Chapter XXX…

Chapter XXX

THE LETTER GWEN WROTE TO MR. TORRENS, TO TELL OF IT. MATILDA, WHO PLAYED SCALES, BUT NOT "THE HARMONIOUS BLACKSMITH." THE OLD LADY'S JEALOUSY OF GRANNY MARROWBONE, AND DAVE'S FIDELITY TO BOTH. HOW BEHEMOTH HICCUPPED, AND DAVE WENT TO SEE WHAT WAS BROKEN. THE EARTHQUAKE AT PISA. IT WAS OWING TO THE REPAIRS. HOW PETER JACKSON APPEARED BY MAGIC. HOW MR. BARTLETT SHORED NO. 7 UP TEMPORY, AND THE TENANTS HAD TO MAKE THE BEST OF WHAT WAS LEFT OF IT. UNCLE MO's ENFORCED BACHELOR LIFE

If love-letters were not so full of their writers' mutual satisfaction with their position, what a resource amatory correspondence would be to history!

In the letters to her lover with which Gwen at this time filled every available minute, the amatory passages were kept in check by the hard condition that they had to be read aloud to their blind recipient. So much so that the account which she wrote to him of her visit to Sapps Court will be very little the shorter for their complete omission.

It begins with a suggestion of suppressed dithyrambics, the suppression to be laid to the door of Irene. But with sympathy for her, too--for how can she help it? It then gets to business. She is going to tell "the thing"--spoken of thus for the first time--in her own way, and to take her own time about it. It is not even to be read fast, but in a leisurely way; and, above all, Irene is not to look on ahead to see what is coming; or, at least, if she does she is not to tell. Quite enough for the present that he should know that she, Gwen, has escaped without a scratch, though dusty. She addresses her lover, most unfairly, as "Mr. Impatience," in a portion of the letter that seems devised expressly to excite its reader's curiosity to the utmost. The fact is that this young beauty, with all her inherent stability and strength of character, was apt to be run away with by impish proclivities, that any good, serious schoolgirl would have been ashamed of. This letter offered her a rare opportunity for indulging them. Let it tell its own tale, even though we begin on the fifth page.

"I must pause now to see what sort of a bed Lutwyche has managed to arrange for me, and ring Maggie up if it isn't comfortable. Not but what I am ready to rough it a little, rather than that the old lady should be moved. She is the dearest old thing that ever was seen, with the loveliest silver hair, and must have been surpassingly beautiful, I should say. She keeps on reminding me of someone, and I can't tell who. It may be Daphne Palliser's grandmother-in-law, or it may be old Madame Edelweissenstein, who's a chanoinesse. But the nice old lady on the farm I told you of keeps mixing herself up in it--and really all old ladies are very much alike. By-the-by, I haven't explained her yet. Don't be in such a hurry!... There now!--my bed's all right, and I needn't fidget. Clo says so. The old lady is asleep with a stayed pulse, says Dr. Dalrymple, who has just gone. And anything more beautiful than that silver hair in the moonlight I never saw. Now I really must begin at the beginning.

"Clo and I started on our pilgrimage to Sapps Court at half-past three, without the barest suspicion of anything pending, least of all what I'm going to tell. Go on. We left Mr. Percival Pellew on the doorstep, pretending he was going to leave a book for Aunt Constance, and go away. Such fun! He went upstairs and stopped two hours, and I do believe they've got to some sort of decorous trothplight. Only A. C. when accused, only says he has shown unmistakable evidence of something or other, I forget what. Why on earth need people be such fools? There they both are, and what more can they want? She admits, however, that there is 'no engagement'! When anybody says that, it means they've been kissing. You ask Irene if it doesn't. Any female, I mean. Now go on.

"A more secluded little corner of the world than Sapps Court I never saw! Clo's barouche shot us out at the head of the street it turns out of, and went to leave a letter at St. John's Wood and be back in half an hour. We had no idea of a visitation, then. Besides, Clo had to be at Down Street at half-past five. There is an arch you go in by, and we nearly stuck and could go neither way. I was sorry to find the houses looked so respectable, but Clo tells me she can take me to some much better ones near Drury Lane. Dave, the boy, and his Uncle and Aunt, and a little sister, Dolly, whom I nearly ate, live in the last house down the Court. When we arrived Dolly was watering a sunflower, almost religiously, in the front-garden eight feet deep. It would die vethy thoon, she said, if neglected. She told us a long screed, about Heaven knows what--I think it related to the sunflower, which a naughty boy had chopped froo wiv a knife, and Dave had tighted on, successfully.

