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, innocently took off his shepherd’s clothes, stretched and yawned, showing his fine long limbs, broad chest and the intriguing dark shadow of hair and tangle of flesh between his legs to the spectator below, finally, he turned around, revealing with marvelous unconcern a comely pair of buttocks, lean, muscular and firm, as he searched around for his nightshirt, donned it, placed his light in the window-bench, and then — knelt down to pray. The contrast of this childlike 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 tonight, 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.
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“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 death-cry of her union with Troy.
“If she is — 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.”
“But I am yours, Frank, in the sight of God and in my heart, I am yours, and I am as warm and alive as this sad creature is cold and dead.”’
Bathsheba, hardly knowing what she did, unlaced the fastenings of the cloak she wore from her earlier expedition to Gabriel Oak’s cottage, and, in full sight of the coffin and the marbled figures therein, laid open her blouse. Her panting breaths revealed twin globes of rosy flesh, but, not content with this, she drew her arms out of her sleeves and, naked from the waist up, displayed herself to him boldly, as a white swan on the lake might surrender her long neck to her cob, inviting his advances.
“Kiss me, Frank, kiss me, I entreat you,” was the wild cry that burst from her lips, and, in a last violent effort to have him, she flung herself between his astonished figure and the coffin.
“Would you profane this altar?” he murmured, staring fixedly in his tranced state at the waxen features of Fanny, who lay as serene in her coffin, clasping her little boy to her breast, as any statue of the Virgin.
“Come to me, hold me, take me”’ was her only reply, holding out her arms to keep him from her rival, to recapture him, to snare him back into life.
“Ah, would you stoop to this? A woman of the regiment would have more shame; a used and battered thing of the streets would not go so low,” and Troy felt the purity of his deep grief slipping away, and with it, the last of Fanny. The better part of him, his truer instinct, was being stolen by this witch, and in its place a cold rage burned. He took the proffered arm and, before she could draw breath, he bent it behind her back and hauled her into the next room — and how willingly she went, for, in anger or in hatred, no matter at what cost, she thought thus to win him back.
The room was empty save for a thin carpet, and Bathsheba made ready to lie herself down upon it, but he wrenched her arm with such force that she cried out and stayed standing.
“You want me?” Troy said.
“I want you as never before. O, kiss me, Frank, and love me a little, for I cannot bear to be set aside for a dead woman, when I love you so entirely.”
“Love? You know not what the word means, you are a shallow, empty vessel, and I would defile Fanny to take you in that room, before her and her blessed child, lying so perfect and so innocent in her coffin. If it be your wish to be ridden now, in these sad circumstances, then let drop your skirt and let me see the goods I have so dearly paid for.”
Bathsheba was already beginning to have regrets that she had started a course of action that would only result in her humiliation, but how else was she to burn away the memory of her rival? In a free and hot display of natural lust, would not the pale shade of Fanny fade into the greyness of unbeing?
With hasty fingers she undid her skirt, and once more she made to lay herself down, but he grasped her by both arms, cruelly pinching her, making her stand upright before him.
“Not so fast, madam. You’ll see how we soldiers take our women. Standing is easy for a practised whore. On street corners we fuck them, by walls and ditches, sometimes with our comrades cheering us on. And hear this well, you pitiful fireside harlot; such coupling is always swift, brutal and free from any taint of love.”
He held her against him, unbuttoned himself, lifted her underskirt, and in a moment drove hard into her, both of them standing, and she, almost swooning, felt her legs buckle, but he clasped her still harder, and forced her back against the plaster wall of the room, driving ever more fiercely into her with no kisses, no kind words or looks of tenderness.
And Bathsheba, though her eyes were shut tight, had no moment of triumph, no escape from the torments of her mind. She was forced to behold in her inward eye, rising before her like a spectre, the pale and chaste tableau of saintly Fanny and her little baby, dead, beautiful and young for ever. Try as she might to banish this vision, it was always Fanny’s face before her, Fanny’s timid voice in her ear, and Fanny’s angelic form looking down from her place in heaven with no reproach or sorrow in her eyes — no, far worse than that, it was simple pity.
There was no pleasure to be had in this congress, no softness, and even the meagre satisfaction of having distracted Troy from reverent worship of his dead wife was denied her, for at the last, he cried out Fanny’s name, and in his blind misery, he felt the joyless spending of his seed in this unworthy body was also the funeral rite for his little son, the only issue he would ever desire.
Literary Love Page 45
