Chapter: He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as artizans in
country-towns are apt to be.  In London the man who carves the boss
or knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which
merges in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second
half of one whole.  When there was not much Gothic moulding for
Jude to run, or much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out
lettering monuments or tombstones, and take a pleasure in the change
of handiwork.

The next time that he saw her was when he was on a ladder executing
a job of this sort inside one of the churches.  There was a short
morning service, and when the parson entered Jude came down from his
ladder, and sat with the half-dozen people forming the congregation,
till the prayer should be ended, and he could resume his tapping.  He
did not observe till the service was half over that one of the women
was Sue, who had perforce accompanied the elderly Miss Fontover
thither.

Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy, curiously
nonchalant risings and sittings, and her perfunctory genuflexions,
and thought what a help such an Anglican would have been to him in
happier circumstances.  It was not so much his anxiety to get on with
his work that made him go up to it immediately the worshipers began
to take their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot,
confront the woman who was beginning to influence him in such an
indescribable manner.  Those three enormous reasons why he must
not attempt intimate acquaintance with Sue Bridehead, now that his
interest in her had shown itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind,
loomed as stubbornly as ever.  But it was also obvious that man could
not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate,
wanted something to love.  Some men would have rushed incontinently
to her, snatched the pleasure of easy friendship which she could
hardly refuse, and have left the rest to chance.  Not so Jude--at
first.

But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely evenings,
dragged along, he found himself, to his moral consternation,
to be thinking more of her instead of thinking less of her, and
experiencing a fearful bliss in doing what was erratic, informal, and
unexpected.  Surrounded by her influence all day, walking past the
spots she frequented, he was always thinking of her, and was obliged
to own to himself that his conscience was likely to be the loser in
this battle.

To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still.  Perhaps to know
her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized
passion.  A voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he
did not desire to be cured.

There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of
view the situation was growing immoral.  For Sue to be the loved one
of a man who was licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella
and none other unto his life's end, was a pretty bad second beginning
when the man was bent on such a course as Jude purposed.  This
conviction was so real with him that one day when, as was frequent,
he was at work in a neighbouring village church alone, he felt it to
be his duty to pray against his weakness.  But much as he wished to
be an exemplar in these things he could not get on.  It was quite
impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when
your heart's desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.  So
he excused himself.  "After all," he said, "it is not altogether
an _erotolepsy_ that is the matter with me, as at that first time.
I can see that she is exceptionally bright; and it is partly a wish
for intellectual sympathy, and a craving for loving-kindness in my
solitude."  Thus he went on adoring her, fearing to realize that
it was human perversity.  For whatever Sue's virtues, talents, or
ecclesiastical saturation, it was certain that those items were not
at all the cause of his affection for her.

On an afternoon at this time a young girl entered the stone-mason's
yard with some hesitation, and, lifting her skirts to avoid draggling
them in the white dust, crossed towards the office.

"That's a nice girl," said one of the men known as Uncle Joe.

"Who is she?" asked another.

"I don't know--I've seen her about here and there.  Why, yes, she's
the daughter of that clever chap Bridehead who did all the wrought
ironwork at St. Silas' ten years ago, and went away to London
afterwards.  I don't know what he's doing now--not much I fancy--as
she's come back here."

Meanwhile the young woman had knocked at the office door and asked if
Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard.  It so happened that Jude
had gone out somewhere or other that afternoon, which information she
received with a look of disappointment, and went away immediately.
When Jude returned they told him, and described her, whereupon he
exclaimed, "Why--that's my cousin Sue!"

He looked along the street after her, but she was out of sight.  He
had no longer any thought of a conscientious avoidance of her, and
resolved to call upon her that very evening.  And when he reached
his lodging he found a note from her--a first note--one of those
documents which, simple and commonplace in themselves, are seen
retrospectively to have been pregnant with impassioned consequences.
The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is shown in such
innocent first epistles from women to men, or _vice versa_, makes
them, when such a drama follows, and they are read over by the purple
or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and in cases,
terrible.

Sue's was of the most artless and natural kind.  She addressed him
as her dear cousin Jude; said she had only just learnt by the merest
accident that he was living in Christminster, and reproached him with
not letting her know.  They might have had such nice times together,
she said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had hardly any
congenial friend.  But now there was every probability of her soon
going away, so that the chance of companionship would be lost perhaps
for ever.

A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was going away.
That was a contingency he had never thought of, and it spurred him
to write all the more quickly to her.  He would meet her that very
evening, he said, one hour from the time of writing, at the cross in
the pavement which marked the spot of the Martyrdoms.

