Hide and Seek Part 40

"Is there any living soul you care about that a trifle of money would do a little good to?" he asked, with such abrupt eagerness that she was quite startled by it.

"Lord bless me!" she exclaimed, "what do you mean? What has that got to do with your poor sister, or Mr. Blyth?"

"It's got this to do," burst out Matthew, starting to his feet, as the struggling grat.i.tude within him stirred body and soul both together; "you turned to and helped Mary when she hadn't n.o.body else in the world to stand by her. She was always father's darling--but father couldn't help her then; and I was away on the wrong side of the sea, and couldn't be no good to her neither. But I'm on the right side, now; and if there's any friends of yours, north, south, east, or west, as would be happier for a trifle of money, here's all mine; catch it, and give it 'em." (He tossed his beaver-skin roll, with the bank-notes in it, into Mrs. Peckover's lap.) "Here's my two hands, that I dursn't take a holt of yours with, for fear of hurting you again; here's my two hands that can work along with any man's. Only give 'em something to do for you, that's all! Give 'em something to make or mend, I don't care what--"

"Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+" interposed Mrs. Peckover; "don't be so dreadful noisy, there's a good man! or you'll wake my brother up stairs. And, besides, where's the use to make such a stir about what I done for your sister?

Anybody else would have took as kindly to her as I did, seeing what distress she was in, poor soul! Here," she continued, handing him back the beaver-skin roll; "here's your money, and thank you for the offer of it. Put it up safe in your pocket again. We manage to keep our heads above water, thank G.o.d! and don't want to do no better than that. Put it up in your pocket again, and then I'll make bold to ask you for something else."

"For what?" inquired Mat, looking her eagerly in the face.

"Just for this: that you'll promise not to take little Mary from Mr.

Blyth. Do, pray do promise me you won't."

"I never thought to take her away," he answered. "Where should I take her to? What can a lonesome old vagabond, like me, do for her? If she's happy where she is--let her stop where she is."

"Lord bless you for saying that!" fervently exclaimed Mrs. Peckover, smiling for the first time, and smoothing out her gown over her knees with an air of inexpressible relief. "I'm rid of my grand fright now, and getting to breathe again freely, which I haven't once yet been able to do since I first set eyes on you. Ah! you're rough to look at; but you've got your feelings like the rest of us. Talk away now as much as you like. Ask me about anything you please--"

"What's the good?" he broke in, gloomily. "You don't know what I wanted you to know. I come down here for to find out the man as once owned this,"--he pulled the lock of hair out of his pocket again--"and you can't help me. I didn't believe it when you first said so, but I do now."

"Well, thank you for saying that much; though you might have put it civiler--"

"His name was Arthur Carr. Did you never hear tell of anybody with the name of Arthur Carr?"

"No: never--never till this very moment."

"The Painter-man will know," continued Mat, talking more to himself than to Mrs. Peckover. "I must go back, and chance it with the Painter-man, after all."

"Painter-man?" repeated Mrs. Peckover. "Painter? Surely you don't mean Mr. Blyth?"

"Yes, I do."

"Why, what in the name of fortune can you be thinking of! How should Mr.

Blyth know more than me? He never set eyes on little Mary till she was ten year old; and he knows nothing about her poor unfortunate mother except what I told him."

These words seemed at first to stupefy Mat: they burst upon him in the shape of a revelation for which he was totally unprepared. It had never once occurred to him to doubt that Valentine was secretly informed of all that he most wished to know. He had looked forward to what the painter might be persuaded--or, in the last resort, forced--to tell him, as the one certainty on which he might finally depend; and here was this fancied security exposed, in a moment, as the wildest delusion that ever man trusted in! What resource was left? To return to Dibbledean, and, by the legal help of Mr. Tatt, to possess himself of any fragments of evidence which Joanna Grice might have left behind her in writing?

This seemed but a broken reed to depend on; and yet nothing else now remained.

"I shall find him! I don't care where he's hid away from me, I shall find him yet," thought Mat, still holding with dogged and desperate obstinacy to his first superst.i.tion, in spite of every fresh sign that appeared to confute it.

"Why worrit yourself about finding Arthur Carr at all?" pursued Mrs.

Peckover, noticing his perplexed and mortified expression. "The wretch is dead, most likely, by this time--"

"I'm not dead!" retorted Mat, fiercely; "and you're not dead; and you and me are as old as him. Don't tell me he's dead again! I say he's alive; and, by G.o.d, I'll be even with him!"

