"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. She was not there, even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing, and again called her name.
She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones were small and confined, and whence they came he could not at first understand. Under the staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed to come from it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or other fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she had suddenly become deranged.
"What are you doing in there?" he asked.
"Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late."
"But there"s no bed, is there? And no ventilation! Why, you"ll be suffocated if you stay all night!"
"Oh no, I think not. Don"t trouble about me."
"But-" Phillotson seized the k.n.o.b and pulled at the door. She had fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke at his pull. There being no bedstead she had flung down some rugs and made a little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet afforded.
When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and trembling.
"You ought not to have pulled open the door!" she cried excitedly. "It is not becoming in you! Oh, will you go away; please will you!"
She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white nightgown against the shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried. She continued to beseech him not to disturb her.
He said: "I"ve been kind to you, and given you every liberty; and it is monstrous that you should feel in this way!"
"Yes," said she, weeping. "I know that! It is wrong and wicked of me, I suppose! I am very sorry. But it is not I altogether that am to blame!"
"Who is then? Am I?"
"No-I don"t know! The universe, I suppose-things in general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"
"Well, it is no use talking like that. Making a man"s house so unseemly at this time o" night! Eliza will hear if we don"t mind." (He meant the servant.) "Just think if either of the parsons in this town was to see us now! I hate such eccentricities, Sue. There"s no order or regularity in your sentiments! ... But I won"t intrude on you further; only I would advise you not to shut the door too tight, or I shall find you stifled to-morrow."
On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet, but Sue had already gone downstairs. There was a little nest where she had lain, and spiders" webs hung overhead. "What must a woman"s aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!" he said bitterly.
He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal began almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement-or rather roadway, pavements being scarce here-which was two or three feet above the level of the parlour floor. They nodded down to the happy couple their morning greetings, as they went on.
"Richard," she said all at once; "would you mind my living away from you?"
"Away from me? Why, that"s what you were doing when I married you. What then was the meaning of marrying at all?"
"You wouldn"t like me any the better for telling you."
"I don"t object to know."
"Because I thought I could do nothing else. You had got my promise a long time before that, remember. Then, as time went on, I regretted I had promised you, and was trying to see an honourable way to break it off. But as I couldn"t I became rather reckless and careless about the conventions. Then you know what scandals were spread, and how I was turned out of the training school you had taken such time and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and this frightened me and it seemed then that the one thing I could do would be to let the engagement stand. Of course I, of all people, ought not to have cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care for. But I was a coward-as so many women are-and my theoretic unconventionality broke down. If that had not entered into the case it would have been better to have hurt your feelings once for all then, than to marry you and hurt them all my life after... And you were so generous in never giving credit for a moment to the rumour."
"I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its probability and inquired of your cousin about it."
"Ah!" she said with pained surprise.
"I didn"t doubt you."
"But you inquired!"
"I took his word."
Her eyes had filled. "He wouldn"t have inquired!" she said. "But you haven"t answered me. Will you let me go away? I know how irregular it is of me to ask it-"
"It is irregular."
"But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to temperaments, which should be cla.s.sified. If people are at all peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that produce comfort in others! ... Will you let me?"
"But we married-"
"What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances," she burst out, "if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?"
"But you are committing a sin in not liking me."
"I do like you! But I didn"t reflect it would be-that it would be so much more than that... For a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circ.u.mstances, however legal. There-I"ve said it! ... Will you let me, Richard?"
"You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"
"Why can"t we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and surely we can cancel it-not legally of course; but we can morally, especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen to be looked after. Then we might be friends, and meet without pain to either. Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall both be dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd. Well-why should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn"t hurt other people?"
"But it does-it hurts me! And you vowed to love me."
"Yes-that"s it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"
"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"
"Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude."
"As his wife?"
"As I choose."
Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: "She, or he, "who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation." J. S. Mill"s words, those are. I have been reading it up. Why can"t you act upon them? I wish to, always."
"What do I care about J. S. Mill!" moaned he. "I only want to lead a quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never once occurred to me before our marriage-that you were in love, and are in love, with Jude Fawley!"
"You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun. But do you suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and live with him?"
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being such a convincing argumentum ad verecundiam as she, in her loss of courage at the last moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her other little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering the cla.s.s-room, where he could see the back of her head through the gla.s.s part.i.tion whenever he turned his eyes that way. As he went on giving and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched from concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore a sc.r.a.p from a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote: