Chapter: 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.

High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge,
solidly constructed Latin cross--as large, probably, as the original
it was designed to commemorate.  It seemed to be suspended in the
air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly
glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed
to and fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion.  Underneath,
upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and
from this was repeated the sobbing that he had heard before.  It was
his Sue's form, prostrate on the paving.

"Sue!" he whispered.

Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.

"What--do you want with me here, Jude?" she said almost sharply.
"You shouldn't come!  I wanted to be alone!  Why did you intrude
here?"

"How can you ask!" he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart
was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him.
"Why do I come?  Who has a right to come, I should like to know, if
I have not!  I, who love you better than my own self--better--far
better--than you have loved me!  What made you leave me to come here
alone?"

"Don't criticize me, Jude--I can't bear it!--I have often told
you so.  You must take me as I am.  I am a wretch--broken by my
distractions!  I couldn't BEAR it when Arabella came--I felt so
utterly miserable I had to come away.  She seems to be your wife
still, and Richard to be my husband!"

"But they are nothing to us!"

"Yes, dear friend, they are.  I see marriage differently now.  My
babies have been taken from me to show me this!  Arabella's child
killing mine was a judgement--the right slaying the wrong.  What,
WHAT shall I do!  I am such a vile creature--too worthless to mix
with ordinary human beings!"

"This is terrible!" said Jude, verging on tears.  "It is monstrous
and unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no
wrong!"

"Ah--you don't know my badness!"

He returned vehemently: "I do!  Every atom and dreg of it!  You make
me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it
may be called, if it's that which has caused this deterioration in
you.  That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like
a diamond--whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of,
if they could have known you--should degrade herself like this!  I am
glad I had nothing to do with Divinity--damn glad--if it's going to
ruin you in this way!"

"You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't see how things
are."

"Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall.  I am
overburdened--and you, too, are unhinged just now."  He put his arm
round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk
without his support.

"I don't dislike you, Jude," she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
"I love you as much as ever!  Only--I ought not to love you--any
more.  Oh I must not any more!"

"I can't own it."

"But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife!  I belong to
him--I sacramentally joined myself to him for life.  Nothing can
alter it!"

"But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this
world?  Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!"

"But not Heaven's.  Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester."

"Sue, Sue--affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this--for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in
me for the Church as an old acquaintance...  What I can't understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic.  Is it
peculiar to you, or is it common to woman?  Is a woman a thinking
unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?  How you
argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract--which it is--how you
showed all the objections to it--all the absurdities!  If two and two
made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now?  I
can't understand it, I repeat!"

"Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music.  You say 'What are they
regarding?  Nothing is there.'  But something is."

"That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel!  You threw
off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go
back upon yourself.  I confess I am utterly stultified in my estimate
of you."

"Dear friend, my only friend, don't be hard with me!  I can't help
being as I am, I am convinced I am right--that I see the light at
last.  But oh, how to profit by it!"

They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the
building and she had returned the key.  "Can this be the girl," said
Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now
that he was in the open street; "can this be the girl who brought
the pagan deities into this most Christian city?--who mimicked Miss
Fontover when she crushed them with her heel?--quoted Gibbon, and
Shelley, and Mill?  Where are dear Apollo, and dear Venus now!"

"Oh don't, don't be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!" she
sobbed.  "I can't bear it!  I was in error--I cannot reason with you.
I was wrong--proud in my own conceit!  Arabella's coming was the
finish.  Don't satirize me: it cuts like a knife!"

He flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately there in the
silent street, before she could hinder him.  They went on till they
came to a little coffee-house. "Jude," she said with suppressed
tears, "would you mind getting a lodging here?"

"I will--if, if you really wish?  But do you?  Let me go to our door
and understand you."

He went and conducted her in.  She said she wanted no supper, and
went in the dark upstairs and struck a light.  Turning she found that
Jude had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door.  She
went to him, put her hand in his, and said "Good-night."

"But Sue!  Don't we live here?"

"You said you would do as I wished!"

"Yes.  Very well! ...  Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue
distastefully as I have done!  Perhaps as we couldn't conscientiously
marry at first in the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted.
Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as
ours!  Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!"

"I am so glad you see that much, at any rate.  I never deliberately
meant to do as I did.  I slipped into my false position through
jealousy and agitation!"

"But surely through love--you loved me?"

"Yes.  But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere
lovers; until--"

"But people in love couldn't live for ever like that!"

"Women could: men can't, because they--won't. An average woman is
in this superior to an average man--that she never instigates, only
responds.  We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more."

"I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said
before! ...  Well, as you will! ...  But human nature can't help
being itself."

"Oh yes--that's just what it has to learn--self-mastery."

"I repeat--if either were to blame it was not you but I."

