Hide and Seek Part 47

"I tried to control myself, Valentine; but my eyes got dim, and I caught fast hold of him by the arm. 'Mat,' I said, 'I can't part with you in this dreary, hopeless way. Don't shut the future up from both of us for ever. We have been eighteen months together, let another year and-a-half pa.s.s if you like; and then give yourself; and give me, another chance.

Say you'll meet me, when that time is past, in New York; or say at least, you'll let me hear where you are?' His face worked and quivered, and he only shook his head. 'Come, Mat,' I said, as cheerfully as I could, 'if I am ready to cross the sea again, for your sake, you can't refuse to do what I ask you, for mine?' 'Will it make the parting easier to you, my lad?' he asked kindly. 'Yes, indeed it will,' I answered.

'Well, then, Zack,' he said, 'you shall have your way. Don't let's say no more, now. Come, let's cut it as short as we can, or we shan't part as men should. G.o.d bless you, lad, and all of them you're going back to see.' Those were his last words.

"After he had walked a few yards inland, he turned round and waved his hand--then went on, and never turned again. I sat down on the sand-hillock where we had said Good-bye, and burst out crying. What with the dreadful secret he had been telling me as we came along, and then the parting when I didn't expect it, all I had of the man about me gave way somehow in a moment. And I sat alone, crying and sobbing on the sand-hillock, with the surf roaring miles out at sea behind me, and the great plain before, with Matthew walking over it alone on his way to the mountains beyond.

"When I had had time to get ashamed of myself for crying, and had got my eyesight clear again, he was already far away from me. I ran to the top of the highest hillock, and watched him over the plain--a desert, without a shrub to break the miles and miles of flat ground spreading away to the mountains. I watched him, as he got smaller and smaller--I watched till he got a mere black speck--till I was doubtful whether I still saw him or not--till I was certain at last, that the great vacancy of the plain had swallowed him up from sight.

"My heart was very heavy, Valentine, as I went back to the town by myself. It is sometimes heavy still; for though I think much of my mother, and of my sister--whom you have been so kind a father to, and whose affection it is such a new happiness to me to have the prospect of soon returning--I think occasionally of dear old Mat, too, and have my melancholy moments when I remember that he and I are not going back together.

"I hope you will think me improved by my long trip--I mean in behavior, as well as health. I have seen much, and learnt much, and thought much--and I hope I have really profited and altered for the better during my absence. It is such a pleasure to think I am really going home--"

Here Mr. Blyth stops abruptly and closes the letter, for Mrs. Thorpe re-enters the room. "The rest is only about when he expects to be back,"

whispers Valentine to Mrs. Peckover. "By my calculations," he continues, raising his voice and turning towards Mrs. Thorpe; "by my calculations (which, not having a mathematical head, I don't boast of, mind, as being infallibly correct), Zack is likely, I should say, to be here in about--"

"Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+" cries Mrs. Peckover, jumping up with incredible agility at the window, and clapping her hands in a violent state of excitement. "Don't talk about when he will be here--_here he is!_ He's come in a cab--he's got out into the garden--he sees me. Welcome back, Master Zack, welcome back! Hooray! hooray!" Here Mrs. Peckover forgets her company-manners, and waves the red cotton handkerchief out of the window in an irrepressible burst of triumph.

Zack's hearty laugh is heard outside--then his quick step on the stairs--then the door opens, and he comes in with his beaming sunburnt face healthier and heartier than ever. His first embrace is for his mother, his second for Madonna; and, after he has greeted every one else cordially, he goes back to those two, and Mr. Blyth is glad to see that he sits down between them and takes their hands gently and affectionately in his.

Matthew Grice is in all their memories, when the first greetings are over. Valentine and Madonna look at each other--and the girl's fingers sign hesitatingly the letters of Matthew's name.

"She is thinking of the comrade you have lost," says the painter, addressing himself, a little sadly, to Zack.

"The only living soul that's kin to her now by her mother's side," adds Mrs. Peckover. "It's like her pretty ways to be thinking of him kindly, for her mother's sake."

"Are you really determined, Zack, to take that second voyage?" asks Valentine. "Are you determined to go back to America, on the one faint chance of seeing Mat once more?"

"If I am a living man, eighteen months hence," Zack answers resolutely, "nothing shall prevent my taking the voyage. Matthew Grice loved me like a brother. And, like a brother, I will yet bring him back--if he lives to keep his promise and meet me, when the time comes."

The time came; and on either side, the two comrades of former days--in years so far apart, in sympathies so close together--lived to look each other in the face again. The solitude which had once hardened Matthew Grice, had wrought on him, in his riper age, to better and higher ends.

In all his later roamings, the tie which had bound him to those sacred human interests in which we live and move and have our being--the tie which he himself believed that he had broken--held fast to him still.

His grim, scarred face softened, his heavy hand trembled in the friendly grasp that held it, as Zack pleaded with him once more; and, this time, pleaded not in vain.

"I've never been my own man again" said Mat, "since you and me wished each other good-bye on the sandhills. The lonesome places have got strange to me--and my rifle's heavier in hand than ever I knew it before. There's some part of myself that seems left behind like, between Mary's grave and Mary's child. Must I cross the seas again to find it?

Give us hold of your hand, Zack--and take the leavings of me back, along with you."

So the n.o.ble nature of the man unconsciously a.s.serted itself in his simple words. So the two returned to the old land together. The first kiss with which his dead sister's child welcomed him back, cooled the Tramp's Fever for ever; and the Man of many Wanderings rested at last among the friends who loved him, to wander no more.

NOTE TO CHAPTER VII. I DO not know that any attempt has yet been made in English fiction to draw the character of a "Deaf Mute," simply and exactly after nature--or, in other words, to exhibit the peculiar effects produced by the loss of the senses of hearing and speaking on the disposition of the person so afflicted. The famous Fenella, in Scott's "Peveril of the Peak," only a.s.sumes deafness and dumbness; and the whole family of dumb people on the stage have the remarkable faculty--so far as my experience goes--of always being able to hear what is said to them. When the idea first occurred to me of representing the character of a "Deaf Mute" as literally as possible according to nature, I found the difficulty of getting at tangible and reliable materials to work from, much greater than I had antic.i.p.ated; so much greater, indeed, that I believe my design must have been abandoned, if a lucky chance had not thrown in my way Dr. Kitto's delightful little book, "The Lost Senses." In the first division of that work, which contains the author's interesting and touching narrative of his own sensations under the total loss of the sense of hearing, and its consequent effect on the faculties of speech, will be found my authority for most of those traits in Madonna's character which are especially and immediately connected with the deprivation from which she is represented as suffering. The moral purpose to be answered by the introduction of such a personage as this, and of the kindred character of the Painter's Wife, lies, I would fain hope, so plainly on the surface, that it can be hardly necessary for me to indicate it even to the most careless reader. I know of nothing which more firmly supports our faith in the better parts of human nature, than to see--as we all may--with what patience and cheerfulness the heavier bodily afflictions of humanity are borne, for the most part, by those afflicted; and also to note what elements of kindness and gentleness the spectacle of these afflictions constantly develops in the persons of the little circle by which the sufferer is surrounded. Here is the ever bright side, the ever n.o.ble and consoling aspect of all human calamity and the object of presenting this to the view of others, as truly and as tenderly as in him lies, seems to me to be a fit object for any writer who desires to address himself to the best sympathies of his readers.