Jude the Obscure

PREFACE

The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been

much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly

as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887

and onward, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a

woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October, 1892;

the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893,

and at full length, as it now appears, from August, 1893, onward into

the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being

in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a

serial story in HARPER’S MAGAZINE at the end of November, 1894, and was

continued in monthly parts.

But, as in the case of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, the magazine

version was, for various reasons, abridged and modified in some degree,

the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as

originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early

decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a

provisional name—two such titles having, in fact, been successively

adopted. The present and final title, deemed on the whole the best, was

one of the earliest thought of.

For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age, which

attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and

disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to

humanity, and to point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of

unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling

to which exception can be taken.

Like former productions of this pen, _Jude the Obscure_ is simply an

endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or

personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their

discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being

regarded as not of the first moment.

T.H.

_August_, 1895.

Part First AT MARYGREEN

_“Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and

become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred,

and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be

strong, seeing they do thus?”_—ESDRAS.

I

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse

to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles

off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing

teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the

managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in

addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had

bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning

instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never

acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a

perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.

The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the

sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the

new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything

would be smooth again.

The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were

standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.

The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should

not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city

he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just

at first.

A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the

packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he

spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a

great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve found

a place to settle in, sir.”

“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.

It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an old

maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr.

Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started to see

about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy and the

schoolmaster were left standing alone.

“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.

Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day

scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, but

one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher’s

term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood

at the present moment afar off, like certain historic disciples,

indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.

The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.

Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he

was sorry.

“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.

“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.

“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,

Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”

“I think I should now, sir.”

“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is,

and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man who

wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be a

university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at

Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and

if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot

will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have

elsewhere.”

The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house was

dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give the

instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in the school

till the evening, when more hands would be available for removing it;

and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.

The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine

o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other

_impedimenta_, and bade his friends good-bye.

“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.

“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read

all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt me

out for old acquaintance’ sake.”

The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner by

the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge of the

greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help his

patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip now

and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused

and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, his face

wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of

life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was looking was

as ancient as the village itself, and from his present position

appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of

quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There was a

lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the hart’s-tongue

fern.

He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, that

the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning

like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen him look

down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I do now, and

when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! But he was too

clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place like this!”

A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning was

a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as a thicker

fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were interrupted by a

sudden outcry:

“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”

It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the

garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly

waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort

for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his own

pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started with

them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well

stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet of

Marygreen.

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an

undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it was,

however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local

history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and

dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many

trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump-backed,

wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either

cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty

walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the

flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of

modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a

new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who

had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long

had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even

recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been

the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by

eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.

II

Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming

house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door

was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted in

yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead panes

of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were five

bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.

While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an

animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,

the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having seen

the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of the

event, and indulging in predictions of his future.

“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy

entered.

“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since you

was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, gaunt

woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and gave a

phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come from

Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck for ’n,

Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, and was

took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you know,

Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing if

Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless

boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be

done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can.

Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. It keeps him out

of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she continued, as the boy,

feeling the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved

aside.

The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of

Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him

with her—“to kip ’ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the

winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.”

Miss Fawley doubted it. … “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to take

’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,” she continued,

in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one.

The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather.

His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not seen the

child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four

walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were

married, didn’ get a house of their own for some year or more; and then

they only had one till—Well, I won’t go into that. Jude, my child,

don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any

more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till

the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!”

Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went

out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast.

The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging from the garden

by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a path northward, till

he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of the

upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This vast concave was the scene

of his labours for Mr. Troutham the farmer, and he descended into the

midst of it.

The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round,

where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge

and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the

scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the

arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the

fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though

once by many of his own dead family.

“How ugly it is here!” he murmured.

The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a

piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse,

taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that

of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really

attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient

harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of

ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play,

bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on

every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet

had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge

which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given

themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by

the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made

love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next

seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this

neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a

lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a

work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good to feed in.

The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds

used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off

pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished

like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him

warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.

He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew

sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like

himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he

frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of gentle

friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in the

least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that

she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.

“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You _shall_ have some

dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can

afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make

a good meal!”

They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed

their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life

with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled

his own.

His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean

and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself as

their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his

buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised

senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence used. The

birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the

latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red

face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the clacker swinging in

his hand.

“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear birdies,’

indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, ‘Eat, dear

birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the

schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s how

you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!”

Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham

had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame

round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts with the

flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with the blows,

which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.

“Don’t ’ee, sir—please don’t ’ee!” cried the whirling child, as

helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked fish

swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the

path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circular

race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good crop in the ground—I

saw ’em sow it—and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner—and you

wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to

’em—oh, oh, oh!”

This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more

than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still

smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing to

resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant

workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of

clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new church

tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the

farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man.

Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the

quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it

him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and never let

him see him in one of those fields again.

Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway

weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the

perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was

good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful

sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in

the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.

With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the

village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge

and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms lying

half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as they always did

in such weather at that time of the year. It was impossible to advance

in regular steps without crushing some of them at each tread.

Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not

himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of

young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and

often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next

morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a

fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the

tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy.

This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was

the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the

curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with

him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the earthworms,

without killing a single one.

On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a

little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do you

come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?”

“I’m turned away.”

“What?”

“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few

peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!”

He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.

“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him a

lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands

doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! don’t

ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than myself,

come to that. But ’tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are younger than I

have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set

with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my father’s journeyman,

anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ’ee go to work for ’n, which

I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ’ee out of mischty.”

More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for

dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,

and only secondarily from a moral one.

“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham

planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t go

off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? But,

oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy side of the

family, and never will be!”

“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson is

gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence.

“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a

score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever to

have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.”

“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?”

“How can I tell?”

“Could I go to see him?”

“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as

that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor

folk in Christminster with we.”

Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an

undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the

pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and the

position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat

over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at

the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought

responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had

thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy

towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his

sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the

centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you

had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of

shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something

glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the

little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a

man.

Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.

During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the

afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the

village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.

“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin

there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.”

The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that

field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something

unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness

of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The farmer

had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet Christminster

lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, stealing out of the

hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which had witnessed his

punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch from the path, and

climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the other side till the

track joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the ploughed

land ended, and all before him was bleak open down.

III

Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of

it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the

sky. At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green

“ridgeway”—the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the

district. This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and down

almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks and

herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and overgrown.

The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the nestling

hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a railway

station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier, and till

now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat, low-lying country

lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his upland world. The

whole northern semicircle between east and west, to a distance of forty

or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a bluer, moister atmosphere,

evidently, than that he breathed up here.

Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of reddish-grey

brick and tile. It was known as the Brown House by the people of the

locality. He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against

the eaves; and the reflection that the higher he got, the further he

could see, led Jude to stand and regard it. On the slope of the roof

two men were repairing the tiling. He turned into the ridgeway and drew

towards the barn.

When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some time he took

courage, and ascended the ladder till he stood beside them.

“Well, my lad, and what may you want up here?”

“I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is, if you please.”

“Christminster is out across there, by that clump. You can see it—at

least you can on a clear day. Ah, no, you can’t now.”

The other tiler, glad of any kind of diversion from the monotony of his

labour, had also turned to look towards the quarter designated. “You

can’t often see it in weather like this,” he said. “The time I’ve

noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame, and it

looks like—I don’t know what.”

“The heavenly Jerusalem,” suggested the serious urchin.

“Ay—though I should never ha’ thought of it myself. … But I can’t see

no Christminster to-day.”

The boy strained his eyes also; yet neither could he see the far-off

city. He descended from the barn, and abandoning Christminster with the

versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track, looking for any

natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout.

When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that the

ladder was still in its place, but that the men had finished their

day’s work and gone away.

It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint mist, but it had

cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and

along the river-courses. He thought again of Christminster, and wished,

since he had come two or three miles from his aunt’s house on purpose,

that he could have seen for once this attractive city of which he had

been told. But even if he waited here it was hardly likely that the air

would clear before night. Yet he was loth to leave the spot, for the

northern expanse became lost to view on retreating towards the village

only a few hundred yards.

He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had

designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the

tiles. He might not be able to come so far as this for many days.

Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster might be forwarded.

People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even

though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man who

had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down

and prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried

the same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found

afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew.

This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the

third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the

mist might rise.

He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or

fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the

northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter

of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the

sun’s position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out

in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately

looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light

like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the

lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the

vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the

spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly

revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen,

or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their

shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague

city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that the sun

had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark,

and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.

He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run,

trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in wait

for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his forehead

and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the

bewitched ship. He knew that he had grown out of belief in these

horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in

the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of his birth,

and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

Inside and round about that old woman’s “shop” window, with its

twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of them

oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles

exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong man could

have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time. But

his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he

was always beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened

to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter’s

imagination and less of the diamond merchant’s in his dreams thereof

than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city acquired a

tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one

nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so

much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living among

the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too,

he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there. Whenever he

could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two,

which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill

and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight

of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his

estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.

Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he ascended

to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or two

further, he would see the night lights of the city. It would be

necessary to come back alone, but even that consideration did not deter

him, for he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no doubt.

The project was duly executed. It was not late when he arrived at the

place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east sky,

accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion dark

enough. He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in rows, as

he had half expected. No individual light was visible, only a halo or

glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it,

making the light and the city seem distant but a mile or so.

He set himself to wonder on the exact point in the glow where the

schoolmaster might be—he who never communicated with anybody at

Marygreen now; who was as if dead to them here. In the glow he seemed

to see Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms in

Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.

He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour,

and the fact now came into his mind. He parted his lips as he faced the

north-east, and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor.

“You,” he said, addressing the breeze caressingly “were in

Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating along the

streets, pulling round the weather-cocks, touching Mr. Phillotson’s

face, being breathed by him; and now you are here, breathed by me—you,

the very same.”

Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him—a message

from the place—from some soul residing there, it seemed. Surely it was

the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical, calling

to him, “We are happy here!”

He had become entirely lost to his bodily situation during this mental

leap, and only got back to it by a rough recalling. A few yards below

the brow of the hill on which he paused a team of horses made its

appearance, having reached the place by dint of half an hour’s

serpentine progress from the bottom of the immense declivity. They had

a load of coals behind them—a fuel that could only be got into the

upland by this particular route. They were accompanied by a carter, a

second man, and a boy, who now kicked a large stone behind one of the

wheels, and allowed the panting animals to have a long rest, while

those in charge took a flagon off the load and indulged in a drink

round.

They were elderly men, and had genial voices. Jude addressed them,

inquiring if they had come from Christminster.

“Heaven forbid, with this load!” said they.

“The place I mean is that one yonder.” He was getting so romantically

attached to Christminster that, like a young lover alluding to his

mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name again. He pointed to

the light in the sky—hardly perceptible to their older eyes.

“Yes. There do seem a spot a bit brighter in the nor’-east than

elsewhere, though I shouldn’t ha’ noticed it myself, and no doubt it

med be Christminster.”

Here a little book of tales which Jude had tucked up under his arm,

having brought them to read on his way hither before it grew dark,

slipped and fell into the road. The carter eyed him while he picked it

up and straightened the leaves.

“Ah, young man,” he observed, “you’d have to get your head screwed on

t’other way before you could read what they read there.”

“Why?” asked the boy.

“Oh, they never look at anything that folks like we can understand,”

the carter continued, by way of passing the time. “On’y foreign tongues

used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families spoke

alike. They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir.

’Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion. And

that’s learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, ’tis a

serious-minded place. Not but there’s wenches in the streets o’ nights…

You know, I suppose, that they raise pa’sons there like radishes in a

bed? And though it do take—how many years, Bob?—five years to turn a

lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn preaching man with no

corrupt passions, they’ll do it, if it can be done, and polish un off

like the workmen they be, and turn un out wi’ a long face, and a long

black coat and waistcoat, and a religious collar and hat, same as they

used to wear in the Scriptures, so that his own mother wouldn’t know un

sometimes. … There, ’tis their business, like anybody else’s.”

“But how should you know”

“Now don’t you interrupt, my boy. Never interrupt your senyers. Move

the fore hoss aside, Bobby; here’s som’at coming… You must mind that I

be a-talking of the college life. ’Em lives on a lofty level; there’s

no gainsaying it, though I myself med not think much of ’em. As we be

here in our bodies on this high ground, so be they in their

minds—noble-minded men enough, no doubt—some on ’em—able to earn

hundreds by thinking out loud. And some on ’em be strong young fellows

that can earn a’most as much in silver cups. As for music, there’s

beautiful music everywhere in Christminster. You med be religious, or

you med not, but you can’t help striking in your homely note with the

rest. And there’s a street in the place—the main street—that ha’n’t

another like it in the world. I should think I did know a little about

Christminster!”

By this time the horses had recovered breath and bent to their collars

again. Jude, throwing a last adoring look at the distant halo, turned

and walked beside his remarkably well-informed friend, who had no

objection to telling him as they moved on more yet of the city—its

towers and halls and churches. The waggon turned into a cross-road,

whereupon Jude thanked the carter warmly for his information, and said

he only wished he could talk half as well about Christminster as he.

“Well, ’tis oonly what has come in my way,” said the carter

unboastfully. “I’ve never been there, no more than you; but I’ve picked

up the knowledge here and there, and you be welcome to it. A-getting

about the world as I do, and mixing with all classes of society, one

can’t help hearing of things. A friend o’ mine, that used to clane the

boots at the Crozier Hotel in Christminster when he was in his prime,

why, I knowed un as well as my own brother in his later years.”

Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that he

forgot to feel timid. He suddenly grew older. It had been the yearning

of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to—for some place

which he could call admirable. Should he find that place in this city

if he could get there? Would it be a spot in which, without fear of

farmers, or hindrance, or ridicule, he could watch and wait, and set

himself to some mighty undertaking like the men of old of whom he had

heard? As the halo had been to his eyes when gazing at it a quarter of

an hour earlier, so was the spot mentally to him as he pursued his dark

way.

“It is a city of light,” he said to himself.

“The tree of knowledge grows there,” he added a few steps further on.

“It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to.”

“It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion.”

After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:

“It would just suit me.”

IV

Walking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration, the boy—an

ancient man in some phases of thought, much younger than his years in

others—was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom,

notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an

extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain that

danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner

swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots. Jude,

beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.

“Well, my man! I’m in a hurry, so you’ll have to walk pretty fast if

you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?”

“Ah—I’m known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public

benefactor.”

Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic

population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed, took

care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers formed his

only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His

position was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the

quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising. He was, in

fact, a survival. The distances he traversed on foot were enormous, and

extended nearly the whole length and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one

day seen him selling a pot of coloured lard to an old woman as a

certain cure for a bad leg, the woman arranging to pay a guinea, in

instalments of a shilling a fortnight, for the precious salve, which,

according to the physician, could only be obtained from a particular

animal which grazed on Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at

great risk to life and limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts

about this gentleman’s medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a

travelled personage, and one who might be a trustworthy source of

information on matters not strictly professional.

“I s’pose you’ve been to Christminster, Physician?”

“I have—many times,” replied the long thin man. “That’s one of my

centres.”

“It’s a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?”

“You’d say so, my boy, if you’d seen it. Why, the very sons of the old

women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin—not good

Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin—cat-Latin, as we used to

call it in my undergraduate days.”

“And Greek?”

“Well—that’s more for the men who are in training for bishops, that

they may be able to read the New Testament in the original.”

“I want to learn Latin and Greek myself.”

“A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue.”

“I mean to go to Christminster some day.”

“Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only proprietor

of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all disorders of the

alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness of breath. Two and

threepence a box—specially licensed by the government stamp.”

“Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?”

“I’ll sell you mine with pleasure—those I used as a student.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!” said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for the

amazing speed of the physician’s walk kept him in a dog-trot which was

giving him a stitch in the side.

“I think you’d better drop behind, my young man. Now I’ll tell you what

I’ll do. I’ll get you the grammars, and give you a first lesson, if

you’ll remember, at every house in the village, to recommend Physician

Vilbert’s golden ointment, life-drops, and female pills.”

“Where will you be with the grammars?”

“I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of

five-and-twenty minutes past seven. My movements are as truly timed as

those of the planets in their courses.”

“Here I’ll be to meet you,” said Jude.

“With orders for my medicines?”

“Yes, Physician.”

Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to recover breath, and

went home with a consciousness of having struck a blow for

Christminster.

Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly at

his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to

him—smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to

spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a

supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures, giving

rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.

He honestly performed his promise to the man of many cures, in whom he

now sincerely believed, walking miles hither and thither among the

surrounding hamlets as the Physician’s agent in advance. On the evening

appointed he stood motionless on the plateau, at the place where he had

parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach. The road-physician

was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of Jude on striking into

his pace, which the pedestrian did not diminish by a single unit of

force, the latter seemed hardly to recognize his young companion,

though with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings had grown light.

Jude thought it might perhaps be owing to his wearing another hat, and

he saluted the physician with dignity.

“Well, my boy?” said the latter abstractedly.

“I’ve come,” said Jude.

“You? who are you? Oh yes—to be sure! Got any orders, lad?”

“Yes.” And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers who

were willing to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and salve.

The quack mentally registered these with great care.

“And the Latin and Greek grammars?” Jude’s voice trembled with anxiety.

“What about them?”

“You were to bring me yours, that you used before you took your

degree.”

“Ah, yes, yes! Forgot all about it—all! So many lives depending on my

attention, you see, my man, that I can’t give so much thought as I

would like to other things.”

Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of the truth;

and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, “You haven’t brought ’em!”

“No. But you must get me some more orders from sick people, and I’ll

bring the grammars next time.”

Jude dropped behind. He was an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of

sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him all

at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of. There was to be no

intellectual light from this source. The leaves dropped from his

imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it, and

cried bitterly.

The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness. He might,

perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do that

required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and though

physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as to be

without a farthing of his own.

At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it gave Jude a

lead. Why should he not write to the schoolmaster, and ask him to be so

kind as to get him the grammars in Christminster? He might slip a

letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach

the desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand copies,

which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university

atmosphere?

To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it. It was

necessary to act alone.

After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the day

of the piano’s departure, which happened to be his next birthday,

clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to

his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his

aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to

abandon his scheme.

The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling every

morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was stirring.

At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he saw from the

ends of it that it contained two thin books. He took it away into a

lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its

possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable

sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one

language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the

required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue

of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him,

by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech

into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a

pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere

known as Grimm’s Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal

completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language

were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given

language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being

furnished by the books aforesaid.

When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of

Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to the

Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely

believe his eyes.

The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wantonly

over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress,

and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day.

But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the first

time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had

supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not

recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be

individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the

elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an

hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and

watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of

the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion!

The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like

that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he

presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!

There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the

little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he

wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that

he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his

trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were

further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come,

because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic

error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

V

During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular vehicle

might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads near

Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.

In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books Jude had

grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages. In

fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a

while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of

Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of

such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a

herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest

in it than in the presupposed patent process. The mountain-weight of

material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the

classics piqued him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to

move it piecemeal.

He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty maiden

aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the business of

the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence. An aged horse with

a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at a sale, a

creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few pounds more,

and in this turn-out it became Jude’s business thrice a week to carry

loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters immediately round

Marygreen.

The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance itself

than in Jude’s manner of conducting it along its route. Its interior

was the scene of most of Jude’s education by “private study.” As soon

as the horse had learnt the road and the houses at which he was to

pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his

arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt,

the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and

plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the

case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure

of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears;

yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read, and divining rather

than beholding the spirit of the original, which often to his mind was

something else than that which he was taught to look for.

The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin

editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap. But, bad

for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were passably good for

him. The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the

marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as

he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be

passing by. And though Jude may have had little chance of becoming a

scholar by these rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting

into the groove he wished to follow.

While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already been

thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of

these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse pursued his

rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the stoppage

of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, “Two to-day, baker,

and I return this stale one.”

He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without

his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood began

to talk about his method of combining work and play (such they

considered his reading to be), which, though probably convenient enough

to himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other travellers

along the same roads. There were murmurs. Then a private resident of an

adjoining place informed the local policeman that the baker’s boy

should not be allowed to read while driving, and insisted that it was

the constable’s duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the

police court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous practices

on the highway. The policeman thereupon lay in wait for Jude, and one

day accosted him and cautioned him.

As Jude had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to heat the oven,

and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the day, he

was obliged to go to bed at night immediately after laying the sponge;

so that if he could not read his classics on the highways he could

hardly study at all. The only thing to be done was, therefore, to keep

a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could in the

circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as anybody loomed in the

distance, the policeman in particular. To do that official justice, he

did not put himself much in the way of Jude’s bread-cart, considering

that in such a lonely district the chief danger was to Jude himself,

and often on seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in

another direction.

On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about

sixteen, and had been stumbling through the “Carmen Sæculare,” on his

way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of the

plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was the sense

of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down, and

the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the

opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem

that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had

caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and

glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the

roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the shiny goddess, who

seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the

disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began:

“Phœbe silvarumque potens Diana!”

The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude

repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never

have thought of humouring in broad daylight.

Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or

acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to

such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next to

being a scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of reading

heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the more convinced

he was of his inconsistency. He began to wonder whether he could be

reading quite the right books for his object in life. Certainly there

seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval

colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.

Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken up

a wrong emotion for a Christian young man. He had dabbled in Clarke’s

Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament in the Greek,

though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a second-hand

bookseller. He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a new dialect, and

for a long time onward limited his reading almost entirely to the

Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach’s text. Moreover, on going into

Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic literature by

finding at the bookseller’s some volumes of the Fathers which had been

left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.

As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all

the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on

fifteenth-century brasses and tombs. On one of these pilgrimages he met

with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence, who read

everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet of the

romantic charms of the city of light and lore. Thither he resolved as

firmly as ever to go.

But how live in that city? At present he had no income at all. He had

no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he

could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might

spread over many years.

What was most required by citizens? Food, clothing, and shelter. An

income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for

making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third

requisite he inclined to. They built in a city; therefore he would

learn to build. He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin Susanna’s

father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow mediæval art in

any material was a trade for which he had rather a fancy. He could not

go far wrong in following his uncle’s footsteps, and engaging himself

awhile with the carcases that contained the scholar souls.

As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone, metal not

being available, and suspending his studies awhile, occupied his spare

half-hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish church.

There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston, and as soon as

he had found a substitute for himself in his aunt’s little business, he

offered his services to this man for a trifling wage. Here Jude had the

opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of freestone-working.

Some time later he went to a church-builder in the same place, and

under the architect’s direction became handy at restoring the

dilapidated masonries of several village churches round about.

Not forgetting that he was only following up this handicraft as a prop

to lean on while he prepared those greater engines which he flattered

himself would be better fitted for him, he yet was interested in his

pursuit on its own account. He now had lodgings during the week in the

little town, whence he returned to Marygreen village every Saturday

evening. And thus he reached and passed his nineteenth year.

VI

At this memorable date of his life he was, one Saturday, returning from

Alfredston to Marygreen about three o’clock in the afternoon. It was

fine, warm, and soft summer weather, and he walked with his tools at

his back, his little chisels clinking faintly against the larger ones

in his basket. It being the end of the week he had left work early, and

had come out of the town by a round-about route which he did not

usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour-mill near

Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.

He was in an enthusiastic mood. He seemed to see his way to living

comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two, and

knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of which

he had dreamed so much. He might, of course, have gone there now, in

some capacity or other, but he preferred to enter the city with a

little more assurance as to means than he could be said to feel at

present. A warm self-content suffused him when he considered what he

had already done. Now and then as he went along he turned to face the

peeps of country on either side of him. But he hardly saw them; the act

was an automatic repetition of what he had been accustomed to do when

less occupied; and the one matter which really engaged him was the

mental estimate of his progress thus far.

“I have acquired quite an average student’s power to read the common

ancient classics, Latin in particular.” This was true, Jude possessing

a facility in that language which enabled him with great ease to

himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary conversations therein.

“I have read two books of the _Iliad_, besides being pretty familiar

with passages such as the speech of Phœnix in the ninth book, the fight

of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth, the appearance of Achilles

unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth, and the funeral

games in the twenty-third. I have also done some Hesiod, a little scrap

of Thucydides, and a lot of the Greek Testament… I wish there was only

one dialect all the same.

“I have done some mathematics, including the first six and the eleventh

and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as far as simple equations.

“I know something of the Fathers, and something of Roman and English

history.

“These things are only a beginning. But I shall not make much farther

advance here, from the difficulty of getting books. Hence I must next

concentrate all my energies on settling in Christminster. Once there I

shall so advance, with the assistance I shall there get, that my

present knowledge will appear to me but as childish ignorance. I must

save money, and I will; and one of those colleges shall open its doors

to me—shall welcome whom now it would spurn, if I wait twenty years for

the welcome.

“I’ll be D.D. before I have done!”

And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a

bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. And what an

example he would set! If his income were £5000 a year, he would give

away £4500 in one form and another, and live sumptuously (for him) on

the remainder. Well, on second thoughts, a bishop was absurd. He would

draw the line at an archdeacon. Perhaps a man could be as good and as

learned and as useful in the capacity of archdeacon as in that of

bishop. Yet he thought of the bishop again.

“Meanwhile I will read, as soon as I am settled in Christminster, the

books I have not been able to get hold of here: Livy, Tacitus,

Herodotus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes—”

“Ha, ha, ha! Hoity-toity!” The sounds were expressed in light voices on

the other side of the hedge, but he did not notice them. His thoughts

went on:

“—Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus.

Then I must master other things: the Fathers thoroughly; Bede and

ecclesiastical history generally; a smattering of Hebrew—I only know

the letters as yet—”

“Hoity-toity!”

“—but I can work hard. I have staying power in abundance, thank God!

and it is that which tells… Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater;

and I’ll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased.”

In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude’s

walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the

ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On

a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware

that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his

feet.

A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part

of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as

it was useless for any other purpose. Pigs were rather plentiful

hereabout, being bred and fattened in large numbers in certain parts of

North Wessex.

On the other side of the hedge was a stream, whence, as he now for the

first time realized, had come the slight sounds of voices and laughter

that had mingled with his dreams. He mounted the bank and looked over

the fence. On the further side of the stream stood a small homestead,

having a garden and pig-sties attached; in front of it, beside the

brook, three young women were kneeling, with buckets and platters

beside them containing heaps of pigs’ chitterlings, which they were

washing in the running water. One or two pairs of eyes slyly glanced

up, and perceiving that his attention had at last been attracted, and

that he was watching them, they braced themselves for inspection by

putting their mouths demurely into shape and recommencing their rinsing

operations with assiduity.

