Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy [top 100 novels of all time TXT] 📗

they look at me here. And you have been keeping on this house and furniture entirely for me and the boy! You don’t want it yourself, and the expense is unnecessary. But whatever we do, wherever we go, you won’t take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not let him go now! The cloud upon his young mind makes him so pathetic to me; I do hope to lift it some day! And he loves me so. You won’t take him away from me?”

“Certainly I won’t, dear little girl! We’ll get nice lodgings, wherever we go. I shall be moving about probably⁠—getting a job here and a job there.”

“I shall do something too, of course, till⁠—till⁠—Well, now I can’t be useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my hand to something else.”

“Don’t hurry about getting employment,” he said regretfully. “I don’t want you to do that. I wish you wouldn’t, Sue. The boy and yourself are enough for you to attend to.”

There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it. Sue could hear the conversation:

“Is Mr. Fawley at home?⁠ ⁠… Biles and Willis the building contractors sent me to know if you’ll undertake the relettering of the Ten Commandments in a little church they’ve been restoring lately in the country near here.”

Jude reflected, and said he could undertake it.

“It is not a very artistic job,” continued the messenger. “The clergyman is a very old-fashioned chap, and he has refused to let anything more be done to the church than cleaning and repairing.”

“Excellent old man!” said Sue to herself, who was sentimentally opposed to the horrors of over-restoration.

“The Ten Commandments are fixed to the east end,” the messenger went on, “and they want doing up with the rest of the wall there, since he won’t have them carted off as old materials belonging to the contractor, in the usual way of the trade.”

A bargain as to terms was struck, and Jude came indoors. “There, you see,” he said cheerfully. “One more job yet, at any rate, and you can help in it⁠—at least you can try. We shall have all the church to ourselves, as the rest of the work is finished.”

Next day Jude went out to the church, which was only two miles off. He found that what the contractor’s clerk had said was true. The tables of the Jewish law towered sternly over the utensils of Christian grace, as the chief ornament of the chancel end, in the fine dry style of the last century. And as their framework was constructed of ornamental plaster they could not be taken down for repair. A portion, crumbled by damp, required renewal; and when this had been done, and the whole cleansed, he began to renew the lettering. On the second morning Sue came to see what assistance she could render, and also because they liked to be together.

The silence and emptiness of the building gave her confidence, and, standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which she was nevertheless timid at mounting, she began painting in the letters of the first Table while he set about mending a portion of the second. She was quite pleased at her powers; she had acquired them in the days she painted illumined texts for the church-fitting shop at Christminster. Nobody seemed likely to disturb them; and the pleasant twitter of birds, and rustle of October leafage, came in through an open window, and mingled with their talk.

They were not, however, to be left thus snug and peaceful for long. About half-past twelve there came footsteps on the gravel without. The old vicar and his churchwarden entered, and, coming up to see what was being done, seemed surprised to discover that a young woman was assisting. They passed on into an aisle, at which time the door again opened, and another figure entered⁠—a small one, that of little Time, who was crying. Sue had told him where he might find her between school-hours, if he wished. She came down from her perch, and said, “What’s the matter, my dear?”

“I couldn’t stay to eat my dinner in school, because they said⁠—” He described how some boys had taunted him about his nominal mother, and Sue, grieved, expressed her indignation to Jude aloft. The child went into the churchyard, and Sue returned to her work. Meanwhile the door had opened again, and there shuffled in with a businesslike air the white-aproned woman who cleaned the church. Sue recognized her as one who had friends in Spring Street, whom she visited. The church-cleaner looked at Sue, gaped, and lifted her hands; she had evidently recognized Jude’s companion as the latter had recognized her. Next came two ladies, and after talking to the charwoman they also moved forward, and as Sue stood reaching upward, watched her hand tracing the letters, and critically regarded her person in relief against the white wall, till she grew so nervous that she trembled visibly.

They went back to where the others were standing, talking in undertones: and one said⁠—Sue could not hear which⁠—“She’s his wife, I suppose?”

“Some say Yes: some say No,” was the reply from the charwoman.

“Not? Then she ought to be, or somebody’s⁠—that’s very clear!”

“They’ve only been married a very few weeks, whether or no.”

“A strange pair to be painting the Two Tables! I wonder Biles and Willis could think of such a thing as hiring those!”

The churchwarden supposed that Biles and Willis knew of nothing wrong, and then the other, who had been talking to the old woman, explained what she meant by calling them strange people.

The probable drift of the subdued conversation which followed was made plain by the churchwarden breaking into an anecdote, in a voice that everybody in the church could hear, though obviously suggested by the present situation:

“Well, now, it is a curious thing, but my grandfather told me a strange tale of a most immoral case that happened at the painting of the Commandments in a church out by Gaymead⁠—which