Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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Sue was so near at hand. At some time near two o’clock, when he was
beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak
that had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly at
Marygreen. It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin. As was the little
creature’s habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would
not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its
torture till the morrow, when the trapper would come and knock it
on the head.
He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms
now began to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg.
If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during
the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the
leg-bone of its 
flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument
enable it to escape, it would die in the 
fields from the mortification of
the limb. If it were a ‘good catch,’ namely, by the fore-leg, the bone
would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an
impossible escape.
Almost half-an-hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry. Jude
could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing
himself quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went
across the green in the direction of the sound. He reached the hedge
bordering the widow’s garden, when he stood still. The faint click of
the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now,
and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck
with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the
open casement at a window on the ground 
floor of the adjacent
cottage. ‘Jude!’ said a voice timidly––Sue’s voice. ‘It is you––is it
not?’
‘Yes, dear!’
‘I haven’t been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit, and
couldn’t help thinking of what it su
ffered, till I felt I must come
down and kill it. But I am so glad you got there 
first. . . . They ought
not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!’
Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that
she was visible down to her waist. She let go the casement-stay, and
put her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.
‘Did it keep you awake?’ he said.
‘No––I was awake.’
At Shaston
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‘How was that?’
‘O, you know––now! I know you, with your religious doctrines,
think that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a
mortal sin in making a man the con
fidant of it, as I did you. I wish I
hadn’t, now!’
‘Don’t wish it, dear,’ he said. ‘That may have been my view; but
my doctrines and I begin to part company.’
‘I knew it––I knew it! And that’s why I vowed I wouldn’t disturb
your beliefs. But––I am so glad to see you!––and, O, I didn’t mean to
see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!’
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. ‘There is a stronger one left!’
he said. ‘I’ll never care about my doctrines or my religion any more!
Let them go! Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even if
you . . . ’
‘Don’t say it!––I know what you mean; but I can’t admit so much
as that. There! Guess what you like, but don’t press me to answer
questions!’
‘I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!’
‘I can’t be! So few could enter into my feeling––they would say
’twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and con-
demn me. . . . It is none of the natural tragedies of love that’s love’s
usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy arti
ficially manufactured
for people who in a natural state would 
find relief in parting! . . . It
would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if
I had been able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody. And I
must
tell somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought
out fully what marriage meant,* even though I knew. It was idiotic of
me––there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very
experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that Training
School scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! . . . I
am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done
so ignorantly. I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they sub-
mit, and I kick. . . . When people of a later age look back upon the
barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the
unhappiness to live in, what will they say!’
‘You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish––I wish——’
‘You must go in now!’
In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face
upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible