Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Part 8 out of 9

Another peal of bells had begun to sound out at some distance off.

"I don't know!" said the landlady tartly. "Did you knock to ask that?"

"No; for lodgings," said Jude, coming to himself.

The householder scrutinized Sue's figure a moment. "We haven't any to let,"
said she, shutting the door.

Jude looked discomfited, and the boy distressed. "Now, Jude,"
said Sue, "let me try. You don't know the way."

They found a second place hard by; but here the occupier,
observing not only Sue, but the boy and the small children,
said civilly, "I am sorry to say we don't let where there
are children"; and also closed the door.

The small child squared its mouth and cried silently,
with an instinct that trouble loomed. The boy sighed.
"I don't like Christminster!" he said. "Are the great old
houses gaols?"

"No; colleges," said Jude; "which perhaps you'll study in some day."

"I'd rather not!" the boy rejoined.

"Now we'll try again," said Sue. "I'll pull my cloak more round
me.... Leaving Kennetbridge for this place is like coming from
Caiaphas to Pilate! ... How do I look now, dear?"

"Nobody would notice it now," said Jude.

There was one other house, and they tried a third time.
The woman here was more amiable; but she had little room to spare,
and could only agree to take in Sue and the children if her husband
could go elsewhere. This arrangement they perforce adopted,
in the stress from delaying their search till so late.
They came to terms with her, though her price was rather
high for their pockets. But they could not afford to be
critical till Jude had time to get a more permanent abode;
and in this house Sue took possession of a back room on
the second floor with an inner closet-room for the children.
Jude stayed and had a cup of tea; and was pleased to find
that the window commanded the back of another of the colleges.
Kissing all four he went to get a few necessaries and look for
lodgings for himself.

When he was gone the landlady came up to talk a little with Sue,
and gather something of the circumstances of the family she had taken in.
Sue had not the art of prevarication, and, after admitting several
facts as to their late difficulties and wanderings, she was startled
by the landlady saying suddenly:

"Are you really a married woman?"

Sue hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that her husband
and herself had each been unhappy in their first marriages,
after which, terrified at the thought of a second irrevocable union,
and lest the conditions of the contract should kill their love,
yet wishing to be together, they had literally not found the courage
to repeat it, though they had attempted it two or three times.
Therefore, though in her own sense of the words she was a married woman,
in the landlady's sense she was not.

The housewife looked embarrassed, and went down-stairs.
Sue sat by the window in a reverie, watching the rain.
Her quiet was broken by the noise of someone entering the house,
and then the voices of a man and woman in conversation
in the passage below. The land-lady's husband had arrived,
and she was explaining to him the incoming of the lodgers during
his absence.

His voice rose in sudden anger. "Now who wants such a woman here? and
perhaps a confinement! ... Besides, didn't I say I wouldn't have children?
The hall and stairs fresh painted, to be kicked about by them!
You must have known all was not straight with 'em--coming like that.
Taking in a family when I said a single man."

The wife expostulated, but, as it seemed, the husband insisted on his point;
for presently a tap came to Sue's door, and the woman appeared.

"I am sorry to tell you, ma'am," she said, "that I can't let
you have the room for the week after all. My husband objects;
and therefore I must ask you to go. I don't mind your staying
over to-night, as it is getting late in the afternoon; but I
shall be glad if you can leave early in the morning."

Though she knew that she was entitled to the lodging for a week,
Sue did not wish to create a disturbance between the wife
and husband, and she said she would leave as requested.
When the landlady had gone Sue looked out of the window again.
Finding that the rain had ceased she proposed to the boy that,
after putting the little ones to bed, they should go out and
search about for another place, and bespeak it for the morrow,
so as not to be so hard-driven then as they had been
that day.

Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just
been sent on from the station by Jude, they sallied out into
the damp though not unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not
to disturb her husband with the news of her notice to quit
while he was perhaps worried in obtaining a lodging for himself.
In the company of the boy she wandered into this street and
into that; but though she tried a dozen different houses she
fared far worse alone than she had fared in Jude's company,
and could get nobody to promise her a room for the following day.
Every householder looked askance at such a woman and child
inquiring for accommodation in the gloom.

"I ought not to be born, ought I?" said the boy with misgiving.

Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where she
was not welcome, but where at least she had temporary shelter.
In her absence Jude had left his address; but knowing how weak
he still was she adhered to her determination not to disturb him
till the next day.

II

SUE sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house
being little more than an old intramural cottage, and then
she regarded the scene outside the uncurtained window.
At some distance opposite, the outer walls of Sarcophagus College--
silent, black, and windowless--threw their four centuries
of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she occupied,
shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by day.
The outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond
the other, and the tower of a third farther off still.
She thought of the strange operation of a simple-minded man's
ruling passion, that it should have led Jude, who loved
her and the children so tenderly, to place them here in this
depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his dream.
Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that
those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.

The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this
house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy--
a brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him.
The silence was broken by his saying: "Mother, WHAT shall we
do to-morrow!"

"I don't know!" said Sue despondently. "I am afraid this will trouble
your father."

"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him!
Then it wouldn't matter so much! Poor Father!"

"It wouldn't!"

"Can I do anything?"

"No! All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"

"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"

"Partly."

"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

"It would almost, dear."

"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't
get a good lodging?"

"Well--people do object to children sometimes."

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"

"Oh--because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed."

"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my
real mother, and you needn't have had me unless you liked.
I oughtn't to have come to 'ee--that's the real truth!
I troubled 'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I
hadn't been born!"

"You couldn't help it, my dear."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they
should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not
allowed to grow big and walk about!"

Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this
too reflective child.

She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted,
she would be honest and candid with one who entered into her
difficulties like an aged friend.

"There is going to be another in our family soon," she hesitatingly remarked.

"How?"

"There is going to be another baby."

"What!" The boy jumped up wildly. "Oh God, Mother, you've never a-sent
for another; and such trouble with what you've got!"

"Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!" murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.

The boy burst out weeping. "Oh you don't care, you don't care!"
he cried in bitter reproach. "How EVER could you, Mother, be so
wicked and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was
better off, and Father well! To bring us all into MORE trouble!
No room for us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned
out to-morrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soon! ...
'Tis done o' purpose!--'tis--'tis!" He walked up and down sobbing.

"Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!" she pleaded, her bosom heaving now as
much as the boy's. "I can't explain--I will when you are older. It does seem--
as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these difficulties!
I can't explain, dear! But it--is not quite on purpose--I can't help it!"

"Yes it is--it must be! For nobody would interfere with us,
like that, unless you agreed! I won't forgive you, ever, ever!
I'll never believe you care for me, or Father, or any of us
any more!"

He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room,
in which a bed had been spread on the floor. There she heard
him say: "If we children was gone there'd be no trouble
at all!"

"Don't think that, dear," she cried, rather peremptorily.
"But go to sleep!"

The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided to get
up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had informed
her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before he went out.
She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children, who, as she knew,
must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.

She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had
chosen as a counterpoise to the expense of her lodging:
and she explained to him her homelessness. He had been so anxious
about her all night, he said. Somehow, now it was morning,
the request to leave the lodgings did not seem such a depressing
incident as it had seemed the night before, nor did even her
failure to find another place affect her so deeply as at first.
Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth while to insist
upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate steps
for removal.

"You must all come to this inn for a day or two," he said.
"It is a rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children,
but we shall have more time to look round. There are plenty
of lodgings in the suburbs--in my old quarter of Beersheba.
Have breakfast with me now you are here, my bird. You are sure
you are well? There will be plenty of time to get back and
prepare the children's meal before they wake. In fact, I'll go
with you."

She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour
they started together, resolving to clear out from Sue's too
respectable lodging immediately. On reaching the place and going
upstairs she found that all was quiet in the children's room,
and called to the landlady in timorous tones to please
bring up the tea-kettle and something for their breakfast.
This was perfunctorily done, and producing a couple of eggs which
she had brought with her she put them into the boiling kettle,
and summoned Jude to watch them for the youngsters, while she
went to call them, it being now about half-past eight o'clock.

Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand,
timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner
chamber where the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him
to start round. He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet--
which had seemed to go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back--
was open, and that Sue had sunk to the floor just within it.
Hastening forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the little
bed spread on the boards; no children were there. He looked
in bewilderment round the room. At the back of the door were
fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms
of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord
round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off
the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner.
An overturned chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes
were slanted into the room; but those of the girl and the baby boy
were closed.

Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene
he let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw
the three children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies
in the momentary handling seemed to say that they were dead.
He caught up Sue, who was in fainting fits, and put her on
the bed in the other room, after which he breathlessly summoned
the landlady and ran out for a doctor.

When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless women,
bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them, and the triplet of
little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew his self-command. The nearest
surgeon came in, but, as Jude had inferred, his presence was superfluous.
The children were past saving, for though their bodies were still barely
cold it was conjectured that they had been hanging more than an hour.
The probability held by the parents later on, when they were able to reason
on the case, was that the elder boy, on waking, looked into the outer room
for Sue, and, finding her absent, was thrown into a fit of aggravated
despondency that the events and information of the evening before had
induced in his morbid temperament. Moreover a piece of paper was found upon
the floor, on which was written, in the boy's hand, with the bit of lead
pencil that he carried:

DONE BECAUSE WE ARE TOO MENNY.

At sight of this Sue's nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy,
throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abatement.
They carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower floor;
and there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her
eyes staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying to
soothe her.

They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above,
and she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept
from doing so by the assurance that, if there were any hope,
her presence might do harm, and the reminder that it was necessary
to take care of herself lest she should endanger a coming life.
Her inquiries were incessant, and at last Jude came down and told
her there was no hope. As soon as she could speak she informed him
what she had said to the boy, and how she thought herself the cause
of this.

"No," said Jude. "It was in his nature to do it.
The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us--
boys of a sort unknown in the last generation--the outcome
of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before
they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.
He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not
to live. He's an advanced man, the doctor: but he can give no
consolation to----"

Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down;
and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted
her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody was gone, she was allowed
to see the children.

The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation.
On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness
and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude,
and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last.
He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a
single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned,
for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes
of these he had died.

When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await
the coroner's inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into
the air of the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

"What is it?" said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

"The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose.
It's the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; 'Truly God is loving
unto Israel.'"

She sobbed again. "Oh, Oh my babies! They had done no harm!
Why should they have been taken away, and not I!"

There was another stillness--broken at last by two persons in conversation
somewhere without.

"They are talking about us, no doubt!" moaned Sue. "'We are made
a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!'"

Jude listened--"No--they are not talking of us," he said.
"They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about
the eastward position. Good God--the eastward position,
and all creation groaning!"

Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable fit
of grief. "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!'
First it said, 'You shan't learn!' Then it said, 'You shan't labour!'
Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"

He tried to soothe her by saying, "That's bitter of you, darling."

"But it's true!"

Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room.
The baby's frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a
chair at the time of his death, she would not now have removed,
though Jude would fain have got them out of her sight.
But whenever he touched them she implored him to let them lie,
and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the house when she also
attempted to put them away.

Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her paroxysms.
"Why don't you speak to me, Jude?" she cried out, after one of these.
"Don't turn away from me! I can't BEAR the loneliness of being out of
your looks!"

"There, dear; here I am," he said, putting his face close to hers.

"Yes.... Oh, my comrade, our perfect union--our two-in-oneness--
is now stained with blood!"

"Shadowed by death--that's all."

"Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn't know
I was doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk
to people of mature age. I said the world was against us,
that it was better to be out of life than in it at this price;
and he took it literally. And I told him I was going to have
another child. It upset him. Oh how bitterly he upbraided me!"

"Why did you do it, Sue?"

"I can't tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful.
I couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life.
And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him
too obscurely.--Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? And
not entirely wiser! Why didn't I tell him pleasant untruths,
instead of half-realities? It was my want of self-control, so that I
could neither conceal things nor reveal them!"

"Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases;
only in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps.
He must have known sooner or later."

"And I was just making my baby darling a new frock;
and now I shall never see him in it, and never talk to him
any more! ... My eyes are so swollen that I can scarcely see;
and yet little more than a year ago I called myself happy!
We went about loving each other too much--indulging ourselves
to utter selfishness with each other! We said--
do you remember?--that we would make a virtue of joy.
I said it was Nature's intention, Nature's law and RAISON D'ETRE
that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us--
instincts which civilization had taken upon itself to thwart.
What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has given us this
stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature at
her word!"

She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said,
"It is best, perhaps, that they should be gone.--Yes--I see it is!
Better that they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither
away miserably!"

"Yes," replied Jude. "Some say that the elders should rejoice
when their children die in infancy."

"But they don't know! ... Oh my babies, my babies, could you be alive now!
You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he wouldn't have done it.
It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was part of his incurably
sad nature, poor little fellow! But then the others--my OWN children
and yours!"

Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and shoes;
and her figure quivered like a string. "I am a pitiable creature,"
she said, "good neither for earth nor heaven any more! I am driven
out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?" She stared at Jude,
and tightly held his hand.

"Nothing can be done," he replied. "Things are as they are,
and will be brought to their destined issue."

She paused. "Yes! Who said that?" she asked heavily.

"It comes in the chorus of the AGAMEMNON. It has been in my mind
continually since this happened."

"My poor Jude--how you've missed everything!--you more than I,
for I did get you! To think you should know that by your
unassisted reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!"

After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held;
and next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral.
Accounts in the newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers,
who stood apparently counting the window-panes and the stones
of the walls. Doubt of the real relations of the couple added
zest to their curiosity. Sue had declared that she would
follow the two little ones to the grave, but at the last moment
she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out of
the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehicle,
and it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord,
who now had only Sue and her luggage remaining on his hands,
which he hoped to be also clear of later on in the day,
and so to have freed his house from the exasperating notoriety
it had acquired during the week through his wife's unlucky
admission of these strangers. In the afternoon he privately
consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that if
any objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred
there they would try to get its number changed.

When Jude had seen the two little boxes--one containing little Jude,
and the other the two smallest--deposited in the earth he hastened
back to Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not
disturb her just then. Feeling anxious, however, he went again
about four o'clock. The woman thought she was still lying down,
but returned to him to say that she was not in her bedroom after all.
Her hat and jacket, too, were missing: she had gone out.
Jude hurried off to the public house where he was sleeping.
She had not been there. Then bethinking himself of possibilities
he went along the road to the cemetery, which he entered,
and crossed to where the interments had recently taken place.
The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the tragedy
were all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands was attempting
to earth in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held
back by an expostulating woman who stood in the half-filled hole.
It was Sue, whose coloured clothing, which she had never thought
of changing for the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye
a deeper grief than the conventional garb of bereavement could
express.

"He's filling them in, and he shan't till I've seen my little ones again!"
she cried wildly when she saw Jude. "I want to see them once more. Oh Jude--
please Jude--I want to see them! I didn't know you would let them be taken
away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should see them once more before
they were screwed down; and then you didn't, but took them away! Oh Jude,
you are cruel to me too!"

"She's been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get to
the coffins," said the man with the spade. "She ought to be took home,
by the look o' her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly.
Can't dig 'em up again now, ma'am. Do ye go home with your husband,
and take it quiet, and thank God that there'll be another soon to swage
yer grief."

But Sue kept asking piteously: "Can't I see them once more--just once!
Can't I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It would not take long!
And I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey
you ever any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home
quietly afterwards, and not want to see them any more! Can't I?
Why can't I?"

Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow
that he almost felt he would try to get the man to accede.
But it could do no good, and might make her still worse;
and he saw that it was imperative to get her home at once.
So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put his arm round
her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and was induced
to leave the cemetery.

He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being
so imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked
along slowly, Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing.
They were to have gone to a new lodging that afternoon,
but Jude saw that it was not practicable, and in course of time
they entered the now hated house. Sue was at once got to bed,
and the doctor sent for.

Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the intelligence
was brought to him that a child had been prematurely born, and that it,
like the others, was a corpse.

III

SUE was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had again
obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings now,
in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of Ceremonies--
Saint Silas.

They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism
of things than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness.
Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days
when her intellect scintillated like a star, that the world
resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream;
it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence,
but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the first cause
worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively
like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions
there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development
of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those
conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity.
But affliction makes opposing forces loom anthropomorphous;
and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of Jude and herself
fleeing from a persecutor.

"We must conform!" she said mournfully. "All the ancient
wrath of the Power above us has been vented upon us.
His poor creatures, and we must submit. There is no choice.
We must. It is no use fighting against God!"

"It is only against man and senseless circumstance," said Jude.

"True!" she murmured. "What have I been thinking of!
I am getting as superstitious as a savage! ... But whoever
or whatever our foe may be, I am cowed into submission.
I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprise.
I am beaten, beaten! ... 'We are made a spectacle unto
the world, and to angels, and to men!' I am always saying
that now."

"I feel the same!"

"What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may only be
because our history and relations are not absolutely known.... Possibly,
if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they would turn you
out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!"

"I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think
that we ought to make it legal now--as soon as you are able to go out."

"You think we ought?"

"Certainly."

And Jude fell into thought. "I have seemed to myself lately,"
he said, "to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous--
the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it!
I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you,
whom I love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men!
I wonder if any other of them are the same purblind,
simple creatures as I? ... Yes, Sue--that's what I am.
I seduced you.... You were a distinct type--a refined creature,
intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn't leave
you alone!"

"No, no, Jude!" she said quickly. "Don't reproach yourself with being
what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I."

"I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson;
and without me perhaps you wouldn't have urged him to let
you go."

"I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not
having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our union.
We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity of our
first marriages."

"Solemnity?" Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew conscious
that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.

"Yes," she said, with a little quiver in her words, "I have had
dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action.
I have thought--that I am still his wife!"

"Whose?"

"Richard's."

"Good God, dearest!--why?"

"Oh I can't explain! Only the thought comes to me."

"It is your weakness--a sick fancy, without reason or meaning!
Don't let it trouble you."

Sue sighed uneasily.

As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come
an improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in
their experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite
unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost directly
he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution;
and outwardly his days went on with that monotonous uniformity
which is in itself so grateful after vicissitude. People seemed
to have forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies:
and he daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could
never enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned
windows he would never look from, as if he had known no wish to
do otherwise.

There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service
at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue
and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy:
events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas,
had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in
the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over
conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he did
not now.

On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late.
She was not at home, but she soon returned, when he found her
silent and meditative.

"What are you thinking of, little woman?" he asked curiously.

"Oh I can't tell clearly! I have thought that we have been selfish,
careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been
a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road.
We should mortify the flesh--the terrible flesh--the curse of Adam!"

"Sue!" he murmured. "What has come over you?"

"We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty!
But I have always striven to do what has pleased me. I well deserved
the scourging I have got! I wish something would take the evil right
out of me, and all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!"

"Sue--my own too suffering dear!--there's no evil woman in you.
Your natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite
so impassioned, perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and dear, and pure.
And as I have often said, you are absolutely the most ethereal,
least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Why do you talk in such a changed way? We have not been selfish,
except when no one could profit by our being otherwise.
You used to say that human nature was noble and long-suffering,
not vile and corrupt, and at last I thought you spoke truly.
And now you seem to take such a much lower view!"

"I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had them yet!"

"You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler,
and you deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too full
of narrow dogmas at that time to see it."

"Don't say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and thought could
be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation--that's everything!
I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over
with pins and bleed out the badness that's in me!"

"Hush!" he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she
were an infant. "It is bereavement that has brought you to this!
Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones
of the earth--who never feel it!"

"I ought not to stay like this," she murmured, when she had remained
in the position a long while.

"Why not?"

"It is indulgence."

"Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on earth
than that we should love one another?"

"Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours--ours is the wrong."

"I won't have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our marriage
to be signed in a vestry?"

She paused, and looked up uneasily. "Never," she whispered.

Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the objection serenely,
and said nothing. Several minutes elapsed, and he thought she
had fallen asleep; but he spoke softly, and found that she was wide
awake all the time. She sat upright and sighed.

"There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere
about you to-night, Sue," he said. "I mean not only mentally,
but about your clothes, also. A sort of vegetable scent,
which I seem to know, yet cannot remember."

"It is incense."

"Incense?"

"I have been to the service at St. Silas', and I was in the fumes of it."

"Oh--St. Silas'."

"Yes. I go there sometimes."

"Indeed. You go there!"

"You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the weekday mornings,
when you are at work, and I think and think of--of my--"
She stopped till she could control the lumpiness of her throat.
"And I have taken to go in there, as it is so near."

"Oh well--of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd, for you.
They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!"

"What do you mean, Jude?"

"Well--a sceptic, to be plain."

"How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I know you
didn't mean it. But you ought not to say that."

"I won't. But I am much surprised!"

"Well--I want to tell you something else, Jude. You won't be angry,
will you? I have thought of it a good deal since my babies died.
I don't think I ought to be your wife--or as your wife--
any longer."

"What? ... But you ARE!"

"From your point of view; but--"

"Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good many others
would have been in our places, with such strong reasons for fears.
But experience has proved how we misjudged ourselves, and overrated
our infirmities; and if you are beginning to respect rites and ceremonies,
as you seem to be, I wonder you don't say it shall be carried out instantly?
You certainly ARE my wife, Sue, in all but law. What do you mean by what
you said?"

"I don't think I am!"

"Not? But suppose we HAD gone through the ceremony?
Would you feel that you were then?"

"No. I should not feel even then that I was. I should feel worse
than I do now."

"Why so--in the name of all that's perverse, my dear?"

"Because I am Richard's."

"Ah--you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!"

"It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more convinced
as time goes on that--I belong to him, or to nobody."

"My good heavens--how we are changing places!"

"Yes. Perhaps so."

Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening, they were
sitting in the same small room down-stairs, when a knock came
to the front door of the carpenter's house where they were lodging,
and in a few moments there was a tap at the door of their room.
Before they could open it the comer did so, and a woman's
form appeared.

"Is Mr. Fawley here?"

Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the affirmative,
for the voice was Arabella's.

He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down in the window bench,
where they could distinctly see her outline against the light;
but no characteristic that enabled them to estimate her general aspect
and air. Yet something seemed to denote that she was not quite so
comfortably circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she had been
during Cartlett's lifetime.

The three attempted an awkward conversation about the tragedy,
of which Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her immediately,
though she had never replied to his letter.

"I have just come from the cemetery," she said. "I inquired
and found the child's grave. I couldn't come to the funeral--
thank you for inviting me all the same. I read all about it
in the papers, and I felt I wasn't wanted.... No--I couldn't
come to the funeral," repeated Arabella, who, seeming utterly
unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic manner,
fumbled with iterations. "But I am glad I found the grave.
As 'tis your trade, Jude, you'll be able to put up a handsome stone
to 'em."

"I shall put up a headstone," said Jude drearily.

"He was my child, and naturally I feel for him."

"I hope so. We all did."

"The others that weren't mine I didn't feel so much for,
as was natural."

"Of course."

A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.

"I had often wished I had mine with me," continued Mrs. Cartlett.
"Perhaps 'twouldn't have happened then! But of course I didn't wish
to take him away from your wife."

