were arranged in a line on the outside of the coping,
the remainder within the enclosure of the grave. The
crocuses and hyacinths were to grow in rows; some of
the summer flowers he placed over her head and feet,
the lilies and forget-me-nots over her heart. The
remainder were dispersed in the spaces between these.
Troy, in his prostration at this time, had no percep-
tion that in the futility of these romantic doings, dictated
by a remorseful reaction from previous indifference, there
was any element of absurdity. Deriving his idiosyn-
crasies from both sides of the Channel, he showed at
such junctures as the present the inelasticity of the
Englishman, together with that blindness to the line
where sentiment verges on mawkishness, characteristic
of the French.
lt was a cloudy, muggy, and very dark night, and
the rays from Troy's lantern spread into the two old
yews with a strange illuminating power, flickering, as it
seemed, up to the black ceiling of cloud above. He
felt a large drop of rain upon the back of his hand, and
presently one came and entered one of the holes of the
lantern, whereupon the candle sputtered and went out-
Troy was weary and it being now not far from midnight,
and the rain threatening to increase, he resolved to leave
the finishing touches of his labour until the day should
break. He groped along the wall and over the graves
in the dark till he found himself round at the north side.
Here he entered the porch, and, reclining upon the
bench within, fell asleep.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS
THE tower of Weatherbury Church was a square
erection of fourteenth-century date, having two stone
gurgoyles on each of the four faces of its parapet. Of
these eight carved protuberances only two at this time
continued to serve the purpose of their erection - that
of spouting the water from the lead roof within. One
mouth in each front had been closed by bygone church-
wardens as superfluous, and two others were broken
away and choked - a matter not of much consequence
to the wellbeing of the tower, for the two mouths which
still remained open and active were gaping enough to do
all the work.
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer
criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the
power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque;
and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no
disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a
somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental
parapet in parish as distinct from cathedral churches,
and the gurgoyles, which are the necessary correlatives
of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent - of the
boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most
original design that a human brain could conceive.
There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion
which is less the characteristic of British than of
Continental grotesques of the period. All the eight
were different from each other. A beholder was con-
vinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous
than those he saw on the north side until he went
round to the south. Of the two on this latter face, only
that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story. It
was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish
to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not
enough like a bird to be called a griffin. This horrible
stone entity was fashioned as if covered with a wrinkled
hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes starting from their
sockets, and its fingers and hands were seizing the
corners of its mouth, which they thus seemed to pull
open to give free passage to the water it vomited. The
lower row of teeth was quite washed away, though the
upper still remained. Here and thus, jutting a couple
of feet from the wall against which its feet rested as a
support, the creature had for four hundred years
laughed at the surrounding landscape, voicelessly in
dry weather, and in wet with a gurgling and snorting
sound.
Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased
outside. Presently the gurgoyle spat. In due time a
small stream began to trickle through the seventy feet
of aerial space between its mouth and the ground, which
the water-drops smote like duckshot in their accelerated
velocity. The stream thickened in substance, and in-
creased in power, gradually spouting further and yet
further from the side of the tower. When the rain fell
in a steady and ceaseless torrent the stream dashed
downward in volumes.
We follow its course to the ground at this point of
time. The end of the liquid parabola has come forward
from the wall, has advanced over the plinth mouldings,
over a heap of stones, over the marble border, into the
midst of Fanny Robin's grave.
The force of the stream had, until very lately, been
received upon some loose stones spread thereabout,
which had acted as a shield to the soil under the onset.
These during the summer had been cleared from the
ground, and there was now nothing to resist the down-
fall but the bare earth. For several years the stream
had not spouted so far from the tower as it was doing
on this night, and such a contingency had been over-
looked. Sometimes this obscure corner received no
inhabitant for the space of two or three years, and
then it was usually but a pauper, a poacher, or other
sinner of undignified sins.
The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws
directed all its vengeance into the grave. The rich
tawny mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like
chocolate. The water accumulated and washed deeper
down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into
the night as the head and chief among other noises of
the kind created by the deluging rain. The flowers so
carefully planted by Fanny's repentant lover began to
move and writhe in their bed. The winter-violets
turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of
mud. Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in
the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants
of the tufted species were loosened, rose to the surface,
and floated of.
Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it
was broad day. Not having been in bed for two nights
his shoulders felt stiff his feet tender, and his head
heavy. He remembered his position, arose, shivered,
took the spade, and again went out.
The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining
through the green, brown, and yellow leaves, now
sparkling and varnished by the raindrops to the bright-
ness of similar effects in the landscapes of Ruysdael and
Hobbema, and full of all those infinite beauties that
arise from the union of water and colour with high
lights. The air was rendered so transparent by the
heavy fall of rain that the autumn hues of the middle
distance were as rich as those near at hand, and the
remote fields intercepted by the angle of the tower ap-
peared in the same plane as the tower itself.
He entered the gravel path which would take him
behind the tower. The path, instead of being stony as
it had been the night before, was browned over with a
thin coating of mud. At one place in the path he saw
a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a
bundle of tendons. He picked it up - surely it could
not be one of the primroses he had planted? He saw
a bulb, another, and another as he advanced. Beyond
doubt they were the crocuses. With a face of perplexed
dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld the
wreck the stream had made.
The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the
ground, and in its place was a hollow. The disturbed
earth was washed over the grass and pathway in the
guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it
spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains.
Nearly all the flowers were washed clean out of the
ground, and they lay, roots upwards, on the spots whither
they had been splashed by the stream.
Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his
teeth closely, and his compressed lips moved as those of
one in great pain. This singular accident, by a strange
confluence of emotions in him, was felt as the sharpest
sting of all. Troy's face was very expressive, and any
observer who had seen him now would hardly have
believed him to be a man who had laughed, and sung,
and poured love-trifles into a woman's ear. To curse
his miserable lot was at first his impulse, but even that
lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whose
absence was necessarily antecedent to the existence of the
morbid misery which wrung him. The sight, coming
as it did, superimposed upon the other dark scenery of
the previous days, formed a sort of climax to the whole
panorama, and it was more than he could endure.
Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding
grief by simply adjourning it. He could put off the
consideration of any particular spectre till the matter
had become old and softened by time. The planting
of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a
species of elusion of the primary grief, and now it was
as if his intention had been known and circumvented.
Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood
by this dismantled grave, wished himself another man.
lt is seldom that a person with much animal spirit does
not feel that the fact of his life being his own is the one
qualification which singles it out as a more hopeful life
than that of others who may actually resemble him in
every particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way,
hundreds of times, that he could not envy other people
their condition, because the possession of that condition
would have necessitated a different personality, when he
desired no other than his own. He had not minded
the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his life,
the meteorlike uncertainty of all that related to him,
because these appertained to the hero of his story,
without whom there would have been no story at all for
him; and it seemed to be only in the nature of things
that matters would right themselves at some proper date
and wind up well. This very morning the illusion
completed its disappearance, and, as it were, all of a
sudden, Troy hated himself. The suddenness was
probably more apparent than real. A coral reef which
just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the
horizon than if it had never been begun, and the mere
finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event
which has long been potentially an accomplished thing.
He stood and mediated - a miserable man. Whither
should he go? " He that is accursed, let him be accursed
still." was the pitiless anathema written in this spoliated
effort of his new-born solicitousness. A man who has
spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction
has not much spirit left for reversing his course. Troy
had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the merest
opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would
have been hard enough under the greatest providential
encouragement; but to find that Providence, far from
helping him into a new course, or showing any wish
that he might adopt one, actually jeered his first trembling
and critical attempt in that kind, was more than nature
could bear.
He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not
attempt to fill up the hole, replace the flowers, or do
anything at all. He simply threw up his cards and
forswore his game for that time and always. Going out
of the churchyard silently and unobserved - none of the
villagers having yet risen - he passed down some fields
at the back, and emerged just as secretly upon the high
road. Shortly afterwards he had gone from the village.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner
in the attic. The door was kept locked, except during
the entries and exits of Liddy, for whom a bed had
been arranged in a small adjoining room. The light
of Troy's lantern in the churchyard was noticed about
ten o'clock by the maid-servant, who casually glanced
from the window in that direction whilst taking her
supper, and she called Bathsheba's attention to it.
They looked curiously at the phenomenon for a time,
until Liddy was sent to bed.
bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night.
