That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should be of this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which had surrounded the school-master’s figure in Jude’s imagination ever since their parting. It created in him at the same time a sympathy with Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man. Jude told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an old friend who had been kind to him in his youthful days.
“I don’t remember you in the least,” said the school-master thoughtfully. “You were one of my pupils, you say? Yes, no doubt; but they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the quite recent ones.”
“It was out at Marygreen,” said Jude, wishing he had not come.
“Yes. I was there a short time. And is this an old pupil, too?”
“No—that’s my cousin… I wrote to you for some grammars, if you recollect, and you sent them?”
“Ah—yes!—I do dimly recall that incident.”
“It was very kind of you to do it. And it was you who first started me on that course. On the morning you left Marygreen, when your goods were on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your scheme was to be a university man and enter the Church—that a degree was the necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a theologian or teacher.”
“I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not keep my own counsel. The idea was given up years ago.”
“I have never forgotten it. It was that which brought me to this part of the country, and out here to see you to-night.”
“Come in,” said Phillotson. “And your cousin, too.”