Dead!
Ezra:
Eliza!
Bell:
I found the body, huddled on the bed,
Already cold and stiffening.
Ezra:
I thought I heard ...
Yet, she set out for Rawridge, to fetch a man ...
I felt her passing, in my very bones.
I knew her foot: you cannot hear a step
For forty-year, and mistake it, though the spring’s
Gone out of it, and it’s turned to a shuffle, it’s still
The same footfall. Why didn’t she answer me?
She chattered enough, before she went—such havers!
Words tumbling from her lips in a witless jumble.
Contrary, to the last, she wouldn’t answer:
But crept away, like a wounded pheasant, to die
Alone. She’s gone before me, after all—
And she, so hale; while I was crutched and crippled.
I haven’t looked on her face for eleven-year:
But she was bonnie, when I saw her first,
That morning at the fair—so fresh and pink.
Bell:
She must have died alone. It’s an ill thing
To die alone, folk say; but I don’t know.
She’d hardly die more lonely than she lived:
For every woman’s lonely in her heart.
I never looked on a lonelier face.
Peter: