Far from the Madding Crowd
have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say—that my
aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me—”
Gabriel expanded. “I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,” he
said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. “Wait a bit till you’ve
found your breath.”
“—It was quite a mistake—aunt’s telling you I had a young man already,”
Bathsheba went on. “I haven’t a sweetheart at all—and I never had one,
and I thought that, as times go with women, it was _such_ a pity to
send you away thinking that I had several.”
“Really and truly I am glad to hear that!” said Farmer Oak, smiling one
of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his
hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it
there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating
heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped
through his fingers like an eel.
“I have a nice snug little farm,” said Gabriel, with half a degree less
assurance than when he had seized her hand.
“Yes; you have.”
“A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon be
paid off, and though I am only an every-day sort of man, I have got on
a little since I was a boy.” Gabriel uttered “a little” in a tone to
show her that it was the complacent form of “a great deal.” He
continued: “When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as
hard as I do now.”
He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba had
overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low stunted holly bush,
now laden with red berries. Seeing his advance take the form of an
attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her
person, she edged off round the bush.
“Why, Farmer Oak,” she said, over the top, looking at him with rounded
eyes, “I never said I was going to marry you.”
“Well—that _is_ a tale!” said Oak, with dismay. “To run after anybody
like this, and then say you don’t want him!”
“What I meant to tell you was only this,” she said eagerly, and yet
half conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for
herself—“that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my
having a dozen, as my aunt said; I _hate_ to be thought men’s property
in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I’d
wanted you I shouldn’t have run after you like this; ’twould have been
the _forwardest_ thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to correct a
piece of false news that had been told you.”
“Oh, no—no harm at all.” But there is such a thing as being too
generous in expressing a judgment impulsively, and Oak added with a
more appreciative sense of all the circumstances—“Well, I am not quite
certain it was no harm.”
“Indeed, I hadn’t time to think before starting whether I wanted to
marry or not, for you’d have been gone over the hill.”
“Come,” said Gabriel, freshening again; “think a minute or two. I’ll
wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me? Do, Bathsheba. I love
you far more than common!”
“I’ll try to think,” she observed, rather more timorously; “if I can
think out of doors; my mind spreads away so.”
“But you can give a guess.”
“Then give me time.” Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the distance,
away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.
“I can make you happy,” said he to the back of her head, across the
bush. “You shall have a piano in a year or two—farmers’ wives are
getting to have pianos now—and I’ll practise up the flute right well to
play with you in the evenings.”
“Yes; I should like that.”
“And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market—and nice
flowers, and birds—cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,”
continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality.
“I should like it very much.”
“And a frame for cucumbers—like a gentleman and lady.”
“Yes.”
“And when the wedding was over, we’d have it put in the newspaper list
of marriages.”
“Dearly I should like that!”
“And the babies in the births—every man jack of ’em! And at home by the
fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up
there will be you.”
“Wait, wait, and don’t be improper!”
Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red
berries between them over and over again, to such an extent, that holly
seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of
marriage. Bathsheba decisively turned to him.
“No; ’tis no use,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you.”
“Try.”
“I have tried hard all the time I’ve been thinking; for a marriage
would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and think
I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that. But a
husband—”
“Well!”
“Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there
he’d be.”
“Of course he would—I, that is.”
“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding,
if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t
show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry—at least yet.”
“That’s a terrible wooden story!”
At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an addition to her
dignity by a slight sweep away from him.
“Upon my heart and soul, I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than
that,” said Oak. “But dearest,” he continued in a palliative voice,
“don’t be like it!” Oak sighed a deep honest sigh—none the less so in
that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather
noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. “Why won’t you have me?”
he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.
“I cannot,” she said, retreating.
“But why?” he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever
reaching her, and facing over the bush.
“Because I don’t love you.”
“Yes, but—”
She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was
hardly ill-mannered at all. “I don’t love you,” she said.
“But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”
“Oh Mr. Oak—that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.”
“Never,” said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the
force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. “I
shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you,
and long for you, and _keep wanting you_ till I die.” His voice had a
genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.
“It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!” she
said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some
means of escape from her moral dilemma. “How I wish I hadn’t run after
you!” However she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to
cheerfulness, and set her face to signify archness. “It wouldn’t do,
Mr. Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you
would never be able to, I know.”
Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless
to attempt argument.
“Mr. Oak,” she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, “you
are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world—I am staying
with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you—and
I don’t love you a bit: that’s my side of the case. Now yours: you are
a farmer just beginning; and you ought in common prudence, if you marry
at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present), to
marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than
you have now.”
Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.
“That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!” he naïvely said.
Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to
succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of
honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.
“Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?” she said, almost
angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.
“I can’t do what I think would be—would be—”
“Right?”
“No: wise.”
“You have made an admission _now_, Mr. Oak,” she exclaimed, with even
more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. “After that, do you
think I could marry you? Not if I know it.”
He broke in passionately. “But don’t mistake me like that! Because I am
open enough to own what every man in my shoes would have thought of,
you make your colours come up your face, and get crabbed with me. That
about your not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a
lady—all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is, I have
heerd, a large farmer—much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in
the evening, or will you walk along with me o’ Sundays? I don’t want
you to make-up your mind at once, if you’d rather not.”
“No—no—I cannot. Don’t press me any more—don’t. I don’t love you—so
’twould be ridiculous,” she said, with a laugh.
No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of
skittishness. “Very well,” said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one
who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.
“Then I’ll ask you no more.”
CHAPTER V
DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA—A PASTORAL TRAGEDY
The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene had
left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might have
surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the
renunciation the less absolute its character.
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out
of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a
short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which
was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s
disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt
to idealize the removed object with others—notably those whose
affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak
belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret
fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now
that she was gone—that was all.
His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the failure
of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba’s movements was done
indirectly. It appeared that she had gone to a place called
Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in what capacity—whether
as a visitor, or permanently, he could not discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped
nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in
random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but
the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out
of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the
blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same
kind of colour in Turner’s pictures. In substance it had originally
been hair, but long contact with sheep seemed to be turning it by
degrees into wool of a poor quality and staple.
This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals and
dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact degrees
of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all descriptions
better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood. Long experience
had so precisely taught the animal the difference between such
exclamations as “Come in!” and “D–––– ye, come in!” that he knew to a
hair’s breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes’ tails that each
call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook was to be escaped.
Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.
The young dog, George’s son, might possibly have been the image of his
mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and George. He
was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow on at the