IV
Their next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,though it was begun on the morning following the singular child'sarrival at their home.
Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint andweird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see inthe substantial world.
"His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene," said Sue. "What isyour name, dear? Did you tell us?"
"Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nickname;because I look so aged, they say."
"And you talk so, too," said Sue tenderly. "It is strange, Jude,that these preternaturally old boys almost always come from newcountries. But what were you christened?"
"I never was."
"Why was that?"
"Because, if I died in damnation, 'twould save the expense of aChristian funeral."
"Oh--your name is not Jude, then?" said his father with somedisappointment.
The boy shook his head. "Never heerd on it."
"Of course not," said Sue quickly; "since she was hating you all thetime!"
"We'll have him christened," said Jude; and privately to Sue: "Theday we are married." Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.
Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that amarriage at a superintendent registrar's office was more private thanan ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time.Both Sue and Jude together went to the office of the district to givenotice: they had become such companions that they could hardly doanything of importance except in each other's company.
Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his shoulderand watching his hand as it traced the words. As she read thefour-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into whichher own and Jude's names were inserted, and by which that veryvolatile essence, their love for each other, was supposed to bemade permanent, her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive."Names and Surnames of the Parties"--(they were to be parties now,not lovers, she thought). "Condition"--(a horrid idea)--"Rank orOccupation"--"Age"--"Dwelling at"--"Length of Residence"--"Church orBuilding in which the Marriage is to be solemnized"--"District andCounty in which the Parties respectively dwell."
"It spoils the sentiment, doesn't it!" she said on their way home."It seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing thecontract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church. Butwe'll try to get through with it, dearest, now."
"We will. 'For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hathnot taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest hedie in the battle, and another man take her.' So said the Jewishlaw-giver."
"How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to have been aparson. I can only quote profane writers!"
During the interval before the issuing of the certificate, Sue, in herhousekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the office, and furtivelyglancing in saw affixed to the wall the notice of the purposed clinchto their union. She could not bear its aspect. Coming after herprevious experience of matrimony, all the romance of their attachmentseemed to be starved away by placing her present case in the samecategory. She was usually leading little Father Time by the hand,and fancied that people thought him hers, and regarded the intendedceremony as the patching up of an old error.
Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in someslight degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining onearth who was associated with his early life at Marygreen--the agedwidow Mrs. Edlin, who had been his great-aunt's friend and nurse inher last illness. He hardly expected that she would come; but shedid, bringing singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brasssnuffers, an ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enormous bagof goose feathers towards a bed. She was allotted the spare room inJude's house, whither she retired early, and where they could hearher through the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord's Prayer ina loud voice, as the Rubric directed.
As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and Judewere still sitting up--it being in fact only ten o'clock--she dressedherself again and came down, and they all sat by the fire till a latehour--Father Time included; though, as he never spoke, they werehardly conscious of him.
"Well, I bain't set against marrying as your great-aunt was," saidthe widow. "And I hope 'twill be a jocund wedding for ye in allrespects this time. Nobody can hope it more, knowing what I doof your families, which is more, I suppose, than anybody else nowliving. For they have been unlucky that way, God knows."
Sue breathed uneasily.
"They was always good-hearted people, too--wouldn't kill a fly ifthey knowed it," continued the wedding guest. "But things happenedto thwart 'em, and if everything wasn't vitty they were upset. Nodoubt that's how he that the tale is told of came to do what 'adid--if he WERE one of your family."
"What was that?" said Jude.
"Well--that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted just on the brow ofthe hill by the Brown House--not far from the milestone betweenMarygreen and Alfredston, where the other road branches off. ButLord, 'twas in my grandfather's time; and it medn' have been one ofyour folk at all."
"I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well," murmuredJude. "But I never heard of this. What--did this man--my ancestorand Sue's--kill his wife?"
"'Twer not that exactly. She ran away from him, with their child,to her friends; and while she was there the child died. He wantedthe body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn't give itup. Her husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke intothe house to steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and beingobstinate, wouldn't tell what he broke in for. They brought it inburglary, and that's why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown HouseHill. His wife went mad after he was dead. But it medn't be truethat he belonged to ye more than to me."
A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out ofthe earth: "If I was you, Mother, I wouldn't marry Father!" It camefrom little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him.
"Oh, it is only a tale," said Sue cheeringly.
After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve ofthe solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest good-night,retired.
The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified with thehours, took Jude privately into the sitting-room before starting."Jude, I want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally," she said,tremulously nestling up to him, with damp lashes. "It won't be everlike this any more, will it? I wish we hadn't begun the business.But I suppose we must go on. How horrid that story was last night!It spoilt my thoughts of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doomoverhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus."
"Or the house of Jeroboam," said the quondam theologian.
"Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying! I amgoing to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband,and you to me in the same as you used to your other wife; regardlessof the deterrent lesson we were taught by those experiments!"
"If you are uneasy I am made unhappy," said he. "I had hoped youwould feel quite joyful. But if you don't, you don't. It is no usepretending. It is a dismal business to you, and that makes it so tome!"
"It is unpleasantly like that other morning--that's all," shemurmured. "Let us go on now."