"The old prizefighter is just like Dr. Johnson, and I thought he was going to hug Clo, he was so delighted to see her, and so affectionate. So was Aunt Maria, a good woman who has lost her looks, but who must have had some, twenty years ago. I got Dolly on my knee, and we did the hugging, Dolly telling me secrets deliciously, and tickling. She is four next birthday, a fact which Aunt Maria thought should have produced a sort of what the Maestro calls precisione. I preferred Dolly as she was, and we exchanged locks of hair.

"We had only been there a very short time when Uncle Moses suggested that Dave should fetch a letter he was writing, from 'Old Mrs. Prichard's Room' upstairs, and Dave--who is a dear little chap of six or seven or eight--rushed upstairs to get it. I forgot how much I told you about the family, but I know I said something in yesterday's letter. Anyhow, 'old Mrs. Prichard' was not new to me, and I was very curious to see her. So when more than five minutes had passed and no Dave reappeared, I proposed that Dolly and I should go up to look for him, and we went, Aunt Maria following in our wake, to cover contingencies. She went back, after introducing me to the very sweet old lady in a high-backed chair, who comes in as the explanation of the beginning of this illegible scrawl. How funny children are! I do believe Uncle Moses was right when he said that Dave, if anything, preferred his loves to be 'a bit elderly.' I am sure these babies see straight through wrinkles and decay and toothless gums to the burning soul the old shell imprisons, and love it. Do you recollect that picture in the Louvre we both had seen, and thought the same about?--the old man with the sweet face and the appalling excrescence on the nose, and the little boy's unflinching love as he looks up at him. Oh, that nose!!! However, there is nothing of that in old Mrs. Picture, as Dave called her, according to her own spelling. Her face is simply perfect.... There!--I went in to look at it again by the moonlight, and I was quite right. And as for her wonderful old white hair!... I could write for ever about her.

"I think our incursion must have frightened the old soul, because she had lived up there by herself, except for her woman-friend who is out all day, and Aunt Maria and the children now and then, since she came to the house; so that a perfect stranger rushing in lawlessly--well, can't you fancy? However, she really stood it very well, considering.

"'I have heard of you, ma'am, from Dave. He's told me all about your rings. Where is the boy?... Haven't you, Dave--told me all about the lady's rings?'

"Dave came from some absorbing interest at the window, to say:--'It wasn't her,' with a sweet, impressive candour. He went back immediately. Something was going on outside. I explained, as I was sharp enough to guess, that my mother was the lady with the rings. I got into conversation with the old lady, and we soon became friends. She was very curious about 'old Mrs. Marrable' in the country. Indeed, I believe Uncle Mo was not far wrong when he said she was as jealous as any schoolgirl. It is most amusing, the idea of these two octogenarians falling out over this small bone of contention!

"While we talked, Dave and Dolly looked out of the window, Dave constantly supplying bulletins of the something that was going on without. I could not make it out at first, and his interjections of 'Now she's took it off'--'Now she's put it on again'--made me think he was inspecting some lady who was 'trying on' in the opposite house. It appeared, however, that the thing that was taken off and put on was not a dress, but some sort of plaister or liniment applied to the face of a boy, the miscreant who had made a raid on Dave's garden that morning, and spoiled his sunflower (see ante). It was because Dave had become so engrossed in this that he had not come downstairs again with his letter.

"The old lady, I am happy to say, was most amiable, and took to me immensely. I couldn't undertake to say now exactly how we got on such good terms so quickly. We agreed about the wickedness of that boy, especially when Dave reported ingratitude on his part towards the sister, who was tending him, whom he smacked and whose hair he pulled. To think of his smacking that dear girl that played the piano so nicely all day! And pulling her back-tails so she called out when she was actually succouring his lacerated face. I gathered that her name may have been Matilda, and that she wore plaits.

"'I think her such a nice, dear girl,' said old Mrs. Picture--I like that name for her--'because she plays the piano all day long, and I sit here and listen, and think of old times.' I asked a question. 'Why, no, my dear!--I can't say she knows any tunes. But she plays her scales all day, very nicely, and makes me think of when my sister and I played scales--oh, so many years ago! But we played tunes too. I sometimes think I could teach her "The Harmonious Blacksmith," if only we was a bit nearer.' I could see in her old face that she was back in the Past, listening to a memory. How I wished I had a piano to play 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' for her again!

"I got her somehow to talk of herself and her antecedents, but rather stingily. She married young and went abroad, but she seemed not to want to talk about this. I could not press her. She had come back home--from wherever she was--many years after her husband's death, with an only son, the survivor of a family of four children. He was a man, not a boy; at least, he married a year or so after. She 'could not say that he was dead.' Otherwise, she knew of no living relative. Her means of livelihood was an annuity 'bought by my poor son before....'--before something she either forgot to tell, or fought shy of--the last, I think. 'I'm very happy up here,' she said. 'Only I might not be, if I was one of those that wanted gaiety. Mrs. Burr she lives with me, and it costs her no rent, and she sees to me. And my children--I call 'em mine--come for company, 'most every day. Don't you, Dave?'

"Dave tore himself away from the pleasing spectacle of his enemy in hospital, and came to confirm this. 'Yorce!' said he, with emphasis. 'Me and Dolly!' He recited rapidly all the days of the week, an appointment being imputed to each. But he weakened the force of his rhetoric by adding:--'Only not some of 'em always!' Mrs. Picture then said:--'But you love your old granny in the country better than you do me, don't you, Davy dear?' Whereupon Dave shouted with all his voice:--'I doesn't!' and flushed quite red, indignantly.

"The old lady then said, most unfairly:--'Then which do you love best, dear child? Because you must love one best, you know!' I thought Dave's answer ingenious:--'I loves whichever it is, best.' If only all young men were as candid about their loves, wouldn't they say the same?

"Dolly had picked up the recitation of the days of the week for her own private use, and was repeating it ad libitum in a melodious undertone, always becoming louder on Flyday, Tackyday, Tunday. She was hanging over the window-sill watching the surgical case opposite. How glad I am now when I recollect my impulse to catch the little maid and keep her on my knee! Dolly's good Angel prompted this, and had a hand in my inspiration to tell the story of Cinderella, with occasional refrains of song which I do believe old Mrs. Picture enjoyed as much as the two smalls. I shudder as I think what it would have been if they had still been at the window when it came--the thing I have been so long postponing.

"It came without any warning that it would have been possible to act upon. We might certainly have shouted to those below to stand clear, if we had ourselves understood. But how could we? You can have no idea how bewildering it was.

"When something you can't explain portends Heavens-know-what, what on earth can you do? Pretend it's ghosts, and very curious and interesting? I think I might have done so this time, when an alarming noise set all our nerves on the jar. It was not a noise capable of description--something like Behemoth hiccuping goes nearest. Only I didn't want to frighten the babies, so I said nothing about the ghosts. Dolly said it wasn't her--an obvious truth. Old Mrs. Picture said it must have been her chair--an obvious fallacy. She then deserted her theory and suggested that Dave should 'go down and see if anything was broken,' which Dave immediately started to do, much excited.

"I felt very uncomfortable and creepy, for it recalled the shock of earthquake Papa and I were in at Pisa two years ago--it is a feeling one never gets over, that terremotitis, as Papa called it. I believe I was more alarmed than Dolly, and as for Dave, I am sure that so far he thought the whole thing the best fun imaginable. Picture to yourself, as he slams the door behind him and shouts his message to the world below, that I remain seated facing the light, while Dolly on my knee listens to a postscript of Cinderella. My eyes are fixed on the beauty of the old side-face I see against the light. Get this image clear, and then I will tell you what followed.

"Even as I sat looking at the old lady, that noise came again, and plaster came tumbling down from the ceiling, obscuring the window behind. As I fixed my eyes upon it, falling, I saw beyond it what really made me think at first that I was taking leave of my senses. The houses opposite seemed to shoot straight up into the air, as though they were reflections in a mirror which had fallen forward. An instant after, I saw what had happened. It was the window that was moving, not the houses.

"It was so odd! I had time to see all this and change my mind, before the great crash came to explain what had happened. For until the roar of a cataract of disintegrated brickwork, followed by a cloud of choking dust, showed that the wall of the room had fallen outwards, leaving the world clear cut and visible under a glorious afternoon sky until that dust-cloud came and veiled it, I could not have said what the thing was, or why. There seemed to be time--good solid time!--between the sudden day-blaze and the crash below, and I took advantage of it to wonder what on earth was happening.

