by Thomas Hardy
The lamps now began to be lighted, and turning to the west front he walked round. He took it as a good omen that numerous blocks of stone were lying about, which signified that the cathedral was undergoing restoration or repair to a considerable extent. It seemed to him, full of the superstitions of his beliefs, that this was an exercise of forethought on the part of a ruling Power, that he might find plenty to do in the art he practised while waiting for a call to higher labours.
Then a wave of warmth came over him as he thought how near he now stood to the bright-eyed vivacious girl with the broad forehead and pile of dark hair above it; the girl with the kindling glance, daringly soft at times — something like that of the girls he had seen in engravings from paintings of the Spanish school. She was here — actually in this Close — in one of the houses confronting this very west façade.
He went down the broad gravel path towards the building. It was an ancient edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace, now a training-school, with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall. Jude opened the gate and went up to the door through which, on inquiring for his cousin, he was gingerly admitted to a waiting-room, and in a few minutes she came.
Though she had been here such a short while, she was not as he had seen her last. All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had become subdued lines. The screens and subtleties of convention had likewise disappeared. Yet neither was she quite the woman who had written the letter that summoned him. That had plainly been dashed off in an impulse which second thoughts had somewhat regretted; thoughts that were possibly of his recent self-disgrace. Jude was quite overcome with emotion.
“You don’t — think me a demoralised wretch — for coming to you as I was — and going so shamefully, Sue?”
“Oh, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know what had caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my poor Jude! And I am glad you have come!”
She wore a murrey-coloured gown with a little lace collar. It was made quite plain, and hung about her slight figure with clinging gracefulness. Her hair, which formerly she had worn according to the custom of the day was now twisted up tightly, and she had altogether the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an under-brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline had not yet been able to reach.
She had come forward prettily, but Jude felt that she had hardly expected him to kiss her, as he was burning to do, under other colours than those of cousinship. He could not perceive the least sign that Sue regarded him as a lover, or ever would do so, now that she knew the worst of him, even if he had the right to behave as one; and this helped on his growing resolve to tell her of his matrimonial entanglement, which he had put off doing from time to time in sheer dread of losing the bliss of her company.
Sue came out into the town with him, and they walked and talked with tongues centred only on the passing moments. Jude said he would like to buy her a little present of some sort, and then she confessed, with something of shame, that she was dreadfully hungry. They were kept on very short allowances in the college, and a dinner, tea, and supper all in one was the present she most desired in the world. Jude thereupon took her to an inn and ordered whatever the house afforded, which was not much. The place, however, gave them a delightful opportunity for a tête-à-tête, nobody else being in the room, and they talked freely.
She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of a young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but it was not what he wanted especially to know — her relations with Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up and smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one, dividing his fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the fingers of a glove she was purchasing.
“Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?” she said.
“Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day.”
“I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man’s hands subdued to what he works in… Well, I’m rather glad I came to this training-school, after all. See how independent I shall be after the two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr. Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school.”
She had touched the subject at last. “I had a suspicion, a fear,” said Jude, “that he — cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps wanted to marry you.”
“Now don’t be such a silly boy!”
“He has said something about it, I expect.”
“If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!”
“Oh, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw him doing — ”
“Not kissing me — that I’m certain!”
“No. But putting his arm round your waist.”
“Ah — I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.”
“You are wriggling out if it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!”
Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at something this reproof was deciding her to say.
“I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s why I don’t want to!”
“Very well, then, dear,” he said soothingly. “I have no real right to ask you, and I don’t wish to know.”
“I shall tell you!” said she, with the perverseness that was part of her. “This is what I have done: I have promised — I have promised — that I will marry him when I come out of the training-school two years hence, and have got my certificate; his plan being that we shall then take a large double school in a great town — he the boys’ and I the girls’ — as married school-teachers often do, and make a good income between us.”
“Oh, Sue! … But of course it is right — you couldn’t have done better!”
He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his own belying his words. Then he drew his hand quite away from hers, and turned his face in estrangement from her to the window. Sue regarded him passively without moving.
“I knew you would be angry!” she said with an air of no emotion whatever. “Very well — I am wrong, I suppose! I ought not to have let you come to see me! We had better not meet again; and we’ll only correspond at long intervals, on purely business matters!”
This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear, as she probably knew, and it brought him round at once. “Oh yes, we will,” he said quickly. “Your being engaged can make no difference to me whatever. I have a perfect right to see you when I want to; and I shall!”
“Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling our evening together. What does it matter about what one is going to do two years hence!”
She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the subject drift away. “Shall we go and sit in the cathedral?” he asked, when their meal was finished.
“Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway station,” she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. “That’s the centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!”
“How modern you are!”
“So would you be if you had lived so much in the Middle Ages as I have done these last few years! The cathedral was a very good place four or five centuries ago; but it is played out now… I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.”
Jude looked distressed.
“There — I won’t say any more of that!” she cried. “Only you don’t know how bad I am, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t think so much of me, or care whether I was engaged or not. Now there’s just time for us to walk round the Close, then I must go in, or I shall be locked out for the n
ight.”
He took her to the gate and they parted. Jude had a conviction that his unhappy visit to her on that sad night had precipitated this marriage engagement, and it did anything but add to his happiness. Her reproach had taken that shape, then, and not the shape of words. However, next day he set about seeking employment, which it was not so easy to get as at Christminster, there being, as a rule, less stone-cutting in progress in this quiet city, and hands being mostly permanent. But he edged himself in by degrees. His first work was some carving at the cemetery on the hill; and ultimately he became engaged on the labour he most desired — the cathedral repairs, which were very extensive, the whole interior stonework having been overhauled, to be largely replaced by new. It might be a labour of years to get it all done, and he had confidence enough in his own skill with the mallet and chisel to feel that it would be a matter of choice with himself how long he would stay.
The lodgings he took near the Close Gate would not have disgraced a curate, the rent representing a higher percentage on his wages than mechanics of any sort usually care to pay. His combined bed and sitting-room was furnished with framed photographs of the rectories and deaneries at which his landlady had lived as trusted servant in her time, and the parlour downstairs bore a clock on the mantelpiece inscribed to the effect that it was presented to the same serious-minded woman by her fellow-servants on the occasion of her marriage. Jude added to the furniture of his room by unpacking photographs of the ecclesiastical carvings and monuments that he had executed with his own hands; and he was deemed a satisfactory acquisition as tenant of the vacant apartment.
He found an ample supply of theological books in the city book-shops, and with these his studies were recommenced in a different spirit and direction from his former course. As a relaxation from the Fathers, and such stock works as Paley and Butler, he read Newman, Pusey, and many other modern lights. He hired a harmonium, set it up in his lodging, and practised chants thereon, single and double.
CHAPTER II
“To-morrow is our grand day, you know. Where shall we go?”
“I have leave from three till nine. Wherever we can get to and come back from in that time. Not ruins, Jude — I don’t care for them.”
“Well — Wardour Castle. And then we can do Fonthill if we like — all in the same afternoon.”
“Wardour is Gothic ruins — and I hate Gothic!”
“No. Quite otherwise. It is a classic building — Corinthian, I think; with a lot of pictures.”
“Ah — that will do. I like the sound of Corinthian. We’ll go.”
Their conversation had run thus some few weeks later, and next morning they prepared to start. Every detail of the outing was a facet reflecting a sparkle to Jude, and he did not venture to meditate on the life of inconsistency he was leading. His Sue’s conduct was one lovely conundrum to him; he could say no more.
There duly came the charm of calling at the college door for her; her emergence in a nunlike simplicity of costume that was rather enforced than desired; the traipsing along to the station, the porters’ “B’your leave!,” the screaming of the trains — everything formed the basis of a beautiful crystallization. Nobody stared at Sue, because she was so plainly dressed, which comforted Jude in the thought that only himself knew the charms those habiliments subdued. A matter of ten pounds spent in a drapery-shop, which had no connection with her real life or her real self, would have set all Melchester staring. The guard of the train thought they were lovers, and put them into a compartment all by themselves.
“That’s a good intention wasted!” said she.
Jude did not respond. He thought the remark unnecessarily cruel, and partly untrue.
They reached the park and castle and wandered through the picture-galleries, Jude stopping by preference in front of the devotional pictures by Del Sarto, Guido Reni, Spagnoletto, Sassoferrato, Carlo Dolci, and others. Sue paused patiently beside him, and stole critical looks into his face as, regarding the Virgins, Holy Families, and Saints, it grew reverent and abstracted. When she had thoroughly estimated him at this, she would move on and wait for him before a Lely or Reynolds. It was evident that her cousin deeply interested her, as one might be interested in a man puzzling out his way along a labyrinth from which one had one’s self escaped.
