Now I won"t write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won"t make her miserable by saying you don"t?-Ever,
Sue.
It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her.
Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue"s impulsive note than it really was intended to bear.
After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles.
He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Sat.u.r.day, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened.
His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o"clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison.
A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?"
"Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily.
"Only a little-not very."
Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn-the voice of Sue calling his name. He pa.s.sed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square.
"Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn"t write?"
"No-it wasn"t that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold-but I could have written. Only I wouldn"t!"
"Why not?-frightening me like this!"
"Yes-that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won"t have me back at the school-that"s why I couldn"t write. Not the fact, but the reason!"
"Well?"
"They not only won"t have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice-"
"What?"
She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude-it is so vulgar and distressing!"
"Is it about us?"
"Yes."
"But do tell me!"
"Well-somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There-now I have told you, and I wish I hadn"t!"
"Oh, poor Sue!"
"I don"t think of you like that means! It did just occur to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn"t begun to. I have recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude-why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn"t have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!"
The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress.
"I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn"t see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me-you have-to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your att.i.tude to me has become known; and naturally they think we"ve been doing wrong! I"ll never trust you again!"
"Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame-more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don"t you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn"t help having them?"
She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him.
By every law of nature and s.e.x a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue"s undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue"s declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella"s parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them.
"Of course-I know you don"t-care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to-Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?"
"Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn"t ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn"t care if he didn"t come any more!"
It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude"s feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else.
"This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt."
"I"ll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively.
Sue"s kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn.
But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in ill.u.s.tration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her:
Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and a.s.sociate, with all my faults. I"ll try not to be like it again.
I am coming to Melchester on Sat.u.r.day, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?-Your repentant
Sue.
Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came.
VI
Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys" school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies.
A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster"s plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose-that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls" schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand.
About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies-one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities-an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time.
A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present-his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, d.y.k.es, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late-to near midnight, indeed-and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying.
The interior of the room-the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster"s loose coat, his att.i.tude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research-more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months before, and it was the clerical rendering of word after word that absorbed him.