Wherever Jude heard of free-stone work to be done, thither he went,
choosing by preference places remote from his old haunts and Sue's.
He laboured at a job, long or briefly, till it was finished; and
then moved on.
Two whole years and a half passed thus. Sometimes he might have
been found shaping the mullions of a country mansion, sometimes
setting the parapet of a town-hall, sometimes ashlaring an hotel at
Sandbourne, sometimes a museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down
as Exonbury, sometimes at Stoke-Barehills. Later still he was at
Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of
Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the village where he
was known; for he had a sensitive dread of being questioned as to his
life and fortunes by those who had been acquainted with him during
his ardent young manhood of study and promise, and his brief and
unhappy married life at that time.
At some of these places he would be detained for months, at others
only a few weeks. His curious and sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical
work, both episcopal and noncomformist, which had risen in him when
suffering under a smarting sense of misconception, remained with him
in cold blood, less from any fear of renewed censure than from an
ultra-conscientiousness which would not allow him to seek a living
out of those who would disapprove of his ways; also, too, from a
sense of inconsistency between his former dogmas and his present
practice, hardly a shred of the beliefs with which he had first
gone up to Christminster now remaining with him. He was mentally
approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met
her.
On a Saturday evening in May, nearly three years after Arabella's
recognition of Sue and himself at the agricultural show, some of
those who there encountered each other met again.
It was the spring fair at Kennetbridge, and, though this ancient
trade-meeting had much dwindled from its dimensions of former times,
the long straight street of the borough presented a lively scene
about midday. At this hour a light trap, among other vehicles,
was driven into the town by the north road, and up to the door of
a temperance inn. There alighted two women, one the driver, an
ordinary country person, the other a finely built figure in the deep
mourning of a widow. Her sombre suit, of pronounced cut, caused
her to appear a little out of place in the medley and bustle of a
provincial fair.
"I will just find out where it is, Anny," said the widow-lady to her
companion, when the horse and cart had been taken by a man who came
forward: "and then I'll come back, and meet you here; and we'll go
in and have something to eat and drink. I begin to feel quite a
sinking."