“Sue!” he whispered.
Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.
“What—do you want with me here, Jude?” she said almost sharply. “You shouldn’t come! I wanted to be alone! Why did you intrude here?”
“How can you ask!” he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him. “Why do I come? Who has a right to come, I should like to know, if I have not! I, who love you better than my own self—better—far better—than you have loved me! What made you leave me to come here alone?”
“Don’t criticize me, Jude—I can’t bear it!—I have often told you so. You must take me as I am. I am a wretch—broken by my distractions! I couldn’t bear it when Arabella came—I felt so utterly miserable I had to come away. She seems to be your wife still, and Richard to be my husband!”
“But they are nothing to us!”
“Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage differently now. My babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella’s child killing mine was a judgement—the right slaying the wrong. What, shall I do! I am such a vile creature—too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!”
“This is terrible!” said Jude, verging on tears. “It is monstrous and unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no wrong!”
“Ah—you don’t know my badness!”
He returned vehemently: “I do! Every atom and dreg of it! You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration in you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you—should degrade herself like this! I am glad I had nothing to do with Divinity—damn glad—if it’s going to ruin you in this way!”