The Life of Thomas Wanless, Peasant

by A. J. Wilson

Thomas answered by clasping her closer to his bosom, and then putting his arm in hers, he led her from the house, none daring to say him nay. Oaths, shrieks of hysterical laughter, and obscenities followed them as they went, but the look on the peasant's face, and the remembrance of his strength of arm, were enough to protect his daughter and him from further ill-usage.

"Thanks be to God I've found ye, my lass; found ye, never to let ye out o' my sight again in this world," Thomas murmured when he found himself alone in the street with his long-lost one, and there welled up in him a holy joy which was unutterable.

His daughter hung her head, and answered not, but she suffered him to lead her to his lodging. A 'bus took them to the head of Portland Road, and thence they walked. It was past midnight before they got home, and all the house was silent; but Thomas gave his daughter his bedroom, and groped his way to the parlour, where he hoped to get a sleep in an easy chair—first prudently turning the key in Sarah's door, to give her no room for untimely repentance.

There was no sleep for his eyelids that night. The cold alone might have kept him awake in any case; but he was too excited to feel it as other than a stimulus to his thoughts. Past and future rolled before him—his daughter lost, joy at her discovery, pain at the life she had led. The grey dawn found him fevered with his thoughts, shivering in body, burning at the heart. Nevertheless, he had resolved to go home that day by the early train; and with that view he roused the landlady to beg an early breakfast for himself and his child. "I have found my lass," was all he ventured to explain, and the woman answered she was glad to hear it. In his eagerness to go home he forgot to tell the coal agent for whom he worked, and forgot also to draw four days' wages due to him—did not remember till the day after he and his daughter reached Ashbrook.

When Sarah, in answer to her father's summons, came down to breakfast in the front kitchen, it was easy to see that she also had slept little. Her eyes were swollen and red, and she could not eat anything. A cup of hot tea she swallowed, and that was all. Her father spoke to her in the old familiar Warwickshire dialect, and urged her to "eat summat, as she had a long day's journey afoore her," but Sally could not, and to all he spoke answered only in monosyllables. Not until he began to talk directly of going "home" did she wake to anything like animation. The very sound of the word made her weep, and her father led her away to his own room to reason with her.

"Oh, don't ask me to go back," she cried; "I cannot, I cannot; I'm fit only to die."

But her father soothed her, talked to her of her lonely mother watching for her coming, praying to see her child's face again before she died; and when that did not move her, he bade her think of her little babe she had left last year. "How could ye like her to grow up a-lookin' for a mother, Sally, lass, an' not findin' one?" That seemed to touch her more than all his assurances that no one would ever reproach her or cry shame upon her in her own father's house. Still she yielded not, but cried out that she was lost to them all, to every good in this world. "You might not blame me openly," she said, "but I would have the feelin' in my heart all the time that I was a shame an' disgrace to you, and that pity alone kept you from telling me so. No, no, no, I will not go back to Ashbrook."

"Look here, then, Sally," said her father at last, "if you wonnot go back, I'll stay by you. My mind's made up. I'll never lose sight of ye again, not while I'm alive; and if you wonnot go home wi' me, I must bide wi' you. There is no other way. It will kill your mother, and it will kill me, an' leave your child an outcast orphan, but ye are determined, an' it must e'en be so."

This staggered her, but still she yielded not, thinking, doubtless, that her father meant not what he said, till at last, in despair, he told her the story of Adelaide Codling. He spoke of her despairing looks, her rapid descent from wild gaiety to death, of her last farewell to this world, of her lonely grave, and her poor, old, broken-hearted father, and wound up by asking—"Will you face an end like that, Sally? Dare you do it, my child? When I saw her jump on the bridge I thought it was you," he added, with a look that went straight to his daughter's heart. The story had at first been listened to in dogged silence. Then the girl's tears began to flow, at first silently, at last with convulsive sobs. Her father held out his hand as he ceased speaking, and she, moved so deeply as to be lifted out of herself, laid both her hands in his, and said—

"Father, I'll do as ye wish. I'll go home wi' ye." He drew her down on her knees beside him, and prayed fervently for mercy and forgiveness for them both. "But my heart was too full to beg," he afterwards said to me. "I could only give God thanks for his infinite mercy in restoring my lost child."