Almost half an hour pa.s.sed, and the rabbit repeated its cry. Jude could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing himself quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went across the green in the direction of the sound. He reached the hedge bordering the widow"s garden, when he stood still. The faint click of the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open cas.e.m.e.nt at a window on the ground floor of the adjacent cottage. "Jude!" said a voice timidly-Sue"s voice. "It is you-is it not?"
"Yes, dear!"
"I haven"t been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit, and couldn"t help thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must come down and kill it! But I am so glad you got there first... They ought not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!"
Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that she was visible down to her waist. She let go the cas.e.m.e.nt-stay and put her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.
"Did it keep you awake?" he said.
"No-I was awake."
"How was that?"
"Oh, you know-now! I know you, with your religious doctrines, think that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a mortal sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you. I wish I hadn"t, now!"
"Don"t wish it, dear," he said. "That may have been my view; but my doctrines and I begin to part company."
"I knew it-I knew it! And that"s why I vowed I wouldn"t disturb your belief. But-I am so glad to see you!-and, oh, I didn"t mean to see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!"
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. "There is a stronger one left!" he said. "I"ll never care about my doctrines or my religion any more! Let them go! Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even if you..."
"Don"t say it!-I know what you mean; but I can"t admit so much as that. There! Guess what you like, but don"t press me to answer questions!"
"I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!"
"I can"t be! So few could enter into my feeling-they would say "twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and condemn me... It is none of the natural tragedies of love that"s love"s usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting! ... It would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I had been able to tell it to anybody else. But I have n.o.body. And I must tell somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me-there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that training school sc.r.a.pe, with all the c.o.c.k-sureness of the fool that I was! ... I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superst.i.tions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!"
"You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish-I wish-"
"You must go in now!"
In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have done. She shut the cas.e.m.e.nt, and he returned to his cottage.
III
Sue"s distressful confession recurred to Jude"s mind all the night as being a sorrow indeed.
The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours saw her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill path which led into the lonely road to Alfredston. An hour pa.s.sed before he returned along the same route, and in his face there was a look of exaltation not unmixed with recklessness. An incident had occurred.
They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and pa.s.sionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and she said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell as he now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss would be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it. If given in the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in the spirit of a lover she could not permit it. "Will you swear that it will not be in that spirit?" she had said.
No: he would not. And then they had turned from each other in estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a distance of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously. That look behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained. They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly, kissed close and long. When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.
The kiss was a turning-point in Jude"s career. Back again in the cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and servant of a religion in which s.e.xual love was regarded as at its best a frailty, and at its worst d.a.m.nation. What Sue had said in warmth was really the cold truth. When to defend his affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in impa.s.sioned attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was condemned ipso facto as a professor of the accepted school of morals. He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited dogma.
Strange that his first aspiration-towards academical proficiency-had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration-towards apostleship-had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal s.e.x-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?"
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble, to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal gain. Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and himself in love erratically, the loved one"s revolt against her state being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable according to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole, to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that he possessed, and had stored here. He knew that, in this country of true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way, even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with, he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a three-p.r.o.nged fork shook them over the flames. They kindled, and lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till they were more or less consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, pa.s.sing cottagers talked to him over the garden hedge.
"Burning up your awld aunt"s rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a lot gets heaped up in nooks and corners when you"ve lived eighty years in one house."
It was nearly one o"clock in the morning before the leaves, covers, and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman and the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he turned and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being no longer a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which gave him calm. He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which, as their proprietor, he might naturally be supposed to exercise on himself first of all. In his pa.s.sion for Sue he could not stand as an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited sepulchre.
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and let him kiss her. Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly. She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue"s logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were wrong in practice.
"I have been too weak, I think!" she jerked out as she pranced on, shaking down tear-drops now and then. "It was burning, like a lover"s-oh, it was! And I won"t write to him any more, or at least for a long time, to impress him with my dignity! And I hope it will hurt him very much-expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and the next, and no letter coming. He"ll suffer then with suspense-won"t he, that"s all!-and I am very glad of it!"-Tears of pity for Jude"s approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those which had surged up in pity for herself.
Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing effect of her aunt"s death and funeral. He began telling her of his day"s doings, and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he had not seen for years, had called upon him. While ascending to the town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly and with an air of self-chastis.e.m.e.nt, regarding the white road and its bordering bushes of hazel:
"Richard-I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while. I don"t know whether you think it wrong?"
He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said vaguely, "Oh, did you? What did you do that for?"
"I don"t know. He wanted to, and I let him."
"I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a novelty."
They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court of an omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not said a word about the kiss.
After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers. She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition, and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o"clock. Entering their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wess.e.x, he went to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene. He was musing, "I think," he said at last, without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:
"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the cla.s.s-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives me the ear-ache."
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the ma.s.sive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the new and shining bra.s.s bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.
"Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he p.r.o.nounced her name).
She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there-the clothes on her side being flung back. Thinking she might have forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a few minutes, when, finding she did not come, he went out upon the landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"
"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen quarter.
"What are you doing down there at midnight-tiring yourself out for nothing!"