"I am not his wife," came from Sue.

The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm sure," said Arabella. "I thought you were!"

Jude had known from the quality of Sue's tone that her new
and transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except
their obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella.
The latter, after evincing that she was struck by Sue's avowal,
recovered herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness
about "her" boy, for whom, though in his lifetime she
had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial
mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience.
She alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed
again to Sue. There was no answer: Sue had invisibly left
the room.

"She said she was not your wife?" resumed Arabella in another voice.
"Why should she do that?"

"I cannot inform you," said Jude shortly.

"She is, isn't she? She once told me so."

"I don't criticize what she says."

"Ah--I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night, and
thought I could do no less than call, after our mutual affliction.
I am sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow
I go back to Alfredston. Father is come home again, and I am living
with him."

"He has returned from Australia?" said Jude with languid curiosity.

"Yes. Couldn't get on there. Had a rough time of it.
Mother died of dys--what do you call it--in the hot weather,
and Father and two of the young ones have just got back.
He has got a cottage near the old place, and for the present I am
keeping house for him."

Jude's former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict good
breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a number
of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability.
When she had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the stairs and
called Sue--feeling anxious as to what had become of her.

There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings
said she had not come in. Jude was puzzled, and became quite
alarmed at her absence, for the hour was growing late.
The carpenter called his wife, who conjectured that Sue might
have gone to St. Silas' church, as she often went there.

"Surely not at this time o' night?" said Jude. "It is shut."

"She knows somebody who keeps the key, and she has it whenever she wants it."

"How long has she been going on with this?"

"Oh, some few weeks, I think."

Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he had
never once approached since he lived out that way years before,
when his young opinions were more mystical than they were now.
The spot was deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened;
he lifted the latch without noise, and pushing to the door
behind him, stood absolutely still inside. The prevalent silence
seemed to contain a faint sound, explicable as a breathing,
or a sobbing, which came from the other end of the building.
The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he moved in that direction
through the obscurity, which was broken only by the faintest
reflected night-light from without.

High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge,
solidly constructed Latin cross--as large, probably, as the original
it was designed to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in the air
by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered
in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed to and fro
in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath, upon the floor,
lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and from this was
repeated the sobbing that he had heard before. It was his Sue's form,
prostrate on the paving.

"Sue!" he whispered.

Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.

"What--do you want with me here, Jude?" she said almost sharply.
"You shouldn't come! I wanted to be alone! Why did you
intrude here?"

"How can you ask!" he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart
was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him.
"Why do I come? Who has a right to come, I should like to know,
if I have not! I, who love you better than my own self--better--
far better--than you have loved me! What made you leave me to come
here alone?"

"Don't criticize me, Jude--I can't bear it!--I have often told you so.
You must take me as I am. I am a wretch--broken by my distractions!
I couldn't BEAR it when Arabella came--I felt so utterly miserable I
had to come away. She seems to be your wife still, and Richard to be
my husband!"

"But they are nothing to us!"

"Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage differently now.
My babies have been taken from me to show me this!
Arabella's child killing mine was a judgement--the right slaying
the wrong. What, WHAT shall I do! I am such a vile creature--
too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!"

"This is terrible!" said Jude, verging on tears. "It is monstrous
and unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no wrong!"

"Ah--you don't know my badness!"

He returned vehemently: "I do! Every atom and dreg of it!
You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism,
or whatever it may be called, if it's that which has caused
this deterioration in you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer,
a woman whose soul shone like a diamond--whom all the wise of
the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you--
should degrade herself like this! I am glad I had nothing
to do with Divinity--damn glad--if it's going to ruin you in
this way!"

"You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't see how things are."

"Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall.
I am overburdened--and you, too, are unhinged just now."
He put his arm round her and lifted her; but though she came,
she preferred to walk without his support.

"I don't dislike you, Jude," she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
"I love you as much as ever! Only--I ought not to love you--any more.
Oh I must not any more!"

"I can't own it."

"But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife!
I belong to him--I sacramentally joined myself to him for life.
Nothing can alter it!"

"But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this world?
Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!"

"But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester."

"Sue, Sue--affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this--for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in me
for the Church as an old acquaintance.... What I can't understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic.
Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman
a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
How you argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract--
which it is--how you showed all the objections to it--
all the absurdities! If two and two made four when we were
happy together, surely they make four now? I can't understand it,
I repeat!"

"Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man observing
people listening to music. You say 'What are they regarding?
Nothing is there.' But something is."

"That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel!
You threw off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it;
and now you go back upon yourself. I confess I am utterly stultified
in my estimate of you."

"Dear friend, my only friend, don't be hard with me!
I can't help being as I am, I am convinced I am right--
that I see the light at last. But oh, how to profit by it!"

They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the building and she
had returned the key. "Can this be the girl," said Jude when she came back,
feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now that he was in the open street;
"can this be the girl who brought the pagan deities into this most
Christian city?--who mimicked Miss Fontover when she crushed them with
her heel?--quoted Gibbon, and Shelley, and Mill? Where are dear Apollo,
and dear Venus now!"

"Oh don't, don't be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!"
she sobbed. "I can't bear it! I was in error--I cannot
reason with you. I was wrong--proud in my own conceit!
Arabella's coming was the finish. Don't satirize me: it cuts
like a knife!"

He flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately
there in the silent street, before she could hinder him.
They went on till they came to a little coffee-house. "Jude,"
she said with suppressed tears, "would you mind getting a
lodging here?"

"I will--if, if you really wish? But do you? Let me go to our door
and understand you."

He went and conducted her in. She said she wanted no supper,
and went in the dark upstairs and struck a light. Turning she found
that Jude had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door.
She went to him, put her hand in his, and said "Good-night."

"But Sue! Don't we live here?"

"You said you would do as I wished!"

"Yes. Very well! ... Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue distastefully
as I have done! Perhaps as we couldn't conscientiously marry at first
in the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted. Perhaps the world
is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we,
to think we could act as pioneers!"

"I am so glad you see that much, at any rate. I never deliberately
meant to do as I did. I slipped into my false position through jealousy
and agitation!"

"But surely through love--you loved me?"

"Yes. But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always
as mere lovers; until----"

"But people in love couldn't live for ever like that!"

"Women could: men can't, because they--won't. An average woman
is in this superior to an average man--that she never instigates,
only responds. We ought to have lived in mental communion,
and no more."

"I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said before! ... Well,
as you will! ... But human nature can't help being itself."

"Oh yes--that's just what it has to learn--self-mastery."

"I repeat--if either were to blame it was not you but I."

"No--it was I. Your wickedness was only the natural man's desire to possess
the woman. Mine was not the reciprocal wish till envy stimulated me
to oust Arabella. I had thought I ought in charity to let you approach me--
that it was damnably selfish to torture you as I did my other friend.
But I shouldn't have given way if you hadn't broken me down by making me
fear you would go back to her.... But don't let us say any more about it!
Jude, will you leave me to myself now?"

"Yes.... But Sue--my wife, as you are!" he burst out;
"my old reproach to you was, after all, a true one.
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is
not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame!
You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite--
not a woman!"

"At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you
I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you;
but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost
more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate,
regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found
I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was--
I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got
to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in
the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting
mine ache for you."

"And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!"

"Ah--yes! The further I flounder, the more harm I do!"

"O Sue!" said he with a sudden sense of his own danger.
"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons! You have been
my social salvation. Stay with me for humanity's sake!
You know what a weak fellow I am. My two arch-enemies you know--
my weakness for womankind and my impulse to strong liquor.
Don't abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul only!
They have been kept entirely at a distance since you became
my guardian-angel! Since I have had you I have been able
to go into any temptations of the sort, without risk.
Isn't my safety worth a little sacrifice of dogmatic principle?
I am in terror lest, if you leave me, it will be with me another
case of the pig that was washed turning back to his wallowing in
the mire!"

