Jude the Obsure - Page 11/318

He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or

fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the

northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a

quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds

parted, the sun's position being partially uncovered, and the beams

streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The

boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of

light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with

the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be

the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the

spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly

revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly

seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their

shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The

vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that

the sun had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown

funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of

chimaeras.

He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run,

trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in

wait for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his

forehead and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on

board the bewitched ship. He knew that he had grown out of belief in

these horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the

lights in the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of

his birth, and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

Inside and round about that old woman's "shop" window, with its

twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of

them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny

articles exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong

man could have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long

tideless time. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings

were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward

he was always beholding a gorgeous city--the fancied place he had

likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the

painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his

dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city

acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from

the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes

he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but

living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.