Everet stopped short, looked back, and attentively scanned the woman’s face.
“‘Margery!’” he repeated. “I never knew anybody of that name, and mine isn’t Geoffrey, either, my woman,” he said, somewhat brusquely, for it nettled him whenever he heard that name, which he had grown to dislike so much.
“Surely my eyes can’t deceive me,” returned the flower vender, earnestly. “I could never forget the dear boy that I nursed and tended during the first five years of his life. Can’t you remember me, dearie? Have you forgotten the chickens and the rabbits—old Chuck, the dog, and the two little white kittens. Ah! try to think, Master Geoffrey, and tell me what became of Jack after he gave you that dreadful blow and then ran away with you when he left me for dead, so many years ago.”
“What under the sun is the old creature talking about?” murmured Everet, with a perplexed look.
“I’d readily forgive him for the hurt that he gave me,” the woman went on, unheeding him, “and overlook the past, if I could only set eyes on him once more and feel that I wasn’t all alone in the world in my old age; it’s hard not to have a single soul to care for you. Sure, I can’t see how you could forget Margery, when you were so fond of her in those old days.”
“I tell you my name is not Geoffrey,” repeated Mapleson. “You are thinking of some one else. I do not know anything about Jack, or his striking anybody, and then running away, and I never saw you until this moment.”
The poor woman was weeping now, and moaning in a low, heart-broken way that made the young man pity her, in spite of his irritability.
“You must have forgotten,” she responded, wiping her fast falling tears. “Perhaps the cruel blow Jack gave you hurt your memory—and whatever could he have done with you after he took you away from the old home that night? It breaks my heart that you don’t know me, dearie, for I served your poor mother so faithfully when you were a wee baby. She was the sweetest little body that the sun ever shone on—so gentle, and kind, too, with a face like a lily and eyes as blue as heaven. Poor boy! You never realized your loss when she died, for Margery promised to care for you as if you were her very own, and she did. You were the pride of my heart during all those five blessed years.”
“You have made a mistake, my good woman,” Everet said, more gently, for her grief and pathetic rambling touched him.
He believed that he had run across an old nurse of Geoffrey Huntress, for he remembered now that he had said he lost his parents when very young, and he did not wonder that she had mistaken him for her former nursling.