Far from the Madding Crowd

LAME—FURY

The next evening Bathsheba, with the idea of getting out of the way of
Mr. Boldwood in the event of his returning to answer her note in
person, proceeded to fulfil an engagement made with Liddy some few
hours earlier. Bathsheba’s companion, as a gauge of their
reconciliation, had been granted a week’s holiday to visit her sister,
who was married to a thriving hurdler and cattle-crib-maker living in a
delightful labyrinth of hazel copse not far beyond Yalbury. The
arrangement was that Miss Everdene should honour them by coming there
for a day or two to inspect some ingenious contrivances which this man
of the woods had introduced into his wares.

Leaving her instructions with Gabriel and Maryann, that they were to
see everything carefully locked up for the night, she went out of the
house just at the close of a timely thunder-shower, which had refined
the air, and daintily bathed the coat of the land, though all beneath
was dry as ever. Freshness was exhaled in an essence from the varied
contours of bank and hollow, as if the earth breathed maiden breath;
and the pleased birds were hymning to the scene. Before her, among the
clouds, there was a contrast in the shape of lairs of fierce light
which showed themselves in the neighbourhood of a hidden sun, lingering
on to the farthest north-west corner of the heavens that this midsummer
season allowed.

She had walked nearly two miles of her journey, watching how the day
was retreating, and thinking how the time of deeds was quietly melting
into the time of thought, to give place in its turn to the time of
prayer and sleep, when she beheld advancing over Yalbury hill the very
man she sought so anxiously to elude. Boldwood was stepping on, not
with that quiet tread of reserved strength which was his customary
gait, in which he always seemed to be balancing two thoughts. His
manner was stunned and sluggish now.

Boldwood had for the first time been awakened to woman’s privileges in
tergiversation even when it involves another person’s possible blight.
That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than
her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that
these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for
consistency’s sake, and accept him, though her fancy might not flood
him with the iridescent hues of uncritical love. But the argument now
came back as sorry gleams from a broken mirror. The discovery was no
less a scourge than a surprise.

He came on looking upon the ground, and did not see Bathsheba till they
were less than a stone’s throw apart. He looked up at the sound of her
pit-pat, and his changed appearance sufficiently denoted to her the
depth and strength of the feelings paralyzed by her letter.

“Oh; is it you, Mr. Boldwood?” she faltered, a guilty warmth pulsing in
her face.

Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means
more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not
on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an
ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that
they avoid the pathway of sound. Boldwood’s look was unanswerable.

Seeing she turned a little aside, he said, “What, are you afraid of
me?”

“Why should you say that?” said Bathsheba.

“I fancied you looked so,” said he. “And it is most strange, because of
its contrast with my feeling for you.”

She regained self-possession, fixed her eyes calmly, and waited.

“You know what that feeling is,” continued Boldwood, deliberately. “A
thing strong as death. No dismissal by a hasty letter affects that.”

“I wish you did not feel so strongly about me,” she murmured. “It is
generous of you, and more than I deserve, but I must not hear it now.”

“Hear it? What do you think I have to say, then? I am not to marry you,
and that’s enough. Your letter was excellently plain. I want you to
hear nothing—not I.”

Bathsheba was unable to direct her will into any definite groove for
freeing herself from this fearfully awkward position. She confusedly
said, “Good evening,” and was moving on. Boldwood walked up to her
heavily and dully.

“Bathsheba—darling—is it final indeed?”

“Indeed it is.”

“Oh, Bathsheba—have pity upon me!” Boldwood burst out. “God’s sake,
yes—I am come to that low, lowest stage—to ask a woman for pity! Still,
she is you—she is you.”

Bathsheba commanded herself well. But she could hardly get a clear
voice for what came instinctively to her lips: “There is little honour
to the woman in that speech.” It was only whispered, for something
unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this spectacle of a
man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated
the feminine instinct for punctilios.

“I am beyond myself about this, and am mad,” he said. “I am no stoic at
all to be supplicating here; but I do supplicate to you. I wish you
knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible, that. In
bare human mercy to a lonely man, don’t throw me off now!”

“I don’t throw you off—indeed, how can I? I never had you.” In her
noon-clear sense that she had never loved him she forgot for a moment
her thoughtless angle on that day in February.

“But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! I
don’t reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold
darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by
that letter—valentine you call it—would have been worse than my
knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say, there
was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing for you, and
yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no encouragement, I
cannot but contradict you.”

