His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and hide, and

perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Marygreen. He

called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found awaiting him a

note of dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he turned his

back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his side, and struck

southward into Wessex. He had no money left in his pocket, his small

savings, deposited at one of the banks in Christminster, having

fortunately been left untouched. To get to Marygreen, therefore, his

only course was walking; and the distance being nearly twenty miles, he

had ample time to complete on the way the sobering process begun in

him.

At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston. Here he pawned his

waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two, slept under a

rick that night. At dawn he rose, shook off the hayseeds and stems from

his clothes, and started again, breasting the long white road up the

hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a long way off, and

passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had carved his hopes years

ago.

He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast. Weary

and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary clearness of

brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so what a poor

Christ he made. Seeing a trough of water near he bathed his face, and

went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found breakfasting in

bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.

“What—out o’ work?” asked his relative, regarding him through eyes

sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for his

tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had been a

struggle with material things.

“Yes,” said Jude heavily. “I think I must have a little rest.”

Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay down in

his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan. He fell asleep for

a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell.

It _was_ hell—“the hell of conscious failure,” both in ambition and in

love. He thought of that previous abyss into which he had fallen before

leaving this part of the country; the deepest deep he had supposed it

then; but it was not so deep as this. That had been the breaking in of

the outer bulwarks of his hope: this was of his second line.

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension

which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his

virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his

mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows.

A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney like

the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall of the

churchless church-yard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its neighbour

smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-Gothic church in the new

spot had already begun to creak. Yet apparently it was not always the

outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice. He guessed its

origin in a moment or two; the curate was praying with his aunt in the

adjoining room. He remembered her speaking of him. Presently the sounds

ceased, and a step seemed to cross the landing. Jude sat up, and

shouted “Hoi!”

The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in. It was

a young clergyman.

“I think you are Mr. Highridge,” said Jude. “My aunt has mentioned you

more than once. Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the

bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I

am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.”

Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements, by an

unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambitious side

of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this had, up till

now, been merely a portion of the general plan of advancement.

“Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me,” added Jude

in conclusion. “And I don’t regret the collapse of my university hopes

one jot. I wouldn’t begin again if I were sure to succeed. I don’t care

for social success any more at all. But I do feel I should like to do

some good thing; and I bitterly regret the Church, and the loss of my

chance of being her ordained minister.”

The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply

interested, and at last he said: “If you feel a real call to the

ministry, and I won’t say from your conversation that you do not, for

it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the Church

as a licentiate. Only you must make up your mind to avoid strong

drink.”

“I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to support

me!”

Part Third AT MELCHESTER

_“For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her!”_

—SAPPHO (H. T. Wharton).

I

It was a new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as distinct

from the intellectual and emulative life. A man could preach and do

good to his fellow-creatures without taking double-firsts in the

schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge.

The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the

bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but

a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared that his whole

scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in,

a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which

was purely an artificial product of civilization. There were thousands

of young men on the same self-seeking track at the present moment. The

sensual hind who ate, drank, and lived carelessly with his wife through

the days of his vanity was a more likable being than he.

But to enter the Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in

any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that

of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city

slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that

might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being

followed by a remorseful man.

The favourable light in which this new thought showed itself by

contrast with his foregone intentions cheered Jude, as he sat there,

shabby and lonely; and it may be said to have given, during the next

few days, the _coup de grâce_ to his intellectual career—a career which

had extended over the greater part of a dozen years. He did nothing,

however, for some long stagnant time to advance his new desire,

occupying himself with little local jobs in putting up and lettering

headstones about the neighbouring villages, and submitting to be

regarded as a social failure, a returned purchase, by the half-dozen or

so of farmers and other country-people who condescended to nod to him.

The human interest of the new intention—and a human interest is

indispensable to the most spiritual and self-sacrificing—was created by

a letter from Sue, bearing a fresh postmark. She evidently wrote with

anxiety, and told very little about her own doings, more than that she

had passed some sort of examination for a Queen’s Scholarship, and was

going to enter a training college at Melchester to complete herself for

the vocation she had chosen, partly by his influence. There was a

theological college at Melchester; Melchester was a quiet and soothing

place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly

learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment; where the

altruistic feeling that he did possess would perhaps be more highly

estimated than a brilliancy which he did not.

As it would be necessary that he should continue for a time to work at

his trade while reading up Divinity, which he had neglected at

Christminster for the ordinary classical grind, what better course for

him than to get employment at the further city, and pursue this plan of

reading? That his excessive human interest in the new place was

entirely of Sue’s making, while at the same time Sue was to be regarded

even less than formerly as proper to create it, had an ethical

contradictoriness to which he was not blind. But that much he conceded

to human frailty, and hoped to learn to love her only as a friend and

kinswoman.

He considered that he might so mark out his coming years as to begin

his ministry at the age of thirty—an age which much attracted him as

being that of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee.

This would allow him plenty of time for deliberate study, and for

acquiring capital by his trade to help his aftercourse of keeping the

necessary terms at a theological college.

Christmas had come and passed, and Sue had gone to the Melchester

Normal School. The time was just the worst in the year for Jude to get

into new employment, and he had written suggesting to her that he

should postpone his arrival for a month or so, till the days had

lengthened. She had acquiesced so readily that he wished he had not

proposed it—she evidently did not much care about him, though she had

never once reproached him for his strange conduct in coming to her that

night, and his silent disappearance. Neither had she ever said a word

about her relations with Mr. Phillotson.

Suddenly, however, quite a passionate letter arrived from Sue. She was

quite lonely and miserable, she told him. She hated the place she was

in; it was worse than the ecclesiastical designer’s; worse than

anywhere. She felt utterly friendless; could he come

immediately?—though when he did come she would only be able to see him

at limited times, the rules of the establishment she found herself in

being strict to a degree. It was Mr. Phillotson who had advised her to

come there, and she wished she had never listened to him.

Phillotson’s suit was not exactly prospering, evidently; and Jude felt

unreasonably glad. He packed up his things and went to Melchester with

a lighter heart than he had known for months.

This being the turning over a new leaf he duly looked about for a

temperance hotel, and found a little establishment of that description

in the street leading from the station. When he had had something to

eat he walked out into the dull winter light over the town bridge, and

turned the corner towards the Close. The day was foggy, and standing

under the walls of the most graceful architectural pile in England he

paused and looked up. The lofty building was visible as far as the

roofridge; above, the dwindling spire rose more and more remotely, till

its apex was quite lost in the mist drifting across it.

The lamps now began to be lighted, and turning to the west front he

walked round. He took it as a good omen that numerous blocks of stone

were lying about, which signified that the cathedral was undergoing

restoration or repair to a considerable extent. It seemed to him, full

of the superstitions of his beliefs, that this was an exercise of

forethought on the part of a ruling Power, that he might find plenty to

do in the art he practised while waiting for a call to higher labours.

Then a wave of warmth came over him as he thought how near he now stood

to the bright-eyed vivacious girl with the broad forehead and pile of

dark hair above it; the girl with the kindling glance, daringly soft at

times—something like that of the girls he had seen in engravings from

paintings of the Spanish school. She was here—actually in this Close—in

one of the houses confronting this very west façade.

He went down the broad gravel path towards the building. It was an

ancient edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace, now a

training-school, with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard

in front shut in from the road by a wall. Jude opened the gate and went

up to the door through which, on inquiring for his cousin, he was

gingerly admitted to a waiting-room, and in a few minutes she came.

Though she had been here such a short while, she was not as he had seen

her last. All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had

become subdued lines. The screens and subtleties of convention had

likewise disappeared. Yet neither was she quite the woman who had

written the letter that summoned him. That had plainly been dashed off

in an impulse which second thoughts had somewhat regretted; thoughts

that were possibly of his recent self-disgrace. Jude was quite overcome

with emotion.

“You don’t—think me a demoralized wretch—for coming to you as I was—and

going so shamefully, Sue?”

“Oh, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know what had

caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my

poor Jude! And I am glad you have come!”

She wore a murrey-coloured gown with a little lace collar. It was made

quite plain, and hung about her slight figure with clinging

gracefulness. Her hair, which formerly she had worn according to the

custom of the day was now twisted up tightly, and she had altogether

the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an

under-brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline

had not yet been able to reach.

She had come forward prettily, but Jude felt that she had hardly

expected him to kiss her, as he was burning to do, under other colours

than those of cousinship. He could not perceive the least sign that Sue

regarded him as a lover, or ever would do so, now that she knew the

worst of him, even if he had the right to behave as one; and this

helped on his growing resolve to tell her of his matrimonial

entanglement, which he had put off doing from time to time in sheer

dread of losing the bliss of her company.

Sue came out into the town with him, and they walked and talked with

tongues centred only on the passing moments. Jude said he would like to

buy her a little present of some sort, and then she confessed, with

something of shame, that she was dreadfully hungry. They were kept on

very short allowances in the college, and a dinner, tea, and supper all

in one was the present she most desired in the world. Jude thereupon

took her to an inn and ordered whatever the house afforded, which was

not much. The place, however, gave them a delightful opportunity for a

_tête-à-tête_, nobody else being in the room, and they talked freely.

