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CHAPTER XLVI - THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS
THE tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of
fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each
of the four faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved
protuberances only two at this time continued to serve the
purpose of their erection -- that of spouting the water from
the lead roof within. One mouth in each front had been
closed by bygone church-wardens as superfluous, and two
others were broken away and choked -- a matter not of much
consequence to the wellbeing of the tower, for the two
mouths which still remained open and active were gaping
enough to do all the work.
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer
criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the
power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and
certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no
disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a somewhat
early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish
as distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles,
which are the necessary correlatives of a parapet, were
exceptionally prominent -- of the boldest cut that the hand
could shape, and of the most original design that a human
brain could conceive. There was, so to speak, that symmetry
in their distortion which is less the characteristic of
British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All
the eight were different from each other. A beholder was
convinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than
those he saw on the north side until he went round to the
south. Of the two on this latter face, only that at the
south-eastern corner concerns the story. It was too human
to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too
animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be
called a griffin. This horrible stone entity was fashioned
as if covered with a wrinkled hide; it had short, erect
ears, eyes starting from their sockets, and its fingers and
hands were seizing the corners of its mouth, which they thus
seemed to pull open to give free passage to the water it
vomited. The lower row of teeth was quite washed away,
though the upper still remained. Here and thus, jutting a
couple of feet from the wall against which its feet rested
as a support, the creature had for four hundred years
laughed at the surrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry
weather, and in wet with a gurgling and snorting sound.
Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased outside.
Presently the gurgoyle spat. In due time a small stream
began to trickle through the seventy feet of aerial space
between its mouth and the ground, which the water-drops
smote like duckshot in their accelerated velocity. The
stream thickened in substance, and increased in power,
gradually spouting further and yet further from the side of
the tower. When the rain fell in a steady and ceaseless
torrent the stream dashed downward in volumes.
We follow its course to the ground at this point of time.
The end of the liquid parabola has come forward from the
wall, has advanced over the plinth mouldings, over a heap of
stones, over the marble border, into the midst of Fanny
Robin's grave.
The force of the stream had, until very lately, been
received upon some loose stones spread thereabout, which had
acted as a shield to the soil under the onset. These during
the summer had been cleared from the ground, and there was
now nothing to resist the down-fall but the bare earth. For
several years the stream had not spouted so far from the
tower as it was doing on this night, and such a contingency
had been over-looked. Sometimes this obscure corner
received no inhabitant for the space of two or three years,
and then it was usually but a pauper, a poacher, or other
sinner of undignified sins.
The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all
its vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was
stirred into motion, and boiled like chocolate. The water
accumulated and washed deeper down, and the roar of the pool
thus formed spread into the night as the head and chief
among other noises of the kind created by the deluging rain.
The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny's repentant lover
began to move and writhe in their bed. The winter-violets
turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of mud.
Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass
like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted
species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.
Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it was
broad day. Not having been in bed for two nights his
shoulders felt stiff, his feet tender, and his head heavy.
He remembered his position, arose, shivered, took the spade,
and again went out.
The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining through
the green, brown, and yellow leaves, now sparkling and
varnished by the raindrops to the brightness of similar
effects in the landscapes of Ruysdael and Hobbema, and full
of all those infinite beauties that arise from the union of
water and colour with high lights. The air was rendered so
transparent by the heavy fall of rain that the autumn hues
of the middle distance were as rich as those near at hand,
and the remote fields intercepted by the angle of the tower
appeared in the same plane as the tower itself.
He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the
tower. The path, instead of being stony as it had been the
night before, was browned over with a thin coating of mud.
At one place in the path he saw a tuft of stringy roots
washed white and clean as a bundle of tendons. He picked it
up -- surely it could not be one of the primroses he had
planted? He saw a bulb, another, and another as he
advanced. Beyond doubt they were the crocuses. With a face
of perplexed dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld
the wreck the stream had made.
The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and
in its place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed
over the grass and pathway in the guise of the brown mud he
had already seen, and it spotted the marble tombstone with
the same stains. Nearly all the flowers were washed clean
out of the ground, and they lay, roots upwards, on the spots
whither they had been splashed by the stream.
Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth
closely, and his compressed lips moved as those of one in
great pain. This singular accident, by a strange confluence
of emotions in him, was felt as the sharpest sting of all.
Troy's face was very expressive, and any observer who had
seen him now would hardly have believed him to be a man who
had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into a
woman's ear. To curse his miserable lot was at first his
impulse, but even that lowest stage of rebellion needed an
activity whose absence was necessarily antecedent to the
existence of the morbid misery which wrung him. The sight,
coming as it did, superimposed upon the other dark scenery
of the previous days, formed a sort of climax to the whole
panorama, and it was more than he could endure. Sanguine by
nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply
adjourning it. He could put off the consideration of any
particular spectre till the matter had become old and
softened by time. The planting of flowers on Fanny's grave
had been perhaps but a species of elusion of the primary
grief, and now it was as if his intention had been known and
circumvented.
Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by
this dismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is
seldom that a person with much animal spirit does not feel
that the fact of his life being his own is the one
qualification which singles it out as a more hopeful life
than that of others who may actually resemble him in every
particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds
of times, that he could not envy other people their
condition, because the possession of that condition would
have necessitated a different personality, when he desired
no other than his own. He had not minded the peculiarities
of his birth, the vicissitudes of his life, the meteor-like
uncertainty of all that related to him, because these
appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there
would have been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be
only in the nature of things that matters would right
themselves at some proper date and wind up well. This very
morning the illusion completed its disappearance, and, as it
were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself. The suddenness
was probably more apparent than real. A coral reef which
just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the
horizon than if it had never been begun, and the mere
finishing stroke is what often appears to create an event
which has long been potentially an accomplished thing.
