Far from the Madding Crowd

HE STORM—THE TWO TOGETHER

A light flapped over the scene, as if reflected from phosphorescent
wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled the air. It was the first
move of the approaching storm.

The second peal was noisy, with comparatively little visible lightning.
Gabriel saw a candle shining in Bathsheba’s bedroom, and soon a shadow
swept to and fro upon the blind.

Then there came a third flash. Manœuvres of a most extraordinary kind
were going on in the vast firmamental hollows overhead. The lightning
now was the colour of silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed
army. Rumbles became rattles. Gabriel from his elevated position could
see over the landscape at least half-a-dozen miles in front. Every
hedge, bush, and tree was distinct as in a line engraving. In a paddock
in the same direction was a herd of heifers, and the forms of these
were visible at this moment in the act of galloping about in the
wildest and maddest confusion, flinging their heels and tails high into
the air, their heads to earth. A poplar in the immediate foreground was
like an ink stroke on burnished tin. Then the picture vanished, leaving
the darkness so intense that Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with
his hands.

He had stuck his ricking-rod, or poniard, as it was indifferently
called—a long iron lance, polished by handling—into the stack, used to
support the sheaves instead of the support called a groom used on
houses. A blue light appeared in the zenith, and in some indescribable
manner flickered down near the top of the rod. It was the fourth of the
larger flashes. A moment later and there was a smack—smart, clear, and
short. Gabriel felt his position to be anything but a safe one, and he
resolved to descend.

Not a drop of rain had fallen as yet. He wiped his weary brow, and
looked again at the black forms of the unprotected stacks. Was his life
so valuable to him after all? What were his prospects that he should be
so chary of running risk, when important and urgent labour could not be
carried on without such risk? He resolved to stick to the stack.
However, he took a precaution. Under the staddles was a long tethering
chain, used to prevent the escape of errant horses. This he carried up
the ladder, and sticking his rod through the clog at one end, allowed
the other end of the chain to trail upon the ground. The spike attached
to it he drove in. Under the shadow of this extemporized
lightning-conductor he felt himself comparatively safe.

Before Oak had laid his hands upon his tools again out leapt the fifth
flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend. It was
green as an emerald, and the reverberation was stunning. What was this
the light revealed to him? In the open ground before him, as he looked
over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently female form.
Could it be that of the only venturesome woman in the parish—Bathsheba?
The form moved on a step: then he could see no more.

“Is that you, ma’am?” said Gabriel to the darkness.

“Who is there?” said the voice of Bathsheba.

“Gabriel. I am on the rick, thatching.”

“Oh, Gabriel!—and are you? I have come about them. The weather awoke
me, and I thought of the corn. I am so distressed about it—can we save
it anyhow? I cannot find my husband. Is he with you?”

“He is not here.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Asleep in the barn.”

“He promised that the stacks should be seen to, and now they are all
neglected! Can I do anything to help? Liddy is afraid to come out.
Fancy finding you here at such an hour! Surely I can do something?”

“You can bring up some reed-sheaves to me, one by one, ma’am; if you
are not afraid to come up the ladder in the dark,” said Gabriel. “Every
moment is precious now, and that would save a good deal of time. It is
not very dark when the lightning has been gone a bit.”

“I’ll do anything!” she said, resolutely. She instantly took a sheaf
upon her shoulder, clambered up close to his heels, placed it behind
the rod, and descended for another. At her third ascent the rick
suddenly brightened with the brazen glare of shining majolica—every
knot in every straw was visible. On the slope in front of him appeared
two human shapes, black as jet. The rick lost its sheen—the shapes
vanished. Gabriel turned his head. It had been the sixth flash which
had come from the east behind him, and the two dark forms on the slope
had been the shadows of himself and Bathsheba.

Then came the peal. It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light
could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

“How terrible!” she exclaimed, and clutched him by the sleeve. Gabriel
turned, and steadied her on her aerial perch by holding her arm. At the
same moment, while he was still reversed in his attitude, there was
more light, and he saw, as it were, a copy of the tall poplar tree on
the hill drawn in black on the wall of the barn. It was the shadow of
that tree, thrown across by a secondary flash in the west.

The next flare came. Bathsheba was on the ground now, shouldering
another sheaf, and she bore its dazzle without flinching—thunder and
all—and again ascended with the load. There was then a silence
everywhere for four or five minutes, and the crunch of the spars, as
Gabriel hastily drove them in, could again be distinctly heard. He
thought the crisis of the storm had passed. But there came a burst of
light.

“Hold on!” said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder, and
grasping her arm again.

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its
inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could
only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east,
west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of
skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones—dancing,
leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in
unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes
of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light.
Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be
called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more
of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. In the meantime
one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel’s rod,
to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth. Gabriel
was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba’s warm arm tremble in
his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life,
everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition
with an infuriated universe.

Oak had hardly time to gather up these impressions into a thought, and
to see how strangely the red feather of her hat shone in this light,
when the tall tree on the hill before mentioned seemed on fire to a
white heat, and a new one among these terrible voices mingled with the
last crash of those preceding. It was a stupefying blast, harsh and
pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, flat blow, without
that reverberation which lends the tones of a drum to more distant
thunder. By the lustre reflected from every part of the earth and from
the wide domical scoop above it, he saw that the tree was sliced down
the whole length of its tall, straight stem, a huge riband of bark
being apparently flung off. The other portion remained erect, and
revealed the bared surface as a strip of white down the front. The
lightning had struck the tree. A sulphurous smell filled the air; then
all was silent, and black as a cave in Hinnom.

