Chapter: When Sue reached home Jude was awaiting her at the door to take the
initial step towards their marriage.  She clasped his arm, and they
went along silently together, as true comrades oft-times do.  He saw
that she was preoccupied, and forbore to question her.

"Oh Jude--I've been talking to her," she said at last.  "I wish I
hadn't!  And yet it is best to be reminded of things."

"I hope she was civil."

"Yes.  I--I can't help liking her--just a little bit!  She's not
an ungenerous nature; and I am so glad her difficulties have all
suddenly ended."  She explained how Arabella had been summoned back,
and would be enabled to retrieve her position.  "I was referring
to our old question.  What Arabella has been saying to me has made
me feel more than ever how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal
marriage is--a sort of trap to catch a man--I can't bear to think
of it.  I wish I hadn't promised to let you put up the banns this
morning!"

"Oh, don't mind me.  Any time will do for me.  I thought you might
like to get it over quickly, now."

"Indeed, I don't feel any more anxious now than I did before.
Perhaps with any other man I might be a little anxious; but among the
very few virtues possessed by your family and mine, dear, I think I
may set staunchness.  So I am not a bit frightened about losing you,
now I really am yours and you really are mine.  In fact, I am easier
in my mind than I was, for my conscience is clear about Richard, who
now has a right to his freedom.  I felt we were deceiving him
before."

"Sue, you seem when you are like this to be one of the women of some
grand old civilization, whom I used to read about in my bygone,
wasted, classical days, rather than a denizen of a mere Christian
country.  I almost expect you to say at these times that you have
just been talking to some friend whom you met in the Via Sacra,
about the latest news of Octavia or Livia; or have been listening to
Aspasia's eloquence, or have been watching Praxiteles chiselling away
at his latest Venus, while Phryne made complaint that she was tired
of posing."

They had now reached the house of the parish clerk.  Sue stood back,
while her lover went up to the door.  His hand was raised to knock
when she said: "Jude!"

He looked round.

"Wait a minute, would you mind?"

He came back to her.

"Just let us think," she said timidly.  "I had such a horrid dream
one night! ...  And Arabella--"

"What did Arabella say to you?" he asked.

"Oh, she said that when people were tied up you could get
the law of a man better if he beat you--and how when couples
quarrelled...  Jude, do you think that when you must have me with
you by law, we shall be so happy as we are now?  The men and women
of our family are very generous when everything depends upon their
goodwill, but they always kick against compulsion.  Don't you
dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation?
Don't you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its
gratuitousness?"

"Upon my word, love, you are beginning to frighten me, too, with all
this foreboding!  Well, let's go back and think it over."

Her face brightened.  "Yes--so we will!" said she.  And they turned
from the clerk's door, Sue taking his arm and murmuring as they
walked on homeward:


   Can you keep the bee from ranging,
   Or the ring-dove's neck from changing?
   No! Nor fetter'd love ...


They thought it over, or postponed thinking.  Certainly they
postponed action, and seemed to live on in a dreamy paradise.
At the end of a fortnight or three weeks matters remained unadvanced,
and no banns were announced to the ears of any Aldbrickham
congregation.

Whilst they were postponing and postponing thus a letter and a
newspaper arrived before breakfast one morning from Arabella.
Seeing the handwriting Jude went up to Sue's room and told her,
and as soon as she was dressed she hastened down.  Sue opened the
newspaper; Jude the letter.  After glancing at the paper she held
across the first page to him with her finger on a paragraph; but he
was so absorbed in his letter that he did not turn awhile.

"Look!" said she.

He looked and read.  The paper was one that circulated in South
London only, and the marked advertisement was simply the announcement
of a marriage at St. John's Church, Waterloo Road, under the names,
"CARTLETT--DONN"; the united pair being Arabella and the inn-keeper.

"Well, it is satisfactory," said Sue complacently.  "Though, after
this, it seems rather low to do likewise, and I am glad.  However,
she is provided for now in a way, I suppose, whatever her faults,
poor thing.  It is nicer that we are able to think that, than to be
uneasy about her.  I ought, too, to write to Richard and ask him how
he is getting on, perhaps?"

But Jude's attention was still absorbed.  Having merely glanced
at the announcement he said in a disturbed voice: "Listen to this
letter.  What shall I say or do?"


   THE THREE HORNS, LAMBETH.

