About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester,
and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the
schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston.
All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails
driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter
nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of
which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative
labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his
abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a
comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself,
had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were
seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on
the civilization of that time.
A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby
of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into
fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting
himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had
collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for
their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with
him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all.
Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite
late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining
from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite
miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person
given over to study, he was not exactly studying.
The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the
schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the
flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of
undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no
advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true
enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was
not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly
hand at his dictation some months before, and it was the clerical
rendering of word after word that absorbed him.
He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,
few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its
envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same
womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by
one and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these
small documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were
straightforward, frank letters, signed "Sue B--"; just such ones as
would be written during short absences, with no other thought than
their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading
and other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by
the writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of
them--quite a recent note--the young woman said that she had received
his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of
him to say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the
school being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her
strong wish that her engagement to him should not be known, which it
would infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the
school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be
gathered from a woman's gratitude that the man who loved her had not
been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.