It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off.The boy quickly waved a signal of assent,drew the water with what was a great effort for one of his stature,landed and emptied the big bucket into his own pair of smaller ones,and pausing a moment for breath,started with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well stood -nearly in the center of the little village,or rather hamlet of Marygreen.
It was as old-fashioned as it was small,and it rested in the lap of an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs.Old as it was,however,the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged.Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years,and many trees felled on the green.
Above all,the original church,hump-backed,wood-turreted,and quaintly hipped,had been taken down,and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane,or utilized as pig-sty walls,garden seats,guard-stones to fences,and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood.In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design,unfamiliar to English eyes,had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day.The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard,the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny castiron crosses warranted to last five years.
Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting.Over the door was a little rectangular piece of blue board,on which was painted in yellow letters,'Drusilla Fawley,Baker.'Within the little lead panes of the window -this being one of the few old houses left -were five bottles of sweets,and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,the Drusilla of the sign-board,and some other villagers.Having seen the school-master depart,they were summing up particulars of the event,and indulging in predictions of his future.
'And who's he?'asked one,comparatively a stranger,when the boy entered.
'Well ye med ask it,Mrs.Williams.He's my great-nephew -come since you was last this way.'The old inhabitant who answered was a tall,gaunt woman,who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject,and gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn.'He come from Mellstock,down in South Wessex,about a year ago -worse luck for 'n,Belinda'(turning to the right)'where his father was living,and was took wi'the shakings for death,and died in two days,as you know,Caroline'(turning to the left).'It would ha'been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too,wi'thy mother and father,poor useless boy!But I've got him here to stay with me till I can see what's to be done with un,though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can.Just now he's a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham.It keeps him 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 washerwoman 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-shet-ters o'nights,and help in the bit o'baking.'
Miss Fawley doubted it....'Why didn't ye get the schoolmaster 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 child 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 child,don't you ever marry.
'Tisn't for the Fawleys to take that step any more.She,their only one,was like a child o'my own,Belinda,till the split come!Ah,that a little maid should know such changes!'
Jude,finding the general attention again centering 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 corn-field.This vast concave was the scene of his labours 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 that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude.The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year's produce standing in the midst of the arable,the rooks that rose at his approach,and the path athwart the fallow by which he had come,trodden now by he hardly knew whom,though once by many of his own dead family.
'How ugly it is here!'he murmured.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy,lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse,taking away its gradations,and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent months,though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare -echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days,of spoken words,and of sturdy deeds.Every inch of ground had been the site,first or last,of energy,gaiety,horse-play,bickerings,weariness.