When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted that in his
hurry he should have suggested to her to meet him out of doors, when
he might have said he would call upon her.  It was, in fact, the
country custom to meet thus, and nothing else had occurred to him.
Arabella had been met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might
not seem respectable to a dear girl like Sue.  However, it could not
be helped now, and he moved towards the point a few minutes before
the hour, under the glimmer of the newly lighted lamps.

The broad street was silent, and almost deserted, although it was
not late.  He saw a figure on the other side, which turned out to
be hers, and they both converged towards the crossmark at the same
moment.  Before either had reached it she called out to him:

"I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in my
life!  Come further on."

The voice, though positive and silvery, had been tremulous.  They
walked on in parallel lines, and, waiting her pleasure, Jude watched
till she showed signs of closing in, when he did likewise, the place
being where the carriers' carts stood in the daytime, though there
was none on the spot then.

"I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn't call," began Jude
with the bashfulness of a lover.  "But I thought it would save time
if we were going to walk."

"Oh--I don't mind that," she said with the freedom of a friend.  "I
have really no place to ask anybody in to.  What I meant was that the
place you chose was so horrid--I suppose I ought not to say horrid--I
mean gloomy and inauspicious in its associations...  But isn't it
funny to begin like this, when I don't know you yet?"  She looked him
up and down curiously, though Jude did not look much at her.

"You seem to know me more than I know you," she added.

"Yes--I have seen you now and then."

"And you knew who I was, and didn't speak?  And now I am going away!"

"Yes.  That's unfortunate.  I have hardly any other friend.  I have,
indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I don't quite like
to call on him just yet.  I wonder if you know anything of him--Mr.
Phillotson?  A parson somewhere about the county I think he is."

"No--I only know of one Mr. Phillotson.  He lives a little way out in
the country, at Lumsdon.  He's a village schoolmaster."

"Ah!  I wonder if he's the same.  Surely it is impossible!  Only a
schoolmaster still!  Do you know his Christian name--is it Richard?"

"Yes--it is; I've directed books to him, though I've never seen him."

"Then he couldn't do it!"

Jude's countenance fell, for how could he succeed in an enterprise
wherein the great Phillotson had failed?  He would have had a day of
despair if the news had not arrived during his sweet Sue's presence,
but even at this moment he had visions of how Phillotson's failure in
the grand university scheme would depress him when she had gone.

"As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call upon him?"
said Jude suddenly.  "It is not late."

She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through some prettily
wooded country.  Presently the embattled tower and square turret
of the church rose into the sky, and then the school-house. They
inquired of a person in the street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to
be at home, and were informed that he was always at home.  A knock
brought him to the school-house door, with a candle in his hand and a
look of inquiry on his face, which had grown thin and careworn since
Jude last set eyes on him.

That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should be
of this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which had
surrounded the school-master's figure in Jude's imagination ever
since their parting.  It created in him at the same time a sympathy
with Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man.
Jude told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an old
friend who had been kind to him in his youthful days.

"I don't remember you in the least," said the school-master
thoughtfully.  "You were one of my pupils, you say?  Yes, no doubt;
but they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have
naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the quite
recent ones."

"It was out at Marygreen," said Jude, wishing he had not come.

"Yes.  I was there a short time.  And is this an old pupil, too?"

"No--that's my cousin...  I wrote to you for some grammars, if you
recollect, and you sent them?"

"Ah--yes!--I do dimly recall that incident."

"It was very kind of you to do it.  And it was you who first started
me on that course.  On the morning you left Marygreen, when your
goods were on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your
scheme was to be a university man and enter the Church--that a degree
was the necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a
theologian or teacher."

"I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not keep
my own counsel.  The idea was given up years ago."

"I have never forgotten it.  It was that which brought me to this
part of the country, and out here to see you to-night."

"Come in," said Phillotson.  "And your cousin, too."

They entered the parlour of the school-house, where there was a lamp
with a paper shade, which threw the light down on three or four
books.  Phillotson took it off, so that they could see each other
better, and the rays fell on the nervous little face and vivacious
dark eyes and hair of Sue, on the earnest features of her cousin,
and on the schoolmaster's own maturer face and figure, showing him
to be a spare and thoughtful personage of five-and-forty, with a
thin-lipped, somewhat refined mouth, a slightly stooping habit, and
a black frock coat, which from continued frictions shone a little at
the shoulder-blades, the middle of the back, and the elbows.

The old friendship was imperceptibly renewed, the schoolmaster
speaking of his experiences, and the cousins of theirs.  He told them
that he still thought of the Church sometimes, and that though he
could not enter it as he had intended to do in former years he might
enter it as a licentiate.  Meanwhile, he said, he was comfortable in
his present position, though he was in want of a pupil-teacher.

They did not stay to supper, Sue having to be indoors before it grew
late, and the road was retraced to Christminster.  Though they had
talked of nothing more than general subjects, Jude was surprised to
find what a revelation of woman his cousin was to him.  She was so
vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling.
An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could
hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points
was such that it might have been misread as vanity.  It was with
heart-sickness he perceived that, while her sentiments towards him
were those of the frankest friendliness only, he loved her more than
before becoming acquainted with her; and the gloom of the walk home
lay not in the night overhead, but in the thought of her departure.

"Why must you leave Christminster?" he said regretfully.  "How can
you do otherwise than cling to a city in whose history such men as
Newman, Pusey, Ward, Keble, loom so large!"

"Yes--they do.  Though how large do they loom in the history of the
world? ...  What a funny reason for caring to stay!  I should never
have thought of it!"  She laughed.

"Well--I must go," she continued.  "Miss Fontover, one of the
partners whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with her; and it
is best to go."

"How did that happen?"

"She broke some statuary of mine."

"Oh?  Wilfully?"

"Yes.  She found it in my room, and though it was my property she
threw it on the floor and stamped on it, because it was not according
to her taste, and ground the arms and the head of one of the figures
all to bits with her heel--a horrid thing!"

"Too Catholic-Apostolic for her, I suppose?  No doubt she called them
popish images and talked of the invocation of saints."

"No...  No, she didn't do that.  She saw the matter quite
differently."

"Ah!  Then I am surprised!"

"Yes.  It was for quite some other reason that she didn't like my
patron-saints.  So I was led to retort upon her; and the end of it
was that I resolved not to stay, but to get into an occupation in
which I shall be more independent."

"Why don't you try teaching again?  You once did, I heard."

"I never thought of resuming it; for I was getting on as an
art-designer."

"DO let me ask Mr. Phillotson to let you try your hand in his
school?  If you like it, and go to a training college, and become a
first-class certificated mistress, you get twice as large an income
as any designer or church artist, and twice as much freedom."

"Well--ask him.  Now I must go in.  Good-bye, dear Jude!  I am so
glad we have met at last.  We needn't quarrel because our parents
did, need we?"

Jude did not like to let her see quite how much he agreed with her,
and went his way to the remote street in which he had his lodging.

To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which operated
without regard of consequences, and the next evening he again set out
for Lumsdon, fearing to trust to the persuasive effects of a note
only.  The school-master was unprepared for such a proposal.

"What I rather wanted was a second year's transfer, as it is called,"
he said.  "Of course your cousin would do, personally; but she has
had no experience.  Oh--she has, has she?  Does she really think of
adopting teaching as a profession?"

Jude said she was disposed to do so, he thought, and his ingenious
arguments on her natural fitness for assisting Mr. Phillotson, of
which Jude knew nothing whatever, so influenced the schoolmaster that
he said he would engage her, assuring Jude as a friend that unless
his cousin really meant to follow on in the same course, and regarded
this step as the first stage of an apprenticeship, of which her
training in a normal school would be the second stage, her time would
be wasted quite, the salary being merely nominal.

The day after this visit Phillotson received a letter from Jude,
containing the information that he had again consulted his cousin,
who took more and more warmly to the idea of tuition; and that
she had agreed to come.  It did not occur for a moment to the
schoolmaster and recluse that Jude's ardour in promoting the
arrangement arose from any other feelings towards Sue than the
instinct of co-operation common among members of the same family.

 Once more Jude has the opportunity to reveal himself to Sue but does not, still troubled by the legitimacy of his interest in her. He wants to pray to be delivered from temptation, but his every desire is precisely to be so tempted. Finally, it occurs that Sue looks him up at work, he is not there at the time, she sends him a note, he replies immediately when she says she may leave Christminster that he will meet her the same evening, and they do meet. Phillotson is mentioned in conversation, and Jude discovers he is still but a schoolmaster in Lumsdon just outside the city. Jude and Sue walk out to call on Phillotson, and at first he does not remember Jude. Jude tells the older man that he is determined to follow his example, but Phillotson has given up his aspirations now except for the possibility of entering the church as a licentiate. Later as they walk back to the city, Sue explains why she plans to leave Christminster: her employer has seen her pagan statues and they have quarreled. Jude suggests she return to teaching, since Phillotson has said he needs help. Sue is interested, Jude convinces Phillotson to hire her if she is really interested, and Sue accepts the job.

