Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/22

 un, though I be obliged to let him earn any penny he can. Just now he's a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. It keeps un out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?" she continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved aside.

The local washer-woman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of Miss or Mrs. Fawley's (as they called her indifferently) to have him with her—"to kip 'ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the winder-shetters o' nights, and help in the bit o' baking."

Miss Fawley doubted it... "Why didn't ye get the school-master to take 'ee to Christminster wi' un, and make a scholar of 'ee," she continued, in frowning pleasantry. "I'm sure he couldn't ha' took a better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I've heard; but I have not seen the chile for years, though she was born in this place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were married, didn' get a house of their own for some year or more; and then they only had one till— Well, I won't go into that. Jude, my chile, don't you ever marry. 'Tisn't for the Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like a chile o' my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!"

Jude, finding the general attention again centring on himself, went out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back, he pursued a path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of the upland, which was sown as a cornfield. This vast concave was the scene of his labors for Mr. Troutham, the farmer, and he descended into the midst of it.

The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist