“Then don’t take it,” he replied; “I want no man’s trouble.”
“For your sake I would not,” I answered; “but for your daughter’s sake I will; the daughter whom you left to starve so pitifully in the wilderness.”
The man stared at me with his pale gray eyes, whose colour was lost from candle light; and his voice as well as his body shook, while he cried—
“It is a lie, man. No daughter, and no son have I. Nor was ever child of mine left to starve in the wilderness. You are too big for me to tackle, and that makes you a coward for saying it.” His hands were playing with a pickaxe helve, as if he longed to have me under it.
“Perhaps I have wronged you, Simon,” I answered very softly; for the sweat upon his forehead shone in the smoky torchlight; “if I have, I crave your pardon. But did you not bring up from Cornwall a little maid named ‘Gwenny,’ and supposed to be your daughter?”
“Ay, and she was my daughter, my last and only child of five; and for her I would give this mine, and all the gold will ever come from it.”
“You shall have her, without either mine or gold; if you only prove to me that you did not abandon her.”
“Abandon her! I abandon Gwenny!” He cried with such a rage of scorn, that I at once believed him. “They told me she was dead, and crushed, and buried in the drift here; and half my heart died with her. The Almighty blast their mining-work, if the scoundrels lied to me!”
“The scoundrels must have lied to you,” I answered, with a spirit fired by his heat of fury: “the maid is living and with us. Come up; and you shall see her.”
“Rig the bucket,” he shouted out along the echoing gallery; and then he fell against the wall, and through the grimy sack I saw the heaving of his breast, as I have seen my opponent’s chest, in a long hard bout of wrestling. For my part, I could do no more than hold my tongue and look at him.
Without another word we rose to the level of the moors and mires; neither would Master Carfax speak, as I led him across the barrows. In this he was welcome to his own way, for I do love silence; so little harm can come of it. And though Gwenny was no beauty, her father might be fond of her.
So I put him in the cowhouse (not to frighten the little maid), and the folding shutters over him, such as we used at the beestings; and he listened to my voice outside, and held on, and preserved himself. For now he would have scooped the earth, as cattle do at yearning-time, and as meekly and as patiently, to have his child restored to him. Not to make long tale of it—for this thing is beyond me, through want of true experience—I went and fetched his Gwenny forth from the back kitchen, where she was fighting, as usual, with our Betty.
“Come along, you little Vick,” I said, for so we called her; “I have a message to you, Gwenny, from the Lord in heaven.”
“Don’t ’ee talk about He,” she answered; “Her have long forgatten me.”
“That He has never done, you stupid. Come, and see who is in the cowhouse.”
Gwenny knew; she knew in a moment. Looking into my eyes, she knew; and hanging back from me to sigh, she knew it even better.
She had not much elegance of emotion, being flat and square all over; but none the less for that her heart came quick, and her words came slowly.
“Oh, Jan, you are too good to cheat me. Is it joke you are putting upon me?”
I answered her with a gaze alone; and she tucked up her clothes and followed me because the road was dirty. Then I opened the door just wide enough for the child to go to her father, and left those two to have it out, as might be most natural. And they took a long time about it.
Meanwhile I needs must go and tell my Lorna all the matter; and her joy was almost as great as if she herself had found a father. And the wonder of the whole was this, that I got all the credit; of which not a thousandth part belonged by right and reason to me. Yet so it almost always is. If I work for good desert, and slave, and lie awake at night, and spend my unborn life in dreams, not a blink, nor wink, nor inkling of my labour ever tells. It would have been better to leave unburned, and to keep undevoured, the fuel and the food of life. But if I have laboured not, only acted by some impulse, whim, caprice, or anything; or even acting not at all, only letting things float by; piled upon me commendations, bravoes, and applauses, almost work me up to tempt once again (though sick of it) the ill luck of deserving.
Without intending any harm, and meaning only good indeed, I had now done serious wrong to Uncle Reuben’s prospects. For Captain Carfax was full as angry at the trick played on him as he was happy in discovering the falsehood and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil whereof was well deserved, whatever it might end in.
For when this poor man left his daughter, asleep as he supposed, and having his food, and change of clothes, and Sunday hat to see to, he meant to return in an hour
