‘Your present engagement—is it the same which separated us? Do not be afraid to tell me the truth, Lizzie. I have borne a good deal in my lifetime, and am proof against suffering.’
His voice was so tender and kind, so much like the voice which I remembered in the old days of our love, that it won me to listen to him quietly.
‘My engagement!’ I echoed in surprise. ‘What are you talking of? I have never been engaged—never since’—and then I halted, fearing what my revelation might suggest to him.
‘What do you tell me?’ he exclaimed. ‘What object have you in deceiving me? Were you not engaged, even before your parents’ death, to young Hassell, of Fairmead, and was it not by his father’s means that your present situation was procured for you? I little thought to meet you here,’ he added bitterly. ‘I imagined you were married long ago, or I should have been more careful of my own feelings. And now you are engaged for the third time! How easily life runs for some people!’
‘Who could have told you such a falsehood?’ I said, turning to him. ‘It is true that old Mr Hassell stood my friend when I had not one in the world, and that he found my present situation for me; but as to being engaged to his son, why, he is a married man—he married my own cousin.’
‘Could the mistake have arisen so?’ said Bruce Armytage, as he seized my hand. ‘Oh, Lizzie, do not be angry; think what I have gone through! When I returned home from that wretched foreign tour, during which I was not allowed to correspond with you, the first news which I heard from my own family was, that your father and mother had died some eighteen months before, and that you were engaged to Robert Hassell, and living with some old lady (no one could tell me where) until the time for your marriage arrived. I would not believe them; I rushed down to Fairmead myself to make inquiries, and reached there on the very day of young Hassell’s wedding with Miss Lacy. Do you think I was a coward not to stop and see the bride, believing her to be yourself? Perhaps I was; but I flew from the spot as though I had been haunted; and I suffered—ah, Lizzie, I cannot tell how much! It is so fearful, so awful a thing to teach one’s self to believe the heart in which we have trusted to be faithless and unworthy.’
‘I know it,’ I said in a low voice, which was nearly choked by my tears.
‘How I have lived since that time I can hardly tell you,’ he continued as he pressed my hand. (I knew it ought not to remain in his, but it was so sweet to feel it there.) ‘I have had very little hope, or peace, or happiness, though I have struggled on through it all, and made myself a name in my profession. And then to meet you again to-night so unexpectedly, still free, but promised to another, myself and my love so evidently forgotten, and to feel that it has been but a chance that separated us! Oh! Lizzie, it is almost harder than it was at first!’
‘I am not engaged,’ I answered, sobbing; ‘you choose to take my words at the piano as meaning so, but it was your mistake, not mine. I have lived much in the manner you describe yourself to have done—not very happily, perhaps, and finding my best relief in work. But I am glad to have met you, Bruce—glad to have heard from your own lips what parted us; and I thank you for this explanation, though it comes too late.’
‘But why too late, my dearest?’ he exclaimed joyfully. ‘Why, if you are free to accept my hand, and can forgive all that has made us so unhappy in the past, should we not bury our mutual trouble in mutual love? Oh, Lizzie, say that you’ll be mine—say that you’ll be my own wife, and help me to wipe out the remembrance of this miserable mistake!’