Jude the Obsure - Page 7/318

This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more

than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still

smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing

to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant

workers--who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business

of clacking with great assiduity--and echoing from the brand-new

church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which

structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for

God and man.

Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing

the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and

gave it him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home and

never let him see him in one of those fields again.

Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway

weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the

perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was

good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful

sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year

in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for

life.

With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the

village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge

and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms

lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as

they always did in such weather at that time of the year. It was

impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them

at each tread.

Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not

himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of

young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and

often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next

morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped,

from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up

and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his

infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested

that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before

the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that

all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe

among the earthworms, without killing a single one.