Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (625 page)

“I never heard anything of you, or I don’t know that I should have come here. But never mind! What shall I treat you to this afternoon? A Scotch and soda? Come, anything that the house will afford, for old acquaintance’ sake!”

“Thanks, Arabella,” said Jude without a smile. “But I don’t want anything more than I’ve had.” The fact was that her unexpected presence there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for strong liquor as completely as if it had whisked him back to his milk-fed infancy.

“That’s a pity, now you could get it for nothing.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About six weeks. I returned from Sydney three months ago. I always liked this business, you know.”

“I wonder you came to this place!”

“Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and being in London I saw the situation in an advertisement. Nobody was likely to know me here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster in my growing up.”

“Why did you return from Australia?”

“Oh, I had my reasons… Then you are not a don yet?”

“No.”

“Not even a reverend?”

“No.”

“Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting gentleman?”

“I am as I was.”

“True — you look so.” She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the pull of the beer-engine as she inspected him critically. He observed that her hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with her, and that on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an ornamental ring set with what seemed to be real sapphires — which they were, indeed, and were much admired as such by the young men who frequented the bar.

“So you pass as having a living husband,” he continued.

“Yes. I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I should have liked.”

“True. I am known here a little.”

“I didn’t mean on that account — for as I said I didn’t expect you. It was for other reasons.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t care to go into them,” she replied evasively. “I make a very good living, and I don’t know that I want your company.”

Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady’s eyebrow, came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was obliged to go and attend to him. “We can’t talk here,” she said, stepping back a moment. “Can’t you wait till nine? Say yes, and don’t be a fool. I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask. I am not living in the house at present.”

He reflected and said gloomily, “I’ll come back. I suppose we’d better arrange something.”

“Oh, bother arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything!”

“But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can’t talk here. Very well; I’ll call for you.”

Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the street. Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of his sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella’s word was absolutely untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her implication that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really supposed him dead. However, there was only one thing now to be done, and that was to play a straightforward part, the law being the law, and the woman between whom and himself there was no more unity than between east and west being in the eye of the Church one person with him.

Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of this a pang had gone through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped. Arabella was perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorized love. Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous irony. The inn was now brilliantly lighted up, and the scene was altogether more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen in colour, each having a pink flush on her cheek; their manners were still more vivacious than before — more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous, and they expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically, laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.

The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but the customers were fewer at last. He nodded to Arabella, and told her that she would find him outside the door when she came away.

“But you must have something with me first,” she said with great good humour. “Just an early night-cap: I always do. Then you can go out and wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going together.” She drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had evidently, from her countenance, already taken in enough alcohol either by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere she had breathed for so many hours, she finished hers quickly. He also drank his, and went outside the house.

In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black feather. “I live quite near,” she said, taking his arm, “and can let myself in by a latch-key at any time. What arrangement do you want to come to?”

“Oh — none in particular,” he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go by; the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when she arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and lonely climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen. “I ought to have gone back really! My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear.”

“I’ll go over with you to-morrow morning. I think I could get a day off.”

There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella, who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him, coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue. Yet he said, “Of course, if you’d like to, you can.”

“Well, that we’ll consider… Now, until we have come to some agreement it is awkward our being together here — where you are known, and I am getting known, though without any suspicion that I have anything to do with you. As we are going towards the station, suppose we take the nine-forty train to Aldbrickham? We shall be there in little more than half an hour, and nobody will know us for one night, and we shall be quite free to act as we choose till we have made up our minds whether we’ll make anything public or not.”

“As you like.”

“Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging. Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so nobody will think anything of my staying out.”

She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate inn near the station in time for a late supper.

CHAPTER IX

On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back to Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a third-class railway-carriage. Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very far from possessing the animation which had characterized it at the bar the night before. When they came out of the station she found that she still had half an hour to spare before she was due at the bar. They walked in silence a little way out of the town in the direction of Alfredston. Jude looked up the far highway.

