“Yes, dear. How then?”
“Roland’s father left him pictures and silver plate and many valuable things belonging to the Treshams, and when Roland died they were mine. Elizabeth bought them from me. They were worth two thousand pounds; she gave me sixteen hundred pounds.”
“Why didn’t you tell father and me? ’Twas cruel thoughtless of you.”
“No, no! I wanted to come back to you as I left you––just Denas––without anything but your love to ask favour from. If I had come swelling myself like a great lady, worth sixteen hundred pounds, how all the people would have hated me! What dreadful things they would have said! Father would have had his hands full and his heart full to make this one and that one keep the insult behind their lips. Oh, ’twould have been a broad defiance to evil of every kind. I did think, too, that father had some money in St. Merryn’s Bank.”
“To be sure. And so he did. But there––your aunt Helen’s husband was drowned last winter, and nothing laid by to bury him, and father had it to do; and then there was a mortgage on the cottage, and that was to lift, or no roof to cover Helen and her children. So with this and that the one hundred 307 pounds went away to forty pounds. That be for our own burying. There be twenty pounds of yours there.”
“Mine is yours!” Then rising quickly, she struck her hands sharply together and cried out: “One and All! One and All!”[4]
And Joan answered her promptly, letting the towel fall from her grasp to imitate the sharp smiting of the hands as with beaming face she repeated the heart-stirring cry.
“One and All! One and All! Denas. Aw, my girl, there was a time when I said in my anger I was sorry I gave you suck. This day I be right glad of it! You be true blood! Cornish clean through, Denas!”
“Yes, I be true Cornish, mother, and the money I have is honest money. Father can take it without a doubt. But I will see Lawyer Tremaine, and he shall put the sum I got in the St. Penfer News, and tell what I got it for, and none can say I did wrong to take my widow right.”
“I be so happy, Denas! I be so happy! My old 308 dear will have his own boat! My old dear will have his own boat!”