Jude the Obsure

After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.

She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition,

and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When

Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the

attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock. Entering

their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty

miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went

to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with

hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered

the far-reaching scene. He was musing, "I think," he said at last,

without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change

the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."

There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on: "And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the

class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives

me the ear-ache."

As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.

The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls

upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the

massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast

to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch

furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod

to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.

"Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).

She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there--the

clothes on her side being flung back. Thinking she might have

forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to

see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a

few minutes, when, finding she did not come, he went out upon the

landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"

"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen

quarter.

"What are you doing down there at midnight--tiring yourself out for

nothing!"

"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."

He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. She was not there,

even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing,

and again called her name.

She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones were small and confined,

and whence they came he could not at first understand. Under the

staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed

to come from it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or other

fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she

had suddenly become deranged.