Far From the Madding Crowd | Page 4

freshness of an
originality. A cynical inference was irresistible by Gabriel Oak as he
regarded the scene, generous though he fain would have been. There
was no necessity whatever for her looking in the glass. She did not
adjust her hat, or pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one
thing to signify that any such intention had been her motive in taking
up the glass. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in
the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though
likely dramas in which men would play a part -- vistas of probable
triumphs -- the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were
imagined as lost and won. Still, this was but conjecture, and the whole
series of actions was so idly put forth as to make it rash to assert that
intention had any part in them at all.
The waggoner's steps were heard returning. She put the glass in the
paper, and the whole again into its place.
When the waggon had passed on, Gabriel withdrew from his point of
espial, and descending into the road, followed the vehicle to the
turnpike-gate some way beyond the bottom of the hill, where the object
of his contemplation now halted for the payment of toll. About twenty
steps still remained between him and the gate, when he heard a dispute.
It was a difference concerning twopence between the persons with the
waggon and the man at the toll-bar.
"Mis'ess's niece is upon the top of the things, and she says that's enough
that I've offered ye, you great miser, and she won't pay any more."
These were the waggoner's words.
"Very well; then mis'ess's niece can't pass," said the turnpike-keeper,
closing the gate.
Oak looked from one to the other of the disputants, and fell into a
reverie. There was something in the tone of twopence remarkably
insignificant. Threepence had a definite value as money -- it was an
appreciable infringement on a day's wages, and, as such, a higgling
matter; but twopence -- "Here," he said, stepping forward and handing
twopence to the gatekeeper; "let the young woman pass." He looked up

at her then; she heard his words, and looked down.
Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the
middle line between the beauty of St. John and the ugliness of Judas
Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not
a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of
distinction or notoriety. The red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden
seemed to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and told
her man to drive on. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a
minute scale, but she did not speak them; more probably she felt none,
for in gaining her a passage he had lost her her point, and we know how
women take a favour of that kind.
The gatekeeper surveyed the retreating vehicle. "That's a handsome
maid," he said to Oak.
"But she has her faults," said Gabriel.
"True, farmer."
"And the greatest of them is -- well, what it is always."
"Beating people down? ay, 'tis so."
"O no."
"What, then?"
Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller's indifference,
glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance over the
hedge, and said, "Vanity."


CHAPTER II
NIGHT -- THE FLOCK -- AN INTERIOR -- ANOTHER INTERIOR

IT was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas's, the shortest day in
the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill
whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the
sunshine of a few days earlier.
Norcombe Hill -- not far from lonely Toller-Down -- was one of the
spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape
approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It
was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil -- an ordinary specimen of
those smoothly- outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain
undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights
and dizzy granite precipices topple down.
The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying
plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest,
fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. To-night these
trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote
the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or
gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves
in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air
occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across