flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite—not a woman!'
'At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion—the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man—was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then—I don't know how it was—I couldn't bear to let you go— possibly to Arabella again—and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.'
'And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!'
'Ah—yes! The further I flounder, the more harm I do!'
'O Sue!' said he with a sudden sense of his own danger. 'Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons! You have been my social salvation. Stay with me for humanity's sake! You know what a weak fellow I am. My two arch-enemies you know—my weakness for womankind and my impulse to strong liquor. Don't abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul only! They have been kept entirely at a distance since you became my guardian-angel! Since I have had you I have been able to go into any temptations of the sort, without risk. Isn't my safety worth a little sacrifice of dogmatic principle? I am in terror lest, if you leave me, it will be with me another case of the pig that was washed turning back to his wallowing in the mire!'
Sue burst out weeping. 'Oh, but you must not, Jude! You won't! I'll pray for you night and day!'
'Well—never mind; don't grieve,' said Jude generously. 'I did suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I suffer again. But perhaps not so much as you. The woman mostly gets the worst of it in the long run!'
'She does.'
'Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible. And this one is not that, anyhow!'
Sue drew a nervous breath or two. 'She is—I fear! … Now Jude—good-night,—please!'
'I mustn't stay?—Not just once more? As it has been so many times—O Sue, my wife, why not!'
'No—no—not wife! … I am in your hands, Jude—don't tempt me back now I have advanced so far!'
'Very well. I do your bidding. I owe that to you, darling, in penance for how I overruled it at the first time. My God, how selfish I was! Perhaps—perhaps I spoilt one of the highest and purest loves that ever existed between man and woman! … Then let the veil of our temple be rent in two from this hour!'
He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and flung it to the floor.
Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept silently. 'You don't see that it is a matter of conscience with me, and not of dislike to you!' she brokenly murmured. 'Dislike to you! But I can't say any more—it breaks my heart—it will be undoing all I have begun! Jude—good-night!'
'Good-night,' he said, and turned to go.
'Oh but you shall kiss me!' said she, starting up. 'I can't—bear—!'
He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely ever done before, and they remained in silence till she said, 'Good-bye, good-bye!' And then gently pressing him away she got free, trying to mitigate the sadness by saying: 'We'll be dear friends just the same, Jude, won't we? And we'll see each other sometimes— yes!—and forget all this, and try to be as we were long ago?'
Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the stairs.
IV
The man whom Sue, in her mental
On the day before the tragedy of the children, Phillotson had seen both her and Jude as they stood in the rain at Christminster watching the procession to the theatre. But he had said nothing of it at the moment to his companion Gillingham, who, being an old friend, was staying with him at the village aforesaid, and had, indeed, suggested the day's trip to Christminster.
'What are you thinking of?' said Gillingham, as they went home. 'The university degree you never obtained?'
'No, no,' said Phillotson gruffly. 'Of somebody I saw to-day.' In a moment he added, 'Susanna.'
'I saw her, too.'
'You said nothing.'
'I didn't wish to draw your attention to her. But, as you did see her, you should have said: 'How d'ye do, my dear-that-was?''
'Ah, well. I might have. But what do you think of this: I have good reason for supposing that she was innocent when I divorced her—that I was all wrong. Yes, indeed! Awkward, isn't it?'
'She has taken care to set you right since, anyhow, apparently.'
'H'm. That's a cheap sneer. I ought to have waited, unquestionably.'
At the end of the week, when Gillingham had gone back to his school near Shaston, Phillotson, as was his custom, went to Alfredston market; ruminating again on Arabella's intelligence as he walked down the long hill which he had known before Jude knew it, though his history had not beaten so intensely upon its incline. Arrived in the town he bought his usual weekly local paper; and when he had sat down in an inn to refresh himself for the five miles' walk back, he pulled the paper from his pocket and read awhile. The account of the 'strange suicide of a stone-mason's children' met his eye.
Unimpassioned as he was, it impressed him painfully, and puzzled him not a little, for he could not understand the age of the elder child being what it was stated to be. However, there was no doubt that the newspaper report was in some way true.
'Their cup of sorrow is now full!' he said: and thought and thought of Sue, and what she had gained by leaving him.
Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the schoolmaster coming to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful that in a few weeks they met again—the precise time being just alter her return from Christminster, where she had stayed much longer than she had at first intended, keeping an interested eye on Jude, though Jude had seen no more of her. Phillotson was on his way homeward when he encountered Arabella, and she was approaching the town.
'You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?' he said.
'I've just begun to again,' she replied. 'It is where I lived as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road. And they have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I've been visiting at Christminster. Yes; I've seen Jude.'
'Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?'
'In a ve-ry strange way—ve-ry strange! She don't live with him any longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though I had thought things were drifting that way from their manner when I called on them.'
'Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought 'twould have united them more.'
'He's not her husband, after all. She has never really married him although they have passed as man and wife so long. And now, instead of this sad event making 'em hurry up, and get the thing done legally, she's took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my affliction at losing Cartlett, only hers is of a more 'sterical sort than mine. And she says, so I was told, that she's your wife in the eye of Heaven and the Church—yours only; and can't be anybody else's by any act of man.'
'Ah—indeed? … Separated, have they!'
'You see, the eldest boy was mine—'
'Oh—yours!'
'Yes, poor little fellow—born in lawful wedlock, thank God. And perhaps she feels, over and above other things, that I ought to have been in her place. I can't say. However, as for me, I am soon off from here. I've got Father to look after now, and we can't live in such a hum-drum place as this. I hope soon to be in a bar again at Christminster, or some other big town.'
They parted. When Phillotson had ascended the hill a few steps he stopped, hastened back, and called her.
