Jude the Obsure

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester,

and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the

schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston.

All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails

driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter

nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of

which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative

labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his

abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a

comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself,

had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were

seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on

the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby

of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into

fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting

himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had

collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for

their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with

him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all.

Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite

late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining

from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite

miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person

given over to study, he was not exactly studying.

The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the

schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the

flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of

undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no

advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true

enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was

not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly

hand at his dictation some months before, and it was the clerical

rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,

few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its

envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same

womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by

one and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these

small documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were

straightforward, frank letters, signed "Sue B--"; just such ones as

would be written during short absences, with no other thought than

their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading

and other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by

the writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of

them--quite a recent note--the young woman said that she had received

his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of

him to say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the

school being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her

strong wish that her engagement to him should not be known, which it

would infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the

school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be

gathered from a woman's gratitude that the man who loved her had not

been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.