   DEAR JUDE (I won't be so distant as to call you Mr.
   Fawley),--I send to-day a newspaper, from which useful
   document you will learn that I was married over again to
   Cartlett last Tuesday.  So that business is settled right
   and tight at last.  But what I write about more particular
   is that private affair I wanted to speak to you on when I
   came down to Aldbrickham.  I couldn't very well tell it to
   your lady friend, and should much have liked to let you
   know it by word of mouth, as I could have explained better
   than by letter.  The fact is, Jude, that, though I have
   never informed you before, there was a boy born of our
   marriage, eight months after I left you, when I was at
   Sydney, living with my father and mother.  All that is
   easily provable.  As I had separated from you before I
   thought such a thing was going to happen,  and I was over
   there, and our quarrel had been sharp, I did not think it
   convenient to write about the birth.  I was then looking
   out for a good situation, so my parents took the child,
   and he has been with them ever since.  That was why I did
   not mention it when I met you in Christminster, nor at
   the law proceedings.  He is now of an intelligent age, of
   course, and my mother and father have lately written to
   say that, as they have rather a hard struggle over there,
   and I am settled comfortably here, they don't see why
   they should be encumbered with the child any longer, his
   parents being alive.  I would have him with me here in
   a moment, but he is not old enough to be of any use in
   the bar nor will be for years and years, and naturally
   Cartlett might think him in the way.  They have, however,
   packed him off to me in charge of some friends who
   happened to be coming home, and I must ask you to take
   him when he arrives, for I don't know what to do with him.
   He is lawfully yours, that I solemnly swear.  If anybody
   says he isn't, call them brimstone liars, for my sake.
   Whatever I may have done before or afterwards, I was
   honest to you from the time we were married till I went
   away, and I remain, yours, &c.,

   ARABELLA CARTLETT.


Sue's look was one of dismay.  "What will you do, dear?" she asked
faintly.

Jude did not reply, and Sue watched him anxiously, with heavy
breaths.

"It hits me hard!" said he in an under-voice. "It MAY be true!
I can't make it out.  Certainly, if his birth was exactly when
she says, he's mine.  I cannot think why she didn't tell me when
I met her at Christminster, and came on here that evening with
her! ...  Ah--I do remember now that she said something about having
a thing on her mind that she would like me to know, if ever we lived
together again."

"The poor child seems to be wanted by nobody!"  Sue replied, and her
eyes filled.

Jude had by this time come to himself.  "What a view of life he
must have, mine or not mine!" he said.  "I must say that, if I were
better off, I should not stop for a moment to think whose he might
be.  I would take him and bring him up.  The beggarly question of
parentage--what is it, after all?  What does it matter, when you come
to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not?  All the
little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of
the time, and entitled to our general care.  That excessive regard of
parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's,
is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other
virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom."

Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion.  "Yes--so
it is, dearest!  And we'll have him here!  And if he isn't yours it
makes it all the better.  I do hope he isn't--though perhaps I ought
not to feel quite that!  If he isn't, I should like so much for us
to have him as an adopted child!"

"Well, you must assume about him what is most pleasing to you, my
curious little comrade!" he said.  "I feel that, anyhow, I don't like
to leave the unfortunate little fellow to neglect.  Just think of
his life in a Lambeth pothouse, and all its evil influences, with a
parent who doesn't want him, and has, indeed, hardly seen him, and
a stepfather who doesn't know him.  'Let the day perish wherein I
was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child
conceived!'  That's what the boy--MY boy, perhaps, will find himself
saying before long!"

"Oh no!"

"As I was the petitioner, I am really entitled to his custody, I
suppose."

"Whether or no, we must have him.  I see that.  I'll do the best I
can to be a mother to him, and we can afford to keep him somehow.
I'll work harder.  I wonder when he'll arrive?"

"In the course of a few weeks, I suppose."

"I wish--When shall we have courage to marry, Jude?"

"Whenever you have it, I think I shall.  It remains with you
entirely, dear.  Only say the word, and it's done."

"Before the boy comes?"

"Certainly."

"It would make a more natural home for him, perhaps," she murmured.

Jude thereupon wrote in purely formal terms to request that the boy
should be sent on to them as soon as he arrived, making no remark
whatever on the surprising nature of Arabella's information, nor
vouchsafing a single word of opinion on the boy's paternity, nor on
whether, had he known all this, his conduct towards her would have
been quite the same.

In the down-train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham station about
ten o'clock the next evening, a small, pale child's face could
be seen in the gloom of a third-class carriage.  He had large,
frightened eyes, and wore a white woollen cravat, over which a
key was suspended round his neck by a piece of common string: the
key attracting attention by its occasional shine in the lamplight.
In the band of his hat his half-ticket was stuck.  His eyes
remained mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never
turned to the window even when a station was reached and called.
On the other seat were two or three passengers, one of them a working
woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was a tabby kitten.
The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the kitten would
put out its head, and indulge in playful antics.  At these the
fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key
and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed
mutely to say: "All laughing comes from misapprehension.  Rightly
looked at, there is no laughable thing under the sun."

Occasionally, at a stoppage, the guard would look into the compartment
and say to the boy, "All right, my man.  Your box is safe in the
van."  The boy would say, "Yes," without animation, would try to
smile, and fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that
his real self showed through crevices.  A ground-swell from ancient
years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his
morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic
of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.

When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did one by
one--even the kitten curling itself up in the basket, weary of its
too circumscribed play--the boy remained just as before.  He then
seemed to be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed divinity,
sitting passive and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole
rounded lives rather than their immediate figures.

This was Arabella's boy.  With her usual carelessness, she had
postponed writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing,
when she could absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known
for weeks of his approaching arrival, and had, as she truly said,
visited Aldbrickham mainly to reveal the boy's existence and his near
home-coming to Jude.  This very day on which she had received her
former husband's answer at some time in the afternoon, the child
reached the London Docks, and the family in whose charge he had come,
having put him into a cab for Lambeth and directed the cabman to his
mother's house, bade him good-bye, and went their way.

