feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_3_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Far from the Madding Crowd.chapters 21-27
feat_summary_id: chapters 21-27
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 21-27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210108004047/https://www.gradesaver.com/far-from-the-madding-crowd/study-guide/summary-chapters-21-27", "summary": "In June, it is time for the sheep shearing. While shearing in the barn, Gabriel notices that Boldwood has come to speak with Bathsheba. He is distracted by speculating about the nature of their conversation and wounds one of the sheep, leading Bathsheba to rebuke him. After Boldwood and Bathsheba ride off together, the other farmworkers speculate that the two of them will soon marry. After the shearing is finished, Bathsheba and her workers celebrate with a traditional shearing-supper. At the end of supper, when Boldwood and Bathsheba are alone together, she tells him that she is willing to consider marrying him but wants more time to think about it. She tells him that she expects she will be able to give him a definitive answer by harvest time. That night, Bathsheba follows her nightly routine of walking around the property and inspecting it before going to bed. As she passes through the fir plantation, a man in military dress walks up behind her, and her skirt gets accidentally hooked onto the spur of his boot. He tries to free her and during the time spent untangling the knot, he identifies himself as Sergeant Troy. Troy also compliments Bathsheba's beauty and flirts with her, making her uncomfortable. When she is freed, she hurries home and asks Liddy if she knows anything about this man. Liddy explains that Troy is well-educated and from a good family, and that he also has a reputation as a flirt and a ladies' man. A week after the shearing, Bathsheba goes to supervise her workers as they load hay and finds that Troy has come to help them. He approaches her and the two flirt with each other, although Bathsheba is somewhat guarded and skeptical. She is shocked when Troy impulsively gives her a watch that belonged to his father. The next day, he comes to the farm again and helps her with her beehive. She mentions that she would like to see him perform his sword exercises and they make a plan to meet that evening in secret. When they meet, Troy dazzles her with his skill as a swordsman and his bold charm. He kisses her before he leaves, leaving Bathsheba overwhelmed and confused by her feelings.", "analysis": "Bathsheba's situation was already complicated as she tried to come to a decision about Boldwood's proposal, but the encounter with Troy throws another suitor into the mix. With both Gabriel and Boldwood, Bathsheba could be detached and rational about what was in her best interest. With Troy, it is immediately clear that she is going to be led by her emotions and desires. The scene in which they meet is rich with symbolism: as a woman walking alone at night, Bathsheba is to some extent in a dangerous situation, and the sudden presence of a man walking near her has the initial possibility of being threatening. When her dress catches on his spur, she is symbolically ensnared or captured by him. Paradoxically, Bathsheba seems to find this vulnerable and relatively helpless situation to be exciting and arousing. The scene is one of the rare moments in the novel where she embodies a more traditionally feminine role of being dependent on a man to resolve a situation for her. The idea that this dependency might have destructive consequences becomes clear when she pleads with Troy to rip her dress in order to set her free: this moment foreshadows the future in which she will endure suffering and damage in order to try and escape from her unhappy marriage. In her subsequent interactions with Troy, Bathsheba wavers back and forth between being somewhat conservative and traditional, and quite reckless in her behavior. She is curious about his reputation, which she reveals by seeking information from Liddy. In a world where reputation and an honorable public identity were major parts of what made someone worthy of respect, Bathsheba is anxious to find out how Troy is perceived. She is also conservative enough to be shocked and somewhat distressed by Troy giving away his father's watch. In a more traditional worldview, an expensive item that is also a family heirloom would not be discarded lightly. However, by agreeing to meet Troy alone in the woods at night, Bathsheba takes a significant risk. This action reflects the precarious freedom of her independent and autonomous position; because she is effectively the head of her own household, Bathsheba has no one to supervise or try and control her behavior. This means that she can do things it would be difficult for other young women of her social position to get away with. Not only does she sneak off alone with him, Bathsheba allows Troy relatively intimate access to her body as he practices his sword exercises with her as a target. There is a literal danger in terms of the injury she could sustain if his sword were to slip, but there is also the symbolic danger of what this sexually charged flirtation could lead to. Troy's sword takes on a clear phallic symbolism in this scene; it is a source of danger for Bathsheba, but she is entranced and seduced by it."}
text: 
  
  TROUBLES IN THE FOLD--A MESSAGE
  
  
  Gabriel Oak had ceased to feed the Weatherbury flock for about
  four-and-twenty hours, when on Sunday afternoon the elderly gentlemen
  Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Fray, and half-a-dozen others, came
  running up to the house of the mistress of the Upper Farm.
  
  "Whatever IS the matter, men?" she said, meeting them at the door
  just as she was coming out on her way to church, and ceasing in a
  moment from the close compression of her two red lips, with which
  she had accompanied the exertion of pulling on a tight glove.
  
  "Sixty!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
  
  "Seventy!" said Moon.
  
  "Fifty-nine!" said Susan Tall's husband.
  
  "--Sheep have broke fence," said Fray.
  
  "--And got into a field of young clover," said Tall.
  
  "--Young clover!" said Moon.
  
  "--Clover!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
  
  "And they be getting blasted," said Henery Fray.
  
  "That they be," said Joseph.
  
  "And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!"
  said Tall.
  
  Joseph's countenance was drawn into lines and puckers by his concern.
  Fray's forehead was wrinkled both perpendicularly and crosswise,
  after the pattern of a portcullis, expressive of a double despair.
  Laban Tall's lips were thin, and his face was rigid.  Matthew's jaws
  sank, and his eyes turned whichever way the strongest muscle happened
  to pull them.
  
  "Yes," said Joseph, "and I was sitting at home, looking for
  Ephesians, and says I to myself, ''Tis nothing but Corinthians and
  Thessalonians in this danged Testament,' when who should come in but
  Henery there: 'Joseph,' he said, 'the sheep have blasted
  theirselves--'"
  
  With Bathsheba it was a moment when thought was speech and speech
  exclamation.  Moreover, she had hardly recovered her equanimity since
  the disturbance which she had suffered from Oak's remarks.
  
  "That's enough--that's enough!--oh, you fools!" she cried, throwing
  the parasol and Prayer-book into the passage, and running out of
  doors in the direction signified.  "To come to me, and not go and get
  them out directly!  Oh, the stupid numskulls!"
  
  Her eyes were at their darkest and brightest now.  Bathsheba's beauty
  belonging rather to the demonian than to the angelic school, she
  never looked so well as when she was angry--and particularly when the
  effect was heightened by a rather dashing velvet dress, carefully put
  on before a glass.
  
  All the ancient men ran in a jumbled throng after her to the
  clover-field, Joseph sinking down in the midst when about half-way,
  like an individual withering in a world which was more and more
  insupportable.  Having once received the stimulus that her presence
  always gave them they went round among the sheep with a will.  The
  majority of the afflicted animals were lying down, and could not be
  stirred.  These were bodily lifted out, and the others driven into
  the adjoining field.  Here, after the lapse of a few minutes, several
  more fell down, and lay helpless and livid as the rest.
  
  Bathsheba, with a sad, bursting heart, looked at these primest
  specimens of her prime flock as they rolled there--
  
  
     Swoln with wind and the rank mist they drew.
  
  
  Many of them foamed at the mouth, their breathing being quick and
  short, whilst the bodies of all were fearfully distended.
  
  "Oh, what can I do, what can I do!" said Bathsheba, helplessly.
  "Sheep are such unfortunate animals!--there's always something
  happening to them!  I never knew a flock pass a year without getting
  into some scrape or other."
  
  "There's only one way of saving them," said Tall.
  
  "What way?  Tell me quick!"
  
  "They must be pierced in the side with a thing made on purpose."
  
  "Can you do it?  Can I?"
  
  "No, ma'am.  We can't, nor you neither.  It must be done in a
  particular spot.  If ye go to the right or left but an inch you stab
  the ewe and kill her.  Not even a shepherd can do it, as a rule."
  
  "Then they must die," she said, in a resigned tone.
  
  "Only one man in the neighbourhood knows the way," said Joseph, now
  just come up.  "He could cure 'em all if he were here."
  
  "Who is he?  Let's get him!"
  
  "Shepherd Oak," said Matthew.  "Ah, he's a clever man in talents!"
  
  "Ah, that he is so!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
  
  "True--he's the man," said Laban Tall.
  
  "How dare you name that man in my presence!" she said excitedly.  "I
  told you never to allude to him, nor shall you if you stay with me.
  Ah!" she added, brightening, "Farmer Boldwood knows!"
  
  "O no, ma'am" said Matthew.  "Two of his store ewes got into some
  vetches t'other day, and were just like these.  He sent a man on
  horseback here post-haste for Gable, and Gable went and saved 'em.
  Farmer Boldwood hev got the thing they do it with.  'Tis a holler
  pipe, with a sharp pricker inside.  Isn't it, Joseph?"
  
  "Ay--a holler pipe," echoed Joseph.  "That's what 'tis."
  
  "Ay, sure--that's the machine," chimed in Henery Fray, reflectively,
  with an Oriental indifference to the flight of time.
  
  "Well," burst out Bathsheba, "don't stand there with your 'ayes'
  and your 'sures' talking at me!  Get somebody to cure the sheep
  instantly!"
  
  All then stalked off in consternation, to get somebody as directed,
  without any idea of who it was to be.  In a minute they had vanished
  through the gate, and she stood alone with the dying flock.
  
  "Never will I send for him--never!" she said firmly.
  
  One of the ewes here contracted its muscles horribly, extended
  itself, and jumped high into the air.  The leap was an astonishing
  one.  The ewe fell heavily, and lay still.
  
  Bathsheba went up to it.  The sheep was dead.
  
  "Oh, what shall I do--what shall I do!" she again exclaimed, wringing
  her hands.  "I won't send for him.  No, I won't!"
  
  The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide
  with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.  It is often flung
  out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst
  strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.  The "No, I won't" of
  Bathsheba meant virtually, "I think I must."
  
  She followed her assistants through the gate, and lifted her hand to
  one of them.  Laban answered to her signal.
  
  "Where is Oak staying?"
  
  "Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"
  
  "Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he must return
  instantly--that I say so."
  
  Tall scrambled off to the field, and in two minutes was on Poll,
  the bay, bare-backed, and with only a halter by way of rein.  He
  diminished down the hill.
  
