Here Mr. Blyth stops abruptly and closes the letter, for Mrs. Thorpe re-enters the room. “The rest is only about when he expects to be back,” whispers Valentine to Mrs. Peckover. “By my calculations,” he continues, raising his voice and turning towards Mrs. Thorpe; “by my calculations (which, not having a mathematical head, I don’t boast of, mind, as being infallibly correct), Zack is likely, I should say, to be here in about—”
“Hush! hush! hush!” cries Mrs. Peckover, jumping up with incredible agility at the window, and clapping her hands in a violent state of excitement. “Don’t talk about when he will be here—here he is! He’s come in a cab—he’s got out into the garden—he sees me. Welcome back, Master Zack, welcome back! Hooray! hooray!” Here Mrs. Peckover forgets her company-manners, and waves the red cotton handkerchief out of the window in an irrepressible burst of triumph.
Zack’s hearty laugh is heard outside—then his quick step on the stairs—then the door opens, and he comes in with his beaming sunburnt face healthier and heartier than ever. His first embrace is for his mother, his second for Madonna; and, after he has greeted every one else cordially, he goes back to those two, and Mr. Blyth is glad to see that he sits down between them and takes their hands gently and affectionately in his.
Matthew Grice is in all their memories, when the first greetings are over. Valentine and Madonna look at each other—and the girl’s fingers sign hesitatingly the letters of Matthew’s name.
“She is thinking of the comrade you have lost,” says the painter, addressing himself, a little sadly, to Zack.
“The only living soul that’s kin to her now by her mother’s side,” adds Mrs. Peckover. “It’s like her pretty ways to be thinking of him kindly, for her mother’s sake.”
“Are you really determined, Zack, to take that second voyage?” asks Valentine. “Are you determined to go back to America, on the one faint chance of seeing Mat once more?”
“If I am a living man, eighteen months hence,” Zack answers resolutely, “nothing shall prevent my taking the voyage. Matthew Grice loved me like a brother. And, like a brother, I will yet bring him back—if he lives to keep his promise and meet me, when the time comes.”
The time came; and on either side, the two comrades of former days—in years so far apart, in sympathies so close together—lived to look each other in the face again. The solitude which had once hardened Matthew Grice, had wrought on him, in his riper age, to better and higher ends. In all his later roamings, the tie which had bound him to those sacred human interests in which we live and move and have our being—the tie which he himself believed that he had broken—held fast to him still. His grim, scarred face softened, his heavy hand trembled in the friendly grasp that held it, as Zack pleaded with him once more; and, this time, pleaded not in vain.