Chapter: "Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before
the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let
him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he
is no better than a Pharisee."--J. MILTON.


Shaston, the ancient British Palladour,

     From whose foundation first such strange reports
     arise,


(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream.
Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent
apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches,
its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions--all
now ruthlessly swept away--throw the visitor, even against his will,
into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and
limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.  The spot was the
burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints
and bishops, knights and squires.  The bones of King Edward "the
Martyr," carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought
Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part
of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far
beyond English shores.  To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age
the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With
the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a
general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile
that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.

The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
but strange to say these qualities, which were noted by many writers
in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are
passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in
England stands virtually unvisited to-day.

It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp,
rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of
the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green
over three counties of verdant pasture--South, Mid, and Nether
Wessex--being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's
eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs.  Impossible to a railway,
it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and
it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that
side.

Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.
Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within
living memory, horses, donkeys and men may have been seen toiling
up the winding ways to the top of the height, laden with tubs and
barrels filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers
retailing their contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.

This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd
facts, namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a
roof behind the church, and that in former times the town passed
through a curious period of corruption, conventual and domestic, gave
rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations
to man, such as the world afforded not elsewhere.  It was a place
where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple, where
beer was more plentiful than water, and where there were more wanton
women than honest wives and maids.  It is also said that after the
Middle Ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests,
and hence were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain
altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity which they
bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on Sunday
afternoons.  In those days the Shastonians were apparently not
without a sense of humour.

There was another peculiarity--this a modern one--which Shaston
appeared to owe to its site.  It was the resting-place and
headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows,
shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business
lay largely at fairs and markets.  As strange wild birds are seen
assembled on some lofty promontory, meditatively pausing for longer
flights, or to return by the course they followed thither, so here,
in this cliff-town, stood in stultified silence the yellow and green
caravans bearing names not local, as if surprised by a change in the
landscape so violent as to hinder their further progress; and here
they usually remained all the winter till they turned to seek again
their old tracks in the following spring.

It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that Jude ascended from the
nearest station for the first time in his life about four o'clock one
afternoon, and entering on the summit of the peak after a toilsome
climb, passed the first houses of the aerial town; and drew towards
the school-house.  The hour was too early; the pupils were still in
school, humming small, like a swarm of gnats; and he withdrew a few
steps along Abbey Walk, whence he regarded the spot which fate had
made the home of all he loved best in the world.  In front of the
schools, which were extensive and stone-built, grew two enormous
beeches with smooth mouse-coloured trunks, as such trees will only
grow on chalk uplands.  Within the mullioned and transomed windows he
could see the black, brown, and flaxen crowns of the scholars over
the sills, and to pass the time away he walked down to the level
terrace where the abbey gardens once had spread, his heart throbbing
in spite of him.

Unwilling to enter till the children were dismissed he remained here
till young voices could be heard in the open air, and girls in white
pinafores over red and blue frocks appeared dancing along the paths
which the abbess, prioress, subprioress, and fifty nuns had demurely
paced three centuries earlier.  Retracing his steps he found that he
had waited too long, and that Sue had gone out into the town at the
heels of the last scholar, Mr. Phillotson having been absent all the
afternoon at a teachers' meeting at Shottsford.

Jude went into the empty schoolroom and sat down, the girl who was
sweeping the floor having informed him that Mrs. Phillotson would be
back again in a few minutes.  A piano stood near--actually the old
piano that Phillotson had possessed at Marygreen--and though the dark
afternoon almost prevented him seeing the notes Jude touched them in
his humble way, and could not help modulating into the hymn which had
so affected him in the previous week.

A figure moved behind him, and thinking it was still the girl with
the broom Jude took no notice, till the person came close and laid
her fingers lightly upon his bass hand.  The imposed hand was a
little one he seemed to know, and he turned.

"Don't stop," said Sue.  "I like it.  I learnt it before I left
Melchester.  They used to play it in the training school."

"I can't strum before you!  Play it for me."

"Oh well--I don't mind."

Sue sat down, and her rendering of the piece, though not remarkable,
seemed divine as compared with his own.  She, like him, was evidently
touched--to her own surprise--by the recalled air; and when she
had finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own
half-way. Jude grasped it--just as he had done before her marriage.

"It is odd," she said, in a voice quite changed, "that I should care
about that air; because--"

"Because what?"

