"The old man shook me vehemently by the hand. 'Thank God!' he ejaculated again. 'Now all is right; now I shall live and die in peace. Now I can say, Luke Barnicott, you did me the grandest day's work imaginable when you caused my transportation, or rather when I caused it myself by mad anger against you.' I asked his pardon a thousand times for my folly in tantalizing him with the brick at the pit.
"'Don't mention it,' he said; 'we have both of us something to forget and to forgive. God, I trust, has forgiven us both. He has prospered me beyond all conception. I am one of the richest men in this colony. I have lands that would make estates for half-a-dozen noblemen, and I have ships on half-a-dozen seas. My story is no secret; everybody knows who are emancipists here, and who are not But we have wealth, and friends, and rising families who will one day rank with the first people of the colony in education and worth. As for me, I feel I am no longer the poor collier of the Marlpool. By trade, by study, by associating with men of intelligence and mind, my own mind and views have expanded. I have grown out of a black, crawling, ignorant caterpillar into a something more noble—into a man and a Christian. I rank with a marked class here, it is true, but I have wealth and friends, and a fine virtuous family; and I have laboured hard to subdue that fierceness and rancour which once disgraced me. You are the cause of this, and I bid you ten times welcome. But come, I must introduce you to Mrs. Welland.'
"He led the way through a spacious hall into an equally spacious and richly-furnished drawing-room, where I saw sitting a venerable lady, reading with spectacles, and, like her husband, with hair white as snow. She rose at our entrance, and I instantly recognised that remarkable stature. But it was no longer the lofty, strapping figure, with a bold, handsome face, and with an old slouched man's hat on, and arrayed in dirty and negligent dress, as I recollected Doll Welland. The old and venerable lady had the air of an ancient dowager empress. I could have fancied her the Czarina of all the Russias.
"'My dear,' said Mr. Welland, 'I introduce to you a friend, who comes, as it were, from the dead. You must go back to past times, to the Marlpool, to the windmill, to—Luke Barnicott.'
"The venerable and stately lady stood in silent wonder. She gazed on her husband, and then on me. 'What words, my dear, are these?' she said 'You tear open old and very deep wounds.'
"'Let them all be closed and healed for ever, for this is the boy Barnicott, who "was dead and is alive, who was lost and is found."'
"I will not," said Luke, "attempt to describe the venerable lady's agitation, and, as that subsided, her joy. Like her husband, she seized and held my hands, and wet them with streaming tears, and kissed them in her emotion. All bitter feeling had long passed out of her bosom. They had made a sharp expiation for their crime in persecuting me, during their early years in the colony, and in the deep-lying sense of my destruction in their souls up to this moment. This had softened and ameliorated their hearts; they had become strongly religious; prosperity had not spoiled them; and my arrival, and my errand to make a full amends for my folly, now needless, cast a stream of heavenly sunshine on the evening of their days.
"I was constrained to take up my quarters with them during my stay. They explained to their sons and daughters, now all grown up, and some of them married, and with mansions and equipages of great splendour, who I was,—for my story was familiar to them all. I found myself at once amongst a set of fine young men and women, highly educated, and in every respect most estimable and charming. I visited them at their houses, and accompanied them to those of their friends situated on the woody shores and promontories that surround the delightful Bay of Sydney. I rode with them across the sandy tract, carpeted with flowers and thicketed with blooming shrubs of rare beauty, to Botany Bay. There we sometimes took boats, and enjoyed the dangerous and exciting sport of killing sharks. In that water, clear as crystal, we could see the terrible monsters come with rapid sweeps up to the sides of our boats, which they would seek to overturn, in which case we should probably all have been snapped asunder and devoured. But throwing them a piece of meat on a hook, they caught at that, and we drew them up to the boat, and stunned them by striking them on the nose with the boat-hooks, and dragged them in triumph to land.
"Sometimes we made a party at snake-hunting in the woods and thickets around the houses of Mr. Welland, or of his sons or daughters, leading down to the bay. Armed with whips, the ladies as well as the gentlemen, and our legs defended with tall boots, we rushed into the wilderness of shrubs, and starting the lurking serpents, most of them of deadly venom, we gave chase, and soon cut them to pieces with our whips. Sometimes we made long rides into the forests and encamped there in huts, and spent whole days in shooting and in hunting the kangaroo. We visited the palmy hills of Illawara, and saw the giant nettle trees, large as oaks, and capable of killing a horse very quickly by their stings; or we roved amongst the orange and lemon groves of Paramatta, and wondered how all this enchanted life had sprung out of the collieries and the events of the Marlpool, in Derbyshire. I can only say," Luke added when he closed his narrative, "that I quitted my old cronies, the Wellands and their children, with profound regret, and I feel that the regret was mutual. The old collier of the Marlpool, now the millionnaire of Sydney, has not forgotten his old friends and native place. I have brought with me £500 to build and partly endow a school on the spot where his humble cottage once stood; and I shall feel it my duty and my pleasure to state the facts that this is the gift of the Wellands, fifteen years ago transported on the charge of having murdered me in consequence of my disappearance. That, innocent of the charge, God has wonderfully prospered them in their distant exile; that they have grown rich and esteemed, and have sent by me, whom they were supposed to have destroyed, this handsome token of their remembrance to their native place. That is due to their justification, and to the wonderful means of compensation existing in the immensely-extended British empire, where even the man unjustly condemned at home, can find, in his unjust punishment, the way to far superior fortune; and where those justly condemned may expiate their offences against society by returning to virtue, and by attaining to a position and a power which enables them to diffuse the most salutary hopes and the most substantial benefits around them."
This is the story of Welland the collier and Luke Barnicott, whom may Heaven long preserve!