Boldwood Gives Himself Up and Bathsheba Takes Charge — Far from the Madding Crowd

Boldwood walks the high road to Casterbridge at an even pace, over Yalbury Hill and across the Moor, and reaches the town between eleven and twelve. He stops before the gaol archway, finds the bell-pull under the lamp, and says something low to the porter. The door closes behind him, and Hardy says he walked the world no more.

Back in the hall, the scene Oak finds five minutes later is terrible. The women are huddled against the walls like sheep in a storm, the men do not know what to do, and Bathsheba sits on the floor with Troy's head in her lap, a handkerchief held to a wound that has scarcely bled. The shock has made her herself again, and Hardy, in his wry way, says she is of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises. She tells Gabriel in quiet words to ride for a surgeon, and adds that Mr. Boldwood has shot her husband. Oak rides, and a mile on it strikes him that he should have sent another man and stayed.

The surgeon, Mr. Aldritch, takes three hours to arrive, and finds Boldwood's hall dark and empty. An old man tells him that Mrs. Troy has had the body taken to her own house, though they warned her to wait for the law. She said the law was nothing to her. At her house Liddy says her mistress locked herself in with the dead man, sent everyone away, and came out only once, for more candles. When at last she opens the door she is calm and rigid as a bust of Melpomene, and says all is done. The body has been washed and laid out in grave clothes, and the doctor wonders at a mere girl with the nerve of a stoic. 'The heart of a wife merely,' says a whisper behind them. She sinks in a heap to the floor, and the surgery that was useless for Troy is needed for her. Through the long hours Liddy hears her mistress moaning that it is her fault, and asking how she can live.