When they came out a long time still remained to them and Jude proposed that as soon as they had had something to eat they should walk across the high country to the north of their present position, and intercept the train of another railway leading back to Melchester, at a station about seven miles off. Sue, who was inclined for any adventure that would intensify the sense of her day’s freedom, readily agreed; and away they went, leaving the adjoining station behind them.
It was indeed open country, wide and high. They talked and bounded on, Jude cutting from a little covert a long walking-stick for Sue as tall as herself, with a great crook, which made her look like a shepherdess. About half-way on their journey they crossed a main road running due east and west — the old road from London to Land’s End. They paused, and looked up and down it for a moment, and remarked upon the desolation which had come over this once lively thoroughfare, while the wind dipped to earth and scooped straws and hay-stems from the ground.
They crossed the road and passed on, but during the next half-mile Sue seemed to grow tired, and Jude began to be distressed for her. They had walked a good distance altogether, and if they could not reach the other station it would be rather awkward. For a long time there was no cottage visible on the wide expanse of down and turnip-land; but presently they came to a sheepfold, and next to the shepherd, pitching hurdles. He told them that the only house near was his mother’s and his, pointing to a little dip ahead from which a faint blue smoke arose, and recommended them to go on and rest there.
This they did, and entered the house, admitted by an old woman without a single tooth, to whom they were as civil as strangers can be when their only chance of rest and shelter lies in the favour of the householder.
“A nice little cottage,” said Jude.
“Oh, I don’t know about the niceness. I shall have to thatch it soon, and where the thatch is to come from I can’t tell, for straw do get that dear, that ‘twill soon be cheaper to cover your house wi’ chainey plates than thatch.”
They sat resting, and the shepherd came in. “Don’t ‘ee mind I,” he said with a deprecating wave of the hand; “bide here as long as ye will. But mid you be thinking o’ getting back to Melchester to-night by train? Because you’ll never do it in this world, since you don’t know the lie of the country. I don’t mind going with ye some o’ the ways, but even then the train mid be gone.”
They started up.
“You can bide here, you know, over the night — can’t ‘em, Mother? The place is welcome to ye. ‘Tis hard lying, rather, but volk may do worse.” He turned to Jude and asked privately: “Be you a married couple?”
“Hsh — no!” said Jude.
“Oh — I meant nothing ba’dy — not I! Well then, she can go into Mother’s room, and you and I can lie in the outer chimmer after they’ve gone through. I can call ye soon enough to catch the first train back. You’ve lost this one now.”
On consideration they decided to close with this offer, and drew up and shared with the shepherd and his mother the boiled bacon and greens for supper.
“I rather like this,” said Sue, while their entertainers were clearing away the dishes. “Outside all laws except gravitation and germination.”
“You only think you like it; you don’t: you are quite a product of civilization,” said Jude, a recollection of her engagement reviving his soreness a little.
“Indeed I am not, Jude. I like reading and all that, but I crave to get back to the life of my infancy and its freedom.”
“Do you remember it so well? You seem to me to have nothing unconventional at all about you.”
“Oh, haven’t I! You don’t know what’s inside me.”
“What?”
“The Ishmaelite.”
“An urban miss is what you are.”
She looked severe disagreement, and turned away.
The shepherd aroused them the next morning, as he had said. It was bright and clear, and the four miles to the train were accomplished pleasantly. When they had reached Melchester, and walked to the Close, and the gables of the old building in which she was again to be immured rose before Sue’s eyes, she looked a little scared. “I expect I shall catch it!” she murmured.
They rang the great bell and waited.
“Oh, I bought something for you, which I had nearly forgotten,” she said quickly, searching her pocket. “It is a new little photograph of me. Would you like it?”
“Would I!” He took it gladly, and the porter came. There seemed to be an ominous glance on his face when he opened the gate. She passed in, looking back at Jude, and waving her hand.
CHAPTER III
The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled the species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester, formed a very mixed community, which included the daughters of mechanics, curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairy-men, soldiers, sailors, and villagers. They sat in the large school-room of the establishment on the evening previously described, and word was passed round that Sue Bridehead had not come in at closing-time.
“She went out with her young man,” said a second-year’s student, who knew about young men. “And Miss Traceley saw her at the station with him. She’ll have it hot when she does come.”
“She said he was her cousin,” observed a youthful new girl.
“That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be effectual in saving our souls,” said the head girl of the year, drily.
The fact was that, only twelve months before, there had occurred a lamentable seduction of one of the pupils who had made the same statement in order to gain meetings with her lover. The affair had created a scandal, and the management had consequently been rough on cousins ever since.