hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but the
customers were fewer at last. He nodded to Arabella, and told her that
she would find him outside the door when she came away.
“But you must have something with me first,” she said with great good
humour. “Just an early night-cap: I always do. Then you can go out and
wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going together.” She
drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had
evidently, from her countenance, already taken in enough alcohol either
by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere she had breathed for
so many hours, she finished hers quickly. He also drank his, and went
outside the house.
In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black
feather. “I live quite near,” she said, taking his arm, “and can let
myself in by a latch-key at any time. What arrangement do you want to
come to?”
“Oh—none in particular,” he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his
thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go by;
the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when she
arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and lonely
climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen. “I ought to have gone
back really! My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear.”
“I’ll go over with you to-morrow morning. I think I could get a day
off.”
There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella,
who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,
coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue. Yet he said,
“Of course, if you’d like to, you can.”
“Well, that we’ll consider… Now, until we have come to some agreement
it is awkward our being together here—where you are known, and I am
getting known, though without any suspicion that I have anything to do
with you. As we are going towards the station, suppose we take the
nine-forty train to Aldbrickham? We shall be there in little more than
half an hour, and nobody will know us for one night, and we shall be
quite free to act as we choose till we have made up our minds whether
we’ll make anything public or not.”
“As you like.”
“Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging.
Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so nobody
will think anything of my staying out.”
She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the
half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate inn
near the station in time for a late supper.
IX
On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back to
Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a third-class
railway-carriage. Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to
catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very
far from possessing the animation which had characterized it at the bar
the night before. When they came out of the station she found that she
still had half an hour to spare before she was due at the bar. They
walked in silence a little way out of the town in the direction of
Alfredston. Jude looked up the far highway.
“Ah … poor feeble me!” he murmured at last.
“What?” said she.
“This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago
full of plans!”
“Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have to
be in the bar by eleven o’clock. And as I said, I shan’t ask for the
day to go with you to see your aunt. So perhaps we had better part
here. I’d sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we’ve come to
no conclusion at all.”
“Very well. But you said when we were getting up this morning that you
had something you wished to tell me before I left?”
“So I had—two things—one in particular. But you wouldn’t promise to
keep it a secret. I’ll tell you now if you promise? As an honest woman
I wish you to know it… It was what I began telling you in the
night—about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel.” Arabella
spoke somewhat hurriedly for her. “You’ll keep it close?”
“Yes—yes—I promise!” said Jude impatiently. “Of course I don’t want to
reveal your secrets.”
“Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much
taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him. I never
thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in
Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last
agreed, and did.”
“What—marry him?”
“Yes.”
“Regularly—legally—in church?”
“Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left. It was stupid, I
know; but I did! There, now I’ve told you. Don’t round upon me! He
talks of coming back to England, poor old chap. But if he does, he
won’t be likely to find me.”
Jude stood pale and fixed.
“Why the devil didn’t you tell me last, night!” he said.
“Well—I didn’t… Won’t you make it up with me, then?”
“So in talking of ‘your husband’ to the bar gentlemen you meant him, of
course—not me!”
“Of course… Come, don’t fuss about it.”
“I have nothing more to say!” replied Jude. “I have nothing at all to
say about the—crime—you’ve confessed to!”
“Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over there! Lots of
’em do it… Well, if you take it like that I shall go back to him! He
was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable
as any married couple in the colony! How did I know where you were?”
“I won’t go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but perhaps it would
be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?”
“Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy
we’ve seen enough of one another for the present! I shall think over
what you said about your circumstances, and let you know.”
Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the direction of the
hotel, and entered the railway station close by. Finding that it wanted
three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could get a train
back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the city as far as to
the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often stood before, and
surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its college after college,
in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such Continental vistas as the
Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines of the buildings being as
distinct in the morning air as in an architectural drawing. But Jude
was far from seeing or criticizing these things; they were hidden by an
indescribable consciousness of Arabella’s midnight contiguity, a sense
of degradation at his revived experiences with her, of her appearance
as she lay asleep at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as
of one accurst. If he could only have felt resentment towards her he
would have been less unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.
Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again towards the station
he started at hearing his name pronounced—less at the name than at the
voice. To his great surprise no other than Sue stood like a vision
before him—her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth
nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.
“Oh, Jude—I am so glad—to meet you like this!” she said in quick,
uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed his
thought that they had not met since her marriage.
They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each
other’s hand without further speech, and went on together awhile, till
she glanced at him with furtive solicitude. “I arrived at Alfredston
station last night, as you asked me to, and there was nobody to meet
me! But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me Aunt was a trifle
better. I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I was
frightened about you—I thought that perhaps, when you found yourself
back in the old city, you were upset at—at thinking I was—married, and
not there as I used to be; and that you had nobody to speak to; so you
had tried to drown your gloom—as you did at that former time when you
were disappointed about entering as a student, and had forgotten your
promise to me that you never would again. And this, I thought, was why
you hadn’t come to meet me!”
“And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!”
“I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you—in
case—in case—”
“I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall never
break out again as I did, I am sure. I may have been doing nothing
better, but I was not doing that—I loathe the thought of it.”
“I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that. But,” she said,
the faintest pout entering into her tone, “you didn’t come back last
night and meet me, as you engaged to!”
“I didn’t—I am sorry to say. I had an appointment at nine o’clock—too
late for me to catch the train that would have met yours, or to get
home at all.”
Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender
thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever
had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that
her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily
ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in
Arabella’s company. There was something rude and immoral in thrusting
these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so
uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average
man. And yet she was Phillotson’s. How she had become such, how she
lived as such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her to-day.
“You’ll go back with me?” he said. “There’s a train just now. I wonder
how my aunt is by this time… And so, Sue, you really came on my account
all this way! At what an early time you must have started, poor thing!”
“Yes. Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and instead
of going to bed when it got light I started. And now you won’t frighten
me like this again about your morals for nothing?”
He was not so sure that she had been frightened about his morals for
nothing. He released her hand till they had entered the train,—it
seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another—where
they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window. He regarded
the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight, applelike
convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella’s amplitudes.
Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn to him, but kept
her eyes forward, as if afraid that by meeting his own some troublous
discussion would be initiated.
“Sue—you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in
such a hurry that we have not said a word about it!”
“There’s no necessity,” she quickly returned.
“Oh well—perhaps not… But I wish”
“Jude—don’t talk about _me_—I wish you wouldn’t!” she entreated. “It
distresses me, rather. Forgive my saying it! … Where did you stay last
night?”
She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic.
He knew that, and said merely, “At an inn,” though it would have been a
relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one. But the
latter’s final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered him
lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.
Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston. That
Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled “Phillotson,” paralyzed
Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual. Yet she
seemed unaltered—he could not say why. There remained the five-mile
extra journey into the country, which it was just as easy to walk as to
drive, the greater part of it being uphill. Jude had never before in
his life gone that road with Sue, though he had with another. It was
now as if he carried a bright light which temporarily banished the
shady associations of the earlier time.
Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation from
herself. At length he inquired if her husband were well.
“O yes,” she said. “He is obliged to be in the school all the day, or
he would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to accompany me
he would have dismissed the school for once, even against his
principles—for he is strongly opposed to giving casual holidays—only I
wouldn’t let him. I felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt
Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being almost a
stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns
out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.”
Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed. “Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,” he
said.
“Of course.”
“You ought to be a happy wife.”
“And of course I am.”
“Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks since
I gave you to him, and—”
“Yes, I know! I know!” There was something in her face which belied her
late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken that
they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in “The Wife’s
Guide to Conduct.” Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue’s
voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and he was
convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month
married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a
relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue
naturally did such things as those.
“Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.”
She reproached him by a glance.
“No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,” murmured Jude. “You are dear, free
Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up
and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further
individuality.”
Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, “Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!”
“But it has!” he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown
House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and
quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now.
He could not help saying to Sue: “That’s the house my wife and I
occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to
that house.”
She looked at it. “That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is
to me.”
“Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours.”
She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till
she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. “Of course I may have
exaggerated your happiness—one never knows,” he continued blandly.
“Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it
to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect
liberty—which elderly husbands don’t do in general… If you think I am
not happy because he’s too old for me, you are wrong.”
“I don’t think anything against him—to you dear.”
“And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?”
“I will not.”
He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking
Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not
to have done.
They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the
village—the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer
many years earlier. On ascending to the village and approaching the
house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them
lifted her hands deprecatingly. “She’s downstairs, if you’ll believe
me!” cried the widow. “Out o’ bed she got, and nothing could turn her.
What will come o’t I do not know!”
On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped
in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of
Sebastiano’s Lazarus. They must have looked their amazement, for she
said in a hollow voice:
“Ah—sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there no longer, to
please nobody! ’Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be ordered
to do this and that by a feller that don’t know half as well as you do
yourself! … Ah—you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!” she added,
turning to Sue. “All our family do—and nearly all everybody else’s. You
should have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson the
schoolmaster, of all men! What made ’ee marry him?”
“What makes most women marry, Aunt?”