She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough

living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered

together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and

work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of a

young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but it

was not what he wanted especially to know—her relations with

Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and

eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up and

smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one,

dividing his fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the

fingers of a glove she was purchasing.

“Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?” she said.

“Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day.”

“I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man’s hands

subdued to what he works in… Well, I’m rather glad I came to this

training-school, after all. See how independent I shall be after the

two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr.

Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school.”

She had touched the subject at last. “I had a suspicion, a fear,” said

Jude, “that he—cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps wanted to

marry you.”

“Now don’t be such a silly boy!”

“He has said something about it, I expect.”

“If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!”

“Oh, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw him doing—”

“Not kissing me—that I’m certain!”

“No. But putting his arm round your waist.”

“Ah—I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.”

“You are wriggling out if it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!”

Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at

something this reproof was deciding her to say.

“I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s why I

don’t want to!”

“Very well, then, dear,” he said soothingly. “I have no real right to

ask you, and I don’t wish to know.”

“I shall tell you!” said she, with the perverseness that was part of

her. “This is what I have done: I have promised—I have promised—that I

will marry him when I come out of the training-school two years hence,

and have got my certificate; his plan being that we shall then take a

large double school in a great town—he the boys’ and I the girls’—as

married school-teachers often do, and make a good income between us.”

“Oh, Sue! … But of course it is right—you couldn’t have done better!”

He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his own belying

his words. Then he drew his hand quite away from hers, and turned his

face in estrangement from her to the window. Sue regarded him passively

without moving.

“I knew you would be angry!” she said with an air of no emotion

whatever. “Very well—I am wrong, I suppose! I ought not to have let you

come to see me! We had better not meet again; and we’ll only correspond

at long intervals, on purely business matters!”

This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear, as she

probably knew, and it brought him round at once. “Oh yes, we will,” he

said quickly. “Your being engaged can make no difference to me

whatever. I have a perfect right to see you when I want to; and I

shall!”

“Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling our

evening together. What does it matter about what one is going to do two

years hence!”

She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the subject drift

away. “Shall we go and sit in the cathedral?” he asked, when their meal

was finished.

“Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway station,”

she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. “That’s the

centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!”

“How modern you are!”

“So would you be if you had lived so much in the Middle Ages as I have

done these last few years! The cathedral was a very good place four or

five centuries ago; but it is played out now… I am not modern, either.

I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.”

Jude looked distressed.

“There—I won’t say any more of that!” she cried. “Only you don’t know

how bad I am, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t think so much of

me, or care whether I was engaged or not. Now there’s just time for us

to walk round the Close, then I must go in, or I shall be locked out

for the night.”

He took her to the gate and they parted. Jude had a conviction that his

unhappy visit to her on that sad night had precipitated this marriage

engagement, and it did anything but add to his happiness. Her reproach

had taken that shape, then, and not the shape of words. However, next

day he set about seeking employment, which it was not so easy to get as

at Christminster, there being, as a rule, less stone-cutting in

progress in this quiet city, and hands being mostly permanent. But he

edged himself in by degrees. His first work was some carving at the

cemetery on the hill; and ultimately he became engaged on the labour he

most desired—the cathedral repairs, which were very extensive, the

whole interior stonework having been overhauled, to be largely replaced

by new. It might be a labour of years to get it all done, and he had

confidence enough in his own skill with the mallet and chisel to feel

that it would be a matter of choice with himself how long he would

stay.

The lodgings he took near the Close Gate would not have disgraced a

curate, the rent representing a higher percentage on his wages than

mechanics of any sort usually care to pay. His combined bed and

sitting-room was furnished with framed photographs of the rectories and

deaneries at which his landlady had lived as trusted servant in her

time, and the parlour downstairs bore a clock on the mantelpiece

inscribed to the effect that it was presented to the same

serious-minded woman by her fellow-servants on the occasion of her

marriage. Jude added to the furniture of his room by unpacking

photographs of the ecclesiastical carvings and monuments that he had

executed with his own hands; and he was deemed a satisfactory

acquisition as tenant of the vacant apartment.

He found an ample supply of theological books in the city book-shops,

and with these his studies were recommenced in a different spirit and

direction from his former course. As a relaxation from the Fathers, and

such stock works as Paley and Butler, he read Newman, Pusey, and many

other modern lights. He hired a harmonium, set it up in his lodging,

and practised chants thereon, single and double.

II

“To-morrow is our grand day, you know. Where shall we go?”

“I have leave from three till nine. Wherever we can get to and come

back from in that time. Not ruins, Jude—I don’t care for them.”

“Well—Wardour Castle. And then we can do Fonthill if we like—all in the

same afternoon.”

“Wardour is Gothic ruins—and I hate Gothic!”

“No. Quite otherwise. It is a classic building—Corinthian, I think;

with a lot of pictures.”

“Ah—that will do. I like the sound of Corinthian. We’ll go.”

Their conversation had run thus some few weeks later, and next morning

they prepared to start. Every detail of the outing was a facet

reflecting a sparkle to Jude, and he did not venture to meditate on the

life of inconsistency he was leading. His Sue’s conduct was one lovely

conundrum to him; he could say no more.

There duly came the charm of calling at the college door for her; her

emergence in a nunlike simplicity of costume that was rather enforced

than desired; the traipsing along to the station, the porters’ “B’your

leave!,” the screaming of the trains—everything formed the basis of a

beautiful crystallization. Nobody stared at Sue, because she was so

plainly dressed, which comforted Jude in the thought that only himself

knew the charms those habiliments subdued. A matter of ten pounds spent

in a drapery-shop, which had no connection with her real life or her

real self, would have set all Melchester staring. The guard of the

train thought they were lovers, and put them into a compartment all by

themselves.

“That’s a good intention wasted!” said she.

Jude did not respond. He thought the remark unnecessarily cruel, and

partly untrue.

They reached the park and castle and wandered through the

picture-galleries, Jude stopping by preference in front of the

devotional pictures by Del Sarto, Guido Reni, Spagnoletto,

Sassoferrato, Carlo Dolci, and others. Sue paused patiently beside him,

and stole critical looks into his face as, regarding the Virgins, Holy

Families, and Saints, it grew reverent and abstracted. When she had

thoroughly estimated him at this, she would move on and wait for him

before a Lely or Reynolds. It was evident that her cousin deeply

interested her, as one might be interested in a man puzzling out his

way along a labyrinth from which one had one’s self escaped.

When they came out a long time still remained to them and Jude proposed

that as soon as they had had something to eat they should walk across

the high country to the north of their present position, and intercept

the train of another railway leading back to Melchester, at a station

about seven miles off. Sue, who was inclined for any adventure that

would intensify the sense of her day’s freedom, readily agreed; and

away they went, leaving the adjoining station behind them.

It was indeed open country, wide and high. They talked and bounded on,

Jude cutting from a little covert a long walking-stick for Sue as tall

as herself, with a great crook, which made her look like a shepherdess.

About half-way on their journey they crossed a main road running due

east and west—the old road from London to Land’s End. They paused, and

looked up and down it for a moment, and remarked upon the desolation

which had come over this once lively thoroughfare, while the wind

dipped to earth and scooped straws and hay-stems from the ground.

They crossed the road and passed on, but during the next half-mile Sue

seemed to grow tired, and Jude began to be distressed for her. They had

walked a good distance altogether, and if they could not reach the

other station it would be rather awkward. For a long time there was no

cottage visible on the wide expanse of down and turnip-land; but

presently they came to a sheepfold, and next to the shepherd, pitching

hurdles. He told them that the only house near was his mother’s and

his, pointing to a little dip ahead from which a faint blue smoke

arose, and recommended them to go on and rest there.

This they did, and entered the house, admitted by an old woman without

a single tooth, to whom they were as civil as strangers can be when

their only chance of rest and shelter lies in the favour of the

householder.

“A nice little cottage,” said Jude.

“Oh, I don’t know about the niceness. I shall have to thatch it soon,

and where the thatch is to come from I can’t tell, for straw do get

that dear, that ’twill soon be cheaper to cover your house wi’ chainey

plates than thatch.”

They sat resting, and the shepherd came in. “Don’t ’ee mind I,” he said

with a deprecating wave of the hand; “bide here as long as ye will. But

mid you be thinking o’ getting back to Melchester to-night by train?

Because you’ll never do it in this world, since you don’t know the lie

of the country. I don’t mind going with ye some o’ the ways, but even

then the train mid be gone.”

They started up.

“You can bide here, you know, over the night—can’t ’em, Mother? The

place is welcome to ye. ’Tis hard lying, rather, but volk may do

worse.” He turned to Jude and asked privately: “Be you a married

couple?”

“Hsh—no!” said Jude.

“Oh—I meant nothing ba’dy—not I! Well then, she can go into Mother’s

room, and you and I can lie in the outer chimmer after they’ve gone

through. I can call ye soon enough to catch the first train back.

