Far from the Madding Crowd
slashes through a cloud low down in the awakening sky. From the trees
came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted leaves under them,
and from the direction of the church she could hear another
noise—peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl of water
falling into a pool.
Liddy knocked at eight o’clock, and Bathsheba unlocked the door.
“What a heavy rain we’ve had in the night, ma’am!” said Liddy, when her
inquiries about breakfast had been made.
“Yes, very heavy.”
“Did you hear the strange noise from the churchyard?”
“I heard one strange noise. I’ve been thinking it must have been the
water from the tower spouts.”
“Well, that’s what the shepherd was saying, ma’am. He’s now gone on to
see.”
“Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!”
“Only just looked in in passing—quite in his old way, which I thought
he had left off lately. But the tower spouts used to spatter on the
stones, and we are puzzled, for this was like the boiling of a pot.”
Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked Liddy to stay
and breakfast with her. The tongue of the more childish woman still ran
upon recent events. “Are you going across to the church, ma’am?” she
asked.
“Not that I know of,” said Bathsheba.
“I thought you might like to go and see where they have put Fanny. The
trees hide the place from your window.”
Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband. “Has Mr.
Troy been in to-night?” she said.
“No, ma’am; I think he’s gone to Budmouth.”
Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much diminished
perspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles interval
betwixt them now. She hated questioning Liddy about her husband’s
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but now
all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard
for public opinion.
“What makes you think he has gone there?” she said.
“Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast.”
Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the
past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in her
without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and she resolved
to go out and walk a little way. So when breakfast was over, she put on
her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church. It was nine
o’clock, and the men having returned to work again from their first
meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in the road. Knowing that
Fanny had been laid in the reprobates’ quarter of the graveyard, called
in the parish “behind church,” which was invisible from the road, it
was impossible to resist the impulse to enter and look upon a spot
which, from nameless feelings, she at the same time dreaded to see. She
had been unable to overcome an impression that some connection existed
between her rival and the light through the trees.
Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, its
delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen it
and left it two hours earlier. On the other side of the scene stood
Gabriel. His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her arrival having
been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his attention. Bathsheba
did not at once perceive that the grand tomb and the disturbed grave
were Fanny’s, and she looked on both sides and around for some humbler
mound, earthed up and clodded in the usual way. Then her eye followed
Oak’s, and she read the words with which the inscription opened:—
Erected by Francis Troy
In Beloved Memory of
Fanny Robin
Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn how
she received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which to
himself had caused considerable astonishment. But such discoveries did
not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed to have become
the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good morning, and
asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which was standing by.
Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba collected the flowers,
and began planting them with that sympathetic manipulation of roots and
leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman’s gardening, and which
flowers seem to understand and thrive upon. She requested Oak to get
the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the mouth of the gurgoyle
that hung gaping down upon them, that by this means the stream might be
directed sideways, and a repetition of the accident prevented. Finally,
with the superfluous magnanimity of a woman whose narrower instincts
have brought down bitterness upon her instead of love, she wiped the
mud spots from the tomb as if she rather liked its words than
otherwise, and went again home.[2]
CHAPTER XLVII
ADVENTURES BY THE SHORE
Troy wandered along towards the south. A composite feeling, made up of
disgust with the, to him, humdrum tediousness of a farmer’s life,
gloomy images of her who lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a general
averseness to his wife’s society, impelled him to seek a home in any
place on earth save Weatherbury. The sad accessories of Fanny’s end
confronted him as vivid pictures which threatened to be indelible, and
made life in Bathsheba’s house intolerable. At three in the afternoon
he found himself at the foot of a slope more than a mile in length,
which ran to the ridge of a range of hills lying parallel with the
shore, and forming a monotonous barrier between the basin of cultivated
country inland and the wilder scenery of the coast. Up the hill
stretched a road nearly straight and perfectly white, the two sides
approaching each other in a gradual taper till they met the sky at the
top about two miles off. Throughout the length of this narrow and
irksome inclined plane not a sign of life was visible on this garish
afternoon. Troy toiled up the road with a languor and depression
greater than any he had experienced for many a day and year before. The
air was warm and muggy, and the top seemed to recede as he approached.
At last he reached the summit, and a wide and novel prospect burst upon
him with an effect almost like that of the Pacific upon Balboa’s gaze.