“Ah! You mean to say you loved the man!”
“I don’t meant to say anything definite.”
“Do ye love un?”
“Don’t ask me, Aunt.”
“I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!—I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but—there be certain men
here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have
said he was one. I don’t say so _now_, since you must ha’ known better
than I—but that’s what I _should_ have said!”
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the
outhouse, crying.
“Don’t cry, dear!” said Jude in distress. “She means well, but is very
crusty and queer now, you know.”
“Oh no—it isn’t that!” said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. “I don’t mind
her roughness one bit.”
“What is it, then?”
“It is that what she says is—is true!”
“God—what—you don’t like him?” asked Jude.
“I don’t mean that!” she said hastily. “That I ought—perhaps I ought
not to have married!”
He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first. They
went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took rather
kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly married
would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the
afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive her
to Alfredston.
“I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?” he said.
She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude
helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she looked
at him prohibitively.
“I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at
Melchester?” he half-crossly observed.
She bent down and said softly: “No, dear—you are not to come yet. I
don’t think you are in a good mood.”
“Very well,” said Jude. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” She waved her hand and was gone.
“She’s right! I won’t go!” he murmured.
He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts
to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read
sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history that
treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before he had returned
from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter from Arabella. The
sight of it revived a stronger feeling of self-condemnation for his
brief return to her society than for his attachment to Sue.
The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the
Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few days after their
parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an
affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of
the hotel in Sydney. He had come to England on purpose to find her; and
had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he wished
her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely to be a
very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent, densely
populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a trade of
£200 a month, which could be easily doubled.
As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to
tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff,
and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had just
gone to join him as he urged. She could not help feeling that she
belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married him,
and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband. In thus
wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted he would
not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her, and bring her
to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her circumstances and
leading a genteel life.
X
Jude returned to Melchester, which had the questionable recommendation
of being only a dozen and a half miles from his Sue’s now permanent
residence. At first he felt that this nearness was a distinct reason
for not going southward at all; but Christminster was too sad a place
to bear, while the proximity of Shaston to Melchester might afford him
the glory of worsting the Enemy in a close engagement, such as was
deliberately sought by the priests and virgins of the early Church,
who, disdaining an ignominious flight from temptation, became even
chamber-partners with impunity. Jude did not pause to remember that, in
the laconic words of the historian, “insulted Nature sometimes
vindicated her rights” in such circumstances.
He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the
priesthood—in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his aims,
and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable of late.
His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to
the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse
thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till
afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to
liquor—which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an
escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with
despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to
make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life
of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might
not always be victorious.
As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he developed his
slight skill in church-music and thorough-bass, till he could join in
part-singing from notation with some accuracy. A mile or two from
Melchester there was a restored village church, to which Jude had
originally gone to fix the new columns and capitals. By this means he
had become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate result was
that he joined the choir as a bass voice.
He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and sometimes in the
week. One evening about Easter the choir met for practice, and a new
hymn which Jude had heard of as being by a Wessex composer was to be
tried and prepared for the following week. It turned out to be a
strangely emotional composition. As they all sang it over and over
again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly.
When they had finished he went round to the organist to make inquiries.
The score was in manuscript, the name of the composer being at the
head, together with the title of the hymn: “The Foot of the Cross.”
“Yes,” said the organist. “He is a local man. He is a professional
musician at Kennetbridge—between here and Christminster. The vicar
knows him. He was brought up and educated in Christminster traditions,
which accounts for the quality of the piece. I think he plays in the
large church there, and has a surpliced choir. He comes to Melchester
sometimes, and once tried to get the cathedral organ when the post was
vacant. The hymn is getting about everywhere this Easter.”
As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell to musing on
its composer, and the reasons why he composed it. What a man of
sympathies he must be! Perplexed and harassed as he himself was about
Sue and Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the
complication of his position, how he would like to know that man! “He
of all men would understand my difficulties,” said the impulsive Jude.
If there were any person in the world to choose as a confidant, this
composer would be the one, for he must have suffered, and throbbed, and
yearned.
In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey,
Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the
very next Sunday. He duly started, early in the morning, for it was
only by a series of crooked railways that he could get to the town.
About mid-day he reached it, and crossing the bridge into the quaint
old borough he inquired for the house of the composer.
They told him it was a red brick building some little way further on.
Also that the gentleman himself had just passed along the street not
five minutes before.
“Which way?” asked Jude with alacrity.
“Straight along homeward from church.”
Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing a man in a
black coat and a black slouched felt hat no considerable distance
ahead. Stretching out his legs yet more widely, he stalked after. “A
hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul!” he said. “I must speak to that
man!”
He could not, however, overtake the musician before he had entered his
own house, and then arose the question if this were an expedient time
to call. Whether or not he decided to do so there and then, now that he
had got here, the distance home being too great for him to wait till
late in the afternoon. This man of soul would understand scant
ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in which an
earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly obtained entrance into
his heart through the opening afforded for religion.
Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.
The musician came to him in a moment, and being respectably dressed,
good-looking, and frank in manner, Jude obtained a favourable
reception. He was nevertheless conscious that there would be a certain
awkwardness in explaining his errand.
“I have been singing in the choir of a little church near Melchester,”
he said. “And we have this week practised ‘The Foot of the Cross,’
which I understand, sir, that you composed?”
“I did—a year or so ago.”
“I—like it. I think it supremely beautiful!”
“Ah well—other people have said so too. Yes, there’s money in it, if I
could only see about getting it published. I have other compositions to
go with it, too; I wish I could bring them out; for I haven’t made a
five-pound note out of any of them yet. These publishing people—they
want the copyright of an obscure composer’s work, such as mine is, for
almost less than I should have to pay a person for making a fair
manuscript copy of the score. The one you speak of I have lent to
various friends about here and Melchester, and so it has got to be sung
a little. But music is a poor staff to lean on—I am giving it up
entirely. You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays.
The wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my forthcoming
list—it is not issued yet—but you can take one.”
He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in booklet shape,
ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth the
various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines with
which he purposed to initiate his new venture. It took Jude more than
by surprise that the man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt
that he could not open up his confidences.
They talked a little longer, but constrainedly, for when the musician
found that Jude was a poor man his manner changed from what it had been
while Jude’s appearance and address deceived him as to his position and
pursuits. Jude stammered out something about his feelings in wishing to
congratulate the author on such an exalted composition, and took an
embarrassed leave.
All the way home by the slow Sunday train, sitting in the fireless
waiting-rooms on this cold spring day, he was depressed enough at his
simplicity in taking such a journey. But no sooner did he reach his
Melchester lodging than he found awaiting him a letter which had
arrived that morning a few minutes after he had left the house. It was
a contrite little note from Sue, in which she said, with sweet
humility, that she felt she had been horrid in telling him he was not
to come to see her, that she despised herself for having been so
conventional; and that he was to be sure to come by the
eleven-forty-five train that very Sunday, and have dinner with them at
half-past one.
Jude almost tore his hair at having missed this letter till it was too
late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself
considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition to
Kennetbridge really did seem to have been another special intervention
of Providence to keep him away from temptation. But a growing
impatience of faith, which he had noticed in himself more than once of
late, made him pass over in ridicule the idea that God sent people on
fools’ errands. He longed to see her; he was angry at having missed
her: and he wrote instantly, telling her what had happened, and saying
he had not enough patience to wait till the following Sunday, but would
come any day in the week that she liked to name.
Since he wrote a little over-ardently, Sue, as her manner was, delayed
her reply till Thursday before Good Friday, when she said he might come
that afternoon if he wished, this being the earliest day on which she
could welcome him, for she was now assistant-teacher in her husband’s
school. Jude therefore got leave from the cathedral works at the
trifling expense of a stoppage of pay, and went.
Part Fourth AT SHASTON
_“Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of
Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or
Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee.”_—J.
MILTON.
I
Shaston, the ancient British Palladour,
From whose foundation first such strange reports arise,
(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague
imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal
abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its
shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now
ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a
pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless
landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place
of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops,
knights and squires. The bones of King Edward “the Martyr,” carefully
removed hither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which
made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled
it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To
this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as
historians tell us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the
enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin: the
Martyr’s bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and
not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
but strange to say these qualities, which were noted by many writers in
ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed
over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England
stands virtually unvisited to-day.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp,
rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the
deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over
three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being
as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller’s eyes as the
medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to a railway, it can best be
reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly
accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east, that
connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.
Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.
Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within
living memory, horses, donkeys and men may have been seen toiling up
the winding ways to the top of the height, laden with tubs and barrels
filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers retailing their
contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.
This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd facts,
namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof behind
the church, and that in former times the town passed through a curious
period of corruption, conventual and domestic, gave rise to the saying
that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man, such as the
world afforded not elsewhere. It was a place where the churchyard lay
nearer heaven than the church steeple, where beer was more plentiful
than water, and where there were more wanton women than honest wives
and maids. It is also said that after the Middle Ages the inhabitants
were too poor to pay their priests, and hence were compelled to pull
down their churches, and refrain altogether from the public worship of
God; a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of
their inns on Sunday afternoons. In those days the Shastonians were
apparently not without a sense of humour.
