“It’s too risky, Jim. I’ll do it, if you want me to; but it’s putting yourself in danger as well as me. All right, I’ll pass it.”
Then she broke out passionately—
“It’s an ill thing you’re going to do, James Woodfall. What do you want of a lady for a wife? Her money’s none so much, and, as for her pretty face, it’s the face of a fool. I’m twice the woman to look at that she is, and I’m only twenty-five; and I’ve stuck to you through thick and thin. Why don’t you marry me, Jim?”
And it flashed across me, as she went on addressing to me reproaches, coaxings, encouragement, and defiance, that she was living over again some long-past passages in her life—passages, I could not but gather, of a very questionable character. For it was plain that this Jim, or James Woodfall, who occupied all her thoughts had been a very bad man indeed, and that Sarah had assisted him in every way in his wicked deeds.
“Don’t go for that, James,” she said once imploringly. “It’ll be a lifer if they catch you; and they’ve had their eye on you lately. There’s many a safer way of getting money than that.”
Another pause, and then came a speech which chilled me with horror.
“Dead men tell no tales, Jim,” said she, in another fearful whisper. “It’s easy done, and it’s safer. What’s an old man’s life that you’re so shy of touching him? You’ve done many a riskier thing. Why do you always turn coward at that?”
I could scarcely sit and watch this woman-fiend after that. I seemed to see murder in her fierce fiery eyes; and I shuddered even as I moistened her dry lips and touched her burning forehead. She rambled on in the same style, mentioning other names I had never heard, and not a word of me or Mr. and Mrs. Rayner, or even of Tom Parkes, until she broke out angrily—
“Jim’s mad about that little Christie girl, Tom, and he says he’ll marry her in spite of everything, and I’ve got to bring it about,” she hissed between her teeth.
What awful confusion in her mind was there to connect me with her criminal lover of years before? There suddenly woke up in my mind the remembrance of the evening when, hidden in my “nest,” I had overheard a conversation between her and Mr. Rayner’s mysterious visitor, who had afterwards turned out to be Mr. Carruthers’s man-servant, and I remembered that she had then expressed jealousy of some man called “Jim.” Was it the same man? How was it that he never appeared? I had thought at the time that she must mean Tom Parkes, and that the woman she was jealous of was Jane; but, on the whole, she got on well with Jane; and the only person in the house against whom her animosity took any serious form was myself. And now she fancied this “Jim” wanted to marry me—and I had never even seen him!