“Don’t say such things. You’re a free, honest man as no living soul can say one word against,” replied Daniel. “Your record be clean, an’ you can stand up in the face of the nation, and no man can cast a word at you. Don’t talk of death. ’Tis true I’ve got her—Minnie—my own wife; but that’s all I have got in the world; an’ God only knows if I shall ever be able to call her mine afore the people. Don’t grudge me my sole, blessed joy. Think what I be, Titus—an outcast, a wanderer, a man that have had to black his face an’ shut his mouth to escape the gallows. Don’t—but why should I say these things to you? Right well I know the steel you be forged of. Right well I know you never change. You’m my side still, Titus? Say you’m my side still. Say you’ve forgived me. ’Twas my neck I was playing for—I never thought to break your heart by this trick. An’ you must forgive Minnie, too. ’Twas only yesterday morn that Mr Henry’s letter went to her. He wouldn’t let me see her before, and he wrote to break it to her that I was alive an’ not far off. Of course, not knowing that, she said ‘Yes’ to you. To-morrow—to-day, I should say—at first glimmer of light, he’ve given me leave to go up along an’ hear what she’ve got to tell me. Shake my hand—I ban’t black except my face. My heart’s white an’ well you know it, Titus.”
He offered his hand and the other took it mechanically.
“You’ve knocked me all of a heap,” he said. “Let me hear your tale. ’Twill give my heart time to still an’ beat level again. You at my elbow! And she—this very night—promised to marry me. ’Tis more than a man’s brain can hold.”
“Afore she knowed that I was back in life again.”
Sim desired to think. The crash of this news confused him and unsettled his mind.
“Tell your tale from the beginning, Daniel,” he said. “Let me hear it all: then I’ll tell you mine, and give you some idea of what I’ve been doing while you was away.”
“You haven’t cleared up the job in Middlecott Lower Hundred?”
“Speak your speech,” repeated Sim. “What I’ve got to say I’ll say afterwards.”
Thereupon Daniel told his long story from the beginning. He described his escape, his visit to Minnie, his journey to Plymouth, his experiences in the Peabody. He told of life in the West Indies, of his meeting with Henry Vivian and the tragedy of Jesse Hagan and Jabez Ford. He finally explained the reasons for his present disguise, and his hopes how, during the next few months, that might happen which would clear his name and prove him an innocent and injured man.