“No. She wouldn’t say a word about any of her friends, and she didn’t say a word about you. But how did you come to be so long away?—that’s what I want to know,” said Mrs. Peckover, pertinaciously repeating her question, partly out of curiosity, partly out of the desire to keep him from returning to the dangerous subject of Arthur Carr.
“I was alway a bitter bad ‘un, I was,” said Matthew, meditatively. “There was no keeping of me straight, try it anyhow you like. I bolted from home, I bolted from school, I bolted from aboard ship—”
“Why? What for?”
“Partly because I was a bitter bad ‘un, and partly because of a letter I picked up in port, at the Brazils, at the end of a long cruise. Here’s the letter—but it’s no good showing it to you: the paper’s so grimed and tore about, you can’t read it.”
“Who wrote it? Mary?”
“No: father—saying what had happened to Mary, and telling me not to come back home till things was pulled straight again. Here—here’s what he said—under the big grease-spot. ‘If you can get continued employment anywhere abroad, accept it instead of coming back. Better for you, at your age, to be spared the sight of such sorrow as we are now suffering.’ Do you see that?”
“Yes, yes, I see. Ah! poor man! he couldn’t give no kinder better advice; and you—”
“Deserted from my ship. The devil was in me to be off on the tramp, and father’s letter did the rest. I got wild and desperate with the thought of what had happened to Mary, and with knowing they were ashamed to see me back again at home. So the night afore the ship sailed for England I slipped into a shore-boat, and turned my back on salt-junk and the boatswain’s mate for the rest of my life.”
“You don’t mean to say you’ve done nothing but wander about in foreign parts from that time to this?”
“I do, though! I’d a notion I should be shot for a deserter if I turned up too soon in my own country. That kep’ me away for ever so long, to begin with. Then tramps’ fever got into my head; and there was an end of it.”