CHAPTER IV

GABRIEL’S RESOLVE—THE VISIT—THE MISTAKE

The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as

a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which

recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of

capture to the subordinated man.

This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon

the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.

Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit,

spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure

passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the

bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak’s feelings were

as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances. His

dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for

the girl’s presence, that the farmer was quite struck with the

resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog. However,

he continued to watch through the hedge for her regular coming, and

thus his sentiments towards her were deepened without any corresponding

effect being produced upon herself. Oak had nothing finished and ready

to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where

they begin; passionate tales—

—Full of sound and fury,

—Signifying nothing—

he said no word at all.

By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba

Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded

the eighth day.

At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for that

year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel had

reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short

time before. He liked saying “Bathsheba” as a private enjoyment instead

of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn

by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he

filled in the public eye was contemptibly small. Love is a possible

strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into

a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in

direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants. Oak began

now to see light in this direction, and said to himself, “I’ll make her

my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!”

All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he

might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.

He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living

lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution—a fine

January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make

cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of

silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket,

and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the

aunt—George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance of great

concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.

Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with

strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the

chimney to the spot of its origin—seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside

it—beside it in her out-door dress; for the clothes she had worn on the

hill were by association equally with her person included in the

compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a

necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene.

He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind—of a nature between the

carefully neat and the carelessly ornate—of a degree between

fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his

silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots,

looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the

plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his

way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box,

put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant

flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects

of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry,

sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a

splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making

it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a

boulder after the ebb.

Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a

knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to be

no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of

those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for,

as the rather untoward commencement of Oak’s overtures, just as he

arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into various

arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George.

The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all

superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath—in fact,

he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done

with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of

Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone through

once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.

A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had run:

“Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it;—did he, poor

dear!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Oak to the voice, “but George was walking on

behind me with a temper as mild as milk.”

Almost before he had ceased speaking, Oak was seized with a misgiving

as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and

he heard the person retreat among the bushes.

Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into his

forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is

as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any

initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of

failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal

and the reality had had no common grounds of opening.

Bathsheba’s aunt was indoors. “Will you tell Miss Everdene that

somebody would be glad to speak to her?” said Mr. Oak. (Calling one’s

self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken as an

example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs from a

refined modesty, of which townspeople, with their cards and

announcements, have no notion whatever.)

Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.

“Will you come in, Mr. Oak?”

“Oh, thank ’ee,” said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. “I’ve

brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear;

girls do.”

“She might,” said Mrs. Hurst, musingly; “though she’s only a visitor

here. If you will wait a minute, Bathsheba will be in.”

“Yes, I will wait,” said Gabriel, sitting down. “The lamb isn’t really

the business I came about, Mrs. Hurst. In short, I was going to ask her

if she’d like to be married.”

“And were you indeed?”

“Yes. Because if she would, I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye

know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?”

“Let me think,” said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire superfluously....

“Yes—bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so

good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides—she was going to be a

governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men

ever come here—but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a

dozen!”

“That’s unfortunate,” said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the

stone floor with sorrow. “I’m only an every-day sort of man, and my

only chance was in being the first comer.... Well, there’s no use in my

waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off

home-along, Mrs. Hurst.”

When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard

a “hoi-hoi!” uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble

quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when

shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after

him, waving a white handkerchief.

Oak stood still—and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene.

Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared,

from emotion, but from running.

“Farmer Oak—I—” she said, pausing for want of breath pulling up in

front of him with a slanted face and putting her hand to her side.

“I have just called to see you,” said Gabriel, pending her further

speech.

“Yes—I know that,” she said panting like a robin, her face red and

moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off

the dew. “I didn’t know you had come to ask to have me, or I should

have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say—that my

aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me—”

Gabriel expanded. “I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,” he

said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. “Wait a bit till you’ve

found your breath.”

“—It was quite a mistake—aunt’s telling you I had a young man already,”

Bathsheba went on. “I haven’t a sweetheart at all—and I never had one,

and I thought that, as times go with women, it was _such_ a pity to

send you away thinking that I had several.”

“Really and truly I am glad to hear that!” said Farmer Oak, smiling one

of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his

hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it

there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating

heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped

through his fingers like an eel.

“I have a nice snug little farm,” said Gabriel, with half a degree less

assurance than when he had seized her hand.

“Yes; you have.”

“A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon be

paid off, and though I am only an every-day sort of man, I have got on

a little since I was a boy.” Gabriel uttered “a little” in a tone to

show her that it was the complacent form of “a great deal.” He

continued: “When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as

hard as I do now.”