  Bathsheba watched.  So did all the rest.  Tall cantered along the
  bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands, Middle Field, The
  Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a point, crossed the bridge,
  and ascended from the valley through Springmead and Whitepits on the
  other side.  The cottage to which Gabriel had retired before taking
  his final departure from the locality was visible as a white spot on
  the opposite hill, backed by blue firs.  Bathsheba walked up and
  down.  The men entered the field and endeavoured to ease the anguish
  of the dumb creatures by rubbing them.  Nothing availed.
  
  Bathsheba continued walking.  The horse was seen descending the
  hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in reverse order:
  Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The Flats, Middle Field,
  Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres.  She hoped Tall had had presence of mind
  enough to give the mare up to Gabriel, and return himself on foot.
  The rider neared them.  It was Tall.
  
  "Oh, what folly!" said Bathsheba.
  
  Gabriel was not visible anywhere.
  
  "Perhaps he is already gone!" she said.
  
  Tall came into the inclosure, and leapt off, his face tragic as
  Morton's after the battle of Shrewsbury.
  
  "Well?" said Bathsheba, unwilling to believe that her verbal
  _lettre-de-cachet_ could possibly have miscarried.
  
  "He says BEGGARS MUSTN'T BE CHOOSERS," replied Laban.
  
  "What!" said the young farmer, opening her eyes and drawing in her
  breath for an outburst.  Joseph Poorgrass retired a few steps behind
  a hurdle.
  
  "He says he shall not come onless you request en to come civilly and
  in a proper manner, as becomes any 'ooman begging a favour."
  
  "Oh, oh, that's his answer!  Where does he get his airs?  Who am I,
  then, to be treated like that?  Shall I beg to a man who has begged
  to me?"
  
  Another of the flock sprang into the air, and fell dead.
  
  The men looked grave, as if they suppressed opinion.
  
  Bathsheba turned aside, her eyes full of tears.  The strait she was
  in through pride and shrewishness could not be disguised longer: she
  burst out crying bitterly; they all saw it; and she attempted no
  further concealment.
  
  "I wouldn't cry about it, miss," said William Smallbury,
  compassionately.  "Why not ask him softer like?  I'm sure he'd come
  then.  Gable is a true man in that way."
  
  Bathsheba checked her grief and wiped her eyes.  "Oh, it is a wicked
  cruelty to me--it is--it is!" she murmured.  "And he drives me to do
  what I wouldn't; yes, he does!--Tall, come indoors."
  
  After this collapse, not very dignified for the head of an
  establishment, she went into the house, Tall at her heels.  Here she
  sat down and hastily scribbled a note between the small convulsive
  sobs of convalescence which follow a fit of crying as a ground-swell
  follows a storm.  The note was none the less polite for being written
  in a hurry.  She held it at a distance, was about to fold it, then
  added these words at the bottom:--
  
  
     "DO NOT DESERT ME, GABRIEL!"
  
  
  She looked a little redder in refolding it, and closed her lips,
  as if thereby to suspend till too late the action of conscience in
  examining whether such strategy were justifiable.  The note was
  despatched as the message had been, and Bathsheba waited indoors
  for the result.
  
  It was an anxious quarter of an hour that intervened between the
  messenger's departure and the sound of the horse's tramp again
  outside.  She could not watch this time, but, leaning over the old
  bureau at which she had written the letter, closed her eyes, as if
  to keep out both hope and fear.
  
  The case, however, was a promising one.  Gabriel was not angry: he
  was simply neutral, although her first command had been so haughty.
  Such imperiousness would have damned a little less beauty; and
  on the other hand, such beauty would have redeemed a little less
  imperiousness.
  
  She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up.  A mounted
  figure passed between her and the sky, and drew on towards the field
  of sheep, the rider turning his face in receding.  Gabriel looked at
  her.  It was a moment when a woman's eyes and tongue tell distinctly
  opposite tales. Bathsheba looked full of gratitude, and she said:--
  
  "Oh, Gabriel, how could you serve me so unkindly!"
  
  Such a tenderly-shaped reproach for his previous delay was the
  one speech in the language that he could pardon for not being
  commendation of his readiness now.
  
  Gabriel murmured a confused reply, and hastened on.  She knew from
  the look which sentence in her note had brought him.  Bathsheba
  followed to the field.
  
  Gabriel was already among the turgid, prostrate forms.  He had flung
  off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and taken from his pocket
  the instrument of salvation.  It was a small tube or trochar, with
  a lance passing down the inside; and Gabriel began to use it with a
  dexterity that would have graced a hospital surgeon.  Passing his
  hand over the sheep's left flank, and selecting the proper point, he
  punctured the skin and rumen with the lance as it stood in the tube;
  then he suddenly withdrew the lance, retaining the tube in its place.
  A current of air rushed up the tube, forcible enough to have
  extinguished a candle held at the orifice.
  
  It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time;
  and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now.
  Forty-nine operations were successfully performed.  Owing to the
  great hurry necessitated by the far-gone state of some of the flock,
  Gabriel missed his aim in one case, and in one only--striking wide
  of the mark, and inflicting a mortal blow at once upon the suffering
  ewe.  Four had died; three recovered without an operation.  The total
  number of sheep which had thus strayed and injured themselves so
  dangerously was fifty-seven.
  
  When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba came and
  looked him in the face.
  
  "Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling winningly,
  and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end,
  because there was going to be another smile soon.
  
  "I will," said Gabriel.
  
  And she smiled on him again.
  
  
  
  
  
  THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS
  
  
  Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not
  making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking
  good spirits when they are indispensable.  Gabriel lately, for the
  first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent
  in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent--conditions
  which, powerless without an opportunity as an opportunity without
  them is barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the
  favourable conjunction should have occurred.  But this incurable
  loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.  The
  spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap
  might soon come which could not.
  
  It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season
  culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being
  all health and colour.  Every green was young, every pore was
  open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.
  God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone
  with the world to town.  Flossy catkins of the later kinds,
  fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel,
  the odd cuckoo-pint,--like an apoplectic saint in a niche of
  malachite,--snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating
  to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled
  doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world
  in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal,
  the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the
  second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their
  calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the
  fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass
  the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as
  general supervisor.  None of these were clothed to any extent worth
  mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the
  decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo.  An angularity of
  lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed
  that serious work was the order of the day.
  
  They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the
  Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with
  transepts.  It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church
  of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.  Whether the barn had
  ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to
  be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained.  The vast porches
  at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest
  with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of
  stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin
  of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been
  attempted.  The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in
  by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was far nobler in design,
  because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our
  modern churches.  Along each side wall was a range of striding
  buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which
  were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions
  the precise requirements both of beauty and ventilation.
  
  One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either
  the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the
  purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with
  that to which it was still applied.  Unlike and superior to either
  of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied
  practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.
  Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with
  the spirit of the modern beholder.  Standing before this abraded
  pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its
  past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity
  throughout--a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the
  permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.  The fact that four
  centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired
  any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had
  battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with
  a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt
  to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.  For once
  mediaevalism and modernism had a common stand-point.  The lanceolate
  windows, the time-eaten archstones and chamfers, the orientation of
  the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no
  exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed.  The defence and
  salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion,
  and a desire.
  
  To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit
  a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers' operations,
  which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick
  oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many
  generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as
  the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion.  Here the shearers
  knelt, the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms,
  and the polished shears they flourished, causing these to bristle
  with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-eyed man.  Beneath
  them a captive sheep lay panting, quickening its pants as misgiving
  merged in terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.
  
  This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did
  not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which
  is implied by the contrast of date.  In comparison with cities,
  Weatherbury was immutable.  The citizen's THEN is the rustic's
  NOW.  In London, twenty or thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris
  ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were
  included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a
  mark on its face or tone.  Five decades hardly modified the cut of a
  gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair.
  Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase.  In
  these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old;
  his old times are still new; his present is futurity.
  
  So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in
  harmony with the barn.
  
  The spacious ends of the building, answering ecclesiastically to nave
  and chancel extremities, were fenced off with hurdles, the sheep
  being all collected in a crowd within these two enclosures; and in
  one angle a catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep
  were continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss
  of time.  In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three
  women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering
  up the fleeces and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying
  them round.  They were indifferently well assisted by the old
  maltster, who, when the malting season from October to April had
  passed, made himself useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads.
  
  Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men to see that
  there was no cutting or wounding through carelessness, and that the
  animals were shorn close.  Gabriel, who flitted and hovered under her
  bright eyes like a moth, did not shear continuously, half his time
  being spent in attending to the others and selecting the sheep for
  them.  At the present moment he was engaged in handing round a mug of
  mild liquor, supplied from a barrel in the corner, and cut pieces of
  bread and cheese.
  
  Bathsheba, after throwing a glance here, a caution there, and
  lecturing one of the younger operators who had allowed his last
  finished sheep to go off among the flock without re-stamping it with
  her initials, came again to Gabriel, as he put down the luncheon to
  drag a frightened ewe to his shear-station, flinging it over upon its
  back with a dexterous twist of the arm.  He lopped off the tresses
  about its head, and opened up the neck and collar, his mistress
  quietly looking on.
  
  "She blushes at the insult," murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink
  flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe
  where they were left bare by the clicking shears--a flush which was
  enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would
  have been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.
  
  Poor Gabriel's soul was fed with a luxury of content by having her
  over him, her eyes critically regarding his skilful shears, which
  apparently were going to gather up a piece of the flesh at every
  close, and yet never did so.  Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in
  that he was not over happy.  He had no wish to converse with her:
  that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their
  own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.
  
  So the chatter was all on her side.  There is a loquacity that tells
  nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says
  much: that was Gabriel's.  Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he
  went on to fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head
  with his knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her
  dewlap; thence about her flank and back, and finishing over the tail.
  
  "Well done, and done quickly!" said Bathsheba, looking at her watch
  as the last snip resounded.
  
  "How long, miss?" said Gabriel, wiping his brow.
  
  "Three-and-twenty minutes and a half since you took the first lock
  from its forehead.  It is the first time that I have ever seen one
  done in less than half an hour."
  
  The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece--how perfectly
  like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be
  realized--looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which
  lay on the floor in one soft cloud, united throughout, the portion
  visible being the inner surface only, which, never before exposed,
  was white as snow, and without flaw or blemish of the minutest kind.
  