“Thank you!” said Jude severely.

“I _didn’t_ throw it, I tell you!” asserted one girl to her neighbour,

as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.

“Nor I,” the second answered.

“Oh, Anny, how can you!” said the third.

“If I had thrown anything at all, it shouldn’t have been _that_!”

“Pooh! I don’t care for him!” And they laughed and continued their

work, without looking up, still ostentatiously accusing each other.

Jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face, and caught their remarks.

“_You_ didn’t do it—oh no!” he said to the up-stream one of the three.

She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl, not exactly handsome,

but capable of passing as such at a little distance, despite some

coarseness of skin and fibre. She had a round and prominent bosom, full

lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen’s egg. She

was a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less; and Jude

was almost certain that to her was attributable the enterprise of

attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters to what was

simmering in the minds around him.

“That you’ll never be told,” said she deedily.

“Whoever did it was wasteful of other people’s property.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.”

“But you want to speak to me, I suppose?”

“Oh yes; if you like to.”

“Shall I clamber across, or will you come to the plank above here?”

Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity; for somehow or other the eyes of

the brown girl rested in his own when he had said the words, and there

was a momentary flash of intelligence, a dumb announcement of affinity

_in posse_ between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley was

concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it. She saw that he had

singled her out from the three, as a woman is singled out in such

cases, for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in

commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters,

unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of

their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.

Springing to her feet, she said: “Bring back what is lying there.”

Jude was now aware that no message on any matter connected with her

father’s business had prompted her signal to him. He set down his

basket of tools, picked up the scrap of offal, beat a pathway for

himself with his stick, and got over the hedge. They walked in parallel

lines, one on each bank of the stream, towards the small plank bridge.

As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave without Jude perceiving it, an

adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession,

by which curious and original manœuvre she brought as by magic upon its

smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to

retain there as long as she continued to smile. This production of

dimples at will was a not unknown operation, which many attempted, but

only a few succeeded in accomplishing.

They met in the middle of the plank, and Jude, tossing back her

missile, seemed to expect her to explain why she had audaciously

stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him.

But she, slyly looking in another direction, swayed herself backwards

and forwards on her hand as it clutched the rail of the bridge; till,

moved by amatory curiosity, she turned her eyes critically upon him.

“You don’t think _I_ would shy things at you?”

“Oh no.”

“We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn’t want anything

thrown away. He makes that into dubbin.” She nodded towards the

fragment on the grass.

“What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?” Jude asked,

politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as to

its truth.

“Impudence. Don’t tell folk it was I, mind!”

“How can I? I don’t know your name.”

“Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?”

“Do!”

“Arabella Donn. I’m living here.”

“I must have known it if I had often come this way. But I mostly go

straight along the high-road.”

“My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me wash the

innerds for black-puddings and such like.”

They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding

each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge. The

unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly by

Arabella’s personality, held Jude to the spot against his

intention—almost against his will, and in a way new to his experience.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had

never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely

regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from

her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked

arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble.

“What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words had

not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.

“Ah, you should see me Sundays!” she said piquantly.

“I don’t suppose I could?” he answered

“That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just now, though

there med be in a week or two.” She had spoken this without a smile,

and the dimples disappeared.

Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. “Will you

let me?”

“I don’t mind.”

By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning her face

aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation

before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than a general

impression of her appearance. “Next Sunday?” he hazarded. “To-morrow,

that is?”

“Yes.”

“Shall I call?”

“Yes.”

She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost tenderly

with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the brookside

grass rejoined her companions.

Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,

filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had just

inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been

hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had

somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.

The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so

precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a

curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.

“Well, it’s only a bit of fun,” he said to himself, faintly conscious

that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more

obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had drawn

him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere

sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her

quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with

literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no

vestal who chose _that_ missile for opening her attack on him. He saw

this with his intellectual eye, just for a short fleeting while, as by

the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on

a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then this passing

discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to all conditions

of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that of having

found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto unsuspected, though

it had lain close beside him. He was to meet this enkindling one of the

other sex on the following Sunday.

Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently resumed

her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid stream.

“Catched un, my dear?” laconically asked the girl called Anny.

“I don’t know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!”

regretfully murmured Arabella.

“Lord! he’s nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old

Drusilla Fawley’s bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he ’prenticed

himself at Alfredston. Since then he’s been very stuck up, and always

reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say.”

“Oh, I don’t care what he is, or anything about ’n. Don’t you think it,

my child!”

“Oh, don’t ye! You needn’t try to deceive us! What did you stay talking

to him for, if you didn’t want un? Whether you do or whether you don’t,

he’s as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted on the bridge,

when he looked at ’ee as if he had never seen a woman before in his

born days. Well, he’s to be had by any woman who can get him to care

for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him the right way.”

VII

The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping

ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black mark

on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past

months.

It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with

Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to

set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,—the re-reading of his

Greek Testament—his new one, with better type than his old copy,

following Griesbach’s text as amended by numerous correctors, and with

variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the book, having

obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing he had

never done before.

He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading, under the

quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he now slept

only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened

yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt

as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot

understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.

He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened the

book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands to

his temples, began at the beginning:

Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ.

Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait indoors,

poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him. There was a

something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from promises. He

ought not to break faith with her. Even though he had only Sundays and

week-day evenings for reading he could afford one afternoon, seeing

that other young men afforded so many. After to-day he would never

probably see her again. Indeed, it would be impossible, considering

what his plans were.

In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular

power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the

spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care

little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated

intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy

he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the

embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had

nothing in common with his own except locality.

Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude sprang up

and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed

himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house

and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground

which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the

dip beyond the upland.

As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours,

easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading

after tea.

Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path joined

the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left, descending

the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown House. Here at

the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it,

and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of

piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the originators of

that smell. He entered the garden, and knocked at the door with the

knob of his stick.

Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on the

inside said:

“Arabella! Here’s your young man come coorting! Mizzle, my girl!”

Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a businesslike aspect as it

evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking of. He

was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her; but “courting” was too

coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas. The door

was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs in radiant

walking attire.

“Take a chair, Mr. What’s-your-name?” said her father, an energetic,

black-whiskered man, in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard from

outside.

“I’d rather go out at once, wouldn’t you?” she whispered to Jude.

“Yes,” said he. “We’ll walk up to the Brown House and back, we can do

it in half an hour.”

Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt

glad he had come, and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto

haunted him.

First they clambered to the top of the great down, during which ascent

he had occasionally to take her hand to assist her. Then they bore off

to the left along the crest into the ridgeway, which they followed till

it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of

his former fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them

now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella with greater

zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies with

all the Dons in the recently adored university, and passed the spot

where he had knelt to Diana and Phœbus without remembering that there

were any such people in the mythology, or that the sun was anything

else than a useful lamp for illuminating Arabella’s face. An

indescribable lightness of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the

incipient scholar, prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not,

felt himself honoured and glorified by the condescension of this

handsome country wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her

Sunday frock and ribbons.

They reached the Brown House barn—the point at which he had planned to

turn back. While looking over the vast northern landscape from this

spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke from the

neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a distance

of a couple of miles.

“It is a fire,” said Arabella. “Let’s run and see it—do! It is not

far!”

The tenderness which had grown up in Jude’s bosom left him no will to

thwart her inclination now—which pleased him in affording him excuse

for a longer time with her. They started off down the hill almost at a

trot; but on gaining level ground at the bottom, and walking a mile,

they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than it had

seemed.

Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on; but it was not

till five o’clock that they found themselves on the scene,—the distance

being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen, and three

from Arabella’s. The conflagration had been got under by the time they

reached it, and after a short inspection of the melancholy ruins they

retraced their steps—their course lying through the town of Alfredston.

Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered an inn of an

inferior class, and gave their order. As it was not for beer they had a

long time to wait. The maid-servant recognized Jude, and whispered her

surprise to her mistress in the background, that he, the student “who

kept hisself up so particular,” should have suddenly descended so low

as to keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was being

said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her

lover—the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is

winning her game.

They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and

Delilah which hung on the wall, and at the circular beer-stains on the

table, and at the spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust. The whole

aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which few places

can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when the setting sun is

slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the unfortunate wayfarer finds

himself with no other haven of rest.

It began to grow dusk. They could not wait longer, really, for the tea,

they said. “Yet what else can we do?” asked Jude. “It is a three-mile

walk for you.”

“I suppose we can have some beer,” said Arabella.

“Beer, oh yes. I had forgotten that. Somehow it seems odd to come to a

public-house for beer on a Sunday evening.”

“But we didn’t.”

“No, we didn’t.” Jude by this time wished he was out of such an

uncongenial atmosphere; but he ordered the beer, which was promptly

brought.

Arabella tasted it. “Ugh!” she said.

Jude tasted. “What’s the matter with it?” he asked. “I don’t understand

beer very much now, it is true. I like it well enough, but it is bad to

read on, and I find coffee better. But this seems all right.”

“Adulterated—I can’t touch it!” She mentioned three or four ingredients

that she detected in the liquor beyond malt and hops, much to Jude’s

surprise.

“How much you know!” he said good-humouredly.

Nevertheless she returned to the beer and drank her share, and they

went on their way. It was now nearly dark, and as soon as they had

withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer together, till

they touched each other. She wondered why he did not put his arm round

her waist, but he did not; he merely said what to himself seemed a

quite bold enough thing: “Take my arm.”

She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder. He felt the warmth of her

body against his, and putting his stick under his other arm held with

his right hand her right as it rested in its place.

“Now we are well together, dear, aren’t we?” he observed.

“Yes,” said she; adding to herself: “Rather mild!”

“How fast I have become!” he was thinking.

Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland, where they

could see the white highway ascending before them in the gloom. From

this point the only way of getting to Arabella’s was by going up the

incline, and dipping again into her valley on the right. Before they

had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been

walking on the grass unseen.

“These lovers—you find ’em out o’ doors in all seasons and

weathers—lovers and homeless dogs only,” said one of the men as they

vanished down the hill.

Arabella tittered lightly.

“Are we lovers?” asked Jude.

“You know best.”

“But you can tell me?”

For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder. Jude took the hint,

and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled her to him and kissed

her.

They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had desired, clasped

together. After all, what did it matter since it was dark, said Jude to

himself. When they were half-way up the long hill they paused as by

arrangement, and he kissed her again. They reached the top, and he

kissed her once more.

“You can keep your arm there, if you would like to,” she said gently.

He did so, thinking how trusting she was.

Thus they slowly went towards her home. He had left his cottage at

half-past three, intending to be sitting down again to the New

Testament by half-past five. It was nine o’clock when, with another

embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father’s door.

She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so odd

otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave way,

and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he found, in

addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round. They all

spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as Arabella’s

intended partner.

They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place and

embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleasant

walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay

longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet woman without

features or character; and bidding them all good night plunged with a

sense of relief into the track over the down.

But that sense was only temporary: Arabella soon re-asserted her sway

in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man from the

Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him? what were his

intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single

minute of time day by day? “Wasting!” It depended on your point of view

to define that: he was just living for the first time: not wasting

life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson;

ay, or a pope!

When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a general

consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things

confronting him. He went upstairs without a light, and the dim interior

of his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his book open,

just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-page

regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the

unclosed eyes of a dead man:

Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ.

* * * * * * * * *

Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of absence at

lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that he threw into his

basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had

brought with him.

He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself. Arabella,

on the contrary, made them public among all her friends and

acquaintances.

Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours

earlier under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his side, he

reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and stood

still. He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss. As the

sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed there

since. Jude looked on the ground and sighed. He looked closely, and

could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of their feet as they

had stood locked in each other’s arms. She was not there now, and “the

embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of nature” so depicted her

past presence that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill. A

pollard willow stood close to the place, and that willow was different

from all other willows in the world. Utter annihilation of the six days

which must elapse before he could see her again as he had promised

would have been his intensest wish if he had had only the week to live.

An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way with her two

companions of the Saturday. She passed unheedingly the scene of the

kiss, and the willow that marked it, though chattering freely on the

subject to the other two.

“And what did he tell ’ee next?”

“Then he said—” And she related almost word for word some of his

tenderest speeches. If Jude had been behind the fence he would have

felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings and

doings on the previous evening were private.

“You’ve got him to care for ’ee a bit, ’nation if you han’t!” murmured

Anny judicially. “It’s well to be you!”

In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low, hungry tone of

latent sensuousness: “I’ve got him to care for me: yes! But I want him

to more than care for me; I want him to have me—to marry me! I must

have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I

shall go mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether! I felt I should

when I first saw him!”

“As he is a romancing, straightfor’ard, honest chap, he’s to be had,

and as a husband, if you set about catching him in the right way.”

Arabella remained thinking awhile. “What med be the right way?” she

asked.

“Oh you don’t know—you don’t!” said Sarah, the third girl.

“On my word I don’t!—No further, that is, than by plain courting, and

taking care he don’t go too far!”

The third girl looked at the second. “She _don’t_ know!”

“’Tis clear she don’t!” said Anny.

“And having lived in a town, too, as one may say! Well, we can teach

’ee som’at then, as well as you us.”

“Yes. And how do you mean—a sure way to gain a man? Take me for an

innocent, and have done wi’ it!”

“As a husband.”

“As a husband.”

“A countryman that’s honourable and serious-minded such as he; God

forbid that I should say a sojer, or sailor, or commercial gent from

the towns, or any of them that be slippery with poor women! I’d do no

friend that harm!”

“Well, such as he, of course!”

Arabella’s companions looked at each other, and turning up their eyes

in drollery began smirking. Then one went up close to Arabella, and,

although nobody was near, imparted some information in a low tone, the

other observing curiously the effect upon Arabella.

“Ah!” said the last-named slowly. “I own I didn’t think of that way! …

But suppose he _isn’t_ honourable? A woman had better not have tried

it!”

“Nothing venture nothing have! Besides, you make sure that he’s

honourable before you begin. You’d be safe enough with yours. I wish I

had the chance! Lots of girls do it; or do you think they’d get married

at all?”

Arabella pursued her way in silent thought. “I’ll try it!” she

whispered; but not to them.

VIII

One week’s end Jude was as usual walking out to his aunt’s at Marygreen

from his lodging in Alfredston, a walk which now had large attractions

for him quite other than his desire to see his aged and morose

relative. He diverged to the right before ascending the hill with the

single purpose of gaining, on his way, a glimpse of Arabella that

should not come into the reckoning of regular appointments. Before

quite reaching the homestead his alert eye perceived the top of her

head moving quickly hither and thither over the garden hedge. Entering

the gate he found that three young unfattened pigs had escaped from

their sty by leaping clean over the top, and that she was endeavouring

unassisted to drive them in through the door which she had set open.

The lines of her countenance changed from the rigidity of business to

the softness of love when she saw Jude, and she bent her eyes

languishingly upon him. The animals took advantage of the pause by

doubling and bolting out of the way.

“They were only put in this morning!” she cried, stimulated to pursue

in spite of her lover’s presence. “They were drove from Spaddleholt

Farm only yesterday, where Father bought ’em at a stiff price enough.

They are wanting to get home again, the stupid toads! Will you shut the

garden gate, dear, and help me to get ’em in. There are no men folk at

home, only Mother, and they’ll be lost if we don’t mind.”

He set himself to assist, and dodged this way and that over the potato

rows and the cabbages. Every now and then they ran together, when he

caught her for a moment and kissed her. The first pig was got back

promptly; the second with some difficulty; the third a long-legged

creature, was more obstinate and agile. He plunged through a hole in

the garden hedge, and into the lane.

“He’ll be lost if I don’t follow ’n!” said she. “Come along with me!”

She rushed in full pursuit out of the garden, Jude alongside her,

barely contriving to keep the fugitive in sight. Occasionally they

would shout to some boy to stop the animal, but he always wriggled past

and ran on as before.

“Let me take your hand, darling,” said Jude. “You are getting out of

breath.” She gave him her now hot hand with apparent willingness, and

they trotted along together.

“This comes of driving ’em home,” she remarked. “They always know the

way back if you do that. They ought to have been carted over.”

By this time the pig had reached an unfastened gate admitting to the

open down, across which he sped with all the agility his little legs

afforded. As soon as the pursuers had entered and ascended to the top

of the high ground it became apparent that they would have to run all

the way to the farmer’s if they wished to get at him. From this summit

he could be seen as a minute speck, following an unerring line towards

his old home.

“It is no good!” cried Arabella. “He’ll be there long before we get

there. It don’t matter now we know he’s not lost or stolen on the way.

They’ll see it is ours, and send un back. Oh dear, how hot I be!”

Without relinquishing her hold of Jude’s hand she swerved aside and

flung herself down on the sod under a stunted thorn, precipitately

pulling Jude on to his knees at the same time.

“Oh, I ask pardon—I nearly threw you down, didn’t I! But I am so

tired!”

She lay supine, and straight as an arrow, on the sloping sod of this

hill-top, gazing up into the blue miles of sky, and still retaining her

warm hold of Jude’s hand. He reclined on his elbow near her.

“We’ve run all this way for nothing,” she went on, her form heaving and

falling in quick pants, her face flushed, her full red lips parted, and

a fine dew of perspiration on her skin. “Well—why don’t you speak,

deary?”

“I’m blown too. It was all up hill.”

They were in absolute solitude—the most apparent of all solitudes, that

of empty surrounding space. Nobody could be nearer than a mile to them

without their seeing him. They were, in fact, on one of the summits of

the county, and the distant landscape around Christminster could be

discerned from where they lay. But Jude did not think of that then.

“Oh, I can see such a pretty thing up this tree,” said Arabella. “A

sort of a—caterpillar, of the most loveliest green and yellow you ever

came across!”

“Where?” said Jude, sitting up.

“You can’t see him there—you must come here,” said she.

He bent nearer and put his head in front of hers. “No—I can’t see it,”

he said.

“Why, on the limb there where it branches off—close to the moving

leaf—there!” She gently pulled him down beside her.

“I don’t see it,” he repeated, the back of his head against her cheek.

“But I can, perhaps, standing up.” He stood accordingly, placing

himself in the direct line of her gaze.

“How stupid you are!” she said crossly, turning away her face.

“I don’t care to see it, dear: why should I?” he replied looking down

upon her. “Get up, Abby.”

“Why?”

“I want you to let me kiss you. I’ve been waiting to ever so long!”

She rolled round her face, remained a moment looking deedily aslant at

him; then with a slight curl of the lip sprang to her feet, and

exclaiming abruptly “I must mizzle!” walked off quickly homeward. Jude

followed and rejoined her.

“Just one!” he coaxed.

“Shan’t!” she said.

He, surprised: “What’s the matter?”

She kept her two lips resentfully together, and Jude followed her like

a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him, talking

calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if he tried to

take her hand or clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts

of her father’s homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to

him with a supercilious, affronted air.

“I expect I took too much liberty with her, somehow,” Jude said to

himself, as he withdrew with a sigh and went on to Marygreen.

On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella’s home was, as usual, the

scene of a grand weekly cooking, the preparation of the special Sunday

dinner. Her father was shaving before a little glass hung on the

mullion of the window, and her mother and Arabella herself were

shelling beans hard by. A neighbour passed on her way home from morning

service at the nearest church, and seeing Donn engaged at the window

with the razor, nodded and came in.

She at once spoke playfully to Arabella: “I zeed ’ee running with

’un—hee-hee! I hope ’tis coming to something?”

Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her face without

raising her eyes.

“He’s for Christminster, I hear, as soon as he can get there.”

“Have you heard that lately—quite lately?” asked Arabella with a

jealous, tigerish indrawing of breath.

“Oh no! But it has been known a long time that it is his plan. He’s

on’y waiting here for an opening. Ah well: he must walk about with

somebody, I s’pose. Young men don’t mean much now-a-days. ’Tis a sip

here and a sip there with ’em. ’Twas different in my time.”

When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly to her mother: “I

want you and Father to go and inquire how the Edlins be, this evening

after tea. Or no—there’s evening service at Fensworth—you can walk to

that.”

“Oh? What’s up to-night, then?”

“Nothing. Only I want the house to myself. He’s shy; and I can’t get un

to come in when you are here. I shall let him slip through my fingers

if I don’t mind, much as I care for ’n!”

“If it is fine we med as well go, since you wish.”

In the afternoon Arabella met and walked with Jude, who had now for

weeks ceased to look into a book of Greek, Latin, or any other tongue.

They wandered up the slopes till they reached the green track along the

ridge, which they followed to the circular British earth-bank

adjoining, Jude thinking of the great age of the trackway, and of the

drovers who had frequented it, probably before the Romans knew the

country. Up from the level lands below them floated the chime of church

bells. Presently they were reduced to one note, which quickened, and

stopped.

“Now we’ll go back,” said Arabella, who had attended to the sounds.

Jude assented. So long as he was near her he minded little where he

was. When they arrived at her house he said lingeringly: “I won’t come

in. Why are you in such a hurry to go in to-night? It is not near

dark.”

“Wait a moment,” said she. She tried the handle of the door and found

it locked.

“Ah—they are gone to church,” she added. And searching behind the

scraper she found the key and unlocked the door. “Now, you’ll come in a

moment?” she asked lightly. “We shall be all alone.”

“Certainly,” said Jude with alacrity, the case being unexpectedly

altered.

Indoors they went. Did he want any tea? No, it was too late: he would

rather sit and talk to her. She took off her jacket and hat, and they

sat down—naturally enough close together.

“Don’t touch me, please,” she said softly. “I am part egg-shell. Or

perhaps I had better put it in a safe place.” She began unfastening the

collar of her gown.

“What is it?” said her lover.

“An egg—a cochin’s egg. I am hatching a very rare sort. I carry it

about everywhere with me, and it will get hatched in less than three

weeks.”

“Where do you carry it?”

“Just here.” She put her hand into her bosom and drew out the egg,

which was wrapped in wool, outside it being a piece of pig’s bladder,

in case of accidents. Having exhibited it to him she put it back, “Now

mind you don’t come near me. I don’t want to get it broke, and have to

begin another.”

“Why do you do such a strange thing?”

“It’s an old custom. I suppose it is natural for a woman to want to

bring live things into the world.”

“It is very awkward for me just now,” he said, laughing.

“It serves you right. There—that’s all you can have of me”

She had turned round her chair, and, reaching over the back of it,

presented her cheek to him gingerly.

“That’s very shabby of you!”

“You should have catched me a minute ago when I had put the egg down!

There!” she said defiantly, “I am without it now!” She had quickly

withdrawn the egg a second time; but before he could quite reach her

she had put it back as quickly, laughing with the excitement of her

strategy. Then there was a little struggle, Jude making a plunge for it

and capturing it triumphantly. Her face flushed; and becoming suddenly

conscious he flushed also.

They looked at each other, panting; till he rose and said: “One kiss,

now I can do it without damage to property; and I’ll go!”

But she had jumped up too. “You must find me first!” she cried.

Her lover followed her as she withdrew. It was now dark inside the

room, and the window being small he could not discover for a long time

what had become of her, till a laugh revealed her to have rushed up the

stairs, whither Jude rushed at her heels.

IX

It was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met

constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatisfied; she was

always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.

One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers

thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her

experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she had

grown brighter. That evening she kept an appointment with Jude, who

seemed sad.

“I am going away,” he said to her. “I think I ought to go. I think it

will be better both for you and for me. I wish some things had never

begun! I was much to blame, I know. But it is never too late to mend.”

Arabella began to cry. “How do you know it is not too late?” she said.

“That’s all very well to say! I haven’t told you yet!” and she looked

into his face with streaming eyes.

“What?” he asked, turning pale. “Not…?”

“Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?”

“Oh, Arabella—how can you say that, my dear! You _know_ I wouldn’t

desert you!”

“Well then—”

“I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have

thought of this before… But, of course if that’s the case, we must

marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?”

“I thought—I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the more for

that, and leave me to face it alone!”

“You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or even

three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans—I mean my

plans before I knew you, my dear. But what are they, after all! Dreams

about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships, and all that.

Certainly we’ll marry: we must!”

That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing. He

knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that Arabella

was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind. Yet, such being

the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had

drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done,

he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences.

For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of

her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he

sometimes said laconically.

The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. The people of

the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was. All his

reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his books to

buy saucepans. Those who guessed the probable state of affairs,

Arabella’s parents being among them, declared that it was the sort of

conduct they would have expected of such an honest young man as Jude in

reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent sweetheart. The parson

who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too. And so, standing

before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time

of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe,

feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired

during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the

undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at

what they swore.

Fawley’s aunt being a baker she made him a bride-cake, saying bitterly

that it was the last thing she could do for him, poor silly fellow; and

that it would have been far better if, instead of his living to trouble

her, he had gone underground years before with his father and mother.

Of this cake Arabella took some slices, wrapped them up in white

note-paper, and sent them to her companions in the pork-dressing

business, Anny and Sarah, labelling each packet “_In remembrance of

good advice_.”

The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not very

brilliant even to the most sanguine mind. He, a stone-mason’s

apprentice, nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till he

should be out of his time. His wife was absolutely useless in a

town-lodging, where he at first had considered it would be necessary

for them to live. But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so

little a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between

the Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a

vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep

a pig. But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it was

a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. Arabella, however,

felt that all these make-shifts were temporary; she had gained a

husband; that was the thing—a husband with a lot of earning power in

him for buying her frocks and hats when he should begin to get

frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw aside those stupid

books for practical undertakings.

So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage, giving up

his old room at his aunt’s—where so much of the hard labour at Greek

and Latin had been carried on.

A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long tail of

hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back of

her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon the

looking-glass which he had bought her.

“What—it wasn’t your own?” he said, with a sudden distaste for her.

“Oh no—it never is nowadays with the better class.”

“Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed to

be different. Besides, you’ve enough of your own, surely?”

“Yes, enough as country notions go. But in town the men expect more,

and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—”

“Barmaid at Aldbrickham?”

“Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house

there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to

getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have the

better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town than all your

Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair—the barber’s

assistant told me so.”

Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be true

to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would

and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their

simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct

towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in

counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was

no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no

more of it.

A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few weeks,

even though the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy.

There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her

acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts,

and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.

Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one

market-day with this quality in her carriage when she met Anny her

former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.

As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them

without saying it.

