Thirty Seven: Far From The Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy -The Two Together

A light flapped over the scene, as if reflected from phosphorescent wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled the sky. It was the first arrow  from the approaching storm and it fell wide. 

The second peal was noisy, with comparatively little visible lightning.  Gabriel saw a candle shining in Bathsheba's bedroom, and soon a shadow moved to and from upon the blind. 

A third flash came.  The lightning was of silver colour and gleamed in the sky intermittently.  Rumbles became rattles.  Gabriel from his elevated position could see over the landscape for a vast distance.  Every hedge, bush, and tree was visible.  In a paddock in the same direction was a herd of heifers, and these were galloping in the wild way, flinging their heels and tails.  Then the picture vanished leaving Gabriel in intense darkness.

He had stuck his ricking rod, groom or poinard as it was indifferently called--- a long iron lance, sharp at the extremity and polished by handling --- into the stack to support the sheaves.  A blue light appeared in the zenith, and in some indescribable manner flickered down near the top of the rod.  It was the fourth of the larger flashes.  A moment later there was a smack --- smart, clear and short.  Gabriel felt his position to be anything but a safe one, and he resolved to descend.

Not a drop of rain had fallen as yet.  He wiped his weary brow, and looked again at the black forms of the unprotected stacks.  Was his life so valuable to him, after all?  What were his prospects that he should be chary of running risk, when important and urgent labour could not be carried on without such risk?  He resolved to stick to the stack.  However he took a precaution.  Under the staddles was a long tethering chain, used to prevent the escape of errant horses.  This he carried up the ladder, and sticking his rod threw the clog at one end, allowed the other end of the chain to trail upon the ground. The spike attached to it he drove in.  Under the shadow of this extemporized lightning conductor he felt himself comparatively safe.

Before Oak had laid his hands upon the tool again out leapt the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of the fiend. It was Green as emerald, and the riverberation was stunning.  What was this the light revealed to him?  In the open ground before him, as he looked over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently female form.  Could it be Bathsheba - the only enterprising woman in the parish?  The form moved on a step: then he could see no more.

"Is that you ma'am?" said Gabriel.

"Who is there?" came the voice of Bathsheba.

"Gabriel.  I am on the rick, thatching." 

"Oh, Gabriel ! and are you?  I have come about them.  The weather awoke me, and I thought of the corn.  I am so distressed about it. --- can we save it anyhow?  I cannot find my husband.  Is he with you?" 

"He is not here." 

"Do you know where he is?" 

"Asleep in the barn." 

"He promised that the stacks should be seen to, and now they are all neglected!  Can I do anything to help you?  Liddy is afraid to come out.  Fancy finding you here at such an hour!  Surely I can do something?"

"You can bring up some reed sheaves to me, one by one, ma'am, if you are not afraid to come up the ladder in the dark," said Gabriel.  "Every moment is precious now, and that would save a good deal of time.  It is not very dark when the lightning has been gone a bit."

"I'll do anything," she said resolutely.  She instantly took a sheaf upon her shoulder, clambered up close to his heels, placed it behind the rod, and descended for another.  At her third ascend the rick suddenly brightened with the brazen glare of shining  majolica every knot in every straw was visible.  On the slope in front of him appeared two human shapes, black as jet.  The rick lost its sheen --- the shapes vanished.  Gabriel turned his head.  It had been the sixth flash which had come from the east behind him, and two dark forms on the slope had been the shadows of himself and Bathsheba.

Then came the peal.  It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

"How terrible," she exclaimed and clutched him by the sleeve.  Gabriel turned, and steadied her on her aerial

perch by holding her arm.  At the same moment, while he was still reversed in his attitude, there was more light, and he saw it were copy of the tall poplar tree on the hill drawn in black on the wall of the barn.  It was the shadow of that tree, thrown across by secondary flash in the west.

The next flare came.  Bathsheba was on the ground now, shouldering another sheaf, and she bore its dazzle without flinching --- thunder and all --- and again ascended with the load.   There was then a silence everywhere for four or five minutes, and the crunch of spars, as Gabriel hastily drove them in, could again be distinctly heard.  He thought the crisis of storm has passed.  But there came a burst of light.

"Hold on" said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder, and grasping her arm again.

Heaven opened then indeed.  The flash was almost novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realised, and Gabriel could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from East, west, north, south. It was a perfect dance of death.  In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth.  Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand --- a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life and everything human seemed trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated Nature.   Oak had hardly time to gather up these impressions into a thought, and to see how strangely the red feather of her hat shone in this light, when the tall tree on the hill before mentioned seemed on fire to a white heat, and a new one among these terrible voices mingled with the last crash of those preceding.  It was a stupefying blast, harsh and pitiless, and it fell upon their ears, in a dead flat blow.  From the lusture reflected from every part of the earth, he saw that the tree was sliced down the whole length of its tall, straight stem, huge ribbon of bark being flung off.  The lightning had struck the tree.  Smell of sulphur filled the air. Then all was silent and black as a cave of Hinnom.

