“He’s a good fellow, isn’t he!” she said with latent tears. On

reconsideration she added, “He was very resigned to letting me go—too

resigned almost! I never was so near being in love with him as when he

made such thoughtful arrangements for my being comfortable on my

journey, and offering to provide money. Yet I was not. If I loved him

ever so little as a wife, I’d go back to him even now.”

“But you don’t, do you?”

“It is true—oh so terribly true!—I don’t.”

“Nor me neither, I half-fear!” he said pettishly. “Nor anybody perhaps!

Sue, sometimes, when I am vexed with you, I think you are incapable of

real love.”

“That’s not good and loyal of you!” she said, and drawing away from him

as far as she could, looked severely out into the darkness. She added

in hurt tones, without turning round: “My liking for you is not as some

women’s perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely

delicate kind, and I don’t want to go further and risk it by—an attempt

to intensify it! I quite realized that, as woman with man, it was a

risk to come. But, as me with you, I resolved to trust you to set my

wishes above your gratification. Don’t discuss it further, dear Jude!”

“Of course, if it would make you reproach yourself… but you do like me

very much, Sue? Say you do! Say that you do a quarter, a tenth, as much

as I do you, and I’ll be content!”

“I’ve let you kiss me, and that tells enough.”

“Just once or so!”

“Well—don’t be a greedy boy.”

He leant back, and did not look at her for a long time. That episode in

her past history of which she had told him—of the poor Christminster

graduate whom she had handled thus, returned to Jude’s mind; and he saw

himself as a possible second in such a torturing destiny.

“This is a queer elopement!” he murmured. “Perhaps you are making a

cat’s paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost

seems so—to see you sitting up there so prim!”

“Now you mustn’t be angry—I won’t let you!” she coaxed, turning and

moving nearer to him. “You did kiss me just now, you know; and I didn’t

dislike you to, I own it, Jude. Only I don’t want to let you do it

again, just yet—considering how we are circumstanced, don’t you see!”

He could never resist her when she pleaded (as she well knew). And they

sat side by side with joined hands, till she aroused herself at some

thought.

“I can’t possibly go to that Temperance Inn, after your telegraphing

that message!”

“Why not?”

“You can see well enough!”

“Very well; there’ll be some other one open, no doubt. I have sometimes

thought, since your marrying Phillotson because of a stupid scandal,

that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to

the social code as any woman I know!”

“Not mentally. But I haven’t the courage of my views, as I said before.

I didn’t marry him altogether because of the scandal. But sometimes a

woman’s _love of being loved_ gets the better of her conscience, and

though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she

encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all. Then,

when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she

can to repair the wrong.”

“You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap,

and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you

tortured yourself to death by doing it.”

“Well—if you will put it brutally!—it was a little like that—that and

the scandal together—and your concealing from me what you ought to have

told me before!”

He could see that she was distressed and tearful at his criticisms, and

soothed her, saying: “There, dear; don’t mind! Crucify me, if you will!

You know you are all the world to me, whatever you do!”

“I am very bad and unprincipled—I know you think that!” she said,

trying to blink away her tears.

“I think and know you are my dear Sue, from whom neither length nor

breadth, nor things present nor things to come, can divide me!”

Though so sophisticated in many things, she was such a child in others

that this satisfied her, and they reached the end of their journey on

the best of terms. It was about ten o’clock when they arrived at

Aldbrickham, the county town of North Wessex. As she would not go to

the Temperance Hotel because of the form of his telegram, Jude inquired

for another; and a youth who volunteered to find one wheeled their

luggage to the George farther on, which proved to be the inn at which

Jude had stayed with Arabella on that one occasion of their meeting

after their division for years.

Owing, however, to their now entering it by another door, and to his

preoccupation, he did not at first recognize the place. When they had

engaged their respective rooms they went down to a late supper. During

Jude’s temporary absence the waiting-maid spoke to Sue.

“I think, ma’am, I remember your relation, or friend, or whatever he

is, coming here once before—late, just like this, with his wife—a lady,

at any rate, that wasn’t you by no manner of means—jest as med be with

you now.”

“Oh do you?” said Sue, with a certain sickness of heart. “Though I

think you must be mistaken! How long ago was it?”

“About a month or two. A handsome, full-figured woman. They had this

room.”

When Jude came back and sat down to supper Sue seemed moping and

miserable. “Jude,” she said to him plaintively, at their parting that

night upon the landing, “it is not so nice and pleasant as it used to

be with us! I don’t like it here—I can’t bear the place! And I don’t

like you so well as I did!”

“How fidgeted you seem, dear! Why do you change like this?”

“Because it was cruel to bring me here!”

“Why?”

“You were lately here with Arabella. There, now I have said it!”

“Dear me, why—” said Jude looking round him. “Yes—it is the same! I

really didn’t know it, Sue. Well—it is not cruel, since we have come as

we have—two relations staying together.”

“How long ago was it you were here? Tell me, tell me!”

“The day before I met you in Christminster, when we went back to

Marygreen together. I told you I had met her.”

“Yes, you said you had met her, but you didn’t tell me all. Your story

was that you had met as estranged people, who were not husband and wife

at all in Heaven’s sight—not that you had made it up with her.”

“We didn’t make it up,” he said sadly. “I can’t explain, Sue.”

“You’ve been false to me; you, my last hope! And I shall never forget

it, never!”

“But by your own wish, dear Sue, we are only to be friends, not lovers!

It is so very inconsistent of you to—”

“Friends can be jealous!”

“I don’t see that. You concede nothing to me and I have to concede

everything to you. After all, you were on good terms with your husband

at that time.”

“No, I wasn’t, Jude. Oh how can you think so! And you have taken me in,

even if you didn’t intend to.” She was so mortified that he was obliged

to take her into her room and close the door lest the people should

hear. “Was it this room? Yes it was—I see by your look it was! I won’t

have it for mine! Oh it was treacherous of you to have her again! _I_

jumped out of the window!”

“But Sue, she was, after all, my legal wife, if not—”

Slipping down on her knees Sue buried her face in the bed and wept.

“I never knew such an unreasonable—such a dog-in-the-manger feeling,”

said Jude. “I am not to approach you, nor anybody else!”

“Oh don’t you _understand_ my feeling? Why don’t you? Why are you so

gross? _I_ jumped out of the window?”

“Jumped out of window?”

“I can’t explain!”

It was true that he did not understand her feelings very well. But he

did a little; and began to love her none the less.

“I—I thought you cared for nobody—desired nobody in the world but me at

that time—and ever since!” continued Sue.

“It is true. I did not, and don’t now!” said Jude, as distressed as

she.

“But you must have thought much of her! Or—”

“No—I need not—you don’t understand me either—women never do! Why

should you get into such a tantrum about nothing?”

Looking up from the quilt she pouted provokingly: “If it hadn’t been

for that, perhaps I would have gone on to the Temperance Hotel, after

all, as you proposed; for I was beginning to think I did belong to

you!”

“Oh, it is of no consequence!” said Jude distantly.

“I thought, of course, that she had never been really your wife since

she left you of her own accord years and years ago! My sense of it was,

that a parting such as yours from her, and mine from him, ended the

marriage.”

“I can’t say more without speaking against her, and I don’t want to do

that,” said he. “Yet I must tell you one thing, which would settle the

matter in any case. She has married another man—really married him! I

knew nothing about it till after the visit we made here.”

“Married another? … It is a crime—as the world treats it, but does not

believe.”

“There—now you are yourself again. Yes, it is a crime—as you don’t

hold, but would fearfully concede. But I shall never inform against

her! And it is evidently a prick of conscience in her that has led her

to urge me to get a divorce, that she may remarry this man legally. So

you perceive I shall not be likely to see her again.”

“And you didn’t really know anything of this when you saw her?” said

Sue more gently, as she rose.

“I did not. Considering all things, I don’t think you ought to be

angry, darling!”

“I am not. But I shan’t go to the Temperance Hotel!”

He laughed. “Never mind!” he said. “So that I am near you, I am

comparatively happy. It is more than this earthly wretch called Me

deserves—you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet,

tantalizing phantom—hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms

round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!

Forgive me for being gross, as you call it! Remember that our calling

cousins when really strangers was a snare. The enmity of our parents

gave a piquancy to you in my eyes that was intenser even than the

novelty of ordinary new acquaintance.”

“Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ as if

they meant me!” she solicited, slanting up closer to him as they stood.

“Don’t you know them?”

“I know hardly any poetry,” he replied mournfully.

“Don’t you? These are some of them:

There was a Being whom my spirit oft

Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.

* * * * * * * * *

A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,

Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman…

Oh it is too flattering, so I won’t go on! But say it’s me! Say it’s

me!”

“It is you, dear; exactly like you!”

“Now I forgive you! And you shall kiss me just once there—not very

long.” She put the tip of her finger gingerly to her cheek; and he did

as commanded. “You do care for me very much, don’t you, in spite of my

not—you know?”

“Yes, sweet!” he said with a sigh; and bade her good-night.

VI

In returning to his native town of Shaston as schoolmaster Phillotson

had won the interest and awakened the memories of the inhabitants, who,

though they did not honour him for his miscellaneous acquirements as he

would have been honoured elsewhere, retained for him a sincere regard.

When, shortly after his arrival, he brought home a pretty

wife—awkwardly pretty for him, if he did not take care, they said—they

were glad to have her settle among them.

For some time after her flight from that home Sue’s absence did not

excite comment. Her place as monitor in the school was taken by another

young woman within a few days of her vacating it, which substitution

also passed without remark, Sue’s services having been of a provisional

nature only. When, however, a month had passed, and Phillotson casually

admitted to an acquaintance that he did not know where his wife was

staying, curiosity began to be aroused; till, jumping to conclusions,

people ventured to affirm that Sue had played him false and run away

from him. The schoolmaster’s growing languor and listlessness over his

work gave countenance to the idea.

Though Phillotson had held his tongue as long as he could, except to

his friend Gillingham, his honesty and directness would not allow him

to do so when misapprehensions as to Sue’s conduct spread abroad. On a

Monday morning the chairman of the school committee called, and after

attending to the business of the school drew Phillotson aside out of

earshot of the children.

“You’ll excuse my asking, Phillotson, since everybody is talking of it:

is this true as to your domestic affairs—that your wife’s going away

was on no visit, but a secret elopement with a lover? If so, I condole

with you.”

“Don’t,” said Phillotson. “There was no secret about it.”

“She has gone to visit friends?”

“No.”

“Then what has happened?”

“She has gone away under circumstances that usually call for condolence

with the husband. But I gave my consent.”

The chairman looked as if he had not apprehended the remark.

“What I say is quite true,” Phillotson continued testily. “She asked

leave to go away with her lover, and I let her. Why shouldn’t I? A

woman of full age, it was a question of her own conscience—not for me.

