The Gurgoyle Floods Fanny's Grave — Far from the Madding Crowd

Hardy opens on the gurgoyles of Weatherbury tower, eight stone grotesques of which only two still work, and describes the one at the south-east corner: too human for a dragon, too impish for a man, its fingers pulling its mouth open for the water. Troy sleeps in the porch while the rain thickens. The gurgoyle spits, then pours, and the stream falls seventy feet and reaches over the plinth and the stones into Fanny Robin’s new grave. Until lately, loose stones had shielded that earth, but they were cleared away in the summer, and nobody expected a spout to throw so far. The mould boils like chocolate, and the flowers Troy planted turn over and float off.

Troy wakes in broad sunlight, stiff from two nights without a bed, and finds crocus bulbs washed up along the path, then the hollow in the grave, the mud on the marble, and the flowers lying root upwards. For once he cannot put his grief off, as he usually does by simply adjourning it. It feels like the sharpest sting of all, a Providence that jeers at his first attempt to turn round. For the first time in his life he wishes himself another man, and he hates himself. He does not fill the hole or replant a single flower. He leaves the churchyard unseen, goes out through the fields to the high road, and soon is gone from the village.

Meanwhile Bathsheba has been shut in the attic with Liddy. She saw a light among the trees the night before without guessing whose it was, and in the morning she can hear the purl of falling water. Liddy tells her Troy has been seen on the Budmouth road. Bathsheba walks to the churchyard, where she finds the tomb splashed with mud and Gabriel standing in front of it. The inscription reads that it was erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin. She asks Gabriel to fill in the hole, gathers the flowers and replants them herself, and asks him to have the churchwardens turn the lead at the gurgoyle’s mouth so that the stream falls sideways. Then she wipes the mud from the stone as if she rather liked its words, and goes home.

Troy walks away from the wreck. His wife, who never saw the tomb until this morning, stays and mends it.