"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.