The Dog and the Chalk Pit — Far from the Madding Crowd

Bathsheba Everdene has gone to Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, and Gabriel cannot learn in what capacity. Hardy remarks that the louder a man renounces a woman, the less he has renounced her. Distance does not cure a steady man of love. It polishes the picture, and Gabriel burns on with a finer flame. His friendship with her aunt ended with his failed suit, so whatever news he gets of Bathsheba comes sideways.

The disaster arrives through a dog. Gabriel keeps two. Old George can tell from a shout exactly how fast to run back from the ewes, and his son, who answers to any pleasant word, cannot tell doing a thing well enough from doing it too well. One night Gabriel leaves them on the hill eating a dead lamb and goes to bed. Before dawn the sheep-bell rings in a way he knows is wrong, and he runs up through the fog to find the young dog standing alone at the top of the chalk-pit, as dark and still as Napoleon at St Helena, expecting a reward. The two hundred ewes lie at the bottom, dead and dying, below a broken rail.

His first feeling is pity for the ewes and their unborn lambs. The second, a moment later, is arithmetic: they were not insured, and all the savings of a frugal life have gone in one night. He leans on a rail with his face in his hands. When he lifts his head, the one thing he says is a thanks to God that he is not married, for what would she have done in the poverty now coming? The dog is shot at noon, a workman too good to live. Gabriel is left a free man with the clothes he stands up in.