“So can a pint of old ale; not but them around about a man mostly looks to it that the raw of sorrow shan’t heal tu quick for want of callin’ to mind.”
“Jan, I’m gwaine to give him up. I have given him up for all time. I shall allus love him, Jan, because I must. But that is all. An’ you—you mustn’t go out into the world an’ wander ’pon the airth an’ maybe never come home no more through fault of mine. Ban’t fair as two men should break theer hearts an’ have theer days ruined for one worthless woman. What I am, I am; what I felt for you, Jan, I feel—no more, no less. ’Tisn’t I loved you less than I always did, but him more. If ’tis unmaidenly so to say, rebuke me, Jan.”
Thus she deliberately came into his life again for the third time, and he was overwhelmed. And yet his answer was one of almost savage fierceness. Joy shook him, too,—a sort of incredulous joy, as when one dreams rare things, yet knows that one dreams. The mingled emotions of the time upset his self-control, induced a sort of tense excitation and rendered his voice indistinct, hollow, mumbling as that of a man drunken or cleft in palate.
“That! That! You say that to me—arter all these long, long days! To come back now! God in Heaven, what a puppet dance ’tis! Now here, now theer—be your heart so light as thistledown? I doan’t know wheer I stand; I’m mazed as a sheep this minute. An’ you’d come back to me now?”
“I would, Jan. I will.”
“An’ live man an’ wife to the li’l lew cot offered us by the gudeness of Farmer?”
“No, not that. I couldn’t do that. You’ve a heart soft enough to understand. I’ll go with ’e, wheer you be gwaine—ay, this very day I will. But I can’t bide here. I must get away from—from mother, an’ faither, an’ all. Then us can send a packet to ’em from far off. Anywheer but Postbridge, Jan.”
“You’m in honest, sober, Bible earnest, Sarah?”
“God’s my witness, I be.”
“Then He’s my witness, tu, that I stand here a new man—an’ not shamed o’ the crumbs from t’other’s table. You to come back! ’Tis more’n my deserts—such a drunken swine as I’ve been since—”