"Then let me go to your little farm," he answered, "and take up your father's life, at least for a time, until I can see how to make myself of greater use to my fellow-men. I will till the fields as he did, and finish the carvings he has left undone, and live his simple, silent life. It will be good for me, and I shall not be banished from my own country. I shall be a happier man then than I have any right to be."
"Have you no fear of being recognized?" she asked.
"None," he replied. "Look at me, Phebe. Should you have known me again if I had not betrayed myself to you?"
"I should have known you again anywhere," she exclaimed. But it was her heart that cried out that no change could have concealed him from her; there was a dread lying deep down in her conscience that she might have passed him by with no suspicion. He shook his head in answer to her assertion.
"I will go out into the town," he continued, "and speak to half-a-dozen men who knew me best, and there will be no gleam of recognition in their eyes. Recollect Roland Sefton is dead, and has been dead so long that there will be no clear memory left of him as he was then to compare with me. And any dim resemblance to him will be fully accounted for by my relationship to Madame Sefton. No, I am not afraid of the keenest eyes."
He went out as he had said, and met his old townsmen, many of whom were themselves so changed that he could barely recognize them. The memory of Roland Sefton was blotted out, he was utterly forgotten as a dead man out of mind.
As Jean Merle strayed through the streets crowded with market-people come in from the country, his new scheme grew stronger and brighter to him. It would keep him in England, within reach of all he had loved and had lost. The little place was dear to him, and the laborious, secluded peasant life had a charm for him who had so long lived as a Swiss peasant. By-and-by, he thought, the chance resemblance in the names would merge that of Merle into the more familiar name of Marlowe; and the identity of his pursuits with those of the deaf and dumb old man would hasten such a change. So the years to come would pass by in labor and obscurity; and an obscure grave in the little churchyard, where all the Marlowes lay, would shelter him at last. A quiet haven after many storms; but oh! what a shipwreck had he made of his life!
All the morning Mr. Clifford sat in his arm-chair lost in thought, only looking up sometimes to ply Phebe with questions. When Jean Merle returned, his gray, meditative face grew bright, with a faint smile shining through his dim eyes.
"You are no phantom then!" he said. "I've been so used to your company as a ghost that when you are out of sight I fancy myself dreaming. I could not let Phebe go away lest I should feel that all this is not real. Did any one know you again?"
"Not a soul," he answered; "how could they? Mrs. Nixey herself has no remembrance of me. There is no fear of my being known."