“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.