“What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute. I
have bitterly repented of it—ay, bitterly, and in tears. Can you still
go on reminding me?”

“I don’t accuse you of it—I deplore it. I took for earnest what you
insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful,
wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling
was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I but have
foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how
I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I
cannot do that, for I love you too well! But it is weak, idle
drivelling to go on like this.... Bathsheba, you are the first woman of
any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the
having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so
hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don’t speak now to move
your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that.
I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you.”

“But I do pity you—deeply—O, so deeply!” she earnestly said.

“Do no such thing—do no such thing. Your dear love, Bathsheba, is such
a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as well as
your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the gain of your
pity make it sensibly less. O sweet—how dearly you spoke to me behind
the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn at the shearing, and
that dearest last time in the evening at your home! Where are your
pleasant words all gone—your earnest hope to be able to love me? Where
is your firm conviction that you would get to care for me very much?
Really forgotten?—really?”

She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the face, and
said in her low, firm voice, “Mr. Boldwood, I promised you nothing.
Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest,
highest compliment a man can pay a woman—telling her he loves her? I
was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless shrew.
Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day—the day just for the
pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to all other men was
death to you? Have reason, do, and think more kindly of me!”

“Well, never mind arguing—never mind. One thing is sure: you were all
but mine, and now you are not nearly mine. Everything is changed, and
that by you alone, remember. You were nothing to me once, and I was
contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the
second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me
up, since it was only to throw me down!”

Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel unmistakable signs
that she was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably against
this femininity which would insist upon supplying unbidden emotions in
stronger and stronger current. She had tried to elude agitation by
fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object before her eyes,
whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not save her now.

“I did not take you up—surely I did not!” she answered as heroically as
she could. “But don’t be in this mood with me. I can endure being told
I am in the wrong, if you will only tell it me gently! O sir, will you
not kindly forgive me, and look at it cheerfully?”

“Cheerfully! Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a reason for
being merry? If I have lost, how can I be as if I had won? Heavens you
must be heartless quite! Had I known what a fearfully bitter sweet this
was to be, how I would have avoided you, and never seen you, and been
deaf of you. I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don’t
care.”

She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and swayed her
head desperately, as if to thrust away the words as they came showering
about her ears from the lips of the trembling man in the climax of
life, with his bronzed Roman face and fine frame.

“Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of
recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly for you again. Forget
that you have said No, and let it be as it was! Say, Bathsheba, that
you only wrote that refusal to me in fun—come, say it to me!”

“It would be untrue, and painful to both of us. You overrate my
capacity for love. I don’t possess half the warmth of nature you
believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten
gentleness out of me.”

He immediately said with more resentment: “That may be true, somewhat;
but ah, Miss Everdene, it won’t do as a reason! You are not the cold
woman you would have me believe. No, no! It isn’t because you have no
feeling in you that you don’t love me. You naturally would have me
think so—you would hide from me that you have a burning heart like
mine. You have love enough, but it is turned into a new channel. I know
where.”

The swift music of her heart became hubbub now, and she throbbed to
extremity. He was coming to Troy. He did then know what had occurred!
And the name fell from his lips the next moment.

“Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?” he asked, fiercely. “When I
had no thought of injuring him, why did he force himself upon your
notice! Before he worried you your inclination was to have me; when
next I should have come to you your answer would have been Yes. Can you
deny it—I ask, can you deny it?”

She delayed the reply, but was too honest to withhold it. “I cannot,”
she whispered.

“I know you cannot. But he stole in in my absence and robbed me. Why
didn’t he win you away before, when nobody would have been
grieved?—when nobody would have been set tale-bearing. Now the people
sneer at me—the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush
shamefully for my folly. I have lost my respect, my good name, my
standing—lost it, never to get it again. Go and marry your man—go on!”

“Oh sir—Mr. Boldwood!”

“You may as well. I have no further claim upon you. As for me, I had
better go somewhere alone, and hide—and pray. I loved a woman once. I
am now ashamed. When I am dead they’ll say, miserable love-sick man
that he was. Heaven—heaven—if I had got jilted secretly, and the
dishonour not known, and my position kept! But no matter, it is gone,
and the woman not gained. Shame upon him—shame!”