When her attendant was unconscious and softly breath-
ing in the next room, the mistress of the house was
still looking out of the window at the faint gleam
spreading from among the trees - not in a steady shine,
but blinking like a revolving coastlight, though this
appearance failed to suggest to her that a person was
passing and repassing in front of it. Bathsheba sat
here till it began to rain, and the light vanished, when
she withdrew to lie restlessly in her bed and re-enact
in a worn mind the lurid scene of yesternight.
Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared
she arose again, and opened the window to obtain a full
breathing of the new morning air, the panes being now
wet with trembling tears left by the night rain, each
one rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-
hued slashes through a cloud low down in the awaken-
ing sky. From the trees came the sound of steady
dripping upon the drifted leaves under them, and from
the direction of the church she could hear another noise
- peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl
of water falling into a pool.
Liddy knocked at eight o'clock, and Bathsheba un-
locked the door.
"What a heavy rain we've had in the night, ma'am!"
said Liddy, when her inquiries about breakfast had been
made.
"Yes, very heavy."
"Did you hear the strange noise from the church
yard?"
"I heard one strange noise. I've been thinking it
must have been the water from the tower spouts."
"Well, that's what the shepherd was saying, ma'am.
He's now gone on to see."
"Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!"
"Only just looked in in passing - quite in his old way,
which I thought he had left off lately. But the tower
spouts used to spatter on the stones, and we are puzzled,
for this was like the boiling of a pot."
Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked
Liddy to stay and breakfast with her. The tongue of the
more childish woman still ran upon recent events. "Are
you going across to the church, ma'am?" she asked.
"Not that I know of." said Bathsheba.
"I thought you might like to go and see where they
have put Fanny. The trees hide the place from your
window."
Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her
husband. "Has Mr. Troy been in to-night?" she said
"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth.
Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with
it a much diminished perspective of him and his deeds;
there were thirteen miles interval betwixt them now.
She hated questioning Liddy about her husband's
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided
doing so; but now all the house knew that there had
been some dreadful disagreement between them, and
it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any
appreciative regard for public opinion.
"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.
"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this
morning before breakfast."
Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward
heaviness of the past twenty-four hours which had
quenched the vitality of youth in her without sub-
stituting the philosophy of maturer years, and the
resolved to go out and walk a little way. So when
breakfast was over, she put on her bonnet, and took
a direction towards the church. It was nine o'clock,
and the men having returned to work again from their
first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in
the road. Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the
reprobates' quarter of the graveyard, called in the parish
"behind church." which was invisible from the road, it
was impossible to resist the impulse to enter and look
upon a spot which, from nameless feelings, she at the
same time dreaded to see. She had been unable to
overcome an impression that some connection existed
between her rival and the light through the trees.
Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole
and the tomb, its delicately veined surface splashed and
stained just as Troy had seen it and left it two hours
earlier. On the other side of the scene stood Gabriel.
His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her arrival
having been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his
attention. Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the
grand tomb and the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and
she looked on both sides and around for some humbler
mound, earthed up and clodded in the usual way. Then
her eye followed Oak's, and she read the words with
which the inscription opened: -
"Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of
Fanny Robin."
Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly
and learn how she received this knowledge of the
authorship of the work, which to himself had caused
considerable astonishment. But such discoveries did
not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed
to have become the commonplaces of her history, and
she bade him good morning, and asked him to fill in
the hole with the spade which was standing by. Whilst
Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba collected the
flowers, and began planting them with that sympathetic
manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous
in a woman's gardening, and which flowers seem to
understand and thrive upon. She requested Oak to
get the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the
mouth of the gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon
them, that by this means the stream might be directed
sideways, and a repetition of the accident prevented.
Finally, with the superfluous magnanimity of a woman
whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness
upon her instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from
the tomb as if she rather liked its words than otherwise,
CHAPTER XLVII
ADVENTURES BY THE SHORE
TROY wandered along towards the south. A composite
feeling, made up of disgust with the, to him, humdrum
tediousness of a farmer's life, gloomily images of her who
lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a general averseness
to his wife's society, impelled him to seek a home in any
place on earth save Weatherbury. The sad accessories
of Fanny's end confronted him as vivid pictures which
threatened to be indelible, and made life in Bathsheba's
house intolerable. At three in the afternoon he found
himself at the foot of a slope more than a mile in length,
which ran to the ridge of a range of hills lying parallel
with the shore, and forming a monotonous barrier between
the basin of cultivated country inland and the wilder
scenery of the coast. Up the hill stretched a road
nearly straight and perfectly white, the two sides
approaching each other in a gradual taper till they
met the sky at the top about two miles off. Through-
out the length of this narrow and irksome inclined plane
not a sign of life was visible on this garish afternoon
Troy toiled up the road with a languor and depression
greater than any he had experienced for many a day
and year before. The air was warm and muggy, and
the top seemed to recede as he approached.