"Oh, don't talk so, don't! It's shocking to hear you and see you," said Mrs. Peckover, recoiling from the expression of his eye at that moment, just as she had recoiled from it already over Mary's grave. "Suppose he is alive, why should you go taking vengeance into your own hands after all these years? Your poor sister's happy in heaven; and her child's took care of by the kindest people, I do believe, that ever drew breath in this world. Why should you want to be even with him now? If he hasn't been punished already, I'll answer for it he will be--in the next world, if not in this. Don't talk about it, or think about it any more, that's a good man! Let's be friendly and pleasant together again--like we were just now--for Mary's sake. Tell me where you've been to all these years.

How is it you've never turned up before? Come! tell me, do."

She ended by speaking to him in much the same tone which she would have made use of to soothe a fractious child. But her instinct as a woman guided her truly: in venturing on that little reference to "Mary," she had not ventured in vain. It quieted him, and turned aside the current of his thoughts into the better and smoother direction. "Didn't she never talk to you about having a brother as was away aboard s.h.i.+p?" he asked, anxiously.

"No. She wouldn't say a word about any of her friends, and she didn't say a word about you. But how did you come to be so long away?--that's what I want to know," said Mrs. Peckover, pertinaciously repeating her question, partly out of curiosity, partly out of the desire to keep him from returning to the dangerous subject of Arthur Carr.

"I was alway a bitter bad 'un, _I_ was," said Matthew, meditatively.

"There was no keeping of me straight, try it anyhow you like. I bolted from home, I bolted from school, I bolted from aboard s.h.i.+p--"

"Why? What for?"

"Partly because I was a bitter bad 'un, and partly because of a letter I picked up in port, at the Brazils, at the end of a long cruise. Here's the letter--but it's no good showing it to you: the paper's so grimed and tore about, you can't read it."

"Who wrote it? Mary?"

"No: father--saying what had happened to Mary, and telling me not to come back home till things was pulled straight again. Here--here's what he said--under the big grease-spot. 'If you can get continued employment anywhere abroad, accept it instead of coming back. Better for you, at your age, to be spared the sight of such sorrow as we are now suffering.' Do you see that?"

"Yes, yes, I see. Ah! poor man! he couldn't give no kinder better advice; and you--"

"Deserted from my s.h.i.+p. The devil was in me to be off on the tramp, and father's letter did the rest. I got wild and desperate with the thought of what had happened to Mary, and with knowing they were ashamed to see me back again at home. So the night afore the s.h.i.+p sailed for England I slipped into a sh.o.r.e-boat, and turned my back on salt-junk and the boatswain's mate for the rest of my life."

"You don't mean to say you've done nothing but wander about in foreign parts from that time to this?"

"I do, though! I'd a notion I should be shot for a deserter if I turned up too soon in my own country. That kep' me away for ever so long, to begin with. Then tramps' fever got into my head; and there was an end of it."

"Tramps' fever! Mercy on me! what do you mean?"

"I mean this: when a man turns gypsy on his own account, as I did, and tramps about through cold and hot, and winter and summer, not caring where he goes or what becomes of him, that sort of life ends by getting into his head, just like liquor does--except that it don't get out again. It got into my head. It's in it new. Tramps' fever kep' me away in the wild country. Tramps' fever will take me back there afore long.

Tramps' fever will lay me down, some day, in the lonesome places, with my hand on my rifle and my face to the sky; and I shan't get up again till the crows and vultures come and carry me off piecemeal."

"Lord bless us! how can you talk about yourself in that way?" cried Mrs.

Peckover, shuddering at the grim image which Mat's last words suggested.

"You're trying to make yourself out worse than you are. Surely you must have thought of your father and sister sometimes--didn't you?"

"Think of them? Of course I did! But, mind ye, there come a time when I as good as forgot them altogether. They seemed to get smeared out of my head--like we used to smear old sums off our slates at school."

"More shame for you! Whatever else you forgot, you oughtn't to have forgotten--"

"Wait a bit. Father's letter told me--I'd show you the place, only I know you couldn't read it--that he was a going to look after Mary, and bring her back home, and forgive her. He'd done that twice for _me,_ when _I_ run away; so I didn't doubt but what he'd do it just the same for _her._ She'll pull through her sc.r.a.pe with father just as I used to pull through mine--was what I thought. And so she would, if her own kin hadn't turned against her; if father's own sister hadn't--" He stopped; the frown gathered on his brow, and the oath burst from his lips, as he thought of Joanna Grice's share in preventing Mary's restoration to her home.

