“Yes. Exactly. Very thoughtful of you, deary, even though it hasn’t much to do with our present business.”
“Why, yes it has! I’m giving my body to be burned! But—ah—you don’t understand!—it wants Sue to understand such things! And I was her seducer—poor little girl! And she’s gone—and I don’t care about myself! Do what you like with me! … And yet she did it for conscience’ sake, poor little Sue!”
“Hang her!—I mean, I think she was right,” hiccupped Arabella. “I’ve my feelings too, like her; and I feel I belong to you in Heaven’s eye, and to nobody else, till death us do part! It is—hic—never too late—hic—to mend!”
They had reached her father’s house, and she softly unfastened the door, groping about for a light within.
The circumstances were not altogether unlike those of their entry into the cottage at Cresscombe, such a long time before. Nor were perhaps Arabella’s motives. But Jude did not think of that, though she did.
“I can’t find the matches, dear,” she said when she had fastened up the door. “But never mind—this way. As quiet as you can, please.”
“It is as dark as pitch,” said Jude.
“Give me your hand, and I’ll lead you. That’s it. Just sit down here, and I’ll pull off your boots. I don’t want to wake him.”
“Who?”
“Father. He’d make a row, perhaps.”
She pulled off his boots. “Now,” she whispered, “take hold of me—never mind your weight. Now—first stair, second stair—”
“But—are we out in our old house by Marygreen?” asked the stupefied Jude. “I haven’t been inside it for years till now! Hey? And where are my books? That’s what I want to know?”
“We are at my house, dear, where there’s nobody to spy out how ill you are. Now—third stair, fourth stair—that’s it. Now we shall get on.”
VII
Arabella was preparing breakfast in the downstairs back room of this small, recently hired tenement of her father’s. She put her head into the little pork-shop in front, and told Mr. Donn it was ready. Donn, endeavouring to look like a master pork-butcher, in a greasy blue blouse, and with a strap round his waist from which a steel dangled, came in promptly.
“You must mind the shop this morning,” he said casually. “I’ve to go and get some inwards and half a pig from Lumsdon, and to call elsewhere. If you live here you must put your shoulder to the wheel, at least till I get the business started!”
“Well, for today I can’t say.” She looked deedily into his face. “I’ve got a prize upstairs.”
“Oh?—What’s that?”
“A husband—almost.”
“No!”
“Yes. It’s Jude. He’s come back to me.”
“Your old original one? Well, I’m damned!”
“Well, I always did like him, that I will say.”
“But how does he come to be up there?” said Donn, humour-struck, and nodding to the ceiling.
“Don’t ask inconvenient questions, father. What we’ve to do is to keep him here till he and I are—as we were.”
“How was that?”
“Married.”
“Ah. … Well it is the rummest thing I ever heard of—marrying an old husband again, and so much new blood in the world! He’s no catch, to my thinking. I’d have had a new one while I was about it.”
“It isn’t rum for a woman to want her old husband back for respectability, though for a man to want his old wife back—well, perhaps it is funny, rather!” And Arabella was suddenly seized with a fit of loud laughter, in which her father joined more moderately.
“Be civil to him, and I’ll do the rest,” she said when she had recovered seriousness. “He told me this morning that his head ached fit to burst, and he hardly seemed to know where he was. And no wonder, considering how he mixed his drink last night. We must keep him jolly and cheerful here for a day or two, and not let him go back to his lodging. Whatever you advance I’ll pay back to you again. But I must go up and see how he is now, poor deary.”
Arabella ascended the stairs, softly opened the door of the first bedroom, and peeped in. Finding that her shorn Samson was asleep she entered to the bedside and stood regarding him. The fevered flush on his face from the debauch of the previous evening lessened the fragility of his ordinary appearance, and his long lashes, dark brows, and curly black hair and beard against the white pillow, completed the physiognomy of one whom Arabella, as a woman of rank passions, still felt it worth while to recapture, highly important to recapture as a woman straitened both in means and in reputation. Her ardent gaze seemed to affect him; his quick breathing became suspended, and he opened his eyes.
“How are you now, dear?” said she. “It is I—Arabella.”
“Ah!—where—O yes, I remember! You gave me shelter. … I am stranded—ill—demoralized—damn bad! That’s what I am!”
“Then do stay there. There’s nobody in the house but father and me, and you can rest till you are thoroughly well. I’ll tell them at the stone-works that you are knocked up.”
“I wonder what they are thinking at the lodgings!”
“I’ll go round and explain. Perhaps you had better let me pay up, or they’ll think we’ve run away?”
“Yes. You’ll find enough money in my pocket there.”
Quite indifferent, and shutting his eyes because he could not bear the daylight in his throbbing eyeballs, Jude seemed to doze again. Arabella took his purse, softly left the room, and putting on her outdoor things went off to the lodgings she and he had quitted the evening before.
Scarcely half-an-hour had elapsed ere she reappeared round the corner, walking beside a lad wheeling a truck on which were piled all Jude’s household possessions, and also