“Ah … poor feeble me!” he murmured at last.

“What?” said she.

“This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago full of plans!”

“Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have to be in the bar by eleven o’clock. And as I said, I shan’t ask for the day to go with you to see your aunt. So perhaps we had better part here. I’d sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we’ve come to no conclusion at all.”

“Very well. But you said when we were getting up this morning that you had something you wished to tell me before I left?”

“So I had — two things — one in particular. But you wouldn’t promise to keep it a secret. I’ll tell you now if you promise? As an honest woman I wish you to know it… It was what I began telling you in the night — about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel.” Arabella spoke somewhat hurriedly for her. “You’ll keep it close?”

“Yes — yes — I promise!” said Jude impatiently. “Of course I don’t want to reveal your secrets.”

“Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him. I never thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last agreed, and did.”

“What — marry him?”

“Yes.”

“Regularly — legally — in church?”

“Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left. It was stupid, I know; but I did! There, now I’ve told you. Don’t round upon me! He talks of coming back to England, poor old chap. But if he does, he won’t be likely to find me.”

Jude stood pale and fixed.

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me last, night!” he said.

“Well — I didn’t… Won’t you make it up with me, then?”

“So in talking of ‘your husband’ to the bar gentlemen you meant him, of course — not me!”

“Of course… Come, don’t fuss about it.”

“I have nothing more to say!” replied Jude. “I have nothing at all to say about the — crime — you’ve confessed to!”

“Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over there! Lots of ‘em do it… Well, if you take it like that I shall go back to him! He was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable as any married couple in the colony! How did I know where you were?”

“I won’t go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but perhaps it would be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?”

“Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy we’ve seen enough of one another for the present! I shall think over what you said about your circumstances, and let you know.”

Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the direction of the hotel, and entered the railway station close by. Finding that it wanted three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could get a train back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the city as far as to the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often stood before, and surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its college after college, in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such Continental vistas as the Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines of the buildings being as distinct in the morning air as in an architectural drawing. But Jude was far from seeing or criticizing these things; they were hidden by an indescribable consciousness of Arabella’s midnight contiguity, a sense of degradation at his revived experiences with her, of her appearance as she lay asleep at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as of one accurst. If he could only have felt resentment towards her he would have been less unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.

Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again towards the station he started at hearing his name pronounced — less at the name than at the voice. To his great surprise no other than Sue stood like a vision before him — her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.

“Oh, Jude — I am so glad — to meet you like this!” she said in quick, uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed his thought that they had not met since her marriage.

They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each other’s hand without further speech, and went on together awhile, till she glanced at him with furtive solicitude. “I arrived at Alfredston station last night, as you asked me to, and there was nobody to meet me! But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me Aunt was a trifle better. I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I was frightened about you — I thought that perhaps, when you found yourself back in the old city, you were upset at — at thinking I was — married, and not there as I used to be; and that you had nobody to speak to; so you had tried to drown your gloom — as you did at that former time when you were disappointed about entering as a student, and had forgotten your promise to me that you never would again. And this, I thought, was why you hadn’t come to meet me!”

“And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!”

“I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you — in case — in case — ”

“I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall never break out again as I did, I am sure. I may have been doing nothing better, but I was not doing that — I loathe the thought of it.”

“I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that. But,” she said, the faintest pout entering into her tone, “you didn’t come back last night and meet me, as you engaged to!”

“I didn’t — I am sorry to say. I had an appointment at nine o’clock — too late for me to catch the train that would have met yours, or to get home at all.”

Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in Arabella’s company. There was something rude and immoral in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average man. And yet she was Phillotson’s. How she had become such, how she lived as such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her to-day.

“You’ll go back with me?” he said. “There’s a train just now. I wonder how my aunt is by this time… And so, Sue, you really came on my account all this way! At what an early time you must have started, poor thing!”

“Yes. Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and instead of going to bed when it got light I started. And now you won’t frighten me like this again about your morals for nothing?”