’He’s welcome to go. He’s more
welcome to go than to stay. But let him never
come back. Let him never put his head inside that
door. And let you never speak a word more in
his favour, or you’ll disown your own father,
likewise, and what your father says of him he’ll
have to come to say of you. Now I see why them
men yonder held aloof from me. They says to one
another, “Here comes the man as ain’t good
enough for his own son!” Lizzie—!’
But, she stopped him with a cry. Looking at her
he saw her, with a face quite strange to him, shrinking
back against the wall, with her hands before her eyes.
‘Father, don’t! I can’t bear
to see you striking with it. Put it down!’
He looked at the knife; but in his astonishment still
held it.
‘Father, it’s too horrible. O put
it down, put it down!’
Confounded by her appearance and exclamation, he tossed
it away, and stood up with his open hands held out
before him.
’What’s come to you, Liz? Can you
think I would strike at you with a knife?’
‘No, father, no; you would never hurt me.’
‘What should I hurt?’
’Nothing, dear father. On my knees, I am
certain, in my heart and soul I am certain, nothing!
But it was too dreadful to bear; for it looked—’
her hands covering her face again, ‘O it looked—’
‘What did it look like?’
The recollection of his murderous figure, combining
with her trial of last night, and her trial of the
morning, caused her to drop at his feet, without having
answered.
He had never seen her so before. He raised her
with the utmost tenderness, calling her the best of
daughters, and ’my poor pretty creetur’,
and laid her head upon his knee, and tried to restore
her. But failing, he laid her head gently down
again, got a pillow and placed it under her dark hair,
and sought on the table for a spoonful of brandy.
There being none left, he hurriedly caught up the empty
bottle, and ran out at the door.
He returned as hurriedly as he had gone, with the
bottle still empty. He kneeled down by her, took
her head on his arm, and moistened her lips with a
little water into which he dipped his fingers:
saying, fiercely, as he looked around, now over this
shoulder, now over that:
’Have we got a pest in the house? Is there
summ’at deadly sticking to my clothes?
What’s let loose upon us? Who loosed it?’
MR WEGG LOOKS AFTER HIMSELF
Silas Wegg, being on his road to the Roman Empire,
approaches it by way of Clerkenwell. The time
is early in the evening; the weather moist and raw.
Mr Wegg finds leisure to make a little circuit, by
reason that he folds his screen early, now that he
combines another source of income with it, and also
that he feels it due to himself to be anxiously expected
at the Bower. ’Boffin will get all the eagerer
for waiting a bit,’ says Silas, screwing up,
as he stumps along, first his right eye, and then
his left. Which is something superfluous in him,
for Nature has already screwed both pretty tight.
