Forty Three: Far From The Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy - Fanny's Revenge

At a later hour of the same evening Bathsheba was sitting alone and cheerless beside the first fire of the season in the large parlour.  Liddy came and stood at the door with a chamber candle stick in her hand. 

"Do you want me any longer, ma'am," inquired Liddy. 

"No more tonight, Liddy." 

"I will sit up for master if you like, ma'am.  I am not at all afraid of Fanny, if I may sit in my own room and have a candle.  She was such a childlike nesh young thing that her spirit couldn't appear to anybody, I am quite sure." 

"Oh, no, no!  You go to bed.  I'll sit up for him myself till twelve o'clock, and if he has not arrived by that time I shall give him up and go to bed too." 

"It is half past ten now." 

"Oh! Is it?" 

"Why don't you sit upstairs ma'am?" 

"Why don't I?" said Bathsheba desultorily.  "It isn't worthwhile --- there is a fire here.  Liddy," she suddenly exclaimed in an impulsive and excited whisper.  "Have you heard anything strange said of Fanny?"  The words had no sooner escaped her than an expression of unutterable regret crossed her face, and she burst into tears.

"No -- not a word!" said Liddy, looking at the weeping woman with astonishment.  "What is it makes you cry so ma'am; has anything hurt you?" She came to Bathsheba's side with a face of full sympathy.

"No, Liddy --- I don't want you any more.  I can hardly say why I have taken so to crying lately: I never used to cry.  Goodnight."

Liddy then left the parlour and closed the door.

Bathsheba was lonely and miserable. She had been lonely before marriage.

But it was the solitude of a cave. Now it was the solitude of a mountain.  Within the last two days her reflections about the past of her husband had disquieted her.  Her wayward sentiment that evening to accomplish Fanny in the parlour was the result of a strange complication of impulses in her bosom.  It was a rebellion against her own prejudices. Fanny had preceded Bathsheba in the attention of a man whom Bathsheba had ceased from loving. Instead of hatred Bathsheba felt sympathy towards the poor girl.

There was another tap at the door.  Liddy reappeared, stood hesitatingly, and said, "Maryann has just heard something strange, but I know it isn't true." 

"What is it?" 

"Oh, nothing connected with you or us, ma'am!  It is about Fanny.  That same thing you have heard." 

"I have heard nothing." 

"I mean that a wicked story is got to Weatherbury, within this last hour --- that" Liddy came close to her mistress and whispered the story slowly into her ear, inclining her head as she spoke in the direction of the room where Fanny lay.

Bathsheba trembled from head to foot. I don't believe it!" she said excitedly.  "And  it is not written on the coffin cover." 

"Nor I am.  And a good many others don't; for we shall surely have been told more about it if it had been true -- don't you think so, ma'am?" 

"We might, or we might not." 

Bathsheba turned and looked into the fire, that Liddy might not see her face.  Finding that her mistress was going to say no more, Liddy glided out, closed the door softly and went to bed.  The sadness of Fanny Robin's fate did not make Bathsheba's glorious, although she was Esther to this poor Vashti, and their fates stand in contrast.  Bathsheba suddenly felt a longing to speak to someone stonger than herself.  Where could she find such a friend?  Nowhere in the house.  Gabriel Oak came to her mind.  Oak must be knowing everything concerned with Fanny.

She flung a clock round her, went to the door, and opened it.  Every blade and every twig was still.  The air was thick with moisture, and steady smack of drops upon the fallen leaves under the boughs kept a rhythm.  It was better to be out of the house than within it.  She closed the door and walked slowly down the lane till she came to Gabriel's cottage, where he now lived alone, having left Coggan's house.  There was light in one window only, and that was downstairs.  No blinds or curtains drawn on the windows.  Gabriel was sitting, reading.  He looked at the clock, surprised at the lateness of hour, closed his book and arose.  He was going to bed. If she tapped it must be done at once.

But she could not do it.  She had not the strength to do it.  She must suspect, guess, chafe, and bear it all alone.

Like a homeless wanderer, she lingered by the bank, and bore it all alone.  Gabriel appeared in the upper room, placed his candle on the window-bench, and then knelt down to pray.  The contrast of the picture with her agitated mind was too much for her to bear.  With a swollen heart she went again up the lane and entered her own door.

She paused in the hall looking at the door of the room wherein Fanny lay. She locked her fingers, threw back her head, and strained her hot hands rigidly across her forehead, saying, with hysterical sobs, "Would to God you would speak and tell me your secret, Fanny! . . . . Oh, I hope, hope it is not true! . . . . If only I could look in upon you for one little minute, I should know all!" 

A few moments passed, and she added, slowly, "And I will." 

At the end of a short though undefined time she found herself in the small room, quivering with emotion, a mist before her eyes, and an excruciating pulsation in her brain, standing beside the uncovered coffin of the girl whose conjuctured end had so entirely engrossed her, and saying to herself in a husky voice, as she gazed within, ---

"It was best to know the worst, and I know it now!"

