Thomas Hardy - Far From the Madding Crowd

All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.

He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution – a fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs Hurst, the aunt – George, the dog, walking behind, with a countenance of great concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.

Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the chimney to the spot of its origin – seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside it – beside it in her outdoor dress; for the clothes she had worn on the hill were by association equally with her person included in the compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene.

He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind – of a nature between the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate – of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots, looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box, put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a boulder after the ebb.

Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to be no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for, as the rather untoward commencement of Oak’s overtures, just as he arrived by the garden gate he saw a cat inside, going into various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George. The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath – in fact, he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of Commination-service which, though offensive, had to be gone through once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.

A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had run:

‘Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it; – did he, poor dear!’

‘I beg yer pardon,’ said Oak to the voice, ‘but George was walking on behind me with a temper as mild as milk.’

Almost before he had ceased speaking Oak was seized with a misgiving as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and he heard the person retreat among the bushes.

Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal and the reality had had no common grounds of opening.

Bathsheba’s aunt was indoors. ‘Will you tell Miss Everdene that somebody would be glad to speak to her?’ said Mr Oak. (Calling one’s self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken as an example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs from a refined modesty of which townspeople, with their cards and announcements, have no notion whatever.)

Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.

‘Will you come in, Mr Oak?’

‘Oh, thank ’ee,’ said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. ‘I’ve brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear; girls do.’

‘She might,’ said Mrs Hurst musingly; ‘though she’s only a visitor here. If you will wait a minute Bathsheba will be in.’

‘Yes, I will wait,’ said Gabriel, sitting down. ‘The lamb isn’t really the business I came about, Mrs Hurst. In short, I was going to ask her if she’d like to be married.’

‘And were you indeed?’

‘Yes. Because if she would I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?’

‘Let me think,’ said Mrs Hurst, poking the fire superfluously . . . ‘Yes – bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides – she was going to be a governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men ever come here – but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a dozen!’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the stone floor with sorrow. ‘I’m only an every-day sort of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer . . . Well, there’s no use in my waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off home-along, Mrs Hurst.’

When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard a ‘hoi-hoi!’ uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after him, waving a white handkerchief.

Oak stood still – and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared, from emotion, but from running.

‘Farmer Oak – I –’ she said, pausing for want of breath, pulling up in front of him with a slanted face, and putting her hand to her side.

‘I have just called to see you,’ said Gabriel pending her further speech.

‘Yes – I know that,’ she said, panting like a robin, her face red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew. ‘I didn’t know you had come to ask to have me, or I should have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say – that my aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me.’

Gabriel expanded. ‘I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,’ he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. ‘Wait a bit till you’ve found your breath.’

‘– It was quite a mistake – aunt’s telling you I had a young man already,’ Bathsheba went on. ‘I haven’t a sweetheart at all – and I never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was such a pity to send you away thinking that I had several.’

‘Really and truly I am glad to hear that!’ said Farmer Oak, smiling one of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped through his fingers like an eel.

‘I have a nice snug little farm,’ said Gabriel, with half a degree less assurance than when he had seized her hand.

‘Yes; you have.’

‘A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon be paid off, and though I am only an every-day sort of man I have got on a little since I was a boy.’ Gabriel uttered ‘a little’ in a tone to show her that it was the complacent form of ‘a great deal’. He continued: ‘When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as hard as I do now.’