"Then I knew it all in an instant, and saw in another instant that the ceiling was sagging down; for aught I knew, under the weight of a falling roof.

"Old Mrs. Picture was not frightened at all. 'You get this little Dolly safe, my dear,' said she to me. 'I can get myself as far as the landing. But don't you fret about me. I'm near my time.' She seemed quite alive to the fact that the house was falling, but at eighty, what did that matter? She added quite quietly:--'It's owing to the repairs.' Dolly suddenly began to weep, panic-struck.

"I saw that Mrs. Picture could not rise from her chair, though she tried. But what could I do? Any attempt of mine to pick her up and carry her would only have led to delay. I saw it would be quicker to get help, and ran for it, overtaking Dave on the stairs.

"Below was chaos. The kitchen where I had left my cousin talking with Uncle Mo and Aunt Maria was all but darkened, and the place was a cloud of dust. I could see that Uncle Mo was wrenching open the street-door, which seemed to have stuck, and then that it opened, letting in an avalanche of rubbish, and some light. Cries came from outside, and Aunt Maria called out that it was Mrs. Burr. Thereon Uncle Mo, crying 'Stand clear, all!' began flinging the rubbish back into the room with marvellous alacrity for a man of his years, and no consideration at all for glass or crockery. I felt sick, you may fancy, when it came home to me that someone was crying aloud with pain, buried under that heap of fallen brickwork.

"But we could be of no use yet a while, so I told Clo and Aunt Maria to come upstairs and help to get the old lady down. They did as they were bid, being, in fact, terrified out of their wits, and quite unable to make suggestions. A male voice came from within the room where I had just left Mrs. Picture by herself. I took it quite as a matter of course.

"'You keep out on that landing, some of you, till I tell you to come in. This here floor won't carry more than my weight.' This was what I heard a man say, speaking from where the window had been, mysteriously. I was aware that he had stepped from some ladder on to the floor of the room, jumping on it recklessly as though to test its bearing power. Then that he had gathered up my old new acquaintance in a bundle, carefully made in a few seconds, and had said:--'Come along down!' to all whom it might concern. He shepherded us, all three women and the two children, into a back-bedroom below, and went away, leaving his bundle on the bed; saying, after glancing round at the cornice:--'You'll be safe enough here for a bit, just till we can see our way.' He had a peculiar hat or cap, and I saw that he was a fireman. I did not know that firemen held any intercourse with human creatures. It appears that they do occasionally, under reserves.

"Then it was that I became alarmed about my old lady. Her face had lost what colour it had, and her finger-tips had become blue and lifeless. But she spoke, faintly enough, although quite clearly, always urging us to go to a safer place, and leave her to her luck. This was, of course, nonsense. Nor was there any safer place to go to, so far as I understood the position. Aunt Maria went down to find brandy, if possible, in the heart of the confusion below. She found half a wineglassful somewhere, and brought back with it a report of progress. They had to be cautious in removing the rubbish, so that no worse should come to the sufferer it had half buried. We kept it from the old lady that this was her fellow-lodger, Mrs. Burr, and made her take some brandy, whether she liked it or no. I then went down to see for myself, and Clo came too.

"The police had taken prompt possession of the Court, and only a limited force of volunteers were allowed to share in the removal of the rubbish. Uncle Mo and the fireman, who seemed to be a personal friend, were attacking the ruin from within, throwing the loose bricks back into the kitchen, and working for the dear life.

"As we came in they halted, in obedience to, 'Easy a minute, you inside there. Gently does it,' from the spontaneous leading mind, whoever he was, without. Uncle Mo, streaming with perspiration, and forgetful of social niceties, turned to me saying:--'You go back, my dear, you go back! 'Tain't for you to see. You go back!' I replied:--'Nonsense, Mr. Wardle! What do you take me for?' For had I not stood beside you, my darling, when you lay dead in the Park?

"I could see what had taken place. The woman had been just about to knock at the door when the wall fell from above. Nothing had struck her direct, else she would almost surely have been killed. The ruin had fallen far enough from the house to avoid this, but the recoil of its disintegration (I'm so proud of that expression) had jammed her against the wall and choked the door.... I'm so sleepy I can't write another word."

