Unimpassioned as he was, it impressed him painfully, and puzzled him
not a little, for he could not understand the age of the elder child
being what it was stated to be. However, there was no doubt that the
newspaper report was in some way true.
"Their cup of sorrow is now full!" he said: and thought and thought
of Sue, and what she had gained by leaving him.
Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the schoolmaster
coming to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful that in
a few weeks they met again--the precise time being just alter her
return from Christminster, where she had stayed much longer than she
had at first intended, keeping an interested eye on Jude, though Jude
had seen no more of her. Phillotson was on his way homeward when he
encountered Arabella, and she was approaching the town.
"You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?" he said.
"I've just begun to again," she replied. "It is where I lived
as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are
interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road. And they
have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I've been visiting at
Christminster. Yes; I've seen Jude."
"Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?"
"In a ve-ry strange way--ve-ry strange! She don't live with him any
longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though
I had thought things were drifting that way from their manner when I
called on them."
"Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought 'twould have
united them more."
"He's not her husband, after all. She has never really married him
although they have passed as man and wife so long. And now, instead
of this sad event making 'em hurry up, and get the thing done
legally, she's took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my
affliction at losing Cartlett, only hers is of a more 'sterical sort
than mine. And she says, so I was told, that she's your wife in the
eye of Heaven and the Church--yours only; and can't be anybody else's
by any act of man."
"Ah--indeed? ... Separated, have they!"
"You see, the eldest boy was mine--"
"Oh--yours!"
"Yes, poor little fellow--born in lawful wedlock, thank God. And
perhaps she feels, over and above other things, that I ought to have
been in her place. I can't say. However, as for me, I am soon off
from here. I've got Father to look after now, and we can't live in
such a hum-drum place as this. I hope soon to be in a bar again at
Christminster, or some other big town."