FAR FROM

THE

MADDING CROWD

Thomas Hardy

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook edition published in 2010

Life and Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life and Times section Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780007395163

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Version: 2015-03-30

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of Collins

General preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912

Chapter 1 - Description of Farmer Oak – An incident

Chapter 2 - Night – The flock – Interiors

Chapter 3 - A girl on horseback – Conversation

Chapter 4 - Gabriel’s resolve – The visit – The mistake

Chapter 5 - Departure of Bathsheba – A pastoral tragedy

Chapter 6 - The fair – The journey – The fire

Chapter 7 - Recognition – A timid girl

Chapter 8 - The malthouse – The chat – News

Chapter 9 - The homestead – A visitor – Half confidences

Chapter 10 - Mistress and men

Chapter 11 - Outside the barracks – Snow – A meeting

Chapter 12 - Farmers – A rule – An exception

Chapter 13 - Sortes sanctorum – The valentine

Chapter 14 - Effect of the letter – Sunrise

Chapter 15 - A morning meeting – The letter again

Chapter 16 - All Saints’ and All Souls’

Chapter 17 - In the market-place

Chapter 18 - Boldwood in meditation – Regret

Chapter 19 - The sheep-washing – The offer

Chapter 20 - Perplexity – Grinding the shears – A quarrel

Chapter 21 - Troubles in the fold – A message

Chapter 22 - The great barn and the sheep-shearers

Chapter 23 - Eventide – A second declaration

Chapter 24 - The same night – The fir plantation

Chapter 25 - The new acquaintance described

Chapter 26 - Scene on the verge of the hay-mead

Chapter 27 - Hiving the bees

Chapter 28 - The hollow amid the ferns

Chapter 29 - Particulars of a twilight walk

Chapter 30 - Hot cheeks and tearful eyes

Chapter 31 - Blame – Fury

Chapter 32 - Night – Horses tramping

Chapter 33 - In the sun – A harbinger

Chapter 34 - Home again – A trickster

Chapter 35 - At an upper window

Chapter 36 - Wealth in jeopardy – The revel

Chapter 37 - The storm – The two together

Chapter 38 - Rain – One solitary meets another

Chapter 39 - Coming home – A cry

Chapter 40 - On Casterbridge highway

Chapter 41 - Suspicion – Fanny is sent for

Chapter 42 - Joseph and his burden – Buck’s Head

Chapter 43 - Fanny’s revenge

Chapter 44 - Under a tree – Reaction

Chapter 45 - Troy’s romanticism

Chapter 46 - The gurgoyle: its doings

Chapter 47 - Adventures by the shore

Chapter 48 - Doubts arise – Doubts linger

Chapter 49 - Oak’s advancement – A great hope

Chapter 50 - The sheep fair – Troy touches his wife’s hand

Chapter 51 - Bathsheba talks with her outrider

Chapter 52 - Converging courses

Chapter 53 - Concurritur – Horae momento

Chapter 54 - After the shock

Chapter 55 - The March following – ‘Bathsheba Boldwood’

Chapter 56 - Beauty in loneliness – After all

Chapter 57 - A foggy night and morning – Conclusion

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

Life & Times - About the Author

About the Publisher

General preface to the Wessex

Edition of 1912

In accepting a proposal for a definite edition of these productions in prose and verse I have found an opportunity of classifying the novels under heads that show approximately the author’s aim, if not his achievement, in each book of the series at the date of its compositon. Sometimes the aim was lower than at other times; sometimes, where the intention was primarily high, force of circumstances (among which the chief were the necessities of magazine publication) compelled a modification, great or slight, of the original plan. Of a few, however, of the longer novels, and of many of the shorter tales, it may be assumed that they stand to-day much as they would have stood if no accidents had obstructed the channel between the writer and the public. That many of them, if any, stand as they would stand if written now is not to be supposed.

In the classification of these fictitious chronicles – for which the name of ‘The Wessex Novels’ was adopted, and is still retained – the first group is called ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, and contains those which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail.

The second group is distinguished as ‘Romances and Fantasies’, a sufficiently descriptive definition. The third class – ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ – show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterized as ‘Experiments’, and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life.

It will not be supposed that these differences are distinctly perceptible in every page of every volume. It was inevitable that blendings and alternations should occur in all. Moreover, as it was not thought desirable in every instance to change the arrangement of the shorter stories to which readers have grown accustomed, certain of these may be found under headings to which an acute judgement might deny appropriateness.

It has sometimes been conceived of novels that evolve their action on a circumscribed scene – as do many (though not all) of these – that they cannot be so inclusive in their exhibition of human nature as novels wherein the scenes cover large extents of country, in which events figure amid towns and cities, even wander over the four quarters of the globe. I am not concerned to argue this point further than to suggest that the conception is an untrue one in respect of the elementary passions. But I would state that the geographical limits of the stage here trodden were not absolutely forced upon the writer by circumstances; he forced them upon himself from judgement. I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large proportion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex, that the domestic emotions have throbbed in Wessex nooks with as much intensity as in the palaces of Europe, and that, anyhow, there was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose. So far was I possessed by this idea that I kept within the frontiers when it would have been easier to overlap them and give more cosmopolitan features to the narrative.

Thus, though the people in most of the novels (and in much of the shorter verse) are dwellers in a province bounded on the north by the Thames, on the south by the English Channel, on the east by a line running from Hayling Island to Windsor Forest, and on the west by the Cornish coast, they were meant to be typically and essentially those of any and every place where

Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool

– beings in whose hearts and minds that which is apparently local should be really universal.

But whatever the success of this intention, and the value of these novels as delineations of humanity, they have at least a humble supplementary quality of which I may be justified in reminding the reader, though it is one that was quite unintentional and unforeseen. At the dates represented in the various narrations things were like that in Wessex: the inhabitants lived in certain ways, engaged in certain occupations, kept alive certain customs, just as they are shown doing in these pages. And in particularizing such I have often been reminded of Boswell’s remarks on the trouble to which he was put and the pilgrimages he was obliged to make to authenticate some detail, though the labour was one which would bring him no praise. Unlike his achievement, however, on which an error would as he says have brought discredit, if these country customs and vocations, obsolete and obsolescent, had been detailed wrongly, nobody would have discovered such errors to the end of Time. Yet I have instituted inquiries to correct tricks of memory, and striven against temptations to exaggerate, in order to preserve for my own satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing life.

It is advisable also to state here, in response to inquiries from readers interested in landscape, prehistoric antiquities, and especially old English architecture, that the description of these backgrounds has been done from the real – that is to say, has something real for its basis, however illusively treated. Many features of the first two kinds have been given under their existing names; for instance, the Vale of Blackmoor or Blakemore, Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury Hill, High-Stoy, Bubb-Down Hill, The Devil’s Kitchen, Cross-in-Hand, Long-Ash Lane, Benvill Lane, Giant’s Hill, Crimmercrock Lane, and Stonehenge. The rivers Froom, or Frome, and Stour, are, of course, well known as such. And the further idea was that large towns and points tending to mark the outline of Wessex – such as Bath, Plymouth, The Start, Portland Bill, Southampton, etc. – should be named clearly. The scheme was not greatly elaborated, but, whatever its value, the names remain still.

In respect of places described under fictitious or ancient names in the novels – for reasons that seemed good at the time of writing them – and kept up in the poems – discerning people have affirmed in print that they clearly recognize the originals: such as Shaftesbury in ‘Shaston’, Sturminster Newton in ‘Stourcastle’, Dorchester in ‘Casterbridge’, Salisbury Plain in ‘The Great Plain’, Cranborne Chase in ‘The Chase’, Beaminster in ‘Emminster’, Bere Regis in ‘Kingsbere’, Woodbury Hill in ‘Greenhill’, Wool Bridge in ‘Wellbridge’, Harfoot or Harput Lane in ‘Stagfoot Lane’, Hazlebury in ‘Nuttlebury’, Bridport in ‘Port Bredy’, Maiden Newton in ‘Chalk Newton’, a farm near Nettlecombe Tout in ‘Flintcombe Ash’, Sherborne in ‘Sherton Abbas’, Milton Abbey in ‘Middleton Abbey’, Cerne Abbas in ‘Abbot’s Cernel’, Evershot in ‘Evershed’, Taunton in ‘Toneborough’, Bournemouth in ‘Sandbourne’, Winchester in ‘Wintoncester’, Oxford in ‘Christminster’, Reading in ‘Aldbrickham’, Newbury in ‘Kennetbridge’, Wantage in ‘Alfredston’, Basingstoke in ‘Stoke Barehills’, and so on. Subject to the qualifications above given, that no detail is guaranteed – that the portraiture of fictitiously named towns and villages was only suggested by certain real places, and wantonly wanders from inventorial descriptions of them – I do not contradict these keen hunters for the real; I am satisfied with their statements as at least an indication of their interest in the scenes.

Thus much for the novels. Turning now to the verse – to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage – I would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer’s freedom in respect of its form or content. Several of the poems – indeed many – were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published. The limited stage to which the majority of the latter confine their exhibitions has not been adhered to here in the same proportion, the dramatic part especially have a very broad theatre of action. It may thus relieve the circumscribed areas treated in the prose, if such relief be needed. To be sure, one might argue that by surveying Europe from a celestial point of vision – as in The Dynasts – that continent becomes virtually a province – a Wessex, an Attica, even a mere garden – and hence is made to conform to the principle of the novels, however far it outmeasures their region. But that may be as it will.

The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.

One word on what has been called the present writer’s philoso -phy of life, as exhibited more particularly in this metrical section of his compositions. Positive views on the Whence and the Wherefore of things have never been advanced by this pen as a consistent phil-o sophy. Nor is it likely, indeed, that imaginative writings extending over more than forty years would exhibit a coherent scientific theory of the universe even if it had been attempted – of that universe concerning which Spencer owns to the ‘paralyzing thought’ that possibly there exists no comprehension of it anywhere. But such objectless consistency never has been attempted, and the sentiments in the following pages have been stated truly to be mere impress ions of the moment, and not convictions or arguments.

That these impressions have been condemned as ‘pessimistic’ – as if that were a very wicked adjective – shows a curious muddle-mindedness. It must be obvious that there is a higher characteristic of philosophy than pessimism, or than meliorism, or even than the optimism of these critics – which is truth. Existence is either ordered in a certain way, or it is not so ordered, and conjectures which harmonize best with experience are removed above all comparison with other conjectures which do not so harmonize. So that to say one view is worse than other views without proving it erroneous implies the possibility of a false view being better or more expedient than a true view; and no pragmatic proppings can make that idolum specus stand on its feet, for it postulates a prescience denied to humanity.

And there is another consideration. Differing natures find their tongue in the presence of differing spectacles. Some natures become vocal at tragedy, some are made vocal by comedy, and it seems to me that to whichever of these aspects of life a writer’s instinct for expression the more readily responds, to that he should allow it to respond. That before a contrasting side of things he remains undemonstrative need not be assumed to mean that he remains unperceiving.

It was my hope to add to these volumes of verse as many more as would make a fairly comprehensive cycle of the whole. I had wished that those in dramatic, ballad, and narrative form should include most of the cardinal situations which occur in social and public life, and those in lyric form a round of emotional experiences of some completeness.

But The petty done, the undone vast!

The more written the more seems to remain to be written; and the night cometh. I realize that these hopes and plans, except possibly to the extent of a volume or two, must remain unfulfilled.

T.H.

October 1911

Chapter 1

Description of Farmer Oak – An incident

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgement, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section – that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

Since he lived six times as many working days as Sundays, Oak’s appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own – the mental picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always dressed in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like Dr Johnson’s; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp – their maker being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity.

Mr Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older than Oak’s grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours’ windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced time-keepers within. It may be mentioned that Oak’s fob being difficult of access, by reason of its somewhat high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which also lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was as a necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side, compressing the mouth and face to a mere mass of ruddy flesh on account of the exertion, and drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a well.

But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across one of his fields on a certain December morning – sunny and exceedingly mild – might have regarded Gabriel Oak in other aspects than these. In his face one might notice that many of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on to manhood: there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient to make his presence imposing, had they been exhibited with due consideration. But there is a way some men have, rural and urban alike, for which the mind is more responsible than flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing their dimensions by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak walked unassumingly, and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an individual if he depends for his valuation more upon his appearance than upon his capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.

He had just reached the time of life at which ‘young’ is ceasing to be the prefix of ‘man’ in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family. In short, he was twenty-eight, and a bachelor.

The field he was in this morning sloped to a ridge called Norcombe Hill. Through a spur of this hill ran the highway between Emminster and Chalk-Newton. Casually glancing over the hedge, Oak saw coming down the incline before him an ornamental spring waggon, painted yellow and gaily marked, drawn by two horses, a waggoner walking alongside bearing a whip perpendicularly. The waggon was laden with household goods and window plants, and on the apex of the whole sat a woman, young and attractive. Gabriel had not beheld the sight for more than half a minute, when the vehicle was brought to a standstill just beneath his eyes.

‘The tailboard of the waggon is gone, Miss,’ said the waggoner.

‘Then I heard it fall,’ said the girl, in a soft, though not particularly low voice. ‘I heard a noise I could not account for when we were coming up the hill.’

‘I’ll run back.’

‘Do,’ she answered.

The sensible horses stood perfectly still, and the waggoner’s steps sank fainter and fainter in the distance.

The girl on the summit of the load sat motionless, surrounded by tables and chairs with their legs upwards, backed by an oak settle, and ornamented in front by pots of geraniums, myrtles and cactuses, together with a caged canary – all probably from the windows of the house just vacated. There was also a cat in a willow basket, from the partly-opened lid of which she gazed with half-closed eyes, and affectionately surveyed the small birds around.

The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place, and the only sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of the canary up and down the perches of its prison. Then she looked attentively downwards. It was not at the bird, nor at the cat; it was at an oblong package tied in paper, and lying between them. She turned her head to learn if the waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight; and her eyes crept back to the package, her thoughts seeming to run upon what was inside it. At length she drew the article into her lap, and untied the paper covering; a small swing looking-glass was disclosed, in which she proceeded to survey herself attentively. She parted her lips and smiled.

It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived farmer who were alone its spectators – whether the smile began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art – nobody knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more.

The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of such an act – from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time of travelling out of doors – lent to the idle deed a novelty it did not intrinsically possess. The picture was a delicate one. Woman’s prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the freshness of an originality. A cynical inference was irresistible by Gabriel Oak as he regarded the scene, generous though he fain would have been. There was no necessity whatever for her looking in the glass. She did not adjust her hat, or pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one thing to signify that any such intention had been her motive in taking up the glass. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part – vistas of probable triumphs – the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won. Still, this was but conjecture, and the whole series of actions was so idly put forth as to make it rash to assert that intention had any part in them at all.

The waggoner’s steps were heard returning. She put the glass in the paper, and the whole again into its place.

When the waggon had passed on, Gabriel withdrew from his point of espial, and descending into the road, followed the vehicle to the turnpike-gate some way beyond the bottom of the hill, where the object of his contemplation now halted for the payment of toll. About twenty steps still remained between him and the gate, when he heard a dispute. It was a difference concerning twopence between the persons with the waggon and the man at the toll-bar.

‘Mis’ess’s niece is upon the top of the things, and she says that’s enough that I’ve offered ye, you great miser, and she won’t pay any more.’ These were the waggoner’s words.

‘Very well; then mis’ess’s niece can’t pass,’ said the turnpike-keeper, closing the gate.

Oak looked from one to the other of the disputants, and fell into a reverie. There was something in the tone of twopence remarkably insignificant. Threepence had a definite value as money – it was an appreciable infringement on a day’s wages, and, as such, a higgling matter: but twopence – ‘Here,’ he said, stepping forward and handing twopence to the gatekeeper; ‘let the young woman pass.’ He looked up at her then; she heard his words, and looked down.

Gabriel’s features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the middle line between the beauty of St John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of distinction or notoriety. The red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden seemed to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and told her man to drive on. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them; more probably she felt none, for in gaining her a passage he had lost her her point, and we know how women take a favour of that kind.

The gatekeeper surveyed the retreating vehicle. ‘That’s a handsome maid,’ he said to Oak.

‘But she has her faults,’ said Gabriel.

‘True, farmer.’

‘And the greatest of them is – well, what it is always.’

‘Beating people down? ay, ’tis so.’

‘O no.’

‘What, then?’

Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller’s indifference, glanced to where he had witnessed her performance over the hedge, and said, ‘Vanity.’