The broad steely sea, marked only by faint lines, which had a semblance
of being etched thereon to a degree not deep enough to disturb its
general evenness, stretched the whole width of his front and round to
the right, where, near the town and port of Budmouth, the sun bristled
down upon it, and banished all colour, to substitute in its place a
clear oily polish. Nothing moved in sky, land, or sea, except a frill
of milkwhite foam along the nearer angles of the shore, shreds of which
licked the contiguous stones like tongues.
He descended and came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs.
Troy’s nature freshened within him; he thought he would rest and bathe
here before going farther. He undressed and plunged in. Inside the cove
the water was uninteresting to a swimmer, being smooth as a pond, and
to get a little of the ocean swell, Troy presently swam between the two
projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this
miniature Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Troy a current unknown to
him existed outside, which, unimportant to craft of any burden, was
awkward for a swimmer who might be taken in it unawares. Troy found
himself carried to the left and then round in a swoop out to sea.
He now recollected the place and its sinister character. Many bathers
had there prayed for a dry death from time to time, and, like Gonzalo
also, had been unanswered; and Troy began to deem it possible that he
might be added to their number. Not a boat of any kind was at present
within sight, but far in the distance Budmouth lay upon the sea, as it
were quietly regarding his efforts, and beside the town the harbour
showed its position by a dim meshwork of ropes and spars. After
well-nigh exhausting himself in attempts to get back to the mouth of
the cove, in his weakness swimming several inches deeper than was his
wont, keeping up his breathing entirely by his nostrils, turning upon
his back a dozen times over, swimming _en papillon_, and so on, Troy
resolved as a last resource to tread water at a slight incline, and so
endeavour to reach the shore at any point, merely giving himself a
gentle impetus inwards whilst carried on in the general direction of
the tide. This, necessarily a slow process, he found to be not
altogether so difficult, and though there was no choice of a
landing-place—the objects on shore passing by him in a sad and slow
procession—he perceptibly approached the extremity of a spit of land
yet further to the right, now well defined against the sunny portion of
the horizon. While the swimmer’s eyes were fixed upon the spit as his
only means of salvation on this side of the Unknown, a moving object
broke the outline of the extremity, and immediately a ship’s boat
appeared manned with several sailor lads, her bows towards the sea.
All Troy’s vigour spasmodically revived to prolong the struggle yet a
little further. Swimming with his right arm, he held up his left to
hail them, splashing upon the waves, and shouting with all his might.
From the position of the setting sun his white form was distinctly
visible upon the now deep-hued bosom of the sea to the east of the
boat, and the men saw him at once. Backing their oars and putting the
boat about, they pulled towards him with a will, and in five or six
minutes from the time of his first halloo, two of the sailors hauled
him in over the stern.
They formed part of a brig’s crew, and had come ashore for sand.
Lending him what little clothing they could spare among them as a
slight protection against the rapidly cooling air, they agreed to land
him in the morning; and without further delay, for it was growing late,
they made again towards the roadstead where their vessel lay.
And now night drooped slowly upon the wide watery levels in front; and
at no great distance from them, where the shoreline curved round, and
formed a long riband of shade upon the horizon, a series of points of
yellow light began to start into existence, denoting the spot to be the
site of Budmouth, where the lamps were being lighted along the parade.
The cluck of their oars was the only sound of any distinctness upon the
sea, and as they laboured amid the thickening shades the lamp-lights
grew larger, each appearing to send a flaming sword deep down into the
waves before it, until there arose, among other dim shapes of the kind,
the form of the vessel for which they were bound.
CHAPTER XLVIII
DOUBTS ARISE—DOUBTS LINGER
Bathsheba underwent the enlargement of her husband’s absence from hours
to days with a slight feeling of surprise, and a slight feeling of
relief; yet neither sensation rose at any time far above the level
commonly designated as indifference. She belonged to him: the
certainties of that position were so well defined, and the reasonable
probabilities of its issue so bounded that she could not speculate on
contingencies. Taking no further interest in herself as a splendid
woman, she acquired the indifferent feelings of an outsider in
contemplating her probable fate as a singular wretch; for Bathsheba
drew herself and her future in colours that no reality could exceed for
darkness. Her original vigorous pride of youth had sickened, and with
it had declined all her anxieties about coming years, since anxiety
recognizes a better and a worse alternative, and Bathsheba had made up
her mind that alternatives on any noteworthy scale had ceased for her.
Soon, or later—and that not very late—her husband would be home again.