finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_42_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 43
chapter 43
{"name": "Chapter 43", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-43", "summary": "Bathsheba sits talking to her servant Liddy next to a fire. Bathsheba keeps asking questions about Fanny Robin's health when she left Weatherbury. It's pretty clear that she suspects that Fanny and Troy had a previous relationship and that Fanny was the woman they met on the road that day. Liddy mentions the rumor that there are actually two bodies inside Fanny's coffin, meaning that she has a baby inside with her. Bathsheba says this is impossible or else they would have written so on the coffin's lid. Bathsheba realizes that she needs to speak to someone with a strong character. So she throws on a cloak and goes to visit Gabriel Oak. She goes to his house and watches him through his windows for a while. She even watches him kneel next to his bed to pray. Once again, Thomas Hardy screams: this guy is so good. She soon realizes that it's too late at night for her, a married woman, to visit a bachelor alone. So she returns to her house. Once she's there, she goes to Fanny's coffin, bites the bullet, and opens it up. Inside, she sees Fanny lying dead with a baby in her arms. Bathsheba sinks to the floor and starts crying. Then she prays and lays some flowers around Fanny's head before closing the coffin again. A few moments later, she hears the house's front door opening and closing. She goes into the hallway to find her husband staring at her. He's now back from his trip. They stare at each other for a while before Troy asks what the matter is. Soon enough, he looks in on Fanny and the dead baby, and he falls completely silent. He finally admits to Bathsheba that Fanny was his former fiance and they had a baby together. He bends over and kisses Fanny. This fills Bathsheba with uncontrollable jealousy, and she jumps on him and demands that he kiss her to prove that he loves her more. Yeah, that's right: kiss her with the same lips that just kissed a corpse that had been sitting around for a few days. Troy, though, refuses to kiss her, admitting that he could never love her as much as he loved Fanny. He even says that in the eyes of heaven, there's no way he's married to Bathsheba. At this, Bathsheba can only turn and run out of the house.", "analysis": ""}


FANNY'S REVENGE


"Do you want me any longer ma'am?" inquired Liddy, at a later hour
the same evening, standing by the door with a chamber candlestick in
her hand and addressing Bathsheba, who sat cheerless and alone in the
large parlour beside the first fire of the season.

"No more to-night, Liddy."

"I'll 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 if it tried, I'm 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 worth
while--there's 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 full of sympathy.

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

Liddy then left the parlour and closed the door.

Bathsheba was lonely and miserable now; not lonelier actually than
she had been before her marriage; but her loneliness then was to that
of the present time as the solitude of a mountain is to the solitude
of a cave.  And within the last day or two had come these disquieting
thoughts about her husband's past.  Her wayward sentiment that
evening concerning Fanny's temporary resting-place had been the
result of a strange complication of impulses in Bathsheba's bosom.
Perhaps it would be more accurately described as a determined
rebellion against her prejudices, a revulsion from a lower instinct
of uncharitableness, which would have withheld all sympathy from
the dead woman, because in life she had preceded Bathsheba in the
attentions of a man whom Bathsheba had by no means ceased from
loving, though her love was sick to death just now with the gravity
of a further misgiving.

In five or ten minutes there was another tap at the door.  Liddy
reappeared, and coming in a little way stood hesitating, until at
length she said, "Maryann has just heard something very strange, but
I know it isn't true.  And we shall be sure to know the rights of it
in a day or two."

"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
remainder of the sentence 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 there's only one
name written on the coffin-cover."

"Nor I, ma'am.  And a good many others don't; for we should 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.

Bathsheba's face, as she continued looking into the fire that
evening, might have excited solicitousness on her account even among
those who loved her least.  The sadness of Fanny Robin's fate did not
make Bathsheba's glorious, although she was the Esther to this poor
Vashti, and their fates might be supposed to stand in some respects
as contrasts to each other.  When Liddy came into the room a second
time the beautiful eyes which met hers had worn a listless, weary
look.  When she went out after telling the story they had expressed
wretchedness in full activity.  Her simple country nature, fed on
old-fashioned principles, was troubled by that which would have
troubled a woman of the world very little, both Fanny and her child,
if she had one, being dead.

