“I sweep it out myself every morning, and keep all tidy. See here!” and he pulled open a drawer. “Here are all her gowns, and there are her hoods; and there—I know ’em all by heart now, and the place of every one. And there, sir—”

And he opened a cupboard, where lay in rows all Rose’s dolls, and the worn-out playthings of her childhood.

“That’s the pleasantest place of all in the room to me,” said he, whispering still, “for it minds me of when—and maybe, she may become a little child once more, sir; it’s written in the Scripture, you know—”

“Amen!” said Amyas, who felt, to his own wonder, a big tear stealing down each cheek.

“And now,” he whispered, “one thing more. Look here!”—and pulling out a key, he unlocked a chest, and lifted up tray after tray of necklaces and jewels, furs, lawns, cloth of gold. “Look there! Two thousand pound won’t buy that chest. Twenty years have I been getting those things together. That’s the cream of many a Levant voyage, and East Indian voyage, and West Indian voyage. My Lady Bath can’t match those pearls in her grand house at Tawstock; I got ’em from a Genoese, though, and paid for ’em. Look at that embroidered lawn! There’s not such a piece in London; no, nor in Alexandria, I’ll warrant; nor short of Calicut, where it came from. . . . Look here again, there’s a golden cup! I bought that of one that was out with Pizarro in Peru. And look here, again!”— and the old man gloated over the treasure.

“And whom do you think I kept all these for? These were for her wedding-day—for her wedding-day. For your wedding-day, if you’d been minded, sir! Yes, yours, sir! And yet, I believe, I was so ambitious that I would not have let her marry under an earl, all the while I was pretending to be too proud to throw her at the head of a squire’s son. Ah, well! There was my idol, sir. I made her mad, I pampered her up with gewgaws and vanity; and then, because my idol was just what I had made her, I turned again and rent her.

“And now,” said he, pointing to the open chest, “that was what I meant; and that” (pointing to the empty bed) “was what God meant. Never mind. Come downstairs and finish your wine. I see you don’t care about it all. Why should you! you are not her father, and you may thank God you are not. Go, and be merry while you can, young sir! . . . And yet, all this might have been yours. And—but I don’t suppose you are one to be won by money—but all this may be yours still, and twenty thousand pounds to boot.”

“I want no money, sir, but what I can earn with my own sword.”

“Earn my money, then!”

“What on earth do you want of me!”

“To keep your oath,” said Salterne, clutching his arm, and looking up into his face with searching eyes.

“My oath! How did you know that I had one?”

“Ah! you were well ashamed of it, I suppose, next day! A drunken frolic all about a poor merchant’s daughter! But there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, nor done in the closet that is not proclaimed on the house-tops.”

“Ashamed of it, sir, I never was: but I have a right to ask how you came to know it?”

“What if a poor fat squinny rogue, a low-born fellow even as I am, whom you had baffled and made a laughing-stock, had come to me in my loneliness and sworn before God that if you honorable gentlemen would not keep your words, he the clown would?”

“John Brimblecombe?”