Chapter 2

Night – The flock – Interiors

It was nearly midnight on the eve of St Thomas’s, the shortest day in the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier.

Norcombe Hill – not far from lonely Toller-Down – was one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil – an ordinary specimen of those smoothly-outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.

The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very mid-winter-time on the twigs which bore them, and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.

Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless shade – the sounds from which suggested that what it concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures – one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive act of human-kind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more.

The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the wind’s eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle with the meridian. A difference of colour in the stars – oftener read of than seen in England – was really perceptible here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak’s flute.

The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to spread high or wide. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the plantation hedge – a shepherd’s hut – now presenting an outline to which an uninitiated person might have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use.

The image as a whole was that of a small Noah’s Ark on a small Ararat, allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of the Ark which are followed by toy-makers – and by these means are established in men’s imaginations among their firmest, because earliest impressions – to pass as an approximate pattern. The hut stood on little wheels, which raised its floor about a foot from the ground. Such shepherds’ huts are dragged into the fields when the lambing season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced nightly attendance.

It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel ‘Farmer’ Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled by sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease the small sheep-farm of which Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock it with two hundred sheep. Previously he had been a bailiff for a short time, and earlier still a shepherd only, having from his childhood assisted his father in tending the flocks of large proprietors, till old Gabriel sank to rest.

This venture, unaided and alone, into the paths of farming as master and not as man, with an advance of sheep not yet paid for, was a critical juncture with Gabriel Oak, and he recognized his position clearly. The first movement in his new progress was the lambing of his ewes, and sheep having been his speciality from his youth, he wisely refrained from deputing the task of tending them at this season to a hireling or a novice.

The wind continued to beat about the corners of the hut, but the flute-playing ceased. A rectangular space of light appeared in the side of the hut, and in the opening the outline of Farmer Oak’s figure. He carried a lantern in his hand, and closing the door behind him came forward and busied himself about this nook of the field for nearly twenty minutes, the lantern light appearing and disappearing here and there, and brightening him or darkening him as he stood before or behind it.

Oak’s motions, though they had a quiet energy, were slow, and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. Yet, although if occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a dash as can the men of towns who are more to the manner born, his special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static, owing little or nothing to momentum as a rule.

A close examination of the ground hereabout, even by the wan starlight only, revealed how a portion of what would have been casually called a wild slope had been appropriated by Farmer Oak for his great purpose this winter. Detached hurdles thatched with straw were struck into the ground at various scattered points, amid and under which the whitish forms of his meek ewes moved and rustled. The ring of the sheep-bell, which had been silent during his absence, recommenced, in tones that had more mellowness than clearness, owing to an increasing growth of surrounding wool. This continued till Oak withdrew again from the flock. He returned to the hut, bringing in his arms a new-born lamb, consisting of four legs large enough for a full-grown sheep, united by a seemingly inconsiderable membrane about half the substance of the legs collectively, which constituted the animal’s entire body just at present.

The little speck of life he placed on a wisp of hay before the small stove, where a can of milk was simmering. Oak extinguished the lantern by blowing into it and then pinching the snuff, the cot being lighted by a candle suspended by a twisted wire. A rather hard couch, formed of a few corn sacks thrown carelessly down, covered half the floor of this little habitation, and here the young man stretched himself along, loosened his woollen cravat, and closed his eyes. In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep.

The inside of the hut, as it now presented itself, was cosy and alluring, and the scarlet handful of fire in addition to the candle, reflecting its own genial colour upon whatever it could reach, flung associations of enjoyment even over utensils and tools. In the corner stood the sheep-crook, and along a shelf at one side were ranged bottles and canisters of the simple preparations pertaining to ovine surgery and physic; spirits of wine, turpentine, tar, magnesia, ginger, and castor-oil being the chief. On a triangular shelf across the corner stood bread, bacon, cheese, and a cup for ale or cider, which was supplied from a flagon beneath. Beside the provisions lay the flute, whose notes had lately been called forth by the lonely watcher to beguile a tedious hour. The house was ventilated by two round holes, like the lights of a ship’s cabin, with wood slides.

The lamb, revived by the warmth, began to bleat, and the sound entered Gabriel’s ears and brain with an instant meaning, as expected sounds will. Passing from the profoundest sleep to the most alert wakefulness with the same ease that had accompanied the reverse operation, he looked at his watch, found that the hour-hand had shifted again, put on his hat, took the lamb in his arms, and carried it into the darkness. After placing the little creature with its mother he stood and carefully examined the sky, to ascertain the time of night from the altitude of the stars.

The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia’s chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs.

‘One o’clock,’ said Gabriel.

Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.

Occupied thus, with eyes stretched afar, Oak gradually perceived that what he had previously taken to be a star low down behind the outskirts of the plantation was in reality no such thing. It was an artificial light, almost close at hand.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction – every kind of evidence in the logician’s list – have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

Farmer Oak went towards the plantation and pushed through its lower boughs to the windy side. A dim mass under the slope reminded him that a shed occupied a place here, the site being a cutting into the slope of the hill, so that at its back part the roof was almost level with the ground. In front it was formed of board nailed to posts and covered with tar as a preservative. Through crevices in the roof and side spread streaks and dots of light, a combination of which made the radiance that had attracted him. Oak stepped up behind, where, leaning down upon the roof and putting his eye close to a hole, he could see into the interior clearly.

The place contained two women and two cows. By the side of the latter a steaming bran-mash stood in a bucket. One of the women was past middle age. Her companion was apparently young and graceful; he could form no decided opinion upon her looks, her position being almost beneath his eye, so that he saw her in a bird’seye view, as Milton’s Satan first saw Paradise. She wore no bonnet or hat, but had enveloped herself in a large cloak, which was carelessly flung over her head as a covering.

‘There, now we’ll go home,’ said the elder of the two, resting her knuckles upon her hips, and looking at their goings-on as a whole. ‘I do hope Daisy will fetch round again now. I have never been more frightened in my life, but I don’t mind breaking my rest if she recovers.’

The young woman, whose eyelids were apparently inclined to fall together on the smallest provocation of silence, yawned without parting her lips to any inconvenient extent, whereupon Gabriel caught the infection and slightly yawned in sympathy.

‘I wish we were rich enough to pay a man to do these things,’ she said.

‘As we are not, we must do them ourselves,’ said the other; ‘for you must help me if you stay.’

‘Well, my hat is gone, however,’ continued the younger. ‘It went over the hedge, I think. The idea of such a slight wind catching it.’

The cow standing erect was of the Devon breed, and was encased in a tight warm hide of rich Indian red, as absolutely uniform from eyes to tail as if the animal had been dipped in a dye of that colour, her long back being mathematically level. The other was spotted, grey and white. Beside her Oak now noticed a little calf about a day old, looking idiotically at the two women, which showed that it had not long been accustomed to the phenomenon of eyesight, and often turning to the lantern, which it apparently mistook for the moon, inherited instinct having as yet had little time for correction by experience. Between the sheep and the cows Lucina had been busy on Norcombe Hill lately.

‘I think we had better send for some oatmeal,’ said the elder woman; ‘there’s no more bran.’

‘Yes, aunt; and I’ll ride over for it as soon as it is light.’

‘But there’s no side-saddle.’

‘I can ride on the other: trust me.’

Oak, upon hearing these remarks, became more curious to observe her features, but this prospect being denied him by the hooding effect of the cloak, and by his aerial position, he felt himself drawing upon his fancy for their details. In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in. Had Gabriel been able from the first to get a distinct view of her countenance, his estimate of it as very handsome or slightly so would have been as his soul required a divinity at the moment or was ready supplied with one. Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her a beauty.

By one of those whimsical coincidences in which Nature, like a busy mother, seems to spare a moment from her unremitting labours to turn and make her children smile, the girl now dropped the cloak, and forth tumbled ropes of black hair over a red jacket. Oak knew her instantly as the heroine of the yellow waggon, myrtles, and looking-glass: prosily, as the woman who owed him twopence.

They placed the calf beside its mother again, took up the lantern, and went out, the light sinking down the hill till it was no more than a nebula. Gabriel Oak returned to his flock.

Chapter 3

A girl on horseback – Conversation

The sluggish day began to break. Even its position terrestrially is one of the elements of a new interest, and for no particular reason save that the incident of the night had occurred there Oak went again into the plantation. Lingering and musing here he heard the step of a horse at the foot of the hill, and soon there appeared in view an auburn pony with a girl on its back, ascending by the path leading past the cattle-shed. She was the young woman of the night before. Gabriel instantly thought of the hat she had mentioned as having lost in the wind; possibly she had come to look for it. He hastily scanned the ditch, and after walking about ten yards along it found the hat among the leaves. Gabriel took it in his hand and returned to his hut. Here he ensconced himself, and peeped through the loophole in the direction of the rider’s approach.

She came up and looked around – then on the other side of the hedge. Gabriel was about to advance and restore the missing article, when an unexpected performance induced him to suspend the action for the present. The path, after passing the cowshed, bisected the plantation. It was not a bridle-path – merely a pedestrian’s track, and the boughs spread horizontally at a height not greater than several feet above the ground, which made it impossible to ride erect beneath them. The girl, who wore no riding-habit, looked around for a moment, as if to assure herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky. The rapidity of her glide into this position was that of a kingfisher – its noiselessness that of a hawk. Gabriel’s eyes had scarcely been able to follow her. The tall lank pony seemed used to such doings, and ambled along unconcerned. Thus she passed under the level boughs.

The performer seemed quite at home anywhere between a horse’s head and its tail, and the necessity for this abnormal attitude having ceased with the passage of the plantation, she began to adopt another, even more obviously convenient than the first. She had no side-saddle, and it was very apparent that a firm seat upon the smooth leather beneath her was unattainable sideways. Springing to her accustomed perpendicular like a bowed sapling, and satisfying herself that nobody was in sight, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly expected of the woman, and trotted off in the direction of Tewnell Mill.

Oak was amused, perhaps a little astonished, and hanging up the hat in his hut went again among his ewes. An hour passed, the girl returned, properly seated now, with a bag of bran in front of her. On nearing the cattle-shed she was met by a boy bringing a milking-pail, who held the reins of the pony whilst she slid off. The boy led away the horse, leaving the pail with the young woman.

Soon soft spirts alternating with loud spirts came in regular succession from within the shed, the obvious sounds of a person milking a cow. Gabriel took the lost hat in his hand, and waited beside the path she would follow in leaving the hill.

She came, the pail in one hand, hanging against her knee. The left arm was extended as a balance, enough of it being shown bare to make Oak wish that the event had happened in the summer, when the whole would have been revealed. There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon the whole, true. Like exceptional emphasis in the tone of a genius, that which would have made mediocrity ridiculous was an addition to recognized power. It was with some surprise that she saw Gabriel’s face rising like the moon behind the hedge.

The adjustment of the farmer’s hazy conceptions of her charms to the portrait of herself she now presented him with was less a diminution than a difference. The starting-point selected by the judgement was her height. She seemed tall, but the pail was a small one, and the hedge diminutive; hence, making allowance for error by comparison with these, she could have been not above the height to be chosen by women as best. All features of consequence were severe and regular. It may have been observed by persons who go about the shires with eyes for beauty that in Englishwomen a classically-formed face is seldom found to be united with a figure of the same pattern, the highly-finished features being generally too large for the remainder of the frame; that a graceful and proportionate figure of eight heads usually goes off into random facial curves. Without throwing a Nymphean tissue over a milkmaid, let it be said that here criticism checked itself as out of place, and looked at her proportions with a long consciousness of pleasure. From the contours of her figure in its upper part she must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders; but since her infancy nobody had ever seen them. Had she been put into a low dress she would have run and thrust her head into a bush. Yet she was not a shy girl by any means; it was merely her instinct to draw the line dividing the seen from the unseen higher than they do it in towns.

That the girl’s thoughts hovered about her face and form as soon as she caught Oak’s eyes conning the same page was natural, and almost certain. The self-consciousness shown would have been vanity if a little more pronounced, dignity if a little less. Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; she brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been irritating its pink surface by actual touch, and the free air of her previous movements was reduced at the same time to a chastened phase of itself. Yet it was the man who blushed, the maid not at all.

‘I found a hat,’ said Oak.

‘It is mine,’ said she, and, from a sense of proportion, kept down to a small smile an inclination to laugh distinctly: ‘it flew away last night.’

‘One o’clock this morning?’

‘Well – it was.’ She was surprised. ‘How did you know?’ she said.

‘I was here.’

‘You are Farmer Oak, are you not?’

‘That or thereabouts. I’m lately come to this place.’

‘A large farm?’ she inquired, casting her eyes round, and swinging back her hair, which was black in the shaded hollows of its mass; but it being now an hour past sunrise the rays touched its prominent curves with a colour of their own.

‘No; not large. About a hundred.’ (In speaking of farms the word ‘acres’ is omitted by the natives, by analogy to such old expressions as ‘a stag of ten’.)

‘I wanted my hat this morning,’ she went on. ‘I had to ride to Tewnell Mill.’

‘Yes, you had.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw you.’

‘Where?’ she inquired, a misgiving bringing every muscle of her lineaments and frame to a standstill.

‘Here – going through the plantation, and all down the hill,’ said Farmer Oak, with an aspect excessively knowing with regard to some matter in his mind, as he gazed at a remote point in the direction named, and then turned back to meet his colloquist’s eyes.

A perception caused him to withdraw his own eyes from hers as suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft. Recollection of the strange antics she had indulged in when passing through the trees was succeeded in the girl by a nettled palpitation, and that by a hot face. It was a time to see a woman redden who was not given to reddening as a rule; not a point in the milkmaid but was of the deepest rose-colour. From the Maiden’s Blush, through all varieties of the Provence down to the Crimson Tuscany the countenance of Oak’s acquaintance quickly graduated; whereupon he, in considerateness, turned away his head.

The sympathetic man still looked the other way, and wondered when she would recover sufficient to justify him in facing her again. He heard what seemed to be the flitting of a dead leaf upon the breeze, and looked. She had gone away.

With an air between that of Tragedy and Comedy Gabriel returned to his work.

Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came regularly to milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick one, but never allowed her vision to stray in the direction of Oak’s person. His want of tact had deeply offended her – not by seeing what he could not help, but by letting her know that he had seen it. For, as without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no indecorum; and she appeared to feel that Gabriel’s espial had made her an indecorous woman without her own connivance. It was food for great regret with him; it was also a contretemps which touched into life a latent heat he had experienced in that direction.

The acquaintanceship might, however, have ended in a slow forgetting but for an incident which occurred at the end of the same week. One afternoon it began to freeze, and the frost increased with evening, which drew on like a stealthy tightening of bonds. It was a time when in cottages the breath of the sleepers freezes to the sheets; when round the drawing-room fire of a thick-walled mansion the sitters’ backs are cold, even whilst their faces are all aglow. Many a small bird went to bed supperless that night among the bare boughs.

As the milking-hour drew near Oak kept his usual watch upon the cowshed. At last he felt cold, and shaking an extra quantity of bedding round the yeaning ewes he entered the hut and heaped more fuel upon the stove. The wind came in at the bottom of the door, and to prevent it Oak laid a sack there and wheeled the cot round a little more to the south. Then the wind spouted in at a ventilating hole – of which there was one on each side of the hut.

Gabriel had always known that when the fire was lighted and the door closed one of these must be kept open – that chosen being always on the side away from the wind. Closing the slide to wind-ward he turned to open the other; on second thoughts the farmer considered that he would first sit down, leaving both closed for a minute or two, till the temperature of the hut was a little raised. He sat down.

His head began to ache in an unwonted manner and, fancying himself weary by reason of the broken rests of the preceding nights, Oak decided to get up, open the slide, and then allow himself to fall asleep. He fell asleep, however, without having performed the necessary preliminary.

How long he remained unconscious Gabriel never knew. During the first stages of his return to perception peculiar deeds seemed to be in course of enactment. His dog was howling, his head was aching fearfully – somebody was pulling him about, hands were loosening his neckerchief.

On opening his eyes he found that evening had sunk to dusk in a strange manner of unexpectedness. The young girl with the remarkably pleasant lips and white teeth was beside him. More than this – astonishingly more – his head was upon her lap, his face and neck were disagreeably wet, and her fingers were unbuttoning his collar.

‘Whatever is the matter?’ said Oak vacantly.

She seemed to experience mirth, but of too insignificant a kind to start enjoyment.

‘Nothing now,’ she answered, ‘since you are not dead. It is a wonder you were not suffocated in this hut of yours.’

