Gabriel has stopped feeding the flock for about a day when Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Henery Fray, Laban Tall and half a dozen more come running to Bathsheba's door as she is pulling on her church glove. They shout numbers at her and finish one another's sentences. The sheep have broken fence into a field of young clover, and they are swelling up. Only one man in the neighbourhood knows how to save them, with a hollow pipe and a sharp point driven into the right spot, and the name of that man is the one name she has forbidden.
The men go off to 'get somebody', with no idea who. Left alone, she swears she will never send for him, and a ewe leaps into the air and drops dead. Hardy notes that her 'No, I won't' really means 'I think I must'. She sends Laban Tall on the bay mare to Nest Cottage, and he comes back with Gabriel's answer: beggars mustn't be choosers, and he will come only if she asks civilly, as a woman begging a favour. Another sheep dies. She bursts into tears in front of her workfolk, then writes a polite note and adds at the bottom, with her lips pressed shut so that conscience cannot ask questions, 'Do not desert me, Gabriel!'
He comes, and he is not angry, only neutral. She greets him with a reproach for being so slow, which is the one speech he can forgive. He strips to his shirt-sleeves and works down the flock with a tube and a lance, with the skill of a hospital surgeon. Forty-nine are saved. One ewe, in the hurry, is struck in the wrong place and dies at once, and four were already dead. When he has finished she asks him whether he will stay on with her. 'I will,' says Gabriel, and she smiles on him again.
Coming Up in Chapter 22
On the first day of June the shearers kneel on a black oak floor in a barn four hundred years old, built like a church with transepts. Bathsheba watches over them for any careless cut, and Gabriel, who should be thinking of his own future, hovers under her bright eyes like a moth.
