Far from the Madding Crowd
Melchester for several months, at the house of a very respectable
widow-woman who takes in work of that sort. She only got handy the
Union-house on Sunday morning ’a b’lieve, and ’tis supposed here and
there that she had traipsed every step of the way from Melchester. Why
she left her place, I can’t say, for I don’t know; and as to a lie,
why, I wouldn’t tell it. That’s the short of the story, ma’am.”
“Ah-h!”
No gem ever flashed from a rosy ray to a white one more rapidly than
changed the young wife’s countenance whilst this word came from her in
a long-drawn breath. “Did she walk along our turnpike-road?” she said,
in a suddenly restless and eager voice.
“I believe she did.... Ma’am, shall I call Liddy? You bain’t well,
ma’am, surely? You look like a lily—so pale and fainty!”
“No; don’t call her; it is nothing. When did she pass Weatherbury?”
“Last Saturday night.”
“That will do, Joseph; now you may go.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
“Joseph, come hither a moment. What was the colour of Fanny Robin’s
hair?”
“Really, mistress, now that ’tis put to me so judge-and-jury like, I
can’t call to mind, if ye’ll believe me!”
“Never mind; go on and do what I told you. Stop—well no, go on.”
She turned herself away from him, that he might no longer notice the
mood which had set its sign so visibly upon her, and went indoors with
a distressing sense of faintness and a beating brow. About an hour
after, she heard the noise of the waggon and went out, still with a
painful consciousness of her bewildered and troubled look. Joseph,
dressed in his best suit of clothes, was putting in the horse to start.
The shrubs and flowers were all piled in the waggon, as she had
directed; Bathsheba hardly saw them now.
“Died of what? did you say, Joseph?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, ma’am, quite sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“I’m sure that all I know is that she arrived in the morning and died
in the evening without further parley. What Oak and Mr. Boldwood told
me was only these few words. ‘Little Fanny Robin is dead, Joseph,’
Gabriel said, looking in my face in his steady old way. I was very
sorry, and I said, ‘Ah!—and how did she come to die?’ ‘Well, she’s dead
in Casterbridge Union,’ he said, ‘and perhaps ’tisn’t much matter about
how she came to die. She reached the Union early Sunday morning, and
died in the afternoon—that’s clear enough.’ Then I asked what she’d
been doing lately, and Mr. Boldwood turned round to me then, and left
off spitting a thistle with the end of his stick. He told me about her
having lived by seampstering in Melchester, as I mentioned to you, and
that she walked therefrom at the end of last week, passing near here
Saturday night in the dusk. They then said I had better just name a
hint of her death to you, and away they went. Her death might have been
brought on by biding in the night wind, you know, ma’am; for people
used to say she’d go off in a decline: she used to cough a good deal in
winter time. However, ’tisn’t much odds to us about that now, for ’tis
all over.”
“Have you heard a different story at all?” She looked at him so
intently that Joseph’s eyes quailed.
“Not a word, mistress, I assure ’ee!” he said. “Hardly anybody in the
parish knows the news yet.”
“I wonder why Gabriel didn’t bring the message to me himself. He mostly
makes a point of seeing me upon the most trifling errand.” These words
were merely murmured, and she was looking upon the ground.
“Perhaps he was busy, ma’am,” Joseph suggested. “And sometimes he seems
to suffer from things upon his mind, connected with the time when he
was better off than ’a is now. ’A’s rather a curious item, but a very
understanding shepherd, and learned in books.”
“Did anything seem upon his mind whilst he was speaking to you about
this?”
“I cannot but say that there did, ma’am. He was terrible down, and so
was Farmer Boldwood.”
“Thank you, Joseph. That will do. Go on now, or you’ll be late.”
Bathsheba, still unhappy, went indoors again. In the course of the
afternoon she said to Liddy, who had been informed of the occurrence,
“What was the colour of poor Fanny Robin’s hair? Do you know? I cannot
recollect—I only saw her for a day or two.”
“It was light, ma’am; but she wore it rather short, and packed away
under her cap, so that you would hardly notice it. But I have seen her
let it down when she was going to bed, and it looked beautiful then.
Real golden hair.”
“Her young man was a soldier, was he not?”
“Yes. In the same regiment as Mr. Troy. He says he knew him very well.”
“What, Mr. Troy says so? How came he to say that?”
“One day I just named it to him, and asked him if he knew Fanny’s young
man. He said, ‘Oh yes, he knew the young man as well as he knew
himself, and that there wasn’t a man in the regiment he liked better.’”
“Ah! Said that, did he?”
“Yes; and he said there was a strong likeness between himself and the
other young man, so that sometimes people mistook them—”
“Liddy, for Heaven’s sake stop your talking!” said Bathsheba, with the
nervous petulance that comes from worrying perceptions.