‘Ah, the hut!’ murmured Gabriel. ‘I gave ten pounds for that hut. But I’ll sell it, and sit under thatched hurdles as they did in old times, and curl up to sleep in a lock of straw! It played me nearly the same trick the other day!’ Gabriel, by way of emphasis, brought down his fist upon the floor.

‘It was not exactly the fault of the hut,’ she observed in a tone which showed her to be that novelty among women – one who finished a thought before beginning the sentence which was to convey it. ‘You should, I think, have considered, and not have been so foolish as to leave the slides closed.’

‘Yes, I suppose I should,’ said Oak absently. He was endeavouring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her, his head upon her dress, before the event passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

She made him sit up, and then Oak began wiping his face and shaking himself like a Samson. ‘How can I thank ’ee?’ he said at last gratefully, some of the natural, rusty red having returned to his face.

‘Oh, never mind that,’ said the girl, smiling, and allowing her smile to hold good for Gabriel’s next remark, whatever that might prove to be.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the hut when I came to the milking (it was so lucky, Daisy’s milking is almost over for the season, and I shall not come here after this week or the next). The dog saw me, and jumped over to me, and laid hold of my skirt. I came across and looked round the hut the very first thing to see if the slides were closed. My uncle has a hut like this one, and I have heard him tell his shepherd not to go to sleep without leaving a slide open. I opened the door, and there you were like dead. I threw the milk over you, as there was no water, forgetting it was warm, and no use.’

‘I wonder if I should have died?’ Gabriel said in a low voice, which was rather meant to travel back to himself than to her.

‘O no!’ the girl replied. She seemed to prefer a less tragic probability; to have saved a man from death involved talk that should harmonize with the dignity of such a deed – and she shunned it.

‘I believe you saved my life, Miss – I don’t know your name. I know your aunt’s, but not yours.’

‘I would just as soon not tell it – rather not. There is no reason either why I should, as you probably will never have much to do with me.’

‘Still I should like to know.’

‘You can inquire at my aunt’s – she will tell you.’

‘My name is Gabriel Oak.’

‘And mine isn’t. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so decisively, Gabriel Oak.’

‘You see, it is the only one I shall ever have, and I must make the most of it.’

‘I always think mine sounds odd and disagreeable.’

‘I should think you might soon get a new one.’

‘Mercy! – how many opinions you keep about you concerning other people, Gabriel Oak.’

‘Well, Miss – excuse the words – I thought you would like them. But I can’t match you, I know, in mapping out my mind upon my tongue. I never was very clever in my inside. But I thank you. Come, give me your hand!’

She hesitated, somewhat disconcerted at Oak’s old-fashioned earnest conclusion to a dialogue lightly carried on. ‘Very well,’ she said, and gave him her hand, compressing her lips to a demure impassivity. He held it but an instant, and in his fear of being too demonstrative, swerved to the opposite extreme, touching her fingers with the lightness of a small-hearted person.

‘I am sorry,’ he said the instant after.

‘What for?’

‘Letting your hand go so quick.’

‘You may have it again if you like; there it is.’ She gave him her hand again.

Oak held it longer this time – indeed, curiously long. ‘How soft it is – being winter-time, too – not chapped or rough, or anything!’ he said.

‘There – that’s long enough,’ said she, though without pulling it away. ‘But I suppose you are thinking you would like to kiss it? You may if you want to.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of any such thing,’ said Gabriel simply; ‘but I will –’

‘That you won’t!’ She snatched back her hand.

Gabriel felt himself guilty of another want of tact.

‘Now find out my name,’ she said teasingly; and withdrew.

Chapter 4

Gabriel’s resolve – The visit – The mistake

The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man.

This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.

Love being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak’s feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances. His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog. However, he continued to watch through the hedge for her regular coming, and thus his sentiments towards her were deepened without any corresponding effect being produced upon herself. Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales –

– Full of sound and fury

– Signifying nothing –

he said no word at all.

By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.

At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for that year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying ‘Bathsheba’ as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of im becility it supplants. Oak began now to see light in this direction, and said to himself, ‘I’ll make her my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!’

All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.

He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution – a fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs Hurst, the aunt – George, the dog, walking behind, with a countenance of great concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.

Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the chimney to the spot of its origin – seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside it – beside it in her outdoor dress; for the clothes she had worn on the hill were by association equally with her person included in the compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene.

He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind – of a nature between the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate – of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots, looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box, put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a boulder after the ebb.

Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to be no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for, as the rather untoward commencement of Oak’s overtures, just as he arrived by the garden gate he saw a cat inside, going into various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George. The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath – in fact, he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of Commination-service which, though offensive, had to be gone through once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.

A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had run:

‘Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it; – did he, poor dear!’

‘I beg yer pardon,’ said Oak to the voice, ‘but George was walking on behind me with a temper as mild as milk.’

Almost before he had ceased speaking Oak was seized with a misgiving as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and he heard the person retreat among the bushes.

Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal and the reality had had no common grounds of opening.

Bathsheba’s aunt was indoors. ‘Will you tell Miss Everdene that somebody would be glad to speak to her?’ said Mr Oak. (Calling one’s self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken as an example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs from a refined modesty of which townspeople, with their cards and announcements, have no notion whatever.)

Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.

‘Will you come in, Mr Oak?’

‘Oh, thank ’ee,’ said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. ‘I’ve brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear; girls do.’

‘She might,’ said Mrs Hurst musingly; ‘though she’s only a visitor here. If you will wait a minute Bathsheba will be in.’

‘Yes, I will wait,’ said Gabriel, sitting down. ‘The lamb isn’t really the business I came about, Mrs Hurst. In short, I was going to ask her if she’d like to be married.’

‘And were you indeed?’

‘Yes. Because if she would I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?’

‘Let me think,’ said Mrs Hurst, poking the fire superfluously . . . ‘Yes – bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides – she was going to be a governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men ever come here – but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a dozen!’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the stone floor with sorrow. ‘I’m only an every-day sort of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer . . . Well, there’s no use in my waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off home-along, Mrs Hurst.’

When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard a ‘hoi-hoi!’ uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after him, waving a white handkerchief.

Oak stood still – and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared, from emotion, but from running.

‘Farmer Oak – I –’ she said, pausing for want of breath, pulling up in front of him with a slanted face, and putting her hand to her side.

‘I have just called to see you,’ said Gabriel pending her further speech.

‘Yes – I know that,’ she said, panting like a robin, her face red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew. ‘I didn’t know you had come to ask to have me, or I should 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 judgement 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 evening.’

‘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’ve 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.’

‘O 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 naively 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 you 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’ve heard, 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 5

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 neigh-bourhood. 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 flock when the other should die, but had got no further than the rudiments as yet – still finding an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well. So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any pleasant interjection) that if sent behind the flock to help them on he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off, or reminded when to stop by the example of old George.

Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form of a V, but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.

One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he called as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the outhouse till next morning. Only one responded – old George; the other could not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden. Gabriel then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from them, except when other food ran short), and concluding that the young one had not finished his meal he went indoors to the luxury of a bed, which latterly he had only enjoyed on Sundays.

It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was assisted in waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music. To the shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle tinkle which signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that all is well in the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways – by the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two hundred of the latter class in Gabriel’s flock. These two hundred seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere. Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd’s call:

‘Ovey, ovey, ovey!’

Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were not in the plantation. He called again: the valleys and furthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed through the trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the extreme summit, where the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing against the sky – dark and motionless as Napoleon at St Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through, and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward for signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes lay dead and dying at its foot – a heap of two hundred mangled carcases, representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton – that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenceless sheep. His first feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their unborn lambs.

It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low – possibly for ever. Gabriel’s energies, patience, and industry had been so severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress, that no more seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a rail, and covered his face with his hands.

Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from his. It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one sentence he uttered was in thankfulness: –

‘Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in the poverty now coming upon me!’

Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, list-lessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon, which had only a few days to last – the morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered.

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day – another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Gabriel’s farm had been stocked by a dealer – on the strength of Oak’s promising look and character – who was receiving a percentage from the farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a free man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.

Chapter 6

The fair – The journey – The fire

Two months passed away. We are brought on to a day in February, on which was held the yearly statute or hiring fair in the county-town of Casterbridge.

At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred blithe and hearty labourers waiting upon Chance – all men of the stamp to whom labour suggests nothing worse than a wrestle with gravitation, and pleasure nothing better than a renunciation of the same. Among these, carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.

In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of somewhat superior appearance to the rest – in fact, his superiority was marked enough to lead several ruddy peasants standing by to speak to him inquiringly, as to a farmer, and to use ‘Sir’ as a finishing word. His answer always was, – ‘I am looking for a place myself – a bailiffs. Do ye know of anybody who wants one?’

Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.

In the morning a regiment of cavalry had left the town, and a sergeant and his party had been beating up for recruits through the four streets. As the end of the day drew on, and he found himself not hired, Gabriel almost wished that he had joined them, and gone off to serve his country. Weary of standing in the market-place, and not much minding the kind of work he turned his hand to, he decided to offer himself in some other capacity than that of bailiff.

All the farmers seemed to be wanting shepherds. Sheep-tending was Gabriel’s speciality. Turning down an obscure street and entering an obscurer lane, he went up to a smith’s shop.

‘How long would it take you to make a shepherd’s crook?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘How much?’

‘Two shillings.’

He sat on a bench and the crook was made, a stem being given him into the bargain.

He then went to a ready-made clothes shop, the owner of which had a large rural connection. As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel’s money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat for a shepherd’s regulation smock-frock.

This transaction having been completed he again hurried off to the centre of the town, and stood on the kerb of the pavement, as a shepherd, crook in hand.

Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd it seemed that bailiffs were most in demand. However, two or three farmers noticed him and drew near. Dialogues followed, more or less in the subjoined form: –

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Norcombe.’

‘That’s a long way.’

‘Fifteen miles.’

‘Whose farm were you on last?’

‘My own.’

This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera. The inquiring farmer would edge away and shake his head dubiously. Gabriel, like his dog, was too good to be trustworthy, and he never made advance beyond this point.

It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it. Gabriel wished he had not nailed up his colours as a shepherd, but had laid himself out for anything in the whole cycle of labour that was required in the fair. It grew dusk. Some merry men were whistling and singing by the corn-exchange. Gabriel’s hand, which had lain for some time idle in his smock-frock pocket, touched his flute, which he carried there. Here was an opportunity for putting his dearly bought wisdom into practice.

He drew out his flute and began to play ‘Jockey to the Fair’ in the style of a man who had never known a moment’s sorrow. Oak could pipe with Arcadian sweetness, and the sound of the well-known notes cheered his own heart as well as those of the loungers. He played on with spirit, and in half an hour had earned in pence what was a small fortune to a destitute man.

By making inquiries he learnt that there was another fair at Shottsford the next day.

‘How far is Shottsford?’

‘Ten miles t’other side of Weatherbury.’

Weatherbury! It was where Bathsheba had gone two months before. This information was like coming from night into noon.

‘How far is it to Weatherbury?’

‘Five or six miles.’

Bathsheba had probably left Weatherbury long before this time, but the place had enough interest attaching to it to lead Oak to choose Shottsford fair as his next field of inquiry, because it lay in the Weatherbury quarter. Moreover, the Weatherbury folk were by no means uninteresting intrinsically. If report spoke truly they were as hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any in the whole county. Oak resolved to sleep at Weatherbury that night on his way to Shottsford, and struck out at once into the high road which had been recommended as the direct route to the village in question.

The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little brooks, whose quivering surfaces were braided along their centres, and folded into creases at the sides; or, where the flow was more rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white froth, which rode on in undisturbed serenity. On the higher levels the dead and dry carcases of leaves tapped the ground as they bowled along helterskelter upon the shoulders of the wind, and little birds in the hedges were rustling their feathers and tucking themselves in comfortably for the night, retaining their places if Oak kept moving, but flying away if he stopped to look at them. He passed by Yalbury Wood where the game-birds were rising to their roosts, and heard the crack-voiced cock-pheasants’ ‘cu-uck, cuck’, and the wheezy whistle of the hens.

By the time he had walked three or four miles every shape in the landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness. He descended Yalbury Hill and could just discern ahead of him a waggon, drawn up under a great over-hanging tree by the roadside.

On coming close, he found there were no horses attached to it, the spot being apparently quite deserted. The waggon, from its position, seemed to have been left there for the night, for beyond about half a truss of hay which was heaped in the bottom, it was quite empty. Gabriel sat down on the shafts of the vehicle and considered his position. He calculated that he had walked a very fair proportion of the journey; and having been on foot since daybreak, he felt tempted to lie down upon the hay in the waggon instead of pushing on to the village of Weatherbury, and having to pay for a lodging.

Eating his last slices of bread and ham, and drinking from the bottle of cider he had taken the precaution to bring with him, he got into the lonely waggon. Here he spread half of the hay as a bed, and, as well as he could in the darkness, pulled the other half over him by way of bed-clothes, covering himself entirely, and feeling, physically, as comfortable as ever he had been in his life. Inward melancholy it was impossible for a man like Oak, introspective far beyond his neighbours, to banish quite, whilst conning the present untoward page of his history. So, thinking of his misfortunes, amorous and pastoral, he fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common with sailors, the privilege of being able to summon the god instead of having to wait for him.

On somewhat suddenly awaking, after a sleep of whose length he had no idea, Oak found that the waggon was in motion. He was being carried along the road at a rate rather considerable for a vehicle without springs, and under circumstances of physical uneasiness, his head being dandled up and down on the bed of the waggon like a kettledrum-stick. He then distinguished voices in conversation, coming from the forepart of the waggon. His concern at this dilemma (which would have been alarm, had he been a thriving man; but misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror) led him to peer cautiously from the hay, and the first sight he beheld was the stars above him. Charles’s Wain was getting towards a right angle with the Pole star, and Gabriel concluded that it must be about nine o’clock – in other words, that he had slept two hours. This small astronomical calculation was made without any positive effort, and whilst he was stealthily turning to discover, if possible, into whose hands he had fallen.

Two figures were dimly visible in front, sitting with their legs outside the waggon, one of whom was driving. Gabriel soon found that this was the waggoner, and it appeared they had come from Casterbridge fair, like himself.

A conversation was in progress, which continued thus: –

‘Be as ’twill, she’s a fine handsome body as far’s looks be concerned. But that’s only the skin of the woman, and these dandy cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides.’

‘Ay – so ’a do seem, Billy Smallbury – so ’a do seem.’ This utterance was very shaky by nature, and more so by circumstance, the jolting of the waggon not being without its effect upon the speaker’s larynx. It came from the man who held the reins.

‘She’s a very vain feymell – so ’tis said here and there.’

‘Ah, now. If so be ’tis like that, I can’t look her in the face. Lord, no: not I – heh-heh-heh! Such a shy man as I be!’

‘Yes – she’s very vain. ’Tis said that every night at going to bed she looks in the glass to put on her nightcap properly.’

‘And not a married woman. Oh, the world!’

‘And ’a can play the peanner, so ’tis said. Can play so clever that ’a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the merriest loose song a man can wish for.’

‘D’ye tell o’t! A happy time for us, and I feel quite a new man! And how do she pay?’

‘That I don’t know, Master Poorgrass.’

On hearing these and other similar remarks, a wild thought flashed into Gabriel’s mind that they might be speaking of Bathsheba. There were, however, no grounds for retaining such a supposition, for the waggon, though going in the direction of Weatherbury, might be going beyond it, and the woman alluded to seemed to be the mistress of some estate. They were now apparently close upon Weatherbury, and not to alarm the speakers unnecessarily Gabriel slipped out of the waggon unseen.

He turned to an opening in the hedge, which he found to be a gate, and mounting thereon he sat meditating whether to seek a cheap lodging in the village, or to ensure a cheaper one by lying under some hay or corn stack. The crunching jangle of the waggon died upon his ear. He was about to walk on, when he noticed on his left hand an unusual light – appearing about half a mile distant. Oak watched it, and the glow increased. Something was on fire.

Gabriel again mounted the gate, and, leaping down on the other side upon what he found to be ploughed soil, made across the field in the exact direction of the fire. The blaze, enlarging in a double ratio by his approach and its own increase, showed him as he drew nearer the outlines of ricks beside it, lighted up to great distinctness. A rick-yard was the source of the fire. His weary face now began to be painted over with a rich orange glow, and the whole front of his smock-front and gaiters was covered with a dancing shadow pattern of thorn-twigs – the light reaching him through a leafless intervening hedge – and the metallic curve of his sheep-crook shone silver-bright in the same abounding rays. He came up to the boundary fence, and stood to regain breath. It seemed as if the spot was unoccupied by a living soul.