Bathsheba's head sank upon her bosom, and the breath which had been bated in suspense, curiosity, and interest, was exhaled now in the form of a whispered wail: "Oh-h-h!" and the silent room added length to her moan.

Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair: tears of a complicated origin, of a nature indescribable, indefinable. In Bathsheba's heated fancy the innocent white countenance expressed a dim triumphant consciousness of the pain she was retaliating for her pain with all merciless rigour of the Mosaic law: Burning for burning; wound for wound; and strife for strife." 

Bathsheba indulged in contemplation the thought of ending her life.  But she found it shameful and inconvenient.  She glided up and down in her room, her hands clasped in front of her, as she thought and expressed in broken words, "I hate her, it is grievous and wicked. My flesh insists upon hating her, whether my spirit is willing or no... .by death she has made my spirit unwilling. O God, have mercy!  I am miserable at all this!"

The vision of Oak kneels down that night recurred to her, and with imitative instinct she seized upon the idea, resolved to kneel and pray.  Gabriel had prayed; so would she.

She knelt beside the coffin, covered her face with her hands, and for a time the room was silent as a tomb.

Bathsheba arose from her prayer with a quiet spirit and regret for the antagonistic instinct. She took flowers from vase by the window and began laying them around the dead girl's head.  She remained engaged thus for a long time.  She immersed in this that she forgot everything.  A slamming together of the coach house doors in the yard brought her back to herself.  The front door was opened and closed, steps crossed the hall, and her husband appeared at the door looking in upon her.

He beheld it all by degrees, stared in stupefaction at the scene, as if he was in a dream.  Bathsheba, pallid as a corpse, gazed back at him in the same wild way.

Door in his hand Troy stood; never he thought of Fanny in connection with what he saw.  His first confused idea was that somebody in the house had died.

"Well --- what?" said Troy, blankly.

"I must go!  I must go," said Bathsheba to herself more than to him.  She came with a dialated eye towards the door, to push past him.

"What's the matter, in God's name? who's dead?" 

"I cannot say, let me go out.  I want air!" she continued.

"But no; stay, I insist!" He seized her hand, and then volition seemed to leave her, and she went off into a state of passivity.  He, still holding her, came up to the room, and thus, hand in hand, Troy and Bathsheba approached the coffin side.  The candle was standing on a bureau close by them, and the light slanted down, distinctly enkindling the cold feature within.  Troy looked in, dropped his wife's hand, ---w knowledge of it all came over him in a lurid sheen, and he stood still.

So still he remained that he had left in him no motive power whatever.  The clashes of feelings in all directions confounded one another, produced a neutrality, and there was no motion in none.

"Do you know her?" said Bathsheba, in a small inclosed echo, as from the interior of a cell.

"I do," said Troy.

"Is it she?" 

"It is." 

He had originally stood perfectly erect.  And now, in the well nigh congealed immobility of his frame could be discerned an incipient movement, as in the darkest night may be discerned light after a while.

He was gradually sinking forwards.  His features changed, and Bathsheba was regarding him from the other side.  He sank upon his knees with remorse and reverence upon his face, and bending over Fanny Robin, gently kissed her, as one would kiss an infant asleep to avoid awakening it.  At the sight of that Bathsheba sprang towards him.  She flung her arms round Troy's neck, exclaiming wildly, "Don't -- don't kiss them!  Oh, Frank, I can't bear it --- I can't!  I love you better than she did: kiss me too, Frank --- kiss me!  You will, Frank, kiss me too !" 

There was abnormal and startling  simplicity in this appeal that Troy loosening her tightly clasped arms from his neck, and looked at her in bewilderment.  It was such a revelation of all women being alike at heart,  Troy could not believe her to be his proud wife.

"I will not kiss you," Troy said, pushing her away.

"What have you to say as your reason?" she asked, her bitter voice being strangely low --- quite that of another woman now.

"I have to say that I have been a bad, black hearted man,'" he answered 

"And this woman is your victim; and I am not the less."

"Ah! don't taunt me madam.  This  woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be.  If Satan had not tempted me with that face of yours, and those cursed coquetries, I should have married her.  I never had another thought till you came in my way. Would to God that I had; but it is all too late!  I deserve to live in torment for this." He turned to Fanny, "But never mind, darling," he said, "in the sight of Heaven you are my very, very wife." 

There arose from Bathsheba a long, low cry of despair and indignation, as had never before been heard within those old inhabited walls.  It was the best Τετέλεσται of her union with Troy.

"If she's --- that, --- what am I?" she added, sobbing fearfully.

"You are nothing to me --- nothing," said Troy, heartlessly.  A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage.  I am not morally yours." 

A vehement impulse to flee from him mastered Bathsheba.  She waited not an instant, but turned to the door and ran out.

          END OF THE CHAPTER