I was not her gaoler. I can’t explain any further. I don’t wish to be

questioned.”

The children observed that much seriousness marked the faces of the two

men, and went home and told their parents that something new had

happened about Mrs. Phillotson. Then Phillotson’s little maidservant,

who was a schoolgirl just out of her standards, said that Mr.

Phillotson had helped in his wife’s packing, had offered her what money

she required, and had written a friendly letter to her young man,

telling him to take care of her. The chairman of committee thought the

matter over, and talked to the other managers of the school, till a

request came to Phillotson to meet them privately. The meeting lasted a

long time, and at the end the school-master came home, looking as usual

pale and worn. Gillingham was sitting in his house awaiting him.

“Well; it is as you said,” observed Phillotson, flinging himself down

wearily in a chair. “They have requested me to send in my resignation

on account of my scandalous conduct in giving my tortured wife her

liberty—or, as they call it, condoning her adultery. But I shan’t

resign!”

“I think I would.”

“I won’t. It is no business of theirs. It doesn’t affect me in my

public capacity at all. They may expel me if they like.”

“If you make a fuss it will get into the papers, and you’ll never get

appointed to another school. You see, they have to consider what you

did as done by a teacher of youth—and its effects as such upon the

morals of the town; and, to ordinary opinion, your position is

indefensible. You must let me say that.”

To this good advice, however, Phillotson would not listen.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t go unless I am turned out. And for

this reason; that by resigning I acknowledge I have acted wrongly by

her; when I am more and more convinced every day that in the sight of

Heaven and by all natural, straightforward humanity, I have acted

rightly.”

Gillingham saw that his rather headstrong friend would not be able to

maintain such a position as this; but he said nothing further, and in

due time—indeed, in a quarter of an hour—the formal letter of dismissal

arrived, the managers having remained behind to write it after

Phillotson’s withdrawal. The latter replied that he should not accept

dismissal; and called a public meeting, which he attended, although he

looked so weak and ill that his friend implored him to stay at home.

When he stood up to give his reasons for contesting the decision of the

managers he advanced them firmly, as he had done to his friend, and

contended, moreover, that the matter was a domestic theory which did

not concern them. This they over-ruled, insisting that the private

eccentricities of a teacher came quite within their sphere of control,

as it touched the morals of those he taught. Phillotson replied that he

did not see how an act of natural charity could injure morals.

All the respectable inhabitants and well-to-do fellow-natives of the

town were against Phillotson to a man. But, somewhat to his surprise,

some dozen or more champions rose up in his defence as from the ground.

It has been stated that Shaston was the anchorage of a curious and

interesting group of itinerants, who frequented the numerous fairs and

markets held up and down Wessex during the summer and autumn months.

Although Phillotson had never spoken to one of these gentlemen they now

nobly led the forlorn hope in his defence. The body included two cheap

Jacks, a shooting-gallery proprietor and the ladies who loaded the

guns, a pair of boxing-masters, a steam-roundabout manager, two

travelling broom-makers, who called themselves widows, a

gingerbread-stall keeper, a swing-boat owner, and a

“test-your-strength” man.

This generous phalanx of supporters, and a few others of independent

judgment, whose own domestic experiences had been not without

vicissitude, came up and warmly shook hands with Phillotson; after

which they expressed their thoughts so strongly to the meeting that

issue was joined, the result being a general scuffle, wherein a black

board was split, three panes of the school windows were broken, an

inkbottle was spilled over a town-councillor’s shirt front, a

churchwarden was dealt such a topper with the map of Palestine that his

head went right through Samaria, and many black eyes and bleeding noses

were given, one of which, to everybody’s horror, was the venerable

incumbent’s, owing to the zeal of an emancipated chimney-sweep, who

took the side of Phillotson’s party. When Phillotson saw the blood

running down the rector’s face he deplored almost in groans the

untoward and degrading circumstances, regretted that he had not

resigned when called upon, and went home so ill that next morning he

could not leave his bed.

The farcical yet melancholy event was the beginning of a serious

illness for him; and he lay in his lonely bed in the pathetic state of

mind of a middle-aged man who perceives at length that his life,

intellectual and domestic, is tending to failure and gloom. Gillingham

came to see him in the evenings, and on one occasion mentioned Sue’s

name.

“She doesn’t care anything about me!” said Phillotson. “Why should

she?”

“She doesn’t know you are ill.”

“So much the better for both of us.”

“Where are her lover and she living?”

“At Melchester—I suppose; at least he was living there some time ago.”

When Gillingham reached home he sat and reflected, and at last wrote an

anonymous line to Sue, on the bare chance of its reaching her, the

letter being enclosed in an envelope addressed to Jude at the diocesan

capital. Arriving at that place it was forwarded to Marygreen in North

Wessex, and thence to Aldbrickham by the only person who knew his

present address—the widow who had nursed his aunt.

Three days later, in the evening, when the sun was going down in

splendour over the lowlands of Blackmoor, and making the Shaston

windows like tongues of fire to the eyes of the rustics in that vale,

the sick man fancied that he heard somebody come to the house, and a

few minutes after there was a tap at the bedroom door. Phillotson did

not speak; the door was hesitatingly opened, and there entered—Sue.

She was in light spring clothing, and her advent seemed ghostly—like

the flitting in of a moth. He turned his eyes upon her, and flushed;

but appeared to check his primary impulse to speak.

“I have no business here,” she said, bending her frightened face to

him. “But I heard you were ill—very ill; and—and as I know that you

recognize other feelings between man and woman than physical love, I

have come.”

“I am not very ill, my dear friend. Only unwell.”

“I didn’t know that; and I am afraid that only a severe illness would

have justified my coming!”

“Yes… yes. And I almost wish you had not come! It is a little too

soon—that’s all I mean. Still, let us make the best of it. You haven’t

heard about the school, I suppose?”

“No—what about it?”

“Only that I am going away from here to another place. The managers and

I don’t agree, and we are going to part—that’s all.”

Sue did not for a moment, either now or later, suspect what troubles

had resulted to him from letting her go; it never once seemed to cross

her mind, and she had received no news whatever from Shaston. They

talked on slight and ephemeral subjects, and when his tea was brought

up he told the amazed little servant that a cup was to be set for Sue.

That young person was much more interested in their history than they

supposed, and as she descended the stairs she lifted her eyes and hands

in grotesque amazement. While they sipped Sue went to the window and

thoughtfully said, “It is such a beautiful sunset, Richard.”

“They are mostly beautiful from here, owing to the rays crossing the

mist of the vale. But I lose them all, as they don’t shine into this

gloomy corner where I lie.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see this particular one? It is like heaven

opened.”

“Ah yes! But I can’t.”

“I’ll help you to.”

“No—the bedstead can’t be shifted.”

“But see how I mean.”

She went to where a swing-glass stood, and taking it in her hands

carried it to a spot by the window where it could catch the sunshine,

moving the glass till the beams were reflected into Phillotson’s face.

“There—you can see the great red sun now!” she said. “And I am sure it

will cheer you—I do so hope it will!” She spoke with a childlike,

repentant kindness, as if she could not do too much for him.

Phillotson smiled sadly. “You are an odd creature!” he murmured as the

sun glowed in his eyes. “The idea of your coming to see me after what

has passed!”

“Don’t let us go back upon that!” she said quickly. “I have to catch

the omnibus for the train, as Jude doesn’t know I have come; he was out

when I started; so I must return home almost directly. Richard, I am so

very glad you are better. You don’t hate me, do you? You have been such

a kind friend to me!”

“I am glad to know you think so,” said Phillotson huskily. “No. I don’t

hate you!”

It grew dusk quickly in the gloomy room during their intermittent chat,

and when candles were brought and it was time to leave she put her hand

in his or rather allowed it to flit through his; for she was

significantly light in touch. She had nearly closed the door when he

said, “Sue!” He had noticed that, in turning away from him, tears were

on her face and a quiver in her lip.

It was bad policy to recall her—he knew it while he pursued it. But he

could not help it. She came back.

“Sue,” he murmured, “do you wish to make it up, and stay? I’ll forgive

you and condone everything!”

“Oh you can’t, you can’t!” she said hastily. “You can’t condone it

now!”

“_He_ is your husband now, in effect, you mean, of course?”

“You may assume it. He is obtaining a divorce from his wife Arabella.”

“His wife! It is altogether news to me that he has a wife.”

“It was a bad marriage.”

“Like yours.”

“Like mine. He is not doing it so much on his own account as on hers.

She wrote and told him it would be a kindness to her, since then she

could marry and live respectably. And Jude has agreed.”

“A wife… A kindness to her. Ah, yes; a kindness to her to release her

altogether… But I don’t like the sound of it. I can forgive, Sue.”

“No, no! You can’t have me back now I have been so wicked—as to do what

I have done!”

There had arisen in Sue’s face that incipient fright which showed

itself whenever he changed from friend to husband, and which made her

adopt any line of defence against marital feeling in him. “I _must_ go

now. I’ll come again—may I?”

“I don’t ask you to go, even now. I ask you to stay.”

“I thank you, Richard; but I must. As you are not so ill as I thought,

I _cannot_ stay!”

“She’s his—his from lips to heel!” said Phillotson; but so faintly that

in closing the door she did not hear it. The dread of a reactionary

change in the schoolmaster’s sentiments, coupled, perhaps, with a faint

shamefacedness at letting even him know what a slipshod lack of

thoroughness, from a man’s point of view, characterized her transferred

allegiance, prevented her telling him of her, thus far, incomplete

relations with Jude; and Phillotson lay writhing like a man in hell as

he pictured the prettily dressed, maddening compound of sympathy and

averseness who bore his name, returning impatiently to the home of her

lover.

Gillingham was so interested in Phillotson’s affairs, and so seriously

concerned about him, that he walked up the hill-side to Shaston two or

three times a week, although, there and back, it was a journey of nine

miles, which had to be performed between tea and supper, after a hard

day’s work in school. When he called on the next occasion after Sue’s

visit his friend was downstairs, and Gillingham noticed that his

restless mood had been supplanted by a more fixed and composed one.

“She’s been here since you called last,” said Phillotson.

“Not Mrs. Phillotson?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! You have made it up?”

“No… She just came, patted my pillow with her little white hand, played

the thoughtful nurse for half an hour, and went away.”

“Well—I’m hanged! A little hussy!”

“What do you say?”