You’ve lost this one now.”

On consideration they decided to close with this offer, and drew up and

shared with the shepherd and his mother the boiled bacon and greens for

supper.

“I rather like this,” said Sue, while their entertainers were clearing

away the dishes. “Outside all laws except gravitation and germination.”

“You only think you like it; you don’t: you are quite a product of

civilization,” said Jude, a recollection of her engagement reviving his

soreness a little.

“Indeed I am not, Jude. I like reading and all that, but I crave to get

back to the life of my infancy and its freedom.”

“Do you remember it so well? You seem to me to have nothing

unconventional at all about you.”

“Oh, haven’t I! You don’t know what’s inside me.”

“What?”

“The Ishmaelite.”

“An urban miss is what you are.”

She looked severe disagreement, and turned away.

The shepherd aroused them the next morning, as he had said. It was

bright and clear, and the four miles to the train were accomplished

pleasantly. When they had reached Melchester, and walked to the Close,

and the gables of the old building in which she was again to be immured

rose before Sue’s eyes, she looked a little scared. “I expect I shall

catch it!” she murmured.

They rang the great bell and waited.

“Oh, I bought something for you, which I had nearly forgotten,” she

said quickly, searching her pocket. “It is a new little photograph of

me. Would you like it?”

“_Would_ I!” He took it gladly, and the porter came. There seemed to be

an ominous glance on his face when he opened the gate. She passed in,

looking back at Jude, and waving her hand.

III

The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to

one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled the

species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester, formed a

very mixed community, which included the daughters of mechanics,

curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairy-men, soldiers, sailors,

and villagers. They sat in the large school-room of the establishment

on the evening previously described, and word was passed round that Sue

Bridehead had not come in at closing-time.

“She went out with her young man,” said a second-year’s student, who

knew about young men. “And Miss Traceley saw her at the station with

him. She’ll have it hot when she does come.”

“She said he was her cousin,” observed a youthful new girl.

“That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be

effectual in saving our souls,” said the head girl of the year, drily.

The fact was that, only twelve months before, there had occurred a

lamentable seduction of one of the pupils who had made the same

statement in order to gain meetings with her lover. The affair had

created a scandal, and the management had consequently been rough on

cousins ever since.

At nine o’clock the names were called, Sue’s being pronounced three

times sonorously by Miss Traceley without eliciting an answer.

At a quarter past nine the seventy stood up to sing the “Evening Hymn,”

and then knelt down to prayers. After prayers they went in to supper,

and every girl’s thought was, Where is Sue Bridehead? Some of the

students, who had seen Jude from the window, felt that they would not

mind risking her punishment for the pleasure of being kissed by such a

kindly-faced young man. Hardly one among them believed in the

cousinship.

Half an hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their tender

feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which at intervals

stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the legend “The

Weaker” upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were moulded,

which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and abilities

could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what

they are. They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose

pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious, and would not

discover till, amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their

injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds

would revert to this experience as to something which had been allowed

to slip past them insufficiently regarded.

One of the mistresses came in to turn out the lights, and before doing

so gave a final glance at Sue’s cot, which remained empty, and at her

little dressing-table at the foot, which, like all the rest, was

ornamented with various girlish trifles, framed photographs being not

the least conspicuous among them. Sue’s table had a moderate show, two

men in their filigree and velvet frames standing together beside her

looking-glass.

“Who are these men—did she ever say?” asked the mistress. “Strictly

speaking, relations’ portraits only are allowed on these tables, you

know.”

“One—the middle-aged man,” said a student in the next bed—“is the

schoolmaster she served under—Mr. Phillotson.”

“And the other—this undergraduate in cap and gown—who is he?”

“He is a friend, or was. She has never told his name.”

“Was it either of these two who came for her?”

“No.”

“You are sure ’twas not the undergraduate?”

“Quite. He was a young man with a black beard.”

The lights were promptly extinguished, and till they fell asleep the

girls indulged in conjectures about Sue, and wondered what games she

had carried on in London and at Christminster before she came here,

some of the more restless ones getting out of bed and looking from the

mullioned windows at the vast west front of the cathedral opposite, and

the spire rising behind it.

When they awoke the next morning they glanced into Sue’s nook, to find

it still without a tenant. After the early lessons by gas-light, in

half-toilet, and when they had come up to dress for breakfast, the bell

of the entrance gate was heard to ring loudly. The mistress of the

dormitory went away, and presently came back to say that the

principal’s orders were that nobody was to speak to Bridehead without

permission.

When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily tidy herself,

looking flushed and tired, she went to her cubicle in silence, none of

them coming out to greet her or to make inquiry. When they had gone

downstairs they found that she did not follow them into the dining-hall

to breakfast, and they then learnt that she had been severely

reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week, there to be

confined, and take her meals, and do all her reading.

At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they thought, too

severe. A round robin was prepared and sent in to the principal, asking

for a remission of Sue’s punishment. No notice was taken. Towards

evening, when the geography mistress began dictating her subject, the

girls in the class sat with folded arms.

“You mean that you are not going to work?” said the mistress at last.

“I may as well tell you that it has been ascertained that the young man

Bridehead stayed out with was not her cousin, for the very good reason

that she has no such relative. We have written to Christminster to

ascertain.”

“We are willing to take her word,” said the head girl.

“This young man was discharged from his work at Christminster for

drunkenness and blasphemy in public-houses, and he has come here to

live, entirely to be near her.”

However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the mistress left the

room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.

Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard exclamations

from the first-year’s girls in an adjoining classroom, and one rushed

in to say that Sue Bridehead had got out of the back window of the room

in which she had been confined, escaped in the dark across the lawn,

and disappeared. How she had managed to get out of the garden nobody

could tell, as it was bounded by the river at the bottom, and the side

door was locked.

They went and looked at the empty room, the casement between the middle

mullions of which stood open. The lawn was again searched with a

lantern, every bush and shrub being examined, but she was nowhere

hidden. Then the porter of the front gate was interrogated, and on

reflection he said that he remembered hearing a sort of splashing in

the stream at the back, but he had taken no notice, thinking some ducks

had come down the river from above.

“She must have walked through the river!” said a mistress.

“Or drownded herself,” said the porter.

The mind of the matron was horrified—not so much at the possible death

of Sue as at the possible half-column detailing that event in all the

newspapers, which, added to the scandal of the year before, would give

the college an unenviable notoriety for many months to come.

More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and then, at last,

on the opposite shore, which was open to the fields, some little

boot-tracks were discerned in the mud, which left no doubt that the too

excitable girl had waded through a depth of water reaching nearly to

her shoulders—for this was the chief river of the county, and was

mentioned in all the geography books with respect. As Sue had not

brought disgrace upon the school by drowning herself, the matron began

to speak superciliously of her, and to express gladness that she was

gone.

On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the Close Gate.

Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the silent Close, and

stand opposite the house that contained Sue, and watch the shadows of

the girls’ heads passing to and fro upon the blinds, and wish he had

nothing else to do but to sit reading and learning all day what many of

the thoughtless inmates despised. But to-night, having finished tea and

brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of the Twenty-ninth

Volume of Pusey’s Library of the Fathers, a set of books which he had

purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price that seemed to him to be

one of miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work. He fancied he

heard something rattle lightly against his window; then he heard it

again. Certainly somebody had thrown gravel. He rose and gently lifted

the sash.

“Jude!” (from below).

“Sue!”

“Yes—it is! Can I come up without being seen?”

“Oh yes!”

“Then don’t come down. Shut the window.”

Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough, the front door

being opened merely by a knob which anybody could turn, as in most old

country towns. He palpitated at the thought that she had fled to him in

her trouble as he had fled to her in his. What counterparts they were!

He unlatched the door of his room, heard a stealthy rustle on the dark

stairs, and in a moment she appeared in the light of his lamp. He went

up to seize her hand, and found she was clammy as a marine deity, and

that her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the

Parthenon frieze.

“I’m so cold!” she said through her chattering teeth. “Can I come by

your fire, Jude?”

She crossed to his little grate and very little fire, but as the water

dripped from her as she moved, the idea of drying herself was absurd.

“Whatever have you done, darling?” he asked, with alarm, the tender

epithet slipping out unawares.

“Walked through the largest river in the county—that’s what I’ve done!

They locked me up for being out with you; and it seemed so unjust that

I couldn’t bear it, so I got out of the window and escaped across the

stream!” She had begun the explanation in her usual slightly

independent tones, but before she had finished the thin pink lips

trembled, and she could hardly refrain from crying.

“Dear Sue!” he said. “You must take off all your things! And let me

see—you must borrow some from the landlady. I’ll ask her.”

“No, no! Don’t let her know, for God’s sake! We are so near the school

that they’ll come after me!”

“Then you must put on mine. You don’t mind?”

“Oh no.”

“My Sunday suit, you know. It is close here.” In fact, everything was

close and handy in Jude’s single chamber, because there was not room

for it to be otherwise. He opened a drawer, took out his best dark

suit, and giving the garments a shake, said, “Now, how long shall I

give you?”