  "Cain Ball!"
  
  "Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!"
  
  Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot.  "B. E." is newly stamped
  upon the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps, panting, over the
  board into the shirtless flock outside.  Then up comes Maryann;
  throws the loose locks into the middle of the fleece, rolls it up,
  and carries it into the background as three-and-a-half pounds of
  unadulterated warmth for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and
  far away, who will, however, never experience the superlative comfort
  derivable from the wool as it here exists, new and pure--before
  the unctuousness of its nature whilst in a living state has dried,
  stiffened, and been washed out--rendering it just now as superior
  to anything WOOLLEN as cream is superior to milk-and-water.
  
  But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel's happiness
  of this morning.  The rams, old ewes, and two-shear ewes had duly
  undergone their stripping, and the men were proceeding with the
  shear-lings and hogs, when Oak's belief that she was going to stand
  pleasantly by and time him through another performance was painfully
  interrupted by Farmer Boldwood's appearance in the extremest corner
  of the barn.  Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there he
  certainly was.  Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere
  of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk,
  which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally
  suspended.
  
  He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a
  carriage of perfect ease.  He spoke to her in low tones, and she
  instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice
  ultimately even caught the inflection of his.  She was far from
  having a wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at
  the impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her
  choice of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades
  of tone and humour, when the influence is great.
  
  What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too
  independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard.  The
  issue of their dialogue was the taking of her hand by the courteous
  farmer to help her over the spreading-board into the bright June
  sunlight outside.  Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went
  on talking again.  Concerning the flock?  Apparently not. Gabriel
  theorized, not without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter
  within reach of the speakers' eyes, these are usually fixed upon
  it.  Bathsheba demurely regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the
  ground, in a way which suggested less ovine criticism than womanly
  embarrassment.  She became more or less red in the cheek, the blood
  wavering in uncertain flux and reflux over the sensitive space
  between ebb and flood.  Gabriel sheared on, constrained and sad.
  
  She left Boldwood's side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly
  a quarter of an hour.  Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of
  myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit;
  and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse
  from the tree under which it had been tied.
  
  Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue
  his shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood's manner,
  he snipped the sheep in the groin.  The animal plunged; Bathsheba
  instantly gazed towards it, and saw the blood.
  
  "Oh, Gabriel!" she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, "you who are
  so strict with the other men--see what you are doing yourself!"
  
  To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but
  to Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the
  cause of the poor ewe's wound, because she had wounded the ewe's
  shearer in a still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding
  sense of his inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not
  calculated to heal.  But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he
  had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him occasionally to
  conceal a feeling.
  
  "Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine.  Cainy Ball ran
  up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.
  
  Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they
  turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and
  tantalizing graciousness.
  
  "I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood's Leicesters.  Take my place in
  the barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work."
  
  The horses' heads were put about, and they trotted away.
  
  Boldwood's deep attachment was a matter of great interest among all
  around him; but, after having been pointed out for so many years
  as the perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an
  anticlimax somewhat resembling that of St. John Long's death by
  consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal
  disease.
  
  "That means matrimony," said Temperance Miller, following them out of
  sight with her eyes.
  
  "I reckon that's the size o't," said Coggan, working along without
  looking up.
  
  "Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor," said Laban
  Tall, turning his sheep.
  
  Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same time: "I
  don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough
  to fight her own battles, and don't want a home; for 'tis keeping
  another woman out.  But let it be, for 'tis a pity he and she should
  trouble two houses."
  
  As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably provoked the
  criticism of individuals like Henery Fray.  Her emblazoned fault was
  to be too pronounced in her objections, and not sufficiently overt in
  her likings.  We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb,
  but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are
  known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their
  dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no
  attribute at all.
  
  Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: "I once hinted my mind
  to her on a few things, as nearly as a battered frame dared to do so
  to such a froward piece.  You all know, neighbours, what a man I be,
  and how I come down with my powerful words when my pride is boiling
  wi' scarn?"
  
  "We do, we do, Henery."
  
  "So I said, 'Mistress Everdene, there's places empty, and there's
  gifted men willing; but the spite'--no, not the spite--I didn't say
  spite--'but the villainy of the contrarikind,' I said (meaning
  womankind), 'keeps 'em out.'  That wasn't too strong for her, say?"
  
  "Passably well put."
  
  "Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me
  for it.  Such is my spirit when I have a mind."
  
  "A true man, and proud as a lucifer."
  
  "You see the artfulness?  Why, 'twas about being baily really; but
  I didn't put it so plain that she could understand my meaning, so I
  could lay it on all the stronger.  That was my depth! ... However,
  let her marry an she will.  Perhaps 'tis high time.  I believe Farmer
  Boldwood kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing t'other
  day--that I do."
  
  "What a lie!" said Gabriel.
  
  "Ah, neighbour Oak--how'st know?" said, Henery, mildly.
  
  "Because she told me all that passed," said Oak, with a pharisaical
  sense that he was not as other shearers in this matter.
  
  "Ye have a right to believe it," said Henery, with dudgeon; "a very
  true right.  But I mid see a little distance into things!  To be
  long-headed enough for a baily's place is a poor mere trifle--yet
  a trifle more than nothing.  However, I look round upon life quite
  cool.  Do you heed me, neighbours?  My words, though made as simple
  as I can, mid be rather deep for some heads."
  
  "O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye."
  
  "A strange old piece, goodmen--whirled about from here to yonder, as
  if I were nothing!  A little warped, too.  But I have my depths; ha,
  and even my great depths!  I might gird at a certain shepherd, brain
  to brain.  But no--O no!"
  
  "A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster, in a
  querulous voice.  "At the same time ye be no old man worth naming--no
  old man at all.  Yer teeth bain't half gone yet; and what's a old
  man's standing if so be his teeth bain't gone?  Weren't I stale in
  wedlock afore ye were out of arms?  'Tis a poor thing to be sixty,
  when there's people far past four-score--a boast weak as water."
  
  It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor differences
  when the maltster had to be pacified.
  
  "Weak as water! yes," said Jan Coggan. "Malter, we feel ye to be a
  wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it."
  
  "Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass.  "Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
  malter, and we all admire ye for that gift."
  
  "Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity, I was
  likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me," said the maltster.
  
  "'Ithout doubt you was--'ithout doubt."
  
  The bent and hoary man was satisfied, and so apparently was Henery
  Fray.  That matters should continue pleasant Maryann spoke, who, what
  with her brown complexion, and the working wrapper of rusty linsey,
  had at present the mellow hue of an old sketch in oils--notably some
  of Nicholas Poussin's:--
  
  "Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-hand
  fellow at all that would do for poor me?" said Maryann.  "A perfect
  one I don't expect to get at my time of life.  If I could hear of
  such a thing twould do me more good than toast and ale."
  
  Coggan furnished a suitable reply.  Oak went on with his shearing,
  and said not another word.  Pestilent moods had come, and teased
  away his quiet.  Bathsheba had shown indications of anointing him
  above his fellows by installing him as the bailiff that the farm
  imperatively required.  He did not covet the post relatively to the
  farm: in relation to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to
  another, he had coveted it.  His readings of her seemed now to be
  vapoury and indistinct.  His lecture to her was, he thought, one of
  the absurdest mistakes.  Far from coquetting with Boldwood, she had
  trifled with himself in thus feigning that she had trifled with
  another.  He was inwardly convinced that, in accordance with the
  anticipations of his easy-going and worse-educated comrades, that day
  would see Boldwood the accepted husband of Miss Everdene.  Gabriel
  at this time of his life had out-grown the instinctive dislike which
  every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now
  quite frequently, and he inwardly said, "'I find more bitter than
  death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!'" This was mere
  exclamation--the froth of the storm.  He adored Bathsheba just the
  same.
  
  "We workfolk shall have some lordly junketing to-night," said Cainy
  Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction.  "This morning I
  see 'em making the great puddens in the milking-pails--lumps of fat
  as big as yer thumb, Mister Oak!  I've never seed such splendid large
  knobs of fat before in the days of my life--they never used to be
  bigger then a horse-bean.  And there was a great black crock upon the
  brandish with his legs a-sticking out, but I don't know what was in
  within."
  
  "And there's two bushels of biffins for apple-pies," said Maryann.
  
  "Well, I hope to do my duty by it all," said Joseph Poorgrass, in a
  pleasant, masticating manner of anticipation.  "Yes; victuals and
  drink is a cheerful thing, and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the
  form of words may be used.  'Tis the gospel of the body, without
  which we perish, so to speak it."
  
  
  
  
  
  EVENTIDE--A SECOND DECLARATION
  
  
  For the shearing-supper a long table was placed on the grass-plot
  beside the house, the end of the table being thrust over the sill
  of the wide parlour window and a foot or two into the room.  Miss
  Everdene sat inside the window, facing down the table.  She was
  thus at the head without mingling with the men.
  
  This evening Bathsheba was unusually excited, her red cheeks and lips
  contrasting lustrously with the mazy skeins of her shadowy hair.  She
  seemed to expect assistance, and the seat at the bottom of the table
  was at her request left vacant until after they had begun the meal.
  She then asked Gabriel to take the place and the duties appertaining
  to that end, which he did with great readiness.
  
  At this moment Mr. Boldwood came in at the gate, and crossed the
  green to Bathsheba at the window.  He apologized for his lateness:
  his arrival was evidently by arrangement.
  
  "Gabriel," said she, "will you move again, please, and let Mr.
  Boldwood come there?"
  
  Oak moved in silence back to his original seat.
  
  The gentleman-farmer was dressed in cheerful style, in a new coat
  and white waistcoat, quite contrasting with his usual sober suits of
  grey.  Inwardy, too, he was blithe, and consequently chatty to an
  exceptional degree.  So also was Bathsheba now that he had come,
  though the uninvited presence of Pennyways, the bailiff who had been
  dismissed for theft, disturbed her equanimity for a while.
  
  Supper being ended, Coggan began on his own private account, without
  reference to listeners:--
  
  
     I've lost my love, and I care not,
     I've lost my love, and I care not;
       I shall soon have another
       That's better than t'other;
     I've lost my love, and I care not.
  
  
  This lyric, when concluded, was received with a silently appreciative
  gaze at the table, implying that the performance, like a work by
  those established authors who are independent of notices in the
  papers, was a well-known delight which required no applause.
  
  "Now, Master Poorgrass, your song!" said Coggan.
  
  "I be all but in liquor, and the gift is wanting in me," said Joseph,
  diminishing himself.
  
  "Nonsense; wou'st never be so ungrateful, Joseph--never!" said
  Coggan, expressing hurt feelings by an inflection of voice.  "And
  mistress is looking hard at ye, as much as to say, 'Sing at once,
  Joseph Poorgrass.'"
  
  "Faith, so she is; well, I must suffer it! ... Just eye my features,
  and see if the tell-tale blood overheats me much, neighbours?"
  
  "No, yer blushes be quite reasonable," said Coggan.
  
  "I always tries to keep my colours from rising when a beauty's eyes
  get fixed on me," said Joseph, differently; "but if so be 'tis willed
  they do, they must."
  
  "Now, Joseph, your song, please," said Bathsheba, from the window.
  
  "Well, really, ma'am," he replied, in a yielding tone, "I don't know
  what to say.  It would be a poor plain ballet of my own composure."
  
  "Hear, hear!" said the supper-party.
  
  Poorgrass, thus assured, trilled forth a flickering yet commendable
  piece of sentiment, the tune of which consisted of the key-note and
  another, the latter being the sound chiefly dwelt upon.  This was so
  successful that he rashly plunged into a second in the same breath,
  after a few false starts:--
  
  
     I sow'-ed th'-e .....
     I sow'-ed .....
     I sow'-ed th'-e seeds' of' love',
        I-it was' all' i'-in the'-e spring',
     I-in A'-pril', Ma'-ay, a'-nd sun'-ny' June',
        When sma'-all bi'-irds they' do' sing.
  
  
  "Well put out of hand," said Coggan, at the end of the verse.  "'They
  do sing' was a very taking paragraph."
  
  "Ay; and there was a pretty place at 'seeds of love.' and 'twas well
  heaved out.  Though 'love' is a nasty high corner when a man's voice
  is getting crazed.  Next verse, Master Poorgrass."
  
  But during this rendering young Bob Coggan exhibited one of those
  anomalies which will afflict little people when other persons are
  particularly serious: in trying to check his laughter, he pushed down
  his throat as much of the tablecloth as he could get hold of, when,
  after continuing hermetically sealed for a short time, his mirth
  burst out through his nose.  Joseph perceived it, and with hectic
  cheeks of indignation instantly ceased singing.  Coggan boxed Bob's
  ears immediately.
  
  "Go on, Joseph--go on, and never mind the young scamp," said Coggan.
  "'Tis a very catching ballet.  Now then again--the next bar; I'll
  help ye to flourish up the shrill notes where yer wind is rather
  wheezy:--
  
  
     "Oh the wi'-il-lo'-ow tree' will' twist',
     And the wil'-low' tre'-ee wi'-ill twine'."
  
  
  But the singer could not be set going again.  Bob Coggan was sent
  home for his ill manners, and tranquility was restored by Jacob
  Smallbury, who volunteered a ballad as inclusive and interminable
  as that with which the worthy toper old Silenus amused on a similar
  occasion the swains Chromis and Mnasylus, and other jolly dogs of
  his day.
  
  It was still the beaming time of evening, though night was stealthily
  making itself visible low down upon the ground, the western lines of
  light raking the earth without alighting upon it to any extent, or
  illuminating the dead levels at all.  The sun had crept round the
  tree as a last effort before death, and then began to sink, the
  shearers' lower parts becoming steeped in embrowning twilight, whilst
  their heads and shoulders were still enjoying day, touched with a
  yellow of self-sustained brilliancy that seemed inherent rather than
  acquired.
  
  The sun went down in an ochreous mist; but they sat, and talked on,
  and grew as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven.  Bathsheba still
  remained enthroned inside the window, and occupied herself in
  knitting, from which she sometimes looked up to view the fading scene
  outside.  The slow twilight expanded and enveloped them completely
  before the signs of moving were shown.
  
  Gabriel suddenly missed Farmer Boldwood from his place at the bottom
  of the table.  How long he had been gone Oak did not know; but he
  had apparently withdrawn into the encircling dusk.  Whilst he was
  thinking of this, Liddy brought candles into the back part of the
  room overlooking the shearers, and their lively new flames shone down
  the table and over the men, and dispersed among the green shadows
  behind.  Bathsheba's form, still in its original position, was now
  again distinct between their eyes and the light, which revealed that
  Boldwood had gone inside the room, and was sitting near her.
  
  Next came the question of the evening.  Would Miss Everdene sing to
  them the song she always sang so charmingly--"The Banks of Allan
  Water"--before they went home?
  
  After a moment's consideration Bathsheba assented, beckoning to
  Gabriel, who hastened up into the coveted atmosphere.
  
  "Have you brought your flute?" she whispered.
  
  "Yes, miss."
  
  "Play to my singing, then."
  
  She stood up in the window-opening, facing the men, the candles
  behind her, Gabriel on her right hand, immediately outside the
  sash-frame.  Boldwood had drawn up on her left, within the room.
  Her singing was soft and rather tremulous at first, but it soon
  swelled to a steady clearness.  Subsequent events caused one of the
  verses to be remembered for many months, and even years, by more
  than one of those who were gathered there:--
  
  
     For his bride a soldier sought her,
       And a winning tongue had he:
     On the banks of Allan Water
       None was gay as she!
  
  
  In addition to the dulcet piping of Gabriel's flute, Boldwood
  supplied a bass in his customary profound voice, uttering his notes
  so softly, however, as to abstain entirely from making anything like
  an ordinary duet of the song; they rather formed a rich unexplored
  shadow, which threw her tones into relief.  The shearers reclined
  against each other as at suppers in the early ages of the world, and
  so silent and absorbed were they that her breathing could almost be
  heard between the bars; and at the end of the ballad, when the last
  tone loitered on to an inexpressible close, there arose that buzz of
  pleasure which is the attar of applause.
  
  It is scarcely necessary to state that Gabriel could not avoid noting
  the farmer's bearing to-night towards their entertainer.  Yet there
  was nothing exceptional in his actions beyond what appertained to
  his time of performing them.  It was when the rest were all looking
  away that Boldwood observed her; when they regarded her he turned
  aside; when they thanked or praised he was silent; when they
  were inattentive he murmured his thanks.  The meaning lay in the
  difference between actions, none of which had any meaning of itself;
  and the necessity of being jealous, which lovers are troubled with,
  did not lead Oak to underestimate these signs.
  
  Bathsheba then wished them good-night, withdrew from the window, and
  retired to the back part of the room, Boldwood thereupon closing the
  sash and the shutters, and remaining inside with her.  Oak wandered
  away under the quiet and scented trees.  Recovering from the softer
  impressions produced by Bathsheba's voice, the shearers rose to
  leave, Coggan turning to Pennyways as he pushed back the bench to
  pass out:--
  
  "I like to give praise where praise is due, and the man deserves
  it--that 'a do so," he remarked, looking at the worthy thief, as if
  he were the masterpiece of some world-renowned artist.
  
  "I'm sure I should never have believed it if we hadn't proved it, so
  to allude," hiccupped Joseph Poorgrass, "that every cup, every one of
  the best knives and forks, and every empty bottle be in their place
  as perfect now as at the beginning, and not one stole at all."
  
  "I'm sure I don't deserve half the praise you give me," said the
  virtuous thief, grimly.
  
  "Well, I'll say this for Pennyways," added Coggan, "that whenever he
  do really make up his mind to do a noble thing in the shape of a good
  action, as I could see by his face he did to-night afore sitting
  down, he's generally able to carry it out.  Yes, I'm proud to say,
  neighbours, that he's stole nothing at all."
  
  "Well, 'tis an honest deed, and we thank ye for it, Pennyways," said
  Joseph; to which opinion the remainder of the company subscribed
  unanimously.
  
  At this time of departure, when nothing more was visible of the
  inside of the parlour than a thin and still chink of light between
  the shutters, a passionate scene was in course of enactment there.
  
  Miss Everdene and Boldwood were alone.  Her cheeks had lost a
  great deal of their healthful fire from the very seriousness of
  her position; but her eye was bright with the excitement of a
  triumph--though it was a triumph which had rather been contemplated
  than desired.
  
  She was standing behind a low arm-chair, from which she had just
  risen, and he was kneeling in it--inclining himself over its back
  towards her, and holding her hand in both his own.  His body moved
  restlessly, and it was with what Keats daintily calls a too happy
  happiness.  This unwonted abstraction by love of all dignity from
  a man of whom it had ever seemed the chief component, was, in its
  distressing incongruity, a pain to her which quenched much of the
  pleasure she derived from the proof that she was idolized.
  
  "I will try to love you," she was saying, in a trembling voice quite
  unlike her usual self-confidence.  "And if I can believe in any way
  that I shall make you a good wife I shall indeed be willing to marry
  you.  But, Mr. Boldwood, hesitation on so high a matter is honourable
  in any woman, and I don't want to give a solemn promise to-night.  I
  would rather ask you to wait a few weeks till I can see my situation
  better.
  
  "But you have every reason to believe that THEN--"
  
  "I have every reason to hope that at the end of the five or six
  weeks, between this time and harvest, that you say you are going to
  be away from home, I shall be able to promise to be your wife," she
  said, firmly.  "But remember this distinctly, I don't promise yet."
  
  "It is enough; I don't ask more.  I can wait on those dear words.
  And now, Miss Everdene, good-night!"
  
  "Good-night," she said, graciously--almost tenderly; and Boldwood
  withdrew with a serene smile.
  
  Bathsheba knew more of him now; he had entirely bared his heart
  before her, even until he had almost worn in her eyes the sorry look
  of a grand bird without the feathers that make it grand.  She had
  been awe-struck at her past temerity, and was struggling to make
  amends without thinking whether the sin quite deserved the penalty
  she was schooling herself to pay.  To have brought all this about her
  ears was terrible; but after a while the situation was not without
  a fearful joy.  The facility with which even the most timid women
  sometimes acquire a relish for the dreadful when that is amalgamated
  with a little triumph, is marvellous.
  
