"Come along do! Phantoms! There's neither living nor dead
hereabouts except a damn policeman! I never saw the streets
emptier."
"Fancy! The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the great
Dissector of Melancholy there!"
"I don't want to hear about 'em! They bore me."
"Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that lane--Wycliffe--Harvey--
Hooker--Arnold--and a whole crowd of Tractarian Shades--"
"I DON'T WANT to know their names, I tell you! What do I care about
folk dead and gone? Upon my soul you are more sober when you've been
drinking than when you have not!"
"I must rest a moment," he said; and as he paused, holding to the
railings, he measured with his eye the height of a college front.
"This is old Rubric. And that Sarcophagus; and Up that lane Crozier
and Tudor: and all down there is Cardinal with its long front, and
its windows with lifted eyebrows, representing the polite surprise of
the university at the efforts of such as I."
"Come along, and I'll treat you!"
"Very well. It will help me home, for I feel the chilly fog from
the meadows of Cardinal as if death-claws were grabbing me through
and through. As Antigone said, I am neither a dweller among men nor
ghosts. But, Arabella, when I am dead, you'll see my spirit flitting
up and down here among these!"
"Pooh! You mayn't die after all. You are tough enough yet, old
man."
It was night at Marygreen, and the rain of the afternoon showed no
sign of abatement. About the time at which Jude and Arabella were
walking the streets of Christminster homeward, the Widow Edlin
crossed the green, and opened the back door of the schoolmaster's
dwelling, which she often did now before bedtime, to assist Sue in
putting things away.
Sue was muddling helplessly in the kitchen, for she was not a good
housewife, though she tried to be, and grew impatient of domestic
details.
"Lord love 'ee, what do ye do that yourself for, when I've come o'
purpose! You knew I should come."
"Oh--I don't know--I forgot! No, I didn't forget. I did it to
discipline myself. I have scrubbed the stairs since eight o'clock.
I MUST practise myself in my household duties. I've shamefully
neglected them!"
"Why should ye? He'll get a better school, perhaps be a parson, in
time, and you'll keep two servants. 'Tis a pity to spoil them pretty
hands."
"Don't talk of my pretty hands, Mrs. Edlin. This pretty body of mine
has been the ruin of me already!"