"I am not that sort--quite."

"Not easily moved?"

"I didn't quite mean that."

"Oh, but you ARE one of that sort, for you are just like me at
heart!"

"But not at head."

She played on and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated
instinct each clasped the other's hand again.

She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly.
"How funny!" she said.  "I wonder what we both did that for?"

"I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before."

"Not in our thoughts!  Perhaps a little in our feelings."

"And they rule thoughts...  Isn't it enough to make one blaspheme
that the composer of that hymn is one of the most commonplace men I
ever met!"

"What--you know him?"

"I went to see him."

"Oh, you goose--to do just what I should have done!  Why did you?"

"Because we are not alike," he said drily.

"Now we'll have some tea," said Sue.  "Shall we have it here instead
of in my house?  It is no trouble to get the kettle and things
brought in.  We don't live at the school you know, but in that
ancient dwelling across the way called Old-Grove Place.  It is so
antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully.  Such houses are
very well to visit, but not to live in--I feel crushed into the earth
by the weight of so many previous lives there spent.  In a new place
like these schools there is only your own life to support.  Sit down,
and I'll tell Ada to bring the tea-things across."

He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she flung open
before going out, and when she returned, followed by the maiden with
tea, they sat down by the same light, assisted by the blue rays of a
spirit-lamp under the brass kettle on the stand.

"This is one of your wedding-presents to me," she said, signifying
the latter.

"Yes," said Jude.

The kettle of his gift sang with some satire in its note, to his
mind; and to change the subject he said, "Do you know of any good
readable edition of the uncanonical books of the New Testament?  You
don't read them in the school I suppose?"

"Oh dear no!--'twould alarm the neighbourhood...  Yes, there is one.
I am not familiar with it now, though I was interested in it when my
former friend was alive.  Cowper's _Apocryphal Gospels_."

"That sounds like what I want."  His thoughts, however reverted with
a twinge to the "former friend"--by whom she meant, as he knew, the
university comrade of her earlier days.  He wondered if she talked of
him to Phillotson.

"The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice," she went on to keep him from
his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly, as she always did.
Indeed when they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was
ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions,
so perfect was the reciprocity between them.  "It is quite like the
genuine article.  All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like
one of the other evangelists read in a dream, when things are the
same, yet not the same.  But, Jude, do you take an interest in those
questions still?  Are you getting up _Apologetica_?"

"Yes.  I am reading Divinity harder than ever."

She regarded him curiously.

"Why do you look at me like that?" said Jude.

"Oh--why do you want to know?"

"I am sure you can tell me anything I may be ignorant of in that
subject.  You must have learnt a lot of everything from your dear
dead friend!"

"We won't get on to that now!" she coaxed.  "Will you be carving out
at that church again next week, where you learnt the pretty hymn?"

"Yes, perhaps."

"That will be very nice.  Shall I come and see you there?  It is in
this direction, and I could come any afternoon by train for half an
hour?"

"No. Don't come!"

"What--aren't we going to be friends, then, any longer, as we used to
be?"

"No."

"I didn't know that.  I thought you were always going to be kind to
me!"

"No, I am not."

"What have I done, then?  I am sure I thought we two--"  The
_tremolo_ in her voice caused her to break off.

"Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt," said he abruptly.

There was a momentary pause, till she suddenly jumped up; and to his
surprise he saw by the kettle-flame that her face was flushed.

"I can't talk to you any longer, Jude!" she said, the tragic
contralto note having come back as of old.  "It is getting too dark
to stay together like this, after playing morbid Good Friday tunes
that make one feel what one shouldn't! ...  We mustn't sit and talk
in this way any more.  Yes--you must go away, for you mistake me!  I
am very much the reverse of what you say so cruelly--Oh, Jude, it WAS
cruel to say that!  Yet I can't tell you the truth--I should shock
you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I
feel that I shouldn't have been provided with attractiveness unless
it were meant to be exercised!  Some women's love of being loved is
insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last
case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the
chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's licence to receive it.
But you are so straightforward, Jude, that you can't understand
me! ...  Now you must go. I am sorry my husband is not at home."

"Are you?"

"I perceive I have said that in mere convention!  Honestly I don't
think I am sorry.  It does not matter, either way, sad to say!"

