As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched
his fingers but lightly when he went out now. He had hardly gone
from the door when, with a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form
and opened the iron casement of a window beneath which he was passing
in the path without. "When do you leave here to catch your train,
Jude?" she asked.
He looked up in some surprise. "The coach that runs to meet it goes
in three-quarters of an hour or so."
"What will you do with yourself for the time?"
"Oh--wander about, I suppose. Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old
church."
"It does seem hard of me to pack you off so! You have thought enough
of churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark. Stay
there."
"Where?"
"Where you are. I can talk to you better like this than when you
were inside... It was so kind and tender of you to give up half
a day's work to come to see me! ... You are Joseph the dreamer of
dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you
are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven
opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!"
Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not
get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had
feared at close quarters.
"I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one
brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into
have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional
shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I
am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with
my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard
Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant
passions, and unaccountable antipathies... Now you mustn't wait
longer, or you will lose the coach. Come and see me again. You
must come to the house then."
"Yes!" said Jude. "When shall it be?"
"To-morrow week. Good-bye--good-bye!" She stretched out her hand
and stroked his forehead pitifully--just once. Jude said good-bye,
and went away into the darkness.
Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the wheels of the
coach departing, and, truly enough, when he reached the Duke's Arms
in the Market Place the coach had gone. It was impossible for him
to get to the station on foot in time for this train, and he settled
himself perforce to wait for the next--the last to Melchester that
night.