At last he reached the summit, and a wide and
novel prospect burst upon him with an effect almost like
that of the Pacific upon Balboa's gaze. The broad
steely sea, marked only by faint lines, which had a
semblance of being etched thereon to a degree not deep
enough to disturb its general evenness, stretched the
whole width of his front and round to the right, where,
near the town and port of Budmouth, the sun bristled
down upon it, and banished all colour, to substitute in
its place a clear oily polish. Nothing moved in sky,
land, or sea, except a frill of milkwhite foam along the
nearer angles of the shore, shreds of which licked the
contiguous stones like tongues.
He descended and came to a small basin of sea
enclosed by the cliffs. Troy's nature freshened within
him; he thought he would rest and bathe here before
going farther. He undressed and plunged in. Inside
the cove the water was uninteresting to a swimmer,
being smooth as a pond, and to get a little of the ocean
swell, Troy presently swam between the two projecting
spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to
this miniature Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Troy
a current unknown to him existed outside, which, un-
important to craft of any burden, was awkward for a
swimmer who might be taken in it unawares. Troy
found himself carried to the left and then round in a
swoop out to sea.
He now recollected the place and its sinister
character. Many bathers had there prayed for a dry
death from time to time, and, like Gonzalo also, had
been unanswered; and Troy began to deem it possible
that he might be added to their number. Not a boat
of any kind was at present within sight, but far in the
distance Budmouth lay upon the sea, as it were quietly
regarding his efforts, and beside the town the harbour
showed its position by a dim meshwork of ropes and
spars. After wellnigh exhausting himself in attempts
to get back to the mouth of the cove, in his weakness
swimming several inches deeper than was his wont,
keeping up his breathing entirely by his nostrils, turning
upon his back a dozen times over, swimming EN PAPILLON
and so on, Troy resolved as a last resource to tread
water at a slight incline, and so endeavour to reach the
shore at any point, merely giving himself a gentle
impetus inwards whilst carried on in the general direc-
tion of the tide. This, necessarily a slow process, he
found to be not altogether so difficult, and though there
was no choice of a landing-place - the objects on shore
passing by him in a sad and slow procession - he per-
ceptibly approached the extremity of a spit of land yet
further to the right, now well defined against the sunny
portion of the horizon. While the swimmer's eye's were
fixed upon the spit as his only means of salvation on
this side of the Unknown, a moving object broke the
outline of the extremity, and immediately a ship's boat
appeared manned with several sailor lads, her bows
towards the sea.
All Troy's vigour spasmodically revived to prolong
the struggle yet a little further. Swimming with his
right arm, he held up his left to hail them, splashing
upon the waves, and shouting with all his might. From
the position of the setting sun his white form was
distinctly visible upon the now deep-hued bosom of the
sea to the east of the boat, and the men saw him at
once. Backing their oars and putting the boat about,
they pulled towards him with a will, and in five or six
minutes from the time of his first halloo, two of the
sailors hauled him in over the stern.
They formed part of a brig's crew, and had come
ashore for sand. Lending him what little clothing they
could spare among them as a slight protection against
late they made again towards the roadstead where their
And now night drooped slowly upon the wide watery
levels in front; and at no great distance from them,
where the shoreline curved round, and formed a long
riband of shade upon the horizon, a series of points of
yellow light began to start into existence, denoting the
spot to be the site of Budmouth, where the lamps were
being lighted along the parade. The cluck of their
oars was the only sound of any distinctness upon the
sea, and as they laboured amid the thickening shades
the lamplights grew larger, each appearing to send a
flaming sword deep down into the waves before it, until
there arose, among other dim shapes of the kind, the
form of the vessel for which they were bound.
