“‘As to them,’ I tells her—‘as to my faither an’ mother, ma’am, there’s a manner of grave doubt, for I’m a workhouse boy, wi’out any havage that be known.’
“But her had fallen to dreaming.
“‘Tell about the in-country,’ she said all of a sudden. ‘My mother comed from down Totnes way.’
“So I tells about the South Hams, an’ the farms, an’ the butivul apple-blooth, as creams out over the orchards in spring, an’ all the rest of it.
“There, I talked myself dry an’ no mistake; an’ she nodded an’ nodded an’ laughed once; an’ it set her off coughing, an’ ’frighted her son terrible.
“Then, after I’d been chittering for a month of Sundays, as it seemed to me, the day ended and it comed on dark, an’ she got up to go.
“‘Keep un here,’ she says to the man. ‘For God’s love doan’t ’e let un go. Pay un anything he axes for to stop.’
“She went off very slow, wi’ a nigger to support her at each elbow, an’ a fine young brown woman to look after her. An’ I was took in the kitchen, an’ had such a bellyful of meat an’ drink as minded me of Christmas up to Hartland Farm in the old days.
“Then the chap—he lets me into the riddle of it all. You see his mother was Farmer Blake’s darter—the first as ever saved land in these parts, an’ rented from the Duchy more’n a hundred years agone now. An’ when Princetown was made for a prison to hold the French us catched in the wars, there comed a Monseer Damian among the prisoners. Him an’ many other gents the authorities let out on parole, as they say; an’ he made friends with Farmer Blake, an’ falled in love with Margery Blake. An’ when war was done, if he didn’t marry her all correct an’ snatch her away to foreign parts! Martinique was left to the French, an’ he took her to that island first, then to Trinidad, which be ours, then to Tobago, which be also ours. There the man prospered, an’ growed sugar, an’ did very flourishing, an’ comed to be first an’ richest party in the island. But smallpox took him in middle life, an’ it took all his children but his eldest son, Matthew Damian. He bided with his mother, an’ married a French woman from Guadeloupe.
“An’ ’twas old lady’s hope an’ prayer for seventy year to hear good Devon spoke again some day. Her only got to hunger terrible for the old country when her childer an’ her husband died, by which time she was too old to travel home again. An’ the Postbridge Blakes had all gone dead ages afore; an’ in truth there couldn’t have been a soul on Dartymoor as remembered her. Of course her son knowed the sound of the speech, from hearing his mother, as never lost it; an’ when he catched me telling to myself, his first thought was for her.