“So it turned out a good plan, you see!” remarked the girl to the wife.

“I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear good fellow, and you

ought to be proud of un.”

“I am,” said Mrs. Fawley quietly.

“And when do you expect?”

“Ssh! Not at all.”

“What!”

“I was mistaken.”

“Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that’s

clever—it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o’,

wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the real

thing—not that one could sham it!”

“Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I didn’t know.”

“My word—won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’ Saturday

nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick—a double one, by the

Lord!”

“I’ll own to the first, but not to the second… Pooh—he won’t care!

He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down, bless

’ee—men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is married.”

Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached

the time when in the natural course of things she would have to reveal

that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. The occasion

was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their chamber in the

lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his work

every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve hours, and had retired

to rest before his wife. When she came into the room he was between

sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her undressing before

the little looking-glass as he lay.

One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her face

being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she was

amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the dimple

before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was mistress,

effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for the first

time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face during his

intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the earlier weeks

of their acquaintance.

“Don’t do that, Arabella!” he said suddenly. “There is no harm in it,

but—I don’t like to see you.”

She turned and laughed. “Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!” she said.

“How countrified you are! That’s nothing.”

“Where did you learn it?”

“Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I

was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was fatter then.”

“I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a

woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you.”

“Most men think otherwise.”

“I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?”

“I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.”

“Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the

adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening.

I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father’s

house.”

“You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more

finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. There was

not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away

for three months.”

“You’ll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won’t you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, of course—little things to make.”

“Oh.”

“When will it be? Can’t you tell me exactly, instead of in such general

terms as you have used?”

“Tell you?”

“Yes—the date.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I made a mistake.”

“What?”

“It was a mistake.”

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. “How can that be?”

“Women fancy wrong things sometimes.”

“But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of

furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn’t have hurried on our

affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if

it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to

save you, ready or no… Good God!”

“Don’t take on, dear. What’s done can’t be undone.”

“I have no more to say!”

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between

them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a

different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to accept

her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while

ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social

ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes

involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man’s one

opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of

contributing his units of work to the general progress of his

generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory

instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be

only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he

had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught

in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a

lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the

immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But the

marriage remained.

X

The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had

fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering was

timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so that

Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a

day.

The night had seemed strangely silent. Jude looked out of the window

long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with

snow—snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still

falling.

“I’m afraid the pig-killer won’t be able to come,” he said to Arabella.

“Oh, he’ll come. You must get up and make the water hot, if you want

Challow to scald him. Though I like singeing best.”

“I’ll get up,” said Jude. “I like the way of my own county.”

He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding it

with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze flinging a

cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of cheerfulness

was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze—to heat water to

scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as yet lived, and

whose voice could be continually heard from a corner of the garden. At

half-past six, the time of appointment with the butcher, the water

boiled, and Jude’s wife came downstairs.

“Is Challow come?” she asked.

“No.”

They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a snowy

dawn. She went out, gazed along the road, and returning said, “He’s not

coming. Drunk last night, I expect. The snow is not enough to hinder

him, surely!”

“Then we must put it off. It is only the water boiled for nothing. The

snow may be deep in the valley.”

“Can’t be put off. There’s no more victuals for the pig. He ate the

last mixing o’ barleymeal yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning? What has he lived on since?”

“Nothing.”

“What—he has been starving?”

“Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the

innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!”

“That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!”

“Well—you must do the sticking—there’s no help for it. I’ll show you

how. Or I’ll do it myself—I think I could. Though as it is such a big

pig I had rather Challow had done it. However, his basket o’ knives and

things have been already sent on here, and we can use ’em.”

“Of course you shan’t do it,” said Jude. “I’ll do it, since it must be

done.”

He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the space of a

couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in front, with the knives

and ropes at hand. A robin peered down at the preparations from the

nearest tree, and, not liking the sinister look of the scene, flew

away, though hungry. By this time Arabella had joined her husband, and

Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal,

who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of

rage. Arabella opened the sty-door, and together they hoisted the

victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella

bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from

struggling.

The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry

of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.

“Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had

this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

“Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife—the

one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

“I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the

chief thing.”

“You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that

he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red

and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it,

and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be

eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

“He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may

look,” said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s

upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then

plunged in the knife with all his might.

“’Od damn it all!” she cried, “that ever I should say it! You’ve

over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time—”

“Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!”

“Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don’t talk!”

However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood

flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had

desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the

shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with

the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the

treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

“Make un stop that!” said Arabella. “Such a noise will bring somebody

or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it

ourselves.” Picking up the knife from the ground whereon Jude had flung

it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was

instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole.

“That’s better,” she said.

“It is a hateful business!” said he.

“Pigs must be killed.”

The animal heaved in a final convulsion, and, despite the rope, kicked

out with all his last strength. A tablespoonful of black clot came

forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some seconds.

“That’s it; now he’ll go,” said she. “Artful creatures—they always keep

back a drop like that as long as they can!”

The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude stagger, and

in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which the blood had

been caught.

“There!” she cried, thoroughly in a passion. “Now I can’t make any

blackpot. There’s a waste, all through you!”

Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole steaming

liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the snow, and

forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other

than an ordinary obtaining of meat. The lips and nostrils of the animal

turned livid, then white, and the muscles of his limbs relaxed.

“Thank God!” Jude said. “He’s dead.”

“What’s God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I should

like to know!” she said scornfully. “Poor folks must live.”

“I know, I know,” said he. “I don’t scold you.”

Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand.

“Well done, young married volk! I couldn’t have carried it out much

better myself, cuss me if I could!” The voice, which was husky, came

from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaughter they

saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate, critically

surveying their performance.

“’Tis well for ’ee to stand there and glane!” said Arabella. “Owing to

your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! ’Twon’t fetch so

much by a shilling a score!”

Challow expressed his contrition. “You should have waited a bit” he

said, shaking his head, “and not have done this—in the delicate state,

too, that you be in at present, ma’am. ’Tis risking yourself too much.”

“You needn’t be concerned about that,” said Arabella, laughing. Jude

too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in his

amusement.

Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the scalding

and scraping. Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he

had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and that the deed

would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by deputy. The

white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal, wore an

illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian;

but he could not see how the matter was to be mended. No doubt he was,

as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.

He did not like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically in

the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his courtship of

his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he read whenever he could

as he walked to and from his work. Yet he sometimes felt that by caring

for books he was not escaping common-place nor gaining rare ideas,

every working-man being of that taste now. When passing near the spot

by the stream on which he had first made her acquaintance he one day

heard voices just as he had done at that earlier time. One of the girls

who had been Arabella’s companions was talking to a friend in a shed,

himself being the subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen

him in the distance. They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were

so thin that he could hear their words as he passed.

“Howsomever, ’twas I put her up to it! ‘Nothing venture nothing have,’

I said. If I hadn’t she’d no more have been his mis’ess than I.”

“’Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told him

she was…”

What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should make

her his “mis’ess,” otherwise wife? The suggestion was horridly

unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of entering

his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket inside the

garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his old aunt and

get some supper there.

This made his arrival home rather late. Arabella however, was busy

melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out on

a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work. Dreading lest what he had

heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he spoke

little. But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other things

that she wanted some money. Seeing the book sticking out of his pocket

she added that he ought to earn more.

“An apprentice’s wages are not meant to be enough to keep a wife on, as

a rule, my dear.”

“Then you shouldn’t have had one.”

“Come, Arabella! That’s too bad, when you know how it came about.”

“I’ll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you was true.

Doctor Vilbert thought so. It was a good job for you that it wasn’t

so!”

“I don’t mean that,” he said hastily. “I mean before that time. I know

it was not your fault; but those women friends of yours gave you bad

advice. If they hadn’t, or you hadn’t taken it, we should at this

moment have been free from a bond which, not to mince matters, galls

both of us devilishly. It may be very sad, but it is true.”

“Who’s been telling you about my friends? What advice? I insist upon

you telling me.”

“Pooh—I’d rather not.”

“But you shall—you ought to. It is mean of ’ee not to!”

“Very well.” And he hinted gently what had been revealed to him. “But I

don’t wish to dwell upon it. Let us say no more about it.”

Her defensive manner collapsed. “That was nothing,” she said, laughing

coldly. “Every woman has a right to do such as that. The risk is hers.”

“I quite deny it, Bella. She might if no lifelong penalty attached to

it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if the weakness of the

moment could end with the moment, or even with the year. But when

effects stretch so far she should not go and do that which entraps a

man if he is honest, or herself if he is otherwise.”

“What ought I to have done?”

“Given me time… Why do you fuss yourself about melting down that pig’s

fat to-night? Please put it away!”

“Then I must do it to-morrow morning. It won’t keep.”

“Very well—do.”

XI

Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten

o’clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had

accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same

intractable temper.

“That’s the story about me in Marygreen, is it—that I entrapped ’ee?

Much of a catch you were, Lord send!” As she warmed she saw some of

Jude’s dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have

been laid. “I won’t have them books here in the way!” she cried

petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon

the floor.

“Leave my books alone!” he said. “You might have thrown them aside if

you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!” In

the operation of making lard Arabella’s hands had become smeared with

the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible

imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the

books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing,

caught her by the arms to make her leave off. Somehow, in going so, he

loosened the fastening of her hair, and it rolled about her ears.

“Let me go!” she said.

“Promise to leave the books alone.”

She hesitated. “Let me go!” she repeated.

“Promise!”

After a pause: “I do.”

Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to the door, out

of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began

to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse

disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her

gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the

bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north.

People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday clothes;

they were mainly lovers—such pairs as Jude and Arabella had been when

they sported along the same track some months earlier. These

pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now

presented, bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind, her

bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work, and her

hands reeking with melted fat. One of the passers said in mock terror:

“Good Lord deliver us!”

“See how he’s served me!” she cried. “Making me work Sunday mornings

when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my head,

and my gown off my back!”

Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force. Then

he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with the sense that all was over

between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he, her husband

stood still, regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined

by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having

based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no

necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong

comradeship tolerable.

“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother,

and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you be

a queer lot as husbands and wives!”

Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her. But she said no more,

and continued her saunter till she was tired. He left the spot, and,

after wandering vaguely a little while, walked in the direction of

Marygreen. Here he called upon his great-aunt, whose infirmities daily

increased.

“Aunt—did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?” said

Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.

She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that

she always wore. “Who’s been telling you that?” she said.

“I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all.”

“You med so well, I s’pose; though your wife—I reckon ’twas she—must

have been a fool to open up that! There isn’t much to know after all.

Your father and mother couldn’t get on together, and they parted. It

was coming home from Alfredston market, when you were a baby—on the

hill by the Brown House barn—that they had their last difference, and

took leave of one another for the last time. Your mother soon

afterwards died—she drowned herself, in short, and your father went

away with you to South Wessex, and never came here any more.”

Jude recalled his father’s silence about North Wessex and Jude’s

mother, never speaking of either till his dying day.

“It was the same with your father’s sister. Her husband offended her,

and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to

London with her little maid. The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it

never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that

won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily

enough if not bound. That’s why you ought to have hearkened to me, and

not ha’ married.”

“Where did Father and Mother part—by the Brown House, did you say?”

“A little further on—where the road to Fenworth branches off, and the

handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our

history. But let that be.”

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt’s as if

to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon

it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued, though it

was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow

and flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the

other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He

ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as

he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a

jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped

again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge, and

stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he

was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death

abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was

there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position?

He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten. Drinking

was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless. He

began to see now why some men boozed at inns. He struck down the hill

northwards and came to an obscure public-house. On entering and sitting

down the sight of the picture of Samson and Delilah on the wall caused

him to recognize the place as that he had visited with Arabella on that

first Sunday evening of their courtship. He called for liquor and drank

briskly for an hour or more.

Staggering homeward late that night, with all his sense of depression

gone, and his head fairly clear still, he began to laugh boisterously,

and to wonder how Arabella would receive him in his new aspect. The

house was in darkness when he entered, and in his stumbling state it

was some time before he could get a light. Then he found that, though

the marks of pig-dressing, of fats and scallops, were visible, the

materials themselves had been taken away. A line written by his wife on

the inside of an old envelope was pinned to the cotton blower of the

fireplace:

“_Have gone to my friends. Shall not return._”

All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the carcase of the

pig to Alfredston. He then cleaned up the premises, locked the door,

put the key in a place she would know if she came back, and returned to

his masonry at Alfredston.

At night when he again plodded home he found she had not visited the

house. The next day went in the same way, and the next. Then there came

a letter from her.

That she had gone tired of him she frankly admitted. He was such a slow

old coach, and she did not care for the sort of life he led. There was

no prospect of his ever bettering himself or her. She further went on

to say that her parents had, as he knew, for some time considered the

question of emigrating to Australia, the pig-jobbing business being a

poor one nowadays. They had at last decided to go, and she proposed to

go with them, if he had no objection. A woman of her sort would have

more chance over there than in this stupid country.

Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her going. He

thought it a wise course, since she wished to go, and one that might be

to the advantage of both. He enclosed in the packet containing the

letter the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig, with

all he had besides, which was not much.

From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly, though her

father and his household did not immediately leave, but waited till his

goods and other effects had been sold off. When Jude learnt that there

was to be an auction at the house of the Donns he packed his own

household goods into a waggon, and sent them to her at the aforesaid

homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as many of them

as she should choose.

He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a shopwindow the

little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law’s furniture.

He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude’s going near the

place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by the southern

road was materially increased by the auction. A few days later he

entered a dingy broker’s shop in the main street of the town, and amid

a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a clothes-horse, rolling-pin,

brass candlestick, swing looking-glass, and other things at the back of

the shop, evidently just brought in from a sale, he perceived a framed

photograph, which turned out to be his own portrait.

It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man

in bird’s-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given her

on their wedding-day. On the back was still to be read, “_Jude to

Arabella_,” with the date. She must have thrown it in with the rest of

her property at the auction.

“Oh,” said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles

in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself, “It

is a small lot of stuff that was knocked down to me at a cottage sale

out on the road to Marygreen. The frame is a very useful one, if you

take out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling.”

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought home

to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of his portrait

and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required to demolish all

sentiment in him. He paid the shilling, took the photograph away with

him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he reached his lodging.

Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had

departed. He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal

leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise, since

she was bent on going, which perhaps was true. On the evening following

their emigration, when his day’s work was done, he came out of doors

after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too familiar road

towards the upland whereon had been experienced the chief emotions of

his life. It seemed to be his own again.

He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed to be a boy

still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the top of

that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for

Christminster and scholarship. “Yet I am a man,” he said. “I have a

wife. More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having disagreed

with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted from her.”

He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at which

the parting between his father and his mother was said to have

occurred.

A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he had

taken for that city, had seemed to be visible. A milestone, now as

always, stood at the roadside hard by. Jude drew near it, and felt

rather than read the mileage to the city. He remembered that once on

his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an inscription

on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations. It had been

done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before he had been

diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman. He wondered if the

inscription were legible still, and going to the back of the milestone

brushed away the nettles. By the light of a match he could still

discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long ago:

[THITHER—J. F. [with a pointing finger]]

The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,

lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan should be to

move onward through good and ill—to avoid morbid sorrow even though he

did see uglinesses in the world? _Bene agere et lætari_—to do good

cheerfully—which he had heard to be the philosophy of one Spinoza,

might be his own even now.

He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original

intention.

By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a

north-easterly direction. There actually rose the faint halo, a small

dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith. It was

enough for him. He would go to Christminster as soon as the term of his

apprenticeship expired.

He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.

Part Second AT CHRISTMINSTER

_“Save his own soul he hath no star.”_—SWINBURNE.

_“Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;

Tempore crevit amor.”_—OVID.

I

The next noteworthy move in Jude’s life was that in which he appeared

gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some three years’

later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella, and the

disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her. He was walking towards

Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the south-west of it.

He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston: he was

out of his apprenticeship, and with his tools at his back seemed to be

in the way of making a new start—the start to which, barring the

interruption involved in his intimacy and married experience with

Arabella, he had been looking forward for about ten years.

Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible,

meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance. He

was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore a

closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth than is usual at

his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some

trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust that settled

on it in the pursuit of his trade. His capabilities in the latter,

having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort,

including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the

restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind. In London he

would probably have become specialized and have made himself a

“moulding mason,” a “foliage sculptor”—perhaps a “statuary.”

He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to the village

nearest the city in this direction, and was now walking the remaining

four miles rather from choice than from necessity, having always

fancied himself arriving thus.

The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin—one more nearly

related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual, as is

often the case with young men. One day while in lodgings at Alfredston

he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and had observed between

the brass candlesticks on her mantlepiece the photograph of a pretty

girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating folds under the brim like

the rays of a halo. He had asked who she was. His grand-aunt had

gruffly replied that she was his cousin Sue Bridehead, of the inimical

branch of the family; and on further questioning the old woman had

replied that the girl lived in Christminster, though she did not know

where, or what she was doing.

His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him; and

ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of

following his friend the school master thither.

He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity, and

obtained his first near view of the city. Grey-stoned and dun-roofed,

it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost with the tip of

one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of the crinkled line

along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fields of that ancient

kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset, a vane here and

there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle to a picture of

sober secondary and tertiary hues.

Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollard

willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted the

outmost lamps of the town—some of those lamps which had sent into the

sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his days of

dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him

dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these years

in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him now.

He was a species of Dick Whittington whose spirit was touched to finer

issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlying streets

with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing of the real city

in the suburbs on this side. His first want being a lodging he

scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offer on inexpensive

terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded; and after inquiry

took a room in a suburb nicknamed “Beersheba,” though he did not know

this at the time. Here he installed himself, and having had some tea

sallied forth.

It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he opened

under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it,

but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to

reach the heart of the place.

After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediæval pile that

he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the gateway.

He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners which no

lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; and a little

further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it were with

the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he passed objects

out of harmony with its general expression he allowed his eyes to slip

over them as if he did not see them.

A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes

had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant for

a hundred.

When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the

quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with his

fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes

passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined

among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through ten

bygone years, and what mattered a night’s rest for once? High against

the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed pinnacles and

indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now

by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten,

there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched

and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by

the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought

could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the

isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation

being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.

He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost,

gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with which the nooks

were haunted.

During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife and

furniture’s uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read and

learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his position,

of the worthies who had spent their youth within these reverend walls,

and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of them, by

the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his fancy

disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The brushings of

the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs were as the

passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf

on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their mournful souls, the

shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement, making him comrades

in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he ran against them without

feeling their bodily frames.

The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he could

not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the

friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed

into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us.

Speculative philosophers drew along, not always with wrinkled foreheads

and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but pink-faced, slim, and active

as in youth; modern divines sheeted in their surplices, among whom the

most real to Jude Fawley were the founders of the religious school

called Tractarian; the well-known three, the enthusiast, the poet, and

the formularist, the echoes of whose teachings had influenced him even

in his obscure home. A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move

them at sight of those other sons of the place, the form in the

full-bottomed wig, statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly

shaven historian so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of

the same incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the

faithful, and took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.

He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer

movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;

the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose

mind contracted with the same.

The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in an odd

impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained foreheads,

and weak-eyed as bats with constant research; then official

characters—such men as governor-generals and lord-lieutenants, in whom

he took little interest; chief-justices and lord chancellors, silent

thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely the names. A keener regard

attached to the prelates, by reason of his own former hopes. Of them he

had an ample band—some men of heart, others rather men of head; he who

apologized for the Church in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening

Hymn; and near them the great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and

zealot, shadowed like Jude by his matrimonial difficulties.

Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them

as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience

on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a

start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the wanderer

were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over his lamp;

and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it was, and

what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went,

he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception of a belated

townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be catching a cold.

A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice:

“You’ve been a-settin’ a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.

What med you be up to?”

It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without the latter

observing him.

Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men

and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he had

brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As he drew

towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had just been

conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances; some audible,

some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (who afterwards mourned

Christminster as “the home of lost causes,” though Jude did not

remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:

“Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce

intellectual life of our century, so serene! … Her ineffable charm

keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to

perfection.”

Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had

just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul

might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:

“Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a

country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the

ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to

now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from

whatever quarter it may come… Deprive me of office to-morrow, you can

never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the powers

committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no desire

to gratify ambition, for no personal gain.”

Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: “How shall

we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world, to

those evidences [miracles] which were presented by Omnipotence? … The

sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and

appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical

government of the world.”

Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

How the world is made for each of us!

* * * * * * * * *

And each of the Many helps to recruit

The life of the race by a general plan.

Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of

the _Apologia_:

“My argument was … that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural

theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging

probabilities … that probabilities which did not reach to logical

certainty might create a mental certitude.”

The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,

Since all alone, so Heaven has will’d, we die?

He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short

face, the genial Spectator:

“When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies in

me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire

goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my

heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents

themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must

quickly follow.”

And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar

rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

Teach me to live, that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed.

Teach me to die…

He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to have gone, and

everything spoke of to-day. He started up in bed, thinking he had

overslept himself and then said:

“By Jove—I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she’s

here all the time! … and my old schoolmaster, too.” His words about his

schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words concerning

his cousin.

II

Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean

bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and

compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs. He had

to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed by many

of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the colleges

had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances: some were

pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above ground;

something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The spirits of the

great men had disappeared.

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally, less

as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and comrade of

the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually executed those

forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them as one who knew their

beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the working, had taken

little or much time, were trying to the arm, or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less

defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted

on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him as he would

have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded, broken,

sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against years,

weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was

not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he had

intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and the morning had

nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to think that in a place

of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of his trade to do in

the business of renovation. He asked his way to the workyard of the

stone-mason whose name had been given him at Alfredston; and soon heard

the familiar sound of the rubbers and chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and

smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen

abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern

prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of

those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They

had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the

smallest building; how impossible to most men.

He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,

mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the

bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by

precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in

the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged

curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the

stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the

name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he lost

it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employment which

might be offered him on the strength of his late employer’s

recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.

This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.

Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching and imitating

went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some temporary and local

cause. He did not at that time see that mediævalism was as dead as a

fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in

the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations

had no place. The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision

towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to

him.

Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thought

again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed to feel

in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion. How he wished he had that

pretty portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt to send it. She

did so, with a request, however, that he was not to bring disturbance

into the family by going to see the girl or her relations. Jude, a

ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised nothing, put the photograph

on the mantel-piece, kissed it—he did not know why—and felt more at

home. She seemed to look down and preside over his tea. It was

cheering—the one thing uniting him to the emotions of the living city.

There remained the schoolmaster—probably now a reverend parson. But he

could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just yet; so raw and

unpolished was his condition, so precarious were his fortunes. Thus he

still remained in loneliness. Although people moved round him he

virtually saw none. Not as yet having mingled with the active life of

the place it was largely non-existent to him. But the saints and

prophets in the window-tracery, the paintings in the galleries, the

statues, the busts, the gargoyles, the corbel-heads—these seemed to

breathe his atmosphere. Like all newcomers to a spot on which the past

is deeply graven he heard that past announcing itself with an emphasis

altogether unsuspected by, and even incredible to, the habitual

residents.

For many days he haunted the cloisters and quadrangles of the colleges

at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by impish echoes of his own

footsteps, smart as the blows of a mallet. The Christminster

“sentiment,” as it had been called, ate further and further into him;

till he probably knew more about those buildings materially,

artistically, and historically, than any one of their inmates.

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his

enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of that

enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from those happy

young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life;

men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark,

learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall—but what a wall!

Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he saw them

going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard their voices,

marked their movements. The conversation of some of the more thoughtful

among them seemed oftentimes, owing to his long and persistent

preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to his own thoughts.

Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at the antipodes. Of

course he was. He was a young workman in a white blouse, and with

stone-dust in the creases of his clothes; and in passing him they did

not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through him as through a pane

of glass at their familiars beyond. Whatever they were to him, he to

them was not on the spot at all; and yet he had fancied he would be

close to their lives by coming there.

But the future lay ahead after all; and if he could only be so

fortunate as to get into good employment he would put up with the

inevitable. So he thanked God for his health and strength, and took

courage. For the present he was outside the gates of everything,

colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Those palaces

of light and leading; he might some day look down on the world through

their panes.

At length he did receive a message from the stone-mason’s yard—that a

job was waiting for him. It was his first encouragement, and he closed

with the offer promptly.

He was young and strong, or he never could have executed with such zest

the undertakings to which he now applied himself, since they involved

reading most of the night after working all the day. First he bought a

shaded lamp for four and six-pence, and obtained a good light. Then he

got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as he had been unable

to obtain elsewhere. Then, to the consternation of his landlady, he

shifted all the furniture of his room—a single one for living and

sleeping—rigged up a curtain on a rope across the middle, to make a

double chamber out of one, hung up a thick blind that nobody should

know how he was curtailing the hours of sleep, laid out his books, and

sat down.

Having been deeply encumbered by marrying, getting a cottage, and

buying the furniture which had disappeared in the wake of his wife, he

had never been able to save any money since the time of those

disastrous ventures, and till his wages began to come in he was obliged

to live in the narrowest way. After buying a book or two he could not

even afford himself a fire; and when the nights reeked with the raw and

cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp in a great-coat, hat,

and woollen gloves.

From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and the

ogee dome under which resounded the great bell of the city. The tall

tower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by the

bridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase. These

objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future was dim.

Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details of

procedure. Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, he

never dwelt upon them. For the present, he said to himself, the one

thing necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge,

and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becoming a

son of the University. “For wisdom is a defence, and money is a

defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to

them that have it.” His desire absorbed him, and left no part of him to

weigh its practicability.

At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor old

aunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her—a fear that

Jude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his cousin Sue

Bridehead and her relations. Sue’s father, his aunt believed, had gone

back to London, but the girl remained at Christminster. To make her

still more objectionable, she was an artist or designer of some sort in

what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse, which was a perfect

seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no doubt abandoned to mummeries on

that account—if not quite a Papist. (Miss Drusilla Fawley was of her

date, Evangelical.)

As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, this

news of Sue’s probable opinions did not much influence him one way or

the other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly interesting.

With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spare

minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt’s description; and

beheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a desk, who was

suspiciously like the original of the portrait. He ventured to enter on

a trivial errand, and having made his purchase lingered on the scene.

