CHAPTER XXXI

BLAME—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.