Sue burst out weeping. "Oh, but you must not, Jude! You won't!
I'll pray for you night and day!"

"Well--never mind; don't grieve," said Jude generously.
"I did suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I
suffer again. But perhaps not so much as you. The woman mostly
gets the worst of it in the long run!"

"She does."

"Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible.
And this one is not that, anyhow!"

Sue drew a nervous breath or two. "She is--I fear! ...
Now Jude--good-night,--please!"

"I mustn't stay?--Not just once more? As it has been so many times--
O Sue, my wife, why not!"

"No--no--not wife! ... I am in your hands, Jude--don't tempt
me back now I have advanced so far!"

"Very well. I do your bidding. I owe that to you, darling,
in penance for how I overruled it at the first time. My God,
how selfish I was! Perhaps--perhaps I spoilt one of the highest
and purest loves that ever existed between man and woman! ...
Then let the veil of our temple be rent in two from this hour!"

He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon,
and flung it to the floor.

Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept silently.
"You don't see that it is a matter of conscience with me, and not
of dislike to you!" she brokenly murmured. "Dislike to you!
But I can't say any more--it breaks my heart--it will be undoing all I
have begun! Jude--good-night!"

"Good-night," he said, and turned to go.

"Oh but you shall kiss me!" said she, starting up. "I can't--bear!"

He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely
ever done before, and they remained in silence till she said,
"Good-bye, good-bye!" And then gently pressing him away
she got free, trying to mitigate the sadness by saying:
"We'll be dear friends just the same, Jude, won't we?
And we'll see each other sometimes--yes!--and forget all this,
and try to be as we were long ago?"

Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the stairs.

IV

THE man whom Sue, in her mental VOLTE-FACE, was now regarding
as her inseparable husband, lived still at Marygreen.

On the day before the tragedy of the children, Phillotson had seen
both her and Jude as they stood in the rain at Christminster
watching the procession to the theatre. But he had said nothing
of it at the moment to his companion Gillingham, who, being an
old friend, was staying with him at the village aforesaid,
and had, indeed, suggested the day's trip to Christminster.

"What are you thinking of?" said Gillingham, as they went home.
"The university degree you never obtained?"

"No, no," said Phillotson gruffly. "Of somebody I saw to-day."
In a moment he added, "Susanna."

"I saw her, too."

"You said nothing."

"I didn't wish to draw your attention to her. But, as you did see her,
you should have said: 'How d'ye do, my dear-that-was?'"

"Ah, well. I might have. But what do you think of this: I have
good reason for supposing that she was innocent when I divorced her--
that I was all wrong. Yes, indeed! Awkward, isn't it?"

"She has taken care to set you right since, anyhow, apparently."

"H'm. That's a cheap sneer. I ought to have waited, unquestionably."

At the end of the week, when Gillingham had gone back to his school
near Shaston, Phillotson, as was his custom, went to Alfredston market;
ruminating again on Arabella's intelligence as he walked
down the long hill which he had known before Jude knew it,
though his history had not beaten so intensely upon its incline.
Arrived in the town he bought his usual weekly local paper;
and when he had sat down in an inn to refresh himself for the five miles'
walk back, he pulled the paper from his pocket and read awhile.
The account of the "strange suicide of a stone-mason's children"
met his eye.

Unimpassioned as he was, it impressed him painfully, and puzzled
him not a little, for he could not understand the age of the elder
child being what it was stated to be. However, there was no doubt
that the newspaper report was in some way true.

"Their cup of sorrow is now full!" he said: and thought and thought of Sue,
and what she had gained by leaving him.

Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the schoolmaster coming
to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful that in a few weeks they
met again--the precise time being just alter her return from Christminster,
where she had stayed much longer than she had at first intended,
keeping an interested eye on Jude, though Jude had seen no more of her.
Phillotson was on his way homeward when he encountered Arabella, and she was
approaching the town.

"You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?" he said.

"I've just begun to again," she replied. "It is where I lived
as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are
interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road.
And they have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I've been
visiting at Christminster. Yes; I've seen Jude."

"Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?"

"In a ve-ry strange way--ve-ry strange! She don't live with him any longer.
I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though I had thought
things were drifting that way from their manner when I called on them."

"Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought 'twould have united
them more."

"He's not her husband, after all. She has never really married
him although they have passed as man and wife so long.
And now, instead of this sad event making 'em hurry up, and get
the thing done legally, she's took in a queer religious way,
just as I was in my affliction at losing Cartlett, only hers is
of a more 'sterical sort than mine. And she says, so I was told,
that she's your wife in the eye of Heaven and the Church--
yours only; and can't be anybody else's by any act of man."

"Ah--indeed? ... Separated, have they!"

"You see, the eldest boy was mine--"

"Oh--yours!"

"Yes, poor little fellow--born in lawful wedlock, thank God.
And perhaps she feels, over and above other things, that I ought
to have been in her place. I can't say. However, as for me,
I am soon off from here. I've got Father to look after now,
and we can't live in such a hum-drum place as this.
I hope soon to be in a bar again at Christminster, or some other
big town."

They parted. When Phillotson had ascended the hill a few steps he stopped,
hastened back, and called her.

"What is, or was, their address?"

Arabella gave it.

"Thank you. Good afternoon."

Arabella smiled grimly as she resumed her way, and practised dimple-making
all along the road from where the pollard willows begin to the old almshouses
in the first street of the town.

Meanwhile Phillotson ascended to Marygreen, and for the first
time during a lengthened period he lived with a forward eye.
On crossing under the large trees of the green to the humble
schoolhouse to which he had been reduced he stood a moment,
and pictured Sue coming out of the door to meet him.
No man had ever suffered more inconvenience from his own charity,
Christian or heathen, than Phillotson had done in letting Sue go.
He had been knocked about from pillar to post at the hands of
the virtuous almost beyond endurance; he had been nearly starved,
and was now dependent entirely upon the very small stipened
from the school of this village (where the parson had got
ill-spoken of for befriending him ). He had often thought of
Arabella's remarks that he should have been more severe with Sue,
that her recalcitrant spirit would soon have been broken.
Yet such was his obstinate and illogical disregard of opinion,
and of the principles in which he had been trained, that his
convictions on the rightness of his course with his wife had not
been disturbed.

Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction
were liable to the same catastrophe in another. The instincts
which had allowed him to give Sue her liberty now enabled
him to regard her as none the worse for her life with Jude.
He wished for her still, in his curious way, if he did not
love her, and, apart from policy, soon felt that he would be
gratified to have her again as his, always provided that she
came willingly.

But artifice was necessary, he had found, for stemming the cold and inhumane
blast of the world's contempt. And here were the materials ready made.
By getting Sue back and remarrying her on the respectable plea of having
entertained erroneous views of her, and gained his divorce wrongfully,
he might acquire some comfort, resume his old courses, perhaps return to the
Shaston school, if not even to the Church as a licentiate.

He thought he would write to Gillingham to inquire his views,
and what he thought of his, Phillotson's, sending a letter to her.
Gillingham replied, naturally, that now she was gone it were best
to let her be, and considered that if she were anybody's wife
she was the wife of the man to whom she had borne three children
and owed such tragical adventures. Probably, as his attachment
to her seemed unusually strong, the singular pair would make their
union legal in course of time, and all would be well, and decent,
and in order.

"But they won't--Sue won't!" exclaimed Phillotson to himself.
"Gillingham is so matter of fact. She's affected by Christminster
sentiment and teaching. I can see her views on the indissolubility of
marriage well enough, and I know where she got them. They are not mine;
but I shall make use of them to further mine."

He wrote a brief reply to Gillingham. "I know I am entirely wrong, but I
don't agree with you. As to her having lived with and had three children
by him, my feeling is (though I can advance no logical or moral defence of it,
on the old lines) that it has done little more than finish her education.
I shall write to her, and learn whether what that woman said is true
or no."