Bathsheba had grounds for conjecturing a connection between her own
history and the dimly suspected tragedy of Fanny's end which Oak
and Boldwood never for a moment credited her with possessing.  The
meeting with the lonely woman on the previous Saturday night had been
unwitnessed and unspoken of.  Oak may have had the best of intentions
in withholding for as many days as possible the details of what had
happened to Fanny; but had he known that Bathsheba's perceptions had
already been exercised in the matter, he would have done nothing to
lengthen the minutes of suspense she was now undergoing, when the
certainty which must terminate it would be the worst fact suspected
after all.

She suddenly felt a longing desire to speak to some one stronger than
herself, and so get strength to sustain her surmised position with
dignity and her lurking doubts with stoicism.  Where could she find
such a friend? nowhere in the house.  She was by far the coolest of
the women under her roof.  Patience and suspension of judgement for
a few hours were what she wanted to learn, and there was nobody to
teach her.  Might she but go to Gabriel Oak!--but that could not be.
What a way Oak had, she thought, of enduring things.  Boldwood,
who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than
Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple
lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he
gave--that among the multitude of interests by which he was
surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the
most absorbing and important in his eyes.  Oak meditatively looked
upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his
own standpoint in the midst.  That was how she would wish to be.  But
then Oak was not racked by incertitude upon the inmost matter of his
bosom, as she was at this moment.  Oak knew all about Fanny that he
wished to know--she felt convinced of that.  If she were to go to him
now at once and say no more than these few words, "What is the truth
of the story?" he would feel bound in honour to tell her.  It would
be an inexpressible relief.  No further speech would need to be
uttered.  He knew her so well that no eccentricity of behaviour in
her would alarm him.

She flung a cloak round her, went to the door and opened it.  Every
blade, every twig was still.  The air was yet thick with moisture,
though somewhat less dense than during the afternoon, and a steady
smack of drops upon the fallen leaves under the boughs was almost
musical in its soothing regularity.  It seemed better to be out of
the house than within it, and Bathsheba closed the door, and walked
slowly down the lane till she came opposite to Gabriel's cottage,
where he now lived alone, having left Coggan's house through being
pinched for room.  There was a light in one window only, and that
was downstairs.  The shutters were not closed, nor was any blind or
curtain drawn over the window, neither robbery nor observation being
a contingency which could do much injury to the occupant of the
domicile.  Yes, it was Gabriel himself who was sitting up: he was
reading.  From her standing-place in the road she could see him
plainly, sitting quite still, his light curly head upon his hand, and
only occasionally looking up to snuff the candle which stood beside
him.  At length he looked at the clock, seemed surprised at the
lateness of the hour, closed his book, and arose.  He was going to
bed, she knew, and if she tapped it must be done at once.

Alas for her resolve!  She felt she could not do it.  Not for worlds
now could she give a hint about her misery to him, much less ask him
plainly for information on the cause of Fanny's death.  She must
suspect, and guess, and chafe, and bear it all alone.

Like a homeless wanderer she lingered by the bank, as if lulled and
fascinated by the atmosphere of content which seemed to spread from
that little dwelling, and was so sadly lacking in her own.  Gabriel
appeared in an upper room, placed his light in the window-bench,
and then--knelt down to pray.  The contrast of the picture with her
rebellious and agitated existence at this same time was too much for
her to bear to look upon longer.  It was not for her to make a truce
with trouble by any such means.  She must tread her giddy distracting
measure to its last note, as she had begun it.  With a swollen heart
she went again up the lane, and entered her own door.

More fevered now by a reaction from the first feelings which Oak's
example had raised in her, 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 a hysterical sob, "Would to God you would
speak and tell me your secret, Fanny! ... Oh, I hope, hope it is not
true that there are two of you! ... If I could only look in upon you
for one little minute, I should know all!"

A few moments passed, and she added, slowly, "AND I WILL."

Bathsheba in after times could never gauge the mood which carried
her through the actions following this murmured resolution on this
memorable evening of her life.  She went to the lumber-closet for a
screw-driver.  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 conjectured 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!"

She was conscious of having brought about this situation by a series
of actions done as by one in an extravagant dream; of following that
idea as to method, which had burst upon her in the hall with glaring
obviousness, by gliding to the top of the stairs, assuring herself by
listening to the heavy breathing of her maids that they were asleep,
gliding down again, turning the handle of the door within which the
young girl lay, and deliberately setting herself to do what, if she
had anticipated any such undertaking at night and alone, would have
horrified her, but which, when done, was not so dreadful as was the
conclusive proof of her husband's conduct which came with knowing
beyond doubt the last chapter of Fanny's story.