"There! there!" interposed Mrs. Peckover, soothingly. "Talk about something pleasanter. Let's hear how you come back to England."

"I can't rightly fix it when Mary first begun to drop out of my head like," Mat continued, abstractedly pursuing his previous train of recollections. "I used to think of her often enough, when I started for my run in the wild country. That was the time, mind ye, when I had clear notions about coming back home. I got her a scarlet pouch and another feather plaything then, knowing she was fond of knick-knacks, and making it out in my own mind that we two was sure to meet together again. It must have been a longish while after that, afore I got ashamed to go home. But I did get ashamed. Thinks I, 'I haven't a rap in my pocket to show father, after being away all this time. I'm getting summut of a savage to look at already; and Mary would be more frighted than pleased to see me as I am now. I'll wait a bit,' says I, 'and see if I can't keep from tramping about, and try and get a little money, by doing some decent sort of work, afore I go home.' I was nigh about a good ten days'

march then from any seaport where honest work could be got for such as me; but I'd fixed to try, and I did try, and got work in a s.h.i.+p-builder's yard. It wasn't no good. Tramps' fever was in my head; and in two days more I was off again to the wild country, with my gun over my shoulder, just as d.a.m.ned a vagabond as ever."

Mrs. Peckover held up her hands in mute amazement. Matthew, without taking notice of the action, went on, speaking partly to her and partly to himself.

"It must have been about that time when Mary and father, and all what had to do with them, begun to drop out of my head. But I kep' them two knick-knacks, which was once meant for presents for her--long after I'd lost all clear notion of ever going back home again, I kep' 'em--from first to last I kep' 'em--I can't hardly say why; unless it was that I'd got so used to keeping of them that I hadn't the heart to let 'em go.

Not, mind ye, but what they mightn't now and then have set me thinking of father and Mary at home--at times, you know, when I changed 'em from one bag to another, or took and blew the dust off of 'em, for to keep 'em as nice as I could. But the older I got, the worse I got at calling anything to mind in a clear way about Mary and the old country. There seemed to be a sort of fog rolling up betwixt us now. I couldn't see her face clear, in my own mind, no longer. It come upon me once or twice in dreams, when I nodded alone over my fire after a tough day's march--it come upon me at such times so clear, that it startled me up, all in a cold sweat, wild and puzzled with not knowing at first whether the stars was s.h.i.+mmering down at me in father's paddock at Dibbledean, or in the lonesome places over the sea, hundreds of miles away from any living soul. But that was only dreams, you know. Waking, I was all astray now, whenever I fell a-thinking about father or her. The longer I tramped it over the lonesome places, the thicker that fog got which seemed to have rose up in my mind between me and them I'd left at home. At last, it come to darken in altogether, and never lifted no more, that I can remember, till I crossed the seas again and got back to my own country."

"But how did you ever think of coming back, after all those years?"

asked Mrs. Peckover.

"Well, I got a good heap of money, for once in a way, with digging for gold in California," he answered; "and my mate that I worked with, he says to me one day:--'I don't see my way to how we are to spend our money, now we've got it, if we stop here. What can we treat ourselves to in this place, excepting bad brandy and cards? Let's go over to the old country, where there ain't nothing we want that we can't get for our money; and, when it's all gone, let's turn tail again, and work for more.' He wrought upon me, like that, till I went back with him. We quarreled aboard s.h.i.+p; and when we got into port, he went his way and I went mine. Not, mind ye, that I started off at once for the old place as soon as I was ash.o.r.e. That fog in my mind, I told you of, seemed to lift a little when I heard my own language, and saw my own country-people's faces about me again. And then there come a sort of fear over me--a fear of going back home at all, after the time I'd been away. I got over it, though, and went in a day or two. When I first laid my hand on the churchyard gate that Mary and me used to swing on, and when I looked up at the old house, with the gable ends just what they used to be (though the front was new painted, and strange names was over the shop-door)--then all my time in the wild country seem to shrivel up somehow, and better than twenty year ago begun to be a'most like yesterday. I'd seen father's name in the churchyard--which was no more than I looked for; but when they told me Mary had never been brought back, when they said she'd died many a year ago among strange people, they cut me to the quick."