Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered,
"Nor has husbandom you, so far as I can see!"
"But it has!" he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and quarrelled, he turned to look at it.
A squalid family lived there now.
He could not help saying to Sue:
"That's the house my wife and I occupied the whole of the time we lived together.
I brought her home to that house."
She looked at it.
"That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is to me."
"Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours."
She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it.
"Of course I may have exaggerated your happiness—one never knows," he continued blandly.
"Don't think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it to sting me!
He's as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect liberty—which elderly husbands don't do in general… If you think I am not happy because he's too old for me, you are wrong."
"I don't think anything against him—to you dear."
"And you won't say things to distress me, will you?"
"I will not."
He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not to have done.
They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the village—the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer many years earlier.
On ascending to the village and approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly.
"She's downstairs, if you'll believe me!" cried the widow.
"Out o' bed she got, and nothing could turn her.
What will come o't I do not know!"
On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of Sebastiano's Lazarus.
They must have looked their amazement, for she said in a hollow voice:
"Ah—sceered ye, have I!
I wasn't going to bide up there no longer, to please nobody!
'Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be ordered to do this and that by a feller that don't know half as well as you do yourself! … Ah—you'll rue this marrying as well as he!" she added, turning to Sue.
"All our family do—and nearly all everybody else's.
You should have done as I did, you simpleton!
And Phillotson the schoolmaster, of all men!
What made 'ee marry him?"
"What makes most women marry, Aunt?"
"Ah!
You mean to say you loved the man!"
"I don't meant to say anything definite."
"Do ye love un?"
"Don't ask me, Aunt."
"I can mind the man very well.
A very civil, honourable liver; but Lord!—I don't want to wownd your feelings, but—there be certain men here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach.
I should have said he was one.
I don't say so now, since you must ha' known better than I—but that's what I should have said!"
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the outhouse, crying.
"Don't cry, dear!" said Jude in distress.
"She means well, but is very crusty and queer now, you know."
"Oh no—it isn't that!" said Sue, trying to dry her eyes.
"I don't mind her roughness one bit."
"What is it, then?"
"It is that what she says is—is true!"