Bad News from Bath — Far from the Madding Crowd

A second week passes without Bathsheba while Weatherbury reaps oats under a merciless Lammas sun. Gabriel Oak lends a hand though not bound to the corn harvest, because the crop is hers and August anxiety runs high. Cain Ball arrives in his Sunday clothes from Bath, where a felon on his thumb bought him a holiday. Choking on bread, ham, and cider, he tells how he saw mistress in a park place arm-in-crook with a soldier he thinks was Sergeant Troy, talking moving things until she cried almost to death, then shining white as a lily in a gold silk gown trimmed with black lace. The men debate Bathsheba's sense and Troy's breeding while Gabriel demands certainty. Cain will assert common truth but refuses Poorgrass's awful oath: perhaps in horrible so-help-me truth it was somebody else. Gabriel turns back to work with a thinner face, making no pretence of liveliness. When they stand apart Jan Coggan says not to take on about her: what difference whose sweetheart she is since she cannot be his? That is the very thing Gabriel says to himself. Hardy delivers catastrophe as comic gossip almost believable and officially unsworn, while Oak already knows in his bones what the parish will soon confirm.