The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women. It contained Anglican

books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster angels on

brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses that were

almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals. He felt very

shy of looking at the girl in the desk; she was so pretty that he could

not believe it possible that she should belong to him. Then she spoke

to one of the two older women behind the counter; and he recognized in

the accents certain qualities of his own voice; softened and sweetened,

but his own. What was she doing? He stole a glance round. Before her

lay a piece of zinc, cut to the shape of a scroll three or four feet

long, and coated with a dead-surface paint on one side. Hereon she was

designing or illuminating, in characters of Church text, the single

word

[A L L E L U J A]

“A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!” thought he.

Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her skill in work of

this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father’s occupation as

an ecclesiastical worker in metal. The lettering on which she was

engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in some chancel to assist

devotion.

He came out. It would have been easy to speak to her there and then,

but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to disregard her

request so incontinently. She had used him roughly, but she had brought

him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control him lent a

pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative as an

argument.

So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet. He had other

reasons against doing so when he had walked away. She seemed so dainty

beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty trousers that he

felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he had felt about Mr.

Phillotson. And how possible it was that she had inherited the

antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as far as a Christian

could, particularly when he had told her that unpleasant part of his

history which had resulted in his becoming enchained to one of her own

sex whom she would certainly not admire.

Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there. The

consciousness of her living presence stimulated him. But she remained

more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave

curious and fantastic day-dreams.

Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with some more

men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting a block of

worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, before hoisting it

to the parapet which they were repairing. Standing in position the head

man said, “Spaik when he heave! He-ho!” And they heaved.

All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow,

pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object

should have been removed. She looked right into his face with liquid,

untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to combine,

keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as

well as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just spoken

to a companion, and being carried on into his face quite unconsciously.

She no more observed his presence than that of the dust-motes which his

manipulations raised into the sunbeams.

His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turned his

face away with a shy instinct to prevent her recognizing him, though as

she had never once seen him she could not possibly do so; and might

very well never have heard even his name. He could perceive that though

she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter girlhood of some years in

London, and a womanhood here, had taken all rawness out of her.

When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her. He had been

so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her general

mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure,

that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was

about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was

nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have

called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised

him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his.

How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock,

have contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done it, he

supposed.

From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in his breast

as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt

in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form;

and he perceived that, whatever his obedient wish in a contrary

direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to make himself

known to her.

He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there were

crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any

other.

The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong. The

second was that they were cousins. It was not well for cousins to fall

in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion. The

third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage

usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would

duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be

intensified to a tragic horror.

Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only a relation’s

mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her in a practical way

as some one to be proud of; to talk and nod to; later on, to be invited

to tea by, the emotion spent on her being rigorously that of a kinsman

and well-wisher. So would she be to him a kindly star, an elevating

power, a companion in Anglican worship, a tender friend.

III

But under the various deterrent influences Jude’s instinct was to

approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went to the morning

service in the Cathedral church of Cardinal College to gain a further

view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended there.

She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was finer.

He knew that if she came at all she would approach the building along

the eastern side of the great green quadrangle from which it was

accessible, and he stood in a corner while the bell was going. A few

minutes before the hour for service she appeared as one of the figures

walking along under the college walls, and at sight of her he advanced

up the side opposite, and followed her into the building, more than

ever glad that he had not as yet revealed himself. To see her, and to

be himself unseen and unknown, was enough for him at present.

He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way

advanced when he was put into a seat. It was a louring, mournful, still

afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to ordinary

practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional and leisured

classes. In the dim light and the baffling glare of the clerestory

windows he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only,

but he saw that Sue was among them. He had not long discovered the

exact seat that she occupied when the chanting of the 119th Psalm in

which the choir was engaged reached its second part, _In quo corriget_,

the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian tune as the singers gave

forth:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?

It was the very question that was engaging Jude’s attention at this

moment. What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as he

had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such

disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself;

then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music

tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had

been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm

was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of

his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary

psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.

The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary

tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those

which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him. She

was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in

church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt,

much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man the

consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which

promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like

the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a

sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.

Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him

that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen

before he himself moved. She did not look towards him, and by the time

he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path. Being dressed

up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her and reveal himself.

But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with the kind

of feeling that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the

service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he could

not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism. She was

such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he said, “It

can’t be! I, a man with a wife, must not know her!” Still Sue _was_ his

own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though she was not in

evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one sense. It would put

all thought of a tender wish on his part out of Sue’s mind, and make

her intercourse with him free and fearless. It was with some heartache

that he saw how little he cared for the freedom and fearlessness that

would result in her from such knowledge.

Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the

pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman, Sue Bridehead, had an

afternoon’s holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in

which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country

with a book in her hand. It was one of those cloudless days which

sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,

as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god. She went along for a

mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the city

she had left behind her. The road passed between green fields, and

coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was reading,

and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles new and old.

On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a foreigner

with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass beside a large

square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they could stand, a

number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed, which he was

re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way. They were in the

main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a

very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see

portrayed, among them being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and,

of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. Though the figures were

many yards away from her the south-west sun brought them out so

brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern their

contours with luminous distinctness; and being almost in a line between

herself and the church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly

foreign and contrasting set of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and,

seeing her, politely took off his cap, and cried, “I-i-i-mages!” in an

accent that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he dexterously

lifted upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities

divine and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them

on to her and resting the board on the stile. First he offered her his

smaller wares—the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then a

winged Cupid. She shook her head.

“How much are these two?” she said, touching with her finger the Venus

and the Apollo—the largest figures on the tray.

He said she should have them for ten shillings.

“I cannot afford that,” said Sue. She offered considerably less, and to

her surprise the image-man drew them from their wire stay and handed

them over the stile. She clasped them as treasures.

When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be

concerned as to what she should do with them. They seemed so very large

now that they were in her possession, and so very naked. Being of a

nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise. When she handled

them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and jacket. After

carrying them along a little way openly an idea came to her, and,

pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other rank growths from

the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she could in these, so

that what she carried appeared to be an enormous armful of green stuff

gathered by a zealous lover of nature.

“Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!” she

said. But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to wish

she had not bought the figures.

Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus’s arm was not

broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian city

in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main one,

and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to which she

was attached. Her purchases were taken straight up to her own chamber,

and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was her very own

property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped them in large

sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner.

The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in

spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as become

one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St.

Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also had

begun to attend. She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced

circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years

before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little

shop of church requisites and developing it to its present creditable

proportions. She wore a cross and beads round her neck as her only

ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.

She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not

respond for a moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily

putting a string round each parcel.

“Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?” she asked, regarding

the enwrapped objects.

“Yes—just something to ornament my room,” said Sue.

“Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already,” said Miss

Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints, the

Church-text scrolls, and other articles which, having become too stale

to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber. “What is it?

How bulky!” She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer, in the

brown paper, and tried to peep in. “Why, statuary? Two figures? Where

did you get them?”

“Oh—I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts—”

“Two saints?”

“Yes.”

“What ones?”

“St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.”

“Well—now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if

there’s light enough afterwards.”

These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest

passing fancy created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects and

looking at them; and at bedtime, when she was sure of being

undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort. Placing the pair of

figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them, she

withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began reading a

book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew nothing of.

It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the chapter dealing with the

reign of Julian the Apostate. Occasionally she looked up at the

statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place, there happening to

be a Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene suggested

the action, she at length jumped up and withdrew another book from her

box—a volume of verse—and turned to the familiar poem—

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:

The world has grown grey from thy breath!

which she read to the end. Presently she put out the candles,

undressed, and finally extinguished her own light.

She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she kept

waking up, and every time she opened her eyes there was enough diffused

light from the street to show her the white plaster figures, standing

on the chest of drawers in odd contrast to their environment of text

and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was only

discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being obscured by

the shades.

On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour. It

fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his books at

a not very distant spot in the same city. Being Saturday night the

morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to call him at

his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as was his custom,

two or three hours later than he could afford to do on any other day of

the week. Just then he was earnestly reading from his Griesbach’s text.

At the very time that Sue was tossing and staring at her figures, the

policeman and belated citizens passing along under his window might

have heard, if they had stood still, strange syllables mumbled with

fervour within—words that had for Jude an indescribable enchantment:

inexplicable sounds something like these:—

“_All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis

auton:_”

Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard to

close:—

“_Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di

autou!_”

IV

He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as artizans in

country-towns are apt to be. In London the man who carves the boss or

knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which merges

in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second half of

one whole. When there was not much Gothic moulding for Jude to run, or

much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out lettering monuments

or tombstones, and take a pleasure in the change of handiwork.

The next time that he saw her was when he was on a ladder executing a

job of this sort inside one of the churches. There was a short morning

service, and when the parson entered Jude came down from his ladder,

and sat with the half-dozen people forming the congregation, till the

prayer should be ended, and he could resume his tapping. He did not

observe till the service was half over that one of the women was Sue,

who had perforce accompanied the elderly Miss Fontover thither.

Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy, curiously nonchalant

risings and sittings, and her perfunctory genuflexions, and thought

what a help such an Anglican would have been to him in happier

circumstances. It was not so much his anxiety to get on with his work

that made him go up to it immediately the worshipers began to take

their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot, confront the

woman who was beginning to influence him in such an indescribable

manner. Those three enormous reasons why he must not attempt intimate

acquaintance with Sue Bridehead, now that his interest in her had shown

itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind, loomed as stubbornly as

ever. But it was also obvious that man could not live by work alone;

that the particular man Jude, at any rate, wanted something to love.

Some men would have rushed incontinently to her, snatched the pleasure

of easy friendship which she could hardly refuse, and have left the

rest to chance. Not so Jude—at first.

But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely evenings,

dragged along, he found himself, to his moral consternation, to be

thinking more of her instead of thinking less of her, and experiencing

a fearful bliss in doing what was erratic, informal, and unexpected.

Surrounded by her influence all day, walking past the spots she

frequented, he was always thinking of her, and was obliged to own to

himself that his conscience was likely to be the loser in this battle.

To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still. Perhaps to know her

would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion. A

voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he did not desire

to be cured.

There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of view

the situation was growing immoral. For Sue to be the loved one of a man

who was licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella and none

other unto his life’s end, was a pretty bad second beginning when the

man was bent on such a course as Jude purposed. This conviction was so

real with him that one day when, as was frequent, he was at work in a

neighbouring village church alone, he felt it to be his duty to pray

against his weakness. But much as he wished to be an exemplar in these

things he could not get on. It was quite impossible, he found, to ask

to be delivered from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be

tempted unto seventy times seven. So he excused himself. “After all,”

he said, “it is not altogether an _erotolepsy_ that is the matter with

me, as at that first time. I can see that she is exceptionally bright;

and it is partly a wish for intellectual sympathy, and a craving for

loving-kindness in my solitude.” Thus he went on adoring her, fearing

to realize that it was human perversity. For whatever Sue’s virtues,

talents, or ecclesiastical saturation, it was certain that those items

were not at all the cause of his affection for her.

On an afternoon at this time a young girl entered the stone-mason’s

yard with some hesitation, and, lifting her skirts to avoid draggling

them in the white dust, crossed towards the office.

“That’s a nice girl,” said one of the men known as Uncle Joe.

“Who is she?” asked another.

“I don’t know—I’ve seen her about here and there. Why, yes, she’s the

daughter of that clever chap Bridehead who did all the wrought ironwork

at St. Silas’ ten years ago, and went away to London afterwards. I

don’t know what he’s doing now—not much I fancy—as she’s come back

here.”

Meanwhile the young woman had knocked at the office door and asked if

Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard. It so happened that Jude had

gone out somewhere or other that afternoon, which information she

received with a look of disappointment, and went away immediately. When

Jude returned they told him, and described her, whereupon he exclaimed,

“Why—that’s my cousin Sue!”

He looked along the street after her, but she was out of sight. He had

no longer any thought of a conscientious avoidance of her, and resolved

to call upon her that very evening. And when he reached his lodging he

found a note from her—a first note—one of those documents which, simple

and commonplace in themselves, are seen retrospectively to have been

pregnant with impassioned consequences. The very unconsciousness of a

looming drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from women

to men, or _vice versa_, makes them, when such a drama follows, and

they are read over by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more

impressive, solemn, and in cases, terrible.

Sue’s was of the most artless and natural kind. She addressed him as

her dear cousin Jude; said she had only just learnt by the merest

accident that he was living in Christminster, and reproached him with

not letting her know. They might have had such nice times together, she

said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had hardly any

congenial friend. But now there was every probability of her soon going

away, so that the chance of companionship would be lost perhaps for

ever.

A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was going away. That

was a contingency he had never thought of, and it spurred him to write

all the more quickly to her. He would meet her that very evening, he

said, one hour from the time of writing, at the cross in the pavement

which marked the spot of the Martyrdoms.

When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted that in his hurry

he should have suggested to her to meet him out of doors, when he might

have said he would call upon her. It was, in fact, the country custom

to meet thus, and nothing else had occurred to him. Arabella had been

met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might not seem respectable

to a dear girl like Sue. However, it could not be helped now, and he

moved towards the point a few minutes before the hour, under the

glimmer of the newly lighted lamps.

The broad street was silent, and almost deserted, although it was not

late. He saw a figure on the other side, which turned out to be hers,

and they both converged towards the crossmark at the same moment.

Before either had reached it she called out to him:

“I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in my life!

Come further on.”

The voice, though positive and silvery, had been tremulous. They walked

on in parallel lines, and, waiting her pleasure, Jude watched till she

showed signs of closing in, when he did likewise, the place being where

the carriers’ carts stood in the daytime, though there was none on the

spot then.

“I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn’t call,” began Jude

with the bashfulness of a lover. “But I thought it would save time if

we were going to walk.”

“Oh—I don’t mind that,” she said with the freedom of a friend. “I have

really no place to ask anybody in to. What I meant was that the place

you chose was so horrid—I suppose I ought not to say horrid—I mean

gloomy and inauspicious in its associations… But isn’t it funny to

begin like this, when I don’t know you yet?” She looked him up and down

curiously, though Jude did not look much at her.

“You seem to know me more than I know you,” she added.

“Yes—I have seen you now and then.”

“And you knew who I was, and didn’t speak? And now I am going away!”

“Yes. That’s unfortunate. I have hardly any other friend. I have,

indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I don’t quite like to

call on him just yet. I wonder if you know anything of him—Mr.

Phillotson? A parson somewhere about the county I think he is.”

“No—I only know of one Mr. Phillotson. He lives a little way out in the

country, at Lumsdon. He’s a village schoolmaster.”

“Ah! I wonder if he’s the same. Surely it is impossible! Only a

schoolmaster still! Do you know his Christian name—is it Richard?”

“Yes—it is; I’ve directed books to him, though I’ve never seen him.”

“Then he couldn’t do it!”

Jude’s countenance fell, for how could he succeed in an enterprise

wherein the great Phillotson had failed? He would have had a day of

despair if the news had not arrived during his sweet Sue’s presence,

but even at this moment he had visions of how Phillotson’s failure in

the grand university scheme would depress him when she had gone.

“As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call upon him?” said

Jude suddenly. “It is not late.”

She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through some prettily

wooded country. Presently the embattled tower and square turret of the

church rose into the sky, and then the school-house. They inquired of a

person in the street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to be at home, and

were informed that he was always at home. A knock brought him to the

school-house door, with a candle in his hand and a look of inquiry on

his face, which had grown thin and careworn since Jude last set eyes on

him.

That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should be of

this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which had

surrounded the school-master’s figure in Jude’s imagination ever since

their parting. It created in him at the same time a sympathy with

Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man. Jude

told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an old friend who

had been kind to him in his youthful days.

“I don’t remember you in the least,” said the school-master

thoughtfully. “You were one of my pupils, you say? Yes, no doubt; but

they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have

naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the quite

recent ones.”

“It was out at Marygreen,” said Jude, wishing he had not come.

“Yes. I was there a short time. And is this an old pupil, too?”

“No—that’s my cousin… I wrote to you for some grammars, if you

recollect, and you sent them?”

“Ah—yes!—I do dimly recall that incident.”

“It was very kind of you to do it. And it was you who first started me

on that course. On the morning you left Marygreen, when your goods were

on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your scheme was to be a

university man and enter the Church—that a degree was the necessary

hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a theologian or teacher.”

“I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not keep

my own counsel. The idea was given up years ago.”

“I have never forgotten it. It was that which brought me to this part

of the country, and out here to see you to-night.”

“Come in,” said Phillotson. “And your cousin, too.”

They entered the parlour of the school-house, where there was a lamp

with a paper shade, which threw the light down on three or four books.

Phillotson took it off, so that they could see each other better, and

the rays fell on the nervous little face and vivacious dark eyes and

hair of Sue, on the earnest features of her cousin, and on the

schoolmaster’s own maturer face and figure, showing him to be a spare

and thoughtful personage of five-and-forty, with a thin-lipped,

somewhat refined mouth, a slightly stooping habit, and a black frock

coat, which from continued frictions shone a little at the

shoulder-blades, the middle of the back, and the elbows.

The old friendship was imperceptibly renewed, the schoolmaster speaking

of his experiences, and the cousins of theirs. He told them that he

still thought of the Church sometimes, and that though he could not

enter it as he had intended to do in former years he might enter it as

a licentiate. Meanwhile, he said, he was comfortable in his present

position, though he was in want of a pupil-teacher.

They did not stay to supper, Sue having to be indoors before it grew

late, and the road was retraced to Christminster. Though they had

talked of nothing more than general subjects, Jude was surprised to

find what a revelation of woman his cousin was to him. She was so

vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling.

An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could

hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points was such

that it might have been misread as vanity. It was with heart-sickness

he perceived that, while her sentiments towards him were those of the

frankest friendliness only, he loved her more than before becoming

acquainted with her; and the gloom of the walk home lay not in the

night overhead, but in the thought of her departure.

“Why must you leave Christminster?” he said regretfully. “How can you

do otherwise than cling to a city in whose history such men as Newman,

Pusey, Ward, Keble, loom so large!”

“Yes—they do. Though how large do they loom in the history of the

world? … What a funny reason for caring to stay! I should never have

thought of it!” She laughed.

“Well—I must go,” she continued. “Miss Fontover, one of the partners

whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with her; and it is best to

go.”

“How did that happen?”

“She broke some statuary of mine.”

“Oh? Wilfully?”

“Yes. She found it in my room, and though it was my property she threw

it on the floor and stamped on it, because it was not according to her

taste, and ground the arms and the head of one of the figures all to

bits with her heel—a horrid thing!”

“Too Catholic-Apostolic for her, I suppose? No doubt she called them

popish images and talked of the invocation of saints.”

“No… No, she didn’t do that. She saw the matter quite differently.”

“Ah! Then I am surprised!”

“Yes. It was for quite some other reason that she didn’t like my

patron-saints. So I was led to retort upon her; and the end of it was

that I resolved not to stay, but to get into an occupation in which I

shall be more independent.”

“Why don’t you try teaching again? You once did, I heard.”

“I never thought of resuming it; for I was getting on as an

art-designer.”

“_Do_ let me ask Mr. Phillotson to let you try your hand in his school?

If you like it, and go to a training college, and become a first-class

certificated mistress, you get twice as large an income as any designer

or church artist, and twice as much freedom.”

“Well—ask him. Now I must go in. Good-bye, dear Jude! I am so glad we

have met at last. We needn’t quarrel because our parents did, need we?”

Jude did not like to let her see quite how much he agreed with her, and

went his way to the remote street in which he had his lodging.

To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which operated without

regard of consequences, and the next evening he again set out for

Lumsdon, fearing to trust to the persuasive effects of a note only. The

school-master was unprepared for such a proposal.

“What I rather wanted was a second year’s transfer, as it is called,”

he said. “Of course your cousin would do, personally; but she has had

no experience. Oh—she has, has she? Does she really think of adopting

teaching as a profession?”

Jude said she was disposed to do so, he thought, and his ingenious

arguments on her natural fitness for assisting Mr. Phillotson, of which

Jude knew nothing whatever, so influenced the schoolmaster that he said

he would engage her, assuring Jude as a friend that unless his cousin

really meant to follow on in the same course, and regarded this step as

the first stage of an apprenticeship, of which her training in a normal

school would be the second stage, her time would be wasted quite, the

salary being merely nominal.

The day after this visit Phillotson received a letter from Jude,

containing the information that he had again consulted his cousin, who

took more and more warmly to the idea of tuition; and that she had

agreed to come. It did not occur for a moment to the schoolmaster and

recluse that Jude’s ardour in promoting the arrangement arose from any

other feelings towards Sue than the instinct of co-operation common

among members of the same family.

V

The schoolmaster sat in his homely dwelling attached to the school,

both being modern erections; and he looked across the way at the old

house in which his teacher Sue had a lodging. The arrangement had been

concluded very quickly. A pupil-teacher who was to have been

transferred to Mr. Phillotson’s school had failed him, and Sue had been

taken as stop-gap. All such provisional arrangements as these could

only last till the next annual visit of H.M. Inspector, whose approval

was necessary to make them permanent. Having taught for some two years

in London, though she had abandoned that vocation of late, Miss

Bridehead was not exactly a novice, and Phillotson thought there would

be no difficulty in retaining her services, which he already wished to

do, though she had only been with him three or four weeks. He had found

her quite as bright as Jude had described her; and what

master-tradesman does not wish to keep an apprentice who saves him half

his labour?

It was a little over half-past eight o’clock in the morning and he was

waiting to see her cross the road to the school, when he would follow.

At twenty minutes to nine she did cross, a light hat tossed on her

head; and he watched her as a curiosity. A new emanation, which had

nothing to do with her skill as a teacher, seemed to surround her this

morning. He went to the school also, and Sue remained governing her

class at the other end of the room, all day under his eye. She

certainly was an excellent teacher.

It was part of his duty to give her private lessons in the evening, and

some article in the Code made it necessary that a respectable, elderly

woman should be present at these lessons when the teacher and the

taught were of different sexes. Richard Phillotson thought of the

absurdity of the regulation in this case, when he was old enough to be

the girl’s father; but he faithfully acted up to it; and sat down with

her in a room where Mrs. Hawes, the widow at whose house Sue lodged,

occupied herself with sewing. The regulation was, indeed, not easy to

evade, for there was no other sitting-room in the dwelling.

Sometimes as she figured—it was arithmetic that they were working

at—she would involuntarily glance up with a little inquiring smile at

him, as if she assumed that, being the master, he must perceive all

that was passing in her brain, as right or wrong. Phillotson was not

really thinking of the arithmetic at all, but of her, in a novel way

which somehow seemed strange to him as preceptor. Perhaps she knew that

he was thinking of her thus.

For a few weeks their work had gone on with a monotony which in itself

was a delight to him. Then it happened that the children were to be

taken to Christminster to see an itinerant exhibition, in the shape of

a model of Jerusalem, to which schools were admitted at a penny a head

in the interests of education. They marched along the road two and two,

she beside her class with her simple cotton sunshade, her little thumb

cocked up against its stem; and Phillotson behind in his long dangling

coat, handling his walking-stick genteelly, in the musing mood which

had come over him since her arrival. The afternoon was one of sun and

dust, and when they entered the exhibition room few people were present

but themselves. The model of the ancient city stood in the middle of

the apartment, and the proprietor, with a fine religious philanthropy

written on his features, walked round it with a pointer in his hand,

showing the young people the various quarters and places known to them

by name from reading their Bibles; Mount Moriah, the Valley of

Jehoshaphat, the City of Zion, the walls and the gates, outside one of

which there was a large mound like a tumulus, and on the mound a little

white cross. The spot, he said, was Calvary.

“I think,” said Sue to the schoolmaster, as she stood with him a little

in the background, “that this model, elaborate as it is, is a very

imaginary production. How does anybody know that Jerusalem was like

this in the time of Christ? I am sure this man doesn’t.”

“It is made after the best conjectural maps, based on actual visits to

the city as it now exists.”

“I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem,” she said, “considering we

are not descended from the Jews. There was nothing first-rate about the

place, or people, after all—as there was about Athens, Rome,

Alexandria, and other old cities.”

“But my dear girl, consider what it is to us!”

She was silent, for she was easily repressed; and then perceived behind

the group of children clustered round the model a young man in a white

flannel jacket, his form being bent so low in his intent inspection of

the Valley of Jehoshaphat that his face was almost hidden from view by

the Mount of Olives. “Look at your cousin Jude,” continued the

schoolmaster. “He doesn’t think we have had enough of Jerusalem!”

“Ah—I didn’t see him!” she cried in her quick, light voice. “Jude—how

seriously you are going into it!”

Jude started up from his reverie, and saw her. “Oh—Sue!” he said, with

a glad flush of embarrassment. “These are your school-children, of

course! I saw that schools were admitted in the afternoons, and thought

you might come; but I got so deeply interested that I didn’t remember

where I was. How it carries one back, doesn’t it! I could examine it

for hours, but I have only a few minutes, unfortunately; for I am in

the middle of a job out here.”

“Your cousin is so terribly clever that she criticizes it

unmercifully,” said Phillotson, with good-humoured satire. “She is

quite sceptical as to its correctness.”

“No, Mr. Phillotson, I am not—altogether! I hate to be what is called a

clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!” answered Sue

sensitively. “I only meant—I don’t know what I meant—except that it was

what you don’t understand!”

“_I_ know your meaning,” said Jude ardently (although he did not). “And

I think you are quite right.”

“That’s a good Jude—I know _you_ believe in me!” She impulsively seized

his hand, and leaving a reproachful look on the schoolmaster turned

away to Jude, her voice revealing a tremor which she herself felt to be

absurdly uncalled for by sarcasm so gentle. She had not the least

conception how the hearts of the twain went out to her at this

momentary revelation of feeling, and what a complication she was

building up thereby in the futures of both.

The model wore too much of an educational aspect for the children not

to tire of it soon, and a little later in the afternoon they were all

marched back to Lumsdon, Jude returning to his work. He watched the

juvenile flock in their clean frocks and pinafores, filing down the

street towards the country beside Phillotson and Sue, and a sad,

dissatisfied sense of being out of the scheme of the latters’ lives had

possession of him. Phillotson had invited him to walk out and see them

on Friday evening, when there would be no lessons to give to Sue, and

Jude had eagerly promised to avail himself of the opportunity.

Meanwhile the scholars and teachers moved homewards, and the next day,

on looking on the blackboard in Sue’s class, Phillotson was surprised

to find upon it, skilfully drawn in chalk, a perspective view of

Jerusalem, with every building shown in its place.

“I thought you took no interest in the model, and hardly looked at it?”

he said.

“I hardly did,” said she, “but I remembered that much of it.”

“It is more than I had remembered myself.”

