The week following Hector's homecoming was a strange, swift medley of joy and sorrow, gaiety and festival and pain, of renewing acquaintances, paying visits, exchanging reminiscences. Hector passed a sad half-hour in the churchyard where so many of those he loved best—his father, Maintop, Long Dick, Nora and the gallant Sergeant Pierce—were sleeping. He made a special journey, also, to have a look at Silvercrest; but at the last moment could not bear to see the old place in a stranger's hands, and came away.
At the end of the week he remembered Arcady and his promise to Perkins. As it happened, no-one could spare the time to go with him. So he went alone, bearing as passport a letter of introduction to a Mr. Tweedy, friend of Allen's and owner of half the village.
Tweedy was all that could be desired. He insisted on carrying Hector home with him for supper and later on demanded that he should stay with them for the duration of his visit, whatever that might be.
After supper Hector broached his errand, intending to lead up to the main point in a roundabout way and to conceal such facts as he deemed advisable. But Mrs. Tweedy—a bright little woman with glasses and a tireless but mercifully charitable tongue—in her first reply, made further questioning almost unnecessary and settled poor Perkins' perplexities for ever.
"Mrs. John Perkins?—Mrs. John Perkins?—Let me see, now. A widow, eh? There was a Mrs. Perkins here—very old—son ran away—only child—the rascal!—you say that's the one? Oh, yes, I know whom you mean. Oh, she's dead!"
The news gave Hector an unpleasant shock and his heart went out to Perkins. A little later, he decided to confide everything to the sympathetic couple. Tweedy shook his head a great many times, Mrs. Tweedy wiped her glasses and murmured "Poor thing! Poor boy! Oh, dear! Well, well!" and both offered to do everything possible to assist Hector if he wished to give the affair any more attention.
"Then," said Hector, "You'll take me over to the Post Office and the old lady's grave. I want to make some enquiries about Perkins' letters and I'd like to be able to tell him——"
In the morning, Hector learned that Perkins' letters had been duly delivered to the old lady up to the time of her death and that those received since had been sent to the dead letter office. Perkins had received nothing from the dead letter office. But then, he moved round so much that this was not surprising. Tweedy then took his guest over to the tumbledown shack which Mrs. Perkins had occupied. The afternoon found him too busy to drive to the cemetery. Hector obtained full directions as to the route and made the journey on foot, took a mental photograph of the grave for Perkins, and turned homeward.
He forgot all about Perkins a few minutes later, in the beauty of the autumn evening. The sun, a paling disc, was dropping slowly down towards its sanctuary behind the far blue hills. Arcady, loveliest of all havens in Ontario, lay below him, in a wide valley brimful of golden sunlight, glorious with the mingling greys and browns and scarlets of woods and fields and orchards. The road on which he stood ran winding into the distant town, resting like a sleeping child in the middle of it all. Harvesters still lingered in the grain. The orchards glowed with crimson apples. From the chimneys of Arcady and the summer cottages which fringed the sparkling, rippling lake beyond, thin threads of blue-grey smoke rose straight upwards through the bracing, sweetly scented air and on the lake a single sail gleamed like a flake of snow. Somewhere, near at hand, a bird called, mournfully, persistently, while a church bell tolled with mellow voice a long way off. The picture was all that Home and Peace and Canada could mean to Hector and for a little while it held him, fresh as he was from raw, unsettled wildernesses and scenes of fierce toil and sordid crime, in a rapturous enchantment.
He felt, then, as if be was poised upon the edge of Paradise, as if marvels that he could not even guess were about to be made known to him.