'Did you come here to escape from him, Lizzie?'
'I came here immediately after he so alarmed me.'
'Are you afraid of him here?'
'I am not timid generally, but I am always afraid of him. I am afraid to see a newspaper, or to hear a word spoken of what is done in London, lest he should have done some violence.'
'Then you are not afraid of him for yourself, dear?' said Bella, after pondering on the words.
'I should be even that, if I met him about here. I look round for him always, as I pass to and fro at night.'
'Are you afraid of anything he may do to himself in London, my dear?'
'No. He might be fierce enough even to do some violence to himself, but I don't think of that.'
'Then it would almost seem, dear,' said Bella quaintly, 'as if there must be somebody else?'
Lizzie put her hands before her face for a moment before replying:
'The words are always in my ears, and the blow he struck upon a stone wall as he said them is always before my eyes. I have tried hard to think it not worth remembering, but I cannot make so little of it. His hand was trickling down with blood as he said to me, "Then I hope that I may never kill him!"Rather startled, Bella made and clasped a girdle of her arms round Lizzie's waist, and then asked quietly, in a soft voice, as they both looked at the fire:
'Kill him! Is this man so jealous, then?'
'Of a gentleman,' said Lizzie. '--I hardly know how to tell you--of a gentleman far above me and my way of life, who broke father's death to me, and has shown an interest in me since.'
'Does he love you?'
Lizzie shook her head.
'Does he admire you?'
Lizzie ceased to shake her head, and pressed her hand upon her living girdle.
'Is it through his influence that you came here?'
'O no! And of all the world I wouldn't have him know that I am here, or get the least clue where to find me.'
'Lizzie, dear! Why?' asked Bella, in amazement at this burst. But then quickly added, reading Lizzie's face: 'No. Don't say why.
That was a foolish question of mine. I see, I see.'
There was silence between them. Lizzie, with a drooping head, glanced down at the glow in the fire where her first fancies had been nursed, and her first escape made from the grim life out of which she had plucked her brother, foreseeing her reward.
'You know all now,' she said, raising her eyes to Bella's. 'There is nothing left out. This is my reason for living secret here, with the aid of a good old man who is my true friend. For a short part of my life at home with father, I knew of things--don't ask me what--that I set my face against, and tried to better. I don't think I could have done more, then, without letting my hold on father go; but they sometimes lie heavy on my mind. By doing all for the best, Ihope I may wear them out.'
'And wear out too,' said Bella soothingly, 'this weakness, Lizzie, in favour of one who is not worthy of it.'
'No. I don't want to wear that out,' was the flushed reply, 'nor do Iwant to believe, nor do I believe, that he is not worthy of it. What should I gain by that, and how much should I lose!'
Bella's expressive little eyebrows remonstrated with the fire for some short time before she rejoined:
'Don't think that I press you, Lizzie; but wouldn't you gain in peace, and hope, and even in freedom? Wouldn't it be better not to live a secret life in hiding, and not to be shut out from your natural and wholesome prospects? Forgive my asking you, would that be no gain?'
'Does a woman's heart that--that has that weakness in it which you have spoken of,' returned Lizzie, 'seek to gain anything?'
The question was so directly at variance with Bella's views in life, as set forth to her father, that she said internally, 'There, you little mercenary wretch! Do you hear that? Ain't you ashamed of your self?' and unclasped the girdle of her arms, expressly to give herself a penitential poke in the side.
'But you said, Lizzie,' observed Bella, returning to her subject when she had administered this chastisement, 'that you would lose, besides. Would you mind telling me what you would lose, Lizzie?'
'I should lose some of the best recollections, best encouragements, and best objects, that I carry through my daily life. I should lose my belief that if I had been his equal, and he had loved me, Ishould have tried with all my might to make him better and happier, as he would have made me. I should lose almost all the value that I put upon the little learning I have, which is all owing to him, and which I conquered the difficulties of, that he might not think it thrown away upon me. I should lose a kind of picture of him--or of what he might have been, if I had been a lady, and he had loved me--which is always with me, and which I somehow feel that I could not do a mean or a wrong thing before. I should leave off prizing the remembrance that he has done me nothing but good since I have known him, and that he has made a change within me, like--like the change in the grain of these hands, which were coarse, and cracked, and hard, and brown when I rowed on the river with father, and are softened and made supple by this new work as you see them now.'
They trembled, but with no weakness, as she showed them.
'Understand me, my dear;' thus she went on. I have never dreamed of the possibility of his being anything to me on this earth but the kind picture that I know I could not make you understand, if the understanding was not in your own breast already. I have no more dreamed of the possibility of MY being his wife, than he ever has--and words could not be stronger than that. And yet I love him. Ilove him so much, and so dearly, that when I sometimes think my life may be but a weary one, I am proud of it and glad of it. I am proud and glad to suffer something for him, even though it is of no service to him, and he will never know of it or care for it.'
Bella sat enchained by the deep, unselfish passion of this girl or woman of her own age, courageously revealing itself in the confidence of her sympathetic perception of its truth. And yet she had never experienced anything like it, or thought of the existence of anything like it.