“Oh—nothing!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what a tantalizing, capricious little woman! If she were not

your wife—”

“She is not; she’s another man’s except in name and law. And I have

been thinking—it was suggested to me by a conversation I had with

her—that, in kindness to her, I ought to dissolve the legal tie

altogether; which, singularly enough, I think I can do, now she has

been back, and refused my request to stay after I said I had forgiven

her. I believe that fact would afford me opportunity of doing it,

though I did not see it at the moment. What’s the use of keeping her

chained on to me if she doesn’t belong to me? I know—I feel absolutely

certain—that she would welcome my taking such a step as the greatest

charity to her. For though as a fellow-creature she sympathizes with,

and pities me, and even weeps for me, as a husband she cannot endure

me—she loathes me—there’s no use in mincing words—she loathes me, and

my only manly, and dignified, and merciful course is to complete what I

have begun… And for worldly reasons, too, it will be better for her to

be independent. I have hopelessly ruined my prospects because of my

decision as to what was best for us, though she does not know it; I see

only dire poverty ahead from my feet to the grave; for I can be

accepted as teacher no more. I shall probably have enough to do to make

both ends meet during the remainder of my life, now my occupation’s

gone; and I shall be better able to bear it alone. I may as well tell

you that what has suggested my letting her go is some news she brought

me—the news that Fawley is doing the same.”

“Oh—he had a spouse, too? A queer couple, these lovers!”

“Well—I don’t want your opinion on that. What I was going to say is

that my liberating her can do her no possible harm, and will open up a

chance of happiness for her which she has never dreamt of hitherto. For

then they’ll be able to marry, as they ought to have done at first.”

Gillingham did not hurry to reply. “I may disagree with your motive,”

he said gently, for he respected views he could not share. “But I think

you are right in your determination—if you can carry it out. I doubt,

however, if you can.”

Part Fifth AT ALDBRICKHAM AND ELSEWHERE

_“Thy aerial part, and all the fiery parts which are mingled in thee,

though by nature they have an upward tendency, still in obedience to

the disposition of the universe they are over-powered here in the

compound mass the body.”_—M. ANTONINUS (Long).

I

How Gillingham’s doubts were disposed of will most quickly appear by

passing over the series of dreary months and incidents that followed

the events of the last chapter, and coming on to a Sunday in the

February of the year following.

Sue and Jude were living in Aldbrickham, in precisely the same

relations that they had established between themselves when she left

Shaston to join him the year before. The proceedings in the law-courts

had reached their consciousness, but as a distant sound and an

occasional missive which they hardly understood.

They had met, as usual, to breakfast together in the little house with

Jude’s name on it, that he had taken at fifteen pounds a year, with

three-pounds-ten extra for rates and taxes, and furnished with his

aunt’s ancient and lumbering goods, which had cost him about their full

value to bring all the way from Marygreen. Sue kept house, and managed

everything.

As he entered the room this morning Sue held up a letter she had just

received.

“Well; and what is it about?” he said after kissing her.

“That the decree _nisi_ in the case of Phillotson _versus_ Phillotson

and Fawley, pronounced six months ago, has just been made absolute.”

“Ah,” said Jude, as he sat down.

The same concluding incident in Jude’s suit against Arabella had

occurred about a month or two earlier. Both cases had been too

insignificant to be reported in the papers, further than by name in a

long list of other undefended cases.

“Now then, Sue, at any rate, you can do what you like!” He looked at

his sweetheart curiously.

“Are we—you and I—just as free now as if we had never married at all?”

“Just as free—except, I believe, that a clergyman may object personally

to remarry you, and hand the job on to somebody else.”

“But I wonder—do you think it is really so with us? I know it is

generally. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that my freedom has been

obtained under false pretences!”

“How?”

“Well—if the truth about us had been known, the decree wouldn’t have

been pronounced. It is only, is it, because we have made no defence,

and have led them into a false supposition? Therefore is my freedom

lawful, however proper it may be?”

“Well—why did you let it be under false pretences? You have only

yourself to blame,” he said mischievously.

“Jude—don’t! You ought not to be touchy about that still. You must take

me as I am.”

“Very well, darling: so I will. Perhaps you were right. As to your

question, we were not obliged to prove anything. That was their

business. Anyhow we are living together.”

“Yes. Though not in their sense.”

“One thing is certain, that however the decree may be brought about, a

marriage is dissolved when it is dissolved. There is this advantage in

being poor obscure people like us—that these things are done for us in

a rough and ready fashion. It was the same with me and Arabella. I was

afraid her criminal second marriage would have been discovered, and she

punished; but nobody took any interest in her—nobody inquired, nobody

suspected it. If we’d been patented nobilities we should have had

infinite trouble, and days and weeks would have been spent in

investigations.”

By degrees Sue acquired her lover’s cheerfulness at the sense of

freedom, and proposed that they should take a walk in the fields, even

if they had to put up with a cold dinner on account of it. Jude agreed,

and Sue went up-stairs and prepared to start, putting on a joyful

coloured gown in observance of her liberty; seeing which Jude put on a

lighter tie.

“Now we’ll strut arm and arm,” he said, “like any other engaged couple.

We’ve a legal right to.”

They rambled out of the town, and along a path over the low-lying lands

that bordered it, though these were frosty now, and the extensive

seed-fields were bare of colour and produce. The pair, however, were so

absorbed in their own situation that their surroundings were little in

their consciousness.

“Well, my dearest, the result of all this is that we can marry after a

decent interval.”

“Yes; I suppose we can,” said Sue, without enthusiasm.

“And aren’t we going to?”

“I don’t like to say no, dear Jude; but I feel just the same about it

now as I have done all along. I have just the same dread lest an iron

contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as

it did between our unfortunate parents.”

“Still, what can we do? I do love you, as you know, Sue.”

“I know it abundantly. But I think I would much rather go on living

always as lovers, as we are living now, and only meeting by day. It is

so much sweeter—for the woman at least, and when she is sure of the

man. And henceforward we needn’t be so particular as we have been about

appearances.”

“Our experiences of matrimony with others have not been encouraging, I

own,” said he, with some gloom; “either owing to our own dissatisfied,

unpractical natures, or by our misfortune. But we two—”

“Should be two dissatisfied ones linked together, which would be twice

as bad as before… I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the

moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government stamp, and I

was licensed to be loved on the premises by you—Ugh, how horrible and

sordid! Although, as you are, free, I trust you more than any other man

in the world.”

“No, no—don’t say I should change!” he expostulated; yet there was

misgiving in his own voice also.

“Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign to

a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must

and shall be that person’s lover. There would be a much likelier chance

of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony

consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease

loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession

being given, and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in

public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy

the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials

of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and

the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling then.”

“Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are not

the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue. People go on

marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of

them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s

pleasure with a life’s discomfort. No doubt my father and mother, and

your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled us in habits

of observation. But then they went and married just the same, because

they had ordinary passions. But you, Sue, are such a phantasmal,

bodiless creature, one who—if you’ll allow me to say it—has so little

animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when

we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t.”

“Well,” she sighed, “you’ve owned that it would probably end in misery

for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women

like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity

it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages it gains them

sometimes—a dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do

without.”

Jude fell back upon his old complaint—that, intimate as they were, he

had never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she

loved or could love him. “I really fear sometimes that you cannot,” he

said, with a dubiousness approaching anger. “And you are so reticent. I

know that women are taught by other women that they must never admit

the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on

full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don’t know

that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man’s

heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct.

The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging

and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who

plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her

that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow

her to go unlamented to her grave.”

Sue, who was regarding the distance, had acquired a guilty look; and

she suddenly replied in a tragic voice: “I don’t think I like you

to-day so well as I did, Jude!”

“Don’t you? Why?”

“Oh, well—you are not nice—too sermony. Though I suppose I am so bad

and worthless that I deserve the utmost rigour of lecturing!”

“No, you are not bad. You are a dear. But as slippery as an eel when I

want to get a confession from you.”

“Oh yes, I am bad, and obstinate, and all sorts! It is no use your

pretending I am not! People who are good don’t want scolding as I do…

But now that I have nobody but you, and nobody to defend me, it is very

hard that I mustn’t have my own way in deciding how I’ll live with you,

and whether I’ll be married or no!”

“Sue, my own comrade and sweetheart, I don’t want to force you either

to marry or to do the other thing—of course I don’t! It is too wicked

of you to be so pettish! Now we won’t say any more about it, and go on

just the same as we have done; and during the rest of our walk we’ll

talk of the meadows only, and the floods, and the prospect of the

farmers this coming year.”

After this the subject of marriage was not mentioned by them for

several days, though living as they were with only a landing between

them it was constantly in their minds. Sue was assisting Jude very

materially now: he had latterly occupied himself on his own account in

working and lettering headstones, which he kept in a little yard at the

back of his little house, where in the intervals of domestic duties she

marked out the letters full size for him, and blacked them in after he

had cut them. It was a lower class of handicraft than were his former

performances as a cathedral mason, and his only patrons were the poor

people who lived in his own neighbourhood, and knew what a cheap man

this “Jude Fawley: Monumental Mason” (as he called himself on his front

door) was to employ for the simple memorials they required for their

dead. But he seemed more independent than before, and it was the only

arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on

him, could render any assistance.

II

It was an evening at the end of the month, and Jude had just returned

home from hearing a lecture on ancient history in the public hall not

far off. When he entered, Sue, who had been keeping indoors during his

absence, laid out supper for him. Contrary to custom she did not speak.

Jude had taken up some illustrated paper, which he perused till,

raising his eyes, he saw that her face was troubled.

“Are you depressed, Sue?” he said.

She paused a moment. “I have a message for you,” she answered.

“Somebody has called?”

“Yes. A woman.” Sue’s voice quavered as she spoke, and she suddenly sat

down from her preparations, laid her hands in her lap, and looked into

the fire. “I don’t know whether I did right or not!” she continued. “I

said you were not at home, and when she said she would wait, I said I

thought you might not be able to see her.”

“Why did you say that, dear? I suppose she wanted a headstone. Was she

in mourning?”

“No. She wasn’t in mourning, and she didn’t want a headstone; and I

thought you couldn’t see her.” Sue looked critically and imploringly at

him.

“But who was she? Didn’t she say?”

“No. She wouldn’t give her name. But I know who she was—I think I do!

It was Arabella!”

“Heaven save us! What should Arabella come for? What made you think it

was she?”

“Oh, I can hardly tell. But I know it was! I feel perfectly certain it

was—by the light in her eyes as she looked at me. She was a fleshy,

coarse woman.”

“Well—I should not have called Arabella coarse exactly, except in

speech, though she may be getting so by this time under the duties of

the public house. She was rather handsome when I knew her.”

“Handsome! But yes!—so she is!”

“I think I heard a quiver in your little mouth. Well, waiving that, as

she is nothing to me, and virtuously married to another man, why should

she come troubling us?”

“Are you sure she’s married? Have you definite news of it?”

“No—not definite news. But that was why she asked me to release her.

She and the man both wanted to lead a proper life, as I understood.”

“Oh Jude—it was, it _was_ Arabella!” cried Sue, covering her eyes with

her hand. “And I am so miserable! It seems such an ill omen, whatever

she may have come for. You could not possibly see her, could you?”

