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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 gage 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 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 he 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 l 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 un-
mistakable signs that she was inherently the weaker vessel.
She strove miserably against this feminity 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
would I 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 to honest to with hold it.
"I cannot," she whispered.
"I know you cannot. But he stole in in my absence and
robbed me. Why did'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 shamefuly 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.
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