Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (177 page)

“I shall find him! I don’t care where he’s hid away from me, I shall find him yet,” thought Mat, still holding with dogged and desperate obstinacy to his first superstition, in spite of every fresh sign that appeared to confute it.

“Why worrit yourself about finding Arthur Carr at all?” pursued Mrs. Peckover, noticing his perplexed and mortified expression. “The wretch is dead, most likely, by this time — ”

“I’m not dead!” retorted Mat, fiercely; “and you’re not dead; and you and me are as old as him. Don’t tell me he’s dead again! I say he’s alive; and, by God, I’ll be even with him!”

“Oh, don’t talk so, don’t! It’s shocking to hear you and see you,” said Mrs. Peckover, recoiling from the expression of his eye at that moment, just as she had recoiled from it already over Mary’s grave. “Suppose he is alive, why should you go taking vengeance into your own hands after all these years? Your poor sister’s happy in heaven; and her child’s took care of by the kindest people, I do believe, that ever drew breath in this world. Why should you want to be even with him now? If he hasn’t been punished already, I’ll answer for it he will be — in the next world, if not in this. Don’t talk about it, or think about it any more, that’s a good man! Let’s be friendly and pleasant together again — like we were just now — for Mary’s sake. Tell me where you’ve been to all these years. How is it you’ve never turned up before? Come! tell me, do.”

She ended by speaking to him in much the same tone which she would have made use of to soothe a fractious child. But her instinct as a woman guided her truly: in venturing on that little reference to “Mary,” she had not ventured in vain. It quieted him, and turned aside the current of his thoughts into the better and smoother direction. “Didn’t she never talk to you about having a brother as was away aboard ship?” he asked, anxiously.

“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.”

“Tramps’ fever! Mercy on me! what do you mean?”

“I mean this: when a man turns gypsy on his own account, as I did, and tramps about through cold and hot, and winter and summer, not caring where he goes or what becomes of him, that sort of life ends by getting into his head, just like liquor does — except that it don’t get out again. It got into my head. It’s in it new. Tramps’ fever kep’ me away in the wild country. Tramps’ fever will take me back there afore long. Tramps’ fever will lay me down, some day, in the lonesome places, with my hand on my rifle and my face to the sky; and I shan’t get up again till the crows and vultures come and carry me off piecemeal.”

“Lord bless us! how can you talk about yourself in that way?” cried Mrs. Peckover, shuddering at the grim image which Mat’s last words suggested. “You’re trying to make yourself out worse than you are. Surely you must have thought of your father and sister sometimes — didn’t you?”

“Think of them? Of course I did! But, mind ye, there come a time when I as good as forgot them altogether. They seemed to get smeared out of my head — like we used to smear old sums off our slates at school.”

“More shame for you! Whatever else you forgot, you oughtn’t to have forgotten — ”

“Wait a bit. Father’s letter told me — I’d show you the place, only I know you couldn’t read it — that he was a going to look after Mary, and bring her back home, and forgive her. He’d done that twice for
me,
when
I
run away; so I didn’t doubt but what he’d do it just the same for
her.
She’ll pull through her scrape with father just as I used to pull through mine — was what I thought. And so she would, if her own kin hadn’t turned against her; if father’s own sister hadn’t — ” He stopped; the frown gathered on his brow, and the oath burst from his lips, as he thought of Joanna Grice’s share in preventing Mary’s restoration to her home.

“There! there!” interposed Mrs. Peckover, soothingly. “Talk about something pleasanter. Let’s hear how you come back to England.”

“I can’t rightly fix it when Mary first begun to drop out of my head like,” Mat continued, abstractedly pursuing his previous train of recollections. “I used to think of her often enough, when I started for my run in the wild country. That was the time, mind ye, when I had clear notions about coming back home. I got her a scarlet pouch and another feather plaything then, knowing she was fond of knick-knacks, and making it out in my own mind that we two was sure to meet together again. It must have been a longish while after that, afore I got ashamed to go home. But I did get ashamed. Thinks I, ‘I haven’t a rap in my pocket to show father, after being away all this time. I’m getting summut of a savage to look at already; and Mary would be more frighted than pleased to see me as I am now. I’ll wait a bit,’ says I, ‘and see if I can’t keep from tramping about, and try and get a little money, by doing some decent sort of work, afore I go home.’ I was nigh about a good ten days’ march then from any seaport where honest work could be got for such as me; but I’d fixed to try, and I did try, and got work in a ship-builder’s yard. It wasn’t no good. Tramps’ fever was in my head; and in two days more I was off again to the wild country, with my gun over my shoulder, just as damned a vagabond as ever.”

Mrs. Peckover held up her hands in mute amazement. Matthew, without taking notice of the action, went on, speaking partly to her and partly to himself.

“It must have been about that time when Mary and father, and all what had to do with them, begun to drop out of my head. But I kep’ them two knick-knacks, which was once meant for presents for her — long after I’d lost all clear notion of ever going back home again, I kep’ ‘em — from first to last I kep’ ‘em — I can’t hardly say why; unless it was that I’d got so used to keeping of them that I hadn’t the heart to let ‘em go. Not, mind ye, but what they mightn’t now and then have set me thinking of father and Mary at home — at times, you know, when I changed ‘em from one bag to another, or took and blew the dust off of ‘em, for to keep ‘em as nice as I could. But the older I got, the worse I got at calling anything to mind in a clear way about Mary and the old country. There seemed to be a sort of fog rolling up betwixt us now. I couldn’t see her face clear, in my own mind, no longer. It come upon me once or twice in dreams, when I nodded alone over my fire after a tough day’s march — it come upon me at such times so clear, that it startled me up, all in a cold sweat, wild and puzzled with not knowing at first whether the stars was shimmering down at me in father’s paddock at Dibbledean, or in the lonesome places over the sea, hundreds of miles away from any living soul. But that was only dreams, you know. Waking, I was all astray now, whenever I fell a-thinking about father or her. The longer I tramped it over the lonesome places, the thicker that fog got which seemed to have rose up in my mind between me and them I’d left at home. At last, it come to darken in altogether, and never lifted no more, that I can remember, till I crossed the seas again and got back to my own country.”

“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.’“