As he had made up his mind to do this before he had written to his friend,
there had not been much reason for writing to the latter at all.
However, it was Phillotson's way to act thus.

He accordingly addressed a carefully considered epistle to Sue, and,
knowing her emotional temperament, threw a Rhadamanthine strictness
into the lines here and there, carefully hiding his heterodox feelings,
not to frighten her. He stated that, it having come to his knowledge
that her views had considerably changed, he felt compelled to say that
his own, too, were largely modified by events subsequent to their parting.
He would not conceal from her that passionate love had little to do
with his communication. It arose from a wish to make their lives,
if not a success, at least no such disastrous failure as they threatened
to become, through his acting on what he had considered at the time
a principle of justice, charity, and reason.

To indulge one's instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right,
was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization
like ours. It was necessary to act under an acquired and cultivated sense
of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour;
and to let crude loving kindness take care of itself.

He suggested that she should come to him there at Marygreen.

On second thoughts he took out the last paragraph but one;
and having rewritten the letter he dispatched it immediately,
and in some excitement awaited the issue.

A few days after a figure moved through the white fog which enveloped
the Beersheba suburb of Christminster, towards the quarter in which
Jude Fawley had taken up his lodging since his division from Sue.
A timid knock sounded upon the door of his abode.

It was evening--so he was at home; and by a species of divination
he jumped up and rushed to the door himself.

"Will you come out with me? I would rather not come in.
I want to--to talk with you--and to go with you to the cemetery."

It had been in the trembling accents of Sue that these words came.
Jude put on his hat. "It is dreary for you to be out," he said.
"But if you prefer not to come in, I don't mind."

"Yes--I do. I shall not keep you long."

Jude was too much affected to go on talking at first; she, too, was now such
a mere cluster of nerves that all initiatory power seemed to have left her,
and they proceeded through the fog like Acherontic shades for a long while,
without sound or gesture.

"I want to tell you," she presently said, her voice now quick,
now slow, "so that you may not hear of it by chance.
I am going back to Richard. He has--so magnanimously--
agreed to forgive all."

"Going back? How can you go----"

"He is going to marry me again. That is for form's sake,
and to satisfy the world, which does not see things as they are.
But of course I AM his wife already. Nothing has changed that."

He turned upon her with an anguish that was well-nigh fierce.

"But you are my wife! Yes, you are. You know it.
I have always regretted that feint of ours in going away and
pretending to come back legally married, to save appearances.
I loved you, and you loved me; and we closed with each other;
and that made the marriage. We still love--you as well as I--
KNOW it, Sue! Therefore our marriage is not cancelled."

"Yes; I know how you see it," she answered with despairing self-suppression.
"But I am going to marry him again, as it would be called by you.
Strictly speaking you, too--don't mind my saying it, Jude!--you should
take back--Arabella."

"I should? Good God--what next! But how if you and I had married legally,
as we were on the point of doing?"

"I should have felt just the same--that ours was not a marriage.
And I would go back to Richard without repeating the sacrament,
if he asked me. But 'the world and its ways have a certain worth'
(I suppose): therefore I concede a repetition of the ceremony.... Don't
crush all the life out of me by satire and argument, I implore you!
I was strongest once, I know, and perhaps I treated you cruelly.
But Jude, return good for evil! I am the weaker now. Don't retaliate
upon me, but be kind. Oh be kind to me--a poor wicked woman who is trying
to mend!"

He shook his head hopelessly, his eyes wet. The blow of her
bereavement seemed to have destroyed her reasoning faculty.
The once keen vision was dimmed. "All wrong, all wrong!"
he said huskily. "Error--perversity! It drives me out
of my senses. Do you care for him? Do you love him?
You know you don't! It will be a fanatic prostitution--
God forgive me, yes--that's what it will be!"

"I don't love him--I must, must, own it, in deepest remorse!
But I shall try to learn to love him by obeying him."

Jude argued, urged, implored; but her conviction was proof against all.
It seemed to be the one thing on earth on which she was firm, and that her
firmness in this had left her tottering in every other impulse and wish
she possessed.

"I have been considerate enough to let you know the whole truth,
and to tell it you myself," she said in cut tones; "that you might
not consider yourself slighted by hearing of it at second hand.
I have even owned the extreme fact that I do not love him.
I did not think you would be so rough with me for doing so! I was
going to ask you ..."

"To give you away?"

"No. To send--my boxes to me--if you would. But I suppose you won't."

"Why, of course I will. What--isn't he coming to fetch you--
to marry you from here? He won't condescend to do that?"

"No--I won't let him. I go to him voluntarily, just as I went away from him.
We are to be married at his little church at Marygreen."

She was so sadly sweet in what he called her wrong-headedness that Jude
could not help being moved to tears more than once for pity of her.
"I never knew such a woman for doing impulsive penances, as you, Sue!
No sooner does one expect you to go straight on, as the one rational
proceeding, than you double round the corner!"

"Ah, well; let that go! ... Jude, I must say good-bye! But I wanted
you to go to the cemetery with me. Let our farewell be there--
beside the graves of those who died to bring home to me the error
of my views."

They turned in the direction of the place, and the gate was
opened to them on application. Sue had been there often,
and she knew the way to the spot in the dark. They reached it,
and stood still.

"It is here--I should like to part," said she.

"So be it!"

"Don't think me hard because I have acted on conviction.
Your generous devotion to me is unparalleled, Jude!
Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit
rather than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest
among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.
Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted
fail.... 'Charity seeketh not her own.'"

"In that chapter we are at one, ever beloved darling, and on it we'll
part friends. Its verses will stand fast when all the rest that you
call religion has passed away!"

"Well--don't discuss it. Good-bye, Jude; my fellow-sinner,
and kindest friend!"

"Good-bye, my mistaken wife. Good-bye!"

V

THE next afternoon the familiar Christminster fog still hung over all things.
Sue's slim shape was only just discernible going towards the station.

Jude had no heart to go to his work that day. Neither could he go
anywhere in the direction by which she would be likely to pass.
He went in an opposite one, to a dreary, strange, flat scene,
where boughs dripped, and coughs and consumption lurked, and where he had
never been before.

"Sue's gone from me--gone!" he murmured miserably.

She in the meantime had left by the train, and reached Alfredston Road,
where she entered the steam-tram and was conveyed into the town.
It had been her request to Phillotson that he should not meet her.
She wished, she said, to come to him voluntarily, to his very house
and hearthstone.

It was Friday evening, which had been chosen because the schoolmaster was
disengaged at four o'clock that day till the Monday morning following.
The little car she hired at the Bear to drive her to Marygreen set her down at
the end of the lane, half a mile from the village, by her desire, and preceded
her to the schoolhouse with such portion of her luggage as she had brought.
On its return she encountered it, and asked the driver if he had found the
master's house open. The man informed her that he had, and that her things
had been taken in by the schoolmaster himself.

She could now enter Marygreen without exciting much observation.
She crossed by the well and under the trees to the pretty new school on
the other side, and lifted the latch of the dwelling without knocking.
Phillotson stood in the middle of the room, awaiting her, as requested.

"I've come, Richard," said she, looking pale and shaken, and sinking
into a chair. "I cannot believe--you forgive your--wife!"

"Everything, darling Susanna," said Phillotson.

She started at the endearment, though it had been spoken advisedly
without fervour. Then she nerved herself again.

"My children--are dead--and it is right that they should be!
I am glad--almost. They were sin-begotten. They were sacrificed
to teach me how to live! Their death was the first stage of
my purification. That's why they have not died in vain! ... You
will take me back?"

He was so stirred by her pitiful words and tone that he did
more than he had meant to do. He bent and kissed her cheek.

Sue imperceptibly shrank away, her flesh quivering under the touch
of his lips.