“We had a narrow escape!” said Gabriel, hurriedly. “You had better go
down.”

Bathsheba said nothing; but he could distinctly hear her rhythmical
pants, and the recurrent rustle of the sheaf beside her in response to
her frightened pulsations. She descended the ladder, and, on second
thoughts, he followed her. The darkness was now impenetrable by the
sharpest vision. They both stood still at the bottom, side by side.
Bathsheba appeared to think only of the weather—Oak thought only of her
just then. At last he said—

“The storm seems to have passed now, at any rate.”

“I think so too,” said Bathsheba. “Though there are multitudes of
gleams, look!”

The sky was now filled with an incessant light, frequent repetition
melting into complete continuity, as an unbroken sound results from the
successive strokes on a gong.

“Nothing serious,” said he. “I cannot understand no rain falling. But
Heaven be praised, it is all the better for us. I am now going up
again.”

“Gabriel, you are kinder than I deserve! I will stay and help you yet.
Oh, why are not some of the others here!”

“They would have been here if they could,” said Oak, in a hesitating
way.

“O, I know it all—all,” she said, adding slowly: “They are all asleep
in the barn, in a drunken sleep, and my husband among them. That’s it,
is it not? Don’t think I am a timid woman and can’t endure things.”

“I am not certain,” said Gabriel. “I will go and see.”

He crossed to the barn, leaving her there alone. He looked through the
chinks of the door. All was in total darkness, as he had left it, and
there still arose, as at the former time, the steady buzz of many
snores.

He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned. It was
Bathsheba’s breath—she had followed him, and was looking into the same
chink.

He endeavoured to put off the immediate and painful subject of their
thoughts by remarking gently, “If you’ll come back again, miss—ma’am,
and hand up a few more; it would save much time.”

Then Oak went back again, ascended to the top, stepped off the ladder
for greater expedition, and went on thatching. She followed, but
without a sheaf.

“Gabriel,” she said, in a strange and impressive voice.

Oak looked up at her. She had not spoken since he left the barn. The
soft and continual shimmer of the dying lightning showed a marble face
high against the black sky of the opposite quarter. Bathsheba was
sitting almost on the apex of the stack, her feet gathered up beneath
her, and resting on the top round of the ladder.

“Yes, mistress,” he said.

“I suppose you thought that when I galloped away to Bath that night it
was on purpose to be married?”

“I did at last—not at first,” he answered, somewhat surprised at the
abruptness with which this new subject was broached.

“And others thought so, too?”

“Yes.”

“And you blamed me for it?”

“Well—a little.”

“I thought so. Now, I care a little for your good opinion, and I want
to explain something—I have longed to do it ever since I returned, and
you looked so gravely at me. For if I were to die—and I may die soon—it
would be dreadful that you should always think mistakenly of me. Now,
listen.”

Gabriel ceased his rustling.

“I went to Bath that night in the full intention of breaking off my
engagement to Mr. Troy. It was owing to circumstances which occurred
after I got there that—that we were married. Now, do you see the matter
in a new light?”

“I do—somewhat.”

“I must, I suppose, say more, now that I have begun. And perhaps it’s
no harm, for you are certainly under no delusion that I ever loved you,
or that I can have any object in speaking, more than that object I have
mentioned. Well, I was alone in a strange city, and the horse was lame.
And at last I didn’t know what to do. I saw, when it was too late, that
scandal might seize hold of me for meeting him alone in that way. But I
was coming away, when he suddenly said he had that day seen a woman
more beautiful than I, and that his constancy could not be counted on
unless I at once became his.... And I was grieved and troubled—” She
cleared her voice, and waited a moment, as if to gather breath. “And
then, between jealousy and distraction, I married him!” she whispered
with desperate impetuosity.

Gabriel made no reply.

“He was not to blame, for it was perfectly true about—about his seeing
somebody else,” she quickly added. “And now I don’t wish for a single
remark from you upon the subject—indeed, I forbid it. I only wanted you
to know that misunderstood bit of my history before a time comes when
you could never know it.—You want some more sheaves?”

She went down the ladder, and the work proceeded. Gabriel soon
perceived a languor in the movements of his mistress up and down, and
he said to her, gently as a mother—

“I think you had better go indoors now, you are tired. I can finish the
rest alone. If the wind does not change the rain is likely to keep
off.”

“If I am useless I will go,” said Bathsheba, in a flagging cadence.
“But O, if your life should be lost!”

“You are not useless; but I would rather not tire you longer. You have
done well.”

“And you better!” she said, gratefully. “Thank you for your devotion, a
thousand times, Gabriel! Goodnight—I know you are doing your very best
for me.”

She diminished in the gloom, and vanished, and he heard the latch of
the gate fall as she passed through. He worked in a reverie now, musing
upon her story, and upon the contradictoriness of that feminine heart
which had caused her to speak more warmly to him to-night than she ever
had done whilst unmarried and free to speak as warmly as she chose.

He was disturbed in his meditation by a grating noise from the
coach-house. It was the vane on the roof turning round, and this change
in the wind was the signal for a disastrous rain.