Her Majesty’s school-inspector was at that time paying

“surprise-visits” in this neighbourhood to test the teaching unawares;

and two days later, in the middle of the morning lessons, the latch of

the door was softly lifted, and in walked my gentleman, the king of

terrors—to pupil-teachers.

To Mr. Phillotson the surprise was not great; like the lady in the

story, he had been played that trick too many times to be unprepared.

But Sue’s class was at the further end of the room, and her back was

towards the entrance; the inspector therefore came and stood behind her

and watched her teaching some half-minute before she became aware of

his presence. She turned, and realized that an oft-dreaded moment had

come. The effect upon her timidity was such that she uttered a cry of

fright. Phillotson, with a strange instinct of solicitude quite beyond

his control, was at her side just in time to prevent her falling from

faintness. She soon recovered herself, and laughed; but when the

inspector had gone there was a reaction, and she was so white that

Phillotson took her into his room, and gave her some brandy to bring

her round. She found him holding her hand.

“You ought to have told me,” she gasped petulantly, “that one of the

inspector’s surprise-visits was imminent! Oh, what shall I do! Now

he’ll write and tell the managers that I am no good, and I shall be

disgraced for ever!”

“He won’t do that, my dear little girl. You are the best teacher ever I

had!”

He looked so gently at her that she was moved, and regretted that she

had upbraided him. When she was better she went home.

Jude in the meantime had been waiting impatiently for Friday. On both

Wednesday and Thursday he had been so much under the influence of his

desire to see her that he walked after dark some distance along the

road in the direction of the village, and, on returning to his room to

read, found himself quite unable to concentrate his mind on the page.

On Friday, as soon as he had got himself up as he thought Sue would

like to see him, and made a hasty tea, he set out, notwithstanding that

the evening was wet. The trees overhead deepened the gloom of the hour,

and they dripped sadly upon him, impressing him with

forebodings—illogical forebodings; for though he knew that he loved her

he also knew that he could not be more to her than he was.

On turning the corner and entering the village the first sight that

greeted his eyes was that of two figures under one umbrella coming out

of the vicarage gate. He was too far back for them to notice him, but

he knew in a moment that they were Sue and Phillotson. The latter was

holding the umbrella over her head, and they had evidently been paying

a visit to the vicar—probably on some business connected with the

school work. And as they walked along the wet and deserted lane Jude

saw Phillotson place his arm round the girl’s waist; whereupon she

gently removed it; but he replaced it; and she let it remain, looking

quickly round her with an air of misgiving. She did not look absolutely

behind her, and therefore did not see Jude, who sank into the hedge

like one struck with a blight. There he remained hidden till they had

reached Sue’s cottage and she had passed in, Phillotson going on to the

school hard by.

“Oh, he’s too old for her—too old!” cried Jude in all the terrible

sickness of hopeless, handicapped love.

He could not interfere. Was he not Arabella’s? He was unable to go on

further, and retraced his steps towards Christminster. Every tread of

his feet seemed to say to him that he must on no account stand in the

schoolmaster’s way with Sue. Phillotson was perhaps twenty years her

senior, but many a happy marriage had been made in such conditions of

age. The ironical clinch to his sorrow was given by the thought that

the intimacy between his cousin and the schoolmaster had been brought

about entirely by himself.

VI

Jude’s old and embittered aunt lay unwell at Marygreen, and on the

following Sunday he went to see her—a visit which was the result of a

victorious struggle against his inclination to turn aside to the

village of Lumsdon and obtain a miserable interview with his cousin, in

which the word nearest his heart could not be spoken, and the sight

which had tortured him could not be revealed.

His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great part of Jude’s

short day was occupied in making arrangements for her comfort. The

little bakery business had been sold to a neighbour, and with the

proceeds of this and her savings she was comfortably supplied with

necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living with her and

ministering to her wants. It was not till the time had nearly come for

him to leave that he obtained a quiet talk with her, and his words

tended insensibly towards his cousin.

“Was Sue born here?”

“She was—in this room. They were living here at that time. What made

’ee ask that?”

“Oh—I wanted to know.”

“Now you’ve been seeing her!” said the harsh old woman. “And what did I

tell ’ee?”

“Well—that I was not to see her.”

“Have you gossiped with her?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t keep it up. She was brought up by her father to hate her

mother’s family; and she’ll look with no favour upon a working chap

like you—a townish girl as she’s become by now. I never cared much

about her. A pert little thing, that’s what she was too often, with her

tight-strained nerves. Many’s the time I’ve smacked her for her

impertinence. Why, one day when she was walking into the pond with her

shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats pulled above her knees,

afore I could cry out for shame, she said: ‘Move on, Aunty! This is no

sight for modest eyes!’”

“She was a little child then.”

“She was twelve if a day.”

“Well—of course. But now she’s older she’s of a thoughtful, quivering,

tender nature, and as sensitive as—”

“Jude!” cried his aunt, springing up in bed. “Don’t you be a fool about

her!”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a thing as a man

could possibly do for himself by trying hard. But she’s gone to the

other side of the world, and med never trouble you again. And there’ll

be a worse thing if you, tied and bound as you be, should have a fancy

for Sue. If your cousin is civil to you, take her civility for what it

is worth. But anything more than a relation’s good wishes it is stark

madness for ’ee to give her. If she’s townish and wanton it med bring

’ee to ruin.”

“Don’t say anything against her, Aunt! Don’t, please!”

A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the companion and nurse of

his aunt, who must have been listening to the conversation, for she

began a commentary on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as a

character in her recollections. She described what an odd little maid

Sue had been when a pupil at the village school across the green

opposite, before her father went to London—how, when the vicar arranged

readings and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the smallest of

them all, “in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash”; how

she recited “Excelsior,” “There was a sound of revelry by night,” and

“The Raven”; how during the delivery she would knit her little brows

and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as if some real

creature stood there—

“Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,

wandering from the Nightly shore,

Tell me what thy lordly name is

on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“She’d bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear,” corroborated the

sick woman reluctantly, “as she stood there in her little sash and

things, that you could see un a’most before your very eyes. You too,

Jude, had the same trick as a child of seeming to see things in the

air.”

The neighbour told also of Sue’s accomplishments in other kinds:

“She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could do things that

only boys do, as a rule. I’ve seen her hit in and steer down the long

slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing, one of a file of

twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted on glass, and

up the back slide without stopping. All boys except herself; and then

they’d cheer her, and then she’d say, ‘Don’t be saucy, boys,’ and

suddenly run indoors. They’d try to coax her out again. But ’a wouldn’t

come.”

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable

that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt that

day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the school to

see the room in which Sue’s little figure had so glorified itself; but

he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his

residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes. Jude was

startled by a salute from one of them:

“Ye’ve got there right enough, then!”

Jude showed that he did not understand.

“Why, to the seat of l’arning—the ‘City of Light’ you used to talk to

us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?”

“Yes; more!” cried Jude.

“When I was there once for an hour I didn’t see much in it for my part;

auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not much

going on at that.”

“You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a

man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought and

religion—the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country. All

that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of infinite

motion—the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a

well-known writer.”

“Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn’t see

nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot

o’ beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha’porth o’ cheese, and waited till it

was time to come along home. You’ve j’ined a college by this time, I

suppose?”

“Ah, no!” said Jude. “I am almost as far off that as ever.”

“How so?”

Jude slapped his pocket.

“Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you—only for them

with plenty o’ money.”

“There you are wrong,” said Jude, with some bitterness. “They are for

such ones!”

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude’s attention from the

imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract figure,

more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation of the

arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure to a seat

in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his prospects in a

cold northern light. He had lately felt that he could not quite satisfy

himself in his Greek—in the Greek of the dramatists particularly. So

fatigued was he sometimes after his day’s work that he could not

maintain the critical attention necessary for thorough application. He

felt that he wanted a coach—a friend at his elbow to tell him in a

moment what sometimes would occupy him a weary month in extracting from

unanticipative, clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely than

he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using up his

spare hours in a vague labour called “private study” without giving an

outlook on practicabilities?

“I ought to have thought of this before,” he said, as he journeyed

back. “It would have been better never to have embarked in the scheme

at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or what I

am aiming at… This hovering outside the walls of the colleges, as if

expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to lift me inside,

won’t do! I must get special information.”

The next week accordingly he sought it. What at first seemed an

opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentleman,

who had been pointed out as the head of a particular college, walking

in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at which Jude

chanced to be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and Jude looked

anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet rather

reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not go up and

address him; but he was sufficiently influenced by the incident to

think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his difficulties

by letter to some of the best and most judicious of these old masters,

and obtain their advice.

During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in such

positions about the city as would afford him glimpses of several of the

most distinguished among the provosts, wardens, and other heads of

houses; and from those he ultimately selected five whose physiognomies

seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-seeing men. To

these five he addressed letters, briefly stating his difficulties, and

asking their opinion on his stranded situation.

When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize them; he

wished they had not been sent. “It is just one of those intrusive,

vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in these days,” he

thought. “Why couldn’t I know better than address utter strangers in

such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad

character, for all that they know to the contrary… Perhaps that’s what

I am!”

Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply as to

his one last chance of redemption. He waited day after day, saying that

it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting. While he waited he

was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson. Phillotson was giving up

the school near Christminster, for a larger one further south, in

Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would affect his cousin; whether,

as seemed possible, it was a practical move of the schoolmaster’s

towards a larger income, in view of a provision for two instead of one,

he would not allow himself to say. And the tender relations between

Phillotson and the young girl of whom Jude was passionately enamoured

effectually made it repugnant to Jude’s tastes to apply to Phillotson

for advice on his own scheme.

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written vouchsafed

no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back entirely on himself,

as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened hope. By indirect

inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had long uneasily

suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and

exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to do this a good deal

of coaching would be necessary, and much natural ability. It was next

to impossible that a man reading on his own system, however widely and

thoroughly, even over the prolonged period of ten years, should be able

to compete with those who had passed their lives under trained teachers

and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the

only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of a

material kind. With the help of his information he began to reckon the

extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay, that,

at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be able to

save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a position

to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance to a

matriculation examination. The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the

place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move

among the churches and halls and become imbued with the _genius loci_,

had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its charms to him

from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal thing to do. “Let

me only get there,” he had said with the fatuousness of Crusoe over his

big boat, “and the rest is but a matter of time and energy.” It would

have been far better for him in every way if he had never come within

sight and sound of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy

commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and

thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear

to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an

iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He

looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his

thought was akin to Heine’s:

Above the youth’s inspired and flashing eyes

I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into

his dear Sue’s life by involving her in this collapse. And the painful

details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should now be

spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known a little

part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged thus

unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he awoke

from his dream. Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he went up

to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built theatre

that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had windows all

round, from which an outlook over the whole town and its edifices could

be gained. Jude’s eyes swept all the views in succession, meditatively,

mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings and their associations and

privileges were not for him. From the looming roof of the great

library, into which he hardly ever had time to enter, his gaze

travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables, streets, chapels,

gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble of this unrivalled

panorama. He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among the

manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied,

unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and

panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read

nor the high thinkers live.

He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees which

screened her whose presence had at first been the support of his heart,

and whose loss was now a maddening torture. But for this blow he might

have borne with his fate. With Sue as companion he could have renounced

his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the

reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should

affect him disastrously. Phillotson had no doubt passed through a

similar intellectual disappointment to that which now enveloped him.

But the schoolmaster had been since blest with the consolation of sweet

Sue, while for him there was no consoler.

Descending to the streets, he went listlessly along till he arrived at

an inn, and entered it. Here he drank several glasses of beer in rapid

succession, and when he came out it was night. By the light of the

flickering lamps he rambled home to supper, and had not long been

sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just

arrived for him. She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of its

possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that it bore

the embossed stamp of one of the colleges whose heads he had addressed.

“_One_—at last!” cried Jude.

The communication was brief, and not exactly what he had expected;

though it really was from the master in person. It ran thus:

BIBLIOLL COLLEGE.

SIR,—I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your

description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you

will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your

own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other

course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully,

T. TETUPHENAY.

To Mr. J. FAWLEY, Stone-mason.

This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had known all that

before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a hard slap after ten years

of labour, and its effect upon him just now was to make him rise

recklessly from the table, and, instead of reading as usual, to go

downstairs and into the street. He stood at a bar and tossed off two or

three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he came to a

spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city, gazing abstractedly

at the groups of people like one in a trance, till, coming to himself,

he began talking to the policeman fixed there.

That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself an inch

and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking humorously at

Jude, said, “You’ve had a wet, young man.”

“No; I’ve only begun,” he replied cynically.

Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He only heard in part

the policeman’s further remarks, having fallen into thought on what

struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway, whom nobody

ever thought of now. It had more history than the oldest college in the

city. It was literally teeming, stratified, with the shades of human

groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce; real enactments

of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had stood and talked of

Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution of King Charles, the

burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the Norman Conquest, possibly of

the arrival of Caesar. Here the two sexes had met for loving, hating,

coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered, for each other; had

triumphed over each other; cursed each other in jealousy, blessed each

other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely

more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life. These

struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster,

though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the

humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers,

who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at

all.

He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he went on till

he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.

Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,

soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light

women of the more respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the real

Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked about and

jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon a platform

and sang a comic song.

The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting

and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances—wistful to

gain a little joy. At ten o’clock he came away, choosing a circuitous

route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head had just

sent him the note.

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the

lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote

along the wall:

“_I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea,

who knoweth not such things as these?_”—Job xii. 3.

VII

The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning he laughed

at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a healthy one. He re-read

the letter from the master, and the wisdom in its lines, which had at

first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now. He saw himself as

a fool indeed.

Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not

proceed to his work. Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a

student, there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with

Sue. That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him through

his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till, unable to

bear it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the real

Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled

tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the

place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its

quaintness. Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced that he was

at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to expect

anything.

In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one, Jude

still retaining his seat in the corner, though his money was all spent,

and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit. He

surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity and

philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly, and made

friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed

church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in

earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed

auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and

Uncle Joe. There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and

surplice-maker’s assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters of

various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed “Bower

o’ Bliss” and “Freckles”; some horsey men “in the know” of betting

circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two devil-may-care

young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates; they had slipped in

by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups, and stayed to drink and smoke

short pipes with the racing gents aforesaid, looking at their watches

every now and then.

The conversation waxed general. Christminster society was criticized,

the dons, magistrates, and other people in authority being sincerely

pitied for their shortcomings, while opinions on how they ought to

conduct themselves and their affairs to be properly respected, were

exchanged in a large-minded and disinterested manner.

Jude Fawley, with the self-conceit, effrontery, and _aplomb_ of a

strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat

peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many

years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort of

mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the extent

of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that would have

appeared pitiable to himself in his sane hours.

“I don’t care a damn,” he was saying, “for any provost, warden,

principal, fellow, or cursed master of arts in the university! What I

know is that I’d lick ’em on their own ground if they’d give me a

chance, and show ’em a few things they are not up to yet!”

“Hear, hear!” said the undergraduates from the corner, where they were

talking privately about the pups.

“You always was fond o’ books, I’ve heard,” said Tinker Taylor, “and I

don’t doubt what you state. Now with me ’twas different. I always saw

there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my steps

accordingly, or I shouldn’t have been the man I am.”

“You aim at the Church, I believe?” said Uncle Joe. “If you are such a

scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why not give us a

specimen of your scholarship? Canst say the Creed in Latin, man? That

was how they once put it to a chap down in my country.”

“I should think so!” said Jude haughtily.

“Not he! Like his conceit!” screamed one of the ladies.

“Just you shut up, Bower o’ Bliss!” said one of the undergraduates.

“Silence!” He drank off the spirits in his tumbler, rapped with it on

the counter, and announced, “The gentleman in the corner is going to

rehearse the Articles of his Belief, in the Latin tongue, for the

edification of the company.”

“I won’t!” said Jude.

“Yes—have a try!” said the surplice-maker.

“You can’t!” said Uncle Joe.

“Yes, he can!” said Tinker Taylor.

“I’ll swear I can!” said Jude. “Well, come now, stand me a small Scotch

cold, and I’ll do it straight off.”

“That’s a fair offer,” said the undergraduate, throwing down the money

for the whisky.

The barmaid concocted the mixture with the bearing of a person

compelled to live amongst animals of an inferior species, and the glass

was handed across to Jude, who, having drunk the contents, stood up and

began rhetorically, without hesitation:

“_Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Factorem coeli et terrae,

visibilium omnium et invisibilium._”

“Good! Excellent Latin!” cried one of the undergraduates, who, however,

had not the slightest conception of a single word.

A silence reigned among the rest in the bar, and the maid stood still,

Jude’s voice echoing sonorously into the inner parlour, where the

landlord was dozing, and bringing him out to see what was going on.

Jude had declaimed steadily ahead, and was continuing:

“_Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus

est. Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas._”

“That’s the Nicene,” sneered the second undergraduate. “And we wanted

the Apostles’!”

“You didn’t say so! And every fool knows, except you, that the Nicene

is the most historic creed!”

“Let un go on, let un go on!” said the auctioneer.

But Jude’s mind seemed to grow confused soon, and he could not get on.

He put his hand to his forehead, and his face assumed an expression of

pain.

“Give him another glass—then he’ll fetch up and get through it,” said

Tinker Taylor.

Somebody threw down threepence, the glass was handed, Jude stretched

out his arm for it without looking, and having swallowed the liquor,

went on in a moment in a revived voice, raising it as he neared the end

with the manner of a priest leading a congregation:

“_Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre

Filioque procedit. Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et

conglorificatur. Qui locutus est per prophetas._

“_Et unam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam. Confiteor unum Baptisma

in remissionem peccatorum. Et exspecto Resurrectionem mortuorum. Et

vitam venturi saeculi. Amen._”

“Well done!” said several, enjoying the last word, as being the first

and only one they had recognized.

Then Jude seemed to shake the fumes from his brain, as he stared round

upon them.

“You pack of fools!” he cried. “Which one of you knows whether I have

said it or no? It might have been the Ratcatcher’s Daughter in double

Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell! See what I have

brought myself to—the crew I have come among!”

The landlord, who had already had his license endorsed for harbouring

queer characters, feared a riot, and came outside the counter; but

Jude, in his sudden flash of reason, had turned in disgust and left the

scene, the door slamming with a dull thud behind him.

He hastened down the lane and round into the straight broad street,

which he followed till it merged in the highway, and all sound of his

late companions had been left behind. Onward he still went, under the

influence of a childlike yearning for the one being in the world to

whom it seemed possible to fly—an unreasoning desire, whose ill

judgement was not apparent to him now. In the course of an hour, when

it was between ten and eleven o’clock, he entered the village of

Lumsdon, and reaching the cottage, saw that a light was burning in a

downstairs room, which he assumed, rightly as it happened, to be hers.

Jude stepped close to the wall, and tapped with his finger on the pane,

saying impatiently, “Sue, Sue!”

She must have recognized his voice, for the light disappeared from the

apartment, and in a second or two the door was unlocked and opened, and

Sue appeared with a candle in her hand.

“Is it Jude? Yes, it is! My dear, dear cousin, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, I am—I couldn’t help coming, Sue!” said he, sinking down upon the

doorstep. “I am so wicked, Sue—my heart is nearly broken, and I could

not bear my life as it was! So I have been drinking, and blaspheming,

or next door to it, and saying holy things in disreputable

quarters—repeating in idle bravado words which ought never to be

uttered but reverently! Oh, do anything with me, Sue—kill me—I don’t

care! Only don’t hate me and despise me like all the rest of the

world!”

“You are ill, poor dear! No, I won’t despise you; of course I won’t!

Come in and rest, and let me see what I can do for you. Now lean on me,

and don’t mind.” With one hand holding the candle and the other

supporting him, she led him indoors, and placed him in the only easy

chair the meagrely furnished house afforded, stretching his feet upon

another, and pulling off his boots. Jude, now getting towards his sober

senses, could only say, “Dear, dear Sue!” in a voice broken by grief

and contrition.

She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook his head. Then

telling him to go to sleep, and that she would come down early in the

morning and get him some breakfast, she bade him good-night and

ascended the stairs.

Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did not wake till

dawn. At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his

situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness of a

right mind. She knew the worst of him—the very worst. How could he face

her now? She would soon be coming down to see about breakfast, as she

had said, and there would he be in all his shame confronting her. He

could not bear the thought, and softly drawing on his boots, and taking

his hat from the nail on which she had hung it, he slipped noiselessly

out of the house.

His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and hide, and

perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Marygreen. He

called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found awaiting him a

note of dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he turned his

back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his side, and struck

southward into Wessex. He had no money left in his pocket, his small

savings, deposited at one of the banks in Christminster, having

fortunately been left untouched. To get to Marygreen, therefore, his

only course was walking; and the distance being nearly twenty miles, he

had ample time to complete on the way the sobering process begun in

him.

At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston. Here he pawned his

waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two, slept under a

rick that night. At dawn he rose, shook off the hayseeds and stems from

his clothes, and started again, breasting the long white road up the

hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a long way off, and

passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had carved his hopes years

ago.

He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast. Weary

and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary clearness of

brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so what a poor

Christ he made. Seeing a trough of water near he bathed his face, and

went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found breakfasting in

bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.

“What—out o’ work?” asked his relative, regarding him through eyes

sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for his

tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had been a

struggle with material things.

“Yes,” said Jude heavily. “I think I must have a little rest.”

Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay down in

his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan. He fell asleep for

a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell.

It _was_ hell—“the hell of conscious failure,” both in ambition and in

love. He thought of that previous abyss into which he had fallen before

leaving this part of the country; the deepest deep he had supposed it

then; but it was not so deep as this. That had been the breaking in of

the outer bulwarks of his hope: this was of his second line.

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension

which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his

virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his

mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows.

A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney like

the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall of the

churchless church-yard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its neighbour

smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-Gothic church in the new

spot had already begun to creak. Yet apparently it was not always the

outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice. He guessed its

origin in a moment or two; the curate was praying with his aunt in the

adjoining room. He remembered her speaking of him. Presently the sounds

ceased, and a step seemed to cross the landing. Jude sat up, and

shouted “Hoi!”

The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in. It was

a young clergyman.

“I think you are Mr. Highridge,” said Jude. “My aunt has mentioned you

more than once. Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the

bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I

am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.”

Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements, by an

unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambitious side

of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this had, up till

now, been merely a portion of the general plan of advancement.

“Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me,” added Jude

in conclusion. “And I don’t regret the collapse of my university hopes

one jot. I wouldn’t begin again if I were sure to succeed. I don’t care

for social success any more at all. But I do feel I should like to do

some good thing; and I bitterly regret the Church, and the loss of my

chance of being her ordained minister.”

The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply

interested, and at last he said: “If you feel a real call to the

ministry, and I won’t say from your conversation that you do not, for

it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the Church

as a licentiate. Only you must make up your mind to avoid strong

drink.”

“I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to support

me!”

Part Third AT MELCHESTER

_“For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her!”_

—SAPPHO (H. T. Wharton).

I

It was a new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as distinct

from the intellectual and emulative life. A man could preach and do

good to his fellow-creatures without taking double-firsts in the

schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge.

The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the

bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but

a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared that his whole

scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in,

a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which

was purely an artificial product of civilization. There were thousands

of young men on the same self-seeking track at the present moment. The

sensual hind who ate, drank, and lived carelessly with his wife through

the days of his vanity was a more likable being than he.

But to enter the Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in

any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that

of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city

slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that

might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being

followed by a remorseful man.

The favourable light in which this new thought showed itself by

contrast with his foregone intentions cheered Jude, as he sat there,

shabby and lonely; and it may be said to have given, during the next

few days, the _coup de grâce_ to his intellectual career—a career which

had extended over the greater part of a dozen years. He did nothing,

however, for some long stagnant time to advance his new desire,

occupying himself with little local jobs in putting up and lettering

headstones about the neighbouring villages, and submitting to be

regarded as a social failure, a returned purchase, by the half-dozen or

so of farmers and other country-people who condescended to nod to him.

The human interest of the new intention—and a human interest is

indispensable to the most spiritual and self-sacrificing—was created by

a letter from Sue, bearing a fresh postmark. She evidently wrote with

anxiety, and told very little about her own doings, more than that she

had passed some sort of examination for a Queen’s Scholarship, and was

going to enter a training college at Melchester to complete herself for

the vocation she had chosen, partly by his influence. There was a

theological college at Melchester; Melchester was a quiet and soothing

place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly

learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment; where the

altruistic feeling that he did possess would perhaps be more highly

estimated than a brilliancy which he did not.

As it would be necessary that he should continue for a time to work at

his trade while reading up Divinity, which he had neglected at

Christminster for the ordinary classical grind, what better course for

him than to get employment at the further city, and pursue this plan of

reading? That his excessive human interest in the new place was

entirely of Sue’s making, while at the same time Sue was to be regarded

even less than formerly as proper to create it, had an ethical

contradictoriness to which he was not blind. But that much he conceded

to human frailty, and hoped to learn to love her only as a friend and

kinswoman.

He considered that he might so mark out his coming years as to begin

his ministry at the age of thirty—an age which much attracted him as

being that of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee.

This would allow him plenty of time for deliberate study, and for

acquiring capital by his trade to help his aftercourse of keeping the

necessary terms at a theological college.

Christmas had come and passed, and Sue had gone to the Melchester

Normal School. The time was just the worst in the year for Jude to get

into new employment, and he had written suggesting to her that he

should postpone his arrival for a month or so, till the days had

lengthened. She had acquiesced so readily that he wished he had not

proposed it—she evidently did not much care about him, though she had

never once reproached him for his strange conduct in coming to her that

night, and his silent disappearance. Neither had she ever said a word

about her relations with Mr. Phillotson.

Suddenly, however, quite a passionate letter arrived from Sue. She was

quite lonely and miserable, she told him. She hated the place she was

in; it was worse than the ecclesiastical designer’s; worse than

anywhere. She felt utterly friendless; could he come

immediately?—though when he did come she would only be able to see him

at limited times, the rules of the establishment she found herself in

being strict to a degree. It was Mr. Phillotson who had advised her to

come there, and she wished she had never listened to him.

Phillotson’s suit was not exactly prospering, evidently; and Jude felt

unreasonably glad. He packed up his things and went to Melchester with

a lighter heart than he had known for months.