They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no witnessaccompanying them except the Widow Edlin. The day was chilly anddull, and a clammy fog blew through the town from "Royal-tower'dThame." On the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marksof people who had entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas.Within the office several persons were gathered, and our coupleperceived that a marriage between a soldier and a young woman wasjust in progress. Sue, Jude, and the widow stood in the backgroundwhile this was going on, Sue reading the notices of marriage on thewall. The room was a dreary place to two of their temperament,though to its usual frequenters it doubtless seemed ordinary enough.Law-books in musty calf covere
d one wall, and elsewhere werepost-office directories, and other books of reference. Papers inpackets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed around, and some ironsafes filled a recess, while the bare wood floor was, like thedoor-step, stained by previous visitors.
The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and timid; shewas soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye.Their little business was soon done, and the twain and their friendsstraggled out, one of the witnesses saying casually to Jude and Suein passing, as if he had known them before: "See the couple justcome in? Ha, ha! That fellow is just out of gaol this morning.She met him at the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She'spaying for everything."
Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely cropped,with a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquorand the satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire.They jocosely saluted the outgoing couple, and went forward in frontof Jude and Sue, whose diffidence was increasing. The latter drewback and turned to her lover, her mouth shaping itself like that ofa child about to give way to grief:
"Jude--I don't like it here! I wish we hadn't come! The place givesme the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love!I wish it had been at church, if it had to be at all. It is not sovulgar there!"
"Dear little girl," said Jude. "How troubled and pale you look!"
"It must be performed here now, I suppose?"
"No--perhaps not necessarily."
He spoke to the clerk, and came back. "No--we need not marry here oranywhere, unless we like, even now," he said. "We can be married ina church, if not with the same certificate with another he'll giveus, I think. Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear, and Itoo, and talk it over."
They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed amisdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the widow,who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them; that theywould call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary. Whenin the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley where theywalked up and down as they had done long ago in the market-house atMelchester.
"Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of it, itstrikes me. Still, ANYTHING that pleases you will please me."
"But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there,didn't you?"
"Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn'tcare much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as itdid you--it was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said thismorning as to whether we ought."
They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice begananew: "It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet howmuch better than to act rashly a second time... How terrible thatscene was to me! The expression in that flabby woman's face, leadingher on to give herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as shewould, but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul--toescape a nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of hercharacter, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrantwho scorned her--a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance ofsalvation... This is our parish church, isn't it? This is whereit would have to be, if we did it in the usual way? A service orsomething seems to be going on."
Jude went up and looked in at the door. "Why--it is a wedding heretoo," he said. "Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day."
Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when therewas always a crowd of marriages. "Let us listen," she said, "andfind how it feels to us when performed in a church."
They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedingsat the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to thewell-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinaryprettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in thebride's hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanicalmurmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at allunder the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude listened,and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same formof self-committal.
"It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing itover again with my present knowledge," Sue whispered. "You see, theyare fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course.But having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or atleast as I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelingsperhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go andundertake the same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here andseeing this has frightened me from a church wedding as much as theother did from a registry one... We are a weak, tremulous pair,Jude, and what others may feel confident in I feel doubts of--mybeing proof against the sordid conditions of a business contractagain!"
Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers theobject-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they wereboth too thin-skinned--that they ought never to have been born--muchless have come together for the most preposterous of all jointventures for THEM--matrimony.
His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeedfelt that they ought not to go in cold blood and sign thatlife-undertaking again? "It is awful if you think we have foundourselves not strong enough for it, and knowing this, are proposingto perjure ourselves," she said.
"I fancy I do think it--since you ask me," said Jude. "Remember I'lldo it if you wish, own darling." While she hesitated he went on toconfess that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, hefelt checked by the dread of incompetency just as she did--from theirpeculiarities, perhaps, because they were unlike other people. "Weare horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us,Sue!" he declared.
"I fancy more are like us than we think!"
"Well, I don't know. The intention of the contract is good, andright for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own endsbecause we are the queer sort of people we are--folk in whom domesticties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."
Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:that all were so. "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We area little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years thedescendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. Theywill see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as
Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,
and will be afraid to reproduce them."
"What a terrible line of poetry! ... though I have felt it myselfabout my fellow-creatures, at morbid times."
Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:
"Well--the general question is not our business, and why should weplague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are, we cometo the same conclusion: that for us particular two, an irrevocableoath is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream!Yes? How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!"
"They accord very much with my own."
He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention ofeverybody present was taken up in observing the bridal processionentering the vestry; and then they came outside the building. By thedoor they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away fora while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the opendaylight. Sue sighed.
"The flowers in the bride's hand are sadly like the garland whichdecked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!"
"Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That'swhat some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against theconditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as awoman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when heis only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him."
"Yes--some are like that, instead of uniting with the man againstthe common enemy, coercion." The bride and bridegroom had by thistime driven off, and the two moved away with the rest of the idlers."No--don't let's do it," she continued. "At least, just now."
They reac
hed home, and passing the window arm in arm saw the widowlooking out at them. "Well," cried their guest when they entered, "Isaid to myself when I zeed ye coming so loving up to the door, 'Theymade up their minds at last, then!'"
They briefly hinted that they had not.
"What--and ha'n't ye really done it? Chok' it all, that I shouldhave lived to see a good old saying like 'marry in haste and repentat leisure' spoiled like this by you two! 'Tis time I got back againto Marygreen--sakes if tidden--if this is what the new notions beleading us to! Nobody thought o' being afeard o' matrimony in mytime, nor of much else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why whenI and my poor man were married we thought no more o't than of a gameo' dibs!"
"Don't tell the child when he comes in," whispered Sue nervously."He'll think it has all gone on right, and it will be better that heshould not be surprised and puzzled. Of course it is only put offfor reconsideration. If we are happy as we are, what does it matterto anybody?"