“No, that’s only to beg your pardon,” said Matt, recovering his voice. “I’ve been a skunk to you, that’s a fact. But I’m not going to behave badly again. I’m just raking in the dollars now hand over fist, and learning painting all the time into the bargain. I don’t want a bit to go to London, and I’ve put by two hundred and eighty dollars that aren’t the least use to me, and that ’ll just come in handy to pay the old scoundrel. And I can easily send you five dollars a week till I earn more. Billy alone ’ll cost you near that, I guess, and it’s my fault he can’t earn anything hardly.”
In the end the imperious Matt had his way, and, while the boy went on to see his mother, Abner returned home with the situation considerably lightened, the bearer of money for Deacon Hailey, and loving messages for all Matt’s brothers and sisters, even Harriet being now restored to grace.
Matt found his mother in a small padded room in a house that stood on the hill overlooking the harbor. She was gazing yearningly seaward, and tears trickled down her doleful cheeks. Matt stood silently near the door, surveying her askance with aching heart. Abner had told him that her life with Deacon Hailey had grown a blank to her, and he wondered if she would recognize him; in the last two years he had shot up from a hobbledehoy into a tall, stalwart youth.
When she turned her head at last and espied him she leaped up with a wild cry of joy, and folded him in her arms.
“Davie!” she cried, rapturously. “My own Davie! At last! I didn’t see your ship come in.”
A nervous thrill ran down Matt’s spine as he submitted to her embrace. The separate tragedies of his parents’ lives seemed poignantly knit together in this supreme moment.
“They’re so strict with me here, Davie,” she said. “Take me away from my folks, anywhere, where we can be happy and free. I don’t care what they say any more—I am so tired of all this humdrum life.”
Matt pacified her as best he could, and, promising to arrange it all soon, left her, his heart nigh breaking. He walked about the bustling streets like one in a dream, resenting the sunshine, and wondering why all these people should be so happy. Again that ancient image of his father’s dead face was tossed up on the waves of memory, to keep company henceforth with the death-in-life of his mother’s face. The breakdown of his ambition seemed a petty thing beside these vaster ironies of human destiny.
Book II.—CHAPTER I
IN LONDON
On a dull February day a respectably clad steerage passenger disembarked at Southampton with little luggage and great hopes. He was only twenty, but he looked several years older. There were deep traces of thought and suffering in the face, bronzed though it was; and despite the vigorous set of the mouth and the jaw, the dark eyes were soft and dreamy. He was clean-shaven except for a dark-brown mustache, which combined with the little tangle of locks on his forehead to suggest the artistic temperament, and to repel the insinuation of rough open-air labor radiating from his sturdy frame and bearing.