Page:Far from the Madding Crowd Vol 1.djvu/136

 to the opening and shutting of every door, a tremble follows every bustling movement, and a creak accompanies a walker about the house, like a spirit, wherever he goes.

In the room from which the conversation proceeded, Bathsheba and her servant-companion, Liddy Smallbury, were to be discovered sitting upon the floor, and sorting a complication of papers, books, bottles, and rubbish spread out thereon—remnants from the household stores of the late occupier. Liddy, the maltster's great-granddaughter, was about Bathsheba's equal in age, and her face was a prominent advertisement of the light-hearted English country girl. The beauty her features might have lacked in form was amply made up for by perfection of hue, which at this winter time was the softened ruddiness on a surface of high rotundity that we meet with in a Terburg or a Gerard Douw, and like the presentations of those great colourists, it was a face which always kept on the natural side of the boundary between comeliness and the ideal. Though elastic in bearing, she was less daring than Bathsheba, and occasionally showed some earnestness, which consisted half of genuine feeling, and half of factitious mannerliness superadded by way of duty.

Through a partly-opened door, the noise of a scrubbing-brush led up to the charwoman, Maryann