He stood and mediated -- a miserable man. Whither should he
go? "He that is accursed, let him be accursed still," was
the pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of
his new-born solicitousness. A man who has spent his primal
strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit
left for reversing his course. Troy had, since yesterday,
faintly reversed his; but the merest opposition had
disheartened him. To turn about would have been hard enough
under the greatest providential encouragement; but to find
that Providence, far from helping him into a new course, or
showing any wish that he might adopt one, actually jeered
his first trembling and critical attempt in that kind, was
more than nature could bear.
He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to
fill up the hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at
all. He simply threw up his cards and forswore his game for
that time and always. Going out of the churchyard silently
and unobserved -- none of the villagers having yet risen --
he passed down some fields at the back, and emerged just as
secretly upon the high road. Shortly afterwards he had gone
from the village.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner in the
attic. The door was kept locked, except during the entries
and exits of Liddy, for whom a bed had been arranged in a
small adjoining room. The light of Troy's lantern in the
churchyard was noticed about ten o'clock by the maid-
servant, who casually glanced from the window in that
direction whilst taking her supper, and she called
Bathsheba's attention to it. They looked curiously at the
phenomenon for a time, until Liddy was sent to bed.
Bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night. When her
attendant was unconscious and softly breathing in the next
room, the mistress of the house was still looking out of the
window at the faint gleam spreading from among the trees --
not in a steady shine, but blinking like a revolving
coastlight, though this appearance failed to suggest to her
that a person was passing and repassing in front of it.
Bathsheba sat here till it began to rain, and the light
vanished, when she withdrew to lie restlessly in her bed and
re-enact in a worn mind the lurid scene of yesternight.
Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared she
arose again, and opened the window to obtain a full
breathing of the new morning air, the panes being now wet
with trembling tears left by the night rain, each one
rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-hued slashes
through a cloud low down in the awakening sky. From the
trees came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted
leaves under them, and from the direction of the church she
could hear another noise -- peculiar, and not intermittent
like the rest, the purl of water falling into a pool.
Liddy knocked at eight o'clock, and Bathsheba un-locked the
door.
"What a heavy rain we've had in the night, ma'am!" said
Liddy, when her inquiries about breakfast had been made.
"Yes, very heavy."
"Did you hear the strange noise from the church yard?"
"I heard one strange noise. I've been thinking it must have
been the water from the tower spouts."
"Well, that's what the shepherd was saying, ma'am. He's now
gone on to see."
"Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!"
"Only just looked in in passing -- quite in his old way,
which I thought he had left off lately. But the tower
spouts used to spatter on the stones, and we are puzzled,
for this was like the boiling of a pot."
Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked
Liddy to stay and breakfast with her. The tongue of the
more childish woman still ran upon recent events. "Are you
going across to the church, ma'am?" she asked.
"Not that I know of," said Bathsheba.
"I thought you might like to go and see where they have put
Fanny. The trees hide the place from your window."
Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband.
"Has Mr. Troy been in to-night?" she said
"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth."
Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much
diminished perspective of him and his deeds; there were
thirteen miles interval betwixt them now. She hated
questioning Liddy about her husband's movements, and indeed
had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but now all the
house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise.
Bathsheba had reached a stage at which people cease to have
any appreciative regard for public opinion.
"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.
"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast."
Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness
of the past twenty-four hours which had quenched the
vitality of youth in her without substituting the philosophy
of maturer years, and she resolved to go out and walk a
little way. So when breakfast was over, she put on her
bonnet, and took a direction towards the church. It was
nine o'clock, and the men having returned to work again from
their first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in
the road. Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the
reprobates' quarter of the graveyard, called in the parish
"behind church," which was invisible from the road, it was
impossible to resist the impulse to enter and look upon a
spot which, from nameless feelings, she at the same time
dreaded to see. She had been unable to overcome an
impression that some connection existed between her rival
and the light through the trees.
Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the
tomb, its delicately veined surface splashed and stained
just as Troy had seen it and left it two hours earlier. On
the other side of the scene stood Gabriel. His eyes, too,
were fixed on the tomb, and her arrival having been
noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his attention.
Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the grand tomb and
the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and she looked on both
sides and around for some humbler mound, earthed up and
clodded in the usual way. Then her eye followed Oak's, and
she read the words with which the inscription opened: --
"Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of
Fanny Robin."
Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and
learn how she received this knowledge of the authorship of
the work, which to himself had caused considerable
astonishment. But such discoveries did not much affect her
now. Emotional convulsions seemed to have become the
commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good morning,
and asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which was
standing by. Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba
collected the flowers, and began planting them with that
sympathetic manipulation of roots and leaves which is so
conspicuous in a woman's gardening, and which flowers seem
to understand and thrive upon. She requested Oak to get the
churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the mouth of the
gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon them, that by this means
the stream might be directed sideways, and a repetition of
the accident prevented. Finally, with the superfluous
magnanimity of a woman whose narrower instincts have brought
down bitterness upon her instead of love, she wiped the mud
spots from the tomb as if she rather liked its words than
otherwise, and went again home. [1]
[1] The local tower and churchyard do not answer precisely
to the foregoing description.
Content of CHAPTER XLVI - THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS [Thomas Hardy's novel: Far From The Madding Crowd]
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