There was another peculiarity—this a modern one—which Shaston appeared
to owe to its site. It was the resting-place and headquarters of the
proprietors of wandering vans, shows, shooting-galleries, and other
itinerant concerns, whose business lay largely at fairs and markets. As
strange wild birds are seen assembled on some lofty promontory,
meditatively pausing for longer flights, or to return by the course
they followed thither, so here, in this cliff-town, stood in stultified
silence the yellow and green caravans bearing names not local, as if
surprised by a change in the landscape so violent as to hinder their
further progress; and here they usually remained all the winter till
they turned to seek again their old tracks in the following spring.
It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that Jude ascended from the
nearest station for the first time in his life about four o’clock one
afternoon, and entering on the summit of the peak after a toilsome
climb, passed the first houses of the aerial town; and drew towards the
school-house. The hour was too early; the pupils were still in school,
humming small, like a swarm of gnats; and he withdrew a few steps along
Abbey Walk, whence he regarded the spot which fate had made the home of
all he loved best in the world. In front of the schools, which were
extensive and stone-built, grew two enormous beeches with smooth
mouse-coloured trunks, as such trees will only grow on chalk uplands.
Within the mullioned and transomed windows he could see the black,
brown, and flaxen crowns of the scholars over the sills, and to pass
the time away he walked down to the level terrace where the abbey
gardens once had spread, his heart throbbing in spite of him.
Unwilling to enter till the children were dismissed he remained here
till young voices could be heard in the open air, and girls in white
pinafores over red and blue frocks appeared dancing along the paths
which the abbess, prioress, subprioress, and fifty nuns had demurely
paced three centuries earlier. Retracing his steps he found that he had
waited too long, and that Sue had gone out into the town at the heels
of the last scholar, Mr. Phillotson having been absent all the
afternoon at a teachers’ meeting at Shottsford.
Jude went into the empty schoolroom and sat down, the girl who was
sweeping the floor having informed him that Mrs. Phillotson would be
back again in a few minutes. A piano stood near—actually the old piano
that Phillotson had possessed at Marygreen—and though the dark
afternoon almost prevented him seeing the notes Jude touched them in
his humble way, and could not help modulating into the hymn which had
so affected him in the previous week.
A figure moved behind him, and thinking it was still the girl with the
broom Jude took no notice, till the person came close and laid her
fingers lightly upon his bass hand. The imposed hand was a little one
he seemed to know, and he turned.
“Don’t stop,” said Sue. “I like it. I learnt it before I left
Melchester. They used to play it in the training school.”
“I can’t strum before you! Play it for me.”
“Oh well—I don’t mind.”
Sue sat down, and her rendering of the piece, though not remarkable,
seemed divine as compared with his own. She, like him, was evidently
touched—to her own surprise—by the recalled air; and when she had
finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own half-way.
Jude grasped it—just as he had done before her marriage.
“It is odd,” she said, in a voice quite changed, “that I should care
about that air; because—”
“Because what?”
“I am not that sort—quite.”
“Not easily moved?”
“I didn’t quite mean that.”
“Oh, but you _are_ one of that sort, for you are just like me at
heart!”
“But not at head.”
She played on and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated
instinct each clasped the other’s hand again.
She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly. “How
funny!” she said. “I wonder what we both did that for?”
“I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before.”
“Not in our thoughts! Perhaps a little in our feelings.”
“And they rule thoughts… Isn’t it enough to make one blaspheme that the
composer of that hymn is one of the most commonplace men I ever met!”
“What—you know him?”
“I went to see him.”
“Oh, you goose—to do just what I should have done! Why did you?”
“Because we are not alike,” he said drily.
“Now we’ll have some tea,” said Sue. “Shall we have it here instead of
in my house? It is no trouble to get the kettle and things brought in.
We don’t live at the school you know, but in that ancient dwelling
across the way called Old-Grove Place. It is so antique and dismal that
it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not
to live in—I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many
previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools there is
only your own life to support. Sit down, and I’ll tell Ada to bring the
tea-things across.”
He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she flung open
before going out, and when she returned, followed by the maiden with
tea, they sat down by the same light, assisted by the blue rays of a
spirit-lamp under the brass kettle on the stand.
“This is one of your wedding-presents to me,” she said, signifying the
latter.
“Yes,” said Jude.
The kettle of his gift sang with some satire in its note, to his mind;
and to change the subject he said, “Do you know of any good readable
edition of the uncanonical books of the New Testament? You don’t read
them in the school I suppose?”
“Oh dear no!—’twould alarm the neighbourhood… Yes, there is one. I am
not familiar with it now, though I was interested in it when my former
friend was alive. Cowper’s _Apocryphal Gospels_.”
“That sounds like what I want.” His thoughts, however reverted with a
twinge to the “former friend”—by whom she meant, as he knew, the
university comrade of her earlier days. He wondered if she talked of
him to Phillotson.
“The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice,” she went on to keep him from
his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly, as she always did. Indeed
when they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was ever a
second silent conversation passing between their emotions, so perfect
was the reciprocity between them. “It is quite like the genuine
article. All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like one of the
other evangelists read in a dream, when things are the same, yet not
the same. But, Jude, do you take an interest in those questions still?
Are you getting up _Apologetica_?”
“Yes. I am reading Divinity harder than ever.”
She regarded him curiously.
“Why do you look at me like that?” said Jude.
“Oh—why do you want to know?”
“I am sure you can tell me anything I may be ignorant of in that
subject. You must have learnt a lot of everything from your dear dead
friend!”
“We won’t get on to that now!” she coaxed. “Will you be carving out at
that church again next week, where you learnt the pretty hymn?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“That will be very nice. Shall I come and see you there? It is in this
direction, and I could come any afternoon by train for half an hour?”
“No. Don’t come!”
“What—aren’t we going to be friends, then, any longer, as we used to
be?”
“No.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought you were always going to be kind to me!”
“No, I am not.”
“What have I done, then? I am sure I thought we two—” The _tremolo_ in
her voice caused her to break off.
“Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt,” said he abruptly.
There was a momentary pause, till she suddenly jumped up; and to his
surprise he saw by the kettle-flame that her face was flushed.
“I can’t talk to you any longer, Jude!” she said, the tragic contralto
note having come back as of old. “It is getting too dark to stay
together like this, after playing morbid Good Friday tunes that make
one feel what one shouldn’t! … We mustn’t sit and talk in this way any
more. Yes—you must go away, for you mistake me! I am very much the
reverse of what you say so cruelly—Oh, Jude, it _was_ cruel to say
that! Yet I can’t tell you the truth—I should shock you by letting you
know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel that I
shouldn’t have been provided with attractiveness unless it were meant
to be exercised! Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and
so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find
that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed
by the bishop’s licence to receive it. But you are so straightforward,
Jude, that you can’t understand me! … Now you must go. I am sorry my
husband is not at home.”
“Are you?”
“I perceive I have said that in mere convention! Honestly I don’t think
I am sorry. It does not matter, either way, sad to say!”
As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched
his fingers but lightly when he went out now. He had hardly gone from
the door when, with a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form and
opened the iron casement of a window beneath which he was passing in
the path without. “When do you leave here to catch your train, Jude?”
she asked.
He looked up in some surprise. “The coach that runs to meet it goes in
three-quarters of an hour or so.”
“What will you do with yourself for the time?”
“Oh—wander about, I suppose. Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old
church.”
“It does seem hard of me to pack you off so! You have thought enough of
churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark. Stay
there.”
“Where?”
“Where you are. I can talk to you better like this than when you were
inside… It was so kind and tender of you to give up half a day’s work
to come to see me! … You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude.
And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while
they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and
comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”
Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not
get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had
feared at close quarters.
“I have been thinking,” she continued, still in the tone of one brimful
of feeling, “that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no
more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the
constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard
Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name.
But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about,
all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies… Now
you mustn’t wait longer, or you will lose the coach. Come and see me
again. You must come to the house then.”
“Yes!” said Jude. “When shall it be?”
“To-morrow week. Good-bye—good-bye!” She stretched out her hand and
stroked his forehead pitifully—just once. Jude said good-bye, and went
away into the darkness.
Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the wheels of the
coach departing, and, truly enough, when he reached the Duke’s Arms in
the Market Place the coach had gone. It was impossible for him to get
to the station on foot in time for this train, and he settled himself
perforce to wait for the next—the last to Melchester that night.
He wandered about awhile, obtained something to eat; and then, having
another half-hour on his hands, his feet involuntarily took him through
the venerable graveyard of Trinity Church, with its avenues of limes,
in the direction of the schools again. They were entirely in darkness.
She had said she lived over the way at Old-Grove Place, a house which
he soon discovered from her description of its antiquity.
