Chapter: Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed across Jude like a
withering blast.

Before reading the letter he was led to suspect that its contents
were of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight of the
signature--which was in her full name, never used in her
correspondence with him since her first note:


   MY DEAR JUDE,--I have something to tell you which perhaps
   you will not be surprised to hear, though certainly it may
   strike you as being accelerated (as the railway companies
   say of their trains). Mr. Phillotson and I are to be married
   quite soon--in three or four weeks.  We had intended, as you
   know, to wait till I had gone through my course of training
   and obtained my certificate, so as to assist him, if
   necessary, in the teaching.  But he generously says he does
   not see any object in waiting, now I am not at the training
   school.  It is so good of him, because the awkwardness of my
   situation has really come about by my fault in getting
   expelled.

   Wish me joy.  Remember I say you are to, and you mustn't
   refuse!--Your affectionate cousin,

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.


Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on
drinking tea because his mouth was so dry.  Then presently he went
back to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so
confronted.  Everything seemed turning to satire.  And yet, what
could the poor girl do? he asked himself, and felt worse than
shedding tears.

"O Susanna Florence Mary!" he said as he worked.  "You don't know
what marriage means!"

Could it be possible that his announcement of his own marriage had
pricked her on to this, just as his visit to her when in liquor may
have pricked her on to her engagement?  To be sure, there seemed to
exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical and social, for
her decision; but Sue was not a very practical or calculating person;
and he was compelled to think that a pique at having his secret
sprung upon her had moved her to give way to Phillotson's probable
representations, that the best course to prove how unfounded were the
suspicions of the school authorities would be to marry him off-hand,
as in fulfilment of an ordinary engagement.  Sue had, in fact, been
placed in an awkward corner.  Poor Sue!

He determined to play the Spartan; to make the best of it, and
support her; but he could not write the requested good wishes for a
day or two.  Meanwhile there came another note from his impatient
little dear:


   Jude, will you give me away?  I have nobody else who could
   do it so conveniently as you, being the only married relation
   I have here on the spot, even if my father were friendly
   enough to be willing, which he isn't.  I hope you won't think
   it a trouble?  I have been looking at the marriage service in
   the prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a
   giver-away should be required at all.  According to the
   ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his
   own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him.  Somebody
   GIVES me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other
   domestic animal.  Bless your exalted views of woman, O
   churchman!  But I forget: I am no longer privileged to tease
   you.--Ever,

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.


Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:


   MY DEAR SUE,--Of course I wish you joy!  And also of course
   I will give you away.  What I suggest is that, as you have
   no house of your own, you do not marry from your school
   friend's, but from mine.  It would be more proper, I think,
   since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to you in
   this part of the world.

   I don't see why you sign your letter in such a new and
   terribly formal way?  Surely you care a bit about me
   still!--Ever your affectionate,

   JUDE.


What had jarred on him even more than the signature was a little
sting he had been silent on--the phrase "married relation"--What an
idiot it made him seem as her lover!  If Sue had written that in
satire, he could hardly forgive her; if in suffering--ah, that was
another thing!

His offer of his lodging must have commended itself to Phillotson
at any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line of warm thanks,
accepting the convenience.  Sue also thanked him.  Jude immediately
moved into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage
of the suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue's unpleasant
experience as for the sake of room.

Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for the wedding; and Jude
decided, after inquiry, that she should come into residence on the
following Saturday, which would allow of a ten days' stay in the city
prior to the ceremony, sufficiently representing a nominal residence
of fifteen.

She arrived by the ten o'clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not
going to meet her at the station, by her special request, that he
should not lose a morning's work and pay, she said (if this were
her true reason).  But so well by this time did he know Sue that the
remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might,
he thought, have weighed with her in this.  When he came home to
dinner she had taken possession of her apartment.

She lived in the same house with him, but on a different floor, and
they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only meal
they took together, when Sue's manner was something like that of a
scared child.  What she felt he did not know; their conversation was
mechanical, though she did not look pale or ill.  Phillotson came
frequently, but mostly when Jude was absent.  On the morning of the
wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin
had breakfast together for the first and last time during this
curious interval; in his room--the parlour--which he had hired for
the period of Sue's residence.  Seeing, as women do, how helpless he
was in making the place comfortable, she bustled about.

"What's the matter, Jude?" she said suddenly.

He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin on his
hands, looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on the
tablecloth.

"Oh--nothing!"

"You are 'father', you know.  That's what they call the man who gives
you away."

Jude could have said "Phillotson's age entitles him to be called
that!"  But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort.

She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in
reflection, and before the meal was over both he and she wished they
had not put such confidence in their new view of things, and had
taken breakfast apart.  What oppressed Jude was the thought that,
having done a wrong thing of this sort himself, he was aiding and
abetting the woman he loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of
imploring and warning her against it.  It was on his tongue to say,
"You have quite made up your mind?"

After breakfast they went out on an errand together moved by a mutual
thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of indulging
in unceremonious companionship.  By the irony of fate, and the
curious trick in Sue's nature of tempting Providence at critical
times, she took his arm as they walked through the muddy street--a
thing she had never done before in her life--and on turning the
corner they found themselves close to a grey perpendicular church
with a low-pitched roof--the church of St. Thomas.

"That's the church," said Jude.

"Where I am going to be married?"

"Yes."

"Indeed!" she exclaimed with curiosity.  "How I should like to go in
and see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it."

Again he said to himself, "She does not realize what marriage means!"