The fire was issuing from a long straw-stack, which was so far gone as to preclude a possibility of saving it. A rick burns differently from a house. As the wind blows the fire inwards, the portion in flames completely disappears like melting sugar, and the outline is lost to the eye. However, a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together, will resist combustion for a length of time if it begins on the outside.

This before Gabriel’s eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together, and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness. It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity like the coal of a cigar. Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down with a whisking noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters like birds from a nest.

Oak suddenly ceased from being a mere spectator by discovering the case to be more serious than he had at first imagined. A scroll of smoke blew aside and revealed to him a wheat-rick in startling juxtaposition with the decaying one, and behind this a series of others, composing the main corn produce of the farm; so that instead of the straw-stack standing, as he had imagined, comparatively isolated, there was a regular connection between it and the remaining stacks of the group.

Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone. The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could never drag on fast enough.

‘O, man – fire, fire! A good master and a bad servant is fire, fire! – I mane a bad servant and a good master. O Mark Clark – come! And you, Billy Smallbury – and you, Maryann Money – and you, Jan Coggan, and Matthew there!’ Other figures now appeared behind this shouting man and among the smoke, and Gabriel found that, far from being alone, he was in a great company – whose shadows danced merrily up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and not at all by their owners’ movements. The assemblage – belonging to that class of society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its feelings into the form of commotion – set to work with a remarkable confusion of purpose.

‘Stop the draught under the wheat-rick!’ cried Gabriel to those nearest to him. The corn stood on stone staddles, and between these, tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw licked and darted playfully. If the fire once got under this stack, all would be lost.

‘Get a tarpaulin – quick!’ said Gabriel.

A rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain across the channel. The flames immediately ceased to go under the bottom of the corn-stack, and stood up vertical.

‘Stand here with a bucket of water and keep the cloth wet,’ said Gabriel again.

The flames, now driven upwards, began to attack the angles of the huge roof covering the wheat-stack.

‘A ladder,’ cried Gabriel.

‘The ladder was against the straw-rick and is burnt to a cinder,’ said a spectre-like form in the smoke.

Oak seized the cut ends of the sheaves, as if he were going to engage in the operation of ‘reed-drawing’, and digging in his feet, and occasionally sticking in the stem of his sheep-crook, he clambered up the beetling face. He at once sat astride the very apex, and began with his crook to beat off the fiery fragments which had lodged thereon, shouting to the others to get him a bough and a ladder, and some water.

Billy Smallbury – one of the men who had been on the waggon – by this time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark ascended, holding on beside Oak upon the thatch. The smoke at this corner was stifling, and Clark, a nimble fellow, having been handed a bucket of water, bathed Oak’s face and sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a long beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the other, kept sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery particles.

On the ground the groups of villagers were still occupied in doing all they could to keep down the conflagration, which was not much. They were all tinged orange, and backed up by shadows of varying pattern. Round the corner of the largest stack, out of the direct rays of the fire, stood a pony, bearing a young woman on its back. By her side was another woman, on foot. These two seemed to keep at a distance from the fire, that the horse might not become restive.

‘He’s a shepherd,’ said the woman on foot. ‘Yes – he is. See how his crook shines as he beats the rick with it. And his smock-frock is burnt in two holes, I declare! A fine young shepherd he is too, ma’am.’

‘Whose shepherd is he?’ said the equestrian in a clear voice.

‘Don’t know, ma’am.’

‘Don’t any of the others know?’

‘Nobody at all – I’ve asked ’em. Quite a stranger, they say.’

The young woman on the pony rode out from the shade and looked anxiously around.

‘Do you think the barn is safe?’ she said.

‘D’ye think the barn is safe, Jan Coggan?’ said the second woman, passing on the question to the nearest man in that direction.

‘Safe now – leastwise I think so. If this rick had gone the barn would have followed. ’Tis that bold shepherd up there that have done the most good – he sitting on the top o’ rick, whizzing his great long arms about like a windmill.’

‘He does work hard,’ said the young woman on horseback, looking up at Gabriel through her thick woollen veil. ‘I wish he was shepherd here. Don’t any of you know his name?’

‘Never heard the man’s name in my life, or seed his form afore.’

The fire began to get worsted, and Gabriel’s elevated position being no longer required of him, he made as if to descend.

‘Maryann,’ said the girl on horseback, ‘go to him as he comes down, and say that the farmer wishes to thank him for the great service he has done.’

Maryann stalked off towards the rick and met Oak at the foot of the ladder. She delivered her message.

‘Where is your master the farmer?’ asked Gabriel, kindling with the idea of getting employment that seemed to strike him now.

‘’Tisn’t a master; ’tis a mistress, shepherd.’

‘A woman farmer?’

‘Ay, ’a b’lieve, and a rich one too!’ said a bystander. ‘Lately ’a came here from a distance. Took on her uncle’s farm, who died suddenly. Used to measure his money in half-pint cups. They say now that she’ve business in every bank in Casterbridge, and thinks no more of playing pitch-and-toss sovereign than you and I do pitch-halfpenny – not a bit in the world, shepherd.’

‘That’s she, back there upon the pony,’ said Maryann; ‘wi’ her face a-covered up in that black cloth with holes in it.’

Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and dripping with water, the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter, advanced with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the slight female form in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect, and not without gallantry: stepping close to her hanging feet he said in a hesitating voice, –

‘Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma’am?’

She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all astonishment. Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling, Bathsheba Everdene, were face to face.

Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an abashed and sad voice, –

‘Do you want a shepherd, ma’am?’

Chapter 7

Recognition – A timid girl

Bathsheba withdrew into the shade. She scarcely knew whether most to be amused at the singularity of the meeting, or to be concerned at its awkwardness. There was room for a little pity, also for a very little exultation: the former at his position, the latter at her own. Embarrassed she was not, and she remembered Gabriel’s declaration of love to her at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.

‘Yes,’ she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and turning again to him with a little warmth of cheek; ‘I do want a shepherd. But –’

‘He’s the very man, ma’am,’ said one of the villagers, quietly. Conviction breeds conviction. ‘Ay, that ’a is,’ said a second, decisively.

‘The man, truly!’ said a third, with heartiness.

‘He’s all there!’ said number four, fervidly.

‘Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff?’ said Bathsheba.

All was practical again now. A summer eve and loneliness would have been necessary to give the meeting its proper fulness of romance.

The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the palpitation within his breast at discovering that this Ashtoreth of strange report was only a modification of Venus the well-known and admired, retired with him to talk over the necessary preliminaries of hiring.

The fire before them wasted away. ‘Men,’ said Bathsheba, ‘you shall take a little refreshment after this extra work. Will you come to the house?’

‘We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, Miss, if so be ye’d send it to Warren’s Malthouse,’ replied the spokesman.

Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men straggled on to the village in twos and threes – Oak and the bailiff being left by the rick alone.

‘And now,’ said the bailiff, finally, ‘all is settled, I think, about your coming, and I am going home-along. Good-night to ye, shepherd.’

‘Can you get me a lodging?’ inquired Gabriel.

‘That I can’t, indeed,’ he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute. ‘If you follow on the road till you come to Warren’s Malthouse, where they are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I daresay some of ’em will tell you of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd.’

The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his neigh-bour as himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still astonished at the encounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

Obliged to some extent to forgo dreaming in order to find the way, he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where several ancient trees grew. There was a wide margin of grass along here, and Gabriel’s footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at this indurating period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure was standing behind it. Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone. The noise was enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed a careless position.

It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.

‘Good-night to you,’ said Gabriel heartily.

‘Good-night,’ said the girl to Gabriel.

The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and dulcet note suggestive of romance; common in descriptions, rare in experience.

‘I’ll thank you to tell me if I’m in the way for Warren’s Malthouse?’ Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the information, indirectly to get more of the music.

‘Quite right. It’s at the bottom of the hill. And do you know –’ The girl hesitated and then went on again. ‘Do you know how late they keep open the Buck’s Head Inn?’ She seemed to be won by Gabriel’s heartiness, as Gabriel had been won by her modulations.

‘I don’t know where the Buck’s Head is, or anything about it. Do you think of going there to-night?’

‘Yes –’ The woman again paused. There was no necessity for any continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add more seemed to proceed from an unconscious desire to show unconcern by making a remark, which is noticeable in the ingenuous when they are acting by stealth. ‘You are not a Weatherbury man?’ she said timorously.

‘I am not. I am the new shepherd – just arrived.’

‘Only a shepherd – and you seem almost a farmer by your ways.’

‘Only a shepherd,’ Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of finality. His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes to the feet of the girl; and for the first time he saw lying there a bundle of some sort. She may have perceived the direction of his face, for she said coaxingly, –

‘You won’t say anything in the parish about having seen me here, will you – at least, not for a day or two?’

‘I won’t if you wish me not to,’ said Oak.

‘Thank you, indeed,’ the other replied. ‘I am rather poor, and I don’t want people to know anything about me.’ Then she was silent and shivered.

‘You ought to have a cloak on such a cold night,’ Gabriel observed. ‘I would advise ’ee to get indoors.’

‘O no! Would you mind going on and leaving me? I thank you much for what you have told me.’

‘I will go on,’ he said; adding hesitatingly, – ‘Since you are not very well off, perhaps you would accept this trifle from me. It is only a shilling, but it is all I have to spare.’

‘Yes, I will take it,’ said the stranger gratefully.

She extended her hand; Gabriel his. In feeling for each other’s palm in the gloom before the money could be passed, a minute incident occurred which told much. Gabriel’s fingers alighted on the young woman’s wrist. It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was already too little.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But there is?’

‘No, no, no! Let your having seen me be a secret!’

‘Very well; I will. Good-night, again.’

‘Good-night.’

The young girl remained motionless by the tree, and Gabriel descended into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it was sometimes called. He fancied that he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this.

Chapter 8

The malthouse – The chat – News

Warren’s Malthouse was enclosed by an old wall inwrapped with ivy, and though not much of the exterior was visible at this hour, the character and purposes of the building were clearly enough shown by its outline upon the sky. From the walls an overhanging thatched roof sloped up to a point in the centre, upon which rose a small wooden lantern, fitted with louvre-boards on all the four sides, and from these openings a mist was dimly perceived to be escaping into the night air. There was no window in front; but a square hole in the door was glazed with a single pane, through which red, comfortable rays now stretched out upon the ivied wall in front. Voices were to be heard inside.

Oak’s hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers extended to an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern, till he found a leathern strap, which he pulled. This lifted a wooden latch, and the door swung open.

The room inside was lighted only by the ruddy glow from the kiln mouth, which shone over the floor with the streaming horizontality of the setting sun, and threw upwards the shadows of all facial irregularities in those assembled around. The stone-flag floor was worn into a path from the doorway to the kiln, and into undulations everywhere. A curved settle of unplaned oak stretched along one side, and in a remote corner was a small bed and bedstead, the owner and frequent occupier of which was the maltster.

This aged man was now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty white hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the grey moss and lichen upon the leafless apple-tree. He wore breeches and the laced-up shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept his eyes fixed upon the fire.

Gabriel’s nose was greeted by an atmosphere laden with the sweet smell of new malt. The conversation (which seemed to have been concerning the origin of the fire) immediately ceased, and every one ocularly criticized him to the degree expressed by contracting the flesh of their foreheads and looking at him with narrowed eyelids, as if he had been a light too strong for their sight. Several exclaimed meditatively, after this operation had been completed: –

‘Oh, ’tis the new shepherd, ’a b’lieve.’ ‘We thought we heard a hand pawing about the door for the bobbin, but weren’t sure ’twere not a dead leaf blowed across,’ said another. ‘Come in, shepherd; sure ye be welcome, though we don’t know yer name.’

‘Gabriel Oak, that’s my name, neighbours.’

The ancient maltster sitting in the midst turned at this – his turning being as the turning of a rusty crane.

‘That’s never Gable Oak’s grandson over at Norcombe – never!’ he said, as a formula expressive of surprise, which nobody was supposed to take literally.

‘My father and my grandfather were old men of the name of Gabriel,’ said the shepherd placidly.

‘Thought I knowed the man’s face as I seed him on the rick! – thought I did! And where be ye trading o’t to now, shepherd?’

‘I’m thinking of biding here,’ said Mr Oak.

‘Knowed yer grandfather for years and years!’ continued the maltster, the words coming forth of their own accord as if the momentum previously imparted had been sufficient.

‘Ah – and did you!’

‘Knowed yer grandmother.’

‘And her too!’

‘Likewise knowed yer father when he was a child. Why, my boy Jacob there and your father were sworn brothers – that they were sure – weren’t ye Jacob?’

‘Ay, sure,’ said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with a semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his upper jaw, which made much of itself by standing prominent, like a milestone in a bank. ‘But ’twas Joe had most to do with him. However, my son William must have knowed the very man afore us – didn’t ye, Billy, afore ye left Norcombe?’

‘No, ’twas Andrew,’ said Jacob’s son Billy, a child of forty, or thereabouts, who manifested the peculiarity of possessing a cheerful soul in a gloomy body, and whose whiskers were assuming a chin-chilla shade here and there.

‘I can mind Andrew,’ said Oak, ‘as being a man in the place when I was quite a child.’

‘Ay – the other day I and my youngest daughter, Liddy, were over at my grandson’s christening,’ continued Billy. ‘We were talking about this very family, and ’twas only last Purification Day in this very world, when the use-money is gied away to the second-best poor folk, you know, shepherd, and I can mind the day because they all had to traypse up to the vestry – yes, this very man’s family.’

‘Come, shepherd, and drink. ’Tis gape and swaller with us – a drap of sommit, but not of much account,’ said the maltster, removing from the fire his eyes, which were vermilion-red and bleared by gazing into it for so many years. ‘Take up the God-forgive-me, Jacob. See if ’tis warm, Jacob.’

Jacob stooped to the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled tall mug standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat: it was rather furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may not have seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation thereon – formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and about the rim. It may be observed that such a class of mug is called a God-forgive-me in Weatherbury and its vicinity for uncertain reasons; probably because its size makes any given toper feel ashamed of himself when he sees its bottom in drinking it empty.

Jacob, on receiving the order to see if the liquor was warm enough, placidly dipped his forefinger into it by way of thermometer, and having pronounced it nearly of the proper degree, raised the cup and very civilly attempted to dust some of the ashes from the bottom with the skirt of his smock-frock, because Shepherd Oak was a stranger.

‘A clane cup for the shepherd,’ said the maltster commandingly.

‘No – not at all,’ Gabriel, in a reproving tone of considerateness. ‘I never fuss about dirt in its pure state, and when I know what sort it is.’ Taking the mug he drank an inch or more from the depth of its contents, and duly passed it to the next man. ‘I wouldn’t think of giving such trouble to neighbours in washing up when there’s so much work to be done in the world already,’ continued Oak in a moister tone, after recovering from the stoppage of breath which is occasioned by pulls at large mugs.

‘A right sensible man,’ said Jacob.

‘True, true; it can’t be gainsaid!’ observed a brisk young man – Mark Clark by name, a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink with was, unfortunately, to pay for.

‘And here’s a mouthful of bread and bacon that mis’ess have sent, shepherd. The cider will go down better with a bit of victuals. Don’t ye chaw quite close, shepherd, for I let the bacon fall in the road outside as I was bringing it along, and may be ’tis rather gritty. There, ’tis clane dirt; and we all know what that is, as you say, and you bain’t a particular man we see, shepherd.’

‘True, true – not at all,’ said the friendly Oak.

‘Don’t let your teeth quite meet, and you won’t feel the sandiness at all. Ah! ’tis wonderful what can be done by contrivance!’

‘My own mind exactly, neighbour.’

‘Ah, he’s his grandfer’s own grandson! – his grandfer were just such a nice unparticular man!’ said the maltster.

‘Drink, Henry Fray – drink,’ magnanimously said Jan Coggan, a person who held Saint-Simonian notions of share and share alike where liquor was concerned, as the vessel showed signs of approaching him in its gradual revolution among them.

Having at this moment reached the end of a wistful gaze into mid-air, Henry did not refuse. He was a man of more than middle age, with eyebrows high up in his forehead, who laid it down that the law of the world was bad, with a long-suffering look through his listeners at the world alluded to, as it presented itself to his imagination. He always signed his name ‘Henery’ – strenuously insisting upon that spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark that the second ‘e’ was superfluous and old-fashioned, he received the reply that ‘H-e-n-e-r-y’ was the name he was christened and the name he would stick to – in the tone of one to whom orthographical differences were matters which had a great deal to do with personal character.

