"MYRA!"
The opening of the door could scarcely have been audible amid the murmur below. She herself had stretched out her arms, uttering no sound, not yet discerning him among the dim murmuring shadows. What telegraphy of love reached, and on the instant, that one child in the throng and fetched him to his feet, crying out her name? And he was blind. From the way he ran to her, heeding no obstacles, stumbling against desks, breaking his shins cruelly against the steps of the platform as he stretched up both hands to her, all might see that he was blind. Yet he came, as she had known he would come.
"CLEM!"
They were in each other"s arms, sobbing, laughing, crooning soft words together, but only these articulate--
"You knew me?"
"Yes, you have come--I knew you would come!"
"Now I ask you," said Aunt Hannah to the Matron, who, un.o.bserved by the visitors, had followed them down the corridor, "I don"t know you from Adam, ma"am, but I ask you, as a Christian woman, if you"d part them two lambs? And, if so, how?"
The Matron"s answer went near to abashing her; for the Matron turned out to be not only a Christian woman, as challenged, but an extremely tender-hearted one.
"I like the child," she answered. "I like him so much that I"d be thankful if you could get him removed; for, to tell the truth, he"s ailing here. We try to feed him well, and we try to make him happy; but he"s losing flesh, and he"s not happy. Indeed we are not tyrants, ma"am, and if it pleases you his sister shall stay with him overnight, and I promise to take care of her; but he came to us from his legal guardian, and without leave we can"t give him up."
It was at this point that inspiration came to Mr. Joshua.
"Why not a telegram?" he suggested. "As his aunt, ma"am, you might suggest a sea voyage for the child, and leave it to me to word it strongly."
"If I wasn"t a married woman," said Mrs. Purchase, "I could openly bless the hour I made your acquaintance."
Between the despatch of Mr. Joshua"s telegram and the receipt of his answer there was weary waiting for all but the two children.
They, content in the moment"s bliss, secure of the future, being reunited, neither asked nor doubted.
Yet they missed something--the glad, astounded surprise of their elders as Mr. Joshua, having taken the yellow envelope from Mrs. Purchase, whose courage failed her, broke it open, and read aloud, "_Leave child in your hands. Only do not bring him home_."
It was a happy party that travelled back that night to Blackfriars; and Mr. Joshua, after shaking hands with everybody many times over, and promising to eat his Christmas dinner on board the _Virtuous Lady_, walked homeward to his solitary lodgings elate, treading the frosty pavement with an unaccustomed springiness of step. He had vindicated the Power of the Press.
CHAPTER XXV.
BUT TOM CAN WRITE.
"A letter for you, Mrs. Trevarthen!"
Spring had come. The flight and finding of Myra had long since ceased to be a nine days" wonder, and she and Clem and Tom Trevarthen--received back into favour, and in some danger of being petted by Mrs. Purchase, who had never been known to pet a seaman--were shipmates now on board the _Virtuous Lady_, and had pa.s.sed for many weeks now beyond ken of the little port. A new schoolmistress reigned in Hester"s stead, since Hester, with the New Year, had taken over the care of the Widows" Houses.
In his counting-house at Hall Samuel Rosewarne sat day after day transacting his business without a clerk, speaking seldom, shunned by all--even by his own son; a man afraid of himself. Susannah declared that the house was like a tomb, and vowed regularly on Monday mornings to give "warning" at the next week-end. The villagers, accustomed to the Rosewarne tyranny for generations, had found it hard to believe in their release. Lady Killiow was little more than a name to them, Rosewarne a very present steward and master of their lives; and at first, when Peter Benny engaged workmen to pull down Nicky Vro"s cottage and erect a modest office on its site, they admired his temerity, but awoke each morning to fresh wonder that no thunderbolt from Hall had descended during the night and razed his work to the ground. The new ferryman had vanished too, paid off and discharged for flagrant drunkenness, and his place was taken by old Billy Daddo the Methodist--a change so comfortable and (when you come to think of it) a choice so happy, that the villagers, after the shock of surprise, could hardly believe they had not suggested it. If they did not quite forget Nicky and his sorrows--if in place of Nicky"s pagan chatter they listened to Billy"s earnest, gentle discourse, and might hardly cross to meal or market without being reminded of G.o.d--why, after all, the word of G.o.d was good hearing, and everyone ought to take an interest in it.