* * * * *

No doubt the sequel described how Mrs. Burr, rescued alive, but insensible, was borne away on a stretcher to the Hospital, and how the party were released from the house, whose complete collapse must have presented itself to their excited imaginations as more than a possibility. No doubt also obscure points were made plain; as, for instance, the one which is prominent in the short newspaper report, which runs as follows:--"A singular fall of brickwork, the consequences of which might easily have proved fatal, occurred on Thursday last at Sapps Court, Marylebone, when the greater part of the front-wall of No. 7 fell forward into the street, blocking the main entrance and causing for a time the greatest alarm to the inhabitants, who, however, were all ultimately rescued uninjured. A remarkable circumstance was that the cloud of dust raised by the shower of loose brickwork was taken for smoke and was sufficient to cause an alarm of fire; as a matter of fact, two engines had arrived before the circumstances were explained. The mistake was not altogether unfortunate, as an escape ladder which was passing at the time was of use in reaching the upper floors, whose tenants were at one time in considerable danger. A sempstress, Mrs. Susan Burr, living upstairs, was returning home at the moment of the calamity, and was severely injured by the falling brickwork, but no serious result is anticipated. A costermonger of the name of Rackstraw also received some severe contusions, but if we may trust the report of his son, an intelligent lad of thirteen, he is very little the worse by his misadventure."

Although "no serious result was anticipated" in Mrs. Burr's case--in the newspaper sense of the words, which referred to the Coroner--the results were serious enough to Mrs. Burr. She was disabled from work indefinitely, and was too much damaged to hope to leave the Hospital, for weeks at any rate. A relative was found, ready to take charge of her when that time should arrive, but apparently not ready to disclose her own name. For, so far as can be ascertained, she was never spoken of at Sapps Court otherwise than as "Mrs. Burr's married niece."

Mr. Bartlett was on the spot, within an hour, taking measures for the immediate safety of the inmates, and his own ultimate pecuniary advantage. He pointed out it was quite unnecessary for anyone to turn out of the rooms below, although he admitted that the open air had got through the top story. His immediate resources were quite equal to a temporary arrangement practicable in a couple of hours or so. A contrivance of inconceivable slightness, involving no drawbacks whatever to families occupying the premises it was engendered in, was necessary to hold the roof up tempory, for fear it should come with a run. It was really a'most nothing in the manner of speaking. You just shoved a len'th of quartering into each room, all down the house to the bottom, with a short scaffold-board top and bottom to distribute out the weight, and tapped 'em across with a 'ammer, and there you were! The top one ketched the roof coming down, and you had no need to be apprehensive, because it would take a tidy weight--double what Mr. Bartlett was going to put upon it.

This was a security against a complete collapse of the roof and upper floor, but if it come on heavy rain, what would keep Aunt M'riar's room dry? She and Dolly could not sleep in a puddle. Mr. Bartlett, however, pledged himself to make all that good with a few yards of tarpauling, and Aunt M'riar and Dolly went to bed, with sore misgivings as to whether they would wake alive next day. Dolly woke in the night and screamed with terror at what she conceived was a spectre from the grave, but which was really nothing but a short length of scaffold-pole standing upright at the foot of her bed.

This was bad enough, but it further appeared next day that a new floor would be de rigueur overhead in Mrs. Prichard's room. Not only were sundry timber balks shoved up against the house outside so they couldn't constitoot a hindrance to anyone--so Mr. Bartlett said when he giv' in a price for the job--but the street-door wouldn't above half shet to, and all the windows had to be seen to. Add to this afflictions from tarpaulings that would keep you bone-dry even if there come a thunderstorm--or perhaps, properly speaking, that would have done so only they were just a trifle wore at critical points--and smells of damp plaster that quite took away the relish from your food, and you will form some idea what remaining in the house during the repairs meant to Uncle Mo and his belongings.

Not that Dolly and Dave took their sufferings to heart much. The novelties of the position went far to compensate them for its drawbacks. One supreme grief there was for them, certainly. The avalanche of brickwork had destroyed, utterly and irrevocably, that cherished sunflower. They had clung to a lingering hope that, as soon as the claims of humanity had been discharged by the rescue of the victims of the catastrophe, the attention of the rescuers would be directed to carefully removing the debris from above their buried treasure. They were shocked at the callous indifference shown to its fate. It was an early revelation of the heartlessness of mankind. Nevertheless, the shattered sunflower was recovered in the end, and Dolly took it to bed with her, and cried herself to sleep over it.

