At dusk on St Valentine’s Day Boldwood sits down to supper by a fire of aged logs. Bathsheba’s letter stands on the wings of the spread eagle on his clock, and his eyes keep going back to the large red seal until it seems a blot of blood on the eye. He reads MARRY ME in his head, though the words are too far off to see. Hardy says the pert words take their colour from the room around them, as a clear crystal does. In a parlour that has the air of a Puritan Sunday lasting all week, a thoughtless jest turns into a solemn command. Since the post came that morning, the neat shape of his life has been bending towards a passion he has no name for. Hardy adds that Boldwood cannot guess how small the motive was.
At night he stands the letter in the corner of his looking-glass, the first time such a thing has happened in his life. He cannot think it an impertinence, and so he thinks it a deliberate act. Some woman’s hand moved over the paper with his name, and he wonders whether her lips were red or pale. The woman he imagines has no face, and Hardy points out that she is, at that moment, fast asleep and knows nothing of love or letters. Moonlight on the snow throws light upward on his ceiling, and shadows fall in the wrong places. Boldwood springs out of bed to shake the envelope in case it holds more, finds nothing, says “Marry me” aloud, and catches sight of his own wan face in the glass.
At dawn he goes out to a field gate and looks east over the snow towards Weatherbury Upper Farm. The mail-cart arrives, and the driver hands him a letter addressed “To the New Shepherd”. He had opened it hoping for another anonymous note. He says it is for Miss Everdene’s shepherd and should be taken to Gabriel Oak with his apology. Then on the ridge, against the sunrise, he sees Gabriel moving hurdles with his dog George behind him. “I’ll take the letter to him myself,” he says. It is no longer another man’s letter but an opportunity. With a face “pregnant with intention”, he walks into the snowy field after Gabriel, keeping some way behind, towards Warren’s Malthouse.
Coming Up in Chapter 15
In Warren’s malthouse the toothless maltster will eat his breakfast off the point of a pocket-knife, with the fire glowing against the scarlet morning. Henery Fray will stamp in from the snow with the carters and shake his head over a mistress who thinks she can manage without a bailiff.