“Ten minutes.”

Jude left the room and went into the street, where he walked up and

down. A clock struck half-past seven, and he returned. Sitting in his

only arm-chair he saw a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself

on a Sunday, so pathetic in her defencelessness that his heart felt big

with the sense of it. On two other chairs before the fire were her wet

garments. She blushed as he sat down beside her, but only for a moment.

“I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all my

things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They are only a woman’s

clothes—sexless cloth and linen… I wish I didn’t feel so ill and sick!

Will you dry my clothes now? Please do, Jude, and I’ll get a lodging by

and by. It is not late yet.”

“No, you shan’t, if you are ill. You must stay here. Dear, dear Sue,

what can I get for you?”

“I don’t know! I can’t help shivering. I wish I could get warm.” Jude

put on her his great-coat in addition, and then ran out to the nearest

public-house, whence he returned with a little bottle in his hand.

“Here’s six of best brandy,” he said. “Now you drink it, dear; all of

it.”

“I can’t out of the bottle, can I?” Jude fetched the glass from the

dressing-table, and administered the spirit in some water. She gasped a

little, but gulped it down, and lay back in the armchair.

She then began to relate circumstantially her experiences since they

had parted; but in the middle of her story her voice faltered, her head

nodded, and she ceased. She was in a sound sleep. Jude, dying of

anxiety lest she should have caught a chill which might permanently

injure her, was glad to hear the regular breathing. He softly went

nearer to her, and observed that a warm flush now rosed her hitherto

blue cheeks, and felt that her hanging hand was no longer cold. Then he

stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a

divinity.

IV

Jude’s reverie was interrupted by the creak of footsteps ascending the

stairs.

He whisked Sue’s clothing from the chair where it was drying, thrust it

under the bed, and sat down to his book. Somebody knocked and opened

the door immediately. It was the landlady.

“Oh, I didn’t know whether you was in or not, Mr. Fawley. I wanted to

know if you would require supper. I see you’ve a young gentleman—”

“Yes, ma’am. But I think I won’t come down to-night. Will you bring

supper up on a tray, and I’ll have a cup of tea as well.”

It was Jude’s custom to go downstairs to the kitchen, and eat his meals

with the family, to save trouble. His landlady brought up the supper,

however, on this occasion, and he took it from her at the door.

When she had descended he set the teapot on the hob, and drew out Sue’s

clothes anew; but they were far from dry. A thick woollen gown, he

found, held a deal of water. So he hung them up again, and enlarged his

fire and mused as the steam from the garments went up the chimney.

Suddenly she said, “Jude!”

“Yes. All right. How do you feel now?”

“Better. Quite well. Why, I fell asleep, didn’t I? What time is it? Not

late surely?”

“It is past ten.”

“Is it really? What _shall_ I do!” she said, starting up.

“Stay where you are.”

“Yes; that’s what I want to do. But I don’t know what they would say!

And what will you do?”

“I am going to sit here by the fire all night, and read. To-morrow is

Sunday, and I haven’t to go out anywhere. Perhaps you will be saved a

severe illness by resting there. Don’t be frightened. I’m all right.

Look here, what I have got for you. Some supper.”

When she had sat upright she breathed plaintively and said, “I do feel

rather weak still. I thought I was well; and I ought not to be here,

ought I?” But the supper fortified her somewhat, and when she had had

some tea and had lain back again she was bright and cheerful.

The tea must have been green, or too long drawn, for she seemed

preternaturally wakeful afterwards, though Jude, who had not taken any,

began to feel heavy; till her conversation fixed his attention.

“You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn’t you?”

she said, breaking a silence. “It was very odd you should have done

that.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.”

“You are very philosophical. ‘A negation’ is profound talking.”

“Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?” she asked, with a touch of

raillery.

“No—not learned. Only you don’t talk quite like a girl—well, a girl who

has had no advantages.”

“I have had advantages. I don’t know Latin and Greek, though I know the

grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin

classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lemprière,

Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio,

Scarron, De Brantôme, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare,

the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the

unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery.”

“You have read more than I,” he said with a sigh. “How came you to read

some of those queerer ones?”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it was by accident. My life has been

entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear

of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them—one or two

of them particularly—almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not

felt about them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their guard

against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—no man short of a

sensual savage—will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad,

unless she invites him. Until she says by a look ‘Come on’ he is always

afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.

However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a

friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught

me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold

of otherwise.”

“Is your friendship broken off?”

“Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken

his degree and left Christminster.”

“You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?”

“Yes. We used to go about together—on walking tours, reading tours, and

things of that sort—like two men almost. He asked me to live with him,

and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he

meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his

mistress, in fact, but I wasn’t in love with him—and on my saying I

should go away if he didn’t agree to _my_ plan, he did so. We shared a

sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one

of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go

abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so

long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman.

I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to

die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty—though I

hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to

Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a

little money—because I broke his heart, I suppose. That’s how men

are—so much better than women!”

“Good heavens!—what did you do then?”

“Ah—now you are angry with me!” she said, a contralto note of tragedy

coming suddenly into her silvery voice. “I wouldn’t have told you if I

had known!”

“No, I am not. Tell me all.”

“Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost

it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned

to Christminster, as my father— who was also in London, and had started

as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre—wouldn’t have me back; and I got

that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me… I said you

didn’t know how bad I was!”

Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read

more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled

as he said: “However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent

as you are unconventional!”

“I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have

‘twitched the robe

From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,’”

said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was

brimming with tears. “But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if

that’s what you mean! I have remained as I began.”

“I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they

began.”

“Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be

cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won’t have it! Some of the

most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in

their daily lives.”

“Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?”

“Yes—long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody.”

“What did he say?”

“He did not pass any criticism—only said I was everything to him,

whatever I did; and things like that.”

Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away

from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender.

“Aren’t you _really_ vexed with me, dear Jude?” she suddenly asked, in

a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come

from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. “I would

rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!”

“I don’t know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about

you!”

“I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met.”

“You don’t care _more_! There, I ought not to say that. Don’t answer

it!”

There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him

cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very

helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he.

“I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so

hard,” he said, to turn the subject. “I am absorbed in theology, you

know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you

weren’t here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you

wouldn’t like—”

“Oh no, no,” she answered, “I would rather not, if you don’t mind. I

should seem so—such a hypocrite.”

“I thought you wouldn’t join, so I didn’t propose it. You must remember

that I hope to be a useful minister some day.”

“To be ordained, I think you said?”

“Yes.”

“Then you haven’t given up the idea?—I thought that perhaps you had by

this time.”

“Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about

that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr.

Phillotson—”

“I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified

degree, on its intellectual side,” said Sue Bridehead earnestly. “My

friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man

I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new

wine in old bottles. The mediævalism of Christminster must go, be

sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at

times one couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of

the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in

touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest

mind I always felt,

‘O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!’”…

“Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!”

“Then I won’t, dear Jude!” The emotional throat-note had come back, and

she turned her face away.

“I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was

resentful because I couldn’t get there.” He spoke gently, and resisted

his impulse to pique her on to tears.

“It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans,

drunkards, and paupers,” she said, perverse still at his differing from

her. “_They_ see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the

colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very

men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a

man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or

friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’

sons.”

“Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher.”

“And I for something broader, truer,” she insisted. “At present

intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other;

and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other.”

“What would Mr. Phillotson—”

“It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!”

He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she

turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending

university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as

Phillotson’s _protégée_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him.

“Well, that’s just what I am, too,” he said. “I am fearful of life,

spectre-seeing always.”

“But you are good and dear!” she murmured.

His heart bumped, and he made no reply.

“You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?” she added,

putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her.

“Let me see—when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and—”

“There’s a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now

will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then

say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on

any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me

to my custom? You are sure you won’t join me?”

“I’ll look at you.”

“No. Don’t tease, Sue!”

“Very well—I’ll do just as you bid me, and I won’t vex you, Jude,” she

replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever

after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than

the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it

up, and turned over the leaves.

“Jude,” she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her;

“will you let me make you a _new_ New Testament, like the one I made

for myself at Christminster?”

“Oh yes. How was that made?”

“I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into

separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as

written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the

Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the

volume rebound. My university friend Mr.—but never mind his name, poor

boy—said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards

made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable.”

“H’m!” said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.

“And what a literary enormity this is,” she said, as she glanced into

the pages of Solomon’s Song. “I mean the synopsis at the head of each

chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn’t

be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed,

many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to

think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number

they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff.”

Jude looked pained. “You are quite Voltairean!” he murmured.

“Indeed? Then I won’t say any more, except that people have no right to

falsify the Bible! I _hate_ such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster

over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human

love as lies in that great and passionate song!” Her speech had grown

spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. “I

_wish_ I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my

side!”

“But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!” he said,

taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into

mere argument.