As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched
his fingers but lightly when he went out now.  He had hardly gone
from the door when, with a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form
and opened the iron casement of a window beneath which he was passing
in the path without.  "When do you leave here to catch your train,
Jude?" she asked.

He looked up in some surprise.  "The coach that runs to meet it goes
in three-quarters of an hour or so."

"What will you do with yourself for the time?"

"Oh--wander about, I suppose.  Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old
church."

"It does seem hard of me to pack you off so!  You have thought enough
of churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark. Stay
there."

"Where?"

"Where you are.  I can talk to you better like this than when you
were inside...  It was so kind and tender of you to give up half
a day's work to come to see me! ...  You are Joseph the dreamer of
dreams, dear Jude.  And a tragic Don Quixote.  And sometimes you
are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven
opened.  Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!"

Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not
get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had
feared at close quarters.

"I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one
brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into
have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional
shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.  I
am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with
my counterpart of that name.  But I am not really Mrs. Richard
Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant
passions, and unaccountable antipathies...  Now you mustn't wait
longer, or you will lose the coach.  Come and see me again.  You
must come to the house then."

"Yes!" said Jude.  "When shall it be?"

"To-morrow week.  Good-bye--good-bye!"  She stretched out her hand
and stroked his forehead pitifully--just once.  Jude said good-bye,
and went away into the darkness.

Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the wheels of the
coach departing, and, truly enough, when he reached the Duke's Arms
in the Market Place the coach had gone.  It was impossible for him
to get to the station on foot in time for this train, and he settled
himself perforce to wait for the next--the last to Melchester that
night.

He wandered about awhile, obtained something to eat; and then, having
another half-hour on his hands, his feet involuntarily took him
through the venerable graveyard of Trinity Church, with its avenues
of limes, in the direction of the schools again.  They were entirely
in darkness.  She had said she lived over the way at Old-Grove
Place, a house which he soon discovered from her description of its
antiquity.

A glimmering candlelight shone from a front window, the shutters
being yet unclosed.  He could see the interior clearly--the floor
sinking a couple of steps below the road without, which had become
raised during the centuries since the house was built.  Sue,
evidently just come in, was standing with her hat on in this front
parlour or sitting-room, whose walls were lined with wainscoting
of panelled oak reaching from floor to ceiling, the latter being
crossed by huge moulded beams only a little way above her head.  The
mantelpiece was of the same heavy description, carved with Jacobean
pilasters and scroll-work.  The centuries did, indeed, ponderously
overhang a young wife who passed her time here.

She had opened a rosewood work-box, and was looking at a photograph.
Having contemplated it a little while she pressed it against her
bosom, and put it again in its place.

Then becoming aware that she had not obscured the windows she came
forward to do so, candle in hand.  It was too dark for her to see
Jude without, but he could see her face distinctly, and there was an
unmistakable tearfulness about the dark, long-lashed eyes.

She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away to pursue his solitary
journey home.  "Whose photograph was she looking at?" he said.  He
had once given her his; but she had others, he knew.  Yet it was his,
surely?

He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation.
Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle
irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters
if they doubted their own strength.  But he could not.  He might fast
and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful
in him than the Divine.




However, if God disposed not, woman did.  The next morning but one
brought him this note from her:


   Don't come next week.  On your own account don't!  We were
   too free, under the influence of that morbid hymn and the
   twilight.  Think no more than you can help of

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY.


The disappointment was keen.  He knew her mood, the look of her face,
when she subscribed herself at length thus.  But, whatever her mood, he
could not say she was wrong in her view. He replied:


   I acquiesce.  You are right.  It is a lesson in
   renunciation which I suppose I ought to learn at this
   season.

   JUDE.


He despatched the note on Easter Eve, and there seemed a finality
in their decisions.  But other forces and laws than theirs were in
operation.  On Easter Monday morning he received a message from the
Widow Edlin, whom he had directed to telegraph if anything serious
happened:


   Your aunt is sinking.  Come at once.


He threw down his tools and went.  Three and a half hours later he
was crossing the downs about Marygreen, and presently plunged into
the concave field across which the short cut was made to the village.
As he ascended on the other side a labouring man, who had been
watching his approach from a gate across the path, moved uneasily,
and prepared to speak.  "I can see in his face that she is dead,"
said Jude.  "Poor Aunt Drusilla!"

