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CHAPTER XXXVII - THE STORM -- THE TWO TOGETHER
A LIGHT flapped over the scene, as if reflected from
phosphorescent wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled
the air. It was the first move of the approaching storm.
The second peal was noisy, with comparatively little visible
lightning. Gabriel saw a candle shining in Bathsheba's
bedroom, and soon a shadow swept to and fro upon the blind.
Then there came a third flash. Manoeuvres of a most
extraordinary kind were going on in the vast firmamental
hollows overhead. The lightning now was the colour of
silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed army.
Rumbles became rattles. Gabriel from his elevated position
could see over the landscape at least half-a-dozen miles in
front. Every hedge, bush, and tree was distinct as in a
line engraving. In a paddock in the same direction was a
herd of heifers, and the forms of these were visible at this
moment in the act of galloping about in the wildest and
maddest confusion, flinging their heels and tails high into
the air, their heads to earth. A poplar in the immediate
fore-ground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin. Then
the picture vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that
Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with his hands.
He had stuck his ricking-rod, or poniard, as it was
indifferently called -- a long iron lance, polished by
handling -- into the stack, used to support the sheaves
instead of the support called a groom used on houses. A blue
light appeared in the zenith, and in some indescribable
manner flickered down near the top of the rod. It was the
fourth of the larger flashes. A moment later and there was
a smack -- smart, clear, and short, Gabriel felt his
position to be anything but a safe one, and he resolved to
descend.
Not a drop of rain had fallen as yet. He wiped his weary
brow, and looked again at the black forms of the unprotected
stacks. Was his life so valuable to him after all? What
were his prospects that he should be so chary of running
risk, when important and urgent labour could not be carried
on without such risk? He resolved to stick to the stack.
However, he took a precaution. Under the staddles was a
long tethering chain, used to prevent the escape of errant
horses. This he carried up the ladder, and sticking his rod
through the clog at one end, allowed the other end of the
chain to trail upon the ground The spike attached to it he
drove in. Under the shadow of this extemporized lightning
conductor he felt himself comparatively safe.
Before Oak had laid his hands upon his tools again out leapt
the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout
of a fiend. It was green as an emerald, and the
reverberation was stunning. What was this the light
revealed to him? In the open ground before him, as he looked
over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently female
form. Could it be that of the only venturesome woman in the
parish -- Bathsheba? The form moved on a step: then he
could see no more.
"Is that you, ma'am?" said Gabriel to the darkness.
"Who is there?" said the voice of Bathsheba.
"Gabriel. I am on the rick, thatching."
"Oh, Gabriel! -- and are you? I have come about them. The
weather awoke me, and I thought of the corn. I am so
distressed about it -- can we save it anyhow? I cannot find
my husband. Is he with you?"
"He is not here."
"Do you know where he is?"
"Asleep in the barn."
"He promised that the stacks should be seen to, and now they
are all neglected! Can I do anything to help? Liddy is
afraid to come out. Fancy finding you here at such an hour!
Surely I can do something?"
"You can bring up some reed-sheaves to me, one by one,
ma'am; if you are not afraid to come up the ladder in the
dark," said Gabriel. "Every moment is precious now, and
that would save a good deal of time. It is not very dark
when the lightning has been gone a bit."
"I'll do anything!" she said, resolutely. She instantly
took a sheaf upon her shoulder, clambered up close to his
heels, placed it behind the rod, and descended for another.
At her third ascent the rick suddenly brightened with the
brazen glare of shining majolica -- every knot in every
straw was visible. On the slope in front of him appeared
two human shapes, black as jet. The rick lost its sheen --
the shapes vanished. Gabriel turned his head. It had been
the sixth flash which had come from the east behind him, and
the two dark forms on the slope had been the shadows of
himself and Bathsheba.
Then came the peal. It hardly was credible that such a
heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical
sound.
"How terrible!" she exclaimed, and clutched him by the
sleeve. Gabriel turned, and steadied her on her aerial
perch by holding her arm. At the same moment, while he was
still reversed in his attitude, there was more light, and he
saw, as it were, a copy of the tall poplar tree on the hill
drawn in black on the wall of the barn. It was the shadow
of that tree, thrown across by a secondary flash in the
west.
The next flare came. Bathsheba was on the ground now,
shouldering another sheaf, and she bore its dazzle without
flinching -- thunder and all -- and again ascended with the
load. There was then a silence everywhere for four or five
minutes, and the crunch of the spars, as Gabriel hastily
drove them in, could again be distinctly heard. He thought
the crisis of the storm had passed. But there came a burst
of light.
"Hold on!" said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder,
and grasping her arm again.
Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel
for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once
realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of
its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and
was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons
appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones --
dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling
altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were
intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was
a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from
every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout;
since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the
nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. In the
meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point
of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain,
and into the earth. Gabriel was almost blinded, and he
could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand -- a
sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life,
everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close
juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.
Oak had hardly time to gather up these impressions into a
thought, and to see how strangely the red feather of her hat
shone in this light, when the tall tree on the hill before
mentioned seemed on fire to a white heat, and a new one
among these terrible voices mingled with the last crash of
those preceding. It was a stupefying blast, harsh and
pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, flat blow,
without that reverberation which lends the tones of a drum
to more distant thunder. By the lustre reflected from every
part of the earth and from the wide domical scoop above it,
he saw that the tree was sliced down the whole length of its
tall, straight stem, a huge riband of bark being apparently
flung off. The other portion remained erect, and revealed
the bared surface as a strip of white down the front. The
lightning had struck the tree. A sulphurous smell filled
the air; then all was silent, and black as a cave in Hinnom.
