Far from the Madding Crowd
“Not you—only your faults. I do hate them.”
“’Twould be much more becoming if you set yourself to cure them. Come,
let’s strike a balance with the twenty pounds, and be friends.”
She gave a sigh of resignation. “I have about that sum here for
household expenses. If you must have it, take it.”
“Very good. Thank you. I expect I shall have gone away before you are
in to breakfast to-morrow.”
“And must you go? Ah! there was a time, Frank, when it would have taken
a good many promises to other people to drag you away from me. You used
to call me darling, then. But it doesn’t matter to you how my days are
passed now.”
“I must go, in spite of sentiment.” Troy, as he spoke, looked at his
watch, and, apparently actuated by _non lucendo_ principles, opened the
case at the back, revealing, snugly stowed within it, a small coil of
hair.
Bathsheba’s eyes had been accidentally lifted at that moment, and she
saw the action and saw the hair. She flushed in pain and surprise, and
some words escaped her before she had thought whether or not it was
wise to utter them. “A woman’s curl of hair!” she said. “Oh, Frank,
whose is that?”
Troy had instantly closed his watch. He carelessly replied, as one who
cloaked some feelings that the sight had stirred. “Why, yours, of
course. Whose should it be? I had quite forgotten that I had it.”
“What a dreadful fib, Frank!”
“I tell you I had forgotten it!” he said, loudly.
“I don’t mean that—it was yellow hair.”
“Nonsense.”
“That’s insulting me. I know it was yellow. Now whose was it? I want to
know.”
“Very well—I’ll tell you, so make no more ado. It is the hair of a
young woman I was going to marry before I knew you.”
“You ought to tell me her name, then.”
“I cannot do that.”
“Is she married yet?”
“No.”
“Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes.”
“It is wonderful how she can be, poor thing, under such an awful
affliction!”
“Affliction—what affliction?” he inquired, quickly.
“Having hair of that dreadful colour.”
“Oh—ho—I like that!” said Troy, recovering himself. “Why, her hair has
been admired by everybody who has seen her since she has worn it loose,
which has not been long. It is beautiful hair. People used to turn
their heads to look at it, poor girl!”
“Pooh! that’s nothing—that’s nothing!” she exclaimed, in incipient
accents of pique. “If I cared for your love as much as I used to I
could say people had turned to look at mine.”
“Bathsheba, don’t be so fitful and jealous. You knew what married life
would be like, and shouldn’t have entered it if you feared these
contingencies.”
Troy had by this time driven her to bitterness: her heart was big in
her throat, and the ducts to her eyes were painfully full. Ashamed as
she was to show emotion, at last she burst out:—
“This is all I get for loving you so well! Ah! when I married you your
life was dearer to me than my own. I would have died for you—how truly
I can say that I would have died for you! And now you sneer at my
foolishness in marrying you. O! is it kind to me to throw my mistake in
my face? Whatever opinion you may have of my wisdom, you should not
tell me of it so mercilessly, now that I am in your power.”
“I can’t help how things fall out,” said Troy; “upon my heart, women
will be the death of me!”
“Well you shouldn’t keep people’s hair. You’ll burn it, won’t you,
Frank?”
Frank went on as if he had not heard her. “There are considerations
even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made—ties you
know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I.”
Trembling now, she put her hand upon his arm, saying, in mingled tones
of wretchedness and coaxing, “I only repent it if you don’t love me
better than any woman in the world! I don’t otherwise, Frank. You don’t
repent because you already love somebody better than you love me, do
you?”
“I don’t know. Why do you say that?”
“You won’t burn that curl. You like the woman who owns that pretty
hair—yes; it is pretty—more beautiful than my miserable black mane!
Well, it is no use; I can’t help being ugly. You must like her best, if
you will!”
“Until to-day, when I took it from a drawer, I have never looked upon
that bit of hair for several months—that I am ready to swear.”
“But just now you said ‘ties’; and then—that woman we met?”
“’Twas the meeting with her that reminded me of the hair.”
“Is it hers, then?”
“Yes. There, now that you have wormed it out of me, I hope you are
content.”
“And what are the ties?”
“Oh! that meant nothing—a mere jest.”
“A mere jest!” she said, in mournful astonishment. “Can you jest when I
am so wretchedly in earnest? Tell me the truth, Frank. I am not a fool,
you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments. Come!
treat me fairly,” she said, looking honestly and fearlessly into his
face. “I don’t want much; bare justice—that’s all! Ah! once I felt I
could be content with nothing less than the highest homage from the
husband I should choose. Now, anything short of cruelty will content
me. Yes! the independent and spirited Bathsheba is come to this!”
“For Heaven’s sake don’t be so desperate!” Troy said, snappishly,
rising as he did so, and leaving the room.
Directly he had gone, Bathsheba burst into great sobs—dry-eyed sobs,
which cut as they came, without any softening by tears. But she
determined to repress all evidences of feeling. She was conquered; but
she would never own it as long as she lived. Her pride was indeed
brought low by despairing discoveries of her spoliation by marriage
with a less pure nature than her own. She chafed to and fro in
rebelliousness, like a caged leopard; her whole soul was in arms, and
the blood fired her face. Until she had met Troy, Bathsheba had been
proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know
that her lips had been touched by no man’s on earth—that her waist had
never been encircled by a lover’s arm. She hated herself now. In those
earlier days she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who
were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should
choose to salute them. She had never taken kindly to the idea of
marriage in the abstract as did the majority of women she saw about
her. In the turmoil of her anxiety for her lover she had agreed to
marry him; but the perception that had accompanied her happiest hours
on this account was rather that of self-sacrifice than of promotion and
honour. Although she scarcely knew the divinity’s name, Diana was the
goddess whom Bathsheba instinctively adored. That she had never, by
look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her—that she had felt
herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her
girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the
simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an
indifferent matrimonial whole—were facts now bitterly remembered. Oh,
if she had never stooped to folly of this kind, respectable as it was,
and could only stand again, as she had stood on the hill at Norcombe,
and dare Troy or any other man to pollute a hair of her head by his
interference!
The next morning she rose earlier than usual, and had the horse saddled
for her ride round the farm in the customary way. When she came in at
half-past eight—their usual hour for breakfasting—she was informed that
her husband had risen, taken his breakfast, and driven off to
Casterbridge with the gig and Poppet.
After breakfast she was cool and collected—quite herself in fact—and
she rambled to the gate, intending to walk to another quarter of the
farm, which she still personally superintended as well as her duties in
the house would permit, continually, however, finding herself preceded
in forethought by Gabriel Oak, for whom she began to entertain the
genuine friendship of a sister. Of course, she sometimes thought of him
in the light of an old lover, and had momentary imaginings of what life
with him as a husband would have been like; also of life with Boldwood
under the same conditions. But Bathsheba, though she could feel, was
not much given to futile dreaming, and her musings under this head were
short and entirely confined to the times when Troy’s neglect was more
than ordinarily evident.
She saw coming up the road a man like Mr. Boldwood. It was Mr.
Boldwood. Bathsheba blushed painfully, and watched. The farmer stopped
when still a long way off, and held up his hand to Gabriel Oak, who was
in a footpath across the field. The two men then approached each other
and seemed to engage in earnest conversation.
Thus they continued for a long time. Joseph Poorgrass now passed near
them, wheeling a barrow of apples up the hill to Bathsheba’s residence.
Boldwood and Gabriel called to him, spoke to him for a few minutes, and
then all three parted, Joseph immediately coming up the hill with his
barrow.
Bathsheba, who had seen this pantomime with some surprise, experienced
great relief when Boldwood turned back again. “Well, what’s the
message, Joseph?” she said.
He set down his barrow, and, putting upon himself the refined aspect
that a conversation with a lady required, spoke to Bathsheba over the
gate.
“You’ll never see Fanny Robin no more—use nor principal—ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s dead in the Union.”
“Fanny dead—never!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What did she die from?”
“I don’t know for certain; but I should be inclined to think it was
from general neshness of constitution. She was such a limber maid that
’a could stand no hardship, even when I knowed her, and ’a went like a
candle-snoff, so ’tis said. She was took bad in the morning, and, being
quite feeble and worn out, she died in the evening. She belongs by law
to our parish; and Mr. Boldwood is going to send a waggon at three this
afternoon to fetch her home here and bury her.”
“Indeed I shall not let Mr. Boldwood do any such thing—I shall do it!
Fanny was my uncle’s servant, and, although I only knew her for a
couple of days, she belongs to me. How very, very sad this is!—the idea
of Fanny being in a workhouse.” Bathsheba had begun to know what
suffering was, and she spoke with real feeling.... “Send across to Mr.
Boldwood’s, and say that Mrs. Troy will take upon herself the duty of
fetching an old servant of the family.... We ought not to put her in a
waggon; we’ll get a hearse.”
“There will hardly be time, ma’am, will there?”
“Perhaps not,” she said, musingly. “When did you say we must be at the
door—three o’clock?”
“Three o’clock this afternoon, ma’am, so to speak it.”
“Very well—you go with it. A pretty waggon is better than an ugly
hearse, after all. Joseph, have the new spring waggon with the blue
body and red wheels, and wash it very clean. And, Joseph—”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Carry with you some evergreens and flowers to put upon her
coffin—indeed, gather a great many, and completely bury her in them.
Get some boughs of laurustinus, and variegated box, and yew, and
boy’s-love; ay, and some bunches of chrysanthemum. And let old Pleasant
draw her, because she knew him so well.”
“I will, ma’am. I ought to have said that the Union, in the form of
four labouring men, will meet me when I gets to our churchyard gate,
and take her and bury her according to the rites of the Board of
Guardians, as by law ordained.”
“Dear me—Casterbridge Union—and is Fanny come to this?” said Bathsheba,
musing. “I wish I had known of it sooner. I thought she was far away.
How long has she lived there?”
“On’y been there a day or two.”
“Oh!—then she has not been staying there as a regular inmate?”
“No. She first went to live in a garrison-town t’other side o’ Wessex,
and since then she’s been picking up a living at seampstering in