The Truth in the Coffin — Far from the Madding Crowd

Late that evening Bathsheba sits alone by the first fire of the season, with Fanny’s coffin in the next room and her husband not yet home. Liddy offers to sit up for him and says she is not afraid of Fanny. Bathsheba, in a sudden whisper, asks if she has heard anything strange said of Fanny, then bursts into tears. A few minutes later Liddy is back with what Maryann has just heard, whispered into her ear: that the coffin holds more than one body. Bathsheba says she does not believe it, since there is only one name on the lid, and turns to the fire so that Liddy cannot see her face. Hardy lets us see what Oak and Boldwood never guess. Bathsheba met the lonely woman on the road on Saturday night, and she has been working towards this fear for days.

She wants someone stronger to ask, and thinks of Gabriel. She walks down the lane in a cloak and sees him through his uncurtained window, reading, and later kneeling to pray in an upstairs room. She cannot knock. The calm of that little house is more than she can bear to look at. Back in the hall, she says to the door of the room where the coffin lies, “Would to God you would speak and tell me your secret, Fanny!” and then, slowly, “And I will.” She fetches a screw-driver from the lumber-closet. Hardy says she could never afterwards understand the mood that carried her through what followed. She uncovers the coffin and looks at Fanny and the child. Yellow hair frames Fanny’s face, and the curl in Troy’s watch needs no more explaining. In her heated mind the dead girl seems to have won. She hates her, is frightened at hating a dead woman, and, remembering Oak at his prayers, kneels by the coffin. When she rises she lays flowers from a vase around Fanny’s head.

Troy comes in and sees her there, and for a moment thinks someone in the house has died. She tries to push past him, but he holds her hand and walks her to the coffin. “Do you know her?” “I do.” “Is it she?” “It is.” He kneels and kisses Fanny, gently, as one would kiss a sleeping child. Bathsheba springs forward and cries, “Kiss me too, Frank,” the proud woman reduced to a child’s plea, and he pushes her away. He says he is a bad, black-hearted man, that the dead woman is more to him than Bathsheba ever was, and that but for her face he would have married Fanny. “In the sight of Heaven you are my very, very wife!” Bathsheba’s cry of despair fills the old house. “You are nothing to me,” Troy says, and she runs out of it.