by Pan Zador
Immediately after the incident with the snatching of the message in the tent, she had risen to go — now absolutely alarmed and really grateful for her old lover’s protection — though regretting Gabriel’s absence, whose company she would have much preferred, as being more proper as well as more pleasant, since he was her own managing-man and servant. This, however, could not be helped; she would not, on any consideration, treat Boldwood harshly, having once already ill-used him, and the moon having risen, and the gig being ready, she drove across the hilltop in the wending way’s which led downwards — to oblivious obscurity, as it seemed, for the moon and the hill it flooded with light were in appearance on a level, the rest of the world lying as a vast shady concave between them. Boldwood mounted his horse, and followed in close attendance behind. Thus they descended into the lowlands, and the sounds of those left on the hill came like voices from the sky, and the lights were as those of a camp in heaven. They soon passed the merry stragglers in the immediate vicinity of the hill, traversed Kingsbere, and got upon the high road.
The keen instincts of Bathsheba had perceived that the farmer’s staunch devotion to herself was still undiminished, and she sympathized deeply. The sight had quite depressed her this evening; had reminded her of her folly; she wished anew, as she had wished many months ago, for some means of making reparation for her fault.
Hence her pity for the man who so persistently loved on to his own injury and permanent gloom had betrayed Bathsheba into an injudicious considerateness of manner, which appeared almost like tenderness, and gave new vigour to the exquisite dream of a Jacob’s seven years service in poor Boldwood’s mind.
As they journeyed homeward, the moonlight suddenly obscured by the looming shadows of tall elms all along the road, she remained blissfully in ignorance that, safely seated behind her on his steady old horse, with the skirts of his greatcoat spread over him concealing all movement, Boldwood was allowing both hands free play to open his breeches, the better to fondle, squeeze and tease his throbbing truncheon, softly at first, feeling its swift rise under his hands to cause his breath to come faster, then, maddened to extremity by the sight of his adored one, so near and yet so far from him, he began to rub himself more eagerly, at first in rhythm to the horse’s slow pace, then faster, as his erection swelled and grew peremptory in its demand for satistfaction. How wondrous it would be, he thought, to stop Bathsheba’s waggon, to show her the visible evidence of his passion, and to join his body to hers, here in the darkness! his proximity to the object of his desire hastened his emissions in so intense a gushing forth of pleasure that it was with the greatest difficulty that he restrained himself from groaning and sobbing aloud with relief.
Summoning every vestige of control, he wiped himself, laced up his breeches, and soon found an excuse for advancing from his position in the rear, and riding close by her side. They had gone two or three miles in the moonlight, speaking desultorily across the wheel of her gig concerning the fair, farming, Oak’s usefulness to them both, and other indifferent subjects, when Boldwood said suddenly and simply —
“Mrs. Troy, you will marry again some day?”
This point-blank query unmistakably confused her, and it was not till a minute or more had elapsed that she said, “I have not seriously thought of any such subject.”
“I quite understand that. Yet your late husband has been dead nearly one year, and — ”
“You forget that his death was never absolutely proved, and may not have taken place; so that I may not be really a widow,” she said, catching at the straw of escape that the fact afforded.
“Not absolutely proved, perhaps, but it was proved circumstantially. A man saw him drowning, too. No reasonable person has any doubt of his death; nor have you, ma’am, I should imagine.”
“I have none now, or I should have acted differently,” she said, gently. “I certainly, at first, had a strange unaccountable feeling that he could not have perished, but I have been able to explain that in several ways since. But though I am fully persuaded that I shall see him no more, I am far from thinking of marriage with another. I should be very contemptible to indulge in such a thought.”
They were silent now awhile, and having struck into an unfrequented track across a common, the creaks of Boldwood’s saddle and her gig springs were all the sounds to be heard. Boldwood ended the pause.
“Do you remember when I carried you fainting in my arms into the King’s Arms, in Casterbridge? Every dog has his day: that was mine.”
“I know — I know it all,” she said, hurriedly.
“I, for one, shall never cease regretting that events so fell out as to deny you to me.”
“I, too, am very sorry,” she said, and then checked herself. “I mean, you know, I am sorry you thought I — ”
“I have always this dreary pleasure in thinking over those past times with you — that I was something to you before he was anything, and that you belonged almost to me. But, of course, that’s nothing. You never liked me.”
“I did; and respected you, too.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes.”
“Which?”
“How do you mean which?”
“Do you like me, or do you respect me?”
“I don’t know — at least, I cannot tell you. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. My treatment of you was thoughtless, inexcusable, wicked! I shall eternally regret it. If there had been anything I could have done to make amends I would most gladly have done it — there was nothing on earth I so longed to do as to repair the error. But that was not possible.”
“Don’t blame yourself — you were not so far in the wrong as you suppose. Bathsheba, suppose you had real complete proof that you are what, in fact, you are — a widow — would you repair the old wrong to me by marrying me?”
“I cannot say. I shouldn’t yet, at any rate.”
“But you might at some future time of your life?”