CHAPTER XLVIII
DOUBTS ARISE - DOUBTS LINGER
BATHSHEBA underwent the enlargement of her
Husband's absence from hours to days with a slight
feeling of surprise, and a slight feeling of relief; yet
neither sensation rose at any time far above the level
commonly designated as indifference. She belonged to
him: the certainties of that position were so well defined,
and the reasonable probabilities of its issue so bounded
that she could not speculate on contingencies. Taking
no further interest in herself as a splendid woman, she
acquired the indifferent feelings of an outsider in contem-
plating her probable fate as a singular wretch; for Bath-
sheba drew herself and her future in colours that no
reality could exceed for darkness. Her original vigorous
pride of youth had sickened, and with it had declined
all her anxieties about coming years, since anxiety
recognizes a better and a worse alternative, and Bath-
sheba had made up her mind that alternatives on any
noteworthy scale had ceased for her. Soon, or later -
and that not very late - her husband would be home
again. And then the days of their tenancy of the
Upper Farm would be numbered. There had origin-
ally been shown by the agent to the estate some distrust
of Bathsheba's tenure as James Everdene's successor,
on the score of her sex, and her youth, and her beauty;
but the peculiar nature of her uncle's will, his own
frequent testimony before his death to her cleverness
in such a pursuit, and her vigorous marshalling of the
numerous flocks and herds which came suddenly into
her hands before negotiations were concluded, had won
confidence in her powers, and no further objections had
been raised. She had latterly been in great doubt as
to what the legal effects of her marriage would be upon
her position; but no notice had been taken as yet of
her change of name, and only one point was clear - that
in the event of her own or her husband's inability to
meet the agent at the forthcoming January rent-day,
very little consideration would be shown, and, for that
matter, very little would be deserved. Once out of the
farm, the approach of poverty would be sure.
Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her
purposes were broken of. She was not a woman who
could hope on without good materials for the process,
differing thus from the less far-Sighted and energetic,
though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope
goes on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food
and shelter are sufficient to wind up; and perceiving
clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one, she
accepted her position, and waited coldly for the end.
The first Saturday after Troy's departure she went
to Casterbridge alone, a journey she had not before
taken since her marriage. On this Saturday Bathsheba
was passing slowly on foot through the crowd of rural
business-men gathered as usual in front of the market-
house, who were as usual gazed upon by the burghers
with feelings that those healthy lives were dearly paid
for by exclusion from possible aldermanship, when a
man, who had apparently been following her, said some
words to another on her left hand. Bathsheba's ears
were keen as those of any wild animal, and she dis-
tinctly heard what the speaker said, though her back
was towards him
"I am looking for Mrs. Troy. Is that she there?"
"Yes; that's the young lady, I believe." said the
the person addressed.
"I have some awkward news to break to her. Her
husband is drowned."
As if endowed with the spirit of prophecy, Bathsheba
gasped out, "No, it is not true; it cannot be true!"
Then she said and heard no more. The ice of self-
command which had latterly gathered over her was
broken, and the currents burst forth again, and over
whelmed her. A darkness came into her eyes, and she
fell.
But not to the ground. A gloomy man, who had
been observing her from under the portico of the old
corn-exchange when she passed through the group
without, stepped quickly to her side at the moment of
her exclamation, and caught her in his arms as she sank
down.
"What is it?" said Boldwood, looking up at the
bringer of the big news, as he supported her.
"Her husband was drowned this week while bathing
in Lulwind Cove. A coastguardsman found his clothes,
and brought them into Budmouth yesterday."
Thereupon a strange fire lighted up Boldwood's eye,
and his face flushed with the suppressed excitement of
an unutterable thought. Everybody's glance was now
centred upon him and the unconscious Bathsheba. He
lifted her bodily off the ground, and smoothed down
the folds of her dress as a child might have taken a
storm-beaten bird and arranged its ruffled plumes, and
bore her along the pavement to the King's Arms Inn.
Here he passed with her under the archway into a
private room; and by the time he had deposited - so
lothly - the precious burden upon a sofa, Bathsheba had
opened her eyes. Remembering all that had occurred,
she murmured, "I want to go home!"
Boldwood left the room. He stood for a moment in
the passage to recover his senses. The experience had
been too much for his consciousness to keep up with,
and now that he had grasped it it had gone again. For
those few heavenly, golden moments she had been in his
arms. What did it matter about her not knowing it? She
had been close to his breast; he had been close to hers.
He started onward again, and sending a woman to
her, went out to ascertain all the facts of the case.
