Hardy opens with a warning about Gabriel. Men fade away as often by not using good spirits as by lacking them, and Gabriel, for the first time since his ruin, is independent and vigorous, yet he wastes his chances by loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene. It is the first of June, and the shearing takes place in a barn four hundred years old that looks like a church and still does the work it was built for. In Weatherbury, Hardy says, the townsman's 'Then' is still the rustic's 'Now'. On the black oak floor Jan Coggan, Fray, Tall, Poorgrass and young Cain Ball kneel with their shears. Behind them stands Bathsheba, who watches for careless cuts and has every shorn sheep stamped with her initials.
Gabriel is happy because she is standing over him. She times him on one sheep and finds he has taken three-and-twenty minutes and a half, the first she has seen done in under half an hour. She does the talking and he says nothing, and Hardy observes that there is a loquacity that tells nothing and a silence that says much. Then Boldwood appears in the far corner of the barn, and the talk stops. Bathsheba lowers her voice to match his. He takes her hand to help her over the board into the sunlight, and she stares at a straw on the ground and blushes. She returns in a new riding-habit of myrtle green, and rides off with him to see his Leicesters. Gabriel, watching them, snips a ewe in the groin, and she scolds him for the blood. He knows well who caused the wound. She then tells him to take her place and keep the men at their work.
The workfolk read the ride at once. 'That means matrimony,' says Temperance Miller. Henery Fray, boasting of his own depths, claims that Boldwood kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing, and Gabriel says it is a lie, because she told him all that passed. The maltster insists that no man is old while he has teeth, and Maryann Money asks for any second-hand husband that will do. Gabriel shears on and says nothing more. He thinks he has misjudged her, that she was trifling with himself when she pretended to trifle with Boldwood, and that this very day will see Boldwood accepted. He reads his Bible now, and tells himself that he finds the woman whose heart is snares and nets more bitter than death. Hardy calls it mere froth on the storm. He adored Bathsheba just the same.
Coming Up in Chapter 23
At the shearing-supper a long table runs out from the lawn through the parlour window, so that Bathsheba sits at its head without mixing with the men. She is unusually excited, and she keeps the foot of the table empty until Gabriel is asked to take it. Then a visitor arrives at the gate.