"We had a narrow escape!" said Gabriel, hurriedly. "You had
better go down."
Bathsheba said nothing; but he could distinctly hear her
rhythmical pants, and the recurrent rustle of the sheaf
beside her in response to her frightened pulsations. She
descended the ladder, and, on second thoughts, he followed
her. The darkness was now impenetrable by the sharpest
vision. They both stood still at the bottom, side by side.
Bathsheba appeared to think only of the weather -- Oak
thought only of her just then. At last he said --
"The storm seems to have passed now, at any rate."
"I think so too," said Bathsheba. "Though there are
multitudes of gleams, look!"
The sky was now filled with an incessant light, frequent
repetition melting into complete continuity, as an unbroken
sound results from the successive strokes on a gong.
"Nothing serious," said he. "I cannot understand no rain
falling. But Heaven be praised, it is all the better for
us. I am now going up again."
"Gabriel, you are kinder than I deserve! I will stay and
help you yet. Oh, why are not some of the others here!"
"They would have been here if they could," said Oak, in a
hesitating way.
"O, I know it all -- all," she said, adding slowly: "They
are all asleep in the barn, in a drunken sleep, and my
husband among them. That's it, is it not? Don't think I am
a timid woman and can't endure things."
"I am not certain," said Gabriel. "I will go and see."
He crossed to the barn, leaving her there alone. He looked
through the chinks of the door. All was in total darkness,
as he had left it, and there still arose, as at the former
time, the steady buzz of many snores.
He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned. It
was Bathsheba's breath -- she had followed him, and was
looking into the same chink.
He endeavoured to put off the immediate and painful subject
of their thoughts by remarking gently, "If you'll come back
again, miss -- ma'am, and hand up a few more; it would save
much time."
Then Oak went back again, ascended to the top, stepped off
the ladder for greater expedition, and went on thatching.
She followed, but without a sheaf.
"Gabriel," she said, in a strange and impressive voice.
Oak looked up at her. She had not spoken since he left the
barn. The soft and continual shimmer of the dying lightning
showed a marble face high against the black sky of the
opposite quarter. Bathsheba was sitting almost on the apex
of the stack, her feet gathered up beneath her, and resting
on the top round of the ladder.
"Yes, mistress," he said.
"I suppose you thought that when I galloped away to Bath
that night it was on purpose to be married?"
"I did at last -- not at first," he answered, somewhat
surprised at the abruptness with which this new subject was
broached.
"And others thought so, too?"
"Yes."
"And you blamed me for it?"
"Well -- a little."
"I thought so. Now, I care a little for your good opinion,
and I want to explain something -- I have longed to do it
ever since I returned, and you looked so gravely at me. For
if I were to die -- and I may die soon -- it would be
dreadful that you should always think mistakenly of me.
Now, listen."
Gabriel ceased his rustling.
"I went to Bath that night in the full intention of breaking
off my engagement to Mr. Troy. It was owing to
circumstances which occurred after I got there that -- that
we were married. Now, do you see the matter in a new
light?"
"I do -- somewhat."
"I must, I suppose, say more, now that I have begun. And
perhaps it's no harm, for you are certainly under no
delusion that I ever loved you, or that I can have any
object in speaking, more than that object I have mentioned.
Well, I was alone in a strange city, and the horse was lame.
And at last I didn't know what to do. I saw, when it was
too late, that scandal might seize hold of me for meeting
him alone in that way. But I was coming away, when he
suddenly said he had that day seen a woman more beautiful
than I, and that his constancy could not be counted on
unless I at once became his.... And I was grieved and
troubled ----" She cleared her voice, and waited a moment,
as if to gather breath. "And then, between jealousy and
distraction, I married him!" she whispered with desperate
impetuosity.
Gabriel made no reply.
"He was not to blame, for it was perfectly true about --
about his seeing somebody else," she quickly added. "And
now I don't wish for a single remark from you upon the
subject -- indeed, I forbid it. I only wanted you to know
that misunderstood bit of my history before a time comes
when you could never know it. -- You want some more
sheaves?"
She went down the ladder, and the work proceeded. Gabriel
soon perceived a languor in the movements of his mistress up
and down, and he said to her, gently as a mother --
"I think you had better go indoors now, you are tired. I
can finish the rest alone. If the wind does not change the
rain is likely to keep off."
"If I am useless I will go," said Bathsheba, in a flagging
cadence. "But O, if your life should be lost!"
"You are not useless; but I would rather not tire you
longer. You have done well."
"And you better!" she said, gratefully. "Thank you for your
devotion, a thousand times, Gabriel! Goodnight -- I know you
are doing your very best for me."
She diminished in the gloom, and vanished, and he heard the
latch of the gate fall as she passed through. He worked in
a reverie now, musing upon her story, and upon the
contradictoriness of that feminine heart which had caused
her to speak more warmly to him to-night than she ever had
done whilst unmarried and free to speak as warmly as she
chose.
He was disturbed in his meditation by a grating noise from
the coach-house. It was the vane on the roof turning round,
and this change in the wind was the signal for a disastrous
rain.
Content of CHAPTER XXXVII - THE STORM -- THE TWO TOGETHER [Thomas Hardy's novel: Far From The Madding Crowd]
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Read next: CHAPTER XXXVIII - RAIN -- ONE SOLITARY MEETS ANOTHER
Read previous: CHAPTER XXXVI - WEALTH IN JEOPARDY -- THE REVEL
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