“But how did you ever think of coming back, after all those years?” asked Mrs. Peckover.
“Well, I got a good heap of money, for once in a way, with digging for gold in California,” he answered; “and my mate that I worked with, he says to me one day:—‘I don’t see my way to how we are to spend our money, now we’ve got it, if we stop here. What can we treat ourselves to in this place, excepting bad brandy and cards? Let’s go over to the old country, where there ain’t nothing we want that we can’t get for our money; and, when it’s all gone, let’s turn tail again, and work for more.’ He wrought upon me, like that, till I went back with him. We quarreled aboard ship; and when we got into port, he went his way and I went mine. Not, mind ye, that I started off at once for the old place as soon as I was ashore. That fog in my mind, I told you of, seemed to lift a little when I heard my own language, and saw my own country-people’s faces about me again. And then there come a sort of fear over me—a fear of going back home at all, after the time I’d been away. I got over it, though, and went in a day or two. When I first laid my hand on the churchyard gate that Mary and me used to swing on, and when I looked up at the old house, with the gable ends just what they used to be (though the front was new painted, and strange names was over the shop-door)—then all my time in the wild country seem to shrivel up somehow, and better than twenty year ago begun to be a’most like yesterday. I’d seen father’s name in the churchyard—which was no more than I looked for; but when they told me Mary had never been brought back, when they said she’d died many a year ago among strange people, they cut me to the quick.”
“Ah! no wonder, no wonder!”
“It was a wonder to me, though. I should have laughed at any man, if he’d told me I should be took so at hearing what I heard about her, after all the time I’d been away. I couldn’t make it out then, and I can’t now. I didn’t feel like my own man, when I first set eyes on the old place. And then to hear she was dead—it cut me, as I told you. It cut me deeper still, when I come to tumble over the things she’d left behind her in her box. Twenty years ago got nigher and nigher to yesterday, with every fresh thing belonging to her that I laid a hand on. There was a arbor in father’s garden she used to be fond of working in of evenings. I’d lost all thought of that place for more years than I can reckon up. I called it to mind again—and called her to mind again, too, sitting and working and singing in the arbor—only with laying holt of a bit of patchwork stuff in the bottom of her box, with her needle and thread left sticking in it.”
“Ah, dear, dear!” sighed Mrs. Peckover, “I wish I’d seen her then! She was as happy, I dare say, as the bird on the tree. But there’s one thing I can’t exactly make out yet,” she added—“how did you first come to know all about Mary’s child?”
“All? There wasn’t no all in it, till I see the child herself. Except knowing that the poor creeter’s baby had been born alive, I knowed nothing when I first come away from the old place in the country. Child! I hadn’t nothing of the sort in my mind, when I got back to London. It was how to track the man as was Mary’s death, that I puzzled and worrited about in my head, at that time—”
“Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Peckover, interposing to keep him away from the dangerous subject, as she heard his voice change, and saw his eyes begin to brighten again. “Yes, yes—but how did you come to see the child? Tell me that.”
“Zack took me into the Painter-man’s big room—”
“Zack! Why, good gracious Heavens! do you mean Master Zachary Thorpe?”
“I see a young woman standing among a lot of people as was all a staring at her,” continued Mat, without noticing the interruption. “I see her just as close to, and as plain, as I see you. I see her look up, all of a sudden, front face to front face with me. A creeping and a crawling went through me; and I says to myself, ‘Mary’s child has lived to grow up, and that’s her.’”