“And if they do,” persisted Alice, who had been consulting with Dinah—“if they do, they seldom have it hard enough to die, so Dinah says; and I don’t believe that was a good, true letter. Somebody wrote it, to be wicked. Marian is alive, I almost know.”
“Must you see her dead body, to be convinced?” asked Frederic, a little impatiently; and Alice rejoined:
“No, no; but somehow it don’t seem right for you to—to—oh, Frederic!” and, bursting into tears, she came at once to the root of the whole matter.
She had thought a great deal about the letter, wondering why Marian had failed to speak of her, and at last rejecting it as an impossibility. Suddenly, too, she remembered that once, when she and Marian were sick, she heard some of the neighbors speak of their disease as scarlet fever, while others called it the canker-rash; and all united in saying they could have it but once. This had led to inquiries of Dinah, and had finally resulted in her conviction that Marian might possibly be living. Full of this new idea, she had hastened to Frederic, and accidentally overheard what he was saying to Isabel. She comprehended it, too, and knew that but for her unexpected presence he would, perhaps, have asked the lady to be his wife, and she felt again as if Marian were there urging her to stand once more between Frederic and temptation. All this she told to him, and the proud, haughty man, who would have spurned a like interference from any other source, listened patiently to the pleadings of the childish voice, which said to him so earnestly:
“Don’t let Isabel be your wife!”
“What objection have you to her?” he asked; and when she replied, “She isn’t good,” he questioned her further as to the cause of her dislike—“was there really a reason, or was it mere prejudice?”
“I try to like her,” said Alice, “and sometimes I do real well, but she don’t act alone with me like she does when you are round. She’ll be just as cross as fury, and if you come in, she’ll smooth my hair and call me ‘little pet.’”
“Does she ever strike you?” asked Frederic, feeling a desire to hear Alice’s version of that story.
Instantly tears came in Alice’s eyes, and she replied, “Only once—and she said she didn’t mean that—but, Frederic, she did,” and in her own way Alice told the story, which sounded to Mr. Raymond more like the truth than the one he had heard from Isabel. Gradually the conviction was forcing itself upon him that Isabel was not exactly what she seemed. Still he could not suddenly shake off the chain which bound him, and when Alice said to him in her odd, straightforward way, “Don’t finish what you were saying to Isabel until you’ve been to New York and found if the letter is true,” he answered, “Fie, Alice, you are unreasonable to ask such a thing of me. Marian is dead. I have no doubt of it, and I am free from the promise made to you more than a year since.”
“May be she isn’t,” was Alice’s reply, “and if she is, we shall both feel better, if you go and see. Go, Frederic, do. It won’t take long, and if you find she is really dead, I’ll never speak another naughty word of Isabel, but try to love her just as I want to love your wife. Will you go, Frederic? I heard you say you ought to see the house before we moved, and Yonkers is close to New York, isn’t it?”