"We had a narrow escape, you had better go down." 

Bathsheba said nothing; but he could distinctly hear her rhythmical pants, and the recurrent rustle of sheaf beside her in response to her frightened pulsations.  She descended the ladder, and, on second thoughts, he followed her.  The darkness was now impenetrable by the sharpest vision.  They both stood still at the bottom, side by side.  Bathsheba appeared to think only of weather, Oak thought only of her just then.  At last he said, --- "The storm seems to have passed, at any rate." 

"I think so too," said Bathsheba; "though there are multitudes of gleams --- look!"

The sky was now filled with an incessant light, frequent repetition melting into complete continuity, as an unbroken sound results from the successive strokes on gong.

"Nothing serious," said he, "I cannot understand no rain falling.  But, heaven be praised, it is all the better for us.  I am now going up again" 

"Gabriel, you are kinder than I deserve!  I will stay and help you yet.  Oh, why are not some of the others here!" 

"They would have been here, if they could," said Oak, in a hesitating way.

"Oh, I know it all --- all," she said, adding slowly: "they are all asleep in the barn, in a drunken sleep, and my husband among them.  That's it, is it not?  Don't think, I am a timid woman, and can't endure things." 

"I am not certain," said Gabriel.  "I will go and see."

He crossed to the barn, leaving her alone.  He looked through the chinks of the door.  All was in total darkness, as he had left it, and there still arose, as at the former time, the steady buzz of many snores.

He felt a Zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned.  It was Bathsheba's breath --- she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink.

He endeavoured to put off the immediate and painful subject, by remarking gently,  "If you will come back again, miss --- ma'am, and hand up a few more, it would save much time."

Oak went back again, ascended to the top, stepped off the ladder for greater expedition, and went on thatching.  She followed, but without a sheaf.

"Gabriel," she said, in a strange and impressive voice.  Oak looked up at her.  She had not spoken since he left the barn.  The soft and the continual shimmer of the dying lightning showed a marble face high against the black sky of opposit quarter.  Bathsheba  was sitting almost on the apex of the stack, her feet gathered up beneath her, and resting on the top round of the ladder.

"Yes, mistress," he said.

"I suppose you thought that when I galloped away to Bath that night it was on purpose to be married.?" 

"I did at last, not at first," he answered somewhat surprised at the abruptness with which this new subject was broached.

"And the others thought so, too?" 

"Yes." 

"And you blamed me for it?" 

"Well, a little." 

"I thought so.  Now, I care a little for your good opinion, and I want to explain something --- I have longed to do it ever since I returned, and you looked so gravely at me.  For if I were to die --- and I may die soon --- it would be dreadful that you should always think mistakingly of me.  Now listen."

Gabriel ceased his rustling.

"I went to Bath that night in the full intention of breaking off my engagement to Mr Troy.  It was owing to circumstances which occurred after I got there that --- that

we were married.  Now, do you see the matter in a new light?"

"I do --- somewhat."

"I must, I suppose, say more, now that I have begun.  And perhaps it is no harm, for you are certainly under no delutsion that I ever loved you, or that I can have any object in speaking, more than that the object I have mentioned.  Well, I was also in a strange city, and the horse was lame.  And at last I didn't know what to do.  I saw when it was too late, that scandal might seize hold of me for meeting him alone in that way.  But I was coming away, when he suddenly said he had that day seen a woman more beautiful than I, and that his constancy could not be counted on unless I at once became his ..... And I was grieved and troubled.".... She cleared her voice, and waited a moment, as if to gather breath.  "And then, between jealousy and distraction, I married him!" she whispered with desparate impetuosity.

Gabriel made no reply.

"He was not to blame. It was perfect true of his seeing somebody else," she quickly added.  "And now I don't wish any remark from you. I only wanted you to know that misunderstood bit of my history, before a time comes when you could never know it.  You want some more sheaves?"

She went down the ladder and the work proceeded.  Gabriel soon perceived a langour in the movement of his mistress up and down, and he said to her as gently as a mother, ---

"I think you had better go indoors now; you are tired.  I can finish the rest alone.  If the wind does not change, the rain is likely to keep off."

"If I am useless I will go," said Bathsheba in a flagging cadence.  But ho, if your life should be lost!" 

"You are not useless; but I would rather not tire you longer.  You have done well." 

"And you better," she said gratefully.  "Thank you for your devotion, a thousand times, Gabriel!  Goodnight --- I know you are doing your best for me."

She diminished in the gloom and vanished, and he heard the latch of the gate fall as she passed through. He worked in reverie, musing upon her story, and upon the contradictoriness of that feminine heart which had caused her to speak warmly to him tonight than she ever had done when she was unmarried.

He was disturbed by a grating noise from the coach-house. It was the vane on the roof turning round, and this change in the wind was the signal for a disastrous rain.

           END OF THE CHAPTER 

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