In the meantime, Valentine, after some blundering at wrong doors, at last found his way out of the circus, and stood alone on the cool grass, in the cloudless autumn moonlight. He struck his stick violently on the ground, which at that moment represented to him the head of Mr. Jubber; and was about to return straight to the rectory, when he heard a breathless voice behind him, calling:--“Stop, sir! oh, do please stop for one minute!”
He turned round. A buxom woman in a tawdry and tattered gown was running towards him as fast as her natural impediments to quick progression would permit.
“Please, sir,” she cried--“Please, sir, wasn’t you the gentleman that was taken queer at seeing our little Foundling? I was peeping through the red curtain, sir, just at the time.”
Instead of answering the question, Valentine instantly began to rhapsodize about the child’s face.
“Oh, sir! if you know anything about her,” interposed the woman, “for God’s sake don’t scruple to tell it to me! I’m only Mrs. Peckover, sir, the wife of Jemmy Peckover, the clown, that you saw in the circus to-night. But I took and nursed the little thing by her poor mother’s own wish; and ever since that time--”
“My dear, good soul,” said Mr. Blyth, “I know nothing of the poor little creature. I only wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do something to help her and make her happy. If Lavvie and I had had such an angel of a child as that,” continued Valentine, clasping his hands together fervently, “deaf and dumb as she is, we should have thanked God for her every day of our lives!”
Mrs. Peckover was apparently not much used to hear such sentiments as these from strangers. She stared up at Mr. Blyth with two big tears rolling over her plump cheeks.
“Mrs. Peckover! Hullo there, Peck! where are you?” roared a stern voice from the stable department of the circus, just as the clown’s wife seemed about to speak again.
Mrs. Peckover started, curtsied, and, without uttering another word, went back even faster than she had come out. Valentine looked after her intently, but made no attempt to follow: he was thinking too much of the child to think of that. When he moved again, it was to return to the rectory.
He penetrated at once into the library, where Doctor Joyce was spelling over the “Rubbleford Mercury,” while Mrs. Joyce sat opposite to him, knitting a fancy jacket for her youngest but one. He was hardly inside the door before he began to expatiate in the wildest manner on the subject of the beautiful deaf and dumb girl. If ever man was in love with a child at first sight, he was that man. As an artist, as a gentleman of refined tastes, and as the softest-hearted of male human beings, in all three capacities, he was enslaved by that little innocent, sad face. He made the Doctor’s head whirl again; he fairly stopped Mrs. Joyce’s progress with the fancy jacket, as he sang the child’s praises, and compared her face to every angel’s face that had ever been painted, from the days of Giotto to the present time. At last, when he had fairly exhausted his hearers and himself, he dashed abruptly out of the room, to cool down his excitement by a moonlight walk in the rectory garden.