"--It was quite a mistake--aunt's telling you I had a young man already," Bathsheba went on. "I haven't a sweetheart at all--and I
never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was such a pity to send you away thinking that I had several."
14
"Really and truly I am glad to hear that!" said Farmer Oak, smiling one of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped through his fingers like an eel."
"I have a nice snug little farm," said Gabriel, with half a degree less assurance than when he had seized her hand.
"Yes; you have."
"A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon be paid off, and though I am only an every-day sort of man, I have got on a little since I was a boy." Gabriel uttered "a little" in a tone to show her that it was the complacent form of "a great deal." He continued: "When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as hard as I do now."
He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba had overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low stunted holly bush, now laden with red berries. Seeing his advance take the form of an attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her person, she edged off round the bush.
"Why, Farmer Oak," she said, over the top, looking at him with rounded eyes, "I never said I was going to marry you." "Well--that is a tale!" said Oak, with dismay. "To run after anybody like this, and then say you don't want him!"
"What I meant to tell you was only this," she said eagerly, and yet half conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for herself--"that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my having a dozen, as my aunt said; I hate to be thought men's property in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I'd wanted you I shouldn't have run after you like this; 'twould have been the forwardest thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to correct a piece of false news that had been told you."
"Oh, no--no harm at all." But there is such a thing as being too generous in expressing a judgment impulsively, and Oak added with a more appreciative sense of all the circumstances--"Well, I am not quite certain it was no harm."
"Indeed, I hadn't time to think before starting whether I wanted to marry or not, for you'd have been gone over the hill."
"Come," said Gabriel, freshening again; "think a minute or two. I'll wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me? Do, Bathsheba. I love you far more than common!"
"I'll try to think," she observed, rather more timorously; "if I can think out of doors; my mind spreads away so." "But you can give a guess."
"Then give me time." Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the distance, away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.
"I can make you happy," said he to the back of her head, across the bush. "You shall have a piano in a year or two--farmers' wives are getting to have pianos now--and I'll practise up the flute right well to play with you in the evenings."
"Yes; I should like that."
"And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market--and nice flowers, and birds--cocks and hens I mean, because they be use-ful," continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality.
"I should like it very much."
"And a frame for cucumbers--like a gentleman and lady."
"Yes."
"And when the wedding was over, we'd have it put in the newspaper list of marriages." "Dearly I should like that!"
15
"And the babies in the births--every man jack of 'em! And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be--and whenever I look up there will be you."
"Wait, wait, and don't be improper!"
Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red berries between them over and over again, to such an extent, that holly seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of marriage. Bathsheba decisively turned to him.
"No; 'tis no use," she said. "I don't want to marry you." "Try."
"I have tried hard all the time I've been thinking; for a marriage would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and think I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that, But a husband--"
"Well!"
"Why, he'd always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he'd be." "Of course he would--I, that is."
"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry--at least yet."
"That's a terrible wooden story!"
At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an addition to her dignity by a slight sweep away from him.
"Upon my heart and soul, I don't know what a maid can say stupider than that," said Oak. "But dearest," he continued in a pallia-tive voice, "don't be like it!" Oak sighed a deep honest sigh--none the less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. "Why won't you have me?" he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.
"I cannot," she said, retreating.
"But why?" he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever reaching her, and facing over the bush. "Because I don't love you."
"Yes, but--"
She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. "I don't love you," she said. "But I love you--and, as for myself, I am content to be liked."
"Oh Mr. Oak--that's very fine! You'd get to despise me."
"Never," said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. "I shall do one thing in this life--one thing certain--that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die." His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.
"It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!" she said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some means of escape from her moral dilemma. "How I wish I hadn't run after you!" However she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to cheerfulness, and set her face to signify archness. "It wouldn't do, Mr Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know."
Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless to attempt argument.
16
"Mr. Oak," she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, "you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world--I
am staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you--and I don't love you a bit: that's my side of the case. Now yours: you are a farmer just beginning; and you ought in common prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present), to marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than you have now."
Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration. "That's the very thing I had been thinking myself !" he naively said.
Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety
of honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.
"Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?" she said, almost angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek. "I can't do what I think would be--would be--"
"Right?" "No: wise."
"You have made an admission now, Mr. Oak," she exclaimed, with even more hauteur,