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!" she said, and the silent room
added length to her moan.

Her tears fell fast beside the unconscious pair in the coffin:
tears of a complicated origin, of a nature indescribable, almost
indefinable except as other than those of simple sorrow.  Assuredly
their wonted fires must have lived in Fanny's ashes when events were
so shaped as to chariot her hither in this natural, unobtrusive, yet
effectual manner.  The one feat alone--that of dying--by which a mean
condition could be resolved into a grand one, Fanny had achieved.
And to that had destiny subjoined this reencounter to-night, which
had, in Bathsheba's wild imagining, turned her companion's failure to
success, her humiliation to triumph, her lucklessness to ascendency;
it had thrown over herself a garish light of mockery, and set upon
all things about her an ironical smile.

Fanny's face was framed in by that yellow hair of hers; and there was
no longer much room for doubt as to the origin of the curl owned by
Troy.  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 the merciless rigour of the Mosaic
law: "Burning for burning; wound for wound: strife for strife."

Bathsheba indulged in contemplations of escape from her position by
immediate death, which, thought she, though it was an inconvenient
and awful way, had limits to its inconvenience and awfulness that
could not be overpassed; whilst the shames of life were measureless.
Yet even this scheme of extinction by death was but tamely copying
her rival's method without the reasons which had glorified it in her
rival's case.  She glided rapidly up and down the room, as was mostly
her habit when excited, her hands hanging clasped in front of her, as
she thought and in part expressed in broken words: "O, I hate her,
yet I don't mean that I hate her, for it is grievous and wicked; and
yet I hate her a little!  Yes, my flesh insists upon hating her,
whether my spirit is willing or no! ... If she had only lived, I
could have been angry and cruel towards her with some justification;
but to be vindictive towards a poor dead woman recoils upon myself.
O God, have mercy!  I am miserable at all this!"

Bathsheba became at this moment so terrified at her own state of mind
that she looked around for some sort of refuge from herself.  The
vision of Oak kneeling down that night recurred to her, and with the
imitative instinct which animates women she seized upon the idea,
resolved to kneel, and, if possible, 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.  Whether from a purely
mechanical, or from any other cause, when Bathsheba arose it was with
a quieted spirit, and a regret for the antagonistic instincts which
had seized upon her just before.

In her desire to make atonement she took flowers from a vase by the
window, and began laying them around the dead girl's head.  Bathsheba
knew no other way of showing kindness to persons departed than by
giving them flowers.  She knew not how long she remained engaged
thus.  She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing.  A
slamming together of the coach-house doors in the yard brought her to
herself again.  An instant after, the front door opened and closed,
steps crossed the hall, and her husband appeared at the entrance to
the room, looking in upon her.

He beheld it all by degrees, stared in stupefaction at the scene, as
if he thought it an illusion raised by some fiendish incantation.
Bathsheba, pallid as a corpse on end, gazed back at him in the same
wild way.

So little are instinctive guesses the fruit of a legitimate induction
that, at this moment, as he stood with the door in his hand, Troy
never once 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 dilated eye towards the door, to push past him.

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

"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 the room, and thus, hand in hand, Troy and
Bathsheba approached the coffin's side.

The candle was standing on a bureau close by them, and the light
slanted down, distinctly enkindling the cold features of both mother
and babe.  Troy looked in, dropped his wife's hand, knowledge of it
all came over him in a lurid sheen, and he stood still.

So still he remained that he could be imagined to have left in him no
motive power whatever.  The clashes of feeling in all directions
confounded one another, produced a neutrality, and there was motion
in none.

"Do you know her?" said Bathsheba, in a small enclosed 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.  The lines of his features
softened, and dismay modulated to illimitable sadness.  Bathsheba
was regarding him from the other side, still with parted lips and
distracted eyes.  Capacity for intense feeling is proportionate to
the general intensity of the nature, and perhaps in all Fanny's
sufferings, much greater relatively to her strength, there never was
a time she suffered in an absolute sense what Bathsheba suffered now.