It was as he had supposed, and Mrs. Edlin had sent out the man to
break the news to him.

"She wouldn't have knowed 'ee.  She lay like a doll wi' glass eyes;
so it didn't matter that you wasn't here," said he.

Jude went on to the house, and in the afternoon, when everything was
done, and the layers-out had finished their beer, and gone, he sat
down alone in the silent place.  It was absolutely necessary to
communicate with Sue, though two or three days earlier they had
agreed to mutual severance.  He wrote in the briefest terms:


   Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost suddenly.
   The funeral is on Friday afternoon.


He remained in and about Marygreen through the intervening days,
went out on Friday morning to see that the grave was finished, and
wondered if Sue would come.  She had not written, and that seemed to
signify rather that she would come than that she would not.  Having
timed her by her only possible train, he locked the door about
mid-day, and crossed the hollow field to the verge of the upland by
the Brown House, where he stood and looked over the vast prospect
northwards, and over the nearer landscape in which Alfredston stood.
Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left
to the right of the picture.

There was a long time to wait, even now, till he would know if she
had arrived.  He did wait, however, and at last a small hired vehicle
pulled up at the bottom of the hill, and a person alighted, the
conveyance going back, while the passenger began ascending the
hill.  He knew her; and she looked so slender to-day that it seemed
as if she might be crushed in the intensity of a too passionate
embrace--such as it was not for him to give.  Two-thirds of the way
up her head suddenly took a solicitous poise, and he knew that she
had at that moment recognized him.  Her face soon began a pensive
smile, which lasted till, having descended a little way, he met her.

"I thought," she began with nervous quickness, "that it would be
so sad to let you attend the funeral alone!  And so--at the last
moment--I came."

"Dear faithful Sue!" murmured Jude.

With the elusiveness of her curious double nature, however, Sue did
not stand still for any further greeting, though it wanted some
time to the burial.  A pathos so unusually compounded as that which
attached to this hour was unlikely to repeat itself for years, if
ever, and Jude would have paused, and meditated, and conversed.  But
Sue either saw it not at all, or, seeing it more than he, would not
allow herself to feel it.

The sad and simple ceremony was soon over, their progress to the
church being almost at a trot, the bustling undertaker having a more
important funeral an hour later, three miles off.  Drusilla was put
into the new ground, quite away from her ancestors.  Sue and Jude
had gone side by side to the grave, and now sat down to tea in the
familiar house; their lives united at least in this last attention
to the dead.

"She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?" murmured
Sue.

"Yes.  Particularly for members of our family."

Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.

"We are rather a sad family, don't you think, Jude?"

"She said we made bad husbands and wives.  Certainly we make unhappy
ones.  At all events, I do, for one!"

Sue was silent.  "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative
tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are
unhappy in their marriage?  If a marriage ceremony is a religious
thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract,
based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing,
and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it
necessary that the male parent should be known--which it seems to
be--why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops,
that it hurts and grieves him or her?"

"I have said so, anyhow, to you."

Presently she went on: "Are there many couples, do you think, where
one dislikes the other for no definite fault?"

"Yes, I suppose.  If either cares for another person, for instance."

"But even apart from that?  Wouldn't the woman, for example, be very
bad-natured if she didn't like to live with her husband; merely"--her
voice undulated, and he guessed things--"merely because she had a
personal feeling against it--a physical objection--a fastidiousness,
or whatever it may be called--although she might respect and be
grateful to him?  I am merely putting a case.  Ought she to try to
overcome her pruderies?"

Jude threw a troubled look at her.  He said, looking away: "It would
be just one of those cases in which my experiences go contrary to my
dogmas.  Speaking as an order-loving man--which I hope I am, though
I fear I am not--I should say, yes.  Speaking from experience and
unbiased nature, I should say, no....  Sue, I believe you are not
happy!"

"Of course I am!" she contradicted.  "How can a woman be unhappy who
has only been married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?"

"'Chose freely!'"

"Why do you repeat it? ...  But I have to go back by the six o'clock
train.  You will be staying on here, I suppose?"

"For a few days to wind up Aunt's affairs.  This house is gone now.
Shall I go to the train with you?"

A little laugh of objection came from Sue.  "I think not.  You may
come part of the way."

"But stop--you can't go to-night!  That train won't take you to
Shaston.  You must stay and go back to-morrow.  Mrs. Edlin has plenty
of room, if you don't like to stay here?"