A glimmering candlelight shone from a front window, the shutters being
yet unclosed. He could see the interior clearly—the floor sinking a
couple of steps below the road without, which had become raised during
the centuries since the house was built. Sue, evidently just come in,
was standing with her hat on in this front parlour or sitting-room,
whose walls were lined with wainscoting of panelled oak reaching from
floor to ceiling, the latter being crossed by huge moulded beams only a
little way above her head. The mantelpiece was of the same heavy
description, carved with Jacobean pilasters and scroll-work. The
centuries did, indeed, ponderously overhang a young wife who passed her
time here.
She had opened a rosewood work-box, and was looking at a photograph.
Having contemplated it a little while she pressed it against her bosom,
and put it again in its place.
Then becoming aware that she had not obscured the windows she came
forward to do so, candle in hand. It was too dark for her to see Jude
without, but he could see her face distinctly, and there was an
unmistakable tearfulness about the dark, long-lashed eyes.
She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away to pursue his solitary
journey home. “Whose photograph was she looking at?” he said. He had
once given her his; but she had others, he knew. Yet it was his,
surely?
He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation.
Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle
irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters
if they doubted their own strength. But he could not. He might fast and
pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him
than the Divine.
II
However, if God disposed not, woman did. The next morning but one
brought him this note from her:
Don’t come next week. On your own account don’t! We were too free,
under the influence of that morbid hymn and the twilight. Think no more
than you can help of
SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY.
The disappointment was keen. He knew her mood, the look of her face,
when she subscribed herself at length thus. But, whatever her mood, he
could not say she was wrong in her view. He replied:
I acquiesce. You are right. It is a lesson in renunciation which I
suppose I ought to learn at this season.
JUDE.
He despatched the note on Easter Eve, and there seemed a finality in
their decisions. But other forces and laws than theirs were in
operation. On Easter Monday morning he received a message from the
Widow Edlin, whom he had directed to telegraph if anything serious
happened:
Your aunt is sinking. Come at once.
He threw down his tools and went. Three and a half hours later he was
crossing the downs about Marygreen, and presently plunged into the
concave field across which the short cut was made to the village. As he
ascended on the other side a labouring man, who had been watching his
approach from a gate across the path, moved uneasily, and prepared to
speak. “I can see in his face that she is dead,” said Jude. “Poor Aunt
Drusilla!”
It was as he had supposed, and Mrs. Edlin had sent out the man to break
the news to him.
“She wouldn’t have knowed ’ee. She lay like a doll wi’ glass eyes; so
it didn’t matter that you wasn’t here,” said he.
Jude went on to the house, and in the afternoon, when everything was
done, and the layers-out had finished their beer, and gone, he sat down
alone in the silent place. It was absolutely necessary to communicate
with Sue, though two or three days earlier they had agreed to mutual
severance. He wrote in the briefest terms:
Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost suddenly. The funeral
is on Friday afternoon.
He remained in and about Marygreen through the intervening days, went
out on Friday morning to see that the grave was finished, and wondered
if Sue would come. She had not written, and that seemed to signify
rather that she would come than that she would not. Having timed her by
her only possible train, he locked the door about mid-day, and crossed
the hollow field to the verge of the upland by the Brown House, where
he stood and looked over the vast prospect northwards, and over the
nearer landscape in which Alfredston stood. Two miles behind it a jet
of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the
picture.
There was a long time to wait, even now, till he would know if she had
arrived. He did wait, however, and at last a small hired vehicle pulled
up at the bottom of the hill, and a person alighted, the conveyance
going back, while the passenger began ascending the hill. He knew her;
and she looked so slender to-day that it seemed as if she might be
crushed in the intensity of a too passionate embrace—such as it was not
for him to give. Two-thirds of the way up her head suddenly took a
solicitous poise, and he knew that she had at that moment recognized
him. Her face soon began a pensive smile, which lasted till, having
descended a little way, he met her.
“I thought,” she began with nervous quickness, “that it would be so sad
to let you attend the funeral alone! And so—at the last moment—I came.”
“Dear faithful Sue!” murmured Jude.
With the elusiveness of her curious double nature, however, Sue did not
stand still for any further greeting, though it wanted some time to the
burial. A pathos so unusually compounded as that which attached to this
hour was unlikely to repeat itself for years, if ever, and Jude would
have paused, and meditated, and conversed. But Sue either saw it not at
all, or, seeing it more than he, would not allow herself to feel it.
The sad and simple ceremony was soon over, their progress to the church
being almost at a trot, the bustling undertaker having a more important
funeral an hour later, three miles off. Drusilla was put into the new
ground, quite away from her ancestors. Sue and Jude had gone side by
side to the grave, and now sat down to tea in the familiar house; their
lives united at least in this last attention to the dead.
“She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?” murmured
Sue.
“Yes. Particularly for members of our family.”
Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.
“We are rather a sad family, don’t you think, Jude?”
“She said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy
ones. At all events, I do, for one!”
Sue was silent. “Is it wrong, Jude,” she said with a tentative tremor,
“for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in
their marriage? If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is
possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material
convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of
land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent
should be known—which it seems to be—why surely a person may say, even
proclaim upon the housetops, that it hurts and grieves him or her?”
“I have said so, anyhow, to you.”
Presently she went on: “Are there many couples, do you think, where one
dislikes the other for no definite fault?”
“Yes, I suppose. If either cares for another person, for instance.”
“But even apart from that? Wouldn’t the woman, for example, be very
bad-natured if she didn’t like to live with her husband; merely”—her
voice undulated, and he guessed things—“merely because she had a
personal feeling against it—a physical objection—a fastidiousness, or
whatever it may be called—although she might respect and be grateful to
him? I am merely putting a case. Ought she to try to overcome her
pruderies?”
Jude threw a troubled look at her. He said, looking away: “It would be
just one of those cases in which my experiences go contrary to my
dogmas. Speaking as an order-loving man—which I hope I am, though I
fear I am not—I should say, yes. Speaking from experience and unbiased
nature, I should say, no. … Sue, I believe you are not happy!”
“Of course I am!” she contradicted. “How can a woman be unhappy who has
only been married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?”
“‘Chose freely!’”
“Why do you repeat it? … But I have to go back by the six o’clock
train. You will be staying on here, I suppose?”
“For a few days to wind up Aunt’s affairs. This house is gone now.
Shall I go to the train with you?”
A little laugh of objection came from Sue. “I think not. You may come
part of the way.”
“But stop—you can’t go to-night! That train won’t take you to Shaston.
You must stay and go back to-morrow. Mrs. Edlin has plenty of room, if
you don’t like to stay here?”
“Very well,” she said dubiously. “I didn’t tell him I would come for
certain.”
Jude went to the widow’s house adjoining, to let her know; and
returning in a few minutes sat down again.
“It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue—horrible!” he said
abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor.
“No! Why?”
“I can’t tell you all my part of the gloom. Your part is that you ought
not to have married him. I saw it before you had done it, but I thought
I mustn’t interfere. I was wrong. I ought to have!”
“But what makes you assume all this, dear?”
“Because—I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!”
Her hand lay on the table, and Jude put his upon it. Sue drew hers
away.
“That’s absurd, Sue,” cried he, “after what we’ve been talking about! I
am more strict and formal than you, if it comes to that; and that you
should object to such an innocent action shows that you are
ridiculously inconsistent!”
“Perhaps it was too prudish,” she said repentantly. “Only I have
fancied it was a sort of trick of ours—too frequent perhaps. There, you
may hold it as much as you like. Is that good of me?”
“Yes; very.”
“But I must tell him.”
“Who?”
“Richard.”
“Oh—of course, if you think it necessary. But as it means nothing it
may be bothering him needlessly.”
“Well—are you sure you mean it only as my cousin?”
“Absolutely sure. I have no feelings of love left in me.”
“That’s news. How has it come to be?”
“I’ve seen Arabella.”
She winced at the hit; then said curiously, “When did you see her?”
“When I was at Christminster.”
“So she’s come back; and you never told me! I suppose you will live
with her now?”
“Of course—just as you live with your husband.”
She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and cactuses, withered
for want of attention, and through them at the outer distance, till her
eyes began to grow moist. “What is it?” said Jude, in a softened tone.
“Why should you be so glad to go back to her if—if what you used to say
to me is still true—I mean if it were true then! Of course it is not
now! How could your heart go back to Arabella so soon?”
“A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way.”
“Ah—it isn’t true!” she said with gentle resentment. “You are teasing
me—that’s all—because you think I am not happy!”
“I don’t know. I don’t wish to know.”
“If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that I
should have a right to dislike him! He is considerate to me in
everything; and he is very interesting, from the amount of general
knowledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his way.
… Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his own age, or
one younger than himself—eighteen years—as I am than he?”
“It depends upon what they feel for each other.”
He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on
unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears:
“I—I think I must be equally honest with you as you have been with me.
Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say?—that though I like Mr.
Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him—it is a torture to me to—live
with him as a husband!—There, now I have let it out—I couldn’t help it,
although I have been—pretending I am happy.—Now you’ll have a contempt
for me for ever, I suppose!” She bent down her face upon her hands as
they lay upon the cloth, and silently sobbed in little jerks that made
the fragile three-legged table quiver.