“Yes you are, yes you are!” she cried, turning away her face that he

might not see her brimming eyes. “You are on the side of the people in

the training-school—at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on

is, that to explain such verses as this: ‘Whither is thy beloved gone,

O thou fairest among women?’ by the note: ‘_The Church professeth her

faith_,’ is supremely ridiculous!”

“Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I

am—only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know

_you_ are fairest among women to me, come to that!”

“But you are not to say it now!” Sue replied, her voice changing to its

softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands

like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on

such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what

was written in an old book like the Bible.

“I won’t disturb your convictions—I really won’t!” she went on

soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. “But I did

want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and

knew you wanted to be my comrade, I—shall I confess it?—thought that

man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don’t

know what to say.”

“Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn’t

long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you

believe it. I take Christianity.”

“Well, perhaps you might take something worse.”

“Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!” He thought of Arabella.

“I won’t ask what, because we are going to be _very_ nice with each

other, aren’t we, and never, never, vex each other any more?” She

looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his

breast.

“I shall always care for you!” said Jude.

“And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your

faulty and tiresome little Sue!”

He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing.

Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and

was he to be the next one? … But Sue was so dear! … If he could only

get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily

of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion

on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of

daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he

had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or

absence, would ever divide him from her.

But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell

asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused

himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six

o’clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her

clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his

she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and

boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on

the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the

yard.

V

When he returned she was dressed as usual.

“Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?” she asked. “The town

is not yet astir.”

“But you have had no breakfast.”

“Oh, I don’t want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that

school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don’t

they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don’t know! It was quite by his

wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have

any respect or fear. I hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me

dreadfully, I expect!”

“I’ll go to him and explain—” began Jude.

“Oh no, you shan’t. I don’t care for him! He may think what he likes—I

shall do just as I choose!”

“But you just this moment said—”

“Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of

what I shall do—go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the

training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near

Shaston, about eighteen miles from here—and I shall stay there till

this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again.”

At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of

coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising

to go to his work every day before the household was astir.

“Now a dew-bit to eat with it,” he said; “and off we go. You can have a

regular breakfast when you get there.”

They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the

station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an

upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed

sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him

at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted

to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the

platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more.

“I want to tell you something—two things,” he said hurriedly as the

train came up. “One is a warm one, the other a cold one!”

“Jude,” she said. “I know one of them. And you mustn’t!”

“What?”

“You mustn’t love me. You are to like me—that’s all!”

Jude’s face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated

in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then

the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished

away.

Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her

departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the

cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her,

which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had

reached her friend’s house. She told him of her safe arrival and

comfortable quarters, and then added:—

What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at

parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were

out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it,

and it has reproached me ever since. _If you want to love me, Jude, you

may_: I don’t mind at all; and I’ll never say again that you mustn’t!

Now I won’t write any more about that. You do forgive your

thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won’t make her miserable by

saying you don’t?—Ever,

SUE.

It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought

what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a

long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt

he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a

conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her.

Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue’s impulsive

note than it really was intended to bear.

After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would

write again. But he received no further communication; and in the

intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he

should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen

miles.

He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his

missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not

stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her

he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following

day, for he felt sure something had happened.

His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her

immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written

for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival

at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of

Sunday, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when the parish was as

vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the

church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison.

A little girl opened the door. “Miss Bridehead is up-stairs,” she said.

“And will you please walk up to her?”

“Is she ill?” asked Jude hastily.

“Only a little—not very.”

Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him

which way to turn—the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the

doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet

square.

“Oh, Sue!” he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. “How

is this! You couldn’t write?”

“No—it wasn’t that!” she answered. “I did catch a bad cold—but I could

have written. Only I wouldn’t!”

“Why not?—frightening me like this!”

“Yes—that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to

you any more. They won’t have me back at the school—that’s why I

couldn’t write. Not the fact, but the reason!”

“Well?”

“They not only won’t have me, but they gave me a parting piece of

advice—”

“What?”

She did not answer directly. “I vowed I never would tell you, Jude—it

is so vulgar and distressing!”

“Is it about us?”

“Yes.”

“But do tell me!”

“Well—somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say

you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my

reputation! … There—now I have told you, and I wish I hadn’t!”

“Oh, poor Sue!”

“I don’t think of you like that means! It did just _occur_ to me to

regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn’t begun to. I _have_

recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as

total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude—why, of course, if I

had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn’t have come to you so often!

And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till

the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little.

Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my

fault. Everything is my fault always!”

The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each

other with a mutual distress.

“I was so blind at first!” she went on. “I didn’t see what you felt at

all. Oh, you have been unkind to me—you have—to look upon me as a

sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself!

Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we’ve

been doing wrong! I’ll never trust you again!”

“Yes, Sue,” he said simply; “I am to blame—more than you think. I was

quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or

two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers

prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge

to avail myself of it. But don’t you think I deserve a little

consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I

couldn’t help having them?”

She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if

afraid she might forgive him.

By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that

fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue’s

undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its

temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and

ventured it, oblivious both of Sue’s declaration of her neutral

feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of

Arabella’s parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part

to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of

this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the

recognized barriers between them.

“Of course—I know you don’t—care about me in any particular way,” he

sorrowed. “You ought not, and you are right. You belong to—Mr.

Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?”

“Yes,” she said shortly, her face changing a little. “Though I didn’t

ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I

shouldn’t care if he didn’t come any more!”

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his

honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude’s feelings of love were

deprecated by her. He went on to something else.

“This will blow over, dear Sue,” he said. “The training-school

authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some

other, no doubt.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Phillotson,” she said decisively.

Sue’s kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more

intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy.

But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would

have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of

renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest,

should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and

decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then,

in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming

characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written

almost immediately he had gone from her:

Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it,

and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you

not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and

associate, with all my faults. I’ll try not to be like it again.

I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from

the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would

like?—Your repentant

SUE.

Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the

cathedral works when she came.

VI

Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty

concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson,

who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near

Christminster, to undertake a large boys’ school in his native town of

Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the

crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal

that the schoolmaster’s plans and dreams so long indulged in had been

abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor

literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was

now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose—that of

keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls’

schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go

into training, since she would not marry him offhand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and

entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster

was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture

being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to

sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of

his old studies—one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic

antiquities—an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a

subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had

interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to

those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains

were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast

to accepted views on the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby

of Phillotson at present—his ostensible reason for going alone into

fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself

up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected,

instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part

had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it

was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular

evening in the month, when it had grown quite late—to near midnight,

indeed—and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient

angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward,

announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was

not exactly studying.

The interior of the room—the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster’s

loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire,

bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research—more than

creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own

making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now.

What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes,

written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months before, and

it was the clerical rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,

few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its

envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same

womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by one

and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these small

documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were

straightforward, frank letters, signed “Sue B—”; just such ones as

would be written during short absences, with no other thought than

their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading and

other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by the

writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of

them—quite a recent note—the young woman said that she had received his

considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of him to

say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the school

being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her strong wish

that her engagement to him should not be known, which it would

infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the

school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be

gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man who loved her had not

been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.

He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from which he

drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had known her,

standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand. There was

another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a very

distinct and attractive picture of her, which just disclosed, too, the

thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods. It was a duplicate of

the one she had given Jude, and would have given to any man. Phillotson

brought it half-way to his lips, but withdrew it in doubt at her

perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing the dead pasteboard with all the

passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young man of

eighteen.

The schoolmaster’s was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,

rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving. A certain

gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by nature, suggesting an

inherent wish to do rightly by all. His speech was a little slow, but

his tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect. His

greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle of his

crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he only wore

spectacles when reading at night. It was almost certainly a

renunciation forced upon him by his academic purpose, rather than a

distaste for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one

of the sex in matrimony.

Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated many and

oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick and

penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to the

self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making him,

in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet glances,

lest they should read what the dream within him was.

He had honourably acquiesced in Sue’s announced wish that he was not

often to visit her at the training school; but at length, his patience

being sorely tried, he set out one Saturday afternoon to pay her an

unexpected call. There the news of her departure—expulsion as it might

almost have been considered—was flashed upon him without warning or

mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few minutes to behold

her face; and when he turned away he could hardly see the road before

him.

Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,

although it was fourteen days old. A short reflection told him that

this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for

silence as any degree of blameworthiness.

They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having no

immediate anxiety about her comfort, his thoughts took the direction of

a burning indignation against the training school committee. In his

bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent cathedral, just now in a

direly dismantled state by reason of the repairs. He sat down on a

block of freestone, regardless of the dusty imprint it made on his

breeches; and his listless eyes following the movements of the workmen

he presently became aware that the reputed culprit, Sue’s lover Jude,

was one amongst them.

Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the model

of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson’s tentative

courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man’s

mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to

communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson’s success in

obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude, he had frankly

recognized that he did not wish to see or hear of his senior any more,

learn anything of his pursuits, or even imagine again what excellencies

might appertain to his character. On this very day of the

schoolmaster’s visit Jude was expecting Sue, as she had promised; and

when therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the nave of the building,

saw, moreover, that he was coming to speak to him, he felt no little

embarrassment; which Phillotson’s own embarrassment prevented his

observing.

Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other workmen to the

spot where Phillotson had been sitting. Jude offered him a piece of

sackcloth for a cushion, and told him it was dangerous to sit on the

bare block.

“Yes; yes,” said Phillotson abstractedly, as he reseated himself, his

eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying to remember where he

was. “I won’t keep you long. It was merely that I have heard that you

have seen my little friend Sue recently. It occurred to me to speak to

you on that account. I merely want to ask—about her.”

“I think I know what!” Jude hurriedly said. “About her escaping from

the training school, and her coming to me?”

“Yes.”

“Well”—Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to

annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery

which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most

honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off

Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true, and

that Sue had irretrievably committed herself with him. But his action

did not respond for a moment to his animal instinct; and what he said

was, “I am glad of your kindness in coming to talk plainly to me about

it. You know what they say?—that I ought to marry her.”

“What!”

“And I wish with all my soul I could!”

Phillotson trembled, and his naturally pale face acquired a corpselike

sharpness in its lines. “I had no idea that it was of this nature! God

forbid!”

“No, no!” said Jude aghast. “I thought you understood? I mean that were

I in a position to marry her, or someone, and settle down, instead of

living in lodgings here and there, I should be glad!”

What he had really meant was simply that he loved her.

“But—since this painful matter has been opened up—what really

happened?” asked Phillotson, with the firmness of a man who felt that a

sharp smart now was better than a long agony of suspense hereafter.

“Cases arise, and this is one, when even ungenerous questions must be

put to make false assumptions impossible, and to kill scandal.”

Jude explained readily; giving the whole series of adventures,

including the night at the shepherd’s, her wet arrival at his lodging,

her indisposition from her immersion, their vigil of discussion, and

his seeing her off next morning.

“Well now,” said Phillotson at the conclusion, “I take it as your final

word, and I know I can believe you, that the suspicion which led to her

rustication is an absolutely baseless one?”

“It is,” said Jude solemnly. “Absolutely. So help me God!”

The schoolmaster rose. Each of the twain felt that the interview could

not comfortably merge in a friendly discussion of their recent

experiences, after the manner of friends; and when Jude had taken him

round, and shown him some features of the renovation which the old

cathedral was undergoing, Phillotson bade the young man good-day and

went away.

This visit took place about eleven o’clock in the morning; but no Sue

appeared. When Jude went to his dinner at one he saw his beloved ahead

of him in the street leading up from the North Gate, walking as if no

way looking for him. Speedily overtaking her he remarked that he had

asked her to come to him at the cathedral, and she had promised.

“I have been to get my things from the college,” she said—an

observation which he was expected to take as an answer, though it was

not one. Finding her to be in this evasive mood he felt inclined to

give her the information so long withheld.

“You have not seen Mr. Phillotson to-day?” he ventured to inquire.

“I have not. But I am not going to be cross-examined about him; and if

you ask anything more I won’t answer!”

“It is very odd that—” He stopped, regarding her.

“What?”

“That you are often not so nice in your real presence as you are in

your letters!”

“Does it really seem so to you?” said she, smiling with quick

curiosity. “Well, that’s strange; but I feel just the same about you,

Jude. When you are gone away I seem such a coldhearted—”

As she knew his sentiment towards her Jude saw that they were getting

upon dangerous ground. It was now, he thought, that he must speak as an

honest man.

But he did not speak, and she continued: “It was that which made me

write and say—I didn’t mind your loving me—if you wanted to, much!”

The exultation he might have felt at what that implied, or seemed to

imply, was nullified by his intention, and he rested rigid till he

began: “I have never told you—”

“Yes you have,” murmured she.

“I mean, I have never told you my history—all of it.”

“But I guess it. I know nearly.”

Jude looked up. Could she possibly know of that morning performance of

his with Arabella; which in a few months had ceased to be a marriage

more completely than by death? He saw that she did not.

“I can’t quite tell you here in the street,” he went on with a gloomy

tongue. “And you had better not come to my lodgings. Let us go in

here.”

The building by which they stood was the market-house; it was the only

place available; and they entered, the market being over, and the

stalls and areas empty. He would have preferred a more congenial spot,

but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle

for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor

littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of

decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished

his brief narrative, which merely led up to the information that he had

married a wife some years earlier, and that his wife was living still.

Almost before her countenance had time to change she hurried out the

words,

“Why didn’t you tell me before!”

“I couldn’t. It seemed so cruel to tell it.”

“To yourself, Jude. So it was better to be cruel to me!”

“No, dear darling!” cried Jude passionately. He tried to take her hand,

but she withdrew it. Their old relations of confidence seemed suddenly

to have ended, and the antagonisms of sex to sex were left without any

counter-poising predilections. She was his comrade, friend, unconscious

sweetheart no longer; and her eyes regarded him in estranged silence.

“I was ashamed of the episode in my life which brought about the

marriage,” he continued. “I can’t explain it precisely now. I could

have done it if you had taken it differently!”

“But how can I?” she burst out. “Here I have been saying, or writing,

that—that you might love me, or something of the sort!—just out of

charity—and all the time—oh, it is perfectly damnable how things are!”

she said, stamping her foot in a nervous quiver.

“You take me wrong, Sue! I never thought you cared for me at all, till

quite lately; so I felt it did not matter! Do you care for me, Sue?—you

know how I mean?—I don’t like ‘out of charity’ at all!”

It was a question which in the circumstances Sue did not choose to

answer.

“I suppose she—your wife—is—a very pretty woman, even if she’s wicked?”

she asked quickly.

“She’s pretty enough, as far as that goes.”

“Prettier than I am, no doubt!”

“You are not the least alike. And I have never seen her for years… But

she’s sure to come back—they always do!”

“How strange of you to stay apart from her like this!” said Sue, her

trembling lip and lumpy throat belying her irony. “You, such a

religious man. How will the demi-gods in your Pantheon—I mean those

legendary persons you call saints—intercede for you after this? Now if

I had done such a thing it would have been different, and not

remarkable, for I at least don’t regard marriage as a sacrament. Your

theories are not so advanced as your practice!”

“Sue, you are terribly cutting when you like to be—a perfect Voltaire!

But you must treat me as you will!”

When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and trying to blink away

her sympathetic tears said with all the winning reproachfulness of a

heart-hurt woman: “Ah—you should have told me before you gave me that

idea that you wanted to be allowed to love me! I had no feeling before

that moment at the railway-station, except—” For once Sue was as

miserable as he, in her attempts to keep herself free from emotion, and

her less than half-success.

“Don’t cry, dear!” he implored.

“I am—not crying—because I meant to—love you; but because of your want

of—confidence!”

They were quite screened from the market-square without, and he could

not help putting out his arm towards her waist. His momentary desire

was the means of her rallying. “No, no!” she said, drawing back

stringently, and wiping her eyes. “Of course not! It would be hypocrisy

to pretend that it would be meant as from my cousin; and it can’t be in

any other way.”

They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself recovered. It was

distracting to Jude, and his heart would have ached less had she

appeared anyhow but as she did appear; essentially large-minded and

generous on reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow

womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give her sex.

“I don’t blame you for what you couldn’t help,” she said, smiling. “How

should I be so foolish? I do blame you a little bit for not telling me

before. But, after all, it doesn’t matter. We should have had to keep

apart, you see, even if this had not been in your life.”

“No, we shouldn’t, Sue! This is the only obstacle.”

“You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be your wife,

even if there had been no obstacle,” said Sue, with a gentle

seriousness which did not reveal her mind. “And then we are cousins,

and it is bad for cousins to marry. And—I am engaged to somebody else.

As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly

way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their

views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by

their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes

relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment

where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by

them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.”

Her being able to talk learnedly showed that she was mistress of

herself again; and before they parted she had almost regained her

vivacious glance, her reciprocity of tone, her gay manner, and her

second-thought attitude of critical largeness towards others of her age

and sex.

He could speak more freely now. “There were several reasons against my

telling you rashly. One was what I have said; another, that it was

always impressed upon me that I ought not to marry—that I belonged to

an odd and peculiar family—the wrong breed for marriage.”

“Ah—who used to say that to you?”

“My great-aunt. She said it always ended badly with us Fawleys.”

“That’s strange. My father used to say the same to me!”

They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an

assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would

have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness—two bitters in one

dish.

“Oh, but there can’t be anything in it!” she said with nervous

lightness. “Our family have been unlucky of late years in choosing

mates—that’s all.”

And then they pretended to persuade themselves that all that had

happened was of no consequence, and that they could still be cousins

and friends and warm correspondents, and have happy genial times when

they met, even if they met less frequently than before. Their parting

was in good friendship, and yet Jude’s last look into her eyes was

tinged with inquiry, for he felt that he did not even now quite know

her mind.

VII

Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed across Jude like a withering

blast.

