II.-III.
BUT UNDER THE VARIOUS deterrent influences Jude’s instinct was to approach her timidly,
and the next Sunday he went to the morning service in the Cathedral-church of Cardinal
College to gain a further view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended
there.
She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was finer. He knew that
if she came at all she would approach the building along the eastern side of the great
green quadrangle from which it was accessible, and he stood in a corner while the
bell was going. A few minutes before the hour for service she appeared as one of the
figures walking along under the College walls, and at sight of her he advanced up
the side opposite, and followed her into the building, more than ever glad that he
had not as yet revealed himself. To see her, and to be himself unseen and unknown,
was enough for him at present.
He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way advanced when he
was put into a seat. It was a louring, mournful, still afternoon, when a religion
of some sort seems a necessity to ordinary practical men, and not only a luxury of
the emotional and leisured classes. In the dim light and the baffling glare of the
clerestory windows he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only, but
he saw that Sue was among them. He had not long discovered the exact seat that she
occupied when the chanting of the 119th Psalm in which the choir was engaged reached
its second part,
In quo corrigetat the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian tune as the singers gave forth:
“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?”
It was the very question that was engaging Jude’s attention at this moment. What a
wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as he had done to an animal passion
for a woman, and allow it to lead to such disastrous consequences; then to think of
putting an end to himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of
pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had been,
it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm was not specially
set by some regardful Providence for this moment of his first entry into the solemn
building. And yet it was the ordinary psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.
The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary tenderness, was at
this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those which floated into his ears; and
the thought was a delight to him. She was probably a frequenter of this place, and,
steeped body and soul in church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit,
had, no doubt, much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man
the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which promised
to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon,
au and he remained throughout the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.
Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him that the atmosphere
blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.
av
Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen before he himself
moved. She did not look towards him, and by the time he reached the door she was half
way down the broad path. Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow
her and reveal himself But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with
the kind of feeling that was awakening in him?
For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the service, and he
had persuaded himself that such was the case, he could not altogether be blind to
the real nature of the magnetism. She was such a stranger that the kinship was affectation,
and he said, “It can’t be! I, a man with a wife, must not know her!” Still Sue was
his own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though she was not in evidence
in this hemisphere, might be a help in one sense. It would put all thought of a tender
wish on his part out of Sue’s mind, and make her intercourse with him free and fearless.
It was with some heartache that he saw how little he cared for the freedom and fearlessness
that would result in her from such knowledge.
Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the pretty, liquid-eyed,
light-footed young woman Sue Bridehead had an afternoon’s holiday, and leaving the
ecclesiastical establishment in which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk
into the country with a book in her hand. It was one of those cloudless days which
sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet, as if intercalated
by caprice of the weather-god. She went along for a mile or two until she came to
much higher ground than that of the city she had left behind her. The road passed
between green fields, and coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she
was reading, and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles new and old.
On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a foreigner with black
hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass beside a large square board whereon were
fixed, as closely as they could stand, a number of plaster statuettes, some of them
bronzed, which he was re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way. They were
in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a very
different character from those the girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them
being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus,
and Mars. Though the figures were many yards away from her the south-west sun brought
them out so brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern their contours
with luminous distinctness; and being almost in a line between herself and the church
towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly foreign and contrasting set of ideas
by comparison. The man rose, and, seeing her, politely took off his cap, and cried
“I-i-i-mages!” in an accent that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he dexterously
lifted upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities divine and human,
and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them on to her and resting the board
on the stile. First he offered her his smaller wares—the busts of kings and queens,
then a minstrel, then a winged Cupid. She shook her head.
“How much are these two?” she said, touching with her finger the Venus and the Apollo—the
largest figures on the tray.
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He said she should have them for ten shillings.
“I cannot afford that,” said Sue. She offered considerably less, and to her surprise
the image-man drew them from their wire stay and handed them over the stile. She clasped
them as treasures.
When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be concerned as to what
she should do with them. They seemed so very large now that they were in her possession,
and so very naked. Being of a nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise.
When she handled them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and jacket. After
carrying them along a little way openly an idea came to her, and, pulling some huge
burdock leaves, parsley, and other rank growths from the hedge, she wrapped up her
burden as well as she could in these, so that what she carried appeared to be an enormous
armful of green stuff gathered by a zealous lover of nature.
“Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!” she said. But she
was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to wish she had not bought the figures.
Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus’s arm was not broken, she
entered with her heathen load into the most Christian city in the country by an obscure
street running parallel to the main one, and round a corner to the side door of the
establishment to which she was attached. Her purchases were taken straight up to her
own chamber, and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was her very own
property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped them in large sheets of brown
paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner.
The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in spectacles, dressed
almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as became one of her business, and a worshipper
at the ceremonial church of St. Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned,
which Jude also had begun to attend. She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years before this date,
she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little shop of church requisites and developing
it to its present creditable proportions. She wore a cross and beads round her neck
as her only ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.
She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not respond for a
moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily putting a string round each
parcel.
“Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?” she asked, regarding the enwrapped
objects.
“Yes—just something to ornament my room,” said Sue.
“Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already,” said Miss Fontover, looking
round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints, the Church-text scrolls, and other articles
which, having become too stale to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber.
“What is it? How bulky!” She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer, in the brown
paper, and tried to peep in. “Why, statuary? Two figures? Where did you get them?”
“O—I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts——”
“Two saints?”
“Yes.”
“What ones?”
“St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.”
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“Well—now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if there’s light enough
afterwards.”
These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest passing fancy,
created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects and looking at them; and at
bedtime, when she was sure of being undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort.
Placing the pair of figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them,
she withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began reading a book she
had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew nothing of. It was a volume of Gibbon,
and she read the chapter dealing with the reign of Julian the Apostate. Occasionally
she looked up at the statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place, there happening
to be a Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene suggested the action,
she at length jumped up and withdrew another book from her box—a volume of verse—and
turned to the familiar poem—
“Thou hast conquered, 0 pale Galilean:
The world has grown grey from thy breath!
”aw
which she read to the end. Presently she put out the candles, undressed, and finally
extinguished her own light.
She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she kept waking up, and
every time she opened her eyes there was enough diffused light from the street to
show her the white plaster figures, standing on the chest of drawers in odd contrast
to their environment of text and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that
was only discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being obscured by the
shades.
On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour. It fell upon the
ears of another person who sat bending over his books at a not very distant spot in
the same city. Being Saturday night the morrow was one on which Jude had not set his
alarm-clock to call him at his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as
was his custom, two or three hours later than he could afford to do on any other day
of the week. Just then he was earnestly reading from his Griesbach’s text. At the
very time that Sue was tossing and staring at her figures, the policeman and belated
citizens passing along under his window might have heard, if they had stood still,
strange syllables mumbled with fervour within—words that had for Jude an indescribable
enchantment: inexplicable sounds something like these:—
“All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis auton:
Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard to close:—
“Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di autou!”
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