This being the turning over a new leaf he duly looked about for a

temperance hotel, and found a little establishment of that description

in the street leading from the station. When he had had something to

eat he walked out into the dull winter light over the town bridge, and

turned the corner towards the Close. The day was foggy, and standing

under the walls of the most graceful architectural pile in England he

paused and looked up. The lofty building was visible as far as the

roofridge; above, the dwindling spire rose more and more remotely, till

its apex was quite lost in the mist drifting across it.

The lamps now began to be lighted, and turning to the west front he

walked round. He took it as a good omen that numerous blocks of stone

were lying about, which signified that the cathedral was undergoing

restoration or repair to a considerable extent. It seemed to him, full

of the superstitions of his beliefs, that this was an exercise of

forethought on the part of a ruling Power, that he might find plenty to

do in the art he practised while waiting for a call to higher labours.

Then a wave of warmth came over him as he thought how near he now stood

to the bright-eyed vivacious girl with the broad forehead and pile of

dark hair above it; the girl with the kindling glance, daringly soft at

times—something like that of the girls he had seen in engravings from

paintings of the Spanish school. She was here—actually in this Close—in

one of the houses confronting this very west façade.

He went down the broad gravel path towards the building. It was an

ancient edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace, now a

training-school, with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard

in front shut in from the road by a wall. Jude opened the gate and went

up to the door through which, on inquiring for his cousin, he was

gingerly admitted to a waiting-room, and in a few minutes she came.

Though she had been here such a short while, she was not as he had seen

her last. All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had

become subdued lines. The screens and subtleties of convention had

likewise disappeared. Yet neither was she quite the woman who had

written the letter that summoned him. That had plainly been dashed off

in an impulse which second thoughts had somewhat regretted; thoughts

that were possibly of his recent self-disgrace. Jude was quite overcome

with emotion.

“You don’t—think me a demoralized wretch—for coming to you as I was—and

going so shamefully, Sue?”

“Oh, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know what had

caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my

poor Jude! And I am glad you have come!”

She wore a murrey-coloured gown with a little lace collar. It was made

quite plain, and hung about her slight figure with clinging

gracefulness. Her hair, which formerly she had worn according to the

custom of the day was now twisted up tightly, and she had altogether

the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an

under-brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline

had not yet been able to reach.

She had come forward prettily, but Jude felt that she had hardly

expected him to kiss her, as he was burning to do, under other colours

than those of cousinship. He could not perceive the least sign that Sue

regarded him as a lover, or ever would do so, now that she knew the

worst of him, even if he had the right to behave as one; and this

helped on his growing resolve to tell her of his matrimonial

entanglement, which he had put off doing from time to time in sheer

dread of losing the bliss of her company.

Sue came out into the town with him, and they walked and talked with

tongues centred only on the passing moments. Jude said he would like to

buy her a little present of some sort, and then she confessed, with

something of shame, that she was dreadfully hungry. They were kept on

very short allowances in the college, and a dinner, tea, and supper all

in one was the present she most desired in the world. Jude thereupon

took her to an inn and ordered whatever the house afforded, which was

not much. The place, however, gave them a delightful opportunity for a

_tête-à-tête_, nobody else being in the room, and they talked freely.

She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough

living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered

together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and

work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of a

young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but it

was not what he wanted especially to know—her relations with

Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and

eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up and

smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one,

dividing his fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the

fingers of a glove she was purchasing.

“Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?” she said.

“Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day.”

“I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man’s hands

subdued to what he works in… Well, I’m rather glad I came to this

training-school, after all. See how independent I shall be after the

two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr.

Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school.”

She had touched the subject at last. “I had a suspicion, a fear,” said

Jude, “that he—cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps wanted to

marry you.”

“Now don’t be such a silly boy!”

“He has said something about it, I expect.”

“If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!”

“Oh, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw him doing—”

“Not kissing me—that I’m certain!”

“No. But putting his arm round your waist.”

“Ah—I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.”

“You are wriggling out if it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!”

Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at

something this reproof was deciding her to say.

“I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s why I

don’t want to!”

“Very well, then, dear,” he said soothingly. “I have no real right to

ask you, and I don’t wish to know.”

“I shall tell you!” said she, with the perverseness that was part of

her. “This is what I have done: I have promised—I have promised—that I

will marry him when I come out of the training-school two years hence,

and have got my certificate; his plan being that we shall then take a

large double school in a great town—he the boys’ and I the girls’—as

married school-teachers often do, and make a good income between us.”

“Oh, Sue! … But of course it is right—you couldn’t have done better!”

He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his own belying

his words. Then he drew his hand quite away from hers, and turned his

face in estrangement from her to the window. Sue regarded him passively

without moving.

“I knew you would be angry!” she said with an air of no emotion

whatever. “Very well—I am wrong, I suppose! I ought not to have let you

come to see me! We had better not meet again; and we’ll only correspond

at long intervals, on purely business matters!”

This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear, as she

probably knew, and it brought him round at once. “Oh yes, we will,” he

said quickly. “Your being engaged can make no difference to me

whatever. I have a perfect right to see you when I want to; and I

shall!”

“Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling our

evening together. What does it matter about what one is going to do two

years hence!”

She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the subject drift

away. “Shall we go and sit in the cathedral?” he asked, when their meal

was finished.

“Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway station,”

she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. “That’s the

centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!”

“How modern you are!”

“So would you be if you had lived so much in the Middle Ages as I have

done these last few years! The cathedral was a very good place four or

five centuries ago; but it is played out now… I am not modern, either.

I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.”

Jude looked distressed.

“There—I won’t say any more of that!” she cried. “Only you don’t know

how bad I am, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t think so much of

me, or care whether I was engaged or not. Now there’s just time for us

to walk round the Close, then I must go in, or I shall be locked out

for the night.”

He took her to the gate and they parted. Jude had a conviction that his

unhappy visit to her on that sad night had precipitated this marriage

engagement, and it did anything but add to his happiness. Her reproach

had taken that shape, then, and not the shape of words. However, next

day he set about seeking employment, which it was not so easy to get as

at Christminster, there being, as a rule, less stone-cutting in

progress in this quiet city, and hands being mostly permanent. But he

edged himself in by degrees. His first work was some carving at the

cemetery on the hill; and ultimately he became engaged on the labour he

most desired—the cathedral repairs, which were very extensive, the

whole interior stonework having been overhauled, to be largely replaced

by new. It might be a labour of years to get it all done, and he had

confidence enough in his own skill with the mallet and chisel to feel

that it would be a matter of choice with himself how long he would

stay.

The lodgings he took near the Close Gate would not have disgraced a

curate, the rent representing a higher percentage on his wages than

mechanics of any sort usually care to pay. His combined bed and

sitting-room was furnished with framed photographs of the rectories and

deaneries at which his landlady had lived as trusted servant in her

time, and the parlour downstairs bore a clock on the mantelpiece

inscribed to the effect that it was presented to the same

serious-minded woman by her fellow-servants on the occasion of her

marriage. Jude added to the furniture of his room by unpacking

photographs of the ecclesiastical carvings and monuments that he had

executed with his own hands; and he was deemed a satisfactory

acquisition as tenant of the vacant apartment.

He found an ample supply of theological books in the city book-shops,

and with these his studies were recommenced in a different spirit and

direction from his former course. As a relaxation from the Fathers, and

such stock works as Paley and Butler, he read Newman, Pusey, and many

other modern lights. He hired a harmonium, set it up in his lodging,

and practised chants thereon, single and double.

II

“To-morrow is our grand day, you know. Where shall we go?”

“I have leave from three till nine. Wherever we can get to and come

back from in that time. Not ruins, Jude—I don’t care for them.”

“Well—Wardour Castle. And then we can do Fonthill if we like—all in the

same afternoon.”

“Wardour is Gothic ruins—and I hate Gothic!”

“No. Quite otherwise. It is a classic building—Corinthian, I think;

with a lot of pictures.”

“Ah—that will do. I like the sound of Corinthian. We’ll go.”

Their conversation had run thus some few weeks later, and next morning

they prepared to start. Every detail of the outing was a facet

reflecting a sparkle to Jude, and he did not venture to meditate on the

life of inconsistency he was leading. His Sue’s conduct was one lovely

conundrum to him; he could say no more.

There duly came the charm of calling at the college door for her; her

emergence in a nunlike simplicity of costume that was rather enforced

than desired; the traipsing along to the station, the porters’ “B’your

leave!,” the screaming of the trains—everything formed the basis of a

beautiful crystallization. Nobody stared at Sue, because she was so

plainly dressed, which comforted Jude in the thought that only himself

knew the charms those habiliments subdued. A matter of ten pounds spent

in a drapery-shop, which had no connection with her real life or her

real self, would have set all Melchester staring. The guard of the

train thought they were lovers, and put them into a compartment all by

themselves.

“That’s a good intention wasted!” said she.

Jude did not respond. He thought the remark unnecessarily cruel, and

partly untrue.

They reached the park and castle and wandered through the

picture-galleries, Jude stopping by preference in front of the

devotional pictures by Del Sarto, Guido Reni, Spagnoletto,

Sassoferrato, Carlo Dolci, and others. Sue paused patiently beside him,

and stole critical looks into his face as, regarding the Virgins, Holy

Families, and Saints, it grew reverent and abstracted. When she had

thoroughly estimated him at this, she would move on and wait for him

before a Lely or Reynolds. It was evident that her cousin deeply

interested her, as one might be interested in a man puzzling out his

way along a labyrinth from which one had one’s self escaped.

When they came out a long time still remained to them and Jude proposed

that as soon as they had had something to eat they should walk across

the high country to the north of their present position, and intercept

the train of another railway leading back to Melchester, at a station

about seven miles off. Sue, who was inclined for any adventure that

would intensify the sense of her day’s freedom, readily agreed; and

away they went, leaving the adjoining station behind them.

It was indeed open country, wide and high. They talked and bounded on,

Jude cutting from a little covert a long walking-stick for Sue as tall

as herself, with a great crook, which made her look like a shepherdess.

About half-way on their journey they crossed a main road running due

east and west—the old road from London to Land’s End. They paused, and

looked up and down it for a moment, and remarked upon the desolation

which had come over this once lively thoroughfare, while the wind

dipped to earth and scooped straws and hay-stems from the ground.

They crossed the road and passed on, but during the next half-mile Sue

seemed to grow tired, and Jude began to be distressed for her. They had

walked a good distance altogether, and if they could not reach the

other station it would be rather awkward. For a long time there was no

cottage visible on the wide expanse of down and turnip-land; but

presently they came to a sheepfold, and next to the shepherd, pitching

hurdles. He told them that the only house near was his mother’s and

his, pointing to a little dip ahead from which a faint blue smoke

arose, and recommended them to go on and rest there.

This they did, and entered the house, admitted by an old woman without

a single tooth, to whom they were as civil as strangers can be when

their only chance of rest and shelter lies in the favour of the

householder.

“A nice little cottage,” said Jude.

“Oh, I don’t know about the niceness. I shall have to thatch it soon,

and where the thatch is to come from I can’t tell, for straw do get

that dear, that ’twill soon be cheaper to cover your house wi’ chainey

plates than thatch.”

They sat resting, and the shepherd came in. “Don’t ’ee mind I,” he said

with a deprecating wave of the hand; “bide here as long as ye will. But

mid you be thinking o’ getting back to Melchester to-night by train?

Because you’ll never do it in this world, since you don’t know the lie

of the country. I don’t mind going with ye some o’ the ways, but even

then the train mid be gone.”

They started up.

“You can bide here, you know, over the night—can’t ’em, Mother? The

place is welcome to ye. ’Tis hard lying, rather, but volk may do

worse.” He turned to Jude and asked privately: “Be you a married

couple?”

“Hsh—no!” said Jude.

“Oh—I meant nothing ba’dy—not I! Well then, she can go into Mother’s

room, and you and I can lie in the outer chimmer after they’ve gone

through. I can call ye soon enough to catch the first train back.

You’ve lost this one now.”

On consideration they decided to close with this offer, and drew up and

shared with the shepherd and his mother the boiled bacon and greens for

supper.

“I rather like this,” said Sue, while their entertainers were clearing

away the dishes. “Outside all laws except gravitation and germination.”

“You only think you like it; you don’t: you are quite a product of

civilization,” said Jude, a recollection of her engagement reviving his

soreness a little.

“Indeed I am not, Jude. I like reading and all that, but I crave to get

back to the life of my infancy and its freedom.”

“Do you remember it so well? You seem to me to have nothing

unconventional at all about you.”

“Oh, haven’t I! You don’t know what’s inside me.”

“What?”

“The Ishmaelite.”

“An urban miss is what you are.”

She looked severe disagreement, and turned away.

The shepherd aroused them the next morning, as he had said. It was

bright and clear, and the four miles to the train were accomplished

pleasantly. When they had reached Melchester, and walked to the Close,

and the gables of the old building in which she was again to be immured

rose before Sue’s eyes, she looked a little scared. “I expect I shall

catch it!” she murmured.

They rang the great bell and waited.

“Oh, I bought something for you, which I had nearly forgotten,” she

said quickly, searching her pocket. “It is a new little photograph of

me. Would you like it?”

“_Would_ I!” He took it gladly, and the porter came. There seemed to be

an ominous glance on his face when he opened the gate. She passed in,

looking back at Jude, and waving her hand.

III

The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to

one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled the

species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester, formed a

very mixed community, which included the daughters of mechanics,

curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairy-men, soldiers, sailors,

and villagers. They sat in the large school-room of the establishment

on the evening previously described, and word was passed round that Sue

Bridehead had not come in at closing-time.

“She went out with her young man,” said a second-year’s student, who

knew about young men. “And Miss Traceley saw her at the station with

him. She’ll have it hot when she does come.”

“She said he was her cousin,” observed a youthful new girl.

“That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be

effectual in saving our souls,” said the head girl of the year, drily.

The fact was that, only twelve months before, there had occurred a

lamentable seduction of one of the pupils who had made the same

statement in order to gain meetings with her lover. The affair had

created a scandal, and the management had consequently been rough on

cousins ever since.

At nine o’clock the names were called, Sue’s being pronounced three

times sonorously by Miss Traceley without eliciting an answer.

At a quarter past nine the seventy stood up to sing the “Evening Hymn,”

and then knelt down to prayers. After prayers they went in to supper,

and every girl’s thought was, Where is Sue Bridehead? Some of the

students, who had seen Jude from the window, felt that they would not

mind risking her punishment for the pleasure of being kissed by such a

kindly-faced young man. Hardly one among them believed in the

cousinship.

Half an hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their tender

feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which at intervals

stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the legend “The

Weaker” upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were moulded,

which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and abilities

could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what

they are. They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose

pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious, and would not

discover till, amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their

injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds

would revert to this experience as to something which had been allowed

to slip past them insufficiently regarded.

One of the mistresses came in to turn out the lights, and before doing

so gave a final glance at Sue’s cot, which remained empty, and at her

little dressing-table at the foot, which, like all the rest, was

ornamented with various girlish trifles, framed photographs being not

the least conspicuous among them. Sue’s table had a moderate show, two

men in their filigree and velvet frames standing together beside her

looking-glass.

“Who are these men—did she ever say?” asked the mistress. “Strictly

speaking, relations’ portraits only are allowed on these tables, you

know.”

“One—the middle-aged man,” said a student in the next bed—“is the

schoolmaster she served under—Mr. Phillotson.”

“And the other—this undergraduate in cap and gown—who is he?”

“He is a friend, or was. She has never told his name.”

“Was it either of these two who came for her?”

“No.”

“You are sure ’twas not the undergraduate?”

“Quite. He was a young man with a black beard.”

The lights were promptly extinguished, and till they fell asleep the

girls indulged in conjectures about Sue, and wondered what games she

had carried on in London and at Christminster before she came here,

some of the more restless ones getting out of bed and looking from the

mullioned windows at the vast west front of the cathedral opposite, and

the spire rising behind it.

When they awoke the next morning they glanced into Sue’s nook, to find

it still without a tenant. After the early lessons by gas-light, in

half-toilet, and when they had come up to dress for breakfast, the bell

of the entrance gate was heard to ring loudly. The mistress of the

dormitory went away, and presently came back to say that the

principal’s orders were that nobody was to speak to Bridehead without

permission.

When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily tidy herself,

looking flushed and tired, she went to her cubicle in silence, none of

them coming out to greet her or to make inquiry. When they had gone

downstairs they found that she did not follow them into the dining-hall

to breakfast, and they then learnt that she had been severely

reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week, there to be

confined, and take her meals, and do all her reading.

At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they thought, too

severe. A round robin was prepared and sent in to the principal, asking

for a remission of Sue’s punishment. No notice was taken. Towards

evening, when the geography mistress began dictating her subject, the

girls in the class sat with folded arms.

“You mean that you are not going to work?” said the mistress at last.

“I may as well tell you that it has been ascertained that the young man

Bridehead stayed out with was not her cousin, for the very good reason

that she has no such relative. We have written to Christminster to

ascertain.”

“We are willing to take her word,” said the head girl.

“This young man was discharged from his work at Christminster for

drunkenness and blasphemy in public-houses, and he has come here to

live, entirely to be near her.”

However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the mistress left the

room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.

Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard exclamations

from the first-year’s girls in an adjoining classroom, and one rushed

in to say that Sue Bridehead had got out of the back window of the room

in which she had been confined, escaped in the dark across the lawn,

and disappeared. How she had managed to get out of the garden nobody

could tell, as it was bounded by the river at the bottom, and the side

door was locked.

They went and looked at the empty room, the casement between the middle

mullions of which stood open. The lawn was again searched with a

lantern, every bush and shrub being examined, but she was nowhere

hidden. Then the porter of the front gate was interrogated, and on

reflection he said that he remembered hearing a sort of splashing in

the stream at the back, but he had taken no notice, thinking some ducks

had come down the river from above.

“She must have walked through the river!” said a mistress.

“Or drownded herself,” said the porter.

The mind of the matron was horrified—not so much at the possible death

of Sue as at the possible half-column detailing that event in all the

newspapers, which, added to the scandal of the year before, would give

the college an unenviable notoriety for many months to come.

More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and then, at last,

on the opposite shore, which was open to the fields, some little

boot-tracks were discerned in the mud, which left no doubt that the too

excitable girl had waded through a depth of water reaching nearly to

her shoulders—for this was the chief river of the county, and was

mentioned in all the geography books with respect. As Sue had not

brought disgrace upon the school by drowning herself, the matron began

to speak superciliously of her, and to express gladness that she was

gone.

On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the Close Gate.

Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the silent Close, and

stand opposite the house that contained Sue, and watch the shadows of

the girls’ heads passing to and fro upon the blinds, and wish he had

nothing else to do but to sit reading and learning all day what many of

the thoughtless inmates despised. But to-night, having finished tea and

brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of the Twenty-ninth

Volume of Pusey’s Library of the Fathers, a set of books which he had

purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price that seemed to him to be

one of miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work. He fancied he

heard something rattle lightly against his window; then he heard it

again. Certainly somebody had thrown gravel. He rose and gently lifted

the sash.

“Jude!” (from below).

“Sue!”

“Yes—it is! Can I come up without being seen?”

“Oh yes!”

“Then don’t come down. Shut the window.”

Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough, the front door

being opened merely by a knob which anybody could turn, as in most old

country towns. He palpitated at the thought that she had fled to him in

her trouble as he had fled to her in his. What counterparts they were!

He unlatched the door of his room, heard a stealthy rustle on the dark

stairs, and in a moment she appeared in the light of his lamp. He went

up to seize her hand, and found she was clammy as a marine deity, and

that her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the

Parthenon frieze.

“I’m so cold!” she said through her chattering teeth. “Can I come by

your fire, Jude?”

She crossed to his little grate and very little fire, but as the water

dripped from her as she moved, the idea of drying herself was absurd.

“Whatever have you done, darling?” he asked, with alarm, the tender

epithet slipping out unawares.

“Walked through the largest river in the county—that’s what I’ve done!

They locked me up for being out with you; and it seemed so unjust that

I couldn’t bear it, so I got out of the window and escaped across the

stream!” She had begun the explanation in her usual slightly

independent tones, but before she had finished the thin pink lips

trembled, and she could hardly refrain from crying.

“Dear Sue!” he said. “You must take off all your things! And let me

see—you must borrow some from the landlady. I’ll ask her.”

“No, no! Don’t let her know, for God’s sake! We are so near the school

that they’ll come after me!”

“Then you must put on mine. You don’t mind?”

“Oh no.”

“My Sunday suit, you know. It is close here.” In fact, everything was

close and handy in Jude’s single chamber, because there was not room

for it to be otherwise. He opened a drawer, took out his best dark

suit, and giving the garments a shake, said, “Now, how long shall I

give you?”

“Ten minutes.”

Jude left the room and went into the street, where he walked up and

down. A clock struck half-past seven, and he returned. Sitting in his

only arm-chair he saw a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself

on a Sunday, so pathetic in her defencelessness that his heart felt big

with the sense of it. On two other chairs before the fire were her wet

garments. She blushed as he sat down beside her, but only for a moment.

“I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all my

things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They are only a woman’s

clothes—sexless cloth and linen… I wish I didn’t feel so ill and sick!

Will you dry my clothes now? Please do, Jude, and I’ll get a lodging by

and by. It is not late yet.”

“No, you shan’t, if you are ill. You must stay here. Dear, dear Sue,

what can I get for you?”

“I don’t know! I can’t help shivering. I wish I could get warm.” Jude

put on her his great-coat in addition, and then ran out to the nearest

public-house, whence he returned with a little bottle in his hand.

“Here’s six of best brandy,” he said. “Now you drink it, dear; all of

it.”

“I can’t out of the bottle, can I?” Jude fetched the glass from the

dressing-table, and administered the spirit in some water. She gasped a

little, but gulped it down, and lay back in the armchair.

She then began to relate circumstantially her experiences since they

had parted; but in the middle of her story her voice faltered, her head

nodded, and she ceased. She was in a sound sleep. Jude, dying of

anxiety lest she should have caught a chill which might permanently

injure her, was glad to hear the regular breathing. He softly went

nearer to her, and observed that a warm flush now rosed her hitherto

blue cheeks, and felt that her hanging hand was no longer cold. Then he

stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a

divinity.

IV

Jude’s reverie was interrupted by the creak of footsteps ascending the

stairs.

He whisked Sue’s clothing from the chair where it was drying, thrust it

under the bed, and sat down to his book. Somebody knocked and opened

the door immediately. It was the landlady.

“Oh, I didn’t know whether you was in or not, Mr. Fawley. I wanted to

know if you would require supper. I see you’ve a young gentleman—”

“Yes, ma’am. But I think I won’t come down to-night. Will you bring

supper up on a tray, and I’ll have a cup of tea as well.”

It was Jude’s custom to go downstairs to the kitchen, and eat his meals

with the family, to save trouble. His landlady brought up the supper,

however, on this occasion, and he took it from her at the door.

When she had descended he set the teapot on the hob, and drew out Sue’s

clothes anew; but they were far from dry. A thick woollen gown, he

found, held a deal of water. So he hung them up again, and enlarged his

fire and mused as the steam from the garments went up the chimney.

Suddenly she said, “Jude!”

“Yes. All right. How do you feel now?”

“Better. Quite well. Why, I fell asleep, didn’t I? What time is it? Not

late surely?”

“It is past ten.”

“Is it really? What _shall_ I do!” she said, starting up.

“Stay where you are.”

“Yes; that’s what I want to do. But I don’t know what they would say!

And what will you do?”

“I am going to sit here by the fire all night, and read. To-morrow is

Sunday, and I haven’t to go out anywhere. Perhaps you will be saved a

severe illness by resting there. Don’t be frightened. I’m all right.

Look here, what I have got for you. Some supper.”

When she had sat upright she breathed plaintively and said, “I do feel

rather weak still. I thought I was well; and I ought not to be here,

ought I?” But the supper fortified her somewhat, and when she had had

some tea and had lain back again she was bright and cheerful.

The tea must have been green, or too long drawn, for she seemed

preternaturally wakeful afterwards, though Jude, who had not taken any,

began to feel heavy; till her conversation fixed his attention.

“You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn’t you?”

she said, breaking a silence. “It was very odd you should have done

that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.”

“You are very philosophical. ‘A negation’ is profound talking.”

“Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?” she asked, with a touch of

raillery.

“No—not learned. Only you don’t talk quite like a girl—well, a girl who

has had no advantages.”

“I have had advantages. I don’t know Latin and Greek, though I know the

grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin

classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lemprière,

Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio,

Scarron, De Brantôme, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare,

the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the

unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery.”

“You have read more than I,” he said with a sigh. “How came you to read

some of those queerer ones?”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it was by accident. My life has been

entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear

of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them—one or two

of them particularly—almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not

felt about them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their guard

against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—no man short of a

sensual savage—will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad,

unless she invites him. Until she says by a look ‘Come on’ he is always

afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.

However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a

friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught

me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold

of otherwise.”

“Is your friendship broken off?”

“Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken

his degree and left Christminster.”

“You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?”

“Yes. We used to go about together—on walking tours, reading tours, and

things of that sort—like two men almost. He asked me to live with him,

and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he

meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his

mistress, in fact, but I wasn’t in love with him—and on my saying I

should go away if he didn’t agree to _my_ plan, he did so. We shared a

sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one

of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go

abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so

long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman.

I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to

die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty—though I

hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to

Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a

little money—because I broke his heart, I suppose. That’s how men

are—so much better than women!”

“Good heavens!—what did you do then?”

“Ah—now you are angry with me!” she said, a contralto note of tragedy

coming suddenly into her silvery voice. “I wouldn’t have told you if I

had known!”

“No, I am not. Tell me all.”

“Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost

it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned

to Christminster, as my father— who was also in London, and had started

as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre—wouldn’t have me back; and I got

that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me… I said you

didn’t know how bad I was!”

Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read

more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled

as he said: “However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent

as you are unconventional!”

“I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have

‘twitched the robe

From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,’”

said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was

brimming with tears. “But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if

that’s what you mean! I have remained as I began.”

“I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they

began.”

“Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be

cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won’t have it! Some of the

most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in

their daily lives.”

“Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?”

“Yes—long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody.”

“What did he say?”

“He did not pass any criticism—only said I was everything to him,

whatever I did; and things like that.”

Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away

from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender.

“Aren’t you _really_ vexed with me, dear Jude?” she suddenly asked, in

a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come

from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. “I would

rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!”

“I don’t know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about

you!”

“I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met.”

“You don’t care _more_! There, I ought not to say that. Don’t answer

it!”

There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him

cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very

helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he.

