Mat looked up suddenly and eagerly. “What’s your name?” he inquired.
“My name’s Peckover, and I’m not ashamed of it,” was the prompt reply. “And, now, if I may make so bold, what’s yours?”
Mat took from his pocket the Hair Bracelet, and, fixing his eyes intently on her face, held it up, across the grave, for her to look at. “Do you know this?” he said.
Mrs. Peckover stooped forward, and closely inspected the Bracelet for a minute or two. “Lord save us!” she exclaimed, recognizing it, and confronting him with cheeks that had suddenly become colorless, and eyes that stared in terror and astonishment. “Lord save us! how did you come by that? And who for mercy’s sake are you?”
“My name’s Matthew Grice,” he answered quickly and sternly. “This Bracelet belonged to my sister, Mary Grice. She run away from home, and died, and was buried in Bangbury churchyard. If you know her grave, tell me in plain words—is it here?”
Breathless as she was with astonishment, Mrs. Peckover managed to stammer a faint answer in the affirmative, and to add that the initials, “M. G.,” would be found somewhere on the broken board lying at their feet. She then tried to ask a question or two in her turn; but the words died away in faint exclamations of surprise. “To think of me and you meeting together!” was all she could say;—“her own brother, too! Oh! to think of that!—only to think of that!”
Mat looked down at the mud, the brambles, and the rotting grass that lay over what had once been a living and loving human creature. The dangerous brightness glittered in his eyes, the cold change spread fast over his cheeks, and the scars of the arrow-wounds began to burn redly and more redly, as he whispered to himself—“I’ll be even yet, Mary, with the man who laid you here!”
“Does Mr. Blyth know who you are, sir?” asked Mrs. Peckover, hesitating and trembling as she put this question. “Did he give you the Bracelet?”
She stopped. Mat was not listening to her. His eyes were fastened on the grave: he was still talking to himself in quick whispering tones.
“Her Bracelet was hid from me in another man’s chest,” he said—“I’ve found her Bracelet. Her child was hid from me in another man’s house—I’ve found her child. Her grave was hid from me in a strange churchyard—I’ve found her grave. The man who laid her in it is hid from me still—I shall find him!”