Stop your ears for a moment, and you could almost believe "twas Nicky come back to life again. n.o.body could deny the man was cheerful and civil.
He rowed a stroke, too, amazingly like Nicky"s.
As for Rosewarne, in the revulsion of their fears they began to despise him. They Had done better to pity him.
Across the water, in her lodging in the Widows" Houses, Hester found work to be done which, to her surprise, kept her busier than she had ever been in her life before--so busy that the quiet quadrangle seemed to hold no room for news of the world without. She found that, if she were to satisfy her conscience in the service of these old women, she could seldom save more than an hour"s leisure from the short spring days; and in that hour maybe Sir George would call with his plans, or she would put on her bonnet and walk down the hill for a call on the Bennys and a chat with Nuncey. But oftener it was Nuncey who came for a gossip; Nuncey having sold her cart and retired from business.
Spring had come. Within the almshouse quadrangle, around the leaden pump, the daffodils were in flower and the tulip buds swelling. A blast from the first of those golden trumpets could hardly have startled her more than did her first sight of it flaunting in the sun. It had stolen upon her like a thief.
"A letter for you, Mrs. Trevarthen!"
The postman, as he crossed the quadrangle to the Matron"s door, glanced up and spied Mrs. Trevarthen bending over a wash-tub in the widows" gallery.
He pulled a letter from his pocket and held it aloft gaily.
"I"ll run up the steps with it if you can"t reach."
"No need to trouble you, my dear, if you"ll wait a moment."
Mrs. Trevarthen dried her hands in her coa.r.s.e ap.r.o.n, leaned over the bal.u.s.trade, and just contrived to reach the letter with her finger-tips.
They were bleached with soap and warm water, and they trembled a little.
""Tis from your son Tom, I reckon," said the postman, while she examined the envelope. "Foreign paper and the Quebec postmark."
"From Tom? O" course "tis from Tom! Get along with "ee do! What other man would be writing to me at my time o" life?"
The postman walked on, laughing. Mrs. Trevarthen stood for some while irresolute, holding the envelope between finger and thumb, and glancing from it to a closed door at the back of the gallery. A slant low sun-ray almost reached to the threshold, and was cut short there by the shadow of the gallery eaves.
"Best not disturb her, I s"pose," said the old woman, with a sigh.
She laid the letter down, but very reluctantly, beside the wash-tub, and plunged both hands among the suds again. "Quebec!" The word recalled a silly old song of the sailors; she had heard her boy hum it again and again--
"Was you ever to Quebec, Bonnie la.s.sie, bonnie la.s.sie?
Was you ever to Quebec, Rousing timber over the deck."--
A door opened at the end of the gallery, and Hester came through.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Trevarthen!"
""Mornin", my dear."
These two were friends now on the common ground of nursing Aunt Butson, who had been bedridden almost from the day of her admission to the almshouse, her gaunt frame twisted with dire rheumatics.
Hester, arriving to take up her duties and finding Mrs. Trevarthen outworn with nursing, had packed her off to rest and taken her place by the invalid"s bedside. In this service she had been faithful ever since; and it was no light one, for affliction did not chasten Mrs. Butson"s caustic tongue.
"Is she still sleeping?" Hester glanced at the door.
"Ay, ever since you left. Her pains have wore her out, belike.
A terrible night! Why didn" you call me sooner?"
"You have a letter, I see."
Mrs. Trevarthen nodded, obviously embarra.s.sed. "Keeping it for _her_, I was," she explained. "She do dearly like to look my letters over.
She gets none of her own, you see."
But Hester was not deceived, having observed (without appearing to detect it) Mrs. Trevarthen"s difficulty with the written instructions on the medicine bottles.
"But she will not wake for some time, we"ll hope; and you haven"t even broken the seal! If you would like me to read it to you--it would save your eyes; and I am very discreet--really I am."