Bad News from Bath — Far from the Madding Crowd

A week passes with no word from Bathsheba. Then a note comes for Maryann: the business that took her mistress to Bath still keeps her there, and she hopes to return within another week. Another week passes, and the oat harvest begins under a hot Lammas sky, with the whetting of scythes and the men sweating through their cider. Gabriel is not bound to help in the corn, but the harvest is an anxious month, and the corn is Bathsheba's, so he lends a hand. Coggan spots a figure in a blue coat and brass buttons running across the field, and Maryann, who broke a key that morning, fears a bad sign. It is Cain Ball, in his Sunday clothes, with a bandaged thumb, eating bread and ham as he runs.

Cain has been to Bath, he says, and he has seen the mistress. But he cannot get it out. A crumb goes the wrong way, then a gnat, then Coggan's cider goes up his nose, and Joseph Poorgrass advises him to say please God before he does anything. At last he tells it. He saw her with a soldier, going arm-in-crook into a park, where they sat for half an hour talking moving things. She was crying almost to death, and when they came out her eyes were shining and she was as white as a lily, in a gold silk gown trimmed with black lace. They looked into each other's faces as far-gone friendly as a man and woman can be. Gabriel's face seems to grow thinner. Asked what else he saw, Cain lists shop windows, hot water springing from the ground, and parsons with gold rings.

Gabriel asks him to swear it was Miss Everdene. Poorgrass makes the oath sound like the end of the world, and Cain will not take it. In common truth it was Miss Everdene and Sergeant Troy, he says, but in the horrible so-help-me truth, perhaps it was somebody else. Gabriel turns back to his work, without pretending to be lively. Coggan, who knows how the land lies, takes him aside. Do not take on, he says. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she cannot be yours? "That's the very thing I say to myself," says Gabriel.