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?"
"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."