Phillotson's heart sank, for desire was renascent in him.
"You still have an aversion to me!"

"Oh no, dear--I have been driving through the damp, and I
was chilly!" she said, with a hurried smile of apprehension.
"When are we going to have the marriage? Soon?"

"To-morrow morning, early, I thought--if you really wish.
I am sending round to the vicar to let him know you are come.
I have told him all, and he highly approves--he says it will bring
our lives to a triumphant and satisfactory issue. But--are you
sure of yourself? It is not too late to refuse now if--
you think you can't bring yourself to it, you know?"

"Yes, yes, I can! I want it done quick. Tell him, tell him at once!
My strength is tried by the undertaking--I can't wait long!"

"Have something to eat and drink then, and go over to your room
at Mrs. Edlin's. I'll tell the vicar half-past eight to-morrow,
before anybody is about--if that's not too soon for you?
My friend Gillingham is here to help us in the ceremony.
He's been good enough to come all the way from Shaston at great
inconvenience to himself."

Unlike a woman in ordinary, whose eye is so keen for material things,
Sue seemed to see nothing of the room they were in, or any detail
of her environment. But on moving across the parlour to put down
her muff she uttered a little "Oh!" and grew paler than before.
Her look was that of the condemned criminal who catches sight of
his coffin.

"What?" said Phillotson.

The flap of the bureau chanced to be open, and in placing her
muff upon it her eye had caught a document which lay there.
"Oh--only a--funny surprise!" she said, trying to laugh away her
cry as she came back to the table.

"Ah! Yes," said Phillotson. "The licence.... It has just come."

Gillingham now joined them from his room above, and Sue nervously made
herself agreeable to him by talking on whatever she thought likely
to interest him, except herself, though that interested him most of all.
She obediently ate some supper, and prepared to leave for her lodging
hard by. Phillotson crossed the green with her, bidding her good-night at
Mrs. Edlin's door.

The old woman accompanied Sue to her temporary quarters,
and helped her to unpack. Among other things she laid out
a night-gown tastefully embroidered.

"Oh--I didn't know THAT was put in!" said Sue quickly.
"I didn't mean it to be. Here is a different one."
She handed a new and absolutely plain garment, of coarse and
unbleached calico.

"But this is the prettiest," said Mrs. Edlin. "That one is no better
than very sackcloth o' Scripture!"

"Yes--I meant it to be. Give me the other."

She took it, and began rending it with all her might, the tears resounding
through the house like a screech-owl.

"But my dear, dear!--whatever ..."

"It is adulterous! It signifies what I don't feel--I bought it long ago--
to please Jude. It must be destroyed!"

Mrs. Edlin lifted her hands, and Sue excitedly continued to tear
the linen into strips, laying the pieces in the fire.

"You med ha' give it to me!" said the widow. "It do make my heart
ache to see such pretty open-work as that a-burned by the flames--
not that ornamental night-rails can be much use to a' ould 'ooman
like I. My days for such be all past and gone!"

"It is an accursed thing--it reminds me of what I want to forget!"
Sue repeated. "It is only fit for the fire."

"Lord, you be too strict! What do ye use such words for,
and condemn to hell your dear little innocent children that's
lost to 'ee! Upon my life I don't call that religion!"

Sue flung her face upon the bed, sobbing. "Oh, don't, don't! That kills me!"
She remained shaken with her grief, and slipped down upon her knees.

"I'll tell 'ee what--you ought not to marry this man again!"
said Mrs. Edlin indignantly. "You are in love wi' t' other still!"

"Yes I must--I am his already!"

"Pshoo! You be t' other man's. If you didn't like to commit
yourselves to the binding vow again, just at first, 'twas all
the more credit to your consciences, considering your reasons,
and you med ha' lived on, and made it all right at last.
After all, it concerned nobody but your own two selves."

"Richard says he'll have me back, and I'm bound to go!
If he had refused, it might not have been so much my duty to--
give up Jude. But--" She remained with her face in the bed-clothes,
and Mrs. Edlin left the room.

Phillotson in the interval had gone back to his friend Gillingham,
who still sat over the supper-table. They soon rose, and walked out
on the green to smoke awhile. A light was burning in Sue's room,
a shadow moving now and then across the blind.

Gillingham had evidently been impressed with the indefinable charm of Sue,
and after a silence he said, "Well: you've all but got her again at last.
She can't very well go a second time. The pear has dropped into your hand."

"Yes! ... I suppose I am right in taking her at her word.
I confess there seems a touch of selfishness in it. Apart from
her being what she is, of course, a luxury for a fogy like me,
it will set me right in the eyes of the clergy and orthodox laity,
who have never forgiven me for letting her go. So I may get back
in some degree into my old track."

"Well--if you've got any sound reason for marrying her again,
do it now in God's name! I was always against your opening
the cage-door and letting the bird go in such an obviously
suicidal way. You might have been a school inspector by this time,
or a reverend, if you hadn't been so weak about her."

"I did myself irreparable damage--I know it."

"Once you've got her housed again, stick to her."

Phillotson was more evasive to-night. He did not care to admit
clearly that his taking Sue to him again had at bottom nothing
to do with repentance of letting her go, but was, primarily,
a human instinct flying in the face of custom and profession.
He said, "Yes--I shall do that. I know woman better now.
Whatever justice there was in releasing her, there was little logic,
for one holding my views on other subjects."

Gillingham looked at him, and wondered whether it would ever happen
that the reactionary spirit induced by the world's sneers and his
own physical wishes would make Phillotson more orthodoxly cruel
to her than he had erstwhile been informally and perversely kind.

"I perceive it won't do to give way to impulse," Phillotson resumed,
feeling more and more every minute the necessity of acting up
to his position. "I flew in the face of the Church's teaching;
but I did it without malice prepense. Women are so strange in their
influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness. However, I know
myself better now. A little judicious severity, perhaps...."

"Yes; but you must tighten the reins by degrees only.
Don't be too strenuous at first. She'll come to any terms
in time."

The caution was unnecessary, though Phillotson did not say so.
"I remember what my vicar at Shaston said, when I left after
the row that was made about my agreeing to her elopement.
'The only thing you can do to retrieve your position and hers is to
admit your error in not restraining her with a wise and strong hand,
and to get her back again if she'll come, and be firm in the future.'
But I was so headstrong at that time that I paid no heed.
And that after the divorce she should have thought of doing so I did
not dream."

The gate of Mrs. Edlin's cottage clicked, and somebody began crossing
in the direction of the school. Phillotson said "Good-night."

"Oh, is that Mr. Phillotson," said Mrs. Edlin. "I was going over to see 'ee.
I've been upstairs with her, helping her to unpack her things; and upon
my word, sir, I don't think this ought to be!"

"What--the wedding?"

"Yes. She's forcing herself to it, poor dear little thing;
and you've no notion what she's suffering. I was never much
for religion nor against it, but it can't be right to let
her do this, and you ought to persuade her out of it.
Of course everybody will say it was very good and forgiving of 'ee
to take her to 'ee again. But for my part I don't."

"It's her wish, and I am willing," said Phillotson with grave reserve,
opposition making him illogically tenacious now. "A great piece of laxity
will be rectified."

"I don't believe it. She's his wife if anybody's. She's had
three children by him, and he loves her dearly; and it's a wicked
shame to egg her on to this, poor little quivering thing!
She's got nobody on her side. The one man who'd be her
friend the obstinate creature won't allow to come near her.
What first put her into this mood o' mind, I wonder!"

"I can't tell. Not I certainly. It is all voluntary on her part.
Now that's all I have to say." Phillotson spoke stiffly.
"You've turned round, Mrs. Edlin. It is unseemly of you!"

"Well. I knowed you'd be affronted at what I had to say;
but I don't mind that. The truth's the truth."

