“Their cup of sorrow is now full!” he said: and thought and thought of Sue, and what she had gained by leaving him.
Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the schoolmaster coming to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful that in a few weeks they met again—the precise time being just after her return from Christminster, where she had stayed much longer than she had at first intended, keeping an interested eye on Jude, though Jude had seen no more of her. Phillotson was on his way homeward when he encountered Arabella, and she was approaching the town.
“You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?” he said.
“I’ve just begun to again,” she replied. “It is where I lived as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road. And they have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I’ve been visiting at Christminster. Yes; I’ve seen Jude.”
“Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?”
“In a ve-ry strange way—ve-ry strange! She don’t live with him any longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though I had thought things were drifting that way from their manner when I called on them.”
“Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought ’twould have united them more.”
“He’s not her husband, after all. She has never really married him although they have passed as man and wife so long. And now, instead of this sad event making ’em hurry up, and get the thing done legally, she’s took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my affliction at losing Cartlett, only hers is of a more ’sterical sort than mine. And she says, so I was told, that she’s your wife in the eye of Heaven and the Church—yours only; and can’t be anybody else’s by any act of man.”
“Ah—indeed? … Separated, have they!”
“You see, the eldest boy was mine—”