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.