He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba had

overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low stunted holly bush,

now laden with red berries. Seeing his advance take the form of an

attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her

person, she edged off round the bush.

“Why, Farmer Oak,” she said, over the top, looking at him with rounded

eyes, “I never said I was going to marry you.”

“Well—that _is_ a tale!” said Oak, with dismay. “To run after anybody

like this, and then say you don’t want him!”

“What I meant to tell you was only this,” she said eagerly, and yet

half conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for

herself—“that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my

having a dozen, as my aunt said; I _hate_ to be thought men’s property

in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I’d

wanted you I shouldn’t have run after you like this; ’twould have been

the _forwardest_ thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to correct a

piece of false news that had been told you.”

“Oh, no—no harm at all.” But there is such a thing as being too

generous in expressing a judgment impulsively, and Oak added with a

more appreciative sense of all the circumstances—“Well, I am not quite

certain it was no harm.”

“Indeed, I hadn’t time to think before starting whether I wanted to

marry or not, for you’d have been gone over the hill.”

“Come,” said Gabriel, freshening again; “think a minute or two. I’ll

wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me? Do, Bathsheba. I love

you far more than common!”

“I’ll try to think,” she observed, rather more timorously; “if I can

think out of doors; my mind spreads away so.”

“But you can give a guess.”

“Then give me time.” Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the distance,

away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.

“I can make you happy,” said he to the back of her head, across the

bush. “You shall have a piano in a year or two—farmers’ wives are

getting to have pianos now—and I’ll practise up the flute right well to

play with you in the evenings.”

“Yes; I should like that.”

“And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market—and nice

flowers, and birds—cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,”

continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality.

“I should like it very much.”

“And a frame for cucumbers—like a gentleman and lady.”

“Yes.”

“And when the wedding was over, we’d have it put in the newspaper list

of marriages.”

“Dearly I should like that!”

“And the babies in the births—every man jack of ’em! And at home by the

fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up

there will be you.”

“Wait, wait, and don’t be improper!”

Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red

berries between them over and over again, to such an extent, that holly

seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of

marriage. Bathsheba decisively turned to him.

“No; ’tis no use,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you.”

“Try.”

“I have tried hard all the time I’ve been thinking; for a marriage

would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and think

I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that. But a

husband—”

“Well!”

“Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there

he’d be.”

“Of course he would—I, that is.”

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding,

if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t

show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry—at least yet.”

“That’s a terrible wooden story!”

At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an addition to her

dignity by a slight sweep away from him.

“Upon my heart and soul, I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than

that,” said Oak. “But dearest,” he continued in a palliative voice,

“don’t be like it!” Oak sighed a deep honest sigh—none the less so in

that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather

noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. “Why won’t you have me?”

he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.

“I cannot,” she said, retreating.

“But why?” he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever

reaching her, and facing over the bush.

“Because I don’t love you.”

“Yes, but—”

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was

hardly ill-mannered at all. “I don’t love you,” she said.

“But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”

“Oh Mr. Oak—that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.”

“Never,” said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the

force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. “I

shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you,

and long for you, and _keep wanting you_ till I die.” His voice had a

genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

“It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!” she

said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some

means of escape from her moral dilemma. “How I wish I hadn’t run after

you!” However she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to

cheerfulness, and set her face to signify archness. “It wouldn’t do,

Mr. Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you

would never be able to, I know.”

Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless

to attempt argument.

“Mr. Oak,” she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, “you

are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world—I am staying

with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you—and

I don’t love you a bit: that’s my side of the case. Now yours: you are

a farmer just beginning; and you ought in common prudence, if you marry

at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present), to

marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than

you have now.”

Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.

“That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!” he naïvely said.

Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to

succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of

honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.

“Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?” she said, almost

angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.

“I can’t do what I think would be—would be—”

“Right?”

“No: wise.”

“You have made an admission _now_, Mr. Oak,” she exclaimed, with even

more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. “After that, do you

think I could marry you? Not if I know it.”

He broke in passionately. “But don’t mistake me like that! Because I am

open enough to own what every man in my shoes would have thought of,

you make your colours come up your face, and get crabbed with me. That

about your not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a

lady—all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is, I have

heerd, a large farmer—much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in

the evening, or will you walk along with me o’ Sundays? I don’t want

you to make-up your mind at once, if you’d rather not.”

“No—no—I cannot. Don’t press me any more—don’t. I don’t love you—so

’twould be ridiculous,” she said, with a laugh.

No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of

skittishness. “Very well,” said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one

who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.

“Then I’ll ask you no more.”