"I'm not affronted, Mrs. Edlin. You've been too kind a neighbour for that.
But I must be allowed to know what's best for myself and Susanna. I suppose
you won't go to church with us, then?"

"No. Be hanged if I can.... I don't know what the times be coming to!
Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one really
do feel afeard to move in it at all. In my time we took it more careless;
and I don't know that we was any the worse for it! When I and my poor
man were jined in it we kept up the junketing all the week, and drunk
the parish dry, and had to borrow half a crown to begin housekeeping!"

When Mrs. Edlin had gone back to her cottage Phillotson spoke moodily.
"I don't know whether I ought to do it--at any rate quite so rapidly."

"Why?"

"If she is really compelling herself to this against her instincts--
merely from this new sense of duty or religion--I ought perhaps to let her
wait a bit."

"Now you've got so far you ought not to back out of it.
That's my opinion."

"I can't very well put it off now; that's true. But I had a qualm when she
gave that little cry at sight of the licence."

"Now, never you have qualms, old boy. I mean to give her away
to-morrow morning, and you mean to take her. It has always been
on my conscience that I didn't urge more objections to your letting
her go, and now we've got to this stage I shan't be content if I
don't help you to set the matter right."

Phillotson nodded, and seeing how staunch his friend was, became more frank.
"No doubt when it gets known what I've done I shall be thought a soft fool
by many. But they don't know Sue as I do. Though so elusive, hers is such an
honest nature at bottom that I don't think she has ever done anything against
her conscience. The fact of her having lived with Fawley goes for nothing.
At the time she left me for him she thought she was quite within her right.
Now she thinks otherwise."

The next morning came, and the self-sacrifice of the woman
on the altar of what she was pleased to call her principles was
acquiesced in by these two friends, each from his own point of view.
Phillotson went across to the Widow Edlin's to fetch Sue a few
minutes after eight o'clock. The fog of the previous day or two
on the low-lands had travelled up here by now, and the trees on
the green caught armfuls, and turned them into showers of big drops.
The bride was waiting, ready; bonnet and all on. She had never in
her life looked so much like the lily her name connoted as she did
in that pallid morning light. Chastened, world-weary, remorseful,
the strain on her nerves had preyed upon her flesh and bones,
and she appeared smaller in outline than she had formerly done,
though Sue had not been a large woman in her days of rudest health.

"Prompt," said the schoolmaster, magnanimously taking her hand.
But he checked his impulse to kiss her, remembering her start
of yesterday, which unpleasantly lingered in his mind.

Gillingham joined them, and they left the house, Widow Edlin
continuing steadfast in her refusal to assist in the ceremony.

"Where is the church?" said Sue. She had not lived there
for any length of time since the old church was pulled down,
and in her preoccupation forgot the new one.

"Up here," said Phillotson; and presently the tower loomed
large and solemn in the fog. The vicar had already crossed
to the building, and when they entered he said pleasantly:
"We almost want candles."

"You do--wish me to be yours, Richard?" gasped Sue in a whisper.

"Certainly, dear: above all things in the world."

Sue said no more; and for the second or third time he felt he was not quite
following out the humane instinct which had induced him to let her go.

There they stood, five altogether: the parson, the clerk, the couple,
and Gillingham; and the holy ordinance was resolemnized forthwith.
In the nave of the edifice were two or three villagers, and when
the clergyman came to the words, "What God hath joined," a woman's
voice from among these was heard to utter audibly:

"God hath jined indeed!"

It was like a re-enactment by the ghosts of their former selves of
the similar scene which had taken place at Melchester years before.
When the books were signed the vicar congratulated the husband
and wife on having performed a noble, and righteous, and mutually
forgiving act. "All's well that ends well," he said smiling.
"May you long be happy together, after thus having been 'saved as
by fire.'"

They came down the nearly empty building, and crossed to the schoolhouse.
Gillingham wanted to get home that night, and left early. He, too,
congratulated the couple. "Now," he said in parting from Phillotson,
who walked out a little way, "I shall be able to tell the people in
your native place a good round tale; and they'll all say 'Well done,'
depend on it."

When the schoolmaster got back Sue was making a pretence of doing some
housewifery as if she lived there. But she seemed timid at his approach,
and compunction wrought on him at sight of it.

"Of course, my dear, I shan't expect to intrude upon your personal privacy
any more than I did before," he said gravely. "It is for our good socially
to do this, and that's its justification, if it was not my reason."
Sue brightened a little.

VI

THE place was the door of Jude's lodging in the out-skirts
of Christminster--far from the precincts of St. Silas'
where he had formerly lived, which saddened him to sickness.
The rain was coming down. A woman in shabby black stood on
the doorstep talking to Jude, who held the door in his hand.

"I am lonely, destitute, and houseless--that's what I am!
Father has turned me out of doors after borrowing every penny
I'd got, to put it into his business, and then accusing
me of laziness when I was only waiting for a situation.
I am at the mercy of the world! If you can't take me and
help me, Jude, I must go to the workhouse, or to something worse.
Only just now two undergraduates winked at me as I came along.
'Tis hard for a woman to keep virtuous where there's so many
young men!"

The woman in the rain who spoke thus was Arabella, the evening being
that of the day after Sue's remarriage with Phillotson.

"I am sorry for you, but I am only in lodgings," said Jude coldly.

"Then you turn me away?"

"I'll give you enough to get food and lodging for a few days."

"Oh, but can't you have the kindness to take me in?
I cannot endure going to a public house to lodge; and I am
so lonely. Please, Jude, for old times' sake!"

"No, no," said Jude hastily. "I don't want to be reminded of those things;
and if you talk about them I shall not help you."

"Then I suppose I must go!" said Arabella. She bent her head
against the doorpost and began sobbing.

"The house is full," said Jude. "And I have only a little extra
room to my own--not much more than a closet--where I keep my tools,
and templates, and the few books I have left!"

"That would be a palace for me!"

"There is no bedstead in it."

"A bit of a bed could be made on the floor. It would be good enough for me."

Unable to be harsh with her, and not knowing what to do,
Jude called the man who let the lodgings, and said this was an
acquaintance of his in great distress for want of temporary shelter.

"You may remember me as barmaid at the Lamb and Flag formerly?"
spoke up Arabella. "My father has insulted me this afternoon,
and I've left him, though without a penny!"

The householder said he could not recall her features.
"But still, if you are a friend of Mr. Fawley's we'll do what we
can for a day or two--if he'll make himself answerable?"

"Yes, yes," said Jude. "She has really taken me quite unawares;
but I should wish to help her out of her difficulty."
And an arrangement was ultimately come to under which a bed was
to be thrown down in Jude's lumber-room, to make it comfortable
for Arabella till she could get out of the strait she was in--
not by her own fault, as she declared--and return to her
father's again.

While they were waiting for this to be done Arabella said:
"You know the news, I suppose?"

"I guess what you mean; but I know nothing."

"I had a letter from Anny at Alfredston to-day. She had just heard
that the wedding was to be yesterday: but she didn't know if it
had come off."

"I don't wish to talk of it."

"No, no: of course you don't. Only it shows what kind of woman----"

"Don't speak of her I say! She's a fool! And she's an angel,
too, poor dear!"

"If it's done, he'll have a chance of getting back to his old position,
by everybody's account, so Anny says. All his well-wishers will be pleased,
including the bishop himself."

"Do spare me, Arabella."

Arabella was duly installed in the little attic, and at first she did not
come near Jude at all. She went to and fro about her own business, which,
when they met for a moment on the stairs or in the passage, she informed him
was that of obtaining another place in the occupation she understood best.
When Jude suggested London as affording the most likely opening in the liquor
trade, she shook her head. "No--the temptations are too many," she said.
"Any humble tavern in the country before that for me."

On the Sunday morning following, when he breakfasted later than on other days,
she meekly asked him if she might come in to breakfast with him, as she had
broken her teapot, and could not replace it immediately, the shops being shut.

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