Chapter: But under the various deterrent influences Jude's instinct was to
approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went to the morning
service in the Cathedral church of Cardinal College to gain a further
view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended there.

She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was
finer.  He knew that if she came at all she would approach the
building along the eastern side of the great green quadrangle from
which it was accessible, and he stood in a corner while the bell was
going.  A few minutes before the hour for service she appeared as
one of the figures walking along under the college walls, and at
sight of her he advanced up the side opposite, and followed her into
the building, more than ever glad that he had not as yet revealed
himself.  To see her, and to be himself unseen and unknown, was
enough for him at present.

He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way
advanced when he was put into a seat.  It was a louring, mournful,
still afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to
ordinary practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional
and leisured classes.  In the dim light and the baffling glare of
the clerestory windows he could discern the opposite worshippers
indistinctly only, but he saw that Sue was among them.  He had not
long discovered the exact seat that she occupied when the chanting
of the 119th Psalm in which the choir was engaged reached its second
part, _In quo corriget_, the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian
tune as the singers gave forth:


   Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?


It was the very question that was engaging Jude's attention at this
moment.  What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as
he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead
to such disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to
himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk.  The great waves of
pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural
as he had been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that
the psalm was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this
moment of his first entry into the solemn building.  And yet it was
the ordinary psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.

The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary
tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those
which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him.
She was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and
soul in church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had,
no doubt, much in common with him.  To an impressionable and lonely
young man the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for
his thoughts, which promised to supply both social and spiritual
possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout
the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.

Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him
that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen
before he himself moved.  She did not look towards him, and by the
time he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path.
Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her
and reveal himself.  But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought
he to do so with the kind of feeling that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the
service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he
could not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism.
She was such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he
said, "It can't be!  I, a man with a wife, must not know her!"  Still
Sue WAS his own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though
she was not in evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one
sense.  It would put all thought of a tender wish on his part out
of Sue's mind, and make her intercourse with him free and fearless.
It was with some heartache that he saw how little he cared for the
freedom and fearlessness that would result in her from such
knowledge.



Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the
pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman, Sue Bridehead, had an
afternoon's holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in
which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country
with a book in her hand.  It was one of those cloudless days which
sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,
as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god.  She went along for
a mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the
city she had left behind her.  The road passed between green fields,
and coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was
reading, and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles
new and old.

On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a
foreigner with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass
beside a large square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they
could stand, a number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed,
which he was re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way.
They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and
comprised divinities of a very different character from those the
girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of
standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus,
and Mars.  Though the figures were many yards away from her the
south-west sun brought them out so brilliantly against the green
herbage that she could discern their contours with luminous
distinctness; and being almost in a line between herself and the
church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly foreign and
contrasting set of ideas by comparison.  The man rose, and, seeing
her, politely took off his cap, and cried, "I-i-i-mages!" in an accent
that agreed with his appearance.  In a moment he dexterously lifted
upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities divine
and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them on to
her and resting the board on the stile.  First he offered her his
smaller wares--the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then
a winged Cupid.  She shook her head.

"How much are these two?" she said, touching with her finger the
Venus and the Apollo--the largest figures on the tray.

He said she should have them for ten shillings.

"I cannot afford that," said Sue.  She offered considerably less,
and to her surprise the image-man drew them from their wire stay and
handed them over the stile.  She clasped them as treasures.

When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be
concerned as to what she should do with them.  They seemed so very
large now that they were in her possession, and so very naked.
Being of a nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise.
When she handled them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and
jacket.  After carrying them along a little way openly an idea came
to her, and, pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other
rank growths from the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she
could in these, so that what she carried appeared to be an enormous
armful of green stuff gathered by a zealous lover of nature.

"Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!" she
said.  But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to
wish she had not bought the figures.

Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus's arm was
not broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian
city in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main
one, and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to
which she was attached.  Her purchases were taken straight up to her
own chamber, and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was
her very own property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped
them in large sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a
corner.

The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in
spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as become
one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St.
Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also
had begun to attend.  She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years
before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little
shop of church requisites and developing it to its present creditable
proportions.  She wore a cross and beads round her neck as her only
ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.

She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not
respond for a moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily
putting a string round each parcel.

"Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?" she asked,
regarding the enwrapped objects.

"Yes--just something to ornament my room," said Sue.

"Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already," said
Miss Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints,
the Church-text scrolls, and other articles which, having become too
stale to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber.  "What
is it?  How bulky!"  She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer,
in the brown paper, and tried to peep in.  "Why, statuary?  Two
figures?  Where did you get them?"

"Oh--I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts--"

"Two saints?"

"Yes."

"What ones?"

"St. Peter and St.--St. Mary Magdalen."

"Well--now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if
there's light enough afterwards."

These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest
passing fancy created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects
and looking at them; and at bedtime, when she was sure of being
undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort.  Placing the pair
of figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them,
she withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began
reading a book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew
nothing of.  It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the chapter
dealing with the reign of Julian the Apostate.  Occasionally she
looked up at the statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place,
there happening to be a Calvary print hanging between them, and,
as if the scene suggested the action, she at length jumped up and
withdrew another book from her box--a volume of verse--and turned to
the familiar poem--


   Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:
   The world has grown grey from thy breath!


which she read to the end.  Presently she put out the candles,
undressed, and finally extinguished her own light.

She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she
kept waking up, and every time she opened her eyes there was enough
diffused light from the street to show her the white plaster figures,
standing on the chest of drawers in odd contrast to their environment
of text and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was
only discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being
obscured by the shades.

On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour.
It fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his
books at a not very distant spot in the same city.  Being Saturday
night the morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to
call him at his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as
was his custom, two or three hours later than he could afford to do
on any other day of the week.  Just then he was earnestly reading
from his Griesbach's text.  At the very time that Sue was tossing and
staring at her figures, the policeman and belated citizens passing
along under his window might have heard, if they had stood still,
strange syllables mumbled with fervour within--words that had for
Jude an indescribable enchantment: inexplicable sounds something
like these:--

"_All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis
auton:_"

Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard
to close:--

"_Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di
autou!_"

 The next Sunday Jude attends the evening service at the Cathedral. Sue is also present at the same service and Jude observes her with growing interest and admiration. He still does not approach her. The organ music and his vision of Sue in church affects Jude greatly. He leaves the church spiritually and emotionally elevated. Some days earlier Sue went on an evening walk and impulsively bought some plaster statuettes of Venus and Apollo. She hides them in brown paper and tells her landlady that they are figures of St. Peter and Mary Magdalene. Later, she unwraps them and places them on a chest of drawers. At this time Jude is earnestly reading his Greek New Testament.