Mr Jan Coggan, who had passed the cup to Henery, was a crimson man with a spacious countenance and private glimmer in his eye, whose name had appeared on the marriage register of Weatherbury and neighbouring parishes as best man and chief witness in countless unions of the previous twenty years; he also very frequently filled the post of head godfather in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind.

‘Come, Mark Clark – come. Ther’s plenty more in the barrel,’ said Jan.

‘Ay – that I will; ’tis my only doctor,’ replied Mr Clark, who, twenty years younger than Jan Coggan, revolved in the same orbit. He secreted mirth on all occasions for special discharge at popular parties.

‘Why, Joseph Poorgrass, ye han’t had a drop!’ said Mr Coggan to a self-conscious man in the background, thrusting the cup towards him.

‘Such a modest man as he is!’ said Jacob Smallbury. ‘Why, ye’ve hardly had strength of eye enough to look in our young mis’ess’s face, so I hear, Joseph?’

All looked at Joseph Poorgrass with pitying reproach.

‘No – I’ve hardly looked at her at all,’ simpered Joseph, reducing his body smaller whilst talking, apparently from a meek sense of undue prominence. ‘And when I seed her, ’twas nothing but blushes with me!’

‘Poor feller,’ said Mr Clark.

‘’Tis a curious nature for a man,’ said Jan Coggan.

‘Yes,’ continued Joseph Poorgrass – his shyness, which was so painful as a defect, filling him with a mild complacency now that it was regarded as an interesting study. ‘’Twere blush, blush, blush with me every minute of the time, when she was speaking to me.’

‘I believe ye, Joseph Poorgrass, for we all know ye to be a very bashful man.’

‘’Tis a’ awkward gift for a man, poor soul,’ said the maltster. ‘And ye have suffered from it a long time, we know.’

‘Ay, ever since I was a boy. Yes – mother was concerned to her heart about it – yes. But ’twas all nought.’

‘Did ye ever go into the world to try and stop it, Joseph Poorgrass?’

‘Oh ay, tried all sorts o’ company. They took me to Greenhill Fair, and into a great gay jerry-go-nimble show, where there were women-folk riding round – standing upon horses, with hardly anything on but their smocks; but it didn’t cure me a morsel. And then I was put errand-man at the Women’s Skittle Alley at the back of the Tailor’s Arms in Casterbridge. ’Twas a horrible sinful situation, and a very curious place for a good man. I had to stand and look ba’dy people in the face from morning till night; but ’twas no use – I was just as bad as ever after all. Blushes hev been in the family for generations. There, ’tis a happy providence that I be no worse.’

‘True,’ said Jacob Smallbury, deepening his thoughts to a profounder view of the subject. ‘’Tis a thought to look at, that ye might have been worse; but even as you be, ’tis a very bad affliction for ’ee, Joseph. For ye see, shepherd, though ’tis very well for a woman, dang it all, ’tis awkward for a man like him, poor feller?’

‘’Tis – ’tis,’ said Gabriel, recovering from a meditation. ‘Yes, very awkward for the man.’

‘Ay, and he’s very timid, too,’ observed Jan Coggan. ‘Once he had been working late at Yalbury Bottom, and had had a drap of drink, and lost his way as he was coming home-along through Yalbury Wood, didn’t ye, Master Poorgrass?’

‘No, no, no; not that story!’ expostulated the modest man, forcing a laugh to bury his concern.

‘– And so ’a lost himself quite,’ continued Mr Coggan, with an impassive face, implying that a true narrative, like time and tide, must run its course and would respect no man. ‘And as he was coming along in the middle of the night, much afeared, and not able to find his way out of the trees nohow, ’a cried out, “Man-a-lost! man-a-lost!” A owl in a tree happened to be crying “Whoo-whoo-whoo!” as owls do, you know, shepherd’ (Gabriel nodded), ‘and Joseph, all in a tremble, said, “Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury, sir!”’

‘No, no, now – that’s too much!’ said the timid man, becoming a man of brazen courage all of a sudden. ‘I didn’t say sir. I’ll take my oath I didn’t say “Joseph Poorgrass o’ Weatherbury, sir”. No, no; what’s right is right, and I never said sir to the bird, knowing very well that no man of a gentleman’s rank would be hollering there at that time o’ night. “Joseph Poorgrass of Weatherbury”, – that’s every word I said, and I shouldn’t ha’ said that if ’t hadn’t been for Keeper Day’s metheglin . . . There, ’twas a merciful thing it ended where it did.’

The question of which was right being tacitly waived by the company, Jan went on meditatively: –

‘And he’s the fearfullest man, bain’t ye, Joseph? Ay, another time ye were lost by Lambing-Down Gate, weren’t ye, Joseph?’

‘I was,’ replied Poorgrass, as if there were some conditions too serious even for modesty to remember itself under, this being one.

‘Yes; that were the middle of the night, too. The gate would not open, try how he would, and knowing there was the Devil’s hand in it, he kneeled down.’

‘Ay,’ said Joseph, acquiring confidence from the warmth of the fire, the cider, and a perception of the narrative capabilities of the experience alluded to. ‘My heart died within me, that time; but I kneeled down and said the Lord’s Prayer, and then the Belief right through, and then the Ten Commandments, in earnest prayer. But no, the gate wouldn’t open; and then I went on with Dearly Beloved Brethren, and, thinks I, this makes four, and ’tis all I know out of book, and if this don’t do it nothing will, and I’m a lost man. Well, when I got to Saying After Me, I rose from my knees and found the gate would open – yes, neighbours, the gate opened the same as ever.’

A meditation on the obvious inference was indulged in by all, and during its continuance each directed his vision into the ashpit, which glowed like a desert in the tropics under a vertical sun, shaping their eyes long and liny, partly because of the light, partly from the depth of the subject discussed.

Gabriel broke the silence. ‘What sort of a place is this to live at, and what sort of a mis’ess is she to work under?’ Gabriel’s bosom thrilled gently as he thus slipped under the notice of the assembly the innermost subject of his heart.

‘We d’know little of her – nothing. She only showed herself a few days ago. Her uncle was took bad, and the doctor was called with his world-wide skill; but he couldn’t save the man. As I take it, she’s going to keep on the farm.’

‘That’s about the shape o’t, ’a b’lieve,’ said Jan Coggan. ‘Ay, ’tis a very good family. I’d as soon be under ’em as under one here and there. Her uncle was a very fair sort of man. Did ye know en, shepherd – a bachelor-man?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I used to go to his house a-courting my first wife, Charlotte, who was his dairymaid. Well, a very good-hearted man were Farmer Everdene, and I being a respectable young fellow was allowed to call and see her and drink as much ale as I liked, but not to carry away any – outside my skin I mane, of course.’

‘Ay, ay, Jan Coggan; we know yer maning.’

‘And so you see ’twas beautiful ale, and I wished to value his kindness as much as I could, and not to be so ill-mannered as to drink only a thimbleful, which would have been insulting the man’s generosity –’

‘True, Master Coggan, ’twould so,’ corroborated Mark Clark.

‘– And so I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going, and then by the time I got there I were as dry as a lime-basket – so thorough dry that that ale would slip down – ah, ’twould slip down sweet! Happy times! heavenly times! Such lovely drunks as I used to have at that house! You can mind, Jacob? You used to go wi’ me sometimes.’

‘I can – I can,’ said Jacob. ‘That one, too, that we had at Buck’s Head on a White Monday was a pretty tipple.’

‘’Twas. But for a wet of the better class, that brought you no nearer to the horned man than you were afore you begun, there was none like those in Farmer Everdene’s kitchen. Not a single damn allowed; no, not a bare poor one, even at the most cheerful moment when all were blindest, though the good old word of sin thrown in here and there at such times is a great relief to a merry soul.’

‘True,’ said the maltster. ‘Nater requires her swearing at the regular times, or she’s not herself; and unholy exclamations is a necessity of life.’

‘But Charlotte,’ continued Coggan – ‘not a word of the sort would Charlotte allow, nor the smallest item of taking in vain . . . Ay, poor Charlotte, I wonder if she had the good fortune to get into Heaven when ’a died! But ’a was never much in luck’s way and perhaps ’a went downwards after all, poor soul.’

‘And did any of you know Miss Everdene’s father and mother?’ inquired the shepherd, who found some difficulty in keeping the conversation in the desired channel.

‘I knew them a little,’ said Jacob Smallbury; ‘but they were townsfolk, and didn’t live here. They’ve been dead for years. Father, what sort of people were mis’ess’ father and mother?’

‘Well,’ said the maltster, ‘he wasn’t much to look at; but she was a lovely woman. He was fond enough of her as his sweetheart.’

‘Used to kiss her scores and long-hundreds o’ times, so ’twas said,’ observed Coggan.

‘He was very proud of her, too, when they were married, as I’ve been told,’ said the maltster.

‘Ay,’ said Coggan. ‘He admired her so much that he used to light the candle three times a night to look at her.’

‘Boundless love; I shouldn’t have supposed it in the universe!’ murmured Joseph Poorgrass, who habitually spoke on a large scale in his moral reflections.

‘Well, to be sure,’ said Gabriel.

‘Oh, ’tis true enough. I knowed the man and woman both well. Levi Everdene – that was the man’s name, sure. “Man”, saith I in my hurry, but he were of a higher circle of life than that – ’a was a gentleman-tailor really, worth scores of pounds. And he became a very celebrated bankrupt two or three times.’

‘Oh, I thought he was quite a common man!’ said Joseph.

‘O no, no! That man failed for heaps of money; hundreds in gold and silver.’

The maltster being rather short of breath, Mr Coggan, after absently scrutinizing a coal which had fallen among the ashes, took up the narrative, with a private twirl of his eye: –

‘Well, now, you’d hardly believe it, but that man – our Miss Everdene’s father – was one of the ficklest husbands alive, after a while. Understand, ’a didn’t want to be fickle, but he couldn’t help it. The poor feller were faithful and true enough to her in his wish, but his heart would rove, do what he would. He spoke to me in real tribulation about it once. “Coggan,” he said, “I could never wish for a handsomer woman than I’ve got, but feeling she’s ticketed as my lawful wife, I can’t help my wicked heart wandering, do what I will.” But at last I believe he cured it by making her take off her wedding-ring and calling her by her maiden name as they sat together after the shop was shut, and so ’a would get to fancy she was only his sweetheart, and not married to him at all. And as soon as he could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing the seventh, ’a got to like her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect picture of mutel love.’

‘Well, ’twas a most ungodly remedy,’ murmured Joseph Poorgrass; ‘but we ought to feel deep cheerfulness that a happy Providence kept it from being any worse. You see, he might have gone the bad road and given his eyes to unlawfulness entirely – yes, gross unlawfulness, so to say it.’

‘You see,’ said Billy Smallbury, ‘the man’s will was to do right, sure enough, but his heart didn’t chime in.’

‘He got so much better that he was quite godly in his later years, wasn’t he, Jan?’ said Joseph Poorgrass. ‘He got himself confirmed over again in a more serious way, and took to saying “Amen” almost as loud as the clerk, and he liked to copy comforting verses from the tombstones. He used, too, to hold the money-plate at Let Your Light so Shine, and stand godfather to poor little come-by-chance children; and he kept a missionary box upon his table to nab folks unawares when they called; yes, and he would box the charity-boys’ ears, if they laughed in church, till they could hardly stand upright, and do other deeds of piety natural to the saintly inclined.’

‘Ay, at that time he thought of nothing but high things,’ added Billy Smallbury. ‘One day Parson Thirdly met him and said, “Good-morning, Mister Everdene; ’tis a fine day!” “Amen”, said Everdene, quite absent-like, thinking only of religion when he seed a parson. Yes, he was a very Christian man.’

‘Their daughter was not at all a pretty chiel at that time,’ said Henery Fray. ‘Never should have thought she’d have growed up such a handsome body as she is.’

‘’Tis to be hoped her temper is as good as her face.’

‘Well, yes; but the baily will have most to do with the business and ourselves. Ah!’ Henery gazed into the ashpit, and smiled volumes of ironical knowledge.

‘A queer Christian, like the Devil’s head in a cowl,* as the saying is,’ volunteered Mark Clark.

‘He is,’ said Henery, implying that irony must cease at a certain point. ‘Between we two, man and man, I believe that man would as soon tell a lie Sundays as working-days – that I do so.’

‘Good faith, you do talk!’ said Gabriel.

‘True enough,’ said the man of bitter moods, looking round upon the company with the antithetic laughter that comes from a keener appreciation of the miseries of life than ordinary men are capable of. ‘Ah, there’s people of one sort, and people of another, but that man – bless your souls!’

Gabriel thought fit to change the subject. ‘You must be a very aged man, maker, to have sons growed up so old and ancient,’ he remarked.

‘Father’s so old that ’a can’t mind his age, can ye, father?’ interposed Jacob. ‘And he’s growed terrible crooked, too, lately,’ Jacob continued, surveying his father’s figure, which was rather more bowed than his own. ‘Really, one may say that father there is three-double.’

‘Crooked folk will last a long while,’ said the maltster, grimly, and not in the best humour.

‘Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer life, father – wouldn’t ye, shepherd?’

‘Ay, that I should,’ said Gabriel, with the heartiness of a man who had longed to hear it for several months. ‘What may your age be, maker?’

The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated form for emphasis, and elongating his gaze to the remotest point of the ashpit, said, in the slow speech justifiable when the importance of a subject is so generally felt that any mannerism must be tolerated in getting at it, ‘Well, I don’t mind the year I were born in, but perhaps I can reckon up the places I’ve lived at, and so get it that way. I bode at Upper Longpuddle across there’ (nodding to the north) ‘till I were eleven. I bode seven at Kingsbere’ (nodding to the east) ‘where I took to malting. I went therefrom to Norcombe, and malted there two-and-twenty years, and twoand-twenty years I was there turnip-hoeing and harvesting. Ah, I knowed that old place, Norcombe, years afore you were thought of, Master Oak’ (Oak smiled sincere belief in the fact). ‘Then I malted at Durnover four year, and four year turnip-hoeing; and I was fourteen times eleven months at Millpond St Jude’s’ (nodding north-west-by-north). ‘Old Twills wouldn’t hire me for more than eleven months at a time, to keep me from being chargeable to the parish if so be I was disabled. Then I was three year at Mellstock, and I’ve been here one-and-thirty year come Candlemas. How much is that?’

‘Hundred and seventeen,’ chuckled another old gentleman, given to mental arithmetic and little conversation, who had hitherto sat unobserved in a corner.

‘Well, then, that’s my age,’ said the maltster emphatically.

‘O no, father!’ said Jacob. ‘Your turnip-hoeing were in the summer and your malting in the winter of the same years, and ye don’t ought to count both halves, father.’

‘Chok’ it all! I lived through the summers, didn’t I? That’s my question. I suppose ye’ll say next I be no age at all to speak of?’

‘Sure we shan’t,’ said Gabriel soothingly.

‘Ye be a very old aged person, malter,’ attested Jan Coggan, also soothingly. ‘We all know that, and ye must have a wonderful talented constitution to be able to live so long, mustn’t he, neighbours?’

‘True, true; ye must, malter, wonderful;’ said the meeting unanimously.

The maltster, being now pacified, was even generous enough to voluntarily disparage in a slight degree the virtue of having lived a great many years, by mentioning that the cup they were drinking out of was three years older than he.

While the cup was being examined, the end of Gabriel Oak’s flute became visible over his smock-frock pocket, and Henery Fray exclaimed, ‘Surely, shepherd, I seed you blowing into a great flute by now at Casterbridge?’

‘You did,’ said Gabriel, blushing faintly. ‘I’ve been in great trouble, neighbours, and was driven to it. I used not to be so poor as I be now.’

‘Never mind, heart!’ said Mark Clark. ‘You should take it careless-like, shepherd, and your time will come. But we could thank ye for a tune, if ye bain’t too tired?’

‘Neither drum nor trumpet have I heard since Christmas,’ said Jan Coggan. ‘Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!’

‘That I will,’ said Gabriel, pulling out his flute and putting it together. ‘A poor tool, neighbours; but such as I can do ye shall have and welcome.’

Oak then struck up ‘Jockey to the Fair’, and played that sparkling melody three times through, accenting the notes in the third round in a most artistic and lively manner by bending his body in small jerks and tapping with his foot to beat time.