"Very well," she said dubiously.  "I didn't tell him I would come for
certain."

Jude went to the widow's house adjoining, to let her know; and
returning in a few minutes sat down again.

"It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue--horrible!" he said
abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor.

"No!  Why?"

"I can't tell you all my part of the gloom.  Your part is that you
ought not to have married him.  I saw it before you had done it, but
I thought I mustn't interfere.  I was wrong.  I ought to have!"

"But what makes you assume all this, dear?"

"Because--I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!"

Her hand lay on the table, and Jude put his upon it.  Sue drew hers
away.

"That's absurd, Sue," cried he, "after what we've been talking about!
I am more strict and formal than you, if it comes to that; and that
you should object to such an innocent action shows that you are
ridiculously inconsistent!"

"Perhaps it was too prudish," she said repentantly.  "Only I have
fancied it was a sort of trick of ours--too frequent perhaps.  There,
you may hold it as much as you like. Is that good of me?"

"Yes; very."

"But I must tell him."

"Who?"

"Richard."

"Oh--of course, if you think it necessary.  But as it means nothing
it may be bothering him needlessly."

"Well--are you sure you mean it only as my cousin?"

"Absolutely sure.  I have no feelings of love left in me."

"That's news.  How has it come to be?"

"I've seen Arabella."

She winced at the hit; then said curiously, "When did you see her?"

"When I was at Christminster."

"So she's come back; and you never told me!  I suppose you will live
with her now?"

"Of course--just as you live with your husband."

She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and cactuses,
withered for want of attention, and through them at the outer
distance, till her eyes began to grow moist.  "What is it?" said
Jude, in a softened tone.

"Why should you be so glad to go back to her if--if what you used to
say to me is still true--I mean if it were true then!  Of course it
is not now!  How could your heart go back to Arabella so soon?"

"A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way."

"Ah--it isn't true!" she said with gentle resentment.  "You are
teasing me--that's all--because you think I am not happy!"

"I don't know.  I don't wish to know."

"If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that
I should have a right to dislike him!  He is considerate to me in
everything; and he is very interesting, from the amount of general
knowledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his
way....  Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his
own age, or one younger than himself--eighteen years--as I am than
he?"

"It depends upon what they feel for each other."

He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on
unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears:

"I--I think I must be equally honest with you as you have been with
me.  Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say?--that though I
like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don't like him--it is a torture to
me to--live with him as a husband!--There, now I have let it out--I
couldn't help it, although I have been--pretending I am happy.--Now
you'll have a contempt for me for ever, I suppose!"  She bent down
her face upon her hands as they lay upon the cloth, and silently
sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged table
quiver.

"I have only been married a month or two!" she went on, still
remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands.  "And it
is said that what a woman shrinks from--in the early days of her
marriage--she shakes down to with comfortable indifference in half a
dozen years.  But that is much like saying that the amputation of a
limb is no affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to
the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time!"

Jude could hardly speak, but he said, "I thought there was something
wrong, Sue!  Oh, I thought there was!"

"But it is not as you think!--there is nothing wrong except my own
wickedness, I suppose you'd call it--a repugnance on my part, for a
reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by
the world in general! ...  What tortures me so much is the necessity
of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is
morally!--the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a
matter whose essence is its voluntariness! ...  I wish he would beat
me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk
about as a justification for feeling as I do!  But he does nothing,
except that he has grown a little cold since he has found out how I
feel.  That's why he didn't come to the funeral...  Oh, I am very
miserable--I don't know what to do! ...  Don't come near me, Jude,
because you mustn't.  Don't--don't!"

But he had jumped up and put his face against hers--or rather against
her ear, her face being inaccessible.

"I told you not to, Jude!"

"I know you did--I only wish to--console you!  It all arose through
my being married before we met, didn't it?  You would have been my
wife, Sue, wouldn't you, if it hadn't been for that?"

Instead of replying she rose quickly, and saying she was going to
walk to her aunt's grave in the churchyard to recover herself, went
out of the house.  Jude did not follow her.  Twenty minutes later he
saw her cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin's, and soon she
sent a little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired
to see him again that night.

In the lonely room of his aunt's house, Jude sat watching the
cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade.
He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and
disheartened; and again questioned his devotional motto that all was
for the best.

