dearest,’ he continued in a palliative voice, ‘don’t be like it!’ Oak sighed a deep honest sigh – none the less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. ‘Why won’t you have me?’ he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.
‘I cannot,’ she said, retreating.
‘But why?’ he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever reaching her, and facing over the bush.
‘Because I don’t love you.’
‘Yes, but –’
She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. ‘I don’t love you,’ she said.
‘But I love you – and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.’
‘O Mr Oak – that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.’
‘Never,’ said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. ‘I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.’ His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.
‘It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!’ she said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some means of escape from her moral dilemma. ‘How I wish I hadn’t run after you!’ However, she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to cheerfulness and set her face to signify archness. ‘It wouldn’t do, Mr Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know.’
Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless to attempt argument.
‘Mr Oak,’ she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, ‘you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world – I am staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you – and I don’t love you a bit: that’s my side of the case. Now yours: you are a farmer just beginning, and you ought in common prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present), to marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than you have now.’
Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.
‘That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!’ he naively said.
Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.
‘Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?’ she said, almost angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.
‘I can’t do what I think would be – would be –’
‘Right?’
‘No: wise.’
‘You have made an admission now, Mr Oak,’ she exclaimed with even more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. ‘After that, do you think I could marry you? Not if I know it.’
He broke in passionately: ‘But don’t mistake me like that! Because I am open enough to own what every man in my shoes would have thought of, you make your colours come up your face and get crabbed with me. That about you not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a lady – all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is, I’ve heard, a large farmer – much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in the evening, or will you walk along with me o’ Sundays? I don’t want you to make up your mind at once, if you’d rather not.’
‘No – no – I cannot. Don’t press me any more – don’t. I don’t love you – so ’twould be ridiculous,’ she said, with a laugh.
No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness. ‘Very well,’ said Oak firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. ‘Then I’ll ask you no more.’
Chapter 5
Departure of Bathsheba – A pastoral tragedy
The news which one day reached Gabriel that Bathsheba Everdene had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the renunciation the less absolute its character.
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others – notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone – that was all.
His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba’s movements was done indirectly. It appeared that she had gone to a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in what capacity – whether as a visitor or permanently, he could not discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner’s pictures. In substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and staple.
This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neigh-bourhood. Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference between such exclamations as ‘Come in!’ and ‘D— ye, come in!’ that he knew to a hair’s breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes’ tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep-crook was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.
The young dog, George’s son, might possibly have been the image of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and George. He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further than the rudiments as yet – still finding an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well. So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any pleasant interjection) that if sent behind the flock to help them on he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off, or reminded when to stop by the example of old George.
Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form of a V, but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.