‘He can blow the flute very well – that ’a can,’ said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as ‘Susan Tall’s husband’. He continued, ‘I’d as lief as not be able to blow into a flute as well as that.’

‘He’s a clever man, and ’tis a true comfort for us to have such a shepherd,’ murmured Joseph Poorgrass, in a soft cadence. ‘We ought to feel full o’ thanksgiving that he’s not a player of ba’dy songs instead of these merry tunes; for ’twould have been just as easy for God to have made the shepherd a loose low man – a man of iniquity, so to speak it – as what he is. Yes, for our wives’ and daughters’ sakes we should feel real thanksgiving.’

‘True, true, – real thanksgiving!’ dashed in Mark Clark conclusively, not feeling it to be of any consequence to his opinion that he had only heard about a word and three-quarters of what Joseph had said.

‘Yes,’ added Joseph, beginning to feel like a man in the Bible; ‘for evil do thrive so in these times that ye may be as much deceived in the cleanest shaved and whitest shirted man as in the raggedest tramp upon the turnpike, if I may term it so.’

‘Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd,’ said Henery Fray, criticizing Gabriel with misty eyes as he entered upon his second tune. ‘Yes – now I see ’ee blowing into the flute I know ’ee to be the same man I see play at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were scrimped up and yer eyes a-staring out like a strangled man’s – just as they be now.’

‘’Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look such a scarecrow,’ observed Mr Mark Clark, with additional criticism of Gabriel’s countenance, the latter person jerking out, with the ghastly grimace required by the instrument, the chorus of ‘Dame Durden’: –

’Twas Moll' and Bet', and Doll' and Kate',

And Dor'-othy Drag'-gle Tail'.

‘I hope you don’t mind that young man’s bad manners in naming your features?’ whispered Joseph to Gabriel.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Oak.

‘For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd,’ continued Joseph Poorgrass with winning suavity.

‘Ay, that ye be, shepherd,’ said the company.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Oak, in the modest tone good manners demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let Bathsheba see him playing the flute; in this resolve showing a discretion equal to that related of its sagacious inventress, the divine Minerva herself.

‘Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church,’ said the old maltster, not pleased at finding himself left out of the subject, ‘we were called the handsomest couple in the neighbour-hood – everybody said so.’

‘Danged if ye bain’t altered now, maker,’ said a voice with the vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkable evident truism. It came from the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and spiteful ways were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he contributed to general laughs.

‘O no, no,’ said Gabriel.

‘Don’t ye play no more, shepherd,’ said Susan Tall’s husband, the young married man who had spoken once before. ‘I must be moving, and when there’s tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires. If I thought after I’d left that music was still playing, and I not there, I should be quite melancholy-like.’

‘What’s yer hurry then, Laban?’ inquired Coggan. ‘You used to bide as late as the latest.’

‘Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she’s my vocation now, and so ye see –’ The young man halted lamely.

‘New lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose,’ remarked Coggan.

‘Ay, ’a b’lieve – ha, ha!’ said Susan Tall’s husband, in a tone intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding them at all. The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.

Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass’s face.

‘O – what’s the matter, what’s the matter, Henery?’ said Joseph, starting back.

‘What’s a-brewing, Henery?’ asked Jacob and Mark Clark.

‘Baily Pennyways – Baily Pennyways – I said so; yes, I said so!’

‘What, found out stealing anything?’

‘Stealing it is. The news is, that after Miss Everdene got home she went out again to see all was safe, as she usually do, and coming in found Baily Pennyways creeping down the granary steps with half a bushel of barley. She fleed at him like a cat – never such a tomboy as she is – of course I speak with closed doors?’

‘You do – you do, Henery.’

‘She fleed at him, and, to cut a long story short, he owned to having carried off five sack altogether, upon her promising not to persecute him. Well, he’s turned out neck and crop, and my question is, who’s going to be baily now?’

The question was such a profound one that Henery was obliged to drink there and then from the large cup till the bottom was distinctly visible inside. Before he had replaced it on the table, in came the young man, Susan Tall’s husband, in a still greater hurry.

‘Have ye heard the news that’s all over parish?’

‘About Baily Pennyways?’

‘But besides that?’

‘No – not a morsel of it!’ they replied, looking into the very midst of Laban Tall as if to meet his words half-way down his throat.

‘What a night of horrors!’ murmured Joseph Poorgrass, waving his hands spasmodically. ‘I’ve had the news-bell ringing in my left ear quite bad enough for a murder, and I’ve seen a magpie all alone!’

‘Fanny Robin – Miss Everdene’s youngest servant – can’t be found. They’ve been wanting to lock up the door these two hours, but she isn’t come in. And they don’t know what to do about going to bed for fear of locking her out. They wouldn’t be so concerned if she hadn’t been noticed in such low spirits these last few days, and Maryann d’ think the beginning of a crowner’s inquest has happened to the poor girl.’

‘O – ’tis burned – ’tis burned!’ came from Joseph Poorgrass’s dry lips.

‘No – ’tis drowned!’ said Tall.

‘Or ’tis her father’s razor!’ suggested Billy Smallbury with a vivid sense of detail.

‘Well – Miss Everdene wants to speak to one or two of us before we go to bed. What with this trouble about the baily, and now about the girl, mis’ess is almost wild.’

They all hastened up the lane to the farmhouse, excepting the old maltster, whom neither news, fire, rain, nor thunder could draw from his hole. There, as the others’ footsteps died away, he sat down again, and continued gazing as usual into the furnace with his red, bleared eyes.

From the bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba’s head and shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen extended into the air.

‘Are any of my men among you?’ she said anxiously.

‘Yes, ma’am, several,’ said Susan Tall’s husband.

‘To-morrow morning I wish two or three of you to make inquiries in the villages round if they have seen such a person as Fanny Robin. Do it quietly; there is no reason for alarm as yet. She must have left whilst we were all at the fire.’

‘I beg yer pardon, but had she any young man courting her in the parish, ma’am?’ asked Jacob Smallbury.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bathsheba.

‘I’ve never heard of any such thing, ma’am,’ said two or three.

‘It is hardly likely, either,’ continued Bathsheba. ‘For any lover of hers might have come to the house if he had been a respectable lad. The most mysterious matter connected with her absence – indeed, the only thing which gives me serious alarm – is that she was seen to go out of the house by Maryann with only her indoor working gown on – not even a bonnet.’

‘And you mean, ma’am, excusing my words, that a young woman would hardly go to see her young man without dressing up,’ said Jacob, turning his mental vision upon past experiences. ‘That’s true – she would not, ma’am.’

‘She had, I think, a bundle, though I couldn’t see very well,’ said a female voice from another window, which seemed that of Maryann. ‘But she had no young man about here. Hers lives in Casterbridge, and I believe he’s a soldier.’

‘Do you know his name?’ Bathsheba said.

‘No, mistress; she was very close about it.’

‘Perhaps I might be able to find out if I went to Casterbridge barracks,’ said William Smallbury.

‘Very well; if she doesn’t return to-morrow, mind you go there and try to discover which man it is, and see him. I feel more responsible than I should if she had had any friends or relations alive. I do hope she has come to no harm through a man of that kind . . . And then there’s this disgraceful affair of the bailiff – but I can’t speak of him now.’

Bathsheba had so many reasons for uneasiness that it seemed she did not think it worth while to dwell upon any particular one. ‘Do as I told you, then,’ she said in conclusion, closing the casement.

‘Ay, ay, mistress; we will,’ they replied, and moved away.

That night at Coggan’s Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of closed eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement, like a river flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had always been the time at which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and through the slow hours of shadow he tenderly regarded her image now. It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness, but they possibly did with Oak to-night, for the delight of merely seeing her effaced for the time his perception of the great difference between seeing and possessing.

He also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and books from Norcombe. The Young Man’s Best Companion, The Farrier’s Sure Guide, The Veterinary Surgeon, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Ash’s Dictionary, and Walkingame’s Arithmetic, constituted his library; and though a limited series, it was one from which he had acquired more sound information by diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from a furlong of laden shelves.

Chapter 9

The homestead – A visitor – Half confidences

By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of the early stage of Classic Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now al together effaced as a distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident landlord, which comprised several such modest demesnes.

Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof the chimneys were panelled or columnar, some coped gables with finials and like features still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction. Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings. A gravel walk leading from the door to the road in front was encrusted at the sides with more moss – here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre. This circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here, together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse facade, suggested to the imagination that on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes the vital principles of the house had turned round inside its body to face the other way. Reversals of this kind, strange deformities, tremendous paralyses, are often seen to be inflicted by trade upon edifices – either individual or in the aggregate as streets and towns – which were originally planned for pleasure alone.

Lively voices were heard this morning in the upper rooms, the main staircase to which was of hard oak, the balusters, heavy as bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint fashion of their century, the handrail as stout as a parapet-top, and the stairs themselves continually twisting round like a person trying to look over his shoulder. Going up, the floors above were found to have a very irregular surface, rising to ridges, sinking into valleys; and being just then uncarpeted, the face of the boards was seen to be eaten into innumerable vermiculations. Every window replied by a clang to the opening and shutting of every door, a tremble followed every bustling movement, and a creak accompanied a walker about the house, like a spirit, wherever he went.

In the room from which the conversation proceeded Bathsheba and her servant-companion, Liddy Smallbury, were to be discovered sitting upon the floor, and sorting a complication of papers, books, bottles, and rubbish spread out thereon – remnants from the household stores of the late occupier. Liddy, the malt-ster’s great-granddaughter, was about Bathsheba’s equal in age, and her face was a prominent advertisement of the light-hearted English country girl. The beauty her features might have lacked in form was amply made up for by perfection of hue, which at this winter-time was the softened ruddiness on a surface of high rotundity that we meet with in a Terburg or a Gerard Douw; and, like the presentations of those great colourists, it was a face which kept well back from the boundary between comeliness and the ideal. Though elastic in nature she was less daring than Bathsheba, and occasionally showed some earnestness, which consisted half of genuine feeling, and half of mannerliness superadded by way of duty.

Through a partly-opened door the noise of a scrubbing-brush led up to the charwoman, Maryann Money, a person who for a face had a circular disc, furrowed less by age than by long gazes of perplexity at distant objects. To think of her was to get good-humoured; to speak of her was to raise the image of a dried Normandy pippin.

‘Stop your scrubbing a moment,’ said Bathsheba through the door to her. ‘I hear something.’

Maryann suspended the brush.

The tramp of a horse was apparent, approaching the front of the building. The paces slackened, turned in at the wicket, and, what was most unusual, came up the mossy path close to the door. The door was tapped with the end of a crop or stick.

‘What impertinence!’ said Liddy, in a low voice. ‘To ride up to the footpath like that! Why didn’t he stop at the gate? Lord! ’tis a gentleman! I see the top of his hat.’

‘Be quiet!’ said Bathsheba.

The further expression of Liddy’s concern was continued by aspect instead of narrative.

‘Why doesn’t Mrs Coggan go to the door?’ Bathsheba continued.

Rat-tat-tat-tat resounded more decisively from Bathsheba’s oak.

‘Maryann, you go!’ said she, fluttering under the onset of a crowd of romantic possibilities.

‘O ma’am – see, here’s a mess!’

The argument was unanswerable after a glance at Maryann. ‘Liddy – you must,’ said Bathsheba.

Liddy held up her hands and arms, coated with dust from the rubbish they were sorting, and looked imploringly at her mistress.

‘There – Mrs Coggan is going!’ said Bathsheba, exhaling her relief in the form of a long breath which had lain in her bosom a minute or more.

The door opened, and a deep voice said –

‘Is Miss Everdene at home?’ ‘I’ll see, sir,’ said Mrs Coggan, and in a minute appeared in the room.

‘Dear, what a thirtover place this world is!’ continued Mrs Coggan (a wholesome-looking lady who had a voice for each class of remark according to the emotion involved; who could toss a pancake or twirl a mop with the accuracy of pure mathematics, and who at this moment showed hands shaggy with fragments of dough and arms encrusted with flour). ‘I am never up to my elbows, Miss, in making a pudding but one of two things do happen – either my nose must needs begin tickling, and I can’t live without scratching it, or somebody knocks at the door. Here’s Mr Boldwood wanting to see you, Miss Everdene.’

A woman’s dress being a part of her countenance, and any disorder in the one being of the same nature with a malformation or wound in the other, Bathsheba said at once –

‘I can’t see him in this state. Whatever shall I do?’ Not-at-homes were hardly naturalized in Weatherbury farmhouses, so Liddy suggested – ‘Say you’re a fright with dust, and can’t come down.’

‘Yes – that sounds very well,’ said Mrs Coggan critically. ‘Say I can’t see him – that will do.’

Mrs Coggan went downstairs, and returned the answer as requested, adding, however, on her own responsibility, ‘Miss is dusting bottles, sir, and is quite a object – that’s why ’tis.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said the deep voice indifferently. ‘All I wanted to ask was, if anything had been heard of Fanny Robin?’

‘Nothing, sir – but we may know to-night. William Smallbury is gone to Casterbridge, where her young man lives, as is supposed, and the other men be inquiring about everywhere.’

The horse’s tramp then recommenced and retreated, and the door closed.

‘Who is Mr Boldwood?’ said Bathsheba.

‘A gentleman-farmer at Little Weatherbury.

‘Married?’

‘No, miss.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Forty, I should say – very handsome – rather stern-looking – and rich.’

‘What a bother this dusting is! I am always in some unfortun ate plight or other,’ Bathsheba said complainingly. ‘Why should he inquire about Fanny?’

‘Oh, because, as she had no friends in her childhood, he took her and put her to school, and got her her place here under your uncle. He’s a very kind man that way, but Lord – there!’

‘What?’

‘Never was such a hopeless man for a woman! He’s been courted by sixes and sevens – all the girls, gentle and simple, for miles round, have tried him. Jane Perkins worked at him for two months like a slave, and the two Miss Taylors spent a year upon him, and he cost Farmer Ive’s daughter nights of tears and twenty pounds’ worth of new clothes; but Lord – the money might as well have been thrown out of the window.’

A little boy came up at this moment and looked in upon them. This child was one of the Coggans, who, with the Smallburys, were as common among the families of this district as the Avons and Derwents among our rivers. He always had a loosened tooth or a cut finger to show to particular friends, which he did with an air of being thereby elevated above the common herd of afflictionless humanity – to which exhibition people were expected to say ‘Poor child!’ with a dash of congratulation as well as pity.

‘I’ve got a pen-nee!’ said Master Coggan in a scanning measure.

‘Well – who gave it you, Teddy?’ said Liddy.

‘Mis-terr Bold-wood! He gave it to me for opening the gate.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, “Where are you going, my little man?” and I said, “To Miss Everdene’s, please”; and he said, “She is a staid woman, isn’t she, my little man?” and I said, “Yes.”’

‘You naughty child! What did you say that for?’

‘’Cause he gave me the penny!’

‘What a pucker everything is in!’ said Bathsheba discontent-edly, when the child had gone. ‘Get away, Maryann, or go on with your scrubbing, or do something! You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me!’

‘Ay, mistress – so I did. But what between the poor men I won’t have, and the rich men who won’t have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!’

‘Did anybody ever want to marry you, miss?’ Liddy ventured to ask when they were again alone. ‘Lots of ’em, I daresay?’

Bathsheba paused, as if about to refuse a reply, but the temptation to say yes, since it really was in her power, was irresistible by aspiring virginity, in spite of her spleen at having been published as old.

‘A man wanted to once,’ she said, in a highly experienced tone, and the image of Gabriel Oak, as the farmer, rose before her.

‘How nice it must seem!’ said Liddy, with the fixed features of mental realization. ‘And you wouldn’t have him?’

‘He wasn’t quite good enough for me.’

‘How sweet to be able to disdain, when most of us are glad to say, “Thank you!” I seem I hear it. “No, sir – I’m your better,” or “Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.” And did you love him, miss?’

‘Oh, no. But I rather liked him.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Of course not – what footsteps are those I hear?’

Liddy looked from a back window into the courtyard behind, which was now getting low-toned and dim with the earliest films of night. A crooked file of men was approaching the back door. The whole string of trailing individuals advanced in the completest balance of intention, like the remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpae, which, distinctly organized in other respects, have one will common to a whole family. Some were, as usual, in snow-white smock-frocks of Russia duck, and some in whitey-brown ones of drabbet – marked on the wrists, breasts, backs, and sleeves with honeycomb-work. Two or three women in pattens brought up the rear.

‘The Philistines be upon us,’ said Liddy, making her nose white against the glass.