“I have only been married a month or two!” she went on, still remaining
bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands. “And it is said that
what a woman shrinks from—in the early days of her marriage—she shakes
down to with comfortable indifference in half a dozen years. But that
is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction,
since a person gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg
or arm in the course of time!”
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, “I thought there was something
wrong, Sue! Oh, I thought there was!”
“But it is not as you think!—there is nothing wrong except my own
wickedness, I suppose you’d call it—a repugnance on my part, for a
reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by the
world in general! … What tortures me so much is the necessity of being
responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the
dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence
is its voluntariness! … I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me,
or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for
feeling as I do! But he does nothing, except that he has grown a little
cold since he has found out how I feel. That’s why he didn’t come to
the funeral… Oh, I am very miserable—I don’t know what to do! … Don’t
come near me, Jude, because you mustn’t. Don’t—don’t!”
But he had jumped up and put his face against hers—or rather against
her ear, her face being inaccessible.
“I told you not to, Jude!”
“I know you did—I only wish to—console you! It all arose through my
being married before we met, didn’t it? You would have been my wife,
Sue, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t been for that?”
Instead of replying she rose quickly, and saying she was going to walk
to her aunt’s grave in the churchyard to recover herself, went out of
the house. Jude did not follow her. Twenty minutes later he saw her
cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin’s, and soon she sent a
little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired to see him
again that night.
In the lonely room of his aunt’s house, Jude sat watching the cottage
of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade. He knew
that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and disheartened;
and again questioned his devotional motto that all was for the best.
He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the sense that
Sue was so near at hand. At some time near two o’clock, when he was
beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak that
had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly at Marygreen.
It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin. As was the little
creature’s habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would
not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture
till the morrow when the trapper would come and knock it on the head.
He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now began
to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg. If it were
a “bad catch” by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing
six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of
its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to escape,
it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it
were a “good catch,” namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken
and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.
Almost half an hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry. Jude could
rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing himself
quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went across the
green in the direction of the sound. He reached the hedge bordering the
widow’s garden, when he stood still. The faint click of the trap as
dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the
spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his
palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open
casement at a window on the ground floor of the adjacent cottage.
“Jude!” said a voice timidly—Sue’s voice. “It is you—is it not?”
“Yes, dear!”
“I haven’t been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit, and
couldn’t help thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must come
down and kill it! But I am so glad you got there first… They ought not
to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!”
Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that she was
visible down to her waist. She let go the casement-stay and put her
hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.
“Did it keep you awake?” he said.
“No—I was awake.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, you know—now! I know you, with your religious doctrines, think
that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a mortal
sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you. I wish I hadn’t,
now!”
“Don’t wish it, dear,” he said. “That may have _been_ my view; but my
doctrines and I begin to part company.”
“I knew it—I knew it! And that’s why I vowed I wouldn’t disturb your
belief. But—I am _so glad_ to see you!—and, oh, I didn’t mean to see
you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!”
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. “There is a stronger one left!” he
said. “I’ll never care about my doctrines or my religion any more! Let
them go! Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even if you…”
“Don’t say it!—I know what you mean; but I can’t admit so much as that.
There! Guess what you like, but don’t press me to answer questions!”
“I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!”
“I _can’t_ be! So few could enter into my feeling—they would say ’twas
my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and condemn me…
It is none of the natural tragedies of love that’s love’s usual tragedy
in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people
who in a natural state would find relief in parting! … It would have
been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I had been
able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody. And I _must_ tell
somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought out fully what
marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no
excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I
rushed on, when I had got into that training school scrape, with all
the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! … I am certain one ought to
be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly! I daresay it
happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick… When people of
a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of
the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what _will_ they
say!”
“You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish—I wish—”
“You must go in now!”
In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon
his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little
kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could
not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have
done. She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.
III
Sue’s distressful confession recurred to Jude’s mind all the night as
being a sorrow indeed.
The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours saw
her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill path which
led into the lonely road to Alfredston. An hour passed before he
returned along the same route, and in his face there was a look of
exaltation not unmixed with recklessness. An incident had occurred.
They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and
passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how
far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and
she said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in
embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell as he
now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss would
be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it. If given in the
spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in the spirit
of a lover she could not permit it. “Will you swear that it will not be
in that spirit?” she had said.
No: he would not. And then they had turned from each other in
estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a distance of twenty
or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously. That look behind
was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained. They had
quickly run back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly, kissed
close and long. When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on
her side, and a beating heart on his.
The kiss was a turning-point in Jude’s career. Back again in the
cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though his kiss
of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life,
as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly
inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and
servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best
a frailty, and at its worst damnation. What Sue had said in warmth was
really the cold truth. When to defend his affection tooth and nail, to
persist with headlong force in impassioned attentions to her, was all
he thought of, he was condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the
accepted school of morals. He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he
had been by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of
accredited dogma.
Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—had
been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards
apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. “Is it,” he said, “that
the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under
which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins
and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?”
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble, to
his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal gain.
Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and himself
in love erratically, the loved one’s revolt against her state being
possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable according
to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the
obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a
law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole, to
which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that he
possessed, and had stored here. He knew that, in this country of true
believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price than
waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way,
even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus
destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with, he cut
the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a three-pronged
fork shook them over the flames. They kindled, and lighted up the back
of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till they were more or less
consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to
him over the garden hedge.
“Burning up your awld aunt’s rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a lot gets heaped
up in nooks and corners when you’ve lived eighty years in one house.”
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning before the leaves, covers, and
binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman and
the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he turned
and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being no longer
a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which gave him calm.
He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing, and no
longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which, as their proprietor,
he might naturally be supposed to exercise on himself first of all. In
his passion for Sue he could not stand as an ordinary sinner, and not
as a whited sepulchre.
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone
along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and
let him kiss her. Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a
lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if
not wrongly. She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue’s logic
was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that before a
thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done it became
wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were
wrong in practice.
“I have been too weak, I think!” she jerked out as she pranced on,
shaking down tear-drops now and then. “It was burning, like a
lover’s—oh, it was! And I won’t write to him any more, or at least for
a long time, to impress him with my dignity! And I hope it will hurt
him very much—expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and
the next, and no letter coming. He’ll suffer then with suspense—won’t
he, that’s all!—and I am very glad of it!”—Tears of pity for Jude’s
approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those which had surged
up in pity for herself.
Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to
her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by
temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial
relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully
along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and
worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was
troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing effect of her
aunt’s death and funeral. He began telling her of his day’s doings, and
how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he had not
seen for years, had called upon him. While ascending to the town,
seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly and with
an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and its bordering
bushes of hazel:
“Richard—I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while. I don’t know
whether you think it wrong?”
He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said
vaguely, “Oh, did you? What did you do that for?”
“I don’t know. He wanted to, and I let him.”
“I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a novelty.”
They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court of an
omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact
that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not
said a word about the kiss.
After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.
She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition, and
at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When Phillotson
arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the attendance-numbers, it
was a quarter to twelve o’clock. Entering their chamber, which by day
commanded a view of some thirty or forty miles over the Vale of
Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went to the window, and,
pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity
into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene.
He was musing, “I think,” he said at last, without turning his head,
“that I must get the committee to change the school-stationer. All the
copybooks are sent wrong this time.”
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:
“And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives me
the ear-ache.”
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.
The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls upstairs
and down in the dilapidated “Old-Grove Place,” and the massive
chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the new
and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that
he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other
across three centuries upon the shaking floor.
“Soo!” he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).
She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there—the
clothes on her side being flung back. Thinking she might have forgotten
some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to see to it, he
pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a few minutes, when,
finding she did not come, he went out upon the landing, candle in hand,
and said again “Soo!”
“Yes!” came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen quarter.
“What are you doing down there at midnight—tiring yourself out for
nothing!”
“I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here.”
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. She was not there,
even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing,
and again called her name.
She answered “Yes!” as before, but the tones were small and confined,
and whence they came he could not at first understand. Under the
staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed to
come from it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or other
fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she had
suddenly become deranged.
“What are you doing in there?” he asked.
“Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late.”
“But there’s no bed, is there? And no ventilation! Why, you’ll be
suffocated if you stay all night!”
“Oh no, I think not. Don’t trouble about me.”
“But—” Phillotson seized the knob and pulled at the door. She had
fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke at his pull.
There being no bedstead she had flung down some rugs and made a little
nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet afforded.
When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and
trembling.
“You ought not to have pulled open the door!” she cried excitedly. “It
is not becoming in you! Oh, will you go away; please will you!”
She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white nightgown against the
shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried. She continued to beseech
him not to disturb her.
He said: “I’ve been kind to you, and given you every liberty; and it is
monstrous that you should feel in this way!”
“Yes,” said she, weeping. “I know that! It is wrong and wicked of me, I
suppose! I am very sorry. But it is not I altogether that am to blame!”
“Who is then? Am I?”
