第77章

`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! O, 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 farthest, 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 unmistakable 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 firing 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 I would have avoided you, and never seen you, and been deaf to 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 I"oman 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 fan - 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!'

`O sir - Mr Boldwood!'