  
  
  
  
  THE SAME NIGHT--THE FIR PLANTATION
  
  
  Among the multifarious duties which Bathsheba had voluntarily imposed
  upon herself by dispensing with the services of a bailiff, was the
  particular one of looking round the homestead before going to bed,
  to see that all was right and safe for the night.  Gabriel had
  almost constantly preceded her in this tour every evening, watching
  her affairs as carefully as any specially appointed officer of
  surveillance could have done; but this tender devotion was to a
  great extent unknown to his mistress, and as much as was known was
  somewhat thanklessly received.  Women are never tired of bewailing
  man's fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.
  
  As watching is best done invisibly, she usually carried a dark
  lantern in her hand, and every now and then turned on the light
  to examine nooks and corners with the coolness of a metropolitan
  policeman.  This coolness may have owed its existence not so much
  to her fearlessness of expected danger as to her freedom from the
  suspicion of any; her worst anticipated discovery being that a horse
  might not be well bedded, the fowls not all in, or a door not closed.
  
  This night the buildings were inspected as usual, and she went round
  to the farm paddock.  Here the only sounds disturbing the stillness
  were steady munchings of many mouths, and stentorian breathings from
  all but invisible noses, ending in snores and puffs like the blowing
  of bellows slowly.  Then the munching would recommence, when the
  lively imagination might assist the eye to discern a group of
  pink-white nostrils, shaped as caverns, and very clammy and humid on
  their surfaces, not exactly pleasant to the touch until one got used
  to them; the mouths beneath having a great partiality for closing
  upon any loose end of Bathsheba's apparel which came within reach of
  their tongues.  Above each of these a still keener vision suggested a
  brown forehead and two staring though not unfriendly eyes, and above
  all a pair of whitish crescent-shaped horns like two particularly
  new moons, an occasional stolid "moo!" proclaiming beyond the shade
  of a doubt that these phenomena were the features and persons of
  Daisy, Whitefoot, Bonny-lass, Jolly-O, Spot, Twinkle-eye, etc.,
  etc.--the respectable dairy of Devon cows belonging to Bathsheba
  aforesaid.
  
  Her way back to the house was by a path through a young plantation of
  tapering firs, which had been planted some years earlier to shelter
  the premises from the north wind.  By reason of the density of
  the interwoven foliage overhead, it was gloomy there at cloudless
  noontide, twilight in the evening, dark as midnight at dusk, and
  black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight.  To describe the spot
  is to call it a vast, low, naturally formed hall, the plumy ceiling
  of which was supported by slender pillars of living wood, the floor
  being covered with a soft dun carpet of dead spikelets and mildewed
  cones, with a tuft of grass-blades here and there.
  
  This bit of the path was always the crux of the night's ramble,
  though, before starting, her apprehensions of danger were not vivid
  enough to lead her to take a companion.  Slipping along here covertly
  as Time, Bathsheba fancied she could hear footsteps entering the
  track at the opposite end.  It was certainly a rustle of footsteps.
  Her own instantly fell as gently as snowflakes.  She reassured
  herself by a remembrance that the path was public, and that the
  traveller was probably some villager returning home; regretting,
  at the same time, that the meeting should be about to occur in the
  darkest point of her route, even though only just outside her own
  door.
  
  The noise approached, came close, and a figure was apparently on the
  point of gliding past her when something tugged at her skirt and
  pinned it forcibly to the ground.  The instantaneous check nearly
  threw Bathsheba off her balance.  In recovering she struck against
  warm clothes and buttons.
  
  "A rum start, upon my soul!" said a masculine voice, a foot or so
  above her head.  "Have I hurt you, mate?"
  
  "No," said Bathsheba, attempting to shrink away.
  
  "We have got hitched together somehow, I think."
  
  "Yes."
  
  "Are you a woman?"
  
  "Yes."
  
  "A lady, I should have said."
  
  "It doesn't matter."
  
  "I am a man."
  
  "Oh!"
  
  Bathsheba softly tugged again, but to no purpose.
  
  "Is that a dark lantern you have?  I fancy so," said the man.
  
  "Yes."
  
  "If you'll allow me I'll open it, and set you free."
  
  A hand seized the lantern, the door was opened, the rays burst
  out from their prison, and Bathsheba beheld her position with
  astonishment.
  
  The man to whom she was hooked was brilliant in brass and scarlet.
  He was a soldier.  His sudden appearance was to darkness what the
  sound of a trumpet is to silence.  Gloom, the _genius loci_ at all
  times hitherto, was now totally overthrown, less by the lantern-light
  than by what the lantern lighted.  The contrast of this revelation
  with her anticipations of some sinister figure in sombre garb was so
  great that it had upon her the effect of a fairy transformation.
  
  It was immediately apparent that the military man's spur had become
  entangled in the gimp which decorated the skirt of her dress.  He
  caught a view of her face.
  
  "I'll unfasten you in one moment, miss," he said, with new-born
  gallantry.
  
  "Oh no--I can do it, thank you," she hastily replied, and stooped for
  the performance.
  
  The unfastening was not such a trifling affair.  The rowel of the
  spur had so wound itself among the gimp cords in those few moments,
  that separation was likely to be a matter of time.
  
  He too stooped, and the lantern standing on the ground betwixt them
  threw the gleam from its open side among the fir-tree needles and the
  blades of long damp grass with the effect of a large glowworm.  It
  radiated upwards into their faces, and sent over half the plantation
  gigantic shadows of both man and woman, each dusky shape becoming
  distorted and mangled upon the tree-trunks till it wasted to nothing.
  
  He looked hard into her eyes when she raised them for a moment;
  Bathsheba looked down again, for his gaze was too strong to be
  received point-blank with her own.  But she had obliquely noticed
  that he was young and slim, and that he wore three chevrons upon his
  sleeve.
  
  Bathsheba pulled again.
  
  "You are a prisoner, miss; it is no use blinking the matter," said
  the soldier, drily.  "I must cut your dress if you are in such a
  hurry."
  
  "Yes--please do!" she exclaimed, helplessly.
  
  "It wouldn't be necessary if you could wait a moment," and he unwound
  a cord from the little wheel.  She withdrew her own hand, but,
  whether by accident or design, he touched it.  Bathsheba was vexed;
  she hardly knew why.
  
  His unravelling went on, but it nevertheless seemed coming to no end.
  She looked at him again.
  
  "Thank you for the sight of such a beautiful face!" said the young
  sergeant, without ceremony.
  
  She coloured with embarrassment.  "'Twas unwillingly shown," she
  replied, stiffly, and with as much dignity--which was very little--as
  she could infuse into a position of captivity.
  
  "I like you the better for that incivility, miss," he said.
  
  "I should have liked--I wish--you had never shown yourself to me by
  intruding here!" She pulled again, and the gathers of her dress began
  to give way like liliputian musketry.
  
  "I deserve the chastisement your words give me.  But why should such
  a fair and dutiful girl have such an aversion to her father's sex?"
  
  "Go on your way, please."
  
  "What, Beauty, and drag you after me?  Do but look; I never saw such
  a tangle!"
  
  "Oh, 'tis shameful of you; you have been making it worse on purpose
  to keep me here--you have!"
  
  "Indeed, I don't think so," said the sergeant, with a merry twinkle.
  
  "I tell you you have!" she exclaimed, in high temper.  "I insist upon
  undoing it.  Now, allow me!"
  
  "Certainly, miss; I am not of steel."  He added a sigh which had as
  much archness in it as a sigh could possess without losing its nature
  altogether.  "I am thankful for beauty, even when 'tis thrown to me
  like a bone to a dog.  These moments will be over too soon!"
  
  She closed her lips in a determined silence.
  
  Bathsheba was revolving in her mind whether by a bold and desperate
  rush she could free herself at the risk of leaving her skirt bodily
  behind her.  The thought was too dreadful.  The dress--which she had
  put on to appear stately at the supper--was the head and front of her
  wardrobe; not another in her stock became her so well.  What woman
  in Bathsheba's position, not naturally timid, and within call of her
  retainers, would have bought escape from a dashing soldier at so dear
  a price?
  
  "All in good time; it will soon be done, I perceive," said her cool
  friend.
  
  "This trifling provokes, and--and--"
  
  "Not too cruel!"
  
  "--Insults me!"
  
  "It is done in order that I may have the pleasure of apologizing to
  so charming a woman, which I straightway do most humbly, madam," he
  said, bowing low.
  
  Bathsheba really knew not what to say.
  
  "I've seen a good many women in my time," continued the young man in
  a murmur, and more thoughtfully than hitherto, critically regarding
  her bent head at the same time; "but I've never seen a woman so
  beautiful as you.  Take it or leave it--be offended or like it--I
  don't care."
  
  "Who are you, then, who can so well afford to despise opinion?"
  
  "No stranger.  Sergeant Troy.  I am staying in this place.--There!
  it is undone at last, you see.  Your light fingers were more eager
  than mine.  I wish it had been the knot of knots, which there's no
  untying!"
  
  This was worse and worse.  She started up, and so did he.  How to
  decently get away from him--that was her difficulty now.  She sidled
  off inch by inch, the lantern in her hand, till she could see the
  redness of his coat no longer.
  
  "Ah, Beauty; good-bye!" he said.
  
  She made no reply, and, reaching a distance of twenty or thirty
  yards, turned about, and ran indoors.
  
  Liddy had just retired to rest.  In ascending to her own chamber,
  Bathsheba opened the girl's door an inch or two, and, panting, said--
  
  "Liddy, is any soldier staying in the village--sergeant somebody--
  rather gentlemanly for a sergeant, and good looking--a red coat with
  blue facings?"
  
  "No, miss ... No, I say; but really it might be Sergeant Troy home on
  furlough, though I have not seen him.  He was here once in that way
  when the regiment was at Casterbridge."
  
  "Yes; that's the name.  Had he a moustache--no whiskers or beard?"
  
  "He had."
  
  "What kind of a person is he?"
  
  "Oh! miss--I blush to name it--a gay man!  But I know him to be very
  quick and trim, who might have made his thousands, like a squire.
  Such a clever young dandy as he is!  He's a doctor's son by name,
  which is a great deal; and he's an earl's son by nature!"
  
  "Which is a great deal more.  Fancy!  Is it true?"
  