These appeared to be limited to what he had already
heard. He then ordered her horse to be put into the
gig, and when all was ready returned to inform her.
He found that, though still pale and unwell, she had in
the meantime sent for the Budmouth man who brought
the tidings, and learnt from him all there was to know.
Being hardly in a condition to drive home as she
had driven to town, Boldwood, with every delicacy of
manner and feeling, offered to get her a driver, or to
give her a seat in his phaeton, which was more com-
fortable than her own conveyance. These proposals
Bathsheba gently declined, and the farmer at once de-
parted.
About half-an-hour later she invigorated herself by
an effort, and took her seat and the reins as usual-in
external appearance much as if nothing had happened.
She went out of the town by a tortuous back street, and
drove slowly along, unconscious of the road and the
scene. The first shades of evening were showing them-
selves when Bathsheba reached home, where, silently
alighting and leaving the horse in the hands of the boy,
she proceeded at once upstairs. Liddy met her on the
landing. The news had preceded Bathsheba to Weather-
bury by half-an-hour, and Liddy looked inquiringly into
her mistress's face. Bathsheba had nothing to say.
She entered her bedroom and sat by the window, and
thought and thought till night enveloped her, and the
extreme lines only of her shape were visible. Somebody
came to the door, knocked, and opened it.
"Well, what is it, Liddy?" she said.
"I was thinking there must be something got for you
to wear." said Liddy, with hesitation.
"What do you mean?"
"Mourning."
"No, no, no." said Bathsheba, hurriedly.
"But I suppose there must be something done for
poor - - "
"Not at present, I think. It is not necessary."
"Why not, ma'am?"
"Because he's still alive."
"How do you know that?" said Liddy, amazed.
"I don't know it. But wouldn't it have been different,
or shouldn't I have heard more, or wouldn't they have
found him, Liddy? - or-i don't know how it is, but
death would have been different from how this is. I am
perfectly convinced that he is still alive!"
Bathsheba remained firm in this opinion till Monday,
when two circumstances conjoined to shake it. The
first was a short paragraph in the local newspaper, which,
beyond making by a methodizing pen formidable pre-
sumptive evidence of Troy's death by drowning, con-
tained the important testimony of a young Mr. Barker,
M.D., of Budmouth, who spoke to being an eyewitness
of the accident, in a letter to the editor. In this he
stated that he was passing over the cliff on the remoter
side of the cove just as the sun was setting. At that
time he saw a bather carried along in the current outside
the mouth of the cove, and guessed in an instant that
there was but a poor chance for him unless he should
be possessed of unusual muscular powers. He drifted
behind a projection of the coast, and Mr. Barker followed
along the shore in the same direction. But by the time
that he could reach an elevation sufficiently great to
command a view of the sea beyond, dusk had set in, and
nothing further was to be seen.
The other circumstance was the arrival of his clothes,
when it became necessary for her to examine and identify
them - though this had virtually been done long before
by those who inspected the letters in his pockets. It
was so evident to her in the midst of her agitation that
Troy had undressed in the full conviction of dressing
again almost immediately, that the notion that anything
but death could have prevented him was a perverse one
to entertain.
Then Bathsheba said to herself that others were
assured in their opinion; strange that she should not
be. A strange reflection occurred to her, causing her
face to flush. Suppose that Troy had followed Fanny
into another world. Had he done this intentionally, yet
contrived to make his death appear like an accident?
Nevertheless, this thought of how the apparent might
differ from the real-made vivid by her bygone jealousy
of Fanny, and the remorse he had shown that night
- did not blind her to the perception of a likelier
difference, less tragic, but to herself far more disastrous.
When alone late that evening beside a small fire, and
much calmed down, Bathsheba took Troy's watch into
her hand, which had been restored to her with the rest
of the articles belonging to him. She opened the case
as he had opened it before her a week ago. There was
the little coil of pale hair which had been as the fuze to
this great explosion.
"He was hers and she was his; they should be gone
together." she said. "I am nothing to either of them,
and why should I keep her hair?" She took it in her
hand, and held it over the fire." No-i'll not burn it
-i'll keep it in memory of her, poor thing!" she added,
snatching back her hand.
