Part 31

“And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! … My eyes are so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much—indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature’s intention, Nature’s law and _raison d’être_ that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilization had taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature at her word!”

She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, “It is best, perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is! Better that they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!”

“Yes,” replied Jude. “Some say that the elders should rejoice when their children die in infancy.”

“But they don’t know! … Oh my babies, my babies, could you be alive now! You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he wouldn’t have done it. It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was part of his incurably sad nature, poor little fellow! But then the others—my _own_ children and yours!”

Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and shoes; and her figure quivered like a string. “I am a pitiable creature,” she said, “good neither for earth nor heaven any more! I am driven out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?” She stared at Jude, and tightly held his hand.

“Nothing can be done,” he replied. “Things are as they are, and will be brought to their destined issue.”

She paused. “Yes! Who said that?” she asked heavily.

“It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_. It has been in my mind continually since this happened.”

“My poor Jude—how you’ve missed everything!—you more than I, for I did get you! To think you should know that by your unassisted reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!”

After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral. Accounts in the newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood apparently counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls. Doubt of the real relations of the couple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had declared that she would follow the two little ones to the grave, but at the last moment she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out of the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehicle, and it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue and her luggage remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear of later on in the day, and so to have freed his house from the exasperating notoriety it had acquired during the week through his wife’s unlucky admission of these strangers. In the afternoon he privately consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that if any objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there they would try to get its number changed.

When Jude had seen the two little boxes—one containing little Jude, and the other the two smallest—deposited in the earth he hastened back to Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not disturb her just then. Feeling anxious, however, he went again about four o’clock. The woman thought she was still lying down, but returned to him to say that she was not in her bedroom after all. Her hat and jacket, too, were missing: she had gone out. Jude hurried off to the public house where he was sleeping. She had not been there. Then bethinking himself of possibilities he went along the road to the cemetery, which he entered, and crossed to where the interments had recently taken place. The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the tragedy were all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands was attempting to earth in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held back by an expostulating woman who stood in the half-filled hole. It was Sue, whose coloured clothing, which she had never thought of changing for the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than the conventional garb of bereavement could express.

“He’s filling them in, and he shan’t till I’ve seen my little ones again!” she cried wildly when she saw Jude. “I want to see them once more. Oh Jude—please Jude—I want to see them! I didn’t know you would let them be taken away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you didn’t, but took them away! Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!”

“She’s been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get to the coffins,” said the man with the spade. “She ought to be took home, by the look o’ her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly. Can’t dig ’em up again now, ma’am. Do ye go home with your husband, and take it quiet, and thank God that there’ll be another soon to swage yer grief.”

But Sue kept asking piteously: “Can’t I see them once more—just once! Can’t I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It would not take long! And I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey you ever any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards, and not want to see them any more! Can’t I? Why can’t I?”

Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he almost felt he would try to get the man to accede. But it could do no good, and might make her still worse; and he saw that it was imperative to get her home at once. So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put his arm round her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and was induced to leave the cemetery.

He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly, Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing. They were to have gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was not practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated house. Sue was at once got to bed, and the Doctor sent for.

Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.

III

Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had again obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings now, in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of Ceremonies—Saint Silas.

They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of things than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness. Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect scintillated like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces loom anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.

“We must conform!” she said mournfully. “All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and we must submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use fighting against God!”

“It is only against man and senseless circumstance,” said Jude.

“True!” she murmured. “What have I been thinking of! I am getting as superstitious as a savage! … But whoever or whatever our foe may be, I am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten! … ‘We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’ I am always saying that now.”

“I feel the same!”

“What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may only be because our history and relations are not absolutely known… Possibly, if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they would turn you out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!”

“I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think that we ought to make it legal now—as soon as you are able to go out.”

“You think we ought?”

“Certainly.”

And Jude fell into thought. “I have seemed to myself lately,” he said, “to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous—the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it! I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you, whom I love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as I? … Yes, Sue—that’s what I am. I seduced you… You were a distinct type—a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone!”

“No, no, Jude!” she said quickly. “Don’t reproach yourself with being what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I.”

“I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you go.”

“I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity of our first marriages.”

“Solemnity?” Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.

“Yes,” she said, with a little quiver in her words, “I have had dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have thought—that I am still his wife!”

“Whose?”

“Richard’s.”

“Good God, dearest!—why?”

“Oh I can’t explain! Only the thought comes to me.”

“It is your weakness—a sick fancy, without reason or meaning! Don’t let it trouble you.”

Sue sighed uneasily.

As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come an improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in their experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost directly he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and outwardly his days went on with that monotonous uniformity which is in itself so grateful after vicissitude. People seemed to have forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies, and he daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could never enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned windows he would never look from, as if he had known no wish to do otherwise.

There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue’s. She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he at that time respected, though he did not now.

On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late. She was not at home, but she soon returned, when he found her silent and meditative.

“What are you thinking of, little woman?” he asked curiously.

“Oh I can’t tell clearly! I have thought that we have been selfish, careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!”

“Sue!” he murmured. “What has come over you?”

“We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty! But I have always striven to do what has pleased me. I well deserved the scourging I have got! I wish something would take the evil right out of me, and all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!”

“Sue—my own too suffering dear!—there’s no evil woman in you. Your natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite so impassioned, perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and dear, and pure. And as I have often said, you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness. Why do you talk in such a changed way? We have not been selfish, except when no one could profit by our being otherwise. You used to say that human nature was noble and long-suffering, not vile and corrupt, and at last I thought you spoke truly. And now you seem to take such a much lower view!”

“I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had them yet!”

