Jude the Obsure - Page 119/318

"Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I

didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been!

But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!"

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his

honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were

deprecated by her. He went on to something else.

"This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school

authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in

some other, no doubt."

"I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively.

Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more

intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly

unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse

as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life.

The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as

a parish priest, should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her,

and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious.

Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her

redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must

have written almost immediately he had gone from her:

Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to

you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my

horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude,

please still keep me as your friend and associate, with

all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again.

I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things

away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half

an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE.

Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the

cathedral works when she came.

VI

Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty

concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard

Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at

Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his

native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the

south-west as the crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal

that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had

been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor

literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he

was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that

of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls'

schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go

into training, since she would not marry him offhand.