CHAPTER V

DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA—A PASTORAL TRAGEDY

The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene had

left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might have

surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the

renunciation the less absolute its character.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out

of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a

short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which

was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s

disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt

to idealize the removed object with others—notably those whose

affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak

belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret

fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now

that she was gone—that was all.

His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the failure

of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba’s movements was done

indirectly. It appeared that she had gone to a place called

Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in what capacity—whether

as a visitor, or permanently, he could not discover.

Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped

nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in

random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but

the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out

of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the

blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same

kind of colour in Turner’s pictures. In substance it had originally

been hair, but long contact with sheep seemed to be turning it by

degrees into wool of a poor quality and staple.

This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals and

dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact degrees

of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all descriptions

better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood. Long experience

had so precisely taught the animal the difference between such

exclamations as “Come in!” and “D–––– ye, come in!” that he knew to a

hair’s breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes’ tails that each

call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook was to be escaped.

Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.

The young dog, George’s son, might possibly have been the image of his

mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and George. He

was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow on at the

flock when the other should die, but had got no further than the

rudiments as yet—still finding an insuperable difficulty in

distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well.

So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had no name

in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any pleasant

interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them on, he did it

so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the whole county

with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded when to stop

by the example of old George.

Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was a

chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and spread

over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form of a V,

but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which was

immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.

One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there

would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he called

as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the outhouse

till next morning. Only one responded—old George; the other could not

be found, either in the house, lane, or garden. Gabriel then remembered

that he had left the two dogs on the hill eating a dead lamb (a kind of

meat he usually kept from them, except when other food ran short), and

concluding that the young one had not finished his meal, he went

indoors to the luxury of a bed, which latterly he had only enjoyed on

Sundays.

It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was assisted in waking

by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music. To the shepherd, the

note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock to other people,

is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or

altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle twinkle which

signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that all is well in

the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn that note was heard

by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and rapidity. This

exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways—by the rapid feeding of

the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture,

which gives it an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep starting off

in a run, when the sound has a regular palpitation. The experienced ear

of Oak knew the sound he now heard to be caused by the running of the

flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy dawn,

and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from those

among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two hundred

of the latter class in Gabriel’s flock. These two hundred seemed to

have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the fifty with their

lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left them, but the rest,

forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere. Gabriel called at the top

of his voice the shepherd’s call:

“Ovey, ovey, ovey!”

Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken through

it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather surprised

to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it down instantly

to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal

grew in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were not in

the plantation. He called again: the valleys and farthest hills

resounded as when the sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian

shore; but no sheep. He passed through the trees and along the ridge of

the hill. On the extreme summit, where the ends of the two converging

hedges of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the brow

of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing against the sky—dark

and motionless as Napoleon at St. Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily

faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through, and

there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked his

hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward for

signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes lay

dead and dying at its foot—a heap of two hundred mangled carcasses,

representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in

pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and

carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been

that his flock ended in mutton—that a day came and found every shepherd

an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was

one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their unborn

lambs.

It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The sheep were

not insured. All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a

blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low—possibly

for ever. Gabriel’s energies, patience, and industry had been so

severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen and

eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress that no more

seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a rail, and covered his

face with his hands.

Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from

his. It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one

sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:—

“Thank God I am not married: what would _she_ have done in the poverty

now coming upon me!”

Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly

surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond,

and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which

had only a few days to last—the morning star dogging her on the left

hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke

a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon

without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric

streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered.

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still

under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep,

the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal off

the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and spirits,

collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures

through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of

worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the

rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too

good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at

twelve o’clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate

which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a

train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly

consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Gabriel’s farm had been stocked by a dealer—on the strength of Oak’s

promising look and character—who was receiving a percentage from the

farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found

that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his

own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a free

man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.