It was Mrs. Peckover herself! She had taken a prescription for her sick brother to the chemist"s--had bought him one or two little things he wanted in the High Street--and had now, before resuming her place at his bedside, stolen a few minutes to go and look at the grave of Madonna"s mother. It was many, many years since Mrs. Peckover had last paid a visit to Bangbury churchyard.
She stopped and hesitated when she first caught sight of Mat; but, after a moment or two, not being a woman easily baulked in anything when she had once undertaken to do it, continued to advance, and never paused for the second time until she had come close to the grave by which Mat stood, and was looking him steadily in the face, exactly across it.
He was the first to speak. "Do you know whose grave this is?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," answered Mrs. Peckover, glancing indignantly at the broken board and the mud and brambles all about it. "Yes, sir, I _do_ know; and, what"s more, I know that it"s a disgrace to the parish. Money has been paid twice over to keep it decent; and look what a state it"s left in!"
"I asked you whose grave it was," repeated Mat, impatiently.
"A poor, unfortunate, forsaken creature"s, who"s gone to Heaven if ever an afflicted, repenting woman went there yet!" answered Mrs. Peckover, warmly.
"Forsaken? Afflicted? A woman, too?" Mat repeated to himself, thoughtfully.
"Yes, forsaken and afflicted," cried Mrs. Peckover, overhearing him.
"Don"t you say no ill of her, whoever you are. She shan"t be spoken unkindly of in my hearing, poor soul!"
Mat looked up suddenly and eagerly. "What"s your name?" he inquired.
"My name"s Peckover, and I"m not ashamed of it," was the prompt reply.
"And, now, if I may make so bold, what"s yours?"
Mat took from his pocket the Hair Bracelet, and, fixing his eyes intently on her face, held it up, across the grave, for her to look at.
"Do you know this?" he said.
Mrs. Peckover stooped forward, and closely inspected the Bracelet for a minute or two. "Lord save us!" she exclaimed, recognizing it, and confronting him with cheeks that had suddenly become colorless, and eyes that stared in terror and astonishment. "Lord save us! how did you come by that? And who for mercy"s sake are you?"
"My name"s Matthew Grice," he answered quickly and sternly. "This Bracelet belonged to my sister, Mary Grice. She run away from home, and died, and was buried in Bangbury churchyard. If you know her grave, tell me in plain words--is it here?"
Breathless as she was with astonishment, Mrs. Peckover managed to stammer a faint answer in the affirmative, and to add that the initials, "M. G.," would be found somewhere on the broken board lying at their feet. She then tried to ask a question or two in her turn; but the words died away in faint exclamations of surprise. "To think of me and you meeting together!" was all she could say;--"her own brother, too! Oh! to think of that!--only to think of that!"
Mat looked down at the mud, the brambles, and the rotting gra.s.s that lay over what had once been a living and loving human creature. The dangerous brightness glittered in his eyes, the cold change spread fast over his cheeks, and the scars of the arrow-wounds began to burn redly and more redly, as he whispered to himself--"I"ll be even yet, Mary, with the man who laid you here!"
"Does Mr. Blyth know who you are, sir?" asked Mrs. Peckover, hesitating and trembling as she put this question. "Did he give you the Bracelet?"
She stopped. Mat was not listening to her. His eyes were fastened on the grave: he was still talking to himself in quick whispering tones.
"Her Bracelet was hid from me in another man"s chest," he said--"I"ve found her Bracelet. Her child was hid from me in another man"s house--I"ve found her child. Her grave was hid from me in a strange churchyard--I"ve found her grave. The man who laid her in it is hid from me still--I shall find _him!"_
"Please do listen to me, sir, for one moment," pleaded Mrs. Peckover, more nervously than before. _"Does_ Mr. Blyth know about you? And little Mary--oh, sir, whatever you do, pray, pray don"t take her away from where she is now! You can"t mean to do that, sir, though you are her own mother"s brother? You can"t, surely?"
He looked up at her so quickly, with such a fierce, steady, serpent-glitter in his light-grey eyes, that she recoiled a step or two; still pleading, however, with desperate perseverance for an answer to her last question.
"Only tell me, sir, that you don"t mean to take little Mary away, and I won"t ask you to say so much as another word! You"ll leave her with Mr.
and Mrs. Blyth, won"t you, sir? For your sister"s sake, you"ll leave her with the poor bed-ridden lady that"s been like a mother to her for so many years past?--for your dear, lost sister"s sake, that I was with when she died--"
"Tell me about her." He said those few words with surprising gentleness, as Mrs. Peckover thought, for such a rough-looking man.
"Yes, yes, all you want to know," she answered. "But I can"t stop here.
There"s my brother--I"ve got such a turn with seeing you, it"s almost put him out of my head--there"s my brother, that I must go back to, and see if he"s asleep still. You just please to come along with me, and wait in the parlor--it"s close by--while I step upstairs--" (Here she stopped in great confusion. It seemed like running some desperate risk to, ask this strange, stern-featured relation of Mary Grice"s into her brother"s house.) "And yet," thought Mrs. Peckover, "if I can only soften his heart by telling him about his poor unfortunate sister, it may make him all the readier to leave little Mary--"
At this point her perplexities were cut short by Matthew himself, who said, shortly, that he had been to Dawson"s Buildings already to look after her. On hearing this, she hesitated no longer. It was too late to question the propriety or impropriety of admitting him now.