"No--it was I.  Your wickedness was only the natural man's desire
to possess the woman.  Mine was not the reciprocal wish till envy
stimulated me to oust Arabella.  I had thought I ought in charity to
let you approach me--that it was damnably selfish to torture you as
I did my other friend.  But I shouldn't have given way if you hadn't
broken me down by making me fear you would go back to her...  But
don't let us say any more about it!  Jude, will you leave me to
myself now?"

"Yes...  But Sue--my wife, as you are!" he burst out; "my old
reproach to you was, after all, a true one.  You have never loved me
as I love you--never--never!  Yours is not a passionate heart--your
heart does not burn in a flame!  You are, upon the whole, a sort of
fay, or sprite--not a woman!"

"At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own.  When I first knew
you I merely wanted you to love me.  I did not exactly flirt with
you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals
almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and
captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and
when I found I had caught you, I was frightened.  And then--I don't
know how it was--I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella
again--and so I got to love you, Jude.  But you see, however fondly
it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart
ache for me without letting mine ache for you."

"And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!"

"Ah--yes!  The further I flounder, the more harm I do!"

"O Sue!" said he with a sudden sense of his own danger.  "Do not
do an immoral thing for moral reasons!  You have been my social
salvation.  Stay with me for humanity's sake!  You know what a weak
fellow I am.  My two arch-enemies you know--my weakness for womankind
and my impulse to strong liquor.  Don't abandon me to them, Sue, to
save your own soul only!  They have been kept entirely at a distance
since you became my guardian-angel!  Since I have had you I have been
able to go into any temptations of the sort, without risk.  Isn't
my safety worth a little sacrifice of dogmatic principle?  I am in
terror lest, if you leave me, it will be with me another case of the
pig that was washed turning back to his wallowing in the mire!"

Sue burst out weeping.  "Oh, but you must not, Jude!  You won't!
I'll pray for you night and day!"

"Well--never mind; don't grieve," said Jude generously.  "I did
suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I suffer again.
But perhaps not so much as you.  The woman mostly gets the worst of
it in the long run!"

"She does."

"Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible.  And this one
is not that, anyhow!"

Sue drew a nervous breath or two.  "She is--I fear! ...  Now
Jude--good-night,--please!"

"I mustn't stay?--Not just once more?  As it has been so many
times--O Sue, my wife, why not?"

"No--no--not wife! ...  I am in your hands, Jude--don't tempt me back
now I have advanced so far!"

"Very well.  I do your bidding.  I owe that to you, darling, in
penance for how I overruled it at the first time.  My God, how
selfish I was!  Perhaps--perhaps I spoilt one of the highest and
purest loves that ever existed between man and woman! ...  Then let
the veil of our temple be rent in two from this hour!"

He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and
flung it to the floor.

Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept silently.
"You don't see that it is a matter of conscience with me, and not
of dislike to you!" she brokenly murmured.  "Dislike to you!  But I
can't say any more--it breaks my heart--it will be undoing all I
have begun!  Jude--good-night!"

"Good-night," he said, and turned to go.

"Oh but you shall kiss me!" said she, starting up.  "I
can't--bear--!"

He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely ever
done before, and they remained in silence till she said, "Good-bye,
good-bye!" And then gently pressing him away she got free, trying to
mitigate the sadness by saying: "We'll be dear friends just the same,
Jude, won't we?  And we'll see each other sometimes--yes!--and forget
all this, and try to be as we were long ago?"

Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the
stairs.

 The death of the three children has left Sue emotionally scarred. She begins to develop an obsession about religion and her own sinfulness. She regards the tragedy as a judgment of God and begins to talk of "self-renunciation" and starts attending the church of St. Silas. Jude is amazed and disturbed at Sue's strange behavior and proposes that they marry. But Sue refuses, saying she is still morally bound to Phillotson, and that she and Jude ought not to behave as man and wife. One day while Jude and Sue are debating such matters, Arabella turns up. She has read of the tragedy in the papers, and after going to visit Little Father Time's grave, she has come to pay them a visit. While they are talking, Sue suddenly denies that she is Jude's wife and leaves the room. Arabella tells Jude that she is now living at Alfredston with her father, who has returned from Australia. Later, after Arabella leaves, Jude goes to look for Sue, and he finally finds her in St. Silas' church where she lies prostrate before a cross. She tells Jude that the death of the children is a divine punishment for her sins and that she is still Phillotson's wife. They discuss their relationship, and Sue admits that she gave herself to him  because she was jealous of Arabella. Jude cries out that Sue does not and never has loved him as he loves her. He begs her not to abandon him lest he fall into the temptation to drink. But Sue is adamant and insists that they live separately because her conscience demands it, although they can still be friends and meet occasionally.

