The first flash comes like the beating of phosphorescent wings, and the thunder follows. Gabriel is up on the barley stack. He sees a candle in Bathsheba's bedroom and a shadow sweeping across the blind. The lightning turns silver and gleams like a mailed army, and in one flash he sees a herd of heifers galloping mad across a paddock. A blue light runs down his iron rod with a smack. He asks himself whether his life is so valuable after all, and stays. He ties a tethering chain to the rod and lets it trail to the ground. Then a green flash shows him a dark female form in the open ground below. It is Bathsheba. The storm has woken her, and she is thinking of the corn. She cannot find her husband. Gabriel tells her he is asleep in the barn. Troy promised the stacks would be seen to, she says, and offers to help. She carries sheaves up the ladder one by one, and they work side by side in the dark.
Then the heavens open. Blue skeletons dance in the air, and a bolt splits the tall poplar down its whole length. Gabriel feels her arm tremble in his hand, and love seems small beside such a universe. When the light fails, she says she knows already: the men are sleeping a drunken sleep in the barn, and her husband among them. Gabriel crosses to look through the chink of the door, and finds that she has followed him and is looking through it too. Back on the stack, she sits near the top and asks him a question. Did he think she galloped to Bath that night to be married? She tells him she went to break off the engagement. But she was alone in a strange city, the horse was lame, and Troy said he had seen a woman more beautiful and that his constancy could not be counted on unless she became his. Between jealousy and distraction, she says, she married him. She forbids him to say a word.
At last she is tired, and he sends her indoors. She thanks him a thousand times for his devotion and vanishes through the gate. He works on, thinking how much more warmly she spoke to him that night than she ever did when she was free to. Then a grating noise comes from the coach-house. The vane on the roof is turning round, and the change of wind is the signal for a disastrous rain.
Coming Up in Chapter 38
Dawn comes grey, and the wind rises until every wind of heaven seems loose. Rain begins to fall as Gabriel works on at the barley. By seven he is soaked through and the last stack is done, and a line of shamefaced men shuffles out of the barn behind a man in a red jacket, who is whistling.
