"Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said.
"And will you please walk up to her?"
"Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily.
"Only a little—not very."
Jude entered and ascended.
On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn—the voice of Sue calling his name.
He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square.
"Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand.
"How is this!
You couldn't write?"
"No—it wasn't that!" she answered.
"I did catch a bad cold—but I could have written.
Only I wouldn't!"
"Why not?—frightening me like this!"
"Yes—that was what I was afraid of!
But I had decided not to write to you any more.
They won't have me back at the school—that's why I couldn't write.
Not the fact, but the reason!"
"Well?"
"They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice—"
"What?"
She did not answer directly.
"I vowed I never would tell you, Jude—it is so vulgar and distressing!"
"Is it about us?"
"Yes."
"But do tell me!"
"Well—somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! … There—now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!"
"Oh, poor Sue!"
"I don't think of you like that means!
It did just occur to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to.
I have recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers.
But my marrying you, dear Jude—why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often!
And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little.
Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you.
It is all my fault.
Everything is my fault always!"
The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress.
"I was so blind at first!" she went on.
"I didn't see what you felt at all.
Oh, you have been unkind to me—you have—to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself!
Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong!
I'll never trust you again!"
"Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame—more than you think.
I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you.
I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it.
But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?"
She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him.
By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature.
Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church.
Jude did not.