Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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evincing that she was struck by Sue’s avowal, recovered herself, and
went on to talk with placid bluntness about ‘her’ boy, for whom,
though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited
a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the
conscience. She alluded to the past, and in making some remark
appealed again to Sue. There was no answer: Sue had invisibly left
the room.
‘She said she was not your wife?’ resumed Arabella in another
voice. ‘Why should she do that?’
‘I cannot inform you,’ said Jude shortly.
‘She is, isn’t she? She once told me so.’
‘I don’t criticize what she says.’
‘Ah––I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night, and
thought I could do no less than call, after our mutual a
ffliction. I am
sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow I go
back to Alfredston. Father is come home again, and I am living with
him.’
‘He has returned from Australia?’ said Jude with languid curiosity.
‘Yes. Couldn’t get on there. Had a rough time of it. Mother died
of dys––what do you call it––in the hot weather, and father and two
of the young ones have just got back. He has got a cottage near the
old place, and for the present I am keeping house for him.’
Jude’s former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict
good breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a
number of minutes that should accord with the highest respect-
ability. When she had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the
stairs and called Sue––feeling anxious as to what had become of her.
There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings
said she had not come in. Jude was puzzled, and became quite
alarmed at her absence, for the hour was growing late. The carpenter
called his wife, who conjectured that Sue might have gone to St.
Silas’ church, as she often went there.
‘Surely not at this time o’ night?’ said Jude. ‘It is shut.’
‘She knows somebody who keeps the keeps the key, and she has it
whenever she wants it.’
‘How long has she been going on with this?’
‘O, some few weeks, I think.’
Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he had
never once approached since he lived out that way years before,
At Christminster Again
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when his young opinions were more mystical than they were now.
The spot was deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he
lifted the latch without noise, and pushing to the door behind him,
stood absolutely still inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain
a faint sound, explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came
from the other end of the building. The 
floor-cloth deadened his
footsteps as he moved in that direction through the obscurity, which
was broken only by the faintest re
flected night-light from without.
High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a
huge, solidly constructed Latin cross––as large, probably, as the ori-
ginal it was designed to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in
the air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly
glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside as the cross swayed
to and fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath,
upon the 
floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and
from this was repeated the sobbing that he had heard before. It was
his Sue’s form, prostrate on the paving.
‘Sue!’ he whispered.
Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.
‘What––do you want with me here, Jude!’ she said almost sharply.
‘You shouldn’t come! I wanted to be alone! Why did you intrude
here?’
‘How can you ask!’ he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart
was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him. ‘Why
do I come? Who has a right to come, I should like to know, if I have
not? I, who love you better than my own self––better––O far
better––than you have loved me! What made you leave me to come
here alone?’
‘Don’t criticize me, Jude––I can’t bear it.––I have often told you
so! You must take me as I am. I am a wretch––broken by my distrac-
tions! I couldn’t bear it when Arabella came––I felt so utterly miser-
able I had to come away. She seems to be your wife still, and Richard
to be my husband!’
‘But they are nothing to us!’
‘Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage di
fferently now! . . . My
babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella’s child
killing mine was a judgment; the right slaying the wrong. What, what
shall I do! I am such a vile creature––too worthless to mix with
ordinary human beings.’