endure being told
I am in the wrong, if you will only tell it me gently! O sir, will you
not kindly forgive me, and look at it cheerfully?”
“Cheerfully! Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a reason for
being merry? If I have lost, how can I be as if I had won? Heavens you
must be heartless quite! Had I known what a fearfully bitter sweet this
was to be, how I would have avoided you, and never seen you, and been
deaf of you. I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don’t
care.”
She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and swayed her
head desperately, as if to thrust away the words as they came showering
about her ears from the lips of the trembling man in the climax of
life, with his bronzed Roman face and fine frame.
“Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of
recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly for you again. Forget
that you have said No, and let it be as it was! Say, Bathsheba, that
you only wrote that refusal to me in fun—come, say it to me!”
“It would be untrue, and painful to both of us. You overrate my
capacity for love. I don’t possess half the warmth of nature you
believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten
gentleness out of me.”
He immediately said with more resentment: “That may be true, somewhat;
but ah, Miss Everdene, it won’t do as a reason! You are not the cold
woman you would have me believe. No, no! It isn’t because you have no
feeling in you that you don’t love me. You naturally would have me
think so—you would hide from me that you have a burning heart like
mine. You have love enough, but it is turned into a new channel. I know
where.”
The swift music of her heart became hubbub now, and she throbbed to
extremity. He was coming to Troy. He did then know what had occurred!
And the name fell from his lips the next moment.
“Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?” he asked, fiercely. “When I
had no thought of injuring him, why did he force himself upon your
notice! Before he worried you your inclination was to have me; when
next I should have come to you your answer would have been Yes. Can you
deny it—I ask, can you deny it?”
She delayed the reply, but was too honest to withhold it. “I cannot,”
she whispered.
“I know you cannot. But he stole in in my absence and robbed me. Why
didn’t he win you away before, when nobody would have been
grieved?—when nobody would have been set tale-bearing. Now the people
sneer at me—the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush
shamefully for my folly. I have lost my respect, my good name, my
standing—lost it, never to get it again. Go and marry your man—go on!”
“Oh sir—Mr. Boldwood!”
“You may as well. I have no further claim upon you. As for me, I had
better go somewhere alone, and hide—and pray. I loved a woman once. I
am now ashamed. When I am dead they’ll say, miserable love-sick man
that he was. Heaven—heaven—if I had got jilted secretly, and the
dishonour not known, and my position kept! But no matter, it is gone,
and the woman not gained. Shame upon him—shame!”
His unreasonable anger terrified her, and she glided from him, without
obviously moving, as she said, “I am only a girl—do not speak to me
so!”
“All the time you knew—how very well you knew—that your new freak was
my misery. Dazzled by brass and scarlet—Oh, Bathsheba—this is woman’s
folly indeed!”
She fired up at once. “You are taking too much upon yourself!” she
said, vehemently. “Everybody is upon me—everybody. It is unmanly to
attack a woman so! I have nobody in the world to fight my battles for
me; but no mercy is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say
things against me, I _will not_ be put down!”
“You’ll chatter with him doubtless about me. Say to him, ‘Boldwood
would have died for me.’ Yes, and you have given way to him, knowing
him to be not the man for you. He has kissed you—claimed you as his. Do
you hear—he has kissed you. Deny it!”
The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although Boldwood
was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self rendered into another
sex, Bathsheba’s cheek quivered. She gasped, “Leave me, sir—leave me! I
am nothing to you. Let me go on!”
“Deny that he has kissed you.”
“I shall not.”
“Ha—then he has!” came hoarsely from the farmer.
“He has,” she said, slowly, and, in spite of her fear, defiantly. “I am
not ashamed to speak the truth.”
“Then curse him; and curse him!” said Boldwood, breaking into a
whispered fury. “Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand,
you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and—kiss you!
Heaven’s mercy—kiss you!... Ah, a time of his life shall come when he
will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused
another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn—as I
do now!”
“Don’t, don’t, oh, don’t pray down evil upon him!” she implored in a
miserable cry. “Anything but that—anything. Oh, be kind to him, sir,
for I love him true!”
Boldwood’s ideas had reached that point of fusion at which outline and
consistency entirely disappear. The impending night appeared to
concentrate in his eye. He did not hear her at all now.
“I’ll punish him—by my soul, that will I! I’ll meet him, soldier or no,
and I’ll horsewhip the untimely stripling for this reckless theft of my
one delight. If he were a hundred men I’d horsewhip him—” He dropped
his voice suddenly and unnaturally. “Bathsheba, sweet, lost coquette,
pardon me! I’ve been blaming you, threatening you, behaving like a
churl to you, when he’s the greatest sinner. He stole your dear heart
away with his unfathomable lies!... It is a fortunate thing for him
that he’s gone back to his regiment—that he’s away up the country, and
not here! I hope he may not return here just yet. I pray God he may not
come into my sight, for I may be tempted beyond myself. Oh, Bathsheba,
keep him away—yes, keep him away from me!”
For a moment Boldwood stood so inertly after this that his soul seemed
to have been entirely exhaled with the breath of his passionate words.
He turned his face away, and withdrew, and his form was soon covered
over by the twilight as his footsteps mixed in with the low hiss of the
leafy trees.
Bathsheba, who had been standing motionless as a model all this latter
time, flung her hands to her face, and wildly attempted to ponder on
the exhibition which had just passed away. Such astounding wells of
fevered feeling in a still man like Mr. Boldwood were incomprehensible,
dreadful. Instead of being a man trained to repression he was—what she
had seen him.
The force of the farmer’s threats lay in their relation to a
circumstance known at present only to herself: her lover was coming
back to Weatherbury in the course of the very next day or two. Troy had
not returned to his distant barracks as Boldwood and others supposed,
but had merely gone to visit some acquaintance in Bath, and had yet a
week or more remaining to his furlough.
She felt wretchedly certain that if he revisited her just at this nick
of time, and came into contact with Boldwood, a fierce quarrel would be
the consequence. She panted with solicitude when she thought of
possible injury to Troy. The least spark would kindle the farmer’s
swift feelings of rage and jealousy; he would lose his self-mastery as
he had this evening; Troy’s blitheness might become aggressive; it
might take the direction of derision, and Boldwood’s anger might then
take the direction of revenge.
With almost a morbid dread of being thought a gushing girl, this
guileless woman too well concealed from the world under a manner of
carelessness the warm depths of her strong emotions. But now there was
no reserve. In her distraction, instead of advancing further she walked
up and down, beating the air with her fingers, pressing on her brow,
and sobbing brokenly to herself. Then she sat down on a heap of stones
by the wayside to think. There she remained long. Above the dark margin
of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud,
bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine
glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round
to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and
palpitating stars. She gazed upon their silent throes amid the shades
of space, but realised none at all. Her troubled spirit was far away
with Troy.
CHAPTER XXXII
NIGHT—HORSES TRAMPING
The village of Weatherbury was quiet as the graveyard in its midst, and
the living were lying well-nigh as still as the dead. The church clock
struck eleven. The air was so empty of other sounds that the whirr of
the clock-work immediately before the strokes was distinct, and so was
also the click of the same at their close. The notes flew forth with
the usual blind obtuseness of inanimate things—flapping and rebounding
among walls, undulating against the scattered clouds, spreading through
their interstices into unexplored miles of space.
Bathsheba’s crannied and mouldy halls were to-night occupied only by
Maryann, Liddy being, as was stated, with her sister, whom Bathsheba
had set out to visit. A few minutes after eleven had struck, Maryann
turned in her bed with a sense of being disturbed. She was totally