It is to the credit of men that few attempt to settle the question by experiment, and it is for their happiness, perhaps, that accident has never settled it for them.
Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by deluging her with untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may acquire powers reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth taught to many by unsought and wringing occurrences.
And some profess to have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and jauntily continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible effect.
Sergeant Troy was one.
He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing.
There was no third method.
"Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man." he would say.
This philosopher's public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his arrival there.
A week or two after the shearing, Bathsheba, feeling a nameless relief of spirits on account of Boldwood's absence, approached her hayfields and looked over the hedge towards the haymakers.
They consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms, the former being the men, the latter the women, who wore tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon their shoulders.
Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in a less forward meadow, Clark humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to which Jan made no attempt to keep time with his.
In the first mead they were already loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men tossing it upon the waggon.
From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and went on loading unconcernedly with the rest.
It was the gallant sergeant, who had come hay- making for pleasure; and nobody could deny that he was doing the mistress of the farm real knight-service by this voluntary contribution of his labour at a busy time.
As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and sticking his pitchfork into the ground and picking up his crop or cane, he came forward.
Bathsheba blushed with half-angry embarrassment, and adjusted her eyes as well as her feet to the direct line of her path.
CHAPTER XXVI
SCENE ON THE VERGE OF THE HAY-MEAD
"AH, Miss Everdene!" said the sergeant, touching his diminutive cap.
"Little did I think it was you I was speaking to the other night.
And yet, if I had reflected, the
"Queen of the Corn-market" (truth is truth at any hour of the day or night, and I heard you so named in Casterbridge yesterday), the "Queen of the Corn-market." I say, could be no other woman.
I step across now to beg your forgiveness a thousand times for having been led by my feelings to express myself too strongly for a stranger.
To be sure I am no stranger to the place — I am Sergeant Troy, as I told you, and I have assisted your uncle in these fields no end of times when I was a lad.
I have been doing the same for you today."
"I suppose I must thank you for that, Sergeant Troy." said the Queen of the Corn-market, in an in- differently grateful tone.
The sergeant looked hurt and sad.
"Indeed you must not, Miss Everdene." he said.
"Why could you think such a thing necessary?"
"I am glad it is not."
"Why? if I may ask without offence."
"Because I don't much want to thank you for any" thing."
"I am afraid I have made a hole with my tongue that my heart will never mend.
O these intolerable times: that ill-luck should follow a man for honestly telling a woman she is beautiful!
'Twas the most I said — you must own that; and the least I could say — that I own myself."
"There is some talk I could do without more easily than money."
"Indeed.
That remark is a sort of digression."
"No.
It means that I would rather have your room than your company."
"And I would rather have curses from you than kisses from any other woman; so I'll stay here."
Bathsheba was absolutely speechless.
And yet she could not help feeling that the assistance he was rendering forbade a harsh repulse.
"Well." continued Troy,
"I suppose there is a praise which is rudeness, and that may be mine.
At the same time there is a treatment which is injustice, and that may be yours.
Because a plain blunt man, who has never been taught concealment, speaks out his mind without exactly intending it, he's to be snapped off like the son of a sinner."
"Indeed there's no such case between us." she said, turning away.
"I don't allow strangers to be bold and impudent — even in praise of me."
"Ah — it is not the fact but the method which offends you." he said, carelessly.