CHAPTER III 27
Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go, because punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.
" The fall did not make you ill; what did, then?" pursued Mr. Lloyd when Bessie was gone.
" I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost till after dark." I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time. " Ghost! What, you are a baby after all! You are afraid of ghosts?"
" Of Mr. Reed ' s ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out there. Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night, if they can help it; and it was cruel to shut me up alone without a candle,-- so cruel that I think I shall never forget it."
" Nonsense! And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid now in daylight?"
" No: but night will come again before long: and besides,-- I am unhappy,-- very unhappy, for other things."
" What other things? Can you tell me some of them?"
How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response.
" For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters." " You have a kind aunt and cousins."