“I don’t really think I could. It would be so very painful to talk to

her now—for her as much as for me. However, she’s gone. Did she say she

would come again?”

“No. But she went away very reluctantly.”

Sue, whom the least thing upset, could not eat any supper, and when

Jude had finished his he prepared to go to bed. He had no sooner raked

out the fire, fastened the doors, and got to the top of the stairs than

there came a knock. Sue instantly emerged from her room, which she had

but just entered.

“There she is again!” Sue whispered in appalled accents.

“How do you know?”

“She knocked like that last time.”

They listened, and the knocking came again. No servant was kept in the

house, and if the summons were to be responded to one of them would

have to do it in person. “I’ll open a window,” said Jude. “Whoever it

is cannot be expected to be let in at this time.”

He accordingly went into his bedroom and lifted the sash. The lonely

street of early retiring workpeople was empty from end to end save of

one figure—that of a woman walking up and down by the lamp a few yards

off.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

“Is that Mr. Fawley?” came up from the woman, in a voice which was

unmistakably Arabella’s.

Jude replied that it was.

“Is it she?” asked Sue from the door, with lips apart.

“Yes, dear,” said Jude. “What do you want, Arabella?” he inquired.

“I beg your pardon, Jude, for disturbing you,” said Arabella humbly.

“But I called earlier—I wanted particularly to see you to-night, if I

could. I am in trouble, and have nobody to help me!”

“In trouble, are you?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence. An inconvenient sympathy seemed to be rising in

Jude’s breast at the appeal. “But aren’t you married?” he said.

Arabella hesitated. “No, Jude, I am not,” she returned. “He wouldn’t,

after all. And I am in great difficulty. I hope to get another

situation as barmaid soon. But it takes time, and I really am in great

distress because of a sudden responsibility that’s been sprung upon me

from Australia; or I wouldn’t trouble you—believe me I wouldn’t. I want

to tell you about it.”

Sue remained at gaze, in painful tension, hearing every word, but

speaking none.

“You are not really in want of money, Arabella?” he asked, in a

distinctly softened tone.

“I have enough to pay for the night’s lodging I have obtained, but

barely enough to take me back again.”

“Where are you living?”

“In London still.” She was about to give the address, but she said, “I

am afraid somebody may hear, so I don’t like to call out particulars of

myself so loud. If you could come down and walk a little way with me

towards the Prince Inn, where I am staying to-night, I would explain

all. You may as well, for old time’s sake!”

“Poor thing! I must do her the kindness of hearing what’s the matter, I

suppose,” said Jude in much perplexity. “As she’s going back to-morrow

it can’t make much difference.”

“But you can go and see her to-morrow, Jude! Don’t go now, Jude!” came

in plaintive accents from the doorway. “Oh, it is only to entrap you, I

know it is, as she did before! Don’t go, dear! She is such a

low-passioned woman—I can see it in her shape, and hear it in her

voice!

“But I shall go,” said Jude. “Don’t attempt to detain me, Sue. God

knows I love her little enough now, but I don’t want to be cruel to

her.” He turned to the stairs.

“But she’s not your wife!” cried Sue distractedly. “And I—”

“And you are not either, dear, yet,” said Jude.

“Oh, but are you going to her? Don’t! Stay at home! Please, please stay

at home, Jude, and not go to her, now she’s not your wife any more than

I!”

“Well, she is, rather more than you, come to that,” he said, taking his

hat determinedly. “I’ve wanted you to be, and I’ve waited with the

patience of Job, and I don’t see that I’ve got anything by my

self-denial. I shall certainly give her something, and hear what it is

she is so anxious to tell me; no man could do less!”

There was that in his manner which she knew it would be futile to

oppose. She said no more, but, turning to her room as meekly as a

martyr, heard him go downstairs, unbolt the door, and close it behind

him. With a woman’s disregard of her dignity when in the presence of

nobody but herself, she also trotted down, sobbing articulately as she

went. She listened. She knew exactly how far it was to the inn that

Arabella had named as her lodging. It would occupy about seven minutes

to get there at an ordinary walking pace; seven to come back again. If

he did not return in fourteen minutes he would have lingered. She

looked at the clock. It was twenty-five minutes to eleven. He _might_

enter the inn with Arabella, as they would reach it before closing

time; she might get him to drink with her; and Heaven only knew what

disasters would befall him then.

In a still suspense she waited on. It seemed as if the whole time had

nearly elapsed when the door was opened again, and Jude appeared.

Sue gave a little ecstatic cry. “Oh, I knew I could trust you!—how good

you are!”—she began.

“I can’t find her anywhere in this street, and I went out in my

slippers only. She has walked on, thinking I’ve been so hard-hearted as

to refuse her requests entirely, poor woman. I’ve come back for my

boots, as it is beginning to rain.”

“Oh, but why should you take such trouble for a woman who has served

you so badly!” said Sue in a jealous burst of disappointment.

“But, Sue, she’s a woman, and I once cared for her; and one can’t be a

brute in such circumstances.”

“She isn’t your wife any longer!” exclaimed Sue, passionately excited.

“You _mustn’t_ go out to find her! It isn’t right! You _can’t_ join

her, now she’s a stranger to you. How can you forget such a thing, my

dear, dear one!”

“She seems much the same as ever—an erring, careless, unreflecting

fellow-creature,” he said, continuing to pull on his boots. “What those

legal fellows have been playing at in London makes no difference in my

real relations to her. If she was my wife while she was away in

Australia with another husband, she’s my wife now.”

“But she wasn’t! That’s just what I hold! There’s the absurdity!—

Well—you’ll come straight back, after a few minutes, won’t you, dear?

She is too low, too coarse for you to talk to long, Jude, and was

always!”

“Perhaps I am coarse too, worse luck! I have the germs of every human

infirmity in me, I verily believe—that was why I saw it was so

preposterous of me to think of being a curate. I have cured myself of

drunkenness I think; but I never know in what new form a suppressed

vice will break out in me! I do love you, Sue, though I have danced

attendance on you so long for such poor returns! All that’s best and

noblest in me loves you, and your freedom from everything that’s gross

has elevated me, and enabled me to do what I should never have dreamt

myself capable of, or any man, a year or two ago. It is all very well

to preach about self-control, and the wickedness of coercing a woman.

But I should just like a few virtuous people who have condemned me in

the past, about Arabella and other things, to have been in my

tantalizing position with you through these late weeks!—they’d believe,

I think, that I have exercised some little restraint in always giving

in to your wishes—living here in one house, and not a soul between us.”

“Yes, you have been good to me, Jude; I know you have, my dear

protector.”

“Well—Arabella has appealed to me for help. I must go out and speak to

her, Sue, at least!”

“I can’t say any more!—Oh, if you must, you must!” she said, bursting

out into sobs that seemed to tear her heart. “I have nobody but you,

Jude, and you are deserting me! I didn’t know you were like this—I

can’t bear it, I can’t! If she were yours it would be different!”

“Or if you were.”

“Very well then—if I must I must. Since you will have it so, I agree! I

will be. Only I didn’t mean to! And I didn’t want to marry again,

either! … But, yes—I agree, I agree! I do love you. I ought to have

known that you would conquer in the long run, living like this!”

She ran across and flung her arms round his neck. “I am not a

cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at such a

distance? I am sure you don’t think so! Wait and see! I do belong to

you, don’t I? I give in!”

“And I’ll arrange for our marriage to-morrow, or as soon as ever you

wish.”

“Yes, Jude.”

“Then I’ll let her go,” said he, embracing Sue softly. “I do feel that

it would be unfair to you to see her, and perhaps unfair to her. She is

not like you, my darling, and never was: it is only bare justice to say

that. Don’t cry any more. There; and there; and there!” He kissed her

on one side, and on the other, and in the middle, and rebolted the

front door.

The next morning it was wet.

“Now, dear,” said Jude gaily at breakfast; “as this is Saturday I mean

to call about the banns at once, so as to get the first publishing done

to-morrow, or we shall lose a week. Banns will do? We shall save a

pound or two.”

Sue absently agreed to banns. But her mind for the moment was running

on something else. A glow had passed away from her, and depression sat

upon her features.

“I feel I was wickedly selfish last night!” she murmured. “It was sheer

unkindness in me—or worse—to treat Arabella as I did. I didn’t care

about her being in trouble, and what she wished to tell you! Perhaps it

was really something she was justified in telling you. That’s some more

of my badness, I suppose! Love has its own dark morality when rivalry

enters in—at least, mine has, if other people’s hasn’t… I wonder how

she got on? I hope she reached the inn all right, poor woman.”

“Oh yes: she got on all right,” said Jude placidly.

“I hope she wasn’t shut out, and that she hadn’t to walk the streets in

the rain. Do you mind my putting on my waterproof and going to see if

she got in? I’ve been thinking of her all the morning.”

“Well—is it necessary? You haven’t the least idea how Arabella is able

to shift for herself. Still, darling, if you want to go and inquire you

can.”

There was no limit to the strange and unnecessary penances which Sue

would meekly undertake when in a contrite mood; and this going to see

all sorts of extraordinary persons whose relation to her was precisely

of a kind that would have made other people shun them was her instinct

ever, so that the request did not surprise him.

“And when you come back,” he added, “I’ll be ready to go about the

banns. You’ll come with me?”

Sue agreed, and went off under cloak and umbrella letting Jude kiss her

freely, and returning his kisses in a way she had never done before.

Times had decidedly changed. “The little bird is caught at last!” she

said, a sadness showing in her smile.

“No—only nested,” he assured her.

She walked along the muddy street till she reached the public house

mentioned by Arabella, which was not so very far off. She was informed

that Arabella had not yet left, and in doubt how to announce herself so

that her predecessor in Jude’s affections would recognize her, she sent

up word that a friend from Spring Street had called, naming the place

of Jude’s residence. She was asked to step upstairs, and on being shown

into a room found that it was Arabella’s bedroom, and that the latter

had not yet risen. She halted on the turn of her toe till Arabella

cried from the bed, “Come in and shut the door,” which Sue accordingly

did.

Arabella lay facing the window, and did not at once turn her head: and

Sue was wicked enough, despite her penitence, to wish for a moment that

Jude could behold her forerunner now, with the daylight full upon her.

She may have seemed handsome enough in profile under the lamps, but a

frowsiness was apparent this morning; and the sight of her own fresh

charms in the looking-glass made Sue’s manner bright, till she

reflected what a meanly sexual emotion this was in her, and hated

herself for it.

“I’ve just looked in to see if you got back comfortably last night,

that’s all,” she said gently. “I was afraid afterwards that you might

have met with any mishap?”

“Oh—how stupid this is! I thought my visitor was—your friend—your

husband—Mrs. Fawley, as I suppose you call yourself?” said Arabella,

flinging her head back upon the pillows with a disappointed toss, and

ceasing to retain the dimple she had just taken the trouble to produce.

“Indeed I don’t,” said Sue.

“Oh, I thought you might have, even if he’s not really yours. Decency

is decency, any hour of the twenty-four.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Sue stiffly. “He is mine, if you

come to that!”

“He wasn’t yesterday.”

Sue coloured roseate, and said, “How do you know?”

“From your manner when you talked to me at the door. Well, my dear,

you’ve been quick about it, and I expect my visit last night helped it

on—ha-ha! But I don’t want to get him away from you.”

Sue looked out at the rain, and at the dirty toilet-cover, and at the

detached tail of Arabella’s hair hanging on the looking-glass, just as

it had done in Jude’s time; and wished she had not come. In the pause

there was a knock at the door, and the chambermaid brought in a

telegram for “Mrs. Cartlett.”

Arabella opened it as she lay, and her ruffled look disappeared.

“I am much obliged to you for your anxiety about me,” she said blandly

when the maid had gone; “but it is not necessary you should feel it. My

man finds he can’t do without me after all, and agrees to stand by the

promise to marry again over here that he has made me all along. See

here! This is in answer to one from me.” She held out the telegram for

Sue to read, but Sue did not take it. “He asks me to come back. His

little corner public in Lambeth would go to pieces without me, he says.

But he isn’t going to knock me about when he has had a drop, any more

after we are spliced by English law than before! … As for you, I should

coax Jude to take me before the parson straight off, and have done with

it, if I were in your place. I say it as a friend, my dear.”

“He’s waiting to, any day,” returned Sue, with frigid pride.

“Then let him, in Heaven’s name. Life with a man is more businesslike

after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have

rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect

you, which you can’t otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a

knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from

you—I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there’s never any knowing

what a man med do—you’ll have the sticks o’ furniture, and won’t be

looked upon as a thief. I shall marry my man over again, now he’s

willing, as there was a little flaw in the first ceremony. In my

telegram last night which this is an answer to, I told him I had almost

made it up with Jude; and that frightened him, I expect! Perhaps I

should quite have done it if it hadn’t been for you,” she said

laughing; “and then how different our histories might have been from

to-day! Never such a tender fool as Jude is if a woman seems in

trouble, and coaxes him a bit! Just as he used to be about birds and

things. However, as it happens, it is just as well as if I had made it

up, and I forgive you. And, as I say, I’d advise you to get the

business legally done as soon as possible. You’ll find it an awful

bother later on if you don’t.”

“I have told you he is asking me to marry him—to make our natural

marriage a legal one,” said Sue, with yet more dignity. “It was quite

by my wish that he didn’t the moment I was free.”

“Ah, yes—you are a oneyer too, like myself,” said Arabella, eyeing her

visitor with humorous criticism. “Bolted from your first, didn’t you,

like me?”

“Good morning!—I must go,” said Sue hastily.

“And I, too, must up and off!” replied the other, springing out of bed

so suddenly that the soft parts of her person shook. Sue jumped aside

in trepidation. “Lord, I am only a woman—not a six-foot sojer! … Just a

moment, dear,” she continued, putting her hand on Sue’s arm. “I really

did want to consult Jude on a little matter of business, as I told him.

I came about that more than anything else. Would he run up to speak to

me at the station as I am going? You think not. Well, I’ll write to him

about it. I didn’t want to write it, but never mind—I will.”

III

When Sue reached home Jude was awaiting her at the door to take the

initial step towards their marriage. She clasped his arm, and they went

along silently together, as true comrades oft-times do. He saw that she

was preoccupied, and forbore to question her.

“Oh Jude—I’ve been talking to her,” she said at last. “I wish I hadn’t!

And yet it is best to be reminded of things.”

“I hope she was civil.”

“Yes. I—I can’t help liking her—just a little bit! She’s not an

ungenerous nature; and I am so glad her difficulties have all suddenly

ended.” She explained how Arabella had been summoned back, and would be

enabled to retrieve her position. “I was referring to our old question.

What Arabella has been saying to me has made me feel more than ever how

hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is—a sort of trap to

catch a man—I can’t bear to think of it. I wish I hadn’t promised to

let you put up the banns this morning!”

“Oh, don’t mind me. Any time will do for me. I thought you might like

to get it over quickly, now.”

“Indeed, I don’t feel any more anxious now than I did before. Perhaps

with any other man I might be a little anxious; but among the very few

virtues possessed by your family and mine, dear, I think I may set

staunchness. So I am not a bit frightened about losing you, now I

really am yours and you really are mine. In fact, I am easier in my

mind than I was, for my conscience is clear about Richard, who now has

a right to his freedom. I felt we were deceiving him before.”

“Sue, you seem when you are like this to be one of the women of some

grand old civilization, whom I used to read about in my bygone, wasted,

classical days, rather than a denizen of a mere Christian country. I

almost expect you to say at these times that you have just been talking

to some friend whom you met in the Via Sacra, about the latest news of

Octavia or Livia; or have been listening to Aspasia’s eloquence, or

have been watching Praxiteles chiselling away at his latest Venus,

while Phryne made complaint that she was tired of posing.”

They had now reached the house of the parish clerk. Sue stood back,

while her lover went up to the door. His hand was raised to knock when

she said: “Jude!”

He looked round.

“Wait a minute, would you mind?”

He came back to her.

“Just let us think,” she said timidly. “I had such a horrid dream one

night! … And Arabella—”

“What did Arabella say to you?” he asked.

“Oh, she said that when people were tied up you could get the law of a

man better if he beat you—and how when couples quarrelled… Jude, do you

think that when you must have me with you by law, we shall be so happy

as we are now? The men and women of our family are very generous when

everything depends upon their goodwill, but they always kick against

compulsion. Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of

legal obligation? Don’t you think it is destructive to a passion whose

essence is its gratuitousness?”

“Upon my word, love, you are beginning to frighten me, too, with all

this foreboding! Well, let’s go back and think it over.”

Her face brightened. “Yes—so we will!” said she. And they turned from

the clerk’s door, Sue taking his arm and murmuring as they walked on

homeward:

Can you keep the bee from ranging,

Or the ring-dove’s neck from changing?

No! Nor fetter’d love…

They thought it over, or postponed thinking. Certainly they postponed

action, and seemed to live on in a dreamy paradise. At the end of a

fortnight or three weeks matters remained unadvanced, and no banns were

announced to the ears of any Aldbrickham congregation.

Whilst they were postponing and postponing thus a letter and a

newspaper arrived before breakfast one morning from Arabella. Seeing

the handwriting Jude went up to Sue’s room and told her, and as soon as

she was dressed she hastened down. Sue opened the newspaper; Jude the

letter. After glancing at the paper she held across the first page to

him with her finger on a paragraph; but he was so absorbed in his

letter that he did not turn awhile.

“Look!” said she.

He looked and read. The paper was one that circulated in South London

only, and the marked advertisement was simply the announcement of a

marriage at St. John’s Church, Waterloo Road, under the names,

“CARTLETT——DONN”; the united pair being Arabella and the inn-keeper.

“Well, it is satisfactory,” said Sue complacently. “Though, after this,

it seems rather low to do likewise, and I am glad. However, she is

provided for now in a way, I suppose, whatever her faults, poor thing.

It is nicer that we are able to think that, than to be uneasy about

her. I ought, too, to write to Richard and ask him how he is getting

on, perhaps?”

But Jude’s attention was still absorbed. Having merely glanced at the

announcement he said in a disturbed voice: “Listen to this letter. What

shall I say or do?”

THE THREE HORNS, LAMBETH.

DEAR JUDE (I won’t be so distant as to call you Mr. Fawley),—I send

to-day a newspaper, from which useful document you will learn that I

was married over again to Cartlett last Tuesday. So that business is

settled right and tight at last. But what I write about more particular

is that private affair I wanted to speak to you on when I came down to

Aldbrickham. I couldn’t very well tell it to your lady friend, and

should much have liked to let you know it by word of mouth, as I could

have explained better than by letter. The fact is, Jude, that, though I

have never informed you before, there was a boy born of our marriage,

eight months after I left you, when I was at Sydney, living with my

father and mother. All that is easily provable. As I had separated from

you before I thought such a thing was going to happen, and I was over

there, and our quarrel had been sharp, I did not think it convenient to

write about the birth. I was then looking out for a good situation, so

my parents took the child, and he has been with them ever since. That

was why I did not mention it when I met you in Christminster, nor at

the law proceedings. He is now of an intelligent age, of course, and my

mother and father have lately written to say that, as they have rather

a hard struggle over there, and I am settled comfortably here, they

don’t see why they should be encumbered with the child any longer, his

parents being alive. I would have him with me here in a moment, but he

is not old enough to be of any use in the bar nor will be for years and

years, and naturally Cartlett might think him in the way. They have,

however, packed him off to me in charge of some friends who happened to

be coming home, and I must ask you to take him when he arrives, for I

don’t know what to do with him. He is lawfully yours, that I solemnly

swear. If anybody says he isn’t, call them brimstone liars, for my

sake. Whatever I may have done before or afterwards, I was honest to

you from the time we were married till I went away, and I remain,

yours, &c.,

ARABELLA CARTLETT.

Sue’s look was one of dismay. “What will you do, dear?” she asked

faintly.

Jude did not reply, and Sue watched him anxiously, with heavy breaths.

“It hits me hard!” said he in an under-voice. “It _may_ be true! I

can’t make it out. Certainly, if his birth was exactly when she says,

he’s mine. I cannot think why she didn’t tell me when I met her at

Christminster, and came on here that evening with her! … Ah—I do

remember now that she said something about having a thing on her mind

that she would like me to know, if ever we lived together again.”

“The poor child seems to be wanted by nobody!” Sue replied, and her

eyes filled.

Jude had by this time come to himself. “What a view of life he must

have, mine or not mine!” he said. “I must say that, if I were better

off, I should not stop for a moment to think whose he might be. I would

take him and bring him up. The beggarly question of parentage—what is

it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it,

whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our

time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and

entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for

their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like

class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a

mean exclusiveness at bottom.”

Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion. “Yes—so it is,

dearest! And we’ll have him here! And if he isn’t yours it makes it all

the better. I do hope he isn’t—though perhaps I ought not to feel quite

that! If he isn’t, I should like so much for us to have him as an

adopted child!”

“Well, you must assume about him what is most pleasing to you, my

curious little comrade!” he said. “I feel that, anyhow, I don’t like to

leave the unfortunate little fellow to neglect. Just think of his life

in a Lambeth pothouse, and all its evil influences, with a parent who

doesn’t want him, and has, indeed, hardly seen him, and a stepfather

who doesn’t know him. ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the

night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived!’ That’s

what the boy—_my_ boy, perhaps, will find himself saying before long!”