He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the sense
that Sue was so near at hand.  At some time near two o'clock, when
he was beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill
squeak that had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly
at Marygreen.  It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin.  As was
the little creature's habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and
probably would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain
bearing its torture till the morrow when the trapper would come and
knock it on the head.

He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now
began to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg.
If it were a "bad catch" by the hind-leg, the animal would tug
during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had
stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed
instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the
mortification of the limb.  If it were a "good catch," namely, by the
fore-leg, the bone would be broken and the limb nearly torn in two in
attempts at an impossible escape.

Almost half an hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry.  Jude
could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing
himself quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went
across the green in the direction of the sound.  He reached the hedge
bordering the widow's garden, when he stood still.  The faint click
of the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now,
and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck
with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.

He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open
casement at a window on the ground floor of the adjacent cottage.
"Jude!" said a voice timidly--Sue's voice.  "It is you--is it not?"

"Yes, dear!"

"I haven't been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit,
and couldn't help thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must
come down and kill it!  But I am so glad you got there first...  They
ought not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!"

Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that she
was visible down to her waist.  She let go the casement-stay and put
her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.

"Did it keep you awake?" he said.

"No--I was awake."

"How was that?"

"Oh, you know--now!  I know you, with your religious doctrines, think
that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a mortal
sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you.  I wish I
hadn't, now!"

"Don't wish it, dear," he said.  "That may have BEEN my view; but my
doctrines and I begin to part company."

"I knew it--I knew it!  And that's why I vowed I wouldn't disturb
your belief.  But--I am SO GLAD to see you!--and, oh, I didn't mean
to see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is
dead!"

Jude seized her hand and kissed it.  "There is a stronger one left!"
he said.  "I'll never care about my doctrines or my religion any
more!  Let them go!  Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even
if you..."

"Don't say it!--I know what you mean; but I can't admit so much as
that.  There!  Guess what you like, but don't press me to answer
questions!"

"I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!"

"I CAN'T be!  So few could enter into my feeling--they would say
'twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and
condemn me...  It is none of the natural tragedies of love that's
love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially
manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in
parting! ...  It would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my
distress to you, if I had been able to tell it to anybody else.  But
I have nobody.  And I MUST tell somebody!  Jude, before I married
him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I
knew.  It was idiotic of me--there is no excuse.  I was old enough,
and I thought I was very experienced.  So I rushed on, when I had got
into that training school scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the
fool that I was! ...  I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo
what one had done so ignorantly!  I daresay it happens to lots of
women, only they submit, and I kick...  When people of a later age
look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times
that we have the unhappiness to live in, what WILL they say!"

"You are very bitter, darling Sue!  How I wish--I wish--"

"You must go in now!"

In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon
his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little
kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could
not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have
done.  She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.

 When Jude visits Sue at Shaston, he sits playing his favorite hymn while waiting for her to come in. Her being moved by it causes him to say that at heart they are alike, but Sue counters by saying they are, however, not alike "at head." When they argue over whether they can still be friends, Jude calls her a flirt; she replies by saying that some women can't be satisfied with loving and being loved by only one man. She calls him a Joseph, a Don Quixote, a St. Stephen, and speaks of herself as a woman full of conflicting feelings. Leaving her and wandering about the town while waiting for his train, Jude finally finds his way back to Sue's house, and from the dark sees her inside take out a photograph and clasp it to her bosom but can't be sure if it's his. He knows that he will go see her again, no matter what resolves he makes. Though Sue writes to say he mustn't come to see her and Jude replies to agree, he does notify her when his aunt dies, expecting Sue to come to Marygreen for the funeral. She does come, and after the funeral she brings up the subject of unhappy marriages and the reasons for them, particularly mentioning a woman's "fastidiousness." When Jude tries to apply her remarks personally, she insists she is not unhappy. Purposely, Jude tells her that he has seen Arabella and he may go back to her because of the way Sue has acted toward him. Sue finally does admit she is unhappy but blames it on her own wickedness, though she says that "what tortures so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally." Later, when Jude goes outside to put out of its suffering a rabbit caught in a trap, he finds that Sue has been unable to sleep. She says that with his religious beliefs he must think it a sin for her to tell him her troubles, but Jude replies that he will forego all his beliefs if she will let him help her.

