Hide and Seek

'Is there any living soul you care about that a trifle of money would do a little good to?' he asked, with such abrupt eagerness that she was quite startled by it.

'Lord bless me!' she exclaimed, 'what do you mean? What has that got to do with your poor sister, or Mr. Blyth?'

'It's got this to do,' burst out Matthew, starting to his feet, as the struggling gratitude within him stirred body and soul both together; 'you turned to and helped Mary when she hadn't nobody else in the world to stand by her. She was always father's darling—but father couldn't help her then; and I was away on the wrong side of the sea, and couldn't be no good to her neither. But I'm on the right side, now; and if there's any friends of yours, north, south, east, or west, as would be happier for a trifle of money, here's all mine; catch it, and give it 'em.' (He tossed his beaver-skin roll, with the bank-notes in it, into Mrs. Peckover's lap.) 'Here's my two hands, that I dursn't take a holt of yours with, for fear of hurting you again; here's my two hands that can work along with any man's. Only give 'em something to do for you, that's all! Give 'em something to make or mend, I don't care what—'

'Hush! hush!' interposed Mrs. Peckover; 'don't be so dreadful noisy, there's a good man! or you'll wake my brother up stairs. And, besides, where's the use to make such a stir about what I done for your sister? Anybody else would have took as kindly to her as I did, seeing what distress she was in, poor soul! Here,' she continued, handing him back the beaver-skin roll; 'here's your money, and thank you for the offer of it. Put it up safe in your pocket again. We manage to keep our heads above water, thank God! and don't want to do no better than that. Put it up in your pocket again, and then I'll make bold to ask you for something else.'

'For what?' inquired Mat, looking her eagerly in the face.

'Just for this: that you'll promise not to take little Mary from Mr. Blyth. Do, pray do promise me you won't.'

'I never thought to take her away,' he answered. 'Where should I take her to? What can a lonesome old vagabond, like me, do for her? If she's happy where she is—let her stop where she is.'

'Lord bless you for saying that!' fervently exclaimed Mrs. Peckover, smiling for the first time, and smoothing out her gown over her knees with an air of inexpressible relief. 'I'm rid of my grand fright now, and getting to breathe again freely, which I haven't once yet been able to do since I first set eyes on you. Ah! you're rough to look at; but you've got your feelings like the rest of us. Talk away now as much as you like. Ask me about anything you please —'

'What's the good?' he broke in, gloomily. 'You don't know what I wanted you to know. I come down here for to find out the man as once owned this,'—he pulled the lock of hair out of his pocket again—'and you can't help me. I didn't believe it when you first said so, but I do now.'

'Well, thank you for saying that much; though you might have put it civiler—'

'His name was Arthur Carr. Did you never hear tell of anybody with the name of Arthur Carr?'

'No: never—never till this very moment.'

'The Painter-man will know,' continued Mat, talking more to himself than to Mrs. Peckover. 'I must go back, and chance it with the Painter-man, after all.'

'Painter-man?' repeated Mrs. Peckover. 'Painter? Surely you don't mean Mr. Blyth?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Why, what in the name of fortune can you be thinking of! How should Mr. Blyth know more than me? He never set eyes on little Mary till she was ten year old; and he knows nothing about her poor unfortunate mother except what I told him.'

These words seemed at first to stupefy Mat: they burst upon him in the shape of a revelation for which he was totally unprepared. It had never once occurred to him to doubt that Valentine was secretly informed of all that he most wished to know. He had looked forward to what the painter might be persuaded—or, in the last resort, forced—to tell him, as the one certainty on which he might finally depend; and here was this fancied security exposed, in a moment, as the wildest delusion that ever man trusted in! What resource was left? To return to Dibbledean, and, by the legal help of Mr. Tatt, to possess himself of any fragments of evidence which Joanna Grice might have left behind her in writing? This seemed but a broken reed to depend on; and yet nothing else now remained.

'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?'