But he jerked the kindly touch away, almost roughly.
‘Don’t come near me,’ he muttered, ‘Don’t speak to me. You are false, and you have destroyed all my faith in womankind.’
‘No, no, Hugh! you shall not say that of me. Listen, and I will tell you everything. I should have told it you in any case, for I sorely need your counsel and advice, only we have had no time as yet to speak of any one but ourselves. But you are good, and noble, and true, and if you do not approve of my action, you will at least not betray it. I will not deceive you, and I think, when you know all, you will acknowledge you would have done the same. Henri de Courcelles is in that room, a fugitive hiding from the law! No, don’t look at me like that! I call Heaven to witness he is not there as my lover, but that I would have extended the same succour to any fellow-creature who threw himself upon my mercy. Hugh! I heard that he had escaped from the Fort prison, and eluded the pursuit of the police by taking refuge in the Alligator Swamp. Could I have left him there to perish by a miserable death, without making one effort to save him?’
Captain Norris looked up at her in amazement.
‘But what could you do?’ he inquired. ‘Not a man in San Diego would venture to penetrate the horrors of the swamp, unless he wished to die.’
‘Yet a woman did,’ she whispered.
‘Lizzie, you do not mean to tell me that you went yourself?—that you risked the awful dangers of the miasma and the alligators, for the sake of this man, and that you live to tell the tale?’
‘The danger was not so great for me as for another, Hugh, because I knew the proper preventatives to carry with me. Anyway, I went, and I was successful. I found this unhappy and misguided man nearly unconscious from the effects of the poisonous air he was inhaling, and I brought him safely out of it, and have hid him here for the last two days, until I could devise some plan to get him away from San Diego. Will you help me, Hugh? I know it is a great thing to ask at your hands; and I have not another friend whom I would trust with the secret; but I shall not rest till I know he is secure from suffering a malefactor’s death upon the gallows.’
‘He deserves it, Lizzie, if any one ever did.’
‘I know it! but if we all received our deserts in this world, how badly we should fare! Hugh, you will believe me when I tell you that such love as I once entertained for Henri de Courcelles is all past, and for ever. I see his character in its true light at last,—as vindictive and revengeful and untrue! But that does not alter the case that once I thought him good enough to be my husband, and mine is a heart that cannot entirely forget!’