Far from the Madding Crowd

FFECT 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 fascination 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 reversed 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 this
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.