“No—I don’t know! The universe, I suppose—things in general, because
they are so horrid and cruel!”
“Well, it is no use talking like that. Making a man’s house so unseemly
at this time o’ night! Eliza will hear if we don’t mind.” (He meant the
servant.) “Just think if either of the parsons in this town was to see
us now! I hate such eccentricities, Sue. There’s no order or regularity
in your sentiments! … But I won’t intrude on you further; only I would
advise you not to shut the door too tight, or I shall find you stifled
to-morrow.”
On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet, but
Sue had already gone downstairs. There was a little nest where she had
lain, and spiders’ webs hung overhead. “What must a woman’s aversion be
when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!” he said bitterly.
He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal began almost
in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement—or rather
roadway, pavements being scarce here—which was two or three feet above
the level of the parlour floor. They nodded down to the happy couple
their morning greetings, as they went on.
“Richard,” she said all at once; “would you mind my living away from
you?”
“Away from me? Why, that’s what you were doing when I married you. What
then was the meaning of marrying at all?”
“You wouldn’t like me any the better for telling you.”
“I don’t object to know.”
“Because I thought I could do nothing else. You had got my promise a
long time before that, remember. Then, as time went on, I regretted I
had promised you, and was trying to see an honourable way to break it
off. But as I couldn’t I became rather reckless and careless about the
conventions. Then you know what scandals were spread, and how I was
turned out of the training school you had taken such time and trouble
to prepare me for and get me into; and this frightened me and it seemed
then that the one thing I could do would be to let the engagement
stand. Of course I, of all people, ought not to have cared what was
said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care for. But I was a
coward—as so many women are—and my theoretic unconventionality broke
down. If that had not entered into the case it would have been better
to have hurt your feelings once for all then, than to marry you and
hurt them all my life after… And you were so generous in never giving
credit for a moment to the rumour.”
“I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its probability and
inquired of your cousin about it.”
“Ah!” she said with pained surprise.
“I didn’t doubt you.”
“But you inquired!”
“I took his word.”
Her eyes had filled. “_He_ wouldn’t have inquired!” she said. “But you
haven’t answered me. Will you let me go away? I know how irregular it
is of me to ask it—”
“It is irregular.”
“But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classified. If people are at all peculiar
in character they have to suffer from the very rules that produce
comfort in others! … Will you let me?”
“But we married—”
“What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances,” she burst out,
“if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?”
“But you are committing a sin in not liking me.”
“I _do_ like you! But I didn’t reflect it would be—that it would be so
much more than that… For a man and woman to live on intimate terms when
one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances, however legal.
There—I’ve said it! … Will you let me, Richard?”
“You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!”
“Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and surely
we can cancel it—not legally of course; but we can morally, especially
as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen to be looked
after. Then we might be friends, and meet without pain to either. Oh
Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall both be dead in a few
years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you relieved me
from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think me eccentric,
or super-sensitive, or something absurd. Well—why should I suffer for
what I was born to be, if it doesn’t hurt other people?”
“But it does—it hurts _me_! And you vowed to love me.”
“Yes—that’s it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable to
bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as silly
as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!”
“And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?”
“Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude.”
“As his wife?”
“As I choose.”
Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: “She, or he, ‘who lets the world, or his own portion of
it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty
than the apelike one of imitation.’ J. S. Mill’s words, those are. I
have been reading it up. Why can’t you act upon them? I wish to,
always.”
“What do I care about J. S. Mill!” moaned he. “I only want to lead a
quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never once
occurred to me before our marriage—that you were in love, and are in
love, with Jude Fawley!”
“You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun. But do you
suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and
live with him?”
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of
replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being such
a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_ as she, in her loss of courage
at the last moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to be so
puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her other
little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering the
class-room, where he could see the back of her head through the glass
partition whenever he turned his eyes that way. As he went on giving
and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched from
concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore a scrap from
a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:
Your request prevents my attending to work at all. I don’t know what I
am doing! Was it seriously made?
He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little boy to
take to Sue. The child toddled off into the class-room. Phillotson saw
his wife turn and take the note, and the bend of her pretty head as she
read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent undue expression under
fire of so many young eyes. He could not see her hands, but she changed
her position, and soon the child returned, bringing nothing in reply.
In a few minutes, however, one of Sue’s class appeared, with a little
note similar to his own. These words only were pencilled therein:
I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously made.
Phillotson looked more disturbed than before, and the meeting-place of
his brows twitched again. In ten minutes he called up the child he had
just sent to her, and dispatched another missive:
God knows I don’t want to thwart you in any reasonable way. My whole
thought is to make you comfortable and happy. But I cannot agree to
such a preposterous notion as your going to live with your lover. You
would lose everybody’s respect and regard; and so should I!
After an interval a similar part was enacted in the class-room, and an
answer came:
I know you mean my good. But I don’t want to be respectable! To produce
“Human development in its richest diversity” (to quote your Humboldt)
is to my mind far above respectability. No doubt my tastes are low—in
your view—hopelessly low! If you won’t let me go to him, will you grant
me this one request—allow me to live in your house in a separate way?
To this he returned no answer.
She wrote again:
I know what you think. But cannot you have pity on me? I beg you to; I
implore you to be merciful! I would not ask if I were not almost
compelled by what I can’t bear! No poor woman has ever wished more than
I that Eve had not fallen, so that (as the primitive Christians
believed) some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled Paradise.
But I won’t trifle! Be kind to me—even though I have not been kind to
you! I will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.
Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:
I do not wish to pain you. How well you _know_ I don’t! Give me a
little time. I am disposed to agree to your last request.
One line from her:
Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve your kindness.
All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.
But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart in
the house. At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed more
composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of their
position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her nature seemed
strained like harp-strings. She talked vaguely and indiscriminately to
prevent his talking pertinently.
IV
Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to get
together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities. For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it. He forgot time and place, and when he
remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o’clock.
His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other side
of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his wife had
occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place, which since
his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively. He entered, and
unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement. Before the
schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up
half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the
side away from him, which was towards the window. This was somewhat
hidden by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her
flinging up the sash. Before he had thought that she meant to do more
than get air she had mounted upon the sill and leapt out. She
disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.
Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply against
the newel in his haste. Opening the heavy door he ascended the two or
three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the gravel before
him lay a white heap. Phillotson seized it in his arms, and bringing
Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he gazed at her by the
flapping light of the candle which he had set down in the draught on
the bottom stair.
She had certainly not broken her neck. She looked at him with eyes that
seemed not to take him in; and though not particularly large in general
they appeared so now. She pressed her side and rubbed her arm, as if
conscious of pain; then stood up, averting her face, in evident
distress at his gaze.
“Thank God—you are not killed! Though it’s not for want of trying—not
much hurt I hope?”
Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the
lowness of the old rooms and to the high level of the ground without.
Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow in the side she had apparently
incurred little harm.
“I was asleep, I think!” she began, her pale face still turned away
from him. “And something frightened me—a terrible dream—I thought I saw
you—” The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her, and she was
silent.
Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched
Phillotson flung it round her. “Shall I help you upstairs?” he asked
drearily; for the significance of all this sickened him of himself and
of everything.
“No thank you, Richard. I am very little hurt. I can walk.”
“You ought to lock your door,” he mechanically said, as if lecturing in
school. “Then no one could intrude even by accident.”
“I have tried—it won’t lock. All the doors are out of order.”
The aspect of things was not improved by her admission. She ascended
the staircase slowly, the waving light of the candle shining on her.
Phillotson did not approach her, or attempt to ascend himself till he
heard her enter her room. Then he fastened up the front door, and
returning, sat down on the lower stairs, holding the newel with one
hand, and bowing his face into the other. Thus he remained for a long
long time—a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him; till,
raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that the
business of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or no,
he took the candle and went upstairs to his lonely room on the other
side of the landing.
No further incident touching the matter between them occurred till the
following evening, when, immediately school was over, Phillotson walked
out of Shaston, saying he required no tea, and not informing Sue where
he was going. He descended from the town level by a steep road in a
north-westerly direction, and continued to move downwards till the soil
changed from its white dryness to a tough brown clay. He was now on the
low alluvial beds
Where Duncliffe is the traveller’s mark,
And cloty Stour’s a-rolling dark.
More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity of evening.
Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible
On the grey-topp’d height
Of Paladore, as pale day wore
Away…[1]
[1] William Barnes.
The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine as if
watching him, one of which windows was his own. Above it he could just
discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity Church. The air down here,
tempered by the thick damp bed of tenacious clay, was not as it had
been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when he had walked a mile or
two he was obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.
Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without hesitation
through the shade, as a man goes on, night or day, in a district over
which he has played as a boy. He had walked altogether about four and a
half miles
Where Stour receives her strength,
From six cleere fountains fed,[2]
[2] Drayton.
when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton—a
little town of three or four thousand inhabitants—where he went on to
the boys’ school, and knocked at the door of the master’s residence.
A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson’s inquiry if Mr.