He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by
the western door.  The only person inside the gloomy building was
a charwoman cleaning.  Sue still held Jude's arm, almost as if she
loved him.  Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning;
but his thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by an
ache:


                          ... I can find no way
   How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,
   Nor prove too much for your womanhood!


They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar
railing, which they stood against in silence, turning then and
walking down the nave again, her hand still on his arm, precisely
like a couple just married.  The too suggestive incident, entirely
of her making, nearly broke down Jude.

"I like to do things like this," she said in the delicate voice of an
epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.

"I know you do!" said Jude.

"They are interesting, because they have probably never been done
before.  I shall walk down the church like this with my husband in
about two hours, shan't I!"

"No doubt you will!"

"Was it like this when you were married?"

"Good God, Sue--don't be so awfully merciless! ...  There, dear one,
I didn't mean it!"

"Ah--you are vexed!" she said regretfully, as she blinked away an
access of eye moisture.  "And I promised never to vex you! ...  I
suppose I ought not to have asked you to bring me in here.  Oh, I
oughtn't!  I see it now.  My curiosity to hunt up a new sensation
always leads me into these scrapes.  Forgive me! ...  You will, won't
you, Jude?"

The appeal was so remorseful that Jude's eyes were even wetter than
hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.

"Now we'll hurry away, and I won't do it any more!" she continued
humbly; and they came out of the building, Sue intending to go
on to the station to meet Phillotson.  But the first person they
encountered on entering the main street was the schoolmaster himself,
whose train had arrived sooner than Sue expected.  There was nothing
really to demur to in her leaning on Jude's arm; but she withdrew her
hand, and Jude thought that Phillotson had looked surprised.

"We have been doing such a funny thing!" said she, smiling candidly.
"We've been to the church, rehearsing as it were.  Haven't we, Jude?"

"How?" said Phillotson curiously.

Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be unnecessary frankness;
but she had gone too far not to explain all, which she accordingly
did, telling him how they had marched up to the altar.

Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude said as cheerfully as he
could, "I am going to buy her another little present.  Will you both
come to the shop with me?"

"No," said Sue, "I'll go on to the house with him"; and requesting
her lover not to be a long time she departed with the schoolmaster.

Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they prepared
for the ceremony.  Phillotson's hair was brushed to a painful
extent, and his shirt collar appeared stiffer than it had been for
the previous twenty years.  Beyond this he looked dignified and
thoughtful, and altogether a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict
that he would make a kind and considerate husband.  That he adored
Sue was obvious; and she could almost be seen to feel that she was
undeserving his adoration.

Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly from the Red
Lion, and six or seven women and children had gathered by the door
when they came out.  The schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though
Jude was getting to be recognized as a citizen; and the couple were
judged to be some relations of his from a distance, nobody supposing
Sue to have been a recent pupil at the training school.

In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little
wedding-present, which turned out to be two or three yards of white
tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as a veil.

"It looks so odd over a bonnet," she said.  "I'll take the bonnet
off."

"Oh no--let it stay," said Phillotson.  And she obeyed.

When they had passed up the church and were standing in their places
Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the edge
of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the
service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the
business of giving her away.  How could Sue have had the temerity to
ask him to do it--a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him?
Women were different from men in such matters.  Was it that they
were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less
romantic; or were they more heroic?  Or was Sue simply so perverse
that she wilfully gave herself and him pain for the odd and mournful
luxury of practising long-suffering in her own person, and of being
touched with tender pity for him at having made him practise it?  He
could perceive that her face was nervously set, and when they reached
the trying ordeal of Jude giving her to Phillotson she could hardly
command herself; rather, however, as it seemed, from her knowledge of
what her cousin must feel, whom she need not have had there at all,
than from self-consideration.  Possibly she would go on inflicting
such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and
again, in all her colossal inconsistency.

Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded by a mist which
prevented his seeing the emotions of others.  As soon as they had
signed their names and come away, and the suspense was over, Jude
felt relieved.

The meal at his lodging was a very simple affair, and at two o'clock
they went off.  In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked back;
and there was a frightened light in her eyes.  Could it be that Sue
had acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew
not what for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of
retaliating on him for his secrecy?  Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome
with men because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their
natures which wore out women's hearts and lives.

When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying that
she had forgotten something.  Jude and the landlady offered to get
it.

"No," she said, running back.  "It is my handkerchief.  I know where
I left it."

Jude followed her back.  She had found it, and came holding it in her
hand.  She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her
lips suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something.  But she
went on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.

 A day or two later Jude gets a letter formally signed by Sue, informing him of her plan to marry Phillotson in a few weeks. Jude is stunned by the news and suspects that his own revelation of his marriage may have triggered this rash decision. Before he can collect his wits, she writes a second letter requesting him to give her away at the wedding. She adds a few sarcastic comments on the custom of giving away the bride. Jude agrees and offers to put her up at his lodgings for the required ten days. Sue lives in the same house with him, on a different floor, sharing an occasional meal. Her manner is strained and nervous. Jude is convinced she is marrying Phillotson on the rebound, but although he would like to warn her against the marriage, he is helpless. On the morning of the wedding day, Sue insists on entering the church of St. Thomas with Jude for a kind of rehearsal. She wants to see the aisle where she will walk down with her husband. This and the actual wedding are extremely painful for Jude. After the wedding Sue and Phillotson have a meal at Jude's lodgings and then the newly wedded couple leaves. Sue appears to want to convey something to Jude, but she does not speak and hurries away.

