第52章 At Melchester(11)

By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment,under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature.Some men would have cast scruples to the winds,and ventured it,oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings,and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church.Jude did not.He had,in fact,come in part to tell his own fatal story.It was upon his lips;yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it.He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them.

'Of course -I know you don't -care about me in any particular way,'he sorrowed.'You ought not,and you are right.You belong to -Mr.

Phillotson.I suppose he has been to see you?'

'Yes,'she said shortly,her face changing a little.'Though Ididn't ask him to come.You are glad,of course,that he has been!But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!'

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival,if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her.He went on to something else.

'This will blow over,dear Sue,'he said.'The training-school authorities are not all the world.You can get to be a student in some other,no doubt.'

'I'll ask Mr.Phillotson,'she said decisively.

Sue's kind hostess now returned from church,and there was no more intimate conversation.Jude left in the afternoon,hopelessly unhappy.

But he had seen her,and sat with her.Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life.The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he,as a parish priest,should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her,and decided that she was rather unreasonable,not to say capricious.Then,in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note,which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her:

Forgive me for my petulance yesterday!I was horrid to you;I know it,and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness.It was so dear of you not to be angry!Jude please still keep me as your friend and associate,with all my faults.I'll try not to he like it again.

I am coming to Melchester on Saturday,to get my things away from the T.S.,&c.I could walk with you for half an hour,if you would like?-Your repentant Sue.Jude forgave her straightway,and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came.

Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter.He was Richard Phillotson,who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster,to undertake a large boys'school in his native town of Shaston,which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common.Essentially an unpractical man,he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose -that of keeping a wife,who,if she chose,might conduct one of the girls'schools adjoining his own;for which purpose he had advised her to go into training,since she would not marry him offhand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester,and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue,the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston.All the furniture being fixed,the books shelved,and the nails driven,he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies -one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities -an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject,that,after his abandonment of the university scheme,had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine;practicable to those who,like himself,had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant,and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present -his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways,dykes,and tumuli abounded,or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns,tiles,and mosaics he had collected,instead of calling round upon his new neighbours,who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him.But it was not the real,or the whole,reason,after all.Thus on a particular evening in the month,when it had grown quite late -to near midnight,indeed -and the light of his lamp,shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward,announced as by words a place and person given over to study,he was not exactly studying.

The interior of the room -the books,the furniture,the schoolmaster's loose coat,his attitude at the table,even the flickering of the fire,bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research -more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making.And yet the tale,true enough till latterly,was not true now.What he was regarding was not history.They were historic notes,written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months before,and it was the clerical rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,few,very few,as correspondence counts nowadays.Each was in its envelope just as it had arrived,and the handwriting was of the same womanly character as the historic notes.He unfolded them one by one and read them musingly.