"Come away, then," she said; "don"t let"s wait no longer. And don"t fret about the infamous state they"ve left things in here," she added, thinking to propitiate him, as she saw his eyes turn once more at parting, on the broken board and the brambles around the grave. "I know where to go, and who to speak to--"
"Go nowhere, and speak to n.o.body," he broke in sternly, to her great astonishment. "All what"s got to be done to it, I mean to do myself."
"You!"
"Yes, me. It was little enough I ever did for her while she was alive; and it"s little enough now, only to make things look decent about the place where she"s buried. But I mean to do that much for her; and no other man shall stir a finger to help me."
Roughly as it was spoken, this speech made Mrs. Peckover feel easier about Madonna"s prospects. The hard-featured man was, after all, not so hard-hearted as she had thought him at first. She even ventured to begin questioning him again, as they walked together towards Dawson"s Buildings.
He varied very much in his manner of receiving her inquiries, replying to some promptly enough, and gruffly refusing, in the plainest terms, to give a word of answer to others.
He was quite willing, for example, to admit that he had procured her temporary address at Bangbury from her daughter at Rubbleford; but he flatly declined to inform her how he had first found out that she lived at Rubbleford at all. Again, he readily admitted that neither Madonna nor Mr. Blyth knew who he really was; but he refused to say why he had not disclosed himself to them, or when he intended--if he ever intended at all--to inform them that he was the brother of Mary Grice. As to getting him to confess in what manner he had become possessed of the Hair Bracelet, Mrs. Peckover"s first question about it, although only answered by a look, was received in such a manner as to show her that any further efforts on her part in that direction would be perfectly fruitless.
On one side of the door, at Dawson"s Buildings, was Mr. Randle"s shop; and on the other was Mr. Randle"s little dining parlor. In this room Mrs. Peckover left Mat, while she went up stairs to see if her sick brother wanted anything. Finding that he was still quietly sleeping, she only waited to arrange the bed-clothes comfortably about him, and to put a hand-bell easily within his reach in case he should awake, and then went down stairs again immediately.
She found Mat sitting with his elbows on the one little table in the dining-parlor, his head resting on his hands. Upon the table lying by the side of the Bracelet, was the lock of hair out of Jane Holdsworth"s letter, which he had yet once more taken from his pocket to look at.
"Why, mercy on me!" cried Mrs. Peckover, glancing at it, "surely it"s the same hair that"s worked into the Bracelet! Wherever, for goodness sake, did you get that?"
"Never mind where I got it. Do you know whose hair it is? Look a little closer. The man this hair belonged to was the man she trusted in--and he laid her in the churchyard for her pains."
"Oh! who was he? who was he?" asked Mrs. Peckover, eagerly
"Who was he?" repeated Matthew, sternly. "What do you mean by asking me that?"
"I only mean that I never heard a word about the villain--I don"t so much as know his name."
"You don"t?" He fastened his eyes suspiciously on her as he said those two words.
"No; as true as I stand here I don"t. Why, I didn"t even know that your poor dear sister"s name was Grice till you told me."
His look of suspicion began to change to a look of amazement as he heard this. He hurriedly gathered up the Bracelet and the lock of hair, and put them into his pocket again.
"Let"s hear first how you met with her," he said. "I"ll have a word or two about the other matter afterwards."
Mrs. Peckover sat down near him, and began to relate the mournful story which she had told to Valentine, and Doctor and Mrs. Joyce, now many years ago, in the Rectory dining-room. But on this occasion she was not allowed to go through her narrative uninterruptedly. While she was speaking the few simple words which told how she had sat down by the road-side, and suckled the half-starved infant of the forsaken and dying Mary Grice, Mat suddenly reached out his heavy, trembling hand, and took fast hold of hers. He griped it with such force that, stout-hearted and hardy as she was, she cried out in alarm and pain, "Oh, don"t! you hurt me--you hurt me!"
He dropped her hand directly, and turned his face away from her; his breath quickening painfully, his fingers fastening on the side of his chair, as if some great pang of oppression were trying him to the quick.
She rose and asked anxiously what ailed him; but, even as the words pa.s.sed her lips, he mastered himself with that iron resolution of his which few trials could bend, and none break, and motioned to her to sit down again.
"Don"t mind me," he said; "I"m old and tough-hearted with being battered about in the world, and I can"t give myself vent nohow with talking or crying like the rest of you. Never mind; it"s all over now. Go on."
She complied, a little nervously at first; but he did not interrupt her again. He listened while she proceeded, looking straight at her; not speaking or moving--except when he winced once or twice, as a man winces under unexpected pain, while Mary"s death-bed words were repeated to him. Having reached this stage of her narrative, Mrs. Peckover added little more; only saying, in conclusion: "I took care of the poor soul"s child, as I said I would; and did my best to behave like a mother to her, till she got to be ten year old; then I give her up--because it was for her own good--to Mr. Blyth."
He did not seem to notice the close of the narrative. The image of the forsaken girl, sitting alone by the roadside, with her child"s natural sustenance dried up within her--travel-worn, friendless, and desperate--was still uppermost in his mind; and when he next spoke, grat.i.tude for the help that had been given to Mary in her last sore distress was the one predominant emotion, which strove roughly to express itself to Mrs. Peck over in these words: