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contradict you.”
“What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute. I have bitterly repented of it — ay, bitterly, and in tears. Can you still go on reminding me?”
“I don’t accuse you of it — I deplore it. I took for earnest what you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I but have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well! But it is weak, idle drivelling to go on like this. . . . Bathsheba, you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don’t speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you.”
“But I do pity you — deeply — O, so deeply!” she earnestly said.
“Do no such thing — do no such thing. Your dear love, Bathsheba, is such a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as well as your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the gain of your pity make it sensibly less. O sweet — how dearly you spoke to me behind the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn at the shearing, and that dearest last time in the evening at your home! Where are your pleasant words all gone — your earnest hope to be able to love me? Where is your firm conviction that you would get to care for me very much? Really forgotten? — really?”
She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the face, and said in her low, firm voice, “Mr. Boldwood, I promised you nothing. Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest, highest compliment a man can pay a woman — telling her he loves her? I was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless shrew. Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day — the day just for the pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to all other men was death to you? Have reason, do, and think more kindly of me!”
“Well, never mind arguing — never mind. One thing is sure: you were all but mine, and now you are not nearly mine. Everything is changed, and that by you alone, remember. You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!”
Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel un-mistakable signs that she was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably against this femininity which would insist upon supplying unbidden emotions in stronger and stronger current. She had tried to elude agitation by fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object before her eyes, whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not save her now.
“I did not take you up — surely I did not!” she answered as heroically as she could. “But don’t be in this mood with me. I can endure being told I am in the wrong, if you will only tell it me gently! O sir, will you not kindly forgive me, and look at it cheerfully?”
“Cheerfully! Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a reason for being merry? If I have lost, how can I be as if I had won? Heavens you must be heartless quite! Had I known what a fearfully bitter sweet this was to be, how would I have avoided you, and never seen you, and been deaf of you. I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don’t care.”
She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and swayed her head desperately, as if to thrust away the words as they came showering about her ears from the lips of the trembling man in the climax of life, with his bronzed Roman face and fine frame.
“Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly for you again. Forget that you have said No, and let it be as it was! Say, Bathsheba, that you only wrote that refusal to me in fun — come, say it to me!”
“It would be untrue, and painful to both of us. You overrate my capacity for love. I don’t possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”
He immediately said with more resentment: “That may be true, somewhat; but ah, Miss Everdene, it won’t do as a reason! You are not the cold woman you would have me believe. No, no! It isn’t because you have no feeling in you that you don’t love me. You naturally would have me think so — you would hide from me that you have a burning heart like mine. You have love enough, but it is turned into a new channel. I know where.”
The swift music of her heart became hubbub now, and she throbbed to extremity. He was coming to Troy. He did then know what had occurred! And the name fell from his lips the next moment.
“Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?” he asked, fiercely. “When I had no thought of injuring him, why did he force himself upon your notice! Before he worried you your inclination was to have me; when next I should have come to you your answer would have been Yes. Can you deny it — I ask, can you deny it?”
She delayed the reply, but was too honest to withhold it. “I cannot,” she whispered.
“I know you cannot. But he stole in in my absence and robbed me. Why didn’t he win you away before, when nobody would have been grieved? — when nobody would have been set tale-bearing. Now the people sneer at me — the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I blush shamefully for my folly. I have lost my respect, my good name, my standing — lost it, never to get it again. Go and marry your man — go on!”
“Oh sir — Mr. Boldwood!”
“You may as well. I have no further claim upon you. As for me, I had better go somewhere alone, and hide — and pray. I loved a woman once. I am now ashamed. When I am dead they’ll say, Miserable love-sick man that he was. Heaven — heaven — if I had got jilted secretly, and the dishonour not known, and my position kept! But no matter, it is gone, and the woman not gained. Shame upon him — shame!”
His unreasonable anger terrified her, and she glided from him, without obviously moving, as she said, “I am only a girl — do not speak to me so!”
“All the time you knew — how very well you knew — that your new freak was my misery. Dazzled by brass and scarlet — Oh, Bathsheba — this is woman’s folly indeed!”
She fired up at once. “You are taking too much upon yourself!” she said, vehemently. “Everybody is upon me — everybody. It is unmanly to attack a woman so! I have nobody in the world to fight my battles for me; but no mercy is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say things against me, I WILL NOT be put down!”
“You’ll chatter with him doubtless about me. Say to him, “Boldwood would have died for me.” Yes, and you have given way to him, knowing him to be not the man for you. He has kissed you — claimed you as his. Do you hear — he has kissed you. Deny it!”
The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although Boldwood was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self rendered into another sex, Bathsheba’s cheek quivered. She gasped, “Leave me, sir — leave me! I am nothing to you. Let me go on!”
“Deny that he has kissed you.”
“I shall not.”
“Ha — then he has!” came hoarsely from the farmer.
“He has,” she said, slowly, and, in spite of her fear, defiantly. “I am not ashamed to speak the truth.”
“Then curse him; and curse him!” said Boldwood, breaking into a whispered fury. “Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand, you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and — kiss you! Heaven’s mercy — kiss you! . . . Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn — as I do now!”
“Don’t, don’t, oh, don’t