What Troy did was to sink upon his knees with an indefinable union of
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 and sound of that, to her, unendurable act, Bathsheba
sprang towards him.  All the strong feelings which had been scattered
over her existence since she knew what feeling was, seemed gathered
together into one pulsation now.  The revulsion from her indignant
mood a little earlier, when she had meditated upon compromised
honour, forestalment, eclipse in maternity by another, was violent
and entire.  All that was forgotten in the simple and still
strong attachment of wife to husband.  She had sighed for her
self-completeness then, and now she cried aloud against the severance
of the union she had deplored.  She flung her arms round Troy's neck,
exclaiming wildly from the deepest deep of her heart--

"Don't--don't kiss them!  O, 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 something so abnormal and startling in the childlike pain
and simplicity of this appeal from a woman of Bathsheba's calibre
and independence, that Troy, loosening her tightly clasped arms from
his neck, looked at her in bewilderment.  It was such an unexpected
revelation of all women being alike at heart, even those so different
in their accessories as Fanny and this one beside him, that Troy
could hardly seem to believe her to be his proud wife Bathsheba.
Fanny's own spirit seemed to be animating her frame.  But this was
the mood of a few instants only.  When the momentary surprise had
passed, his expression changed to a silencing imperious gaze.

"I will not kiss you!" he said pushing her away.

Had the wife now but gone no further.  Yet, perhaps, under the
harrowing circumstances, to speak out was the one wrong act which
can be better understood, if not forgiven in her, than the right and
politic one, her rival being now but a corpse.  All the feeling she
had been betrayed into showing she drew back to herself again by a
strenuous effort of self-command.

"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 that this woman is your victim; and I not less than she."

"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!"  He turned
to Fanny then.  "But never mind, darling," he said; "in the sight of
Heaven you are my very, very wife!"

At these words there arose from Bathsheba's lips a long, low cry of
measureless despair and indignation, such a wail of anguish as had
never before been heard within those old-inhabited walls.  It was the
"Tetelestai" [GREEK word meaning "it is finished"] of her union with Troy.

"If she's--that,--what--am I?" she added, as a continuation of the
same cry, and sobbing pitifully: and the rarity with her of such
abandonment only made the condition more dire.

"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, to run from this place, hide,
and escape his words at any price, not stopping short of death
itself, mastered Bathsheba now.  She waited not an instant, but
turned to the door and ran out.




Chapter 43
Bathsheba sits talking to her servant Liddy next to a fire. Bathsheba keeps asking questions about Fanny Robin's health when she left Weatherbury. It's pretty clear that she suspects that Fanny and Troy had a previous relationship and that Fanny was the woman they met on the road that day. Liddy mentions the rumor that there are actually two bodies inside Fanny's coffin, meaning that she has a baby inside with her. Bathsheba says this is impossible or else they would have written so on the coffin's lid. Bathsheba realizes that she needs to speak to someone with a strong character. So she throws on a cloak and goes to visit Gabriel Oak. She goes to his house and watches him through his windows for a while. She even watches him kneel next to his bed to pray. Once again, Thomas Hardy screams: this guy is so good. She soon realizes that it's too late at night for her, a married woman, to visit a bachelor alone. So she returns to her house. Once she's there, she goes to Fanny's coffin, bites the bullet, and opens it up. Inside, she sees Fanny lying dead with a baby in her arms. Bathsheba sinks to the floor and starts crying. Then she prays and lays some flowers around Fanny's head before closing the coffin again. A few moments later, she hears the house's front door opening and closing. She goes into the hallway to find her husband staring at her. He's now back from his trip. They stare at each other for a while before Troy asks what the matter is. Soon enough, he looks in on Fanny and the dead baby, and he falls completely silent. He finally admits to Bathsheba that Fanny was his former fiance and they had a baby together. He bends over and kisses Fanny. This fills Bathsheba with uncontrollable jealousy, and she jumps on him and demands that he kiss her to prove that he loves her more. Yeah, that's right: kiss her with the same lips that just kissed a corpse that had been sitting around for a few days. Troy, though, refuses to kiss her, admitting that he could never love her as much as he loved Fanny. He even says that in the eyes of heaven, there's no way he's married to Bathsheba. At this, Bathsheba can only turn and run out of the house.