Far From the Madding Crowd: Chapter 44 Summary & Analysis

Bathsheba pays no attention to where she’s going. She passes a thicket with Gabriel and beech trees, and enters to hide there. She sinks down by a trunk and closes her eyes. Later, gradually, she becomes aware of the call of sparrows, finches, and robins. Then she hears a ploughboy from her own farm approaching. Through the fern Bathsheba watches her horses stop to drink at a pond across the way. The glow of the rising sun breaks through the morning mist, but the swamp also has a wet and poisonous feeling. Bathsheba rises, frightened now by the place.

Now a schoolboy comes into sight, trying to memorize a prayer by repeating it over and over: a small bit of amusement amid Bathsheba’s tragedy. Now she is anxious, hungry and thirsty. But suddenly she sees Liddy come along the road, and calls out to her: Liddy makes her way through the swamp, and, teary-eyed, begins to question Bathsheba, who asks her not to. She asks if Fanny has been taken away yet: she’ll be taken away at nine, Liddy says. She fetches some tea and food for Bathsheba, who doesn’t want to go inside. Instead they wander through the wood for hours.

Bathsheba first wonders if she might never go home again. Then, though, she tells Liddy that only women without pride run away from their husbands. They return in a roundabout way to the house and enter at the back. She asks Liddy to make a disused attic comfortable for themselves and Mary-ann: she asks how they might pass time there. She dismisses Liddy’s suggestions of knitting, sewing, and samplers, and asks Liddy to bring some old books. They remain there all day, though Troy doesn’t appear in the neighborhood anyway.

Bathsheba watches, at six in the evening, the young village men gather for a game of fives. Their game soon ends abruptly: Liddy says that it’s because men are putting up a grand tombstone in the churchyard.