“Oh no!”

“As I was the petitioner, I am really entitled to his custody, I

suppose.”

“Whether or no, we must have him. I see that. I’ll do the best I can to

be a mother to him, and we can afford to keep him somehow. I’ll work

harder. I wonder when he’ll arrive?”

“In the course of a few weeks, I suppose.”

“I wish—When shall we have courage to marry, Jude?”

“Whenever you have it, I think I shall. It remains with you entirely,

dear. Only say the word, and it’s done.”

“Before the boy comes?”

“Certainly.”

“It would make a more natural home for him, perhaps,” she murmured.

Jude thereupon wrote in purely formal terms to request that the boy

should be sent on to them as soon as he arrived, making no remark

whatever on the surprising nature of Arabella’s information, nor

vouchsafing a single word of opinion on the boy’s paternity, nor on

whether, had he known all this, his conduct towards her would have been

quite the same.

In the down train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham station about ten

o’clock the next evening, a small, pale child’s face could be seen in

the gloom of a third-class carriage. He had large, frightened eyes, and

wore a white woollen cravat, over which a key was suspended round his

neck by a piece of common string: the key attracting attention by its

occasional shine in the lamplight. In the band of his hat his

half-ticket was stuck. His eyes remained mostly fixed on the back of

the seat opposite, and never turned to the window even when a station

was reached and called. On the other seat were two or three passengers,

one of them a working woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was

a tabby kitten. The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the

kitten would put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these

the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key

and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed

mutely to say: “All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked

at, there is no laughable thing under the sun.”

Occasionally, at a stoppage, the guard would look into the compartment

and say to the boy, “All right, my man. Your box is safe in the van.”

The boy would say, “Yes,” without animation, would try to smile, and

fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his

real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of

night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life,

when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and

appeared not to care about what it saw.

When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did one by

one—even the kitten curling itself up in the basket, weary of its too

circumscribed play—the boy remained just as before. He then seemed to

be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed divinity, sitting passive

and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole rounded lives

rather than their immediate figures.

This was Arabella’s boy. With her usual carelessness, she had postponed

writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing, when she could

absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known for weeks of his

approaching arrival, and had, as she truly said, visited Aldbrickham

mainly to reveal the boy’s existence and his near home-coming to Jude.

This very day on which she had received her former husband’s answer at

some time in the afternoon, the child reached the London Docks, and the

family in whose charge he had come, having put him into a cab for

Lambeth and directed the cabman to his mother’s house, bade him

good-bye, and went their way.

On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him over with an

expression that was as good as saying, “You are very much what I

expected you to be,” had given him a good meal, a little money, and,

late as it was getting, dispatched him to Jude by the next train,

wishing her husband Cartlett, who was out, not to see him.

The train reached Aldbrickham, and the boy was deposited on the lonely

platform beside his box. The collector took his ticket, and, with a

meditative sense of the unfitness of things, asked him where he was

going by himself at that time of night.

“Going to Spring Street,” said the little one impassively.

“Why, that’s a long way from here; a’most out in the country; and the

folks will be gone to bed.”

“I’ve got to go there.”

“You must have a fly for your box.”

“No. I must walk.”

“Oh well: you’d better leave your box here and send for it. There’s a

‘bus goes half-way, but you’ll have to walk the rest.”

“I am not afraid.”

“Why didn’t your friends come to meet ’ee?”

“I suppose they didn’t know I was coming.”

“Who is your friends?”

“Mother didn’t wish me to say.”

“All I can do, then, is to take charge of this. Now walk as fast as you

can.”

Saying nothing further the boy came out into the street, looking round

to see that nobody followed or observed him. When he had walked some

little distance he asked for the street of his destination. He was told

to go straight on quite into the outskirts of the place.

The child fell into a steady mechanical creep which had in it an

impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or of

the cloud. He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring

gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy’s ideas of life

were different from those of the local boys. Children begin with

detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous,

and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun

with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the

particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond,

were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows;

but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark

world.

He found the way to the little lane, and knocked at the door of Jude’s

house. Jude had just retired to bed, and Sue was about to enter her

chamber adjoining when she heard the knock and came down.

“Is this where Father lives?” asked the child.

“Who?”

“Mr. Fawley, that’s his name.”

Sue ran up to Jude’s room and told him, and he hurried down as soon as

he could, though to her impatience he seemed long.

“What—is it he—so soon?” she asked as Jude came.

She scrutinized the child’s features, and suddenly went away into the

little sitting-room adjoining. Jude lifted the boy to a level with

himself, keenly regarded him with gloomy tenderness, and telling him he

would have been met if they had known of his coming so soon, set him

provisionally in a chair whilst he went to look for Sue, whose

supersensitiveness was disturbed, as he knew. He found her in the dark,

bending over an arm-chair. He enclosed her with his arm, and putting

his face by hers, whispered, “What’s the matter?”

“What Arabella says is true—true! I see you in him!”

“Well: that’s one thing in my life as it should be, at any rate.”

“But the other half of him is—_she_! And that’s what I can’t bear! But

I ought to—I’ll try to get used to it; yes, I ought!”

“Jealous little Sue! I withdraw all remarks about your sexlessness.

Never mind! Time may right things… And Sue, darling; I have an idea!

We’ll educate and train him with a view to the university. What I

couldn’t accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out through

him? They are making it easier for poor students now, you know.”

“Oh you dreamer!” said she, and holding his hand returned to the child

with him. The boy looked at her as she had looked at him. “Is it you

who’s my _real_ mother at last?” he inquired.

“Why? Do I look like your father’s wife?”

“Well, yes; ’cept he seems fond of you, and you of him. Can I call you

Mother?”

Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue

thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp

which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to

vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.

“You may call me Mother, if you wish to, my poor dear!” she said,

bending her cheek against his to hide her tears.

“What’s this round your neck?” asked Jude with affected calmness.

“The key of my box that’s at the station.”

They bustled about and got him some supper, and made him up a temporary

bed, where he soon fell asleep. Both went and looked at him as he lay.

“He called you Mother two or three times before he dropped off,”

murmured Jude. “Wasn’t it odd that he should have wanted to!”

“Well—it was significant,” said Sue. “There’s more for us to think

about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky…

I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that ceremony over?

It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel myself getting

intertwined with my kind. Oh Jude, you’ll love me dearly, won’t you,

afterwards? I do want to be kind to this child, and to be a mother to

him; and our adding the legal form to our marriage might make it easier

for me.”

IV

Their next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,

though it was begun on the morning following the singular child’s

arrival at their home.

Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and

weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in the

substantial world.

“His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene,” said Sue. “What is

your name, dear? Did you tell us?”

“Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nickname;

because I look so aged, they say.”

“And you talk so, too,” said Sue tenderly. “It is strange, Jude, that

these preternaturally old boys almost always come from new countries.

But what were you christened?”

“I never was.”

“Why was that?”

“Because, if I died in damnation, ’twould save the expense of a

Christian funeral.”

“Oh—your name is not Jude, then?” said his father with some

disappointment.

The boy shook his head. “Never heerd on it.”

“Of course not,” said Sue quickly; “since she was hating you all the

time!”

“We’ll have him christened,” said Jude; and privately to Sue: “The day

we are married.” Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.

Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that a

marriage at a superintendent registrar’s office was more private than

an ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time. Both

Sue and Jude together went to the office of the district to give

notice: they had become such companions that they could hardly do

anything of importance except in each other’s company.

Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his shoulder

and watching his hand as it traced the words. As she read the

four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which her own

and Jude’s names were inserted, and by which that very volatile

essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be made permanent,

her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. “Names and Surnames of

the Parties”—(they were to be parties now, not lovers, she thought).

“Condition”—(a horrid idea)—“Rank or Occupation”—“Age”—“Dwelling

at”—“Length of Residence”—“Church or Building in which the Marriage is

to be solemnized”—“District and County in which the Parties

respectively dwell.”

“It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it!” she said on their way home. “It

seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the

contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church. But we’ll

try to get through with it, dearest, now.”

“We will. ‘For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath not

taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the

battle, and another man take her.’ So said the Jewish law-giver.”

“How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to have been a

parson. I can only quote profane writers!”

During the interval before the issuing of the certificate, Sue, in her

housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the office, and furtively

glancing in saw affixed to the wall the notice of the purposed clinch

to their union. She could not bear its aspect. Coming after her

previous experience of matrimony, all the romance of their attachment

seemed to be starved away by placing her present case in the same

category. She was usually leading little Father Time by the hand, and

fancied that people thought him hers, and regarded the intended

ceremony as the patching up of an old error.

Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in some slight

degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining on earth

who was associated with his early life at Marygreen—the aged widow Mrs.

Edlin, who had been his great-aunt’s friend and nurse in her last

illness. He hardly expected that she would come; but she did, bringing

singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brass snuffers, an

ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enormous bag of goose

feathers towards a bed. She was allotted the spare room in Jude’s

house, whither she retired early, and where they could hear her through

the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord’s Prayer in a loud voice,

as the Rubric directed.

As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and Jude were

still sitting up—it being in fact only ten o’clock—she dressed herself

again and came down, and they all sat by the fire till a late

hour—Father Time included; though, as he never spoke, they were hardly

conscious of him.

“Well, I bain’t set against marrying as your great-aunt was,” said the

widow. “And I hope ’twill be a jocund wedding for ye in all respects

this time. Nobody can hope it more, knowing what I do of your families,

which is more, I suppose, than anybody else now living. For they have

been unlucky that way, God knows.”

Sue breathed uneasily.

“They was always good-hearted people, too—wouldn’t kill a fly if they

knowed it,” continued the wedding guest. “But things happened to thwart

’em, and if everything wasn’t vitty they were upset. No doubt that’s

how he that the tale is told of came to do what ’a did—if he _were_ one

of your family.”

“What was that?” said Jude.

“Well—that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted just on the brow of the

hill by the Brown House—not far from the milestone between Marygreen

and Alfredston, where the other road branches off. But Lord, ’twas in

my grandfather’s time; and it medn’ have been one of your folk at all.”

“I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well,” murmured

Jude. “But I never heard of this. What—did this man—my ancestor and

Sue’s—kill his wife?”

“’Twer not that exactly. She ran away from him, with their child, to

her friends; and while she was there the child died. He wanted the

body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn’t give it up. Her

husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke into the house to

steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and being obstinate,

wouldn’t tell what he broke in for. They brought it in burglary, and

that’s why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill. His wife

went mad after he was dead. But it medn’t be true that he belonged to

ye more than to me.”

A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out of

the earth: “If I was you, Mother, I wouldn’t marry Father!” It came

from little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him.

“Oh, it is only a tale,” said Sue cheeringly.

After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve of the

solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest good-night, retired.