  "Yes.  And, he was brought up so well, and sent to Casterbridge
  Grammar School for years and years.  Learnt all languages while he
  was there; and it was said he got on so far that he could take down
  Chinese in shorthand; but that I don't answer for, as it was only
  reported.  However, he wasted his gifted lot, and listed a soldier;
  but even then he rose to be a sergeant without trying at all.  Ah!
  such a blessing it is to be high-born; nobility of blood will shine
  out even in the ranks and files.  And is he really come home, miss?"
  
  "I believe so.  Good-night, Liddy."
  
  After all, how could a cheerful wearer of skirts be permanently
  offended with the man?  There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba
  will put up with a great deal of unconventional behaviour.  When they
  want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered,
  which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.
  Just now the first feeling was in the ascendant with Bathsheba,
  with a dash of the second.  Moreover, by chance or by devilry, the
  ministrant was antecedently made interesting by being a handsome
  stranger who had evidently seen better days.
  
  So she could not clearly decide whether it was her opinion that he
  had insulted her or not.
  
  "Was ever anything so odd!" she at last exclaimed to herself, in her
  own room.  "And was ever anything so meanly done as what I did--to
  skulk away like that from a man who was only civil and kind!" Clearly
  she did not think his barefaced praise of her person an insult now.
  
  It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her
  she was beautiful.
  
  
  
  
  
  THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED
  
  
  Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as
  an exceptional being.
  
  He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations
  a superfluity.  Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was
  before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present.  His outlook
  upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that
  projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which
  makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word
  for circumspection, was foreign to Troy.  With him the past was
  yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.
  
  On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as
  one of the most fortunate of his order.  For it may be argued with
  great plausibility that reminiscence is less an endowment than a
  disease, and that expectation in its only comfortable form--that of
  absolute faith--is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form
  of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve,
  curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.
  
  Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of
  expectation, was never disappointed.  To set against this negative
  gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain
  narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed.  But
  limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser
  therefrom: in this attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts
  plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it,
  whilst those who mind it soon cease to suffer.  It is not a denial
  of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy had never
  enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully conscious that what sober
  people missed he enjoyed, his capacity, though really less, seemed
  greater than theirs.
  
  He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like
  a Cretan--a system of ethics above all others calculated to win
  popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and
  the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference
  only to the future.
  
  He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the
  ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded,
  disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile.  This
  treatment had led to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men's
  gallantries, to his own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than
  to the moral profit of his hearers.
  
  His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating
  influence, having separated by mutual consent long ago: thence it
  sometimes happened that, while his intentions were as honourable as
  could be wished, any particular deed formed a dark background which
  threw them into fine relief.  The sergeant's vicious phases being the
  offspring of impulse, and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the
  latter had a modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.
  
  Troy was full of activity, but his activities were less of a
  locomotive than a vegetative nature; and, never being based upon
  any original choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised
  on whatever object chance might place in their way.  Hence, whilst
  he sometimes reached the brilliant in speech because that was
  spontaneous, he fell below the commonplace in action, from inability
  to guide incipient effort.  He had a quick comprehension and
  considerable force of character; but, being without the power to
  combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities
  whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself
  in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension.
  
  He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class--
  exceptionally well educated for a common soldier.  He spoke fluently
  and unceasingly.  He could in this way be one thing and seem another:
  for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the
  husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.
  
  The wondrous power of flattery in _passados_ at woman is a perception
  so universal as to be remarked upon by many people almost as
  automatically as they repeat a proverb, or say that they are
  Christians and the like, without thinking much of the enormous
  corollaries which spring from the proposition.  Still less is it
  acted upon for the good of the complemental being alluded to.
  With the majority such an opinion is shelved with all those trite
  aphorisms which require some catastrophe to bring their tremendous
  meanings thoroughly home.  When expressed with some amount of
  reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with a belief that this flattery
  must be reasonable to be effective.  It is to the credit of men that
  few attempt to settle the question by experiment, and it is for
  their happiness, perhaps, that accident has never settled it for
  them.  Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by deluging her with
  untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may acquire powers
  reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth taught to many by
  unsought and wringing occurrences.  And some profess to have attained
  to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and jauntily
  continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible effect.
  Sergeant Troy was one.
  
  He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind
  the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing.  There was
  no third method.  "Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man." he
  would say.
  
  This person's public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his
  arrival there.  A week or two after the shearing, Bathsheba, feeling
  a nameless relief of spirits on account of Boldwood's absence,
  approached her hayfields and looked over the hedge towards the
  haymakers.  They consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and
  flexuous forms, the former being the men, the latter the women, who
  wore tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon
  their shoulders.  Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in a less forward
  meadow, Clark humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to
  which Jan made no attempt to keep time with his.  In the first mead
  they were already loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and
  windrows, and the men tossing it upon the waggon.
  
  From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and went on
  loading unconcernedly with the rest.  It was the gallant sergeant,
  who had come haymaking for pleasure; and nobody could deny that
  he was doing the mistress of the farm real knight-service by this
  voluntary contribution of his labour at a busy time.
  
  As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and sticking his
  pitchfork into the ground and picking up his crop or cane, he came
  forward.  Bathsheba blushed with half-angry embarrassment, and
  adjusted her eyes as well as her feet to the direct line of her path.
  
  
  
  
  
  SCENE ON THE VERGE OF THE HAY-MEAD
  
  
  "Ah, Miss Everdene!" said the sergeant, touching his diminutive cap.
  "Little did I think it was you I was speaking to the other night.
  And yet, if I had reflected, the 'Queen of the Corn-market' (truth is
  truth at any hour of the day or night, and I heard you so named in
  Casterbridge yesterday), the 'Queen of the Corn-market.' I say, could
  be no other woman.  I step across now to beg your forgiveness a
  thousand times for having been led by my feelings to express myself
  too strongly for a stranger.  To be sure I am no stranger to the
  place--I am Sergeant Troy, as I told you, and I have assisted your
  uncle in these fields no end of times when I was a lad.  I have been
  doing the same for you to-day."
  
  "I suppose I must thank you for that, Sergeant Troy," said the Queen
  of the Corn-market, in an indifferently grateful tone.
  
  The sergeant looked hurt and sad.  "Indeed you must not, Miss
  Everdene," he said.  "Why could you think such a thing necessary?"
  
  "I am glad it is not."
  
  "Why? if I may ask without offence."
  
  "Because I don't much want to thank you for anything."
  
  "I am afraid I have made a hole with my tongue that my heart will
  never mend.  O these intolerable times: that ill-luck should follow
  a man for honestly telling a woman she is beautiful!  'Twas the most
  I said--you must own that; and the least I could say--that I own
  myself."
  
  "There is some talk I could do without more easily than money."
  
  "Indeed.  That remark is a sort of digression."
  
  "No.  It means that I would rather have your room than your company."
  
  "And I would rather have curses from you than kisses from any other
  woman; so I'll stay here."
  
  Bathsheba was absolutely speechless.  And yet she could not help
  feeling that the assistance he was rendering forbade a harsh repulse.
  
  "Well," continued Troy, "I suppose there is a praise which is
  rudeness, and that may be mine.  At the same time there is a
  treatment which is injustice, and that may be yours.  Because a plain
  blunt man, who has never been taught concealment, speaks out his mind
  without exactly intending it, he's to be snapped off like the son of
  a sinner."
  
  "Indeed there's no such case between us," she said, turning away.  "I
  don't allow strangers to be bold and impudent--even in praise of me."
  
  "Ah--it is not the fact but the method which offends you," he said,
  carelessly.  "But I have the sad satisfaction of knowing that my
  words, whether pleasing or offensive, are unmistakably true.  Would
  you have had me look at you, and tell my acquaintance that you are
  quite a common-place woman, to save you the embarrassment of being
  stared at if they come near you?  Not I.  I couldn't tell any such
  ridiculous lie about a beauty to encourage a single woman in England
  in too excessive a modesty."
  
  "It is all pretence--what you are saying!" exclaimed Bathsheba,
  laughing in spite of herself at the sly method.  "You have a rare
  invention, Sergeant Troy.  Why couldn't you have passed by me that
  night, and said nothing?--that was all I meant to reproach you for."
  
  "Because I wasn't going to.  Half the pleasure of a feeling lies in
  being able to express it on the spur of the moment, and I let out
  mine.  It would have been just the same if you had been the reverse
  person--ugly and old--I should have exclaimed about it in the same
  way."
  
  "How long is it since you have been so afflicted with strong feeling,
  then?"
  
  "Oh, ever since I was big enough to know loveliness from deformity."
  
  "'Tis to be hoped your sense of the difference you speak of doesn't
  stop at faces, but extends to morals as well."
  
  "I won't speak of morals or religion--my own or anybody else's.
  Though perhaps I should have been a very good Christian if you pretty
  women hadn't made me an idolater."
  
  Bathsheba moved on to hide the irrepressible dimplings of merriment.
  Troy followed, whirling his crop.
  
  "But--Miss Everdene--you do forgive me?"
  
  "Hardly."
  
  "Why?"
  
  "You say such things."
  
  "I said you were beautiful, and I'll say so still; for, by G---- so you
  are!  The most beautiful ever I saw, or may I fall dead this instant!
  Why, upon my ----"
  
  "Don't--don't!  I won't listen to you--you are so profane!" she said,
  in a restless state between distress at hearing him and a _penchant_
  to hear more.
  
  "I again say you are a most fascinating woman.  There's nothing
  remarkable in my saying so, is there?  I'm sure the fact is evident
  enough.  Miss Everdene, my opinion may be too forcibly let out
  to please you, and, for the matter of that, too insignificant to
  convince you, but surely it is honest, and why can't it be excused?"
  
  "Because it--it isn't a correct one," she femininely murmured.
  
  "Oh, fie--fie!  Am I any worse for breaking the third of that
  Terrible Ten than you for breaking the ninth?"
  
  "Well, it doesn't seem QUITE true to me that I am fascinating," she
  replied evasively.
  
  "Not so to you: then I say with all respect that, if so, it is owing
  to your modesty, Miss Everdene.  But surely you must have been told
  by everybody of what everybody notices?  And you should take their
  words for it."
  
  "They don't say so exactly."
  
  "Oh yes, they must!"
  
