finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_13_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 14
chapter 14
{"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-14", "summary": "On the evening of Valentine's Day, Boldwood sits down to his supper. Up on his mantle is the letter Bathsheba has sent, and he can't help but stare at the wax seal that says \"Marry Me.\" When he goes to bed, he puts the letter in the corner of his bedroom mirror and can't stop thinking about it. Uh oh. Boldwood is hooked. The next day, Boldwood runs up to the mail cart and blindly seizes a letter from it, thinking for some reason that he'll get another Valentine's Day card. But the letter he's grabbed is addressed to Gabriel Oak. Too late, though. Boldwood has opened it by mistake. Just then, he sees Oak coming over the hill and Boldwood volunteers to take the letter to him himself.", "analysis": ""}


EFFECT OF THE LETTER--SUNRISE


At dusk, on the evening of St. Valentine's Day, Boldwood sat down
to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs.  Upon the
mantel-shelf before him was a time-piece, surmounted by a spread
eagle, and upon the eagle's wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent.
Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening itself, till the
large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye;
and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon,
although they were too remote for his sight--


   "MARRY ME."


The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which,
colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them.  Here,
in the quiet of Boldwood's parlour, where everything that was not
grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan
Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their
tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity,
imbibed from their accessories now.

Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt
the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the
direction of an ideal passion.  The disturbance was as the first
floating weed to Columbus--the contemptibly little suggesting
possibilities of the infinitely great.

The letter must have had an origin and a motive.  That the latter
was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all,
Boldwood, of course, did not know.  And such an explanation did not
strike him as a possibility even.  It is foreign to a mystified
condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of
approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a
course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result.  The
vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing
into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent
to the person confounded by the issue.

When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of
the looking-glass.  He was conscious of its presence, even when his
back was turned upon it.  It was the first time in Boldwood's life
that such an event had occurred.  The same fascination that caused
him to think it an act which had a deliberate motive prevented
him from regarding it as an impertinence.  He looked again at
the direction.  The mysterious influences of night invested the
writing with the presence of the unknown writer.  Somebody's--some
WOMAN'S--hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name;
her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her
brain had seen him in imagination the while.  Why should she have
imagined him?  Her mouth--were the lips red or pale, plump or
creased?--had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went
on--the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what
had been the expression?

The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words
written, had no individuality.  She was a misty shape, and well she
might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound
asleep and oblivious of all love and letter-writing under the sky.
Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to
be a vision: when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.

The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind.
His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen
had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and
lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in
strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.

The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in
comparison with the fact of its arrival.  He suddenly wondered
if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had
withdrawn.  He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the
letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope--searched it.
Nothing more was there.  Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times
the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: "Marry me," he said
aloud.

The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck
it in the frame of the glass.  In doing so he caught sight of his
reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form.
He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were
wide-spread and vacant.  Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself
for this nervous excitability, he returned to bed.

Then the dawn drew on.  The full power of the clear heaven was not
equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose and
dressed himself.  He descended the stairs and went out towards the
gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked
around.

It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and
the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward,
and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on
Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the
only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and
flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone.  The whole effect
resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.

In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by
the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts
the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that
before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which
attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky
is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky.  Over
the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, like
tarnished brass.

Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed
the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with
the polish of marble; how, in some portions of the slope, withered
grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan
coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and
how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow
whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a
short permanency.  A half-muffled noise of light wheels interrupted
him.  Boldwood turned back into the road.  It was the mail-cart--a
crazy, two-wheeled vehicle, hardly heavy enough to resist a puff of
wind.  The driver held out a letter.  Boldwood seized it and opened
it, expecting another anonymous one--so greatly are people's ideas of
probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.

"I don't think it is for you, sir," said the man, when he saw
Boldwood's action.  "Though there is no name, I think it is for your
shepherd."

Boldwood looked then at the address--


   To the New Shepherd,
         Weatherbury Farm,
               Near Casterbridge


"Oh--what a mistake!--it is not mine.  Nor is it for my shepherd.  It
is for Miss Everdene's.  You had better take it on to him--Gabriel
Oak--and say I opened it in mistake."

At this moment, on the ridge, up against the blazing sky, a figure
was visible, like the black snuff in the midst of a candle-flame.
Then it moved and began to bustle about vigorously from place to
place, carrying square skeleton masses, which were riddled by the
same rays.  A small figure on all fours followed behind.  The tall
form was that of Gabriel Oak; the small one that of George; the
articles in course of transit were hurdles.

"Wait," said Boldwood. "That's the man on the hill.  I'll take the
letter to him myself."

To Boldwood it was now no longer merely a letter to another man.  It
was an opportunity.  Exhibiting a face pregnant with intention, he
entered the snowy field.

Gabriel, at that minute, descended the hill towards the right.  The
glow stretched down in this direction now, and touched the distant
roof of Warren's Malthouse--whither the shepherd was apparently bent:
Boldwood followed at a distance.




Chapter 14
On the evening of Valentine's Day, Boldwood sits down to his supper. Up on his mantle is the letter Bathsheba has sent, and he can't help but stare at the wax seal that says "Marry Me." When he goes to bed, he puts the letter in the corner of his bedroom mirror and can't stop thinking about it. Uh oh. Boldwood is hooked. The next day, Boldwood runs up to the mail cart and blindly seizes a letter from it, thinking for some reason that he'll get another Valentine's Day card. But the letter he's grabbed is addressed to Gabriel Oak. Too late, though. Boldwood has opened it by mistake. Just then, he sees Oak coming over the hill and Boldwood volunteers to take the letter to him himself.