The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified with the hours,

took Jude privately into the sitting-room before starting. “Jude, I

want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally,” she said, tremulously

nestling up to him, with damp lashes. “It won’t be ever like this any

more, will it? I wish we hadn’t begun the business. But I suppose we

must go on. How horrid that story was last night! It spoilt my thoughts

of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as

it did the house of Atreus.”

“Or the house of Jeroboam,” said the quondam theologian.

“Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying! I am going

to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you

to me in the same as you used to your other wife; regardless of the

deterrent lesson we were taught by those experiments!”

“If you are uneasy I am made unhappy,” said he. “I had hoped you would

feel quite joyful. But if you don’t, you don’t. It is no use

pretending. It is a dismal business to you, and that makes it so to

me!”

“It is unpleasantly like that other morning—that’s all,” she murmured.

“Let us go on now.”

They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no witness

accompanying them except the Widow Edlin. The day was chilly and dull,

and a clammy fog blew through the town from “Royal-tower’d Thame.” On

the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marks of people who

had entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas. Within the office

several persons were gathered, and our couple perceived that a marriage

between a soldier and a young woman was just in progress. Sue, Jude,

and the widow stood in the background while this was going on, Sue

reading the notices of marriage on the wall. The room was a dreary

place to two of their temperament, though to its usual frequenters it

doubtless seemed ordinary enough. Law-books in musty calf covered one

wall, and elsewhere were post-office directories, and other books of

reference. Papers in packets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed

around, and some iron safes filled a recess, while the bare wood floor

was, like the door-step, stained by previous visitors.

The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and timid; she was

soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye. Their

little business was soon done, and the twain and their friends

straggled out, one of the witnesses saying casually to Jude and Sue in

passing, as if he had known them before: “See the couple just come in?

Ha, ha! That fellow is just out of gaol this morning. She met him at

the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She’s paying for

everything.”

Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely cropped, with

a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquor and the

satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire. They jocosely

saluted the outgoing couple, and went forward in front of Jude and Sue,

whose diffidence was increasing. The latter drew back and turned to her

lover, her mouth shaping itself like that of a child about to give way

to grief:

“Jude—I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The place gives me

the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love! I wish it

had been at church, if it had to be at all. It is not so vulgar there!”

“Dear little girl,” said Jude. “How troubled and pale you look!”

“It must be performed here now, I suppose?”

“No—perhaps not necessarily.”

He spoke to the clerk, and came back. “No—we need not marry here or

anywhere, unless we like, even now,” he said. “We can be married in a

church, if not with the same certificate with another he’ll give us, I

think. Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear, and I too, and

talk it over.”

They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed a

misdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the widow,

who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them; that they

would call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary. When in

the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley where they

walked up and down as they had done long ago in the market-house at

Melchester.

“Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of it, it strikes

me. Still, _anything_ that pleases you will please me.”

“But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there,

didn’t you?”

“Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn’t care

much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did you—it

was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this morning as to

whether we ought.”

They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began

anew: “It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much

better than to act rashly a second time… How terrible that scene was to

me! The expression in that flabby woman’s face, leading her on to give

herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a

lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a nominal

shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading

herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her—a man

whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of salvation… This is our

parish church, isn’t it? This is where it would have to be, if we did

it in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going on.”

Jude went up and looked in at the door. “Why—it is a wedding here too,”

he said. “Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.”

Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there was

always a crowd of marriages. “Let us listen,” she said, “and find how

it feels to us when performed in a church.”

They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings

at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to the

well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary

prettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in the

bride’s hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical

murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all

under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude listened,

and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same form

of self-committal.

“It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it

over again with my present knowledge,” Sue whispered. “You see, they

are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course. But

having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at least as

I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings perhaps

sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and undertake the

same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and seeing this has

frightened me from a church wedding as much as the other did from a

registry one… We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may

feel confident in I feel doubts of—my being proof against the sordid

conditions of a business contract again!”

Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the

object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were both

too thin-skinned—that they ought never to have been born—much less have

come together for the most preposterous of all joint ventures for

_them_—matrimony.

His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed felt that

they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that life-undertaking

again? “It is awful if you think we have found ourselves not strong

enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing to perjure ourselves,”

she said.

“I fancy I do think it—since you ask me,” said Jude. “Remember I’ll do

it if you wish, own darling.” While she hesitated he went on to confess

that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked

by the dread of incompetency just as she did—from their peculiarities,

perhaps, because they were unlike other people. “We are horribly

sensitive; that’s really what’s the matter with us, Sue!” he declared.

“I fancy more are like us than we think!”

“Well, I don’t know. The intention of the contract is good, and right

for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends because

we are the queer sort of people we are—folk in whom domestic ties of a

forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness.”

Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:

that all were so. “Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a

little beforehand, that’s all. In fifty, a hundred, years the

descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will see

weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as

Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,

and will be afraid to reproduce them.”

“What a terrible line of poetry! … though I have felt it myself about

my fellow-creatures, at morbid times.”

Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:

“Well—the general question is not our business, and why should we

plague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are, we come

to the same conclusion: that for us particular two, an irrevocable oath

is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream! Yes?

How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!”

“They accord very much with my own.”

He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of

everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession

entering the vestry; and then they came outside the building. By the

door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for a

while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open

daylight. Sue sighed.

“The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland which

decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!”

“Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That’s what

some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the

conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a

woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is

only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him.”

“Yes—some are like that, instead of uniting with the man against the

common enemy, coercion.” The bride and bridegroom had by this time

driven off, and the two moved away with the rest of the idlers.

“No—don’t let’s do it,” she continued. “At least, just now.”

They reached home, and passing the window arm in arm saw the widow

looking out at them. “Well,” cried their guest when they entered, “I

said to myself when I zeed ye coming so loving up to the door, ‘They

made up their minds at last, then!’”

They briefly hinted that they had not.

“What—and ha’n’t ye really done it? Chok’ it all, that I should have

lived to see a good old saying like ‘marry in haste and repent at

leisure’ spoiled like this by you two! ’Tis time I got back again to

Marygreen—sakes if tidden—if this is what the new notions be leading us

to! Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much

else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor man

were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!”

“Don’t tell the child when he comes in,” whispered Sue nervously.

“He’ll think it has all gone on right, and it will be better that he

should not be surprised and puzzled. Of course it is only put off for

reconsideration. If we are happy as we are, what does it matter to

anybody?”

V

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to

express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. That

the twain were happy—between their times of sadness—was indubitable.

And when the unexpected apparition of Jude’s child in the house had

shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it had looked, but one

that brought into their lives a new and tender interest of an ennobling

and unselfish kind, it rather helped than injured their happiness.

To be sure, with such pleasing anxious beings as they were, the boy’s

coming also brought with it much thought for the future, particularly

as he seemed at present to be singularly deficient in all the usual

hopes of childhood. But the pair tried to dismiss, for a while at

least, a too strenuously forward view.

There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand souls; the

town may be called Stoke-Barehills. It stands with its gaunt,

unattractive, ancient church, and its new red brick suburb, amid the

open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary triangle

which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham and

Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot. The

great western highway from London passes through it, near a point where

the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty miles

further westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there used to

arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days, endless questions

of choice between the respective ways. But the question is now as dead

as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner, and the mail

coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single inhabitant of

Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads which part in his

town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and down the great

western highway daily.

The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,

standing among some picturesque mediæval ruins beside the railway; the

modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs having a look of

intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient

walls.

On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now been

reached by this narrative—the month being early June—the features of

the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive by the

trains; some down-trains, in especial, nearly emptying themselves here.

It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose vast

encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town like the tents

of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts, booths, pavilions,

arcades, porticoes—every kind of structure short of a permanent

one—cover the green field for the space of a square half-mile, and the

crowds of arrivals walk through the town in a mass, and make straight

for the exhibition ground. The way thereto is lined with shows, stalls,

and hawkers on foot, who make a market-place of the whole roadway to

the show proper, and lead some of the improvident to lighten their

pockets appreciably before they reach the gates of the exhibition they

came expressly to see.

It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast arriving

excursion trains two from different directions enter the two contiguous

railway stations at almost the same minute. One, like several which

have preceded it, comes from London: the other by a cross-line from

Aldbrickham; and from the London train alights a couple; a short,

rather bloated man, with a globular stomach and small legs, resembling

a top on two pegs, accompanied by a woman of rather fine figure and

rather red face, dressed in black material, and covered with beads from

bonnet to skirt, that made her glisten as if clad in chain-mail.

They cast their eyes around. The man was about to hire a fly as some

others had done, when the woman said, “Don’t be in such a hurry,

Cartlett. It isn’t so very far to the show-yard. Let us walk down the

street into the place. Perhaps I can pick up a cheap bit of furniture

or old china. It is years since I was here—never since I lived as a

girl at Aldbrickham, and used to come across for a trip sometimes with

my young man.”

“You can’t carry home furniture by excursion train,” said, in a thick

voice, her husband, the landlord of The Three Horns, Lambeth; for they

had both come down from the tavern in that “excellent, densely

populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood,” which they had occupied ever

since the advertisement in those words had attracted them thither. The

configuration of the landlord showed that he, too, like his customers,

was becoming affected by the liquors he retailed.

“Then I’ll get it sent, if I see any worth having,” said his wife.

They sauntered on, but had barely entered the town when her attention

was attracted by a young couple leading a child, who had come out from

the second platform, into which the train from Aldbrickham had steamed.

They were walking just in front of the inn-keepers.

“Sakes alive!” said Arabella.

“What’s that?” said Cartlett.

“Who do you think that couple is? Don’t you recognize the man?”

“No.”

“Not from the photos I have showed you?”

“Is it Fawley?”

“Yes—of course.”

“Oh, well. I suppose he was inclined for a little sight-seeing like the

rest of us.” Cartlett’s interest in Jude whatever it might have been

when Arabella was new to him, had plainly flagged since her charms and

her idiosyncrasies, her supernumerary hair-coils, and her optional

dimples, were becoming as a tale that is told.

Arabella so regulated her pace and her husband’s as to keep just in the

rear of the other three, which it was easy to do without notice in such

a stream of pedestrians. Her answers to Cartlett’s remarks were vague

and slight, for the group in front interested her more than all the

rest of the spectacle.

“They are rather fond of one another and of their child, seemingly,”

continued the publican.

“_Their_ child! ’Tisn’t their child,” said Arabella with a curious,

sudden covetousness. “They haven’t been married long enough for it to

be theirs!”

But although the smouldering maternal instinct was strong enough in her

to lead her to quash her husband’s conjecture, she was not disposed on

second thoughts to be more candid than necessary. Mr. Cartlett had no

other idea than that his wife’s child by her first husband was with his

grandparents at the Antipodes.