“I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so

hard,” he said, to turn the subject. “I am absorbed in theology, you

know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you

weren’t here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you

wouldn’t like—”

“Oh no, no,” she answered, “I would rather not, if you don’t mind. I

should seem so—such a hypocrite.”

“I thought you wouldn’t join, so I didn’t propose it. You must remember

that I hope to be a useful minister some day.”

“To be ordained, I think you said?”

“Yes.”

“Then you haven’t given up the idea?—I thought that perhaps you had by

this time.”

“Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about

that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr.

Phillotson—”

“I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified

degree, on its intellectual side,” said Sue Bridehead earnestly. “My

friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man

I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new

wine in old bottles. The mediævalism of Christminster must go, be

sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at

times one couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of

the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in

touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest

mind I always felt,

‘O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!’”…

“Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!”

“Then I won’t, dear Jude!” The emotional throat-note had come back, and

she turned her face away.

“I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was

resentful because I couldn’t get there.” He spoke gently, and resisted

his impulse to pique her on to tears.

“It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans,

drunkards, and paupers,” she said, perverse still at his differing from

her. “_They_ see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the

colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very

men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a

man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or

friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’

sons.”

“Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher.”

“And I for something broader, truer,” she insisted. “At present

intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other;

and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other.”

“What would Mr. Phillotson—”

“It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!”

He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she

turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending

university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as

Phillotson’s _protégée_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him.

“Well, that’s just what I am, too,” he said. “I am fearful of life,

spectre-seeing always.”

“But you are good and dear!” she murmured.

His heart bumped, and he made no reply.

“You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?” she added,

putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her.

“Let me see—when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and—”

“There’s a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now

will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then

say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on

any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me

to my custom? You are sure you won’t join me?”

“I’ll look at you.”

“No. Don’t tease, Sue!”

“Very well—I’ll do just as you bid me, and I won’t vex you, Jude,” she

replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever

after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than

the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it

up, and turned over the leaves.

“Jude,” she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her;

“will you let me make you a _new_ New Testament, like the one I made

for myself at Christminster?”

“Oh yes. How was that made?”

“I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into

separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as

written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the

Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the

volume rebound. My university friend Mr.—but never mind his name, poor

boy—said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards

made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable.”

“H’m!” said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.

“And what a literary enormity this is,” she said, as she glanced into

the pages of Solomon’s Song. “I mean the synopsis at the head of each

chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn’t

be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed,

many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to

think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number

they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff.”

Jude looked pained. “You are quite Voltairean!” he murmured.

“Indeed? Then I won’t say any more, except that people have no right to

falsify the Bible! I _hate_ such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster

over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human

love as lies in that great and passionate song!” Her speech had grown

spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. “I

_wish_ I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my

side!”

“But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!” he said,

taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into

mere argument.

“Yes you are, yes you are!” she cried, turning away her face that he

might not see her brimming eyes. “You are on the side of the people in

the training-school—at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on

is, that to explain such verses as this: ‘Whither is thy beloved gone,

O thou fairest among women?’ by the note: ‘_The Church professeth her

faith_,’ is supremely ridiculous!”

“Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I

am—only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know

_you_ are fairest among women to me, come to that!”

“But you are not to say it now!” Sue replied, her voice changing to its

softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands

like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on

such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what

was written in an old book like the Bible.

“I won’t disturb your convictions—I really won’t!” she went on

soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. “But I did

want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and

knew you wanted to be my comrade, I—shall I confess it?—thought that

man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don’t

know what to say.”

“Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn’t

long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you

believe it. I take Christianity.”

“Well, perhaps you might take something worse.”

“Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!” He thought of Arabella.

“I won’t ask what, because we are going to be _very_ nice with each

other, aren’t we, and never, never, vex each other any more?” She

looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his

breast.

“I shall always care for you!” said Jude.

“And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your

faulty and tiresome little Sue!”

He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing.

Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and

was he to be the next one? … But Sue was so dear! … If he could only

get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily

of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion

on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of

daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he

had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or

absence, would ever divide him from her.

But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell

asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused

himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six

o’clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her

clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his

she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and

boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on

the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the

yard.

V

When he returned she was dressed as usual.

“Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?” she asked. “The town

is not yet astir.”

“But you have had no breakfast.”

“Oh, I don’t want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that

school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don’t

they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don’t know! It was quite by his

wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have

any respect or fear. I hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me

dreadfully, I expect!”

“I’ll go to him and explain—” began Jude.

“Oh no, you shan’t. I don’t care for him! He may think what he likes—I

shall do just as I choose!”

“But you just this moment said—”

“Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of

what I shall do—go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the

training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near

Shaston, about eighteen miles from here—and I shall stay there till

this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again.”

At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of

coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising

to go to his work every day before the household was astir.

“Now a dew-bit to eat with it,” he said; “and off we go. You can have a

regular breakfast when you get there.”

They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the

station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an

upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed

sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him

at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted

to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the

platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more.

“I want to tell you something—two things,” he said hurriedly as the

train came up. “One is a warm one, the other a cold one!”

“Jude,” she said. “I know one of them. And you mustn’t!”

“What?”

“You mustn’t love me. You are to like me—that’s all!”

Jude’s face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated

in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then

the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished

away.

Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her

departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the

cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her,

which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had

reached her friend’s house. She told him of her safe arrival and

comfortable quarters, and then added:—

What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at

parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were

out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it,

and it has reproached me ever since. _If you want to love me, Jude, you

may_: I don’t mind at all; and I’ll never say again that you mustn’t!

Now I won’t write any more about that. You do forgive your

thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won’t make her miserable by

saying you don’t?—Ever,

SUE.

It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought

what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a

long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt

he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a

conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her.

Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue’s impulsive

note than it really was intended to bear.

After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would

write again. But he received no further communication; and in the

intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he

should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen

miles.

He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his

missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not

stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her

he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following

day, for he felt sure something had happened.

His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her

immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written

for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival

at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of

Sunday, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when the parish was as

vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the

church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison.

A little girl opened the door. “Miss Bridehead is up-stairs,” she said.

“And will you please walk up to her?”

“Is she ill?” asked Jude hastily.

“Only a little—not very.”

Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him

which way to turn—the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the

doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet

square.

“Oh, Sue!” he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. “How

is this! You couldn’t write?”

“No—it wasn’t that!” she answered. “I did catch a bad cold—but I could

have written. Only I wouldn’t!”

“Why not?—frightening me like this!”

“Yes—that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to

you any more. They won’t have me back at the school—that’s why I

couldn’t write. Not the fact, but the reason!”

“Well?”

“They not only won’t have me, but they gave me a parting piece of

advice—”

“What?”

She did not answer directly. “I vowed I never would tell you, Jude—it

is so vulgar and distressing!”

“Is it about us?”

“Yes.”

“But do tell me!”

“Well—somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say

you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my

reputation! … There—now I have told you, and I wish I hadn’t!”

“Oh, poor Sue!”

“I don’t think of you like that means! It did just _occur_ to me to

regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn’t begun to. I _have_

recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as

total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude—why, of course, if I

had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn’t have come to you so often!

And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till

the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little.

Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my

fault. Everything is my fault always!”

The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each

other with a mutual distress.

“I was so blind at first!” she went on. “I didn’t see what you felt at

all. Oh, you have been unkind to me—you have—to look upon me as a

sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself!

Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we’ve

been doing wrong! I’ll never trust you again!”

“Yes, Sue,” he said simply; “I am to blame—more than you think. I was

quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or

two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers

prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge

to avail myself of it. But don’t you think I deserve a little

consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I

couldn’t help having them?”

She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if

afraid she might forgive him.

By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that

fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue’s

undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its

temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and

ventured it, oblivious both of Sue’s declaration of her neutral

feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of

Arabella’s parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part

to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of

this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the

recognized barriers between them.

“Of course—I know you don’t—care about me in any particular way,” he

sorrowed. “You ought not, and you are right. You belong to—Mr.

Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?”

“Yes,” she said shortly, her face changing a little. “Though I didn’t

ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I

shouldn’t care if he didn’t come any more!”

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his

honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude’s feelings of love were

deprecated by her. He went on to something else.

“This will blow over, dear Sue,” he said. “The training-school

authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some

other, no doubt.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Phillotson,” she said decisively.

Sue’s kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more

intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy.

But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would

have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of

renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest,

should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and

decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then,

in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming

characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written

almost immediately he had gone from her:

Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it,

and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you

not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and

associate, with all my faults. I’ll try not to be like it again.

I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from

the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would

like?—Your repentant

SUE.

Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the

cathedral works when she came.

VI

Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty

concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson,

who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near

Christminster, to undertake a large boys’ school in his native town of

Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the

crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal

that the schoolmaster’s plans and dreams so long indulged in had been

abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor

literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was

now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose—that of

keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls’

schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go

into training, since she would not marry him offhand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and

entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster

was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture

being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to

sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of

his old studies—one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic

antiquities—an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a

subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had

interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to

those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains

were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast

to accepted views on the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby

of Phillotson at present—his ostensible reason for going alone into

fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself

up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected,

instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part

had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it

was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular

evening in the month, when it had grown quite late—to near midnight,

indeed—and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient

angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward,

announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was

not exactly studying.

The interior of the room—the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster’s

loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire,

bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research—more than

creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own

making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now.

What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes,

written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months before, and

it was the clerical rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,

few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its

envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same

womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by one

and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these small

documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were

straightforward, frank letters, signed “Sue B—”; just such ones as

would be written during short absences, with no other thought than

their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading and

other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by the

writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of

them—quite a recent note—the young woman said that she had received his

considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of him to

say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the school

being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her strong wish

that her engagement to him should not be known, which it would

infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the

school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be

gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man who loved her had not

been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.

He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from which he

drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had known her,

standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand. There was

another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a very

distinct and attractive picture of her, which just disclosed, too, the

thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods. It was a duplicate of

the one she had given Jude, and would have given to any man. Phillotson

brought it half-way to his lips, but withdrew it in doubt at her

perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing the dead pasteboard with all the

passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young man of

eighteen.

The schoolmaster’s was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,

rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving. A certain

gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by nature, suggesting an

inherent wish to do rightly by all. His speech was a little slow, but

his tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect. His

greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle of his

crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he only wore

spectacles when reading at night. It was almost certainly a

renunciation forced upon him by his academic purpose, rather than a

distaste for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one

of the sex in matrimony.

Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated many and

oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick and

penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to the

self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making him,

in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet glances,

lest they should read what the dream within him was.

He had honourably acquiesced in Sue’s announced wish that he was not

often to visit her at the training school; but at length, his patience

being sorely tried, he set out one Saturday afternoon to pay her an

unexpected call. There the news of her departure—expulsion as it might

almost have been considered—was flashed upon him without warning or

mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few minutes to behold

her face; and when he turned away he could hardly see the road before

him.

Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,

although it was fourteen days old. A short reflection told him that

this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for

silence as any degree of blameworthiness.

They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having no

immediate anxiety about her comfort, his thoughts took the direction of

a burning indignation against the training school committee. In his

bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent cathedral, just now in a

direly dismantled state by reason of the repairs. He sat down on a

block of freestone, regardless of the dusty imprint it made on his

breeches; and his listless eyes following the movements of the workmen

he presently became aware that the reputed culprit, Sue’s lover Jude,

was one amongst them.

Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the model

of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson’s tentative

courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man’s

mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to

communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson’s success in

obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude, he had frankly

recognized that he did not wish to see or hear of his senior any more,

learn anything of his pursuits, or even imagine again what excellencies

might appertain to his character. On this very day of the

schoolmaster’s visit Jude was expecting Sue, as she had promised; and

when therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the nave of the building,

saw, moreover, that he was coming to speak to him, he felt no little

embarrassment; which Phillotson’s own embarrassment prevented his

observing.

Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other workmen to the

spot where Phillotson had been sitting. Jude offered him a piece of

sackcloth for a cushion, and told him it was dangerous to sit on the

bare block.

“Yes; yes,” said Phillotson abstractedly, as he reseated himself, his

eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying to remember where he

was. “I won’t keep you long. It was merely that I have heard that you

have seen my little friend Sue recently. It occurred to me to speak to

you on that account. I merely want to ask—about her.”

“I think I know what!” Jude hurriedly said. “About her escaping from

the training school, and her coming to me?”

“Yes.”

“Well”—Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to

annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery

which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most

honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off

Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true, and

that Sue had irretrievably committed herself with him. But his action

did not respond for a moment to his animal instinct; and what he said

was, “I am glad of your kindness in coming to talk plainly to me about

it. You know what they say?—that I ought to marry her.”

“What!”

“And I wish with all my soul I could!”

Phillotson trembled, and his naturally pale face acquired a corpselike

sharpness in its lines. “I had no idea that it was of this nature! God

forbid!”

“No, no!” said Jude aghast. “I thought you understood? I mean that were

I in a position to marry her, or someone, and settle down, instead of

living in lodgings here and there, I should be glad!”

What he had really meant was simply that he loved her.

“But—since this painful matter has been opened up—what really

happened?” asked Phillotson, with the firmness of a man who felt that a

sharp smart now was better than a long agony of suspense hereafter.

“Cases arise, and this is one, when even ungenerous questions must be

put to make false assumptions impossible, and to kill scandal.”

Jude explained readily; giving the whole series of adventures,

including the night at the shepherd’s, her wet arrival at his lodging,

her indisposition from her immersion, their vigil of discussion, and

his seeing her off next morning.

“Well now,” said Phillotson at the conclusion, “I take it as your final

word, and I know I can believe you, that the suspicion which led to her

rustication is an absolutely baseless one?”

“It is,” said Jude solemnly. “Absolutely. So help me God!”

The schoolmaster rose. Each of the twain felt that the interview could

not comfortably merge in a friendly discussion of their recent

experiences, after the manner of friends; and when Jude had taken him

round, and shown him some features of the renovation which the old

cathedral was undergoing, Phillotson bade the young man good-day and

went away.

This visit took place about eleven o’clock in the morning; but no Sue

appeared. When Jude went to his dinner at one he saw his beloved ahead

of him in the street leading up from the North Gate, walking as if no

way looking for him. Speedily overtaking her he remarked that he had

asked her to come to him at the cathedral, and she had promised.

“I have been to get my things from the college,” she said—an

observation which he was expected to take as an answer, though it was

not one. Finding her to be in this evasive mood he felt inclined to

give her the information so long withheld.

“You have not seen Mr. Phillotson to-day?” he ventured to inquire.

“I have not. But I am not going to be cross-examined about him; and if

you ask anything more I won’t answer!”

“It is very odd that—” He stopped, regarding her.

“What?”

“That you are often not so nice in your real presence as you are in

your letters!”

“Does it really seem so to you?” said she, smiling with quick

curiosity. “Well, that’s strange; but I feel just the same about you,

Jude. When you are gone away I seem such a coldhearted—”

As she knew his sentiment towards her Jude saw that they were getting

upon dangerous ground. It was now, he thought, that he must speak as an

honest man.

But he did not speak, and she continued: “It was that which made me

write and say—I didn’t mind your loving me—if you wanted to, much!”

The exultation he might have felt at what that implied, or seemed to

imply, was nullified by his intention, and he rested rigid till he

began: “I have never told you—”

“Yes you have,” murmured she.

“I mean, I have never told you my history—all of it.”

“But I guess it. I know nearly.”

Jude looked up. Could she possibly know of that morning performance of

his with Arabella; which in a few months had ceased to be a marriage

more completely than by death? He saw that she did not.

“I can’t quite tell you here in the street,” he went on with a gloomy

tongue. “And you had better not come to my lodgings. Let us go in

here.”

The building by which they stood was the market-house; it was the only

place available; and they entered, the market being over, and the

stalls and areas empty. He would have preferred a more congenial spot,

but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle

for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor

littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of

decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished

his brief narrative, which merely led up to the information that he had

married a wife some years earlier, and that his wife was living still.

Almost before her countenance had time to change she hurried out the

words,

“Why didn’t you tell me before!”

“I couldn’t. It seemed so cruel to tell it.”

“To yourself, Jude. So it was better to be cruel to me!”

“No, dear darling!” cried Jude passionately. He tried to take her hand,

but she withdrew it. Their old relations of confidence seemed suddenly

to have ended, and the antagonisms of sex to sex were left without any

counter-poising predilections. She was his comrade, friend, unconscious

sweetheart no longer; and her eyes regarded him in estranged silence.

“I was ashamed of the episode in my life which brought about the

marriage,” he continued. “I can’t explain it precisely now. I could

have done it if you had taken it differently!”

“But how can I?” she burst out. “Here I have been saying, or writing,

that—that you might love me, or something of the sort!—just out of

charity—and all the time—oh, it is perfectly damnable how things are!”

she said, stamping her foot in a nervous quiver.

“You take me wrong, Sue! I never thought you cared for me at all, till

quite lately; so I felt it did not matter! Do you care for me, Sue?—you

know how I mean?—I don’t like ‘out of charity’ at all!”

It was a question which in the circumstances Sue did not choose to

answer.

“I suppose she—your wife—is—a very pretty woman, even if she’s wicked?”

she asked quickly.

“She’s pretty enough, as far as that goes.”

“Prettier than I am, no doubt!”

“You are not the least alike. And I have never seen her for years… But

she’s sure to come back—they always do!”

“How strange of you to stay apart from her like this!” said Sue, her

trembling lip and lumpy throat belying her irony. “You, such a

religious man. How will the demi-gods in your Pantheon—I mean those

legendary persons you call saints—intercede for you after this? Now if

I had done such a thing it would have been different, and not

remarkable, for I at least don’t regard marriage as a sacrament. Your

theories are not so advanced as your practice!”

“Sue, you are terribly cutting when you like to be—a perfect Voltaire!

But you must treat me as you will!”

When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and trying to blink away

her sympathetic tears said with all the winning reproachfulness of a

heart-hurt woman: “Ah—you should have told me before you gave me that

idea that you wanted to be allowed to love me! I had no feeling before

that moment at the railway-station, except—” For once Sue was as

miserable as he, in her attempts to keep herself free from emotion, and

her less than half-success.

“Don’t cry, dear!” he implored.

“I am—not crying—because I meant to—love you; but because of your want

of—confidence!”

They were quite screened from the market-square without, and he could

not help putting out his arm towards her waist. His momentary desire

was the means of her rallying. “No, no!” she said, drawing back

stringently, and wiping her eyes. “Of course not! It would be hypocrisy

to pretend that it would be meant as from my cousin; and it can’t be in

any other way.”

They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself recovered. It was

distracting to Jude, and his heart would have ached less had she

appeared anyhow but as she did appear; essentially large-minded and

generous on reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow

womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give her sex.

“I don’t blame you for what you couldn’t help,” she said, smiling. “How

should I be so foolish? I do blame you a little bit for not telling me

before. But, after all, it doesn’t matter. We should have had to keep

apart, you see, even if this had not been in your life.”

“No, we shouldn’t, Sue! This is the only obstacle.”

“You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be your wife,

even if there had been no obstacle,” said Sue, with a gentle

seriousness which did not reveal her mind. “And then we are cousins,

and it is bad for cousins to marry. And—I am engaged to somebody else.

As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly

way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their

views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by

their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes

relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment

where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by

them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.”

Her being able to talk learnedly showed that she was mistress of

herself again; and before they parted she had almost regained her

vivacious glance, her reciprocity of tone, her gay manner, and her

second-thought attitude of critical largeness towards others of her age

and sex.

He could speak more freely now. “There were several reasons against my

telling you rashly. One was what I have said; another, that it was

always impressed upon me that I ought not to marry—that I belonged to

an odd and peculiar family—the wrong breed for marriage.”

“Ah—who used to say that to you?”

“My great-aunt. She said it always ended badly with us Fawleys.”

“That’s strange. My father used to say the same to me!”

They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an

assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would

have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness—two bitters in one

dish.

“Oh, but there can’t be anything in it!” she said with nervous

lightness. “Our family have been unlucky of late years in choosing

mates—that’s all.”

And then they pretended to persuade themselves that all that had

happened was of no consequence, and that they could still be cousins

and friends and warm correspondents, and have happy genial times when

they met, even if they met less frequently than before. Their parting

was in good friendship, and yet Jude’s last look into her eyes was

tinged with inquiry, for he felt that he did not even now quite know

her mind.

VII

Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed across Jude like a withering

blast.

Before reading the letter he was led to suspect that its contents were

of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight of the signature—which was

in her full name, never used in her correspondence with him since her

first note:

MY DEAR JUDE,—I have something to tell you which perhaps you will not

be surprised to hear, though certainly it may strike you as being

accelerated (as the railway companies say of their trains). Mr.

Phillotson and I are to be married quite soon—in three or four weeks.

We had intended, as you know, to wait till I had gone through my course

of training and obtained my certificate, so as to assist him, if

necessary, in the teaching. But he generously says he does not see any

object in waiting, now I am not at the training school. It is so good

of him, because the awkwardness of my situation has really come about

by my fault in getting expelled.

Wish me joy. Remember I say you are to, and you mustn’t

refuse!—Your affectionate cousin,

SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on

drinking tea because his mouth was so dry. Then presently he went back

to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so confronted.

Everything seemed turning to satire. And yet, what could the poor girl

do? he asked himself, and felt worse than shedding tears.

“O Susanna Florence Mary!” he said as he worked. “You don’t know what

marriage means!”

Could it be possible that his announcement of his own marriage had

pricked her on to this, just as his visit to her when in liquor may

have pricked her on to her engagement? To be sure, there seemed to

exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical and social, for her

decision; but Sue was not a very practical or calculating person; and

he was compelled to think that a pique at having his secret sprung upon

her had moved her to give way to Phillotson’s probable representations,

that the best course to prove how unfounded were the suspicions of the

school authorities would be to marry him off-hand, as in fulfilment of

an ordinary engagement. Sue had, in fact, been placed in an awkward

corner. Poor Sue!

He determined to play the Spartan; to make the best of it, and support

her; but he could not write the requested good wishes for a day or two.

Meanwhile there came another note from his impatient little dear:

Jude, will you give me away? I have nobody else who could do it so

conveniently as you, being the only married relation I have here on the

spot, even if my father were friendly enough to be willing, which he

isn’t. I hope you won’t think it a trouble? I have been looking at the

marriage service in the prayer-book, and it seems to me very

humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to

the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will

and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody _gives_ me to him, like

a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted

views of woman, O churchman! But I forget: I am no longer privileged to

tease you.—Ever,

SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:

MY DEAR SUE,—Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give

you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house of your own, you

do not marry from your school friend’s, but from mine. It would be more

proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to

you in this part of the world.

I don’t see why you sign your letter in such a new and terribly

formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still!—Ever your

affectionate,

JUDE.

What had jarred on him even more than the signature was a little sting

he had been silent on—the phrase “married relation”—What an idiot it

made him seem as her lover! If Sue had written that in satire, he could

hardly forgive her; if in suffering—ah, that was another thing!

His offer of his lodging must have commended itself to Phillotson at

any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line of warm thanks,

accepting the convenience. Sue also thanked him. Jude immediately moved

into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage of the

suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue’s unpleasant

experience as for the sake of room.

Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for the wedding; and Jude

decided, after inquiry, that she should come into residence on the

following Saturday, which would allow of a ten days’ stay in the city

prior to the ceremony, sufficiently representing a nominal residence of

fifteen.

She arrived by the ten o’clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not

going to meet her at the station, by her special request, that he

should not lose a morning’s work and pay, she said (if this were her

true reason). But so well by this time did he know Sue that the

remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might, he

thought, have weighed with her in this. When he came home to dinner she

had taken possession of her apartment.

She lived in the same house with him, but on a different floor, and

they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only meal

they took together, when Sue’s manner was something like that of a

scared child. What she felt he did not know; their conversation was

mechanical, though she did not look pale or ill. Phillotson came

frequently, but mostly when Jude was absent. On the morning of the

wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin had

breakfast together for the first and last time during this curious

interval; in his room—the parlour—which he had hired for the period of

Sue’s residence. Seeing, as women do, how helpless he was in making the

place comfortable, she bustled about.

“What’s the matter, Jude?” she said suddenly.

He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands,

looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on the

tablecloth.

“Oh—nothing!”

“You are ‘father’, you know. That’s what they call the man who gives

you away.”

Jude could have said “Phillotson’s age entitles him to be called that!”

But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort.

She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in reflection,

and before the meal was over both he and she wished they had not put

such confidence in their new view of things, and had taken breakfast

apart. What oppressed Jude was the thought that, having done a wrong

thing of this sort himself, he was aiding and abetting the woman he

loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of imploring and warning her

against it. It was on his tongue to say, “You have quite made up your

mind?”

After breakfast they went out on an errand together moved by a mutual

thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of indulging

in unceremonious companionship. By the irony of fate, and the curious

trick in Sue’s nature of tempting Providence at critical times, she

took his arm as they walked through the muddy street—a thing she had

never done before in her life—and on turning the corner they found

themselves close to a grey perpendicular church with a low-pitched

roof—the church of St. Thomas.

“That’s the church,” said Jude.

“Where I am going to be married?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed!” she exclaimed with curiosity. “How I should like to go in and

see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it.”

Again he said to himself, “She does not realize what marriage means!”

He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by the

western door. The only person inside the gloomy building was a

charwoman cleaning. Sue still held Jude’s arm, almost as if she loved

him. Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his

thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by an ache:

… I can find no way

How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,

Nor prove too much for your womanhood!

They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar railing,

which they stood against in silence, turning then and walking down the

nave again, her hand still on his arm, precisely like a couple just

married. The too suggestive incident, entirely of her making, nearly

broke down Jude.

“I like to do things like this,” she said in the delicate voice of an

epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.

“I know you do!” said Jude.

“They are interesting, because they have probably never been done

before. I shall walk down the church like this with my husband in about

two hours, shan’t I!”

“No doubt you will!”

“Was it like this when you were married?”

“Good God, Sue—don’t be so awfully merciless! … There, dear one, I

didn’t mean it!”

“Ah—you are vexed!” she said regretfully, as she blinked away an access

of eye moisture. “And I promised never to vex you! … I suppose I ought

not to have asked you to bring me in here. Oh, I oughtn’t! I see it

now. My curiosity to hunt up a new sensation always leads me into these

scrapes. Forgive me! … You will, won’t you, Jude?”

