It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble, to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal gain.
Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and himself in love erratically, the loved one's revolt against her state being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable according to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole, to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that he possessed, and had stored here.
He knew that, in this country of true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way, even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus destroying them.
Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with, he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a three-pronged fork shook them over the flames.
They kindled, and lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till they were more or less consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to him over the garden hedge.
"Burning up your awld aunt's rubbidge, I suppose?
Ay; a lot gets heaped up in nooks and corners when you've lived eighty years in one house."
It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before the leaves, covers, and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman and the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he turned and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being no longer a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which gave him calm.
He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which, as their proprietor, he might naturally be supposed to exercise on himself first of all.
In his passion for Sue he could not stand as an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited sepulchre.
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and let him kiss her.
Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly.
She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue's logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were wrong in practice.
"I have been too weak, I think!" she jerked out as she pranced on, shaking down tear-drops now and then.
"It was burning, like a lover's—oh, it was!
And I won't write to him any more, or at least for a long time, to impress him with my dignity!
And I hope it will hurt him very much—expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and the next, and no letter coming.
He'll suffer then with suspense—won't he, that's all!—and I am very glad of it!"—Tears of pity for Jude's approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those which had surged up in pity for herself.
Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing effect of her aunt's death and funeral.
He began telling her of his day's doings, and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he had not seen for years, had called upon him.
While ascending to the town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and its bordering bushes of hazel:
"Richard—I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while.
I don't know whether you think it wrong?"
He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said vaguely, "Oh, did you? What did you do that for?"
"I don't know.
He wanted to, and I let him."
"I hope it pleased him.
I should think it was hardly a novelty."
They lapsed into silence.
Had this been a case in the court of an omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not said a word about the kiss.
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!"