  "Well, I mean to my face, as you do," she went on, allowing herself
  to be further lured into a conversation that intention had rigorously
  forbidden.
  
  "But you know they think so?"
  
  "No--that is--I certainly have heard Liddy say they do, but--"  She
  paused.
  
  Capitulation--that was the purport of the simple reply, guarded as it
  was--capitulation, unknown to herself.  Never did a fragile tailless
  sentence convey a more perfect meaning.  The careless sergeant smiled
  within himself, and probably too the devil smiled from a loop-hole in
  Tophet, for the moment was the turning-point of a career.  Her tone
  and mien signified beyond mistake that the seed which was to lift the
  foundation had taken root in the chink: the remainder was a mere
  question of time and natural changes.
  
  "There the truth comes out!" said the soldier, in reply.  "Never tell
  me that a young lady can live in a buzz of admiration without knowing
  something about it.  Ah, well, Miss Everdene, you are--pardon my
  blunt way--you are rather an injury to our race than otherwise."
  
  "How--indeed?" she said, opening her eyes.
  
  "Oh, it is true enough.  I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb
  (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a
  rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your
  pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon.  Why,
  Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more
  harm than good in the world."  The sergeant looked down the mead in
  critical abstraction.  "Probably some one man on an average falls in
  love with each ordinary woman.  She can marry him: he is content,
  and leads a useful life.  Such women as you a hundred men always
  covet--your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing
  fancy for you--you can only marry one of that many.  Out of these
  say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love
  in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or
  attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition
  apart from their attachment to you; twenty more--the susceptible
  person myself possibly among them--will be always draggling after
  you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things.
  Men are such constant fools!  The rest may try to get over their
  passion with more or less success.  But all these men will be
  saddened.  And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine
  women they might have married are saddened with them.  There's my
  tale.  That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss
  Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race."
  
  The handsome sergeant's features were during this speech as rigid and
  stern as John Knox's in addressing his gay young queen.
  
  Seeing she made no reply, he said, "Do you read French?"
  
  "No; I began, but when I got to the verbs, father died," she said
  simply.
  
  "I do--when I have an opportunity, which latterly has not been often
  (my mother was a Parisienne)--and there's a proverb they have,
  _Qui aime bien, chatie bien_--'He chastens who loves well.'  Do you
  understand me?"
  
  "Ah!" she replied, and there was even a little tremulousness in the
  usually cool girl's voice; "if you can only fight half as winningly
  as you can talk, you are able to make a pleasure of a bayonet wound!"
  And then poor Bathsheba instantly perceived her slip in making this
  admission: in hastily trying to retrieve it, she went from bad to
  worse.  "Don't, however, suppose that _I_ derive any pleasure from
  what you tell me."
  
  "I know you do not--I know it perfectly," said Troy, with much hearty
  conviction on the exterior of his face: and altering the expression
  to moodiness; "when a dozen men are ready to speak tenderly to you,
  and give the admiration you deserve without adding the warning you
  need, it stands to reason that my poor rough-and-ready mixture of
  praise and blame cannot convey much pleasure.  Fool as I may be, I
  am not so conceited as to suppose that!"
  
  "I think you--are conceited, nevertheless," said Bathsheba, looking
  askance at a reed she was fitfully pulling with one hand, having
  lately grown feverish under the soldier's system of procedure--not
  because the nature of his cajolery was entirely unperceived, but
  because its vigour was overwhelming.
  
  "I would not own it to anybody else--nor do I exactly to you.  Still,
  there might have been some self-conceit in my foolish supposition
  the other night.  I knew that what I said in admiration might be
  an opinion too often forced upon you to give any pleasure, but I
  certainly did think that the kindness of your nature might prevent
  you judging an uncontrolled tongue harshly--which you have done--and
  thinking badly of me and wounding me this morning, when I am working
  hard to save your hay."
  
  "Well, you need not think more of that: perhaps you did not mean to
  be rude to me by speaking out your mind: indeed, I believe you did
  not," said the shrewd woman, in painfully innocent earnest.  "And I
  thank you for giving help here.  But--but mind you don't speak to me
  again in that way, or in any other, unless I speak to you."
  
  "Oh, Miss Bathsheba!  That is too hard!"
  
  "No, it isn't.  Why is it?"
  
  "You will never speak to me; for I shall not be here long.  I am soon
  going back again to the miserable monotony of drill--and perhaps
  our regiment will be ordered out soon.  And yet you take away the
  one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life
  of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked
  characteristic."
  
  "When are you going from here?" she asked, with some interest.
  
  "In a month."
  
  "But how can it give you pleasure to speak to me?"
  
  "Can you ask Miss Everdene--knowing as you do--what my offence is
  based on?"
  
  "If you do care so much for a silly trifle of that kind, then, I
  don't mind doing it," she uncertainly and doubtingly answered.  "But
  you can't really care for a word from me? you only say so--I think
  you only say so."
  
  "That's unjust--but I won't repeat the remark.  I am too gratified to
  get such a mark of your friendship at any price to cavil at the tone.
  I DO, Miss Everdene, care for it.  You may think a man foolish to
  want a mere word--just a good morning.  Perhaps he is--I don't know.
  But you have never been a man looking upon a woman, and that woman
  yourself."
  
  "Well."
  
  "Then you know nothing of what such an experience is like--and Heaven
  forbid that you ever should!"
  
  "Nonsense, flatterer!  What is it like?  I am interested in knowing."
  
  "Put shortly, it is not being able to think, hear, or look in
  any direction except one without wretchedness, nor there without
  torture."
  
  "Ah, sergeant, it won't do--you are pretending!" she said, shaking
  her head. "Your words are too dashing to be true."
  
  "I am not, upon the honour of a soldier."
  
  "But WHY is it so?--Of course I ask for mere pastime."
  
  "Because you are so distracting--and I am so distracted."
  
  "You look like it."
  
  "I am indeed."
  
  "Why, you only saw me the other night!"
  
  "That makes no difference.  The lightning works instantaneously.  I
  loved you then, at once--as I do now."
  
  Bathsheba surveyed him curiously, from the feet upward, as high as
  she liked to venture her glance, which was not quite so high as his
  eyes.
  
  "You cannot and you don't," she said demurely.  "There is no such
  sudden feeling in people.  I won't listen to you any longer.  Hear
  me, I wish I knew what o'clock it is--I am going--I have wasted too
  much time here already!"
  
  The sergeant looked at his watch and told her.  "What, haven't you a
  watch, miss?" he inquired.
  
  "I have not just at present--I am about to get a new one."
  
  "No.  You shall be given one.  Yes--you shall.  A gift, Miss
  Everdene--a gift."
  
  And before she knew what the young man was intending, a heavy gold
  watch was in her hand.
  
  "It is an unusually good one for a man like me to possess," he
  quietly said.  "That watch has a history.  Press the spring and open
  the back."
  
  She did so.
  
  "What do you see?"
  
  "A crest and a motto."
  
  "A coronet with five points, and beneath, _Cedit amor rebus_--'Love
  yields to circumstance.' It's the motto of the Earls of Severn.
  That watch belonged to the last lord, and was given to my mother's
  husband, a medical man, for his use till I came of age, when it was
  to be given to me.  It was all the fortune that ever I inherited.
  That watch has regulated imperial interests in its time--the stately
  ceremonial, the courtly assignation, pompous travels, and lordly
  sleeps.  Now it is yours."
  
  "But, Sergeant Troy, I cannot take this--I cannot!" she exclaimed,
  with round-eyed wonder.  "A gold watch!  What are you doing?  Don't
  be such a dissembler!"
  
  The sergeant retreated to avoid receiving back his gift, which she
  held out persistently towards him.  Bathsheba followed as he retired.
  
  "Keep it--do, Miss Everdene--keep it!" said the erratic child of
  impulse.  "The fact of your possessing it makes it worth ten times
  as much to me.  A more plebeian one will answer my purpose just
  as well, and the pleasure of knowing whose heart my old one beats
  against--well, I won't speak of that.  It is in far worthier hands
  than ever it has been in before."
  
  "But indeed I can't have it!" she said, in a perfect simmer of
  distress.  "Oh, how can you do such a thing; that is if you really
  mean it!  Give me your dead father's watch, and such a valuable one!
  You should not be so reckless, indeed, Sergeant Troy!"
  
  "I loved my father: good; but better, I love you more.  That's how I
  can do it," said the sergeant, with an intonation of such exquisite
  fidelity to nature that it was evidently not all acted now.  Her
  beauty, which, whilst it had been quiescent, he had praised in jest,
  had in its animated phases moved him to earnest; and though his
  seriousness was less than she imagined, it was probably more than he
  imagined himself.
  
  Bathsheba was brimming with agitated bewilderment, and she said, in
  half-suspicious accents of feeling, "Can it be!  Oh, how can it be,
  that you care for me, and so suddenly!  You have seen so little
  of me: I may not be really so--so nice-looking as I seem to you.
  Please, do take it; Oh, do!  I cannot and will not have it.  Believe
  me, your generosity is too great.  I have never done you a single
  kindness, and why should you be so kind to me?"
  
  A factitious reply had been again upon his lips, but it was again
  suspended, and he looked at her with an arrested eye.  The truth was,
  that as she now stood--excited, wild, and honest as the day--her
  alluring beauty bore out so fully the epithets he had bestowed upon
  it that he was quite startled at his temerity in advancing them as
  false.  He said mechanically, "Ah, why?" and continued to look at
  her.
  
  "And my workfolk see me following you about the field, and are
  wondering.  Oh, this is dreadful!" she went on, unconscious of the
  transmutation she was effecting.
  
  "I did not quite mean you to accept it at first, for it was my one
  poor patent of nobility," he broke out, bluntly; "but, upon my soul,
  I wish you would now.  Without any shamming, come!  Don't deny me the
  happiness of wearing it for my sake?  But you are too lovely even to
  care to be kind as others are."
  
  "No, no; don't say so!  I have reasons for reserve which I cannot
  explain."
  
  "Let it be, then, let it be," he said, receiving back the watch at
  last; "I must be leaving you now.  And will you speak to me for these
  few weeks of my stay?"
  
  "Indeed I will.  Yet, I don't know if I will!  Oh, why did you come
  and disturb me so!"
  