The appeal was so remorseful that Jude’s eyes were even wetter than

hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.

“Now we’ll hurry away, and I won’t do it any more!” she continued

humbly; and they came out of the building, Sue intending to go on to

the station to meet Phillotson. But the first person they encountered

on entering the main street was the schoolmaster himself, whose train

had arrived sooner than Sue expected. There was nothing really to demur

to in her leaning on Jude’s arm; but she withdrew her hand, and Jude

thought that Phillotson had looked surprised.

“We have been doing such a funny thing!” said she, smiling candidly.

“We’ve been to the church, rehearsing as it were. Haven’t we, Jude?”

“How?” said Phillotson curiously.

Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be unnecessary frankness; but

she had gone too far not to explain all, which she accordingly did,

telling him how they had marched up to the altar.

Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude said as cheerfully as he

could, “I am going to buy her another little present. Will you both

come to the shop with me?”

“No,” said Sue, “I’ll go on to the house with him”; and requesting her

lover not to be a long time she departed with the schoolmaster.

Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they prepared for

the ceremony. Phillotson’s hair was brushed to a painful extent, and

his shirt collar appeared stiffer than it had been for the previous

twenty years. Beyond this he looked dignified and thoughtful, and

altogether a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict that he would

make a kind and considerate husband. That he adored Sue was obvious;

and she could almost be seen to feel that she was undeserving his

adoration.

Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly from the Red

Lion, and six or seven women and children had gathered by the door when

they came out. The schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though Jude was

getting to be recognized as a citizen; and the couple were judged to be

some relations of his from a distance, nobody supposing Sue to have

been a recent pupil at the training school.

In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little

wedding-present, which turned out to be two or three yards of white

tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as a veil.

“It looks so odd over a bonnet,” she said. “I’ll take the bonnet off.”

“Oh no—let it stay,” said Phillotson. And she obeyed.

When they had passed up the church and were standing in their places

Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the edge

of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the

service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the

business of giving her away. How could Sue have had the temerity to ask

him to do it—a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him? Women

were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead

of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic; or were

they more heroic? Or was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully gave

herself and him pain for the odd and mournful luxury of practising

long-suffering in her own person, and of being touched with tender pity

for him at having made him practise it? He could perceive that her face

was nervously set, and when they reached the trying ordeal of Jude

giving her to Phillotson she could hardly command herself; rather,

however, as it seemed, from her knowledge of what her cousin must feel,

whom she need not have had there at all, than from self-consideration.

Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and

grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal

inconsistency.

Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded by a mist which

prevented his seeing the emotions of others. As soon as they had signed

their names and come away, and the suspense was over, Jude felt

relieved.

The meal at his lodging was a very simple affair, and at two o’clock

they went off. In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked back; and

there was a frightened light in her eyes. Could it be that Sue had

acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew not what

for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of retaliating on

him for his secrecy? Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because

she was childishly ignorant of that side of their natures which wore

out women’s hearts and lives.

When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying that

she had forgotten something. Jude and the landlady offered to get it.

“No,” she said, running back. “It is my handkerchief. I know where I

left it.”

Jude followed her back. She had found it, and came holding it in her

hand. She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her lips

suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something. But she went

on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.

VIII

Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief behind; or

whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love

that at the last moment she could not bring herself to express.

He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were gone, and

fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol he went

upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots for

his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.

But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to be

possessed with an idea that she would come back. She could not possibly

go home with Phillotson, he fancied. The feeling grew and stirred. The

moment that the clock struck the last of his working hours he threw

down his tools and rushed homeward. “Has anybody been for me?” he

asked.

Nobody had been there.

As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o’clock that

night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had struck

eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off the feeling

that she would come back and sleep in the little room adjoining his own

in which she had slept so many previous days. Her actions were always

unpredictable: why should she not come? Gladly would he have compounded

for the denial of her as a sweetheart and wife by having her live thus

as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on the most distant terms. His

supper still remained spread, and going to the front door, and softly

setting it open, he returned to the room and sat as watchers sit on

Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the phantom of the Beloved. But she did

not come.

Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked out of

the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to London,

whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling

along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of

ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon showed its

position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars made

themselves visible as faint nebulæ only. It was a new beginning of

Sue’s history. He projected his mind into the future, and saw her with

children more or less in her own likeness around her. But the

consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her identity was

denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in

not allowing issue from one parent alone. Every desired renewal of an

existence is debased by being half alloy. “If at the estrangement or

death of my lost love, I could go and see her child—hers solely—there

would be comfort in it!” said Jude. And then he again uneasily saw, as

he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature

for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.

The oppressive strength of his affection for Sue showed itself on the

morrow and following days yet more clearly. He could no longer endure

the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab paint, and

the blue sky as zinc. Then he received news that his old aunt was

dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost coincided with

a letter from his former employer at Christminster, who offered him

permanent work of a good class if he would come back. The letters were

almost a relief to him. He started to visit Aunt Drusilla, and resolved

to go onward to Christminster to see what worth there might be in the

builder’s offer.

Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication from the Widow

Edlin had led him to expect. There was every possibility of her

lingering on for weeks or months, though little likelihood. He wrote to

Sue informing her of the state of her aunt, and suggesting that she

might like to see her aged relative alive. He would meet her at

Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back from

Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed his

down-train at that station. Next morning, according, he went on to

Christminster, intending to return to Alfredston soon enough to keep

the suggested appointment with Sue.

The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all

feeling for its associations. Yet as the sun made vivid lights and

shades of the mullioned architecture of the façades, and drew patterns

of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the quadrangles, Jude

thought he had never seen the place look more beautiful. He came to the

street in which he had first beheld Sue. The chair she had occupied

when, leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her

hand, her girlish figure had arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes,

stood precisely in its former spot, empty. It was as if she were dead,

and nobody had been found capable of succeeding her in that artistic

pursuit. Hers was now the city phantom, while those of the intellectual

and devotional worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no

longer able to assert their presence there.

However, here he was; and in fulfilment of his intention he went on to

his former lodging in “Beersheba,” near the ritualistic church of St.

Silas. The old landlady who opened the door seemed glad to see him

again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder who had

employed him had called to inquire his address.

Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked. But the old sheds

and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it impossible to engage

himself to return and stay in this place of vanished dreams. He longed

for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where he might

probably meet Sue.

Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by these scenes,

there returned upon him that feeling which had been his undoing more

than once—that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of

either by himself or others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker

Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at Fourways, who

proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink together. They

walked along the street till they stood before one of the great

palpitating centres of Christminster life, the inn wherein he formerly

had responded to the challenge to rehearse the Creed in Latin—now a

popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance, which gave

admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and refitted in

modern style since Jude’s residence here.

Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too

stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker

than he had money to be just then. Jude was longer finishing his, and

stood abstractedly silent in the, for the minute, almost empty place.

The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany

fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the

back of the standing-space there were stuffed sofa-benches. The room

was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which

were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in

one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in

the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids leant over the

white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside,

dripping into a pewter trough.

Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train left, Jude

sat down on one of the sofas. At the back of the barmaids rose

bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on

which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in

bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst. The moment was enlivened

by the entrance of some customers into the next compartment, and the

starting of the mechanical tell-tale of monies received, which emitted

a ting-ting every time a coin was put in.

The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude’s

direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the glass behind her

was occasionally caught by his eyes. He had only observed this

listlessly, when she turned her face for a moment to the glass to set

her hair tidy. Then he was amazed to discover that the face was

Arabella’s.

If she had come on to his compartment she would have seen him. But she

did not, this being presided over by the maiden on the other side. Abby

was in a black gown, with white linen cuffs and a broad white collar,

and her figure, more developed than formerly, was accentuated by a

bunch of daffodils that she wore on her left bosom. In the compartment

she served stood an electro-plated fountain of water over a

spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent a steam from the top, all this being

visible to him only in the mirror behind her; which also reflected the

faces of the men she was attending to—one of them a handsome,

dissipated young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who had been

relating to her an experience of some humorous sort.

“Oh, Mr. Cockman, now! How can you tell such a tale to me in my

innocence!” she cried gaily. “Mr. Cockman, what do you use to make your

moustache curl so beautiful?” As the young man was clean shaven, the

retort provoked a laugh at his expense.

“Come!” said he, “I’ll have a curaçao; and a light, please.”

She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles and striking a

match held it to his cigarette with ministering archness while he

whiffed.

“Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my dear?” he asked.

“Not a sound,” said she.

“Where is he?”

“I left him in Australia; and I suppose he’s there still.”

Jude’s eyes grew rounder.

“What made you part from him?”

“Don’t you ask questions, and you won’t hear lies.”

“Come then, give me my change, which you’ve been keeping from me for

the last quarter of an hour; and I’ll romantically vanish up the street

of this picturesque city.”

She handed the change over the counter, in taking which he caught her

fingers and held them. There was a slight struggle and titter, and he

bade her good-bye and left.

Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed philosopher. It was

extraordinary how far removed from his life Arabella now seemed to be.

He could not realize their nominal closeness. And, this being the case,

in his present frame of mind he was indifferent to the fact that

Arabella was his wife indeed.

The compartment that she served emptied itself of visitors, and after a

brief thought he entered it, and went forward to the counter. Arabella

did not recognize him for a moment. Then their glances met. She

started; till a humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she spoke.

“Well, I’m blest! I thought you were underground years ago!”

“Oh!”

“I never heard anything of you, or I don’t know that I should have come

here. But never mind! What shall I treat you to this afternoon? A

Scotch and soda? Come, anything that the house will afford, for old

acquaintance’ sake!”

“Thanks, Arabella,” said Jude without a smile. “But I don’t want

anything more than I’ve had.” The fact was that her unexpected presence

there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for strong liquor

as completely as if it had whisked him back to his milk-fed infancy.

“That’s a pity, now you could get it for nothing.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About six weeks. I returned from Sydney three months ago. I always

liked this business, you know.”

“I wonder you came to this place!”

“Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and being in London

I saw the situation in an advertisement. Nobody was likely to know me

here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster in my

growing up.”

“Why did you return from Australia?”

“Oh, I had my reasons… Then you are not a don yet?”

“No.”

“Not even a reverend?”

“No.”

“Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting gentleman?”

“I am as I was.”

“True—you look so.” She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the pull of

the beer-engine as she inspected him critically. He observed that her

hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with her, and that

on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an ornamental ring set

with what seemed to be real sapphires—which they were, indeed, and were

much admired as such by the young men who frequented the bar.

“So you pass as having a living husband,” he continued.

“Yes. I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I

should have liked.”

“True. I am known here a little.”

“I didn’t mean on that account—for as I said I didn’t expect you. It

was for other reasons.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t care to go into them,” she replied evasively. “I make a very

good living, and I don’t know that I want your company.”

Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady’s eyebrow,

came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was

obliged to go and attend to him. “We can’t talk here,” she said,

stepping back a moment. “Can’t you wait till nine? Say yes, and don’t

be a fool. I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask. I

am not living in the house at present.”

He reflected and said gloomily, “I’ll come back. I suppose we’d better

arrange something.”

“Oh, bother arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything!”

“But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can’t talk here.

Very well; I’ll call for you.”

Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the

street. Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of his

sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella’s word was absolutely

untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her implication

that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really supposed him

dead. However, there was only one thing now to be done, and that was to

play a straightforward part, the law being the law, and the woman

between whom and himself there was no more unity than between east and

west, being in the eye of the Church one person with him.

Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at

Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of this a pang had gone

through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped. Arabella was

perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorized

love. Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the

town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall,

because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar

while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell

of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous

irony. The inn was now brilliantly lighted up, and the scene was

altogether more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen in

colour, each having a pink flush on her cheek; their manners were still

more vivacious than before—more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous,

and they expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically,

laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.

The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous

hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but the

customers were fewer at last. He nodded to Arabella, and told her that

she would find him outside the door when she came away.

“But you must have something with me first,” she said with great good

humour. “Just an early night-cap: I always do. Then you can go out and

wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going together.” She

drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had

evidently, from her countenance, already taken in enough alcohol either

by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere she had breathed for

so many hours, she finished hers quickly. He also drank his, and went

outside the house.

In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black

feather. “I live quite near,” she said, taking his arm, “and can let

myself in by a latch-key at any time. What arrangement do you want to

come to?”

“Oh—none in particular,” he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his

thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go by;

the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when she

arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and lonely

climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen. “I ought to have gone

back really! My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear.”

“I’ll go over with you to-morrow morning. I think I could get a day

off.”

There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella,

who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,

coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue. Yet he said,

“Of course, if you’d like to, you can.”

“Well, that we’ll consider… Now, until we have come to some agreement

it is awkward our being together here—where you are known, and I am

getting known, though without any suspicion that I have anything to do

with you. As we are going towards the station, suppose we take the

nine-forty train to Aldbrickham? We shall be there in little more than

half an hour, and nobody will know us for one night, and we shall be

quite free to act as we choose till we have made up our minds whether

we’ll make anything public or not.”

“As you like.”

“Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging.

Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so nobody

will think anything of my staying out.”

She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the

half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate inn

near the station in time for a late supper.

IX

On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back to

Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a third-class

railway-carriage. Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to

catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very

far from possessing the animation which had characterized it at the bar

the night before. When they came out of the station she found that she

still had half an hour to spare before she was due at the bar. They

walked in silence a little way out of the town in the direction of

Alfredston. Jude looked up the far highway.

“Ah … poor feeble me!” he murmured at last.

“What?” said she.

“This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago

full of plans!”

“Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have to

be in the bar by eleven o’clock. And as I said, I shan’t ask for the

day to go with you to see your aunt. So perhaps we had better part

here. I’d sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we’ve come to

no conclusion at all.”

“Very well. But you said when we were getting up this morning that you

had something you wished to tell me before I left?”

“So I had—two things—one in particular. But you wouldn’t promise to

keep it a secret. I’ll tell you now if you promise? As an honest woman

I wish you to know it… It was what I began telling you in the

night—about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel.” Arabella

spoke somewhat hurriedly for her. “You’ll keep it close?”

“Yes—yes—I promise!” said Jude impatiently. “Of course I don’t want to

reveal your secrets.”

“Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much

taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him. I never

thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in

Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last

agreed, and did.”

“What—marry him?”

“Yes.”

“Regularly—legally—in church?”

“Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left. It was stupid, I

know; but I did! There, now I’ve told you. Don’t round upon me! He

talks of coming back to England, poor old chap. But if he does, he

won’t be likely to find me.”

Jude stood pale and fixed.

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me last, night!” he said.

“Well—I didn’t… Won’t you make it up with me, then?”

“So in talking of ‘your husband’ to the bar gentlemen you meant him, of

course—not me!”

“Of course… Come, don’t fuss about it.”

“I have nothing more to say!” replied Jude. “I have nothing at all to

say about the—crime—you’ve confessed to!”

“Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over there! Lots of

’em do it… Well, if you take it like that I shall go back to him! He

was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable

as any married couple in the colony! How did I know where you were?”

“I won’t go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but perhaps it would

be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?”

“Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy

we’ve seen enough of one another for the present! I shall think over

what you said about your circumstances, and let you know.”

Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the direction of the

hotel, and entered the railway station close by. Finding that it wanted

three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could get a train

back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the city as far as to

the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often stood before, and

surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its college after college,

in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such Continental vistas as the

Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines of the buildings being as

distinct in the morning air as in an architectural drawing. But Jude

was far from seeing or criticizing these things; they were hidden by an

indescribable consciousness of Arabella’s midnight contiguity, a sense

of degradation at his revived experiences with her, of her appearance

as she lay asleep at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as

of one accurst. If he could only have felt resentment towards her he

would have been less unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.

Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again towards the station

he started at hearing his name pronounced—less at the name than at the

voice. To his great surprise no other than Sue stood like a vision

before him—her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth

nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.

“Oh, Jude—I am so glad—to meet you like this!” she said in quick,

uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed his

thought that they had not met since her marriage.

They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each

other’s hand without further speech, and went on together awhile, till

she glanced at him with furtive solicitude. “I arrived at Alfredston

station last night, as you asked me to, and there was nobody to meet

me! But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me Aunt was a trifle

better. I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I was

frightened about you—I thought that perhaps, when you found yourself

back in the old city, you were upset at—at thinking I was—married, and

not there as I used to be; and that you had nobody to speak to; so you

had tried to drown your gloom—as you did at that former time when you

were disappointed about entering as a student, and had forgotten your

promise to me that you never would again. And this, I thought, was why

you hadn’t come to meet me!”

“And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!”

“I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you—in

case—in case—”

“I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall never

break out again as I did, I am sure. I may have been doing nothing

better, but I was not doing that—I loathe the thought of it.”

“I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that. But,” she said,

the faintest pout entering into her tone, “you didn’t come back last

night and meet me, as you engaged to!”

“I didn’t—I am sorry to say. I had an appointment at nine o’clock—too

late for me to catch the train that would have met yours, or to get

home at all.”

Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender

thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever

had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that

her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily

ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in

Arabella’s company. There was something rude and immoral in thrusting

these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so

uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average

man. And yet she was Phillotson’s. How she had become such, how she

lived as such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her to-day.

“You’ll go back with me?” he said. “There’s a train just now. I wonder

how my aunt is by this time… And so, Sue, you really came on my account

all this way! At what an early time you must have started, poor thing!”

“Yes. Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and instead

of going to bed when it got light I started. And now you won’t frighten

me like this again about your morals for nothing?”

He was not so sure that she had been frightened about his morals for

nothing. He released her hand till they had entered the train,—it

seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another—where

they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window. He regarded

the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight, applelike

convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella’s amplitudes.

Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn to him, but kept

her eyes forward, as if afraid that by meeting his own some troublous

discussion would be initiated.

“Sue—you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in

such a hurry that we have not said a word about it!”

“There’s no necessity,” she quickly returned.

“Oh well—perhaps not… But I wish”

“Jude—don’t talk about _me_—I wish you wouldn’t!” she entreated. “It

distresses me, rather. Forgive my saying it! … Where did you stay last

night?”

She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic.

He knew that, and said merely, “At an inn,” though it would have been a

relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one. But the

latter’s final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered him

lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.

Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston. That

Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled “Phillotson,” paralyzed

Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual. Yet she

seemed unaltered—he could not say why. There remained the five-mile

extra journey into the country, which it was just as easy to walk as to

drive, the greater part of it being uphill. Jude had never before in

his life gone that road with Sue, though he had with another. It was

now as if he carried a bright light which temporarily banished the

shady associations of the earlier time.

Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation from

herself. At length he inquired if her husband were well.

“O yes,” she said. “He is obliged to be in the school all the day, or

he would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to accompany me

he would have dismissed the school for once, even against his

principles—for he is strongly opposed to giving casual holidays—only I

wouldn’t let him. I felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt

Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being almost a

stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns

out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.”

Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being

expressed. “Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,” he

said.

“Of course.”

“You ought to be a happy wife.”

“And of course I am.”

“Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks since

I gave you to him, and—”

“Yes, I know! I know!” There was something in her face which belied her

late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken that

they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in “The Wife’s

Guide to Conduct.” Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue’s

voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and he was

convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month

married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a

relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue

naturally did such things as those.

“Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.”

She reproached him by a glance.

“No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,” murmured Jude. “You are dear, free

Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up

and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further

individuality.”

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, “Nor has

husbandom you, so far as I can see!”

“But it has!” he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown

House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and

quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now.

He could not help saying to Sue: “That’s the house my wife and I

occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to

that house.”

She looked at it. “That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is

to me.”

“Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours.”

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till

she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. “Of course I may have

exaggerated your happiness—one never knows,” he continued blandly.

“Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it

to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect

liberty—which elderly husbands don’t do in general… If you think I am

not happy because he’s too old for me, you are wrong.”

“I don’t think anything against him—to you dear.”

“And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?”

“I will not.”

He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking

Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not

to have done.

They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the

village—the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer

many years earlier. On ascending to the village and approaching the

house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them

lifted her hands deprecatingly. “She’s downstairs, if you’ll believe

me!” cried the widow. “Out o’ bed she got, and nothing could turn her.

What will come o’t I do not know!”

On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped

in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of

Sebastiano’s Lazarus. They must have looked their amazement, for she

said in a hollow voice:

“Ah—sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there no longer, to

please nobody! ’Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be ordered

to do this and that by a feller that don’t know half as well as you do

yourself! … Ah—you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!” she added,

turning to Sue. “All our family do—and nearly all everybody else’s. You

should have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson the

schoolmaster, of all men! What made ’ee marry him?”

“What makes most women marry, Aunt?”

“Ah! You mean to say you loved the man!”

“I don’t meant to say anything definite.”

“Do ye love un?”

“Don’t ask me, Aunt.”

“I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but

Lord!—I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but—there be certain men

here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have

said he was one. I don’t say so _now_, since you must ha’ known better

than I—but that’s what I _should_ have said!”

Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the

outhouse, crying.

“Don’t cry, dear!” said Jude in distress. “She means well, but is very

crusty and queer now, you know.”

“Oh no—it isn’t that!” said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. “I don’t mind

her roughness one bit.”

“What is it, then?”

“It is that what she says is—is true!”

“God—what—you don’t like him?” asked Jude.

“I don’t mean that!” she said hastily. “That I ought—perhaps I ought

not to have married!”

He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first. They

went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took rather

kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly married

would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the

afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive her

to Alfredston.

“I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?” he said.

She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude

helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she looked

at him prohibitively.

“I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at

Melchester?” he half-crossly observed.

She bent down and said softly: “No, dear—you are not to come yet. I

don’t think you are in a good mood.”

“Very well,” said Jude. “Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” She waved her hand and was gone.

“She’s right! I won’t go!” he murmured.

He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every

possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts

to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read

sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history that

treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before he had returned

from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter from Arabella. The

sight of it revived a stronger feeling of self-condemnation for his

brief return to her society than for his attachment to Sue.

The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the

Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few days after their

parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an

affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of

the hotel in Sydney. He had come to England on purpose to find her; and

had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he wished

her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely to be a

very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent, densely

populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a trade of

£200 a month, which could be easily doubled.

As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to

tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff,

and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had just

gone to join him as he urged. She could not help feeling that she

belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married him,

and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband. In thus

wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted he would

not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her, and bring her

to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her circumstances and

leading a genteel life.

X

Jude returned to Melchester, which had the questionable recommendation

of being only a dozen and a half miles from his Sue’s now permanent

residence. At first he felt that this nearness was a distinct reason

for not going southward at all; but Christminster was too sad a place

to bear, while the proximity of Shaston to Melchester might afford him

the glory of worsting the Enemy in a close engagement, such as was

deliberately sought by the priests and virgins of the early Church,

who, disdaining an ignominious flight from temptation, became even

chamber-partners with impunity. Jude did not pause to remember that, in

the laconic words of the historian, “insulted Nature sometimes

vindicated her rights” in such circumstances.

He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the

priesthood—in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his aims,

and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable of late.

His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to

the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse

thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till

afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to

liquor—which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an

escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with

despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to

make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life

of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might

not always be victorious.

As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he developed his

slight skill in church-music and thorough-bass, till he could join in

part-singing from notation with some accuracy. A mile or two from

Melchester there was a restored village church, to which Jude had

originally gone to fix the new columns and capitals. By this means he

had become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate result was

that he joined the choir as a bass voice.

He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and sometimes in the

week. One evening about Easter the choir met for practice, and a new

hymn which Jude had heard of as being by a Wessex composer was to be

tried and prepared for the following week. It turned out to be a

strangely emotional composition. As they all sang it over and over

again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly.

When they had finished he went round to the organist to make inquiries.

The score was in manuscript, the name of the composer being at the

head, together with the title of the hymn: “The Foot of the Cross.”

“Yes,” said the organist. “He is a local man. He is a professional

musician at Kennetbridge—between here and Christminster. The vicar

knows him. He was brought up and educated in Christminster traditions,

which accounts for the quality of the piece. I think he plays in the

large church there, and has a surpliced choir. He comes to Melchester

sometimes, and once tried to get the cathedral organ when the post was

vacant. The hymn is getting about everywhere this Easter.”

As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell to musing on

its composer, and the reasons why he composed it. What a man of

sympathies he must be! Perplexed and harassed as he himself was about

Sue and Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the

complication of his position, how he would like to know that man! “He

of all men would understand my difficulties,” said the impulsive Jude.

If there were any person in the world to choose as a confidant, this

composer would be the one, for he must have suffered, and throbbed, and

yearned.

In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey,

Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the

very next Sunday. He duly started, early in the morning, for it was

only by a series of crooked railways that he could get to the town.

About mid-day he reached it, and crossing the bridge into the quaint

old borough he inquired for the house of the composer.

They told him it was a red brick building some little way further on.

Also that the gentleman himself had just passed along the street not

five minutes before.

“Which way?” asked Jude with alacrity.

“Straight along homeward from church.”

Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing a man in a

black coat and a black slouched felt hat no considerable distance

ahead. Stretching out his legs yet more widely, he stalked after. “A

hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul!” he said. “I must speak to that

man!”

He could not, however, overtake the musician before he had entered his

own house, and then arose the question if this were an expedient time

to call. Whether or not he decided to do so there and then, now that he

had got here, the distance home being too great for him to wait till

late in the afternoon. This man of soul would understand scant

ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in which an

earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly obtained entrance into

his heart through the opening afforded for religion.

Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.

The musician came to him in a moment, and being respectably dressed,

good-looking, and frank in manner, Jude obtained a favourable

reception. He was nevertheless conscious that there would be a certain

awkwardness in explaining his errand.

“I have been singing in the choir of a little church near Melchester,”

he said. “And we have this week practised ‘The Foot of the Cross,’

which I understand, sir, that you composed?”

“I did—a year or so ago.”

“I—like it. I think it supremely beautiful!”

“Ah well—other people have said so too. Yes, there’s money in it, if I

could only see about getting it published. I have other compositions to

go with it, too; I wish I could bring them out; for I haven’t made a

five-pound note out of any of them yet. These publishing people—they

want the copyright of an obscure composer’s work, such as mine is, for

almost less than I should have to pay a person for making a fair

manuscript copy of the score. The one you speak of I have lent to

various friends about here and Melchester, and so it has got to be sung

a little. But music is a poor staff to lean on—I am giving it up

entirely. You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays.

The wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my forthcoming

list—it is not issued yet—but you can take one.”

He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in booklet shape,

ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth the

various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines with

which he purposed to initiate his new venture. It took Jude more than

by surprise that the man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt

that he could not open up his confidences.