Before reading the letter he was led to suspect that its contents were

of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight of the signature—which was

in her full name, never used in her correspondence with him since her

first note:

MY DEAR JUDE,—I have something to tell you which perhaps you will not

be surprised to hear, though certainly it may strike you as being

accelerated (as the railway companies say of their trains). Mr.

Phillotson and I are to be married quite soon—in three or four weeks.

We had intended, as you know, to wait till I had gone through my course

of training and obtained my certificate, so as to assist him, if

necessary, in the teaching. But he generously says he does not see any

object in waiting, now I am not at the training school. It is so good

of him, because the awkwardness of my situation has really come about

by my fault in getting expelled.

Wish me joy. Remember I say you are to, and you mustn’t

refuse!—Your affectionate cousin,

SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on

drinking tea because his mouth was so dry. Then presently he went back

to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so confronted.

Everything seemed turning to satire. And yet, what could the poor girl

do? he asked himself, and felt worse than shedding tears.

“O Susanna Florence Mary!” he said as he worked. “You don’t know what

marriage means!”

Could it be possible that his announcement of his own marriage had

pricked her on to this, just as his visit to her when in liquor may

have pricked her on to her engagement? To be sure, there seemed to

exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical and social, for her

decision; but Sue was not a very practical or calculating person; and

he was compelled to think that a pique at having his secret sprung upon

her had moved her to give way to Phillotson’s probable representations,

that the best course to prove how unfounded were the suspicions of the

school authorities would be to marry him off-hand, as in fulfilment of

an ordinary engagement. Sue had, in fact, been placed in an awkward

corner. Poor Sue!

He determined to play the Spartan; to make the best of it, and support

her; but he could not write the requested good wishes for a day or two.

Meanwhile there came another note from his impatient little dear:

Jude, will you give me away? I have nobody else who could do it so

conveniently as you, being the only married relation I have here on the

spot, even if my father were friendly enough to be willing, which he

isn’t. I hope you won’t think it a trouble? I have been looking at the

marriage service in the prayer-book, and it seems to me very

humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to

the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will

and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody _gives_ me to him, like

a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted

views of woman, O churchman! But I forget: I am no longer privileged to

tease you.—Ever,

SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:

MY DEAR SUE,—Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give

you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house of your own, you

do not marry from your school friend’s, but from mine. It would be more

proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to

you in this part of the world.

I don’t see why you sign your letter in such a new and terribly

formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still!—Ever your

affectionate,

JUDE.

What had jarred on him even more than the signature was a little sting

he had been silent on—the phrase “married relation”—What an idiot it

made him seem as her lover! If Sue had written that in satire, he could

hardly forgive her; if in suffering—ah, that was another thing!

His offer of his lodging must have commended itself to Phillotson at

any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line of warm thanks,

accepting the convenience. Sue also thanked him. Jude immediately moved

into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage of the

suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue’s unpleasant

experience as for the sake of room.

Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for the wedding; and Jude

decided, after inquiry, that she should come into residence on the

following Saturday, which would allow of a ten days’ stay in the city

prior to the ceremony, sufficiently representing a nominal residence of

fifteen.

She arrived by the ten o’clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not

going to meet her at the station, by her special request, that he

should not lose a morning’s work and pay, she said (if this were her

true reason). But so well by this time did he know Sue that the

remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might, he

thought, have weighed with her in this. When he came home to dinner she

had taken possession of her apartment.

She lived in the same house with him, but on a different floor, and

they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only meal

they took together, when Sue’s manner was something like that of a

scared child. What she felt he did not know; their conversation was

mechanical, though she did not look pale or ill. Phillotson came

frequently, but mostly when Jude was absent. On the morning of the

wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin had

breakfast together for the first and last time during this curious

interval; in his room—the parlour—which he had hired for the period of

Sue’s residence. Seeing, as women do, how helpless he was in making the

place comfortable, she bustled about.

“What’s the matter, Jude?” she said suddenly.

He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands,

looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on the

tablecloth.

“Oh—nothing!”

“You are ‘father’, you know. That’s what they call the man who gives

you away.”

Jude could have said “Phillotson’s age entitles him to be called that!”

But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort.

She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in reflection,

and before the meal was over both he and she wished they had not put

such confidence in their new view of things, and had taken breakfast

apart. What oppressed Jude was the thought that, having done a wrong

thing of this sort himself, he was aiding and abetting the woman he

loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of imploring and warning her

against it. It was on his tongue to say, “You have quite made up your

mind?”

After breakfast they went out on an errand together moved by a mutual

thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of indulging

in unceremonious companionship. By the irony of fate, and the curious

trick in Sue’s nature of tempting Providence at critical times, she

took his arm as they walked through the muddy street—a thing she had

never done before in her life—and on turning the corner they found

themselves close to a grey perpendicular church with a low-pitched

roof—the church of St. Thomas.

“That’s the church,” said Jude.

“Where I am going to be married?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed!” she exclaimed with curiosity. “How I should like to go in and

see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it.”

Again he said to himself, “She does not realize what marriage means!”

He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by the

western door. The only person inside the gloomy building was a

charwoman cleaning. Sue still held Jude’s arm, almost as if she loved

him. Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his

thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by an ache:

… I can find no way

How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,

Nor prove too much for your womanhood!

They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar railing,

which they stood against in silence, turning then and walking down the

nave again, her hand still on his arm, precisely like a couple just

married. The too suggestive incident, entirely of her making, nearly

broke down Jude.

“I like to do things like this,” she said in the delicate voice of an

epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.

“I know you do!” said Jude.

“They are interesting, because they have probably never been done

before. I shall walk down the church like this with my husband in about

two hours, shan’t I!”

“No doubt you will!”

“Was it like this when you were married?”

“Good God, Sue—don’t be so awfully merciless! … There, dear one, I

didn’t mean it!”

“Ah—you are vexed!” she said regretfully, as she blinked away an access

of eye moisture. “And I promised never to vex you! … I suppose I ought

not to have asked you to bring me in here. Oh, I oughtn’t! I see it

now. My curiosity to hunt up a new sensation always leads me into these

scrapes. Forgive me! … You will, won’t you, Jude?”

The appeal was so remorseful that Jude’s eyes were even wetter than

hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.

“Now we’ll hurry away, and I won’t do it any more!” she continued

humbly; and they came out of the building, Sue intending to go on to

the station to meet Phillotson. But the first person they encountered

on entering the main street was the schoolmaster himself, whose train

had arrived sooner than Sue expected. There was nothing really to demur

to in her leaning on Jude’s arm; but she withdrew her hand, and Jude

thought that Phillotson had looked surprised.

“We have been doing such a funny thing!” said she, smiling candidly.

“We’ve been to the church, rehearsing as it were. Haven’t we, Jude?”

“How?” said Phillotson curiously.

Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be unnecessary frankness; but

she had gone too far not to explain all, which she accordingly did,

telling him how they had marched up to the altar.

Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude said as cheerfully as he

could, “I am going to buy her another little present. Will you both

come to the shop with me?”

“No,” said Sue, “I’ll go on to the house with him”; and requesting her

lover not to be a long time she departed with the schoolmaster.

Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they prepared for

the ceremony. Phillotson’s hair was brushed to a painful extent, and

his shirt collar appeared stiffer than it had been for the previous

twenty years. Beyond this he looked dignified and thoughtful, and

altogether a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict that he would

make a kind and considerate husband. That he adored Sue was obvious;

and she could almost be seen to feel that she was undeserving his

adoration.

Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly from the Red

Lion, and six or seven women and children had gathered by the door when

they came out. The schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though Jude was

getting to be recognized as a citizen; and the couple were judged to be

some relations of his from a distance, nobody supposing Sue to have

been a recent pupil at the training school.

In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little

wedding-present, which turned out to be two or three yards of white

tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as a veil.

“It looks so odd over a bonnet,” she said. “I’ll take the bonnet off.”

“Oh no—let it stay,” said Phillotson. And she obeyed.

When they had passed up the church and were standing in their places

Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the edge

of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the

service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the

business of giving her away. How could Sue have had the temerity to ask

him to do it—a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him? Women

were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead

of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic; or were

they more heroic? Or was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully gave

herself and him pain for the odd and mournful luxury of practising

long-suffering in her own person, and of being touched with tender pity

for him at having made him practise it? He could perceive that her face

was nervously set, and when they reached the trying ordeal of Jude

giving her to Phillotson she could hardly command herself; rather,

however, as it seemed, from her knowledge of what her cousin must feel,

whom she need not have had there at all, than from self-consideration.

Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and

grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal

inconsistency.

Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded by a mist which

prevented his seeing the emotions of others. As soon as they had signed

their names and come away, and the suspense was over, Jude felt

relieved.

The meal at his lodging was a very simple affair, and at two o’clock

they went off. In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked back; and

there was a frightened light in her eyes. Could it be that Sue had

acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew not what

for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of retaliating on

him for his secrecy? Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because

she was childishly ignorant of that side of their natures which wore

out women’s hearts and lives.