“Oh I suppose not. She looks quite a girl.”

“They are only lovers, or lately married, and have the child in charge,

as anybody can see.”

All continued to move ahead. The unwitting Sue and Jude, the couple in

question, had determined to make this agricultural exhibition within

twenty miles of their own town the occasion of a day’s excursion which

should combine exercise and amusement with instruction, at small

expense. Not regardful of themselves alone, they had taken care to

bring Father Time, to try every means of making him kindle and laugh

like other boys, though he was to some extent a hindrance to the

delightfully unreserved intercourse in their pilgrimages which they so

much enjoyed. But they soon ceased to consider him an observer, and

went along with that tender attention to each other which the shyest

can scarcely disguise, and which these, among entire strangers as they

imagined, took less trouble to disguise than they might have done at

home. Sue, in her new summer clothes, flexible and light as a bird, her

little thumb stuck up by the stem of her white cotton sunshade, went

along as if she hardly touched ground, and as if a moderately strong

puff of wind would float her over the hedge into the next field. Jude,

in his light grey holiday-suit, was really proud of her companionship,

not more for her external attractiveness than for her sympathetic words

and ways. That complete mutual understanding, in which every glance and

movement was as effectual as speech for conveying intelligence between

them, made them almost the two parts of a single whole.

The pair with their charge passed through the turnstiles, Arabella and

her husband not far behind them. When inside the enclosure the

publican’s wife could see that the two ahead began to take trouble with

the youngster, pointing out and explaining the many objects of

interest, alive and dead; and a passing sadness would touch their faces

at their every failure to disturb his indifference.

“How she sticks to him!” said Arabella. “Oh no—I fancy they are not

married, or they wouldn’t be so much to one another as that… I wonder!”

“But I thought you said he did marry her?”

“I heard he was going to—that’s all, going to make another attempt,

after putting it off once or twice… As far as they themselves are

concerned they are the only two in the show. I should be ashamed of

making myself so silly if I were he!”

“I don’t see as how there’s anything remarkable in their behaviour. I

should never have noticed their being in love, if you hadn’t said so.”

“You never see anything,” she rejoined. Nevertheless Cartlett’s view of

the lovers’ or married pair’s conduct was undoubtedly that of the

general crowd, whose attention seemed to be in no way attracted by what

Arabella’s sharpened vision discerned.

“He’s charmed by her as if she were some fairy!” continued Arabella.

“See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am

inclined to think that she don’t care for him quite so much as he does

for her. She’s not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking,

though she cares for him pretty middling much—as much as she’s able to;

and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try—which he’s

too simple to do. There—now they are going across to the cart-horse

sheds. Come along.”

“I don’t want to see the cart-horses. It is no business of ours to

follow these two. If we have come to see the show let us see it in our

own way, as they do in theirs.”

“Well—suppose we agree to meet somewhere in an hour’s time—say at that

refreshment tent over there, and go about independent? Then you can

look at what you choose to, and so can I.”

Cartlett was not loath to agree to this, and they parted—he proceeding

to the shed where malting processes were being exhibited, and Arabella

in the direction taken by Jude and Sue. Before, however, she had

regained their wake a laughing face met her own, and she was confronted

by Anny, the friend of her girlhood.

Anny had burst out in hearty laughter at the mere fact of the chance

encounter. “I am still living down there,” she said, as soon as she was

composed. “I am soon going to be married, but my intended couldn’t come

up here to-day. But there’s lots of us come by excursion, though I’ve

lost the rest of ’em for the present.”

“Have you met Jude and his young woman, or wife, or whatever she is? I

saw ’em by now.”

“No. Not a glimpse of un for years!”

“Well, they are close by here somewhere. Yes—there they are—by that

grey horse!”

“Oh, that’s his present young woman—wife did you say? Has he married

again?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she!”

“Yes—nothing to complain of; or jump at. Not much to depend on, though;

a slim, fidgety little thing like that.”

“He’s a nice-looking chap, too! You ought to ha’ stuck to un,

Arabella.”

“I don’t know but I ought,” murmured she.

Anny laughed. “That’s you, Arabella! Always wanting another man than

your own.”

“Well, and what woman don’t I should like to know? As for that body

with him—she don’t know what love is—at least what I call love! I can

see in her face she don’t.”

“And perhaps, Abby dear, you don’t know what she calls love.”

“I’m sure I don’t wish to! … Ah—they are making for the art department.

I should like to see some pictures myself. Suppose we go that way?—

Why, if all Wessex isn’t here, I verily believe! There’s Dr. Vilbert.

Haven’t seen him for years, and he’s not looking a day older than when

I used to know him. How do you do, Physician? I was just saying that

you don’t look a day older than when you knew me as a girl.”

“Simply the result of taking my own pills regular, ma’am. Only two and

threepence a box—warranted efficacious by the Government stamp. Now let

me advise you to purchase the same immunity from the ravages of time by

following my example? Only two-and-three.”

The physician had produced a box from his waistcoat pocket, and

Arabella was induced to make the purchase.

“At the same time,” continued he, when the pills were paid for, “you

have the advantage of me, Mrs.— Surely not Mrs. Fawley, once Miss Donn,

of the vicinity of Marygreen?”

“Yes. But Mrs. Cartlett now.”

“Ah—you lost him, then? Promising young fellow! A pupil of mine, you

know. I taught him the dead languages. And believe me, he soon knew

nearly as much as I.”

“I lost him; but not as you think,” said Arabella dryly. “The lawyers

untied us. There he is, look, alive and lusty; along with that young

woman, entering the art exhibition.”

“Ah—dear me! Fond of her, apparently.”

“They _say_ they are cousins.”

“Cousinship is a great convenience to their feelings, I should say?”

“Yes. So her husband thought, no doubt, when he divorced her… Shall we

look at the pictures, too?”

The trio followed across the green and entered. Jude and Sue, with the

child, unaware of the interest they were exciting, had gone up to a

model at one end of the building, which they regarded with considerable

attention for a long while before they went on. Arabella and her

friends came to it in due course, and the inscription it bore was:

“Model of Cardinal College, Christminster; by J. Fawley and S. F. M.

Bridehead.”

“Admiring their own work,” said Arabella. “How like Jude—always

thinking of colleges and Christminster, instead of attending to his

business!”

They glanced cursorily at the pictures, and proceeded to the

band-stand. When they had stood a little while listening to the music

of the military performers, Jude, Sue, and the child came up on the

other side. Arabella did not care if they should recognize her; but

they were too deeply absorbed in their own lives, as translated into

emotion by the military band, to perceive her under her beaded veil.

She walked round the outside of the listening throng, passing behind

the lovers, whose movements had an unexpected fascination for her

to-day. Scrutinizing them narrowly from the rear she noticed that

Jude’s hand sought Sue’s as they stood, the two standing close together

so as to conceal, as they supposed, this tacit expression of their

mutual responsiveness.

“Silly fools—like two children!” Arabella whispered to herself

morosely, as she rejoined her companions, with whom she preserved a

preoccupied silence.

Anny meanwhile had jokingly remarked to Vilbert on Arabella’s hankering

interest in her first husband.

“Now,” said the physician to Arabella, apart; “do you want anything

such as this, Mrs. Cartlett? It is not compounded out of my regular

pharmacopœia, but I am sometimes asked for such a thing.” He produced a

small phial of clear liquid. “A love-philtre, such as was used by the

ancients with great effect. I found it out by study of their writings,

and have never known it to fail.”

“What is it made of?” asked Arabella curiously.

“Well—a distillation of the juices of doves’ hearts—otherwise

pigeons’—is one of the ingredients. It took nearly a hundred hearts to

produce that small bottle full.”

“How do you get pigeons enough?”

“To tell a secret, I get a piece of rock-salt, of which pigeons are

inordinately fond, and place it in a dovecot on my roof. In a few hours

the birds come to it from all points of the compass—east, west, north,

and south—and thus I secure as many as I require. You use the liquid by

contriving that the desired man shall take about ten drops of it in his

drink. But remember, all this is told you because I gather from your

questions that you mean to be a purchaser. You must keep faith with

me?”

“Very well—I don’t mind a bottle—to give some friend or other to try it

on her young man.” She produced five shillings, the price asked, and

slipped the phial in her capacious bosom. Saying presently that she was

due at an appointment with her husband, she sauntered away towards the

refreshment bar, Jude, his companion, and the child having gone on to

the horticultural tent, where Arabella caught a glimpse of them

standing before a group of roses in bloom.

She waited a few minutes observing them, and then proceeded to join her

spouse with no very amiable sentiments. She found him seated on a stool

by the bar, talking to one of the gaily dressed maids who had served

him with spirits.

“I should think you had enough of this business at home!” Arabella

remarked gloomily. “Surely you didn’t come fifty miles from your own

bar to stick in another? Come, take me round the show, as other men do

their wives! Dammy, one would think you were a young bachelor, with

nobody to look after but yourself!”

“But we agreed to meet here; and what could I do but wait?”

“Well, now we have met, come along,” she returned, ready to quarrel

with the sun for shining on her. And they left the tent together, this

pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the antipathetic, recriminatory

mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom.

In the meantime the more exceptional couple and the boy still lingered

in the pavilion of flowers—an enchanted palace to their appreciative

taste—Sue’s usually pale cheeks reflecting the pink of the tinted roses

at which she gazed; for the gay sights, the air, the music, and the

excitement of a day’s outing with Jude had quickened her blood and made

her eyes sparkle with vivacity. She adored roses, and what Arabella had

witnessed was Sue detaining Jude almost against his will while she

learnt the names of this variety and that, and put her face within an

inch of their blooms to smell them.

“I should like to push my face quite into them—the dears!” she had

said. “But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them—isn’t it,

Jude?”

“Yes, you baby,” said he: and then playfully gave her a little push, so

that her nose went among the petals.

“The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was my husband’s

fault!”

Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told so much to

Arabella.

“Happy?” he murmured.

She nodded.

“Why? Because you have come to the great Wessex Agricultural Show—or

because _we_ have come?”

“You are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of absurdities.

Because I am improving my mind, of course, by seeing all these

steam-ploughs, and threshing-machines, and chaff-cutters, and cows, and

pigs, and sheep.”

Jude was quite content with a baffle from his ever evasive companion.

But when he had forgotten that he had put the question, and because he

no longer wished for an answer, she went on: “I feel that we have

returned to Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness

and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-five centuries have taught

the race since their time, as one of your Christminster luminaries

says… There is one immediate shadow, however—only one.” And she looked

at the aged child, whom, though they had taken him to everything likely

to attract a young intelligence, they had utterly failed to interest.

He knew what they were saying and thinking. “I am very, very sorry,

Father and Mother,” he said. “But please don’t mind!—I can’t help it. I

should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking

they’d be all withered in a few days!”

VI