His unreasonable anger terrified her, and she glided from him, without
obviously moving, as she said, “I am only a girl—do not speak to me
so!”

“All the time you knew—how very well you knew—that your new freak was
my misery. Dazzled by brass and scarlet—Oh, Bathsheba—this is woman’s
folly indeed!”

She fired up at once. “You are taking too much upon yourself!” she
said, vehemently. “Everybody is upon me—everybody. It is unmanly to
attack a woman so! I have nobody in the world to fight my battles for
me; but no mercy is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say
things against me, I will not be put down!”

“You’ll chatter with him doubtless about me. Say to him, ‘Boldwood
would have died for me.’ Yes, and you have given way to him, knowing
him to be not the man for you. He has kissed you—claimed you as his. Do
you hear—he has kissed you. Deny it!”

The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although Boldwood
was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self rendered into another
sex, Bathsheba’s cheek quivered. She gasped, “Leave me, sir—leave me! I
am nothing to you. Let me go on!”

“Deny that he has kissed you.”

“I shall not.”

“Ha—then he has!” came hoarsely from the farmer.

“He has,” she said, slowly, and, in spite of her fear, defiantly. “I am
not ashamed to speak the truth.”

“Then curse him; and curse him!” said Boldwood, breaking into a
whispered fury. “Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand,
you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and—kiss you!
Heaven’s mercy—kiss you!... Ah, a time of his life shall come when he
will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused
another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn—as I
do now!”

“Don’t, don’t, oh, don’t pray down evil upon him!” she implored in a
miserable cry. “Anything but that—anything. Oh, be kind to him, sir,
for I love him true!”

Boldwood’s ideas had reached that point of fusion at which outline and
consistency entirely disappear. The impending night appeared to
concentrate in his eye. He did not hear her at all now.

“I’ll punish him—by my soul, that will I! I’ll meet him, soldier or no,
and I’ll horsewhip the untimely stripling for this reckless theft of my
one delight. If he were a hundred men I’d horsewhip him—” He dropped
his voice suddenly and unnaturally. “Bathsheba, sweet, lost coquette,
pardon me! I’ve been blaming you, threatening you, behaving like a
churl to you, when he’s the greatest sinner. He stole your dear heart
away with his unfathomable lies!... It is a fortunate thing for him
that he’s gone back to his regiment—that he’s away up the country, and
not here! I hope he may not return here just yet. I pray God he may not
come into my sight, for I may be tempted beyond myself. Oh, Bathsheba,
keep him away—yes, keep him away from me!”

For a moment Boldwood stood so inertly after this that his soul seemed
to have been entirely exhaled with the breath of his passionate words.
He turned his face away, and withdrew, and his form was soon covered
over by the twilight as his footsteps mixed in with the low hiss of the
leafy trees.

Bathsheba, who had been standing motionless as a model all this latter
time, flung her hands to her face, and wildly attempted to ponder on
the exhibition which had just passed away. Such astounding wells of
fevered feeling in a still man like Mr. Boldwood were incomprehensible,
dreadful. Instead of being a man trained to repression he was—what she
had seen him.

The force of the farmer’s threats lay in their relation to a
circumstance known at present only to herself: her lover was coming
back to Weatherbury in the course of the very next day or two. Troy had
not returned to his distant barracks as Boldwood and others supposed,
but had merely gone to visit some acquaintance in Bath, and had yet a
week or more remaining to his furlough.

She felt wretchedly certain that if he revisited her just at this nick
of time, and came into contact with Boldwood, a fierce quarrel would be
the consequence. She panted with solicitude when she thought of
possible injury to Troy. The least spark would kindle the farmer’s
swift feelings of rage and jealousy; he would lose his self-mastery as
he had this evening; Troy’s blitheness might become aggressive; it
might take the direction of derision, and Boldwood’s anger might then
take the direction of revenge.

With almost a morbid dread of being thought a gushing girl, this
guileless woman too well concealed from the world under a manner of
carelessness the warm depths of her strong emotions. But now there was
no reserve. In her distraction, instead of advancing further she walked
up and down, beating the air with her fingers, pressing on her brow,
and sobbing brokenly to herself. Then she sat down on a heap of stones
by the wayside to think. There she remained long. Above the dark margin
of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud,
bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine
glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round
to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and
palpitating stars. She gazed upon their silent throes amid the shades
of space, but realised none at all. Her troubled spirit was far away
with Troy.