Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had
departed. He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal
leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise,
since she was bent on going, which perhaps was true. On the evening
following their emigration, when his day's work was done, he came out
of doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too
familiar road towards the upland whereon had been experienced the
chief emotions of his life. It seemed to be his own again.
He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed to be a
boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the
top of that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for
Christminster and scholarship. "Yet I am a man," he said. "I have
a wife. More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having
disagreed with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted
from her."
He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at
which the parting between his father and his mother was said to have
occurred.
A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he
had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible. A milestone, now
as always, stood at the roadside hard by. Jude drew near it, and
felt rather than read the mileage to the city. He remembered that
once on his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an
inscription on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations.
It had been done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before
he had been diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman. He
wondered if the inscription were legible still, and going to the back
of the milestone brushed away the nettles. By the light of a match
he could still discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long
ago:
THITHER
J. F.
[with a pointing finger]
The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,
lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan should
be to move onward through good and ill--to avoid morbid sorrow
even though he did see uglinesses in the world? _Bene agere et
loetari_--to do good cheerfully--which he had heard to be the
philosophy of one Spinoza, might be his own even now.
He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original
intention.
By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a
north-easterly direction. There actually rose the faint halo, a
small dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith.
It was enough for him. He would go to Christminster as soon as the
term of his apprenticeship expired.