It is a Sunday afternoon in February, dinner is over, and Bathsheba has asked Liddy to sit with her for want of a better companion. The old farmhouse is dreary before the candles are lit, and the new piano, which is an old one with a history of its own, slopes on the warped floor. Liddy ripples on like a shallow brook. She points to the leather Bible on the table and asks if her mistress ever found out whom she will marry by the Bible and key. Bathsheba calls it nonsense, then springs from her seat and says, “Very well, let’s try it.” Liddy frets that it is Sunday. “What’s right week days is right Sundays,” says Bathsheba. She puts the key on a verse in the Book of Ruth, blushes, and will not say whom she tried.
Liddy’s mind has already moved to Boldwood. His pew is exactly opposite Bathsheba’s, and he did not turn his head to her once in the whole service, though everyone else did. Bathsheba says she did not ask him to, in a nettled voice. She remembers the valentine she bought for little Teddy Coggan, and when Liddy asks if it is for Boldwood, the name seems to her more fitting than the right one. Liddy’s joke about sending it to “the stupid old Boldwood” first annoys her, for he has become a troublesome image, a Daniel who kneels eastward while everyone else follows suit and glances her way. They will not toss money on a Sunday, so they toss a hymn-book. It lands shut, which means Boldwood, and Bathsheba writes his name with a yawn.
She tries a unicorn’s head and two doves for a seal, and then one with a motto she cannot read. In the hot wax Liddy reads: “MARRY ME.” Bathsheba cries “Capital!” and says it would upset the solemnity of a parson and clerk. Hardy gives his verdict on the afternoon: the deed was done so idly that of love as a spectacle she knew something, but of love as a feeling she knew nothing. That night the letter goes to the Casterbridge post-office, to come back to Weatherbury in the morning.
Coming Up in Chapter 14
At dusk on Valentine’s evening Boldwood will sit down to supper by a fire of aged logs, with Bathsheba’s letter propped on the wings of the eagle on his clock. His eyes will keep returning to the red seal until it looks like a blot of blood.