“Oh yes, I might at some time.”
“Well, then, do you know that without further proof of any kind you may marry again in about six years from the present — subject to nobody’s objection or blame?”
“Oh yes,” she said, quickly. “I know all that. But don’t talk of it — seven or six years — where may we all be by that time?”
“They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past — much less than to look forward to now.”
“Yes, yes; I have found that in my own experience.”
“Now listen once more,” Boldwood pleaded. “If I wait that time, will you marry me? You own that you owe me amends — let that be your way of making them.”
“But, Mr. Boldwood — six years — ”
“Do you want to be the wife of any other man?”
“No indeed! I mean, that I don’t like to talk about this matter now. Perhaps it is not proper, and I ought not to allow it. Let us drop it. My husband may be living, as I said.”
“Of course, I’ll drop the subject if you wish. But propriety has nothing to do with reasons. I am a middle-aged man, willing to protect you for the remainder of our lives. On your side, at least, there is no passion or blamable haste — on mine, perhaps, there is. But I can’t help seeing that if you choose from a feeling of pity, and, as you say, a wish to make amends, to make a bargain with me for a far-ahead time — an agreement which will set all things right and make me happy, late though it may be — there is no fault to be found with you as a woman. Hadn’t I the first place beside you? Haven’t you been almost mine once already? Surely you can say to me as much as this, you will have me back again should circumstances permit? Now, pray speak! O Bathsheba, promise — it is only a little promise — that if you marry again, you will marry me!”
His tone was so excited that she almost feared him at this moment, even whilst she sympathized. It was a simple physical fear — the weak of the strong; there was no emotional aversion or inner repugnance. She said, with some distress in her voice, for she remembered vividly his outburst on the Yalbury Road, and shrank from a repetition of his anger, “I will never marry another man whilst you wish me to be your wife, whatever comes — but to say more — you have taken me so by surprise — ”
“But let it stand in these simple words — that in six years’ time you will be my wife? Unexpected accidents we’ll not mention, because those, of course, must be given way to. Now, this time I know you will keep your word.”
“That’s why I hesitate to give it.”
“But do give it! Remember the past, and be kind.”
She breathed; and then said mournfully: “Oh what shall I do? I don’t love you, and I much fear that I never shall love you as much as a woman ought to love a husband. If you, sir, know that, and I can yet give you happiness by a mere promise to marry at the end of six years, if my husband should not come back, it is a great honour to me. And if you value such an act of friendship from a woman who doesn’t esteem herself as she did, and has little love left, why I — I will — ”
“Promise!”
“ — Consider, if I cannot promise soon.”
“But soon is perhaps never?”
“Oh no, it is not! I mean soon. Christmas, we’ll say.”
“Christmas!” He said nothing further till he added: “Well, I’ll say no more to you about it till that time.”
Bathsheba was in a very peculiar state of mind, which showed how entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood. It is hardly too much to say that she felt coerced by a force stronger than her own will, not only into the act of promising upon this singularly remote and vague matter, but into the emotion of fancying that she ought to promise. And, after all, was she not a widow who had known the passionate heat of connection with a husband who was able to drive her into frenzies and leave her spent, exhausted, and gasping? How was that aching void within her to be filled? Or was she never again to know the feel of a man’s hard cock gently inserted into her, the insistent, mounting rhythms of the act of conjugal union?
How differently the night ended for her three revelling farm folk. Having gained entrance to an unused shepherd’s hut on a field near Bathsheba’s farm, the two men were about to draw lots for their roles in the forthcoming drama, but Maryann would have none of it.
“I’ll take you, Jan Coggan,” she said, undoing his trouser waistband with a brisk hand, “and you, Matthew, stand further off, at the end of the bed and watch. Only watch, mind, I’ll have no speeches about my performance. Nor suggestions neither.”
Moon was in that nervous state between pleasure and terror, and needed no further instruction. The times he had sat with his companions in the maltster’s inn, hearing tales of Maryann and her amorous skills, he had never dreamed he would take part in such a jaunt as this. Why, she had Jan stripped to the buff in a twinkling! She was taking his man’s part in her hands, moulding it like a loaf of bread till it began to rise. Jan was lying on the bed, groaning. Maryann loosed her bodice, letting her full breasts bounce free. Matthew could hardly keep himself from reaching out and touching one of these durable wonders. Now, Maryann was taking Jan’s hand, bringing it up to stroke her breast! She made a sound, it was a gasping kind of sound, and Jan, taking a more active part, raised up his head and found her nipple with his mouth, and as she held his head to her, he sucked like a baby, and his member swelled till it looked near bursting.
