“Please do listen to me, sir, for one moment,” pleaded Mrs. Peckover, more nervously than before. “Does Mr. Blyth know about you? And little Mary—oh, sir, whatever you do, pray, pray don’t take her away from where she is now! You can’t mean to do that, sir, though you are her own mother’s brother? You can’t, surely?”
He looked up at her so quickly, with such a fierce, steady, serpent-glitter in his light-grey eyes, that she recoiled a step or two; still pleading, however, with desperate perseverance for an answer to her last question.
“Only tell me, sir, that you don’t mean to take little Mary away, and I won’t ask you to say so much as another word! You’ll leave her with Mr. and Mrs. Blyth, won’t you, sir? For your sister’s sake, you’ll leave her with the poor bed-ridden lady that’s been like a mother to her for so many years past?—for your dear, lost sister’s sake, that I was with when she died—”
“Tell me about her.” He said those few words with surprising gentleness, as Mrs. Peckover thought, for such a rough-looking man.
“Yes, yes, all you want to know,” she answered. “But I can’t stop here. There’s my brother—I’ve got such a turn with seeing you, it’s almost put him out of my head—there’s my brother, that I must go back to, and see if he’s asleep still. You just please to come along with me, and wait in the parlor—it’s close by—while I step upstairs—” (Here she stopped in great confusion. It seemed like running some desperate risk to ask this strange, stern-featured relation of Mary Grice’s into her brother’s house.) “And yet,” thought Mrs. Peckover, “if I can only soften his heart by telling him about his poor unfortunate sister, it may make him all the readier to leave little Mary—”
At this point her perplexities were cut short by Matthew himself, who said, shortly, that he had been to Dawson’s Buildings already to look after her. On hearing this, she hesitated no longer. It was too late to question the propriety or impropriety of admitting him now.
“Come away, then,” she said; “don’t let’s wait no longer. And don’t fret about the infamous state they’ve left things in here,” she added, thinking to propitiate him, as she saw his eyes turn once more at parting, on the broken board and the brambles around the grave. “I know where to go, and who to speak to—”
“Go nowhere, and speak to nobody,” he broke in sternly, to her great astonishment. “All what’s got to be done to it, I mean to do myself.”
“You!”
“Yes, me. It was little enough I ever did for her while she was alive; and it’s little enough now, only to make things look decent about the place where she’s buried. But I mean to do that much for her; and no other man shall stir a finger to help me.”