  "Perhaps in setting a gin, I have caught myself.  Such things have
  happened.  Well, will you let me work in your fields?" he coaxed.
  
  "Yes, I suppose so; if it is any pleasure to you."
  
  "Miss Everdene, I thank you."
  
  "No, no."
  
  "Good-bye!"
  
  The sergeant brought his hand to the cap on the slope of his head,
  saluted, and returned to the distant group of haymakers.
  
  Bathsheba could not face the haymakers now.  Her heart erratically
  flitting hither and thither from perplexed excitement, hot, and
  almost tearful, she retreated homeward, murmuring, "Oh, what have I
  done!  What does it mean!  I wish I knew how much of it was true!"
  
  
  
  
  
  HIVING THE BEES
  
  
  The Weatherbury bees were late in their swarming this year. It was in
  the latter part of June, and the day after the interview with Troy in
  the hayfield, that Bathsheba was standing in her garden, watching a
  swarm in the air and guessing their probable settling place.  Not
  only were they late this year, but unruly.  Sometimes throughout a
  whole season all the swarms would alight on the lowest attainable
  bough--such as part of a currant-bush or espalier apple-tree; next
  year they would, with just the same unanimity, make straight off to
  the uppermost member of some tall, gaunt costard, or quarrenden,
  and there defy all invaders who did not come armed with ladders and
  staves to take them.
  
  This was the case at present.  Bathsheba's eyes, shaded by one hand,
  were following the ascending multitude against the unexplorable
  stretch of blue till they ultimately halted by one of the unwieldy
  trees spoken of.  A process somewhat analogous to that of alleged
  formations of the universe, time and times ago, was observable.  The
  bustling swarm had swept the sky in a scattered and uniform haze,
  which now thickened to a nebulous centre: this glided on to a bough
  and grew still denser, till it formed a solid black spot upon the
  light.
  
  The men and women being all busily engaged in saving the hay--even
  Liddy had left the house for the purpose of lending a hand--Bathsheba
  resolved to hive the bees herself, if possible.  She had dressed the
  hive with herbs and honey, fetched a ladder, brush, and crook, made
  herself impregnable with armour of leather gloves, straw hat, and
  large gauze veil--once green but now faded to snuff colour--and
  ascended a dozen rungs of the ladder.  At once she heard, not ten
  yards off, a voice that was beginning to have a strange power in
  agitating her.
  
  "Miss Everdene, let me assist you; you should not attempt such a
  thing alone."
  
  Troy was just opening the garden gate.
  
  Bathsheba flung down the brush, crook, and empty hive, pulled the
  skirt of her dress tightly round her ankles in a tremendous flurry,
  and as well as she could slid down the ladder.  By the time she
  reached the bottom Troy was there also, and he stooped to pick up
  the hive.
  
  "How fortunate I am to have dropped in at this moment!" exclaimed the
  sergeant.
  
  She found her voice in a minute.  "What! and will you shake them in
  for me?" she asked, in what, for a defiant girl, was a faltering way;
  though, for a timid girl, it would have seemed a brave way enough.
  
  "Will I!" said Troy.  "Why, of course I will.  How blooming you are
  to-day!"  Troy flung down his cane and put his foot on the ladder to
  ascend.
  
  "But you must have on the veil and gloves, or you'll be stung
  fearfully!"
  
  "Ah, yes.  I must put on the veil and gloves.  Will you kindly show
  me how to fix them properly?"
  
  "And you must have the broad-brimmed hat, too, for your cap has no
  brim to keep the veil off, and they'd reach your face."
  
  "The broad-brimmed hat, too, by all means."
  
  So a whimsical fate ordered that her hat should be taken off--veil
  and all attached--and placed upon his head, Troy tossing his own into
  a gooseberry bush.  Then the veil had to be tied at its lower edge
  round his collar and the gloves put on him.
  
  He looked such an extraordinary object in this guise that, flurried
  as she was, she could not avoid laughing outright. It was the removal
  of yet another stake from the palisade of cold manners which had kept
  him off.
  
  Bathsheba looked on from the ground whilst he was busy sweeping and
  shaking the bees from the tree, holding up the hive with the other
  hand for them to fall into.  She made use of an unobserved minute
  whilst his attention was absorbed in the operation to arrange her
  plumes a little.  He came down holding the hive at arm's length,
  behind which trailed a cloud of bees.
  
  "Upon my life," said Troy, through the veil, "holding up this hive
  makes one's arm ache worse than a week of sword-exercise." When the
  manoeuvre was complete he approached her.  "Would you be good enough
  to untie me and let me out? I am nearly stifled inside this silk
  cage."
  
  To hide her embarrassment during the unwonted process of untying the
  string about his neck, she said:--
  
  "I have never seen that you spoke of."
  
  "What?"
  
  "The sword-exercise."
  
  "Ah! would you like to?" said Troy.
  
  Bathsheba hesitated.  She had heard wondrous reports from time to
  time by dwellers in Weatherbury, who had by chance sojourned awhile
  in Casterbridge, near the barracks, of this strange and glorious
  performance, the sword-exercise.  Men and boys who had peeped through
  chinks or over walls into the barrack-yard returned with accounts of
  its being the most flashing affair conceivable; accoutrements and
  weapons glistening like stars--here, there, around--yet all by rule
  and compass.  So she said mildly what she felt strongly.
  
  "Yes; I should like to see it very much."
  
  "And so you shall; you shall see me go through it."
  
  "No!  How?"
  
  "Let me consider."
  
  "Not with a walking-stick--I don't care to see that.  It must be a
  real sword."
  
  "Yes, I know; and I have no sword here; but I think I could get one
  by the evening.  Now, will you do this?"
  
  Troy bent over her and murmured some suggestion in a low voice.
  
  "Oh no, indeed!" said Bathsheba, blushing. "Thank you very much, but
  I couldn't on any account."
  
  "Surely you might?  Nobody would know."
  
  She shook her head, but with a weakened negation.  "If I were to,"
  she said, "I must bring Liddy too.  Might I not?"
  
  Troy looked far away.  "I don't see why you want to bring her," he
  said coldly.
  
  An unconscious look of assent in Bathsheba's eyes betrayed that
  something more than his coldness had made her also feel that Liddy
  would be superfluous in the suggested scene.  She had felt it, even
  whilst making the proposal.
  
  "Well, I won't bring Liddy--and I'll come.  But only for a very short
  time," she added; "a very short time."
  
  "It will not take five minutes," said Troy.
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapters 21-27
target: In June, it is time for the sheep shearing. While shearing in the barn, Gabriel notices that Boldwood has come to speak with Bathsheba. He is distracted by speculating about the nature of their conversation and wounds one of the sheep, leading Bathsheba to rebuke him. After Boldwood and Bathsheba ride off together, the other farmworkers speculate that the two of them will soon marry. After the shearing is finished, Bathsheba and her workers celebrate with a traditional shearing-supper. At the end of supper, when Boldwood and Bathsheba are alone together, she tells him that she is willing to consider marrying him but wants more time to think about it. She tells him that she expects she will be able to give him a definitive answer by harvest time. That night, Bathsheba follows her nightly routine of walking around the property and inspecting it before going to bed. As she passes through the fir plantation, a man in military dress walks up behind her, and her skirt gets accidentally hooked onto the spur of his boot. He tries to free her and during the time spent untangling the knot, he identifies himself as Sergeant Troy. Troy also compliments Bathsheba's beauty and flirts with her, making her uncomfortable. When she is freed, she hurries home and asks Liddy if she knows anything about this man. Liddy explains that Troy is well-educated and from a good family, and that he also has a reputation as a flirt and a ladies' man. A week after the shearing, Bathsheba goes to supervise her workers as they load hay and finds that Troy has come to help them. He approaches her and the two flirt with each other, although Bathsheba is somewhat guarded and skeptical. She is shocked when Troy impulsively gives her a watch that belonged to his father. The next day, he comes to the farm again and helps her with her beehive. She mentions that she would like to see him perform his sword exercises and they make a plan to meet that evening in secret. When they meet, Troy dazzles her with his skill as a swordsman and his bold charm. He kisses her before he leaves, leaving Bathsheba overwhelmed and confused by her feelings.
feat_summary_analysis: Bathsheba's situation was already complicated as she tried to come to a decision about Boldwood's proposal, but the encounter with Troy throws another suitor into the mix. With both Gabriel and Boldwood, Bathsheba could be detached and rational about what was in her best interest. With Troy, it is immediately clear that she is going to be led by her emotions and desires. The scene in which they meet is rich with symbolism: as a woman walking alone at night, Bathsheba is to some extent in a dangerous situation, and the sudden presence of a man walking near her has the initial possibility of being threatening. When her dress catches on his spur, she is symbolically ensnared or captured by him. Paradoxically, Bathsheba seems to find this vulnerable and relatively helpless situation to be exciting and arousing. The scene is one of the rare moments in the novel where she embodies a more traditionally feminine role of being dependent on a man to resolve a situation for her. The idea that this dependency might have destructive consequences becomes clear when she pleads with Troy to rip her dress in order to set her free: this moment foreshadows the future in which she will endure suffering and damage in order to try and escape from her unhappy marriage. In her subsequent interactions with Troy, Bathsheba wavers back and forth between being somewhat conservative and traditional, and quite reckless in her behavior. She is curious about his reputation, which she reveals by seeking information from Liddy. In a world where reputation and an honorable public identity were major parts of what made someone worthy of respect, Bathsheba is anxious to find out how Troy is perceived. She is also conservative enough to be shocked and somewhat distressed by Troy giving away his father's watch. In a more traditional worldview, an expensive item that is also a family heirloom would not be discarded lightly. However, by agreeing to meet Troy alone in the woods at night, Bathsheba takes a significant risk. This action reflects the precarious freedom of her independent and autonomous position; because she is effectively the head of her own household, Bathsheba has no one to supervise or try and control her behavior. This means that she can do things it would be difficult for other young women of her social position to get away with. Not only does she sneak off alone with him, Bathsheba allows Troy relatively intimate access to her body as he practices his sword exercises with her as a target. There is a literal danger in terms of the injury she could sustain if his sword were to slip, but there is also the symbolic danger of what this sexually charged flirtation could lead to. Troy's sword takes on a clear phallic symbolism in this scene; it is a source of danger for Bathsheba, but she is entranced and seduced by it.