Gillingham was at home, replied that he was, going at once off to his
own house, and leaving Phillotson to find his way in as he could. He
discovered his friend putting away some books from which he had been
giving evening lessons. The light of the paraffin lamp fell on
Phillotson’s face—pale and wretched by contrast with his friend’s, who
had a cool, practical look. They had been schoolmates in boyhood, and
fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many years before
this time.
“Glad to see you, Dick! But you don’t look well! Nothing the matter?”
Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed the
cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.
“Why you haven’t been here—let me see—since you were married? I called,
you know, but you were out; and upon my word it is such a climb after
dark that I have been waiting till the days are longer before lumpering
up again. I am glad you didn’t wait, however.”
Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally used
a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.
“I’ve come, George, to explain to you my reasons for taking a step that
I am about to take, so that you, at least, will understand my motives
if other people question them anywhen—as they may, indeed certainly
will… But anything is better than the present condition of things. God
forbid that you should ever have such an experience as mine!”
“Sit down. You don’t mean—anything wrong between you and Mrs.
Phillotson?”
“I do… My wretched state is that I’ve a wife I love who not only does
not love me, but—but— Well, I won’t say. I know her feeling! I should
prefer hatred from her!”
“Ssh!”
“And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame as I. She
was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I took advantage of her
inexperience, and toled her out for walks, and got her to agree to a
long engagement before she well knew her own mind. Afterwards she saw
somebody else, but she blindly fulfilled her engagement.”
“Loving the other?”
“Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly; though her exact
feeling for him is a riddle to me—and to him too, I think—possibly to
herself. She is one of the oddest creatures I ever met. However, I have
been struck with these two facts; the extraordinary sympathy, or
similarity, between the pair. He is her cousin, which perhaps accounts
for some of it. They seem to be one person split in two! And with her
unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband, even though she may like
me as a friend, ’tis too much to bear longer. She has conscientiously
struggled against it, but to no purpose. I cannot bear it—I cannot! I
can’t answer her arguments—she has read ten times as much as I. Her
intellect sparkles like diamonds, while mine smoulders like brown
paper… She’s one too many for me!”
“She’ll get over it, good-now?”
“Never! It is—but I won’t go into it—there are reasons why she never
will. At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave me and go
to him. The climax came last night, when, owing to my entering her room
by accident, she jumped out of window—so strong was her dread of me!
She pretended it was a dream, but that was to soothe me. Now when a
woman jumps out of window without caring whether she breaks her neck or
no, she’s not to be mistaken; and this being the case I have come to a
conclusion: that it is wrong to so torture a fellow-creature any
longer; and I won’t be the inhuman wretch to do it, cost what it may!”
“What—you’ll let her go? And with her lover?”
“Whom with is her matter. I shall let her go; with him certainly, if
she wishes. I know I may be wrong—I know I can’t logically, or
religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers, or harmonize
it with the doctrines I was brought up in. Only I know one thing:
something within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing her. I, like
other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such a so-called
preposterous request from his wife, the only course that can possibly
be regarded as right and proper and honourable in him is to refuse it,
and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder her lover
perhaps. But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable, or
is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don’t profess to decide. I
simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of
themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries
for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible.”
“But—you see, there’s the question of neighbours and society—what will
happen if everybody—”
“Oh, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer! I only see what’s
under my eyes.”
“Well—I don’t agree with your instinct, Dick!” said Gillingham gravely.
“I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that such a sedate, plodding
fellow as you should have entertained such a craze for a moment. You
said when I called that she was puzzling and peculiar: I think you
are!”
“Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to be intrinsically a
good woman, while she has pleaded for release—been the man she has
knelt to and implored indulgence of?”
“I am thankful to say I haven’t.”
“Then I don’t think you are in a position to give an opinion. I have
been that man, and it makes all the difference in the world, if one has
any manliness or chivalry in him. I had not the remotest idea—living
apart from women as I have done for so many years—that merely taking a
woman to church and putting a ring upon her finger could by any
possibility involve one in such a daily, continuous tragedy as that now
shared by her and me!”
“Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you, provided
she kept to herself. But to go attended by a cavalier—that makes a
difference.”
“Not a bit. Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure her present
misery than be made to promise to keep apart from him? All that is a
question for herself. It is not the same thing at all as the treachery
of living on with a husband and playing him false… However, she has not
distinctly implied living with him as wife, though I think she means
to... And, to the best of my understanding, it is not an ignoble,
merely animal, feeling between the two: that is the worst of it;
because it makes me think their affection will be enduring. I did not
mean to confess to you that in the first jealous weeks of my marriage,
before I had come to my right mind, I hid myself in the school one
evening when they were together there, and I heard what they said. I am
ashamed of it now, though I suppose I was only exercising a legal
right. I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or
sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all
flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together—to share
each other’s emotions, and fancies, and dreams.”
“Platonic!”
“Well no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it. They remind me of—what are
their names—Laon and Cythna. Also of Paul and Virginia a little. The
more I reflect, the more _entirely_ I am on their side!”
“But if people did as you want to do, there’d be a general domestic
disintegration. The family would no longer be the social unit.”
“Yes—I am all abroad, I suppose!” said Phillotson sadly. “I was never a
very bright reasoner, you remember. … And yet, I don’t see why the
woman and the children should not be the unit without the man.”
“By the Lord Harry!—Matriarchy! … Does _she_ say all this too?”
“Oh no. She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this—all in the last
twelve hours!”
“It will upset all received opinion hereabout. Good God—what will
Shaston say!”
“I don’t say that it won’t. I don’t know—I don’t know! … As I say, I am
only a feeler, not a reasoner.”
“Now,” said Gillingham, “let us take it quietly, and have something to
drink over it.” He went under the stairs, and produced a bottle of
cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer each. “I think you are rafted,
and not yourself,” he continued. “Do go back and make up your mind to
put up with a few whims. But keep her. I hear on all sides that she’s a
charming young thing.”
“Ah yes! That’s the bitterness of it! Well, I won’t stay. I have a long
walk before me.”
Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting
expressed his hope that this consultation, singular as its subject was,
would be the renewal of their old comradeship. “Stick to her!” were his
last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson; from which his
friend answered “Aye, aye!”
But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night, and no sound
was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour, he said,
“So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments against it
than those!”
“I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses—that’s what
I think!” murmured Gillingham, as he walked back alone.
The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told Sue:
“You may go—with whom you will. I absolutely and unconditionally
agree.”
Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to Phillotson more and
more indubitably the true one. His mild serenity at the sense that he
was doing his duty by a woman who was at his mercy almost overpowered
his grief at relinquishing her.
Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had
come—a cloudy evening with wind—which indeed was very seldom absent in
this elevated place. How permanently it was imprinted upon his vision;
that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea; a slim flexible
figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and marked by the pallors
of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic possibilities quite at
variance with her times of buoyancy; a trying of this morsel and that,
and an inability to eat either. Her nervous manner, begotten of a fear
lest he should be injured by her course, might have been interpreted by
a stranger as displeasure that Phillotson intruded his presence on her
for the few brief minutes that remained.
“You had better have a slice of ham or an egg, or something with your
tea? You can’t travel on a mouthful of bread and butter.”
She took the slice he helped her to; and they discussed as they sat
trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he would find the key
of this or that cupboard, what little bills were paid, and what not.
“I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue,” he said, in a heroic
attempt to put her at her ease. “So that being without a wife will not
really be irksome to me, as it might be to other men who have had one a
little while. I have, too, this grand hobby in my head of writing ‘The
Roman Antiquities of Wessex,’ which will occupy all my spare hours.”
“If you will send me some of the manuscript to copy at any time, as you
used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!” she said with amenable
gentleness. “I should much like to be some help to you still—as
a—f-f-friend.”
Phillotson mused, and said: “No, I think we ought to be really
separate, if we are to be at all. And for this reason, that I don’t
wish to ask you any questions, and particularly wish you not to give me
information as to your movements, or even your address… Now, what money
do you want? You must have some, you know.”
“Oh, of course, Richard, I couldn’t think of having any of your money
to go away from you with! I don’t want any either. I have enough of my
own to last me for a long while, and Jude will let me have—”
“I would rather not know anything about him, if you don’t mind. You are
free, absolutely; and your course is your own.”
“Very well. But I’ll just say that I have packed only a change or two
of my own personal clothing, and one or two little things besides that
are my very own. I wish you would look into my trunk before it is
closed. Besides that I have only a small parcel that will go into
Jude’s portmanteau.”
“Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your luggage! I wish you
would take three-quarters of the household furniture. I don’t want to
be bothered with it. I have a sort of affection for a little of it that
belonged to my poor mother and father. But the rest you are welcome to
whenever you like to send for it.”
“That I shall never do.”
“You go by the six-thirty train, don’t you? It is now a quarter to
six.”
“You… You don’t seem very sorry I am going, Richard!”
“Oh no—perhaps not.”
“I like you much for how you have behaved. It is a curious thing that
directly I have begun to regard you as not my husband, but as my old
teacher, I like you. I won’t be so affected as to say I love you,
because you know I don’t, except as a friend. But you do seem that to
me!”
Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these reflections, and
then the station omnibus came round to take her up. Phillotson saw her
things put on the top, handed her in, and was obliged to make an
appearance of kissing her as he wished her good-bye, which she quite
understood and imitated. From the cheerful manner in which they parted
the omnibus-man had no other idea than that she was going for a short
visit.
When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs and opened the
window in the direction the omnibus had taken. Soon the noise of its
wheels died away. He came down then, his face compressed like that of
one bearing pain; he put on his hat and went out, following by the same
route for nearly a mile. Suddenly turning round he came home.
He had no sooner entered than the voice of his friend Gillingham
greeted him from the front room.
“I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I walked in, and
made myself comfortable. I said I would call, you remember.”
“Yes. I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly for coming
to-night.”
“How is Mrs.—”
“She is quite well. She is gone—just gone. That’s her tea-cup, that she
drank out of only an hour ago. And that’s the plate she—” Phillotson’s
throat got choked up, and he could not go on. He turned and pushed the
tea-things aside.
“Have you had any tea, by the by?” he asked presently in a renewed
voice.
“No—yes—never mind,” said Gillingham, preoccupied. “Gone, you say she
is?”
“Yes… I would have died for her; but I wouldn’t be cruel to her in the
name of the law. She is, as I understand, gone to join her lover. What
they are going to do I cannot say. Whatever it may be she has my full
consent to.”
There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson’s pronouncement which
restrained his friend’s comment. “Shall I—leave you?” he asked.
“No, no. It is a mercy to me that you have come. I have some articles
to arrange and clear away. Would you help me?”
Gillingham assented; and having gone to the upper rooms the
schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all Sue’s things that
she had left behind, and laying them in a large box. “She wouldn’t take
all I wanted her to,” he continued. “But when I made up my mind to her
going to live in her own way I did make up my mind.”
“Some men would have stopped at an agreement to separate.”
“I’ve gone into all that, and don’t wish to argue it. I was, and am,
the most old-fashioned man in the world on the question of marriage—in
fact I had never thought critically about its ethics at all. But
certain facts stared me in the face, and I couldn’t go against them.”
They went on with the packing silently. When it was done Phillotson
closed the box and turned the key.
“There,” he said. “To adorn her in somebody’s eyes; never again in
mine!”
V
Four-and-twenty hours before this time Sue had written the following
note to Jude:
It is as I told you; and I am leaving to-morrow evening. Richard and I
thought it could be done with less obtrusiveness after dark. I feel
rather frightened, and therefore ask you to be sure you are on the
Melchester platform to meet me. I arrive at a little to seven. I know
you will, of course, dear Jude; but I feel so timid that I can’t help
begging you to be punctual. He has been so _very_ kind to me through it
all!
Now to our meeting!
S.
As she was carried by the omnibus farther and farther down from the
mountain town—the single passenger that evening—she regarded the
receding road with a sad face. But no hesitation was apparent therein.
The up-train by which she was departing stopped by signal only. To Sue
it seemed strange that such a powerful organization as a railway train
should be brought to a stand-still on purpose for her—a fugitive from
her lawful home.
The twenty minutes’ journey drew towards its close, and Sue began
gathering her things together to alight. At the moment that the train
came to a stand-still by the Melchester platform a hand was laid on the
door and she beheld Jude. He entered the compartment promptly. He had a
black bag in his hand, and was dressed in the dark suit he wore on
Sundays and in the evening after work. Altogether he looked a very
handsome young fellow, his ardent affection for her burning in his
eyes.
“Oh Jude!” She clasped his hand with both hers, and her tense state
caused her to simmer over in a little succession of dry sobs. “I—I am
so glad! I get out here?”
“No. I get in, dear one! I’ve packed. Besides this bag I’ve only a big
box which is labelled.”
“But don’t I get out? Aren’t we going to stay here?”
“We couldn’t possibly, don’t you see. We are known here—I, at any rate,
am well known. I’ve booked for Aldbrickham; and here’s your ticket for
the same place, as you have only one to here.”
“I thought we should have stayed here,” she repeated.
“It wouldn’t have done at all.”
“Ah! Perhaps not.”
“There wasn’t time for me to write and say the place I had decided on.
Aldbrickham is a much bigger town—sixty or seventy thousand
inhabitants—and nobody knows anything about us there.”
“And you have given up your cathedral work here?”
“Yes. It was rather sudden—your message coming unexpectedly. Strictly,
I might have been made to finish out the week. But I pleaded urgency
and I was let off. I would have deserted any day at your command, dear
Sue. I have deserted more than that for you!”
“I fear I am doing you a lot of harm. Ruining your prospects of the
Church; ruining your progress in your trade; everything!”
“The Church is no more to me. Let it lie! _I_ am not to be one of
The soldier-saints who, row on row,
Burn upward each to his point of bliss,
if any such there be! My point of bliss is not upward, but here.”
“Oh I seem so bad—upsetting men’s courses like this!” said she, taking
up in her voice the emotion that had begun in his. But she recovered
her equanimity by the time they had travelled a dozen miles.
“He has been so good in letting me go,” she resumed. “And here’s a note
I found on my dressing-table, addressed to you.”
“Yes. He’s not an unworthy fellow,” said Jude, glancing at the note.
“And I am ashamed of myself for hating him because he married you.”
“According to the rule of women’s whims I suppose I ought to suddenly
love him, because he has let me go so generously and unexpectedly,” she
answered smiling. “But I am so cold, or devoid of gratitude, or so
something, that even this generosity hasn’t made me love him, or
repent, or want to stay with him as his wife; although I do feel I like
his large-mindedness, and respect him more than ever.”
“It may not work so well for us as if he had been less kind, and you
had run away against his will,” murmured Jude.
“That I _never_ would have done.”
Jude’s eyes rested musingly on her face. Then he suddenly kissed her;
and was going to kiss her again. “No—only once now—please, Jude!”
“That’s rather cruel,” he answered; but acquiesced. “Such a strange
thing has happened to me,” Jude continued after a silence. “Arabella
has actually written to ask me to get a divorce from her—in kindness to
her, she says. She wants to honestly and legally marry that man she has
already married virtually; and begs me to enable her to do it.”
“What have you done?”
“I have agreed. I thought at first I couldn’t do it without getting her
into trouble about that second marriage, and I don’t want to injure her
in any way. Perhaps she’s no worse than I am, after all! But nobody
knows about it over here, and I find it will not be a difficult
proceeding at all. If she wants to start afresh I have only too obvious
reasons for not hindering her.”
“Then you’ll be free?”
“Yes, I shall be free.”
“Where are we booked for?” she asked, with the discontinuity that
marked her to-night.
“Aldbrickham, as I said.”
“But it will be very late when we get there?”
“Yes. I thought of that, and I wired for a room for us at the
Temperance Hotel there.”
“One?”
“Yes—one.”
She looked at him. “Oh Jude!” Sue bent her forehead against the corner
of the compartment. “I thought you might do it; and that I was
deceiving you. But I didn’t mean that!”
In the pause which followed, Jude’s eyes fixed themselves with a
stultified expression on the opposite seat. “Well!” he said… “Well!”
He remained in silence; and seeing how discomfited he was she put her
face against his cheek, murmuring, “Don’t be vexed, dear!”
“Oh—there’s no harm done,” he said. “But—I understood it like that… Is
this a sudden change of mind?”
“You have no right to ask me such a question; and I shan’t answer!” she
said, smiling.
“My dear one, your happiness is more to me than anything—although we
seem to verge on quarrelling so often!—and your will is law to me. I am
something more than a mere—selfish fellow, I hope. Have it as you
wish!” On reflection his brow showed perplexity. “But perhaps it is
that you don’t love me—not that you have become conventional! Much as,
under your teaching, I hate convention, I hope it _is_ that, not the
other terrible alternative!”
Even at this obvious moment for candour Sue could not be quite candid
as to the state of that mystery, her heart. “Put it down to my
timidity,” she said with hurried evasiveness; “to a woman’s natural
timidity when the crisis comes. I may feel as well as you that I have a
perfect right to live with you as you thought—from this moment. I may
hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father of a
woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers as the cut of
her underlinen, on whom nobody will have any right to question her. But
partly, perhaps, because it is by his generosity that I am now free, I
would rather not be other than a little rigid. If there had been a
rope-ladder, and he had run after us with pistols, it would have seemed
different, and I may have acted otherwise. But don’t press me and
criticize me, Jude! Assume that I haven’t the courage of my opinions. I
know I am a poor miserable creature. My nature is not so passionate as
yours!”
He repeated simply! “I thought—what I naturally thought. But if we are
not lovers, we are not. Phillotson thought so, I am sure. See, here is
what he has written to me.” He opened the letter she had brought, and
read:
“I make only one condition—that you are tender and kind to her. I know
you love her. But even love may be cruel at times. You are made for
each other: it is obvious, palpable, to any unbiased older person. You
were all along ‘the shadowy third’ in my short life with her. I repeat,
take care of Sue.”