CHAPTER XLIX
OAK'S ADVANCEMENT - A GREAT HOPE
THE later autumn and the winter drew on apace,
and the leaves lay thick upon the turf of the glades
and the mosses of the woods. Bathsheba, having
previously been living in a state of suspended feeling
which was not suspense, now lived in a mood of
quietude which was not precisely peacefulness. While
she had known him to be alive she could have thought
of his death with equanimity; but now that it might be
she had lost him, she regretted that he was not hers
still. She kept the farm going, raked in her profits
without caring keenly about them, and expended
money on ventures because she had done so in bygone
days, which, though not long gone by, seemed infinitely
removed from her present. She looked back upon that
past over a great gulf, as if she were now a dead person,
having the faculty of meditation still left in her, by
means of which, like the mouldering gentlefolk of the
poet's story, she could sit and ponder what a gift life
used to be.
However, one excellent result of her general apathy
was the long-delayed installation of Oak as bailiff; but
he having virtually exercised that function for a long
time already, the change, beyond the substantial in-
crease of wages it brought, was little more than a
nominal one addressed to the outside world.
Boldwood lived secluded and inactive. Much of
his wheat and all his barley of that season had been
spoilt by the rain. It sprouted, grew into intricate
mats, and was ultimately thrown to the pigs in armfuls.
The strange neglect which had produced this ruin
and waste became the subject of whispered talk among
all the people round; and it was elicited from one of
Boldwood's men that forgetfulness had nothing to do
with it, for he had been reminded of the danger to
his corn as many times and as persistently as inferiors
dared to do. The sight of the pigs turning in disgust
from the rotten ears seemed to arouse Boldwood, and
he one evening sent for Oak. Whether it was sug-
gested by Bathsheba's recent act of promotion or not,
the farmer proposed at the interview that Gabriel
should undertake the superintendence of the Lower
Farm as well as of Bathsheba's, because of the necessity
Boldwood felt for such aid, and the impossibility of
discovering a more trustworthy man. Gabriel's malig-
nant star was assuredly setting fast.
Bathsheba, when she learnt of this proposal-for
Oak was obliged to consult her - at first languidly
objected. She considered that the two farms together
were too extensive for the observation of one man.
Boldwood, who was apparently determined by personal
rather than commercial reasons, suggested that Oak
should be furnished with a horse for his sole use,
when the plan would present no difficulty, the two
farms lying side by side. Boldwood did not directly
communicate with her during these negotiations, only
speaking to Oak, who was the go-between throughout.
All was harmoniously arranged at last, and we now
see Oak mounted on a strong cob, and daily trotting
the length breadth of about two thousand acres
in a cheerful spirit of surveillance, as if the crops
belonged to him - the actual mistress of the one-half
and the master of the other, sitting in their respective
homes in gloomy and sad seclusion.
Out of this there arose, during the spring succeeding,
a talk in the parish that Gabriel Oak was feathering his
nest fast.
"Whatever d'ye think." said Susan Tall," Gable Oak
is coming it quite the dand. He now wears shining
boots with hardly a hob in 'em, two or three times
a-week, and a tall hat a-Sundays, and 'a hardly knows
the name of smockfrock. When I see people strut
enough to he cut up into bantam cocks, I stand
dormant with wonder, and says no more!"
It was eventually known that Gabriel, though paid
a fixed wage by Bathsheba independent of the fluctua-
tions of agricultural profits, had made an engagement
with Boldwood by which Oak was to receive a share
of the receipts - a small share certainly, yet it was
money of a higher quality than mere wages, and
capable of expansion in a way that wages were not.
Some were beginning to consider Oak a "near" man,
for though his condition had thus far improved, he
lived in no better style than before, occupying the
same cottage, paring his own potatoes, mending his
stockings, and sometimes even making his bed with
his own hands. But as Oak was not only provokingly
indifferent to public opinion, but a man who clung
persistently to old habits and usages, simply because
they were old, there was room for doubt as to his
motives.
A great hope had latterly germinated in Boldwood,
whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only
be characterized as a fond madness which neither
time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could
weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up
again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet
which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was
drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost
shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts
should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba
having at last been persuaded to wear mourning, her
appearance as she entered the church in that guise
was in itself a weekly addition to his faith that a
time was coming - very far off perhaps, yet surely
nearing - when his waiting on events should have
its reward. How long he might have to wait he had
not yet closely considered. what he would try to
recognize was that the severe schooling she had been
subjected to had made Bathsheba much more con-