Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody was gone, she was allowed to see the children.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.
When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.
“What is it?” said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.
“The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose. It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; ‘Truly God is loving unto Israel.’”
She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should they have been taken away, and not I!”
There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in conversation somewhere without.
“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”
Jude listened—“No—they are not talking of us,” he said. “They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!”
Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable fit of grief. “There is something external to us which says, ‘You shan’t!’ First it said, ‘You shan’t learn!’ Then it said, ‘You shan’t labour!’ Now it says, ‘You shan’t love!’”