‘Oh, very well. Maryann, go down and keep them in the kitchen till I am dressed, and then show them in to me in the hall.’

Chapter 10

Mistress and men

Half-an-hour later Bathsheba, in finished dress, and followed by Liddy, entered the upper end of the old hall to find that her men had all deposited themselves on a long form and a settle at the lower extremity. She sat down at a table and opened the time-book, pen in her hand, with a canvas money-bag beside her. From this she poured a small heap of coin. Liddy chose a position at her elbow and began to sew, sometimes pausing and looking round, or, with the air of a privileged person, taking up one of the half-sovereigns lying before her, and surveying it merely as a work of art, while strictly preventing her countenance from expressing any wish to possess it as money.

‘Now, before I begin, men,’ said Bathsheba, ‘I have two matters to speak of. The first is that the bailiff is dismissed for thieving, and that I have formed a resolution to have no bailiff at all, but to manage everything with my own head and hands.’

The men breathed an audible breath of amazement.

‘The next matter is, have you heard anything of Fanny?’

‘Nothing, ma’am.’

‘Have you done anything?’

‘I met Farmer Boldwood,’ said Jacob Smallbury, ‘and I went with him and two of his men, and dragged Newmill Pond, but we found nothing.’

‘And the new shepherd have been to Buck’s Head, by Yalbury, thinking she had gone there, but nobody had seed her,’ said Laban Tall.

‘Hasn’t William Smallbury been to Casterbridge?’

‘Yes, ma’am, but he’s not yet come home. He promised to be back by six.’

‘It wants a quarter to six at present,’ said Bathsheba, looking at her watch. ‘I daresay he’ll be in directly. Well, now then’ – she looked into the book – ‘Joseph Poorgrass, are you there?’

‘Yes, sir – ma’am I mane,’ said the person addressed. ‘I be the person name of Poorgrass.’

‘And what are you?’

‘Nothing in my own eye. In the eye of other people – well, I don’t say it; though public thought will out.’

‘What do you do on the farm?’

‘I do carting things all the year, and in seed time I shoots the rooks and sparrows, and helps at pig-killing, sir.’

‘How much to you?’

‘Please nine and ninepence and a good halfpenny where ’twas a bad one, sir – ma’am I mane.’

‘Quite correct. Now here are ten shillings in addition as a small present, as I am a new comer.’

Bathsheba blushed slightly at the sense of being generous in public, and Henery Fray, who had drawn up towards her chair, lifted his eyebrows and fingers to express amazement on a small scale.

‘How much do I owe you – that man in the corner – what’s your name?’ continued Bathsheba.

‘Matthew Moon, ma’am,’ said a singular framework of clothes with nothing of any consequence inside them, which advanced with the toes in no definite direction forwards, but turned in or out as they chanced to swing.

‘Matthew Mark, did you say? – speak out – I shall not hurt you,’ inquired the young farmer kindly.

‘Matthew Moon, mem,’ said Henery Fray, correctingly, from behind her chair, to which point he had edged himself.

‘Matthew Moon,’ murmured Bathsheba, turning her bright eyes to the book. ‘Ten and twopence halfpenny is the sum put down to you, I see?’

‘Yes, mis’ess,’ said Matthew, as the rustle of wind among dead leaves.

‘Here it is, and ten shillings. Now the next – Andrew Randle, you are a new man, I hear. How came you to leave your last farm?’

‘P-p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-1-l-l-l-ease, ma’am, p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-please, ma’am-please’m-please’m –’

‘’A’s a stammering man, mem,’ said Henery Fray in an under-tone, ‘and they turned him away because the only time he ever did speak plain he said his soul was his own, and other iniquities, to the squire. ’A can cuss, mem, as well as you or I, but ’a can’t speak a common speech to save his life.’

‘Andrew Randle, here’s yours – finish thanking me in a day or two. Temperance Miller – oh, here’s another, Soberness – both women, I suppose?’

‘Yes’m. Here we be, ’a b’lieve,’ was echoed in shrill unison.

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Tending thrashing-machine, and wimbling haybonds, and saying “Hoosh!” to the cocks and hens when they go upon your seeds, and planting Early Flourballs and Thompson’s Wonderfuls with a dibble.’

‘Yes – I see. Are they satisfactory women?’ she inquired softly of Henery Fray.

‘O mem – don’t ask me! Yielding women – as scarlet a pair as ever was!’ groaned Henery under his breath.

‘Sit down.’

‘Who, mem?’

‘Sit down.’

Joseph Poorgrass, in the background, twitched, and his lips became dry with fear of some terrible consequences, as he saw Bathsheba summarily speaking, and Henery slinking off to a corner.

‘Now the next. Laban Tall, you’ll stay on working for me?’

‘For you or anybody that pays me well, ma’am,’ replied the young married man.

‘True – the man must live!’ said a woman in the back quarter, who had just entered with clicking pattens.

‘What woman is that?’ Bathsheba asked.

‘I be his lawful wife!’ continued the voice with greater prominence of manner and tone. This lady called herself five-and-twenty, looked thirty, passed as thirty-five, and was forty. She was a woman who never, like some newly married, showed conjugal tenderness in public, perhaps because she had none to show.

‘Oh, you are,’ said Bathsheba. ‘Well, Laban, will you stay on?’

‘Yes, he’ll stay, ma’am!’ said again the shrill tongue of Laban’s lawful wife.

‘Well, he can speak for himself, I suppose.’

‘O Lord, not he, ma’am! A simple tool. Well enough, but a poor gawkhammer mortal,’ the wife replied.

‘Heh-heh-heh!’ laughed the married man, with a hideous effort of appreciation, for he was as irrepressibly good-humoured under ghastly snubs as a parliamentary candidate on the hustings.

The names remaining were called in the same manner.

‘Now I think I have done with you,’ said Bathsheba, closing the book and shaking back a stray twine of hair. ‘Has William Smallbury returned?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘The new shepherd will want a man under him,’ suggested Henery Fray, trying to make himself official again by a sideway approach towards her chair.

‘Oh – he will. Who can he have?’

‘Young Cain Ball is a very good lad,’ Henery said, ‘and Shepherd Oak don’t mind his youth?’ he added, turning with an apologetic smile to the shepherd, who had just appeared on the scene, and was now leaning against the doorpost with his arms folded.

‘No, I don’t mind that,’ said Gabriel.

‘How did Cain come by such a name?’ asked Bathsheba.

‘Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking ’twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, but ’twas too late, for the name could never be got rid of in the parish. ’Tis very unfortunate for the boy.’

‘It is rather unfortunate.’

‘Yes. However, we soften it down as much as we can, and call him Cainy. Ah, pore widow-woman! she cried her heart out about it almost. She was brought up by a very heathen father and mother, who never sent her to church or school, and it shows how the sins of the parents are visited upon the children, mem.’

Mr Fray here drew up his features to the mild degree of melancholy required when the persons involved in the given misfortune do not belong to your own family.

‘Very well then, Cainy Ball to be under-shepherd. And you quite understand your duties? – you I mean, Gabriel Oak?’

‘Quite well, I thank you, Miss Everdene,’ said Shepherd Oak from the doorpost. ‘If I don’t, I’ll inquire.’ Gabriel was rather staggered by the remarkable coolness of her manner. Certainly nobody without previous information would have dreamt that Oak and the handsome woman before whom he stood had ever been other than strangers. But perhaps her air was the inevitable result of the social rise which had advanced her from a cottage to a large house and fields. The case is not unexampled in high places. When, in the writings of the later poets, Jove and his family are found to have moved from their cramped quarters on the peak of Olympus into the wide sky above it, their words show a proportionate increase of arrogance and reserve.

Footsteps were heard in the passage, combining in their character the qualities both of weight and measure, rather at the expense of velocity.

(All.) ‘Here’s Billy Smallbury come from Casterbridge.’

‘And what’s the news?’ said Bathsheba, as William, after marching to the middle of the hall, took a handkerchief from his hat and wiped his forehead from its centre to its remoter boundaries.

‘I should have been sooner, miss,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the weather.’ He then stamped with each foot severely, and on looking down his boots were perceived to be clogged with snow.

‘Come at last, is it?’ said Henery.

‘Well, what about Fanny?’ said Bathsheba.

‘Well, ma’am, in round numbers, she’s run away with the soldiers,’ said William.

‘No; not a steady girl like Fanny!’

‘I’ll tell ye all particulars. When I got to Casterbridge Barracks, they said, “The Eleventh Dragoon Guards be gone away, and new troops have come.” The Eleventh left last week for Melchester and onwards. The Route came from Government like a thief in the night, as is his nature to, and afore the Eleventh knew it almost, they were on the march. They passed near here.’

Gabriel had listened with interest. ‘I saw them go,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ continued William, ‘they pranced down the street playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me”, so ’tis said, in glorious notes of triumph. Every looker-on’s inside shook with the blows of the great drum to his deepest vitals, and there was not a dry eye throughout the town among the public-house people and the nameless women!’

‘But they’re not gone to any war?’

‘No, ma’am; but they be gone to take the places of them who may, which is very close connected. And so I said to myself, Fanny’s young man was one of the regiment, and she’s gone after him. There, ma’am, that’s it in black and white.’

‘Did you find out his name?’

‘No; nobody knew it. I believe he was higher in rank than a private.’

Gabriel remained musing and said nothing, for he was in doubt.

‘Well, we are not likely to know more to-night, at any rate,’ said Bathsheba. ‘But one of you had better run across to Farmer Boldwood’s and tell him that much.’

She then rose; but before retiring, addressed a few words to them with a pretty dignity, to which her mourning dress added a soberness that was hardly to be found in the words themselves:

‘Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don’t yet know my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you. Don’t any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I’m a woman I don’t understand the difference between bad goings-on and good.’

(All.) ‘No’m!’

(Liddy.) ‘Excellent well said.’

‘I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.’

(All.) ‘Yes’m!’

‘And so good-night.’

(All.) ‘Good-night, ma’am.’

Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table, and surged out of the hall, her black silk dress licking up a few straws and dragging them along with a scratching noise upon the floor. Liddy, elevating her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from travesty, and the door was closed.

Chapter 11

Outside the barracks – Snow – A meeting

For dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of a certain town and military station, many miles north of Weatherbury, at a later hour on this same snowy evening – if that may be called a prospect of which the chief constituent was darkness.

It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.

The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river, behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land, partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating upland.

The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are not so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering the general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to the country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might have been successively observed the retreat of the snakes, the transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools, a rising of fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the fungi, and an obliteration by snow.

This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more character than that of being the limit of something else – the lowest layer of a firmament of snow. From this chaotic skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked thereby. The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor; for the instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and that encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without any intervening stratum of air at all.

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if anything could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the facade was notched and prolonged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the water’s edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

An indescribable succession of dull blows, perplexing in their regularity, sent their sound with difficulty through the fluffy atmosphere. It was a neighbouring clock striking ten. The bell was in the open air, and being overlaid with several inches of muffling snow, had lost its voice for the time.

About this hour the snow abated: ten flakes fell where twenty had fallen, then one had the room of ten. Not long after a form moved by the brink of the river.

By its outline upon the colourless background a close observer might have seen that it was small. This was all that was positively discoverable, though it seemed human.

The shape went slowly along, but without much exertion, for the snow, though sudden, was not as yet more than two inches deep. At this time some words were spoken aloud: –

‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five.’

Between each utterance the little shape advanced about half-a-dozen yards. It was evident now that the windows high in the wall were being counted. The word ‘Five’ represented the fifth window from the end of the wall.

Here the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller. The figure was stooping. Then a morsel of snow flew across the river towards the fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a point several yards from its mark. The throw was the idea of a man conjoined with the execution of a woman. No man who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or squirrel in his childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter imbecility as was shown here.

Another attempt, and another; till by degrees the wall must have become pimpled with the adhering lumps of snow. At last one fragment struck the fifth window.

The river would have been seen by day to be of that deep smooth sort which races middle and sides with the same gliding precision, any irregularities of speed being immediately corrected by a small whirlpool. Nothing was heard in reply to the signal but the gurgle and cluck of one of these invisible wheels – together with a few small sounds which a sad man would have called moans, and a happy man laughter – caused by the flapping of the waters against trifling objects in other parts of the stream.

The window was struck again in the same manner.

Then a noise was heard, apparently produced by the opening of the window. This was followed by a voice from the same quarter:

‘Who’s there?’

The tones were masculine, and not those of surprise. The high wall being that of a barrack, and marriage being looked upon with disfavour in the army, assignations and communications had probably been made across the river before to-night.

‘Is it Sergeant Troy?’ said the blurred spot in the snow, tremulously.

This person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth, and the other speaker so much a part of the building, that one would have said the wall was holding a conversation with the snow.

‘Yes,’ came suspiciously from the shadow. ‘What girl are you?’

‘O, Frank – don’t you know me?’ said the spot. ‘Your wife, Fanny Robin.’

‘Fanny!’ said the wall, in utter astonishment.

‘Yes,’ said the girl, with a half-suppressed gasp of emotion.

There was something in the woman’s tone which is not that of the wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely a husband’s. The dialogue went on:

‘How did you come here?’

‘I asked which was your window. Forgive me!’

‘I did not expect you to-night. Indeed, I did not think you would come at all. It was a wonder you found me here. I am orderly to-morrow.’

‘You said I was to come.’

‘Well – I said that you might.’

‘Yes, I mean that I might. You are glad to see me, Frank?’

‘O yes – of course.’

‘Can you – come to me?’

‘My dear Fan, no! The bugle has sounded, the barrack gates are closed, and I have no leave. We are all of us as good as in the county gaol till to-morrow morning.’

‘Then I shan’t see you till then!’ The words were in a faltering tone of disappointment.

‘How did you get here from Weatherbury?’

‘I walked – some part of the way – the rest by the carriers.’

‘I am surprised.’

‘Yes – so am I. And Frank, when will it be?’

‘What?’

‘That you promised.’

‘I don’t quite recollect.’

‘O you do! Don’t speak like that. It weighs me to the earth. It makes me say what ought to be said first by you.’

‘Never mind – say it.’

‘O, must I? – it is, when shall we be married, Frank?’

‘Oh, I see. Well – you have to get proper clothes.’

‘I have money. Will it be by banns or license?’

‘Banns, I should think.’

‘And we live in two parishes.’

‘Do we? What then?’

‘My lodgings are in St Mary’s, and this is not. So they will have to be published in both.’

‘Is that the law?’

‘Yes. O Frank – you think me forward, I am afraid! Don’t, dear Frank – will you – for I love you so. And you said lots of times you would marry me, and – and I – I – I –’

‘Don’t cry, now! It is foolish. If I said so, of course I will.’

‘And shall I put up the banns in my parish, and will you in yours.’

‘Yes.’

‘To-morrow?’

‘Not to-morrow. We’ll settle in a few days.’

‘You have the permission of the officers?’

‘No – not yet.’

‘O – how is it? You said you almost had before you left Casterbridge.’

‘The fact is, I forgot to ask. Your coming like this is so sudden and unexpected.’

‘Yes – yes – it is. It was wrong of me to worry you. I’ll go away now. Will you come and see me to-morrow, at Mrs Twills’s, in North Street? I don’t like to come to the Barracks. There are bad women about, and they think me one.’

‘Quite so. I’ll come to you, my dear. Good-night.’

‘Good-night, Frank – good-night!’

And the noise was again heard of a window closing. The little spot moved away. When she passed the corner a subdued exclamation was heard inside the wall.

‘Ho – ho – Sergeant – ho – ho!’ An expostulation followed, but it was indistinct; and it became lost amid a low peal of laughter, which was hardly distinguishable from the gurgle of the tiny whirlpools outside.

Chapter 12

Farmers – A rule – An exception

The first public evidence of Bathsheba’s decision to be a farmer in her own person and by proxy no more was her appearance the following market-day in the corn market at Casterbridge.

The low though extensive hall, supported by beams and pillars, and latterly dignified by the name of Corn Exchange, was thronged with hot men who talked among each other in twos and threes, the speaker of the minute looking sideways into his auditor’s face and concentrating his argument by a contraction of one eyelid during delivery. The greater number carried in their hands ground-ash saplings, using them partly as walking-sticks and partly for poking up pigs, sheep, neighbours with their backs turned, and restful things in general, which seemed to require such treatment in the course of their peregrinations. During conversations each subjected his sapling to great varieties of usage – bending it round his back, forming an arch of it between his two hands, overweighting it on the ground till it reached nearly a semicircle; or perhaps it was hastily tucked under the arm whilst the sample-bag was pulled forth and a handful of corn poured into the palm, which, after criticism, was flung upon the floor, an issue of events perfectly well known to half-a-dozen acute town-bred fowls which had as usual crept into the building unobserved, and waited the fulfilment of their anticipations with a high-stretched neck and oblique eye.

Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination – far more than she had at first imagined – to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.

Two or three only of the farmers were personally known to Bathsheba, and to these she had made her way. But if she was to be the practical woman she had intended to show herself, business must be carried on, introductions or none, and she ultimately acquired confidence enough to speak and reply boldly to men merely known to her by hearsay. Bathsheba too had her sample-bags, and by degrees adopted the professional pour into the hand – holding up the grains in her narrow palm for inspection, in perfect Casterbridge manner.

Something in the exact arch of her upper unbroken row of teeth, and in the keenly pointed corners of her red mouth when, with parted lips, she somewhat defiantly turned up her face to argue a point with a tall man, suggested that there was potentiality enough in that lithe slip of humanity for alarming exploits of sex, and daring enough to carry them out. But her eyes had a softness – invariably a softness – which, had they not been dark, would have seemed mistiness; as they were, it lowered an expression that might have been piercing to simple clearness.

Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigour, she always allowed her interlocutors to finish their statements before rejoining with hers. In arguing on prices she held to her own firmly, as was natural in a dealer, and reduced theirs persistently, as was inevitable in a woman. But there was an elasticity in her firmness which removed it from obstinacy, as there was a naiveté in her cheapening which saved it from meanness.

Those of the farmers with whom she had no dealings (by far the greater part) were continually asking each other, ‘Who is she?’ The reply would be –

‘Farmer Everdene’s niece; took on Weatherbury Upper Farm; turned away the baily, and swears she’ll do everything herself.’

The other man would then shake his head.

‘Yes, ’tis a pity she’s so headstrong,’ the first would say. ‘But we ought to be proud of her here – she lightens up the old place. ’Tis such a shapely maid, however, that she’ll soon get picked up.’

It would be ungallant to suggest that the novelty of her engagement in such an occupation had almost as much to do with the magnetism as had the beauty of her face and movements. However, the interest was general, and this Saturday’s debut in the forum, whatever it may have been to Bathsheba as the buying and selling farmer, was unquestionably a triumph to her as the maiden. Indeed, the sensation was so pronounced that her instinct on two or three occasions was merely to walk as a queen among these gods of the fallow, like a little sister of a little Jove, and to neglect closing prices altogether.

The numerous evidences of her power to attract were only thrown into greater relief by a marked exception. Women seem to have eyes in their ribbons for such matters as these. Bathsheba, without looking within a right angle of him, was conscious of a black sheep among the flock.

It perplexed her first. If there had been a respectable minority on either side, the case would have been most natural. If nobody had regarded her, she would have taken the matter indifferently – such cases had occurred. If everybody, this man included, she would have taken it as a matter of course – people had done so before. But the smallness of the exception made the mystery.

She soon knew thus much of the recusant’s appearance. He was a gentlemanly man, with full and distinctly outlined Roman features, the prominences of which glowed in the sun with a bronze-like richness of tone. He was erect in attitude, and quiet in demeanour. One characteristic pre-eminently marked him – dignity.

Apparently he had some time ago reached that entrance to middle age at which a man’s aspect naturally ceases to alter for the term of a dozen years or so; and, artificially, a woman’s does likewise. Thirty-five and fifty were his limits of variation – he might have been either, or anywhere between the two.

It may be said that married men of forty are usually ready and generous enough to fling passing glances at any specimen of moderate beauty they may discern by the way. Probably, as with persons playing whist for love, the consciousness of a certain immunity under any circumstances from that worst possible ultimate, the having to pay, makes them unduly speculative. Bathsheba was convinced that this unmoved person was not a married man.

When marketing was over, she rushed off to Liddy, who was waiting for her beside the yellow gig in which they had driven to town. The horse was put in, and on they trotted – Bathsheba’s sugar, tea, and drapery parcels being packed behind, and expressing in some indescribable manner, by their colour, shape, and general lineaments, that they were that young lady-farmer’s property, and the grocer’s and draper’s no more.

‘I’ve been through it, Liddy, and it is over. I shan’t mind it again, for they will all have grown accustomed to seeing me there; but this morning it was as bad as being married – eyes everywhere!’

‘I knowed it would be,’ Liddy said. ‘Men be such a terrible class of society to look at a body.’

‘But there was one man who had more sense than to waste his time upon me.’ The information was put in this form that Liddy might not for a moment suppose her mistress was at all piqued. ‘A very good-looking man,’ she continued, ‘upright; about forty, I should think. Do you know at all who he could be?’

Liddy couldn’t think.

‘Can’t you guess at all?’ said Bathsheba with some disappointment.

‘I haven’t a notion; besides, ’tis no difference, since he took less notice of you than any of the rest. Now, if he’d taken more, it would have mattered a great deal.’

Bathsheba was suffering from the reverse feeling just then, and they bowled along in silence. A low carriage, bowling along still more rapidly behind a horse of unimpeachable breed, overtook and passed them.

‘Why, there he is!’ she said.

Liddy looked. ‘That! That’s Farmer Boldwood – of course ’tis – the man you couldn’t see the other day when he called.’

‘Oh, Farmer Boldwood,’ murmured Bathsheba, and looked at him as he outstripped them. The farmer had never turned his head once, but with eyes fixed on the most advanced point along the road, passed as unconsciously and abstractedly as if Bathsheba and her charms were thin air.

‘He’s an interesting man – don’t you think so?’ she remarked.

‘O yes, very. Everybody owns it,’ replied Liddy.

‘I wonder why he is so wrapt up and indifferent, and seemingly so far away from all he sees around him.’

‘It is said – but not known for certain – that he met with some bitter disappointment when he was a young man and merry. A woman jilted him, they say.’

‘People always say that – and we know very well women scarcely ever jilt men; ’tis the men who jilt us. I expect it is simply his nature to be so reserved.’

‘Simply his nature – I expect so, miss – nothing else in the world.’

‘Still, ’tis more romantic to think he has been served cruelly, poor thing! Perhaps, after all, he has.’

‘Depend upon it he has. O yes, miss, he has! I feel he must have.’

‘However, we are very apt to think extremes of people. I shouldn’t wonder after all if it wasn’t a little of both – just between the two – rather cruelly used and rather reserved.’

‘O dear no, miss – I can’t think it between the two!’

‘That’s most likely.’

‘Well, yes, so it is. I am convinced it is most likely. You may take my word, miss, that that’s what’s the matter with him.’

Chapter 13

Sortes sanctorum – The valentine

It was Sunday afternoon in the farmhouse, on the thirteenth of February. Dinner being over, Bathsheba, for want of a better companion, had asked Liddy to come and sit with her. The mouldy pile was dreary in winter-time before the candles were lighted and the shutters closed; the atmosphere of the place seemed as old as the walls; every nook behind the furniture had a temperature of its own, for the fire was not kindled in this part of the house early in the day; and Bathsheba’s new piano, which was an old one in other annals, looked particularly sloping and out of level on the warped floor before night threw a shade over its less prominent angles and hid the unpleasantness. Liddy, like a little brook, though shallow, was always rippling; her presence had not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to exercise it.

On the table lay an old quarto Bible, bound in leather. Liddy looking at it said, –

‘Did you ever find out, miss, who you are going to marry by means of the Bible and key?’

‘Don’t be so foolish, Liddy. As if such things could be.’

‘Well, there’s a good deal in it, all the same.’

‘Nonsense, child.’

‘And it makes your heart beat fearful. Some believe in it; some don’t; I do.’

‘Very well, let’s try it,’ said Bathsheba, bounding from her seat with that total disregard of consistency which can be indulged in towards a dependant, and entering into the spirit of divination at once. ‘Go and get the front door key.’

Liddy fetched it. ‘I wish it wasn’t Sunday,’ she said, on returning. ‘Perhaps ’tis wrong.’

‘What’s right week days is right Sundays,’ replied her mistress in a tone which was a proof in itself.

The book was opened – the leaves, drab with age, being quite worn away at much-read verses by the forefingers of unpractised readers in former days, where they were moved along under the line as an aid to the vision. The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, and the sublime words met her eye. They slightly thrilled and abashed her. It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete. Folly in the concrete blushed, persisted in her intention, and placed the key on the book. A rusty patch immediately upon the verse, caused by previous pressure of an iron substance thereon, told that this was not the first time the old volume had been used for the purpose.

‘Now keep steady, and be silent,’ said Bathsheba.

The verse was repeated; the book turned round; Bathsheba blushed guiltily.

‘Who did you try?’ said Liddy curiously. ‘I shall not tell you.’

‘Did you notice Mr Boldwood’s doings in church this morning, miss?’ Liddy continued, adumbrating by the remark the track her thoughts had taken.

‘No, indeed,’ said Bathsheba, with serene indifference.

‘His pew is exactly opposite yours, miss.’

‘I know it.’

‘And you did not see his goings on!’

‘Certainly I did not, I tell you.’

Liddy assumed a smaller physiognomy, and shut her lips decisively.

This move was unexpected, and proportionately disconcerting. ‘What did he do?’ Bathsheba said perforce.

‘Didn’t turn his head to look at you once all the service.’

‘Why should he?’ again demanded her mistress, wearing a nettled look. ‘I didn’t ask him to.’

‘Oh, no. But everybody else was noticing you; and it was odd he didn’t. There, ’tis like him. Rich and gentlemanly, what does he care?’

Bathsheba dropped into a silence intended to express that she had opinions on the matter too abstruse for Liddy’s comprehension, rather than that she had nothing to say.

‘Dear me – I had nearly forgotten the valentine I bought yesterday,’ she exclaimed at length.

‘Valentine! who for, miss?’ said Liddy. ‘Farmer Boldwood?’

It was the single name among all possible wrong ones that just at this moment seemed to Bathsheba more pertinent than the right.

‘Well, no. It is only for little Teddy Coggan. I have promised him something, and this will be a pretty surprise for him. Liddy, you may as well bring me my desk and I’ll direct it at once.’

Bathsheba took from her desk a gorgeously illuminated and embossed design in post-octavo, which had been bought on the previous market-day at the chief stationer’s in Casterbridge. In the centre was a small oval enclosure; this was left blank, that the sender might insert tender words more appropriate to the special occasion than any generalities by a printer could possibly be.

‘Here’s a place for writing,’ said Bathsheba. ‘What shall I put?’

‘Something of this sort, I should think,’ returned Liddy promptly: –

‘The rose is red,

The violet blue,

Carnation’s sweet,

And so are you.’

‘Yes, that shall be it. It just suits itself to a chubby-faced child like him,’ said Bathsheba. She inserted the words in a small though legible handwriting; enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and dipped her pen for the direction.

‘What fun it would be to send it to the stupid old Boldwood, and how he would wonder!’ said the irrepressible Liddy, lifting her eyebrows, and indulging in an awful mirth on the verge of fear as she thought of the moral and social magnitude of the man contemplated.

Bathsheba paused to regard the idea at full length. Boldwood’s had begun to be a troublesome image – a species of Daniel in her kingdom who persisted in kneeling eastward when reason and common sense said that he might just as well follow suit with the rest, and afford her the official glance of admiration which cost nothing at all. She was far from being seriously concerned about his nonconformity. Still, it was faintly depressing that the most dignified and valuable man in the parish should withhold his eyes, and that a girl like Liddy should talk about it. So Liddy’s idea was at first rather harassing than piquant.

‘No, I won’t do that. He wouldn’t see any humour in it.’

‘He’d worry to death,’ said the persistent Liddy.

‘Really, I don’t care particularly to send it to Teddy,’ remarked her mistress. ‘He’s rather a naughty child sometimes.’

‘Yes – that he is.’

‘Let’s toss, as men do,’ said Bathsheba idly. ‘Now then, head, Boldwood; tail, Teddy. No, we won’t toss money on a Sunday, that would be tempting the devil indeed.’

‘Toss this hymn-book; there can’t be no sinfulness in that, miss.’

‘Very well. Open, Boldwood – shut, Teddy. No; it’s more likely to fall open. Open, Teddy – shut, Boldwood.’

The book went fluttering in the air and came down shut.

Bathsheba, a small yawn upon her mouth, took the pen, and with off-hand serenity directed the missive to Boldwood.

‘Now light a candle, Liddy. Which seal shall we use? Here’s a unicorn’s head – there’s nothing in that. What’s this? – two doves – no. It ought to be something extraordinary, ought it not, Lidd? Here’s one with a motto – I remember it is some funny one, but I can’t read it. We’ll try this, and if it doesn’t do we’ll have another.’

A large red seal was duly affixed. Bathsheba looked closely at the hot wax to discover the words.

‘Capital!’ she exclaimed, throwing down the letter frolicsomely. ‘’Twould upset the solemnity of a parson and clerk too.’

Liddy looked at the words of the seal, and read –

‘Marry Me.’

The same evening the letter was sent, and was duly sorted in Casterbridge post-office that night, to be returned to Weatherbury again in the morning.

So very idly and unreflectingly was this deed done. Of love as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.

Chapter 14

Effect of the letter – Sunrise

At dusk on the evening of St Valentine’s Day Boldwood sat down to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs. Upon the mantel-shelf before him was a time-piece, surmounted by a spread eagle, and upon the eagle’s wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent. Here the bachelor’s gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye; and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although they were too remote for his sight –

Marry Me.

The pert injunction was like those crystal substances, which, colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them. Here, in the quiet of Boldwood’s parlour, where everything that was not grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity, imbibed from their accessories now.

Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus – the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.

The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the latter was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all, Boldwood, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of the looking-glass. He was conscious of its presence, even when his back was turned upon it. It was the first time in Boldwood’s life that such an event had occurred. The same fascin ation that caused him to think it an act which had a deliberate motive prevented him from regarding it as an impertinence. He looked again at the direction. The mysterious influences of night invested the writing with the presence of the unknown writer. Somebody’s – some woman’s – hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name; her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her brain had seen him in imagination the while. Why should she have imagined him? Her mouth – were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? – had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went on – the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what had been the expression?

The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape, and well she might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound asleep and oblivious of all love and letter writing under the sky. Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to be a vision; when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.

The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind. His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reverse direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.

The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in comparison with the fact of its arrival. He suddenly wondered if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had withdrawn. He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope – searched it. Nothing more was there. Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: ‘Marry me,’ he said aloud.

The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck it in the frame of the glass. In doing so he caught sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form. He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were wide-spread and vacant. Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself for his nervous excitability, he returned to bed.

Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven was not equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose and dressed himself. He descended the stairs and went out towards the gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked around.

It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone. The whole effect resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.

In other directions the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, like tarnished brass.

Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with the polish of marble; how, in some portions of the slope, withered grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a short permanency.

A half-muffled noise of light wheels interrupted him. Boldwood turned back into the road. It was the mail-cart – a crazy two-wheeled vehicle, hardly heavy enough to resist a puff of wind. The driver held out a letter. Boldwood seized it and opened it, expecting another anonymous one – so greatly are people’s ideas of probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.

‘I don’t think it is for you, sir,’ said the man, when he saw Boldwood’s action. Though there is no name, I think it is for your shepherd.’

Boldwood looked then at the address –

To the New Shepherd, Weatherbury Farm, Near Casterbridge.

‘Oh – what a mistake! – it is not mine. Nor is it for my shepherd. It is for Miss Everdene’s. You had better take it on to him – Gabriel Oak – and say I opened it in mistake.’

At this moment on the ridge, up against the blazing sky, a figure was visible, like the black snuff in the midst of a candle-flame. Then it moved and began to bustle about vigorously from place to place, carrying square skeleton masses, which were riddled by the same rays. A small figure on all fours followed behind. The tall form was that of Gabriel Oak; the small one that of George; the articles in course of transit were hurdles.

‘Wait,’ said Boldwood. ‘That’s the man on the hill. I’ll take the letter to him myself.’

To Boldwood it was now no longer merely a letter to another man. It was an opportunity. Exhibiting a face pregnant with intention, he entered the snowy field Gabriel, at that minute, descended the hill towards the right. The glow stretched down in this direction now, and touched the distant roof of Warren’s Malthouse – whither the shepherd was apparently bent. Boldwood followed at a distance.

Chapter 15

A morning meeting – The letter again

The scarlet and orange light outside the malthouse did not penetrate to its interior, which was, as usual, lighted by a rival glow of similar hue, radiating from the hearth.

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