“O Lord,” Matthew Moon said suddenly, feeling a rush of fluid from his own tool, which took him so by surprise that he lost his balance and sank to the floor. With clumsy hands he freed his member from its restrictive clothing, and began stroking it in a state of dreamy excitement as the two on the bed, having kissed and twisted their limbs together in a most tantalising configuration, commenced to thrust and heave one against the other; their eyes were shut, their faces contused with their exertions, and Matthew, finding himself inadvertently moving in a similar thrusting motion, spent himself upon the air with a loud cry, while Jan, almost seeming to expire with holding back his urgency, rent the air with such a bellow of relief that it must have been heard all the way to Weatherbury, and Maryann, her needs at last assauged, clenched her whole body for two or three convulsions of ecstasy, and finally allowed her legs, fast entwined around the trunk of her amour, to relax to their natural position.
“Well, Matthew Moon, and how did you like this sport?” she enquired, as soon as her breathing slowed enough to speak.
“Oh, well enough … well, indeed,” replied the hapless Matthew, trying in vain to conceal the swelling of his organ from Jan Coggan, who lay chuckling, naked as the day he was born.
Maryann raised herself on her elbow, and took in his readiness at a glance.
“Handsomely done, my man,” she said, tipping Jan out of the narrow bed and onto the floor. “Come you in here along of me, now, Matthew Moon, lest you do yourself further mischief.”
Matthew needed no second exhortation, but scrambled to the warm place so recently occupied by his friend. Bathed in the warm juices of her recent congress, Maryann took Moon lazily in her hand and played up and down the length of his erection with slow and easy movements, using her long fingers in a way that no mortal woman had ever touched him before; he felt his breath quickening as her lips, that he had never seen at such invitingly close quarters, mouthed a kiss at him, and her free arm pulled him closer, till she could plant her mouth on his, and sound him with a deep and searching tongue.
Jan still lay on the floor, his hands fastened tight to his prick, trying to stop its inevitable outrush before he had had time to take in the view in front of his eyes. For the life of him, he could not say which was the more exciting — to be lying between those thighs, feeling them moving beneath him, and to have his member gripped so hard by the rhythmic contractions of a woman’s part that he had never before imagined to have such muscular strength, or to watch with absorption the expression on the face of his drinking companion, going from amazement to wonder to an overwhelming urge for release, and to watch the two wrestling and heaving to their climax — it undid his composure to such extent that he remained on the floor, hunched over his organ, which pounded forth its vital juices with such vigour he felt himself to be a man endowed with supernatural powers.
For their careworn mistress, the night was not so gay and sprightly, for Boldwood’s promise to leave off wooing until Christmas meant that she dreaded the arrival of that festive time.
When the weeks intervening between the night of her last conversation with him and Christmas day began perceptibly to diminish, her anxiety and perplexity increased.
One day she was led by an accident into an oddly confidential dialogue with Gabriel about her difficulty. It afforded her a little relief — of a dull and cheerless kind. They were auditing accounts, and something occurred in the course of their labours which led Oak to say, speaking of Boldwood, “He’ll never forget you, ma’am, never.”
Then out came her trouble before she was aware; and she told him how she had again got into the toils; what Boldwood had asked her, and how he was expecting her assent. “The most mournful reason of all for my agreeing to it,” she said sadly, “and the true reason why I think to do so for good or for evil, is this — it is a thing I have not breathed to a living soul as yet — I believe that if I don’t give my word, he’ll go out of his mind.”
“Really, do ye?” said Gabriel, gravely.
“I believe this,” she continued, with reckless frankness; “and Heaven knows I say it in a spirit the very reverse of vain, for I am grieved and troubled to my soul about it — I believe I hold that man’s future in my hand.
His career depends entirely upon my treatment of him. O Gabriel, I tremble at my responsibility, for it is terrible!”
“Well, I think this much, ma’am, as I told you years ago,” said Oak, “that his life is a total blank whenever he isn’t hoping for ‘ee; but I can’t suppose — I hope that nothing so dreadful hangs on to it as you fancy. His natural manner has always been dark and strange, you know. But since the case is so sad and odd-like, why don’t ye give the conditional promise? I think I would.”
“But is it right? Some rash acts of my past life have taught me that a watched woman must have very much circumspection to retain only a very little credit, and I do want and long to be discreet in this! And six years — why we may all be in our graves by that time, even if Mr. Troy does not come back again, which he may not impossibly do! Such thoughts give a sort of absurdity to the scheme. Now, isn’t it preposterous, Gabriel? However he came to dream of it, I cannot think. But is it wrong? You know — you are older than I.”
“Eight years older, ma’am.”
“Yes, eight years — and is it wrong?”
“Perhaps it would be an uncommon agreement for a man and woman to make: I don’t see anything really wrong about it,” said Oak, slowly. “In fact the very thing that makes it doubtful if you ought to marry en under any condition, that is, your not caring about him — for I may suppose — ”
“Yes, you may suppose that love is wanting,” she said shortly. “Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me — for him or any one else.”
“Well, your want of love seems to me the one thing that takes away harm from such an agreement with him. If wild heat had to do wi’ it, making ye long to over-come the awkwardness about your husband’s vanishing, it mid be wrong; but a cold-hearted agreement to oblige a man seems different, somehow. The real sin, ma’am in my mind, lies in thinking of ever wedding wi’ a man you don’t love honest and true.”