Jude the Obscure | Page 9

a man who had
begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down and
prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried the
same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found afterwards
that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew. This was not
discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung,
where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the mist might rise.
He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or fifteen
minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern
horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter of an
hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun's
position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in
visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately
looked back in the old direction.
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light
like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse

of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes,
windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires,
domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed.
It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in
the peculiar atmosphere.
The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their
shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague
city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that the sun had
disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark,
and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.
He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run,
trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in wait
for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his forehead
and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the
bewitched ship. He knew that he had grown out of belief in these
horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in
the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of his birth,
and his great-aunt did not care much about him.
Inside and round about that old woman's "shop" window, with its
twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of them
oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles
exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong man could
have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time. But
his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he
was always beholding a gorgeous city--the fancied place he had likened
to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter's
imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his dreams thereof
than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city acquired a
tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one
nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had
so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living
among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he
could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there. Whenever he could
get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two, which was
not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and strain
his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight of a dome
or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his estimate had
some of the mysticism of incense.
Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he
ascended to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or two
further, he would see the night lights of the city. It would be necessary
to come back alone, but even that consideration did not deter him, for
he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no doubt.
The project was duly executed. It was not late when he arrived at the
place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east sky,
accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion dark
enough. He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in rows,
as he had half expected. No individual light was visible, only a halo or
glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it,
making the light and the city seem