“You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too full of narrow dogmas at that time to see it.”

“Don’t say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and thought could be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!”

“Hush!” he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she were an infant. “It is bereavement that has brought you to this! Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones of the earth—who never feel it!”

“I ought not to stay like this,” she murmured, when she had remained in the position a long while.

“Why not?”

“It is indulgence.”

“Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on earth than that we should love one another?”

“Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours—ours—is the wrong.”

“I won’t have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our marriage to be signed in a vestry?”

She paused, and looked up uneasily. “Never,” she whispered.

Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the objection serenely, and said nothing. Several minutes elapsed, and he thought she had fallen asleep; but he spoke softly, and found that she was wide awake all the time. She sat upright and sighed.

“There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere about you to-night, Sue,” he said. “I mean not only mentally, but about your clothes, also. A sort of vegetable scent, which I seem to know, yet cannot remember.”

“It is incense.”

“Incense?”

“I have been to the service at St. Silas’, and I was in the fumes of it.”

“Oh—St. Silas.”

“Yes. I go there sometimes.”

“Indeed. You go there!”

“You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the weekday mornings, when you are at work, and I think and think of—of my—” She stopped till she could control the lumpiness of her throat. “And I have taken to go in there, as it is so near.”

“Oh well—of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd, for you. They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!”

“What do you mean, Jude?”

“Well—a sceptic, to be plain.”

“How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I know you didn’t mean it. But you ought not to say that.”

“I won’t. But I am much surprised!”

“Well—I want to tell you something else, Jude. You won’t be angry, will you? I have thought of it a good deal since my babies died. I don’t think I ought to be your wife—or as your wife—any longer.”

“What? … But you _are_!”

“From your point of view; but—”

“Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good many others would have been in our places, with such strong reasons for fears. But experience has proved how we misjudged ourselves, and overrated our infirmities; and if you are beginning to respect rites and ceremonies, as you seem to be, I wonder you don’t say it shall be carried out instantly? You certainly _are_ my wife, Sue, in all but law. What do you mean by what you said?”

“I don’t think I am!”

“Not? But suppose we _had_ gone through the ceremony? Would you feel that you were then?”

“No. I should not feel even then that I was. I should feel worse than I do now.”

“Why so—in the name of all that’s perverse, my dear?”

“Because I am Richard’s.”

“Ah—you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!”

“It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more convinced as time goes on that—I belong to him, or to nobody.”

“My good heavens—how we are changing places!”

“Yes. Perhaps so.”

Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening, they were sitting in the same small room downstairs, when a knock came to the front door of the carpenter’s house where they were lodging, and in a few moments there was a tap at the door of their room. Before they could open it the comer did so, and a woman’s form appeared.

“Is Mr. Fawley here?”

Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the affirmative, for the voice was Arabella’s.

He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down in the window bench, where they could distinctly see her outline against the light; but no characteristic that enabled them to estimate her general aspect and air. Yet something seemed to denote that she was not quite so comfortably circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she had been during Cartlett’s lifetime.

The three attempted an awkward conversation about the tragedy, of which Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her immediately, though she had never replied to his letter.

“I have just come from the cemetery,” she said. “I inquired and found the child’s grave. I couldn’t come to the funeral—thank you for inviting me all the same. I read all about it in the papers, and I felt I wasn’t wanted… No—I couldn’t come to the funeral,” repeated Arabella, who, seeming utterly unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic manner, fumbled with iterations. “But I am glad I found the grave. As ’tis your trade, Jude, you’ll be able to put up a handsome stone to ’em.”

“I shall put up a headstone,” said Jude drearily.

“He was my child, and naturally I feel for him.”

“I hope so. We all did.”

“The others that weren’t mine I didn’t feel so much for, as was natural.”

“Of course.”

A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.

“I had often wished I had mine with me,” continued Mrs. Cartlett. “Perhaps ’twouldn’t have happened then! But of course I didn’t wish to take him away from your wife.”

“I am not his wife,” came from Sue.

The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said Arabella. “I thought you were!”

Jude had known from the quality of Sue’s tone that her new and transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except their obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing that she was struck by Sue’s avowal, recovered herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness about “her” boy, for whom, though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience. She alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed again to Sue. There was no answer: Sue had invisibly left the room.

“She said she was not your wife?” resumed Arabella in another voice. “Why should she do that?”

“I cannot inform you,” said Jude shortly.

“She is, isn’t she? She once told me so.”

“I don’t criticize what she says.”

“Ah—I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night, and thought I could do no less than call, after our mutual affliction. I am sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow I go back to Alfredston. Father is come home again, and I am living with him.”

“He has returned from Australia?” said Jude with languid curiosity.

“Yes. Couldn’t get on there. Had a rough time of it. Mother died of dys—what do you call it—in the hot weather, and Father and two of the young ones have just got back. He has got a cottage near the old place, and for the present I am keeping house for him.”

Jude’s former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict good breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a number of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability. When she had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the stairs and called Sue—feeling anxious as to what had become of her.

There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings said she had not come in. Jude was puzzled, and became quite alarmed at her absence, for the hour was growing late. The carpenter called his wife, who conjectured that Sue might have gone to St. Silas’ church, as she often went there.

“Surely not at this time o’ night?” said Jude. “It is shut.”

“She knows somebody who keeps the key, and she has it whenever she wants it.”

“How long has she been going on with this?”

“Oh, some few weeks, I think.”

Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he had never once approached since he lived out that way years before, when his young opinions were more mystical than they were now. The spot was deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch without noise, and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely still inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint sound, explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came from the other end of the building. The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he moved in that direction through the obscurity, which was broken only by the faintest reflected night-light from without.