On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him over with
an expression that was as good as saying, "You are very much what I
expected you to be," had given him a good meal, a little money, and,
late as it was getting, dispatched him to Jude by the next train,
wishing her husband Cartlett, who was out, not to see him.

The train reached Aldbrickham, and the boy was deposited on the
lonely platform beside his box.  The collector took his ticket, and,
with a meditative sense of the unfitness of things, asked him where
he was going by himself at that time of night.

"Going to Spring Street," said the little one impassively.

"Why, that's a long way from here; a'most out in the country; and the
folks will be gone to bed."

"I've got to go there."

"You must have a fly for your box."

"No. I must walk."

"Oh well: you'd better leave your box here and send for it.  There's
a 'bus goes half-way, but you'll have to walk the rest."

"I am not afraid."

"Why didn't your friends come to meet 'ee?"

"I suppose they didn't know I was coming."

"Who is your friends?"

"Mother didn't wish me to say."

"All I can do, then, is to take charge of this.  Now walk as fast as
you can."

Saying nothing further the boy came out into the street, looking
round to see that nobody followed or observed him.  When he
had walked some little distance he asked for the street of his
destination.  He was told to go straight on quite into the outskirts
of the place.

The child fell into a steady mechanical creep which had in it an
impersonal quality--the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or
of the cloud.  He followed his directions literally, without an
inquiring gaze at anything.  It could have been seen that the boy's
ideas of life were different from those of the local boys.  Children
begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the
contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal.  The boy seemed
to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned
himself with the particulars.  To him the houses, the willows,
the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded not as brick
residences, pollards, meadows; but as human dwellings in the
abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world.

He found the way to the little lane, and knocked at the door of
Jude's house.  Jude had just retired to bed, and Sue was about to
enter her chamber adjoining when she heard the knock and came down.

"Is this where Father lives?" asked the child.

"Who?"

"Mr. Fawley, that's his name."

Sue ran up to Jude's room and told him, and he hurried down as soon
as he could, though to her impatience he seemed long.

"What--is it he--so soon?" she asked as Jude came.

She scrutinized the child's features, and suddenly went away into the
little sitting-room adjoining.  Jude lifted the boy to a level with
himself, keenly regarded him with gloomy tenderness, and telling him
he would have been met if they had known of his coming so soon, set
him provisionally in a chair whilst he went to look for Sue, whose
supersensitiveness was disturbed, as he knew.  He found her in the
dark, bending over an arm-chair.  He enclosed her with his arm, and
putting his face by hers, whispered, "What's the matter?"

"What Arabella says is true--true!  I see you in him!"

"Well: that's one thing in my life as it should be, at any rate."

"But the other half of him is--SHE!  And that's what I can't bear!
But I ought to--I'll try to get used to it; yes, I ought!"

"Jealous little Sue!  I withdraw all remarks about your sexlessness.
Never mind!  Time may right things...  And Sue, darling; I have an
idea!  We'll educate and train him with a view to the university.
What I couldn't accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out
through him?  They are making it easier for poor students now, you
know."

"Oh you dreamer!" said she, and holding his hand returned to the
child with him.  The boy looked at her as she had looked at him.
"Is it you who's my REAL mother at last?" he inquired.

"Why?  Do I look like your father's wife?"

"Well, yes; 'cept he seems fond of you, and you of him.  Can I call
you Mother?"

Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry.  Sue
thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a
harp which the least wind of emotion from another's heart could make
to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.

"You may call me Mother, if you wish to, my poor dear!" she said,
bending her cheek against his to hide her tears.

"What's this round your neck?" asked Jude with affected calmness.

"The key of my box that's at the station."

They bustled about and got him some supper, and made him up a
temporary bed, where he soon fell asleep.  Both went and looked at
him as he lay.

"He called you Mother two or three times before he dropped off,"
murmured Jude.  "Wasn't it odd that he should have wanted to!"

"Well--it was significant," said Sue.  "There's more for us to think
about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the
sky...  I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that
ceremony over?  It is no use struggling against the current, and I
feel myself getting intertwined with my kind.  Oh Jude, you'll love
me dearly, won't you, afterwards?  I do want to be kind to this
child, and to be a mother to him; and our adding the legal form to
our marriage might make it easier for me."

 Jude and Sue leave for the parish clerk's office to put up the banns for their marriage, but again, Sue gets cold feet about the wedding, and they decide to think it over. Hence it is delayed once more. In the meantime news comes from Arabella that she has now married Cartlett. There also comes the stunning revelation that she had a son by Jude eight months after their separation. The child will soon be arriving from Australia, and Arabella wants Jude to take charge of him. Jude and Sue, although initially dismayed, feel sorry for the unwanted child. Although he may not be Jude's, both Jude and Sue agree to keep him. Sue even considers marriage for the boy's sake, as it will make for a more natural home. The boy arrives the next night all alone from London; he is a solemn, anxious child, with an unnaturally old appearance. Sue and Jude welcome the boy and pity him.