CHAPTER XLII
JOSEPH AND HIS BURDEN—BUCK’S HEAD
A wall bounded the site of Casterbridge Union-house, except along a
portion of the end. Here a high gable stood prominent, and it was
covered like the front with a mat of ivy. In this gable was no window,
chimney, ornament, or protuberance of any kind. The single feature
appertaining to it, beyond the expanse of dark green leaves, was a
small door.
The situation of the door was peculiar. The sill was three or four feet
above the ground, and for a moment one was at a loss for an explanation
of this exceptional altitude, till ruts immediately beneath suggested
that the door was used solely for the passage of articles and persons
to and from the level of a vehicle standing on the outside. Upon the
whole, the door seemed to advertise itself as a species of Traitor’s
Gate translated to another sphere. That entry and exit hereby was only
at rare intervals became apparent on noting that tufts of grass were
allowed to flourish undisturbed in the chinks of the sill.
As the clock over the South-street Alms-house pointed to five minutes
to three, a blue spring waggon, picked out with red, and containing
boughs and flowers, passed the end of the street, and up towards this
side of the building. Whilst the chimes were yet stammering out a
shattered form of “Malbrook,” Joseph Poorgrass rang the bell, and
received directions to back his waggon against the high door under the
gable. The door then opened, and a plain elm coffin was slowly thrust
forth, and laid by two men in fustian along the middle of the vehicle.
One of the men then stepped up beside it, took from his pocket a lump
of chalk, and wrote upon the cover the name and a few other words in a
large scrawling hand. (We believe that they do these things more
tenderly now, and provide a plate.) He covered the whole with a black
cloth, threadbare, but decent, the tail-board of the waggon was
returned to its place, one of the men handed a certificate of registry
to Poorgrass, and both entered the door, closing it behind them. Their
connection with her, short as it had been, was over for ever.
Joseph then placed the flowers as enjoined, and the evergreens around
the flowers, till it was difficult to divine what the waggon contained;
he smacked his whip, and the rather pleasing funeral car crept down the
hill, and along the road to Weatherbury.
The afternoon drew on apace, and, looking to the right towards the sea
as he walked beside the horse, Poorgrass saw strange clouds and scrolls
of mist rolling over the long ridges which girt the landscape in that
quarter. They came in yet greater volumes, and indolently crept across
the intervening valleys, and around the withered papery flags of the
moor and river brinks. Then their dank spongy forms closed in upon the
sky. It was a sudden overgrowth of atmospheric fungi which had their
roots in the neighbouring sea, and by the time that horse, man, and
corpse entered Yalbury Great Wood, these silent workings of an
invisible hand had reached them, and they were completely enveloped,
this being the first arrival of the autumn fogs, and the first fog of
the series.
The air was as an eye suddenly struck blind. The waggon and its load
rolled no longer on the horizontal division between clearness and
opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor
throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible
drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches, and firs
composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of
intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock
them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely,
that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small
rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were
distinctly individualized.
Joseph Poorgrass looked round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly
through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid
the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like
in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished
he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he
listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the
dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree
through the evergreens and alighting with a smart rap upon the coffin
of poor Fanny. The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this
was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The
hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim
Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three.
Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the
dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were
beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red
leaves of the beeches were hung with similar drops, like diamonds on
auburn hair.
At the roadside hamlet called Roy-Town, just beyond this wood, was the
old inn Buck’s Head. It was about a mile and a half from Weatherbury,
and in the meridian times of stage-coach travelling had been the place
where many coaches changed and kept their relays of horses. All the old
stabling was now pulled down, and little remained besides the habitable
inn itself, which, standing a little way back from the road, signified
its existence to people far up and down the highway by a sign hanging
from the horizontal bough of an elm on the opposite side of the way.
Travellers—for the variety _tourist_ had hardly developed into a
distinct species at this date—sometimes said in passing, when they cast
their eyes up to the sign-bearing tree, that artists were fond of
representing the signboard hanging thus, but that they themselves had
never before noticed so perfect an instance in actual working order. It
was near this tree that the waggon was standing into which Gabriel Oak
crept on his first journey to Weatherbury; but, owing to the darkness,
the sign and the inn had been unobserved.
The manners of the inn were of the old-established type. Indeed, in the
minds of its frequenters they existed as unalterable formulæ: _e.g._—
Rap with the bottom of your pint for more liquor.
For tobacco, shout.
In calling for the girl in waiting, say, “Maid!”
Ditto for the landlady, “Old Soul!” etc., etc.
It was a relief to Joseph’s heart when the friendly signboard came in
view, and, stopping his horse immediately beneath it, he proceeded to
fulfil an intention made a long time before. His spirits were oozing