Particulars of a Twilight Walk
We now see the element of folly distinctly mingling with the many varying particulars which made up the character of Bathsheba Everdene. It was almost foreign to her intrinsic nature. Introduced as lymph on the dart of Eros it eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution. Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.
Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false - except, indeed, in that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows to be true.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition.
Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
Bathsheba was not conscious of guile in this matter. Though in one sense a woman of the world, it was, after all, that world of daylight coteries and green carpets wherein cattle form the passing crowd and winds the busy hum; where a quiet family of rabbits or hares lives on the other side of your party-wall, where your neighbour is everybody in the tything, and where calculation is confined to market-days. Of the fabricated tastes of good fashionable society she knew but little, and of the formulated self-indulgence of bad, nothing at all. Had her utmost thoughts in this direction been distinctly worded (and by herself they never were), they would only have amounted to such a matter as that she felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her discretion. Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay in her making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into consequences. She could show others the steep and thorny way, but `reck'd not her own rede'.
And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.
The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct.
Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she had only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.
All this infatuation Gabriel saw, and was troubled thereby from the time of his daily journey a-field to the time of his return, and on to the small hours of many a night. That he wan not beloved had hitherto been his great sorrow; that Bathsheba was getting into the toils was now a sorrow greater than the first, and one which nearly obscured it. It was a result which paralleled the oft-quoted observation of Hippocrates concerning physical pains.
That is a noble though perhaps an unpromising love which not even the fear of breeding aversion in the bosom of the one beloved can deter from combating his or her errors. Oak determined to speak to his mistress. He would base his appeal on what he considered her unfair treatment of Farmer Boldwood, now absent from home.
An opportunity occurred one evening when she had gone for a short walk by a path through the neighboring cornfields. It was dusk when Oak, who had not been far a-field that day, took the same path and met her returning, quite pensively, as he thought.
The wheat was now tall, and the path was narrow; thus the way was quite a sunken groove between the embowing thicket on either side. Two persons could not walk abreast without damaging the crop, and Oak stood aside to let her pass.
`Oh, is it Gabriel?' she said. `You are taking a walk too. Good-night.'
`I thought I would come to meet you, as it is rather late,' said Oak, turning and following at her heels when she had brushed somewhat quickly by him.
`Thank you, indeed, but I am not very fearful.'
`O no; but there are bad characters about.'
`I never meet them.'
Now Oak, with marvellous ingenuity, had been going to introduce the gallant sergeant through the channel of `bad characters'. But all at once the scheme broke down, it suddenly occurring to him that this was rather a clumsy way, and too barefaced to begin with. He tried another preamble.
`And as the man who would naturally come to meet you is away from home, too - I mean Farmer Boldwood - why, thinks I, I'll go, he said.
`Ah, yes.' She walked on without turning her head, and for many steps nothing farther was heard from her quarter than the rustle of her dress against the heavy corn-ears. Then she resumed rather tartly--`I don't quite understand what you meant by saying that Mr Boldwood would naturally come to meet me.
`I meant on account of the wedding which they say is likely to take place between you and him, miss. Forgive my speaking plainly.'
`They say what is not true,' she returned quickly. `No marriage is likely to take place between us.'
Gabriel now put forth his unobscured opinion, for the moment had come.
`Well, Miss Everdene,' he said, `putting aside what people say, I never in my life saw any courting if his is not a courting of you.'
Bathsheba would probably have terminated the conversation there and then by flatly forbidding the subject, had not her conscious weakness of position allured her to palter and argue in endeavours to better it.
`Since this subject has been mentioned,' she said very emphatically, `I am glad of the opportunity of clearing up a mistake which ii very common and very provoking. I didn't definitely promise Mr Boldwood anything. I have never cared for him. I respect him, and he has urged me to marry him.
But I have given him no distinct answer. As soon as he returns I shall do so; and the answer will be that I cannot think of marrying him.'
