Gabriel Warns Bathsheba in the Wheat — Far from the Madding Crowd

Hardy opens by owning that folly now runs through Bathsheba. She has too much sense to be ruled by feeling, and too much feeling to use her sense well. He notes, with a dry eye, that women can believe flattery they know to be false while doubting warnings they know to be true. She loves Troy as only a self-reliant woman can once she throws her self-reliance away, and while she chatted freely to Liddy about Boldwood, she has kept Troy to herself. Gabriel sees all of it. That she does not love him was his old sorrow. That she is walking into a trap is a greater one.

One dusk he meets her on a path sunk between tall wheat, too narrow for two to walk abreast. He tries bad characters, then Boldwood's absence, then the talk of a wedding, which she flatly denies: she has promised Boldwood nothing and means to refuse him. When Gabriel names Troy, she answers that the sergeant is educated and well born. Gabriel says that proves nothing and shows a course heading down. Then she offers her best proof of Troy's goodness. He goes to church, she says, slipping in by the old tower door and sitting at the back of the gallery. Gabriel has never seen him there, and the claim strikes him like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.

He tells her he loves her, then spends the confession on pleading for Boldwood's safe hands. She orders him off the farm. He points out that this is the second time she has pretended to dismiss him, and says he will go only if she hires a bailiff. She will be her own manager. At last she asks him, as a woman and not as a mistress, to leave her alone on that bare hill, and he goes. A figure rises from the earth beside her. On his way home he climbs the steps to the gallery door and finds a sprig of ivy has tied it to the stone for more than a foot. Nobody has opened it since Troy came back to Weatherbury.