When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying that

she had forgotten something. Jude and the landlady offered to get it.

“No,” she said, running back. “It is my handkerchief. I know where I

left it.”

Jude followed her back. She had found it, and came holding it in her

hand. She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her lips

suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something. But she went

on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.

VIII

Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief behind; or

whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love

that at the last moment she could not bring herself to express.

He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were gone, and

fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol he went

upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots for

his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.

But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to be

possessed with an idea that she would come back. She could not possibly

go home with Phillotson, he fancied. The feeling grew and stirred. The

moment that the clock struck the last of his working hours he threw

down his tools and rushed homeward. “Has anybody been for me?” he

asked.

Nobody had been there.

As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o’clock that

night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had struck

eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off the feeling

that she would come back and sleep in the little room adjoining his own

in which she had slept so many previous days. Her actions were always

unpredictable: why should she not come? Gladly would he have compounded

for the denial of her as a sweetheart and wife by having her live thus

as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on the most distant terms. His

supper still remained spread, and going to the front door, and softly

setting it open, he returned to the room and sat as watchers sit on

Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the phantom of the Beloved. But she did

not come.

Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked out of

the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to London,

whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling

along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of

ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon showed its

position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars made

themselves visible as faint nebulæ only. It was a new beginning of

Sue’s history. He projected his mind into the future, and saw her with

children more or less in her own likeness around her. But the

consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her identity was

denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in

not allowing issue from one parent alone. Every desired renewal of an

existence is debased by being half alloy. “If at the estrangement or

death of my lost love, I could go and see her child—hers solely—there

would be comfort in it!” said Jude. And then he again uneasily saw, as

he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature

for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.

The oppressive strength of his affection for Sue showed itself on the

morrow and following days yet more clearly. He could no longer endure

the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab paint, and

the blue sky as zinc. Then he received news that his old aunt was

dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost coincided with

a letter from his former employer at Christminster, who offered him

permanent work of a good class if he would come back. The letters were

almost a relief to him. He started to visit Aunt Drusilla, and resolved

to go onward to Christminster to see what worth there might be in the

builder’s offer.

Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication from the Widow

Edlin had led him to expect. There was every possibility of her

lingering on for weeks or months, though little likelihood. He wrote to

Sue informing her of the state of her aunt, and suggesting that she

might like to see her aged relative alive. He would meet her at

Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back from

Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed his

down-train at that station. Next morning, according, he went on to

Christminster, intending to return to Alfredston soon enough to keep

the suggested appointment with Sue.

The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all

feeling for its associations. Yet as the sun made vivid lights and

shades of the mullioned architecture of the façades, and drew patterns

of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the quadrangles, Jude

thought he had never seen the place look more beautiful. He came to the

street in which he had first beheld Sue. The chair she had occupied

when, leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her

hand, her girlish figure had arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes,

stood precisely in its former spot, empty. It was as if she were dead,

and nobody had been found capable of succeeding her in that artistic

pursuit. Hers was now the city phantom, while those of the intellectual

and devotional worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no

longer able to assert their presence there.

However, here he was; and in fulfilment of his intention he went on to

his former lodging in “Beersheba,” near the ritualistic church of St.

Silas. The old landlady who opened the door seemed glad to see him

again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder who had

employed him had called to inquire his address.

Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked. But the old sheds

and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it impossible to engage

himself to return and stay in this place of vanished dreams. He longed

for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where he might

probably meet Sue.

Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by these scenes,

there returned upon him that feeling which had been his undoing more

than once—that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of

either by himself or others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker

Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at Fourways, who

proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink together. They

walked along the street till they stood before one of the great

palpitating centres of Christminster life, the inn wherein he formerly

had responded to the challenge to rehearse the Creed in Latin—now a

popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance, which gave

admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and refitted in

modern style since Jude’s residence here.

Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too

stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker

than he had money to be just then. Jude was longer finishing his, and

stood abstractedly silent in the, for the minute, almost empty place.

The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany

fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the

back of the standing-space there were stuffed sofa-benches. The room

was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which

were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in

one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in

the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids leant over the

white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside,

dripping into a pewter trough.

Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train left, Jude

sat down on one of the sofas. At the back of the barmaids rose

bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on

which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in

bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst. The moment was enlivened

by the entrance of some customers into the next compartment, and the

starting of the mechanical tell-tale of monies received, which emitted

a ting-ting every time a coin was put in.

The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude’s

direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the glass behind her

was occasionally caught by his eyes. He had only observed this

listlessly, when she turned her face for a moment to the glass to set

her hair tidy. Then he was amazed to discover that the face was

Arabella’s.

If she had come on to his compartment she would have seen him. But she

did not, this being presided over by the maiden on the other side. Abby

was in a black gown, with white linen cuffs and a broad white collar,

and her figure, more developed than formerly, was accentuated by a

bunch of daffodils that she wore on her left bosom. In the compartment

she served stood an electro-plated fountain of water over a

spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent a steam from the top, all this being

visible to him only in the mirror behind her; which also reflected the

faces of the men she was attending to—one of them a handsome,

dissipated young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who had been

relating to her an experience of some humorous sort.

“Oh, Mr. Cockman, now! How can you tell such a tale to me in my

innocence!” she cried gaily. “Mr. Cockman, what do you use to make your

moustache curl so beautiful?” As the young man was clean shaven, the

retort provoked a laugh at his expense.

“Come!” said he, “I’ll have a curaçao; and a light, please.”

She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles and striking a

match held it to his cigarette with ministering archness while he

whiffed.

“Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my dear?” he asked.

“Not a sound,” said she.

“Where is he?”

“I left him in Australia; and I suppose he’s there still.”

Jude’s eyes grew rounder.

“What made you part from him?”

“Don’t you ask questions, and you won’t hear lies.”

“Come then, give me my change, which you’ve been keeping from me for

the last quarter of an hour; and I’ll romantically vanish up the street

of this picturesque city.”

She handed the change over the counter, in taking which he caught her

fingers and held them. There was a slight struggle and titter, and he

bade her good-bye and left.

Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed philosopher. It was

extraordinary how far removed from his life Arabella now seemed to be.

He could not realize their nominal closeness. And, this being the case,

in his present frame of mind he was indifferent to the fact that

Arabella was his wife indeed.

The compartment that she served emptied itself of visitors, and after a

brief thought he entered it, and went forward to the counter. Arabella

did not recognize him for a moment. Then their glances met. She

started; till a humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she spoke.

“Well, I’m blest! I thought you were underground years ago!”

“Oh!”

“I never heard anything of you, or I don’t know that I should have come

here. But never mind! What shall I treat you to this afternoon? A

Scotch and soda? Come, anything that the house will afford, for old

acquaintance’ sake!”

“Thanks, Arabella,” said Jude without a smile. “But I don’t want

anything more than I’ve had.” The fact was that her unexpected presence

there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for strong liquor

as completely as if it had whisked him back to his milk-fed infancy.

“That’s a pity, now you could get it for nothing.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About six weeks. I returned from Sydney three months ago. I always

liked this business, you know.”

“I wonder you came to this place!”

“Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and being in London

I saw the situation in an advertisement. Nobody was likely to know me

here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster in my

growing up.”

“Why did you return from Australia?”

“Oh, I had my reasons… Then you are not a don yet?”

“No.”

“Not even a reverend?”

“No.”

“Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting gentleman?”

“I am as I was.”

“True—you look so.” She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the pull of

the beer-engine as she inspected him critically. He observed that her

hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with her, and that

on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an ornamental ring set

with what seemed to be real sapphires—which they were, indeed, and were

much admired as such by the young men who frequented the bar.

“So you pass as having a living husband,” he continued.

“Yes. I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I

should have liked.”

“True. I am known here a little.”

“I didn’t mean on that account—for as I said I didn’t expect you. It

was for other reasons.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t care to go into them,” she replied evasively. “I make a very

good living, and I don’t know that I want your company.”

Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady’s eyebrow,

came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was

obliged to go and attend to him. “We can’t talk here,” she said,

stepping back a moment. “Can’t you wait till nine? Say yes, and don’t

be a fool. I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask. I

am not living in the house at present.”

He reflected and said gloomily, “I’ll come back. I suppose we’d better

arrange something.”

“Oh, bother arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything!”

“But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can’t talk here.

Very well; I’ll call for you.”

Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the

street. Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of his

sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella’s word was absolutely

untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her implication

that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really supposed him

dead. However, there was only one thing now to be done, and that was to

play a straightforward part, the law being the law, and the woman

between whom and himself there was no more unity than between east and

west, being in the eye of the Church one person with him.

Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at

Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of this a pang had gone

through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped. Arabella was

perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorized

love. Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the

town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall,

because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar

while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell

of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous

irony. The inn was now brilliantly lighted up, and the scene was

altogether more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen in

colour, each having a pink flush on her cheek; their manners were still

more vivacious than before—more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous,

and they expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically,

laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.