A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes

had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant

for a hundred.

When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the

quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with

his fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes

passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined

among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through

ten bygone years, and what mattered a night's rest for once? High

against the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed

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pinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently

never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed

to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,

doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air

being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed

impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit

and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with

the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the

sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself

seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus

almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly

presences with which the nooks were haunted.

During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife

and furniture's uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read

and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his

position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these

reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer

age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in

his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The

brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs

were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings

of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their

mournful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement,

making him comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he

ran against them without feeling their bodily frames.

The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he

could not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late,

from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has

recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who

is still among us. Speculative philosophers drew along, not always

with wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but

pink-faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted in

their surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were the

founders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known

three, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes

of whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure home.

A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move them at sight of

those other sons of the place, the form in the full-bottomed wig,

statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historian

so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of the same

incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and

took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.




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