* * * * *

So it seemed impossible for Dave and Dolly, and their uncle and aunt, all to remain on in the half-wrecked house. But then--where had they to go to? It was clear that Dolly and her aunt would have to turn out, and the only resource seemed to be that they should go away for a while to her grandmother's, an old lady at Ealing, who existed, but went no further. She had never entered Sapps Court, but her daughters, Aunt M'riar and Dolly's mother, had paid her dutiful visits. There was no ill-feeling--none whatever! So to Ealing Aunt M'riar went, two or three days later, and Dave went too, although he was convinced Uncle Mo couldn't do without him.

The old boy himself remained in residence, being fed by The Rising Sun; which sounds like poetry, but relates to chops and sausages and a half-a-pint, a monotonous dietary on which he subsisted until his family returned a month later to a reinstated mansion. He lived a good deal at The Sun during this period, relying on the society of his host and his friend Jerry. His retrospective chats with the latter recorded his impressions of the event which had deprived him of his household, and left him a childless wanderer on the surface of Marylebone.

"Red-nosed Tommy," said he, referring to Mr. Bartlett, "he wouldn't have put in that bit of bressemer to ketch up those rotten joists over M'riar's room if I hadn't told him. We should just have had the floor come through and p'r'aps my little maid and M'riar squashed dead right off. You see, they would have took it all atop, and no mistake. Pore Susan got it bad enough, but it wasn't a dead squelch in her case. It come sideways." Uncle Mo emptied his pipe on the table, and thoughtfully made the ash do duty first for Mrs. Burr, and then for Aunt M'riar and Dolly, by means of a side-push and a top-squash with his finger. He looked at the last result sadly as he refilled his pipe--a hypothetically bereaved man. Dolly might have been as flat as that!

"How's Susan Burr getting on?" asked Mr. Alibone.

"That's according to how much money you're inclined to put on the doctors. Going by looks only--what M'riar says--she don't give the idea of coming to time. Only then, there's Sister Nora--Miss Grahame they call her now; very nice lady--she's on the doctor's side, and says Mrs. Burr means to pull round. Hope so!"

"How's Carrots--Carrots senior--young Radishes' dad?"

"Oh--him? He's all right. He ain't the sort to take to bein' doctored. He's getting about again."

"I thought a bit of wall came down on him."

"Came down bodily, he says. But it don't foller that it did, because he says so. Anyhow, he got a hard corner of his nut against it. He ain't delicate. He says he'll have it out of the landlord--action for damages--wilful neglect--'sorlt and battery--that kind o' thing!"

"Won't Mrs. Burr?"

"Couldn't say--don't know if a woman counts. But it don't matter. Sister Nora, she'll see to her. Goes to see her every day. She or the other one. I say, Jerry!..."

"What say, old Mo?"

"You haven't seen the other one."

"Oh, that's it, is it?" Mr. Jerry spoke perceptively, appreciatively. For Uncle Mo, by partly closing one eye, and slightly varying the expression of his lips, had contrived somehow to convey the idea that he was speaking of dazzling beauty, not by any means unadorned.

"I tell you this, Jerry, and you can believe me or not, as you like. If I was a young feller, I'd hang about Hy' Park all day long only to get a squint at her. My word!--there's nothing to come anigh her--ever I saw! And there she was, a-kissing our little Dolly, like e'er a one of us!"

"What do you make out her name to be?" said Mr. Jerry.

"Sister Nora called her Gwen," replied Mo, speaking the name mechanically but firmly. "But what the long for that may be, I couldn't say. 'Tain't Gwenjamin, anyhow." He stopped to light his pipe.

"It was this young ladyship that carried off old Prichard in a two-horse carriage, I take it."

Uncle Mo nodded. "Round to Sister Nora's--in Cavendish Square--with a black Statute stood upright--behind palin's. M'riar she's been round to see the old lady there, being told to. And seemin'ly this here young Countess"--Uncle Mo seemed to object to using this word--"she's a-going to carry the old lady off to the Towels, where she lives when she's at home...."

"The Towels? Are you sure it isn't Towers? Much more likely!"

Uncle Mo made a mental note about Jerry, that he was tainted with John Bull's love of a lord. How could anything but a reverent study of Debrett have given such an insight into the names of Nobs' houses? "It don't make any odds, that I can see!" was his comment. The correction, however, resulted in an incumbrance to his speech, as he was only half prepared to concede the point. He continued:--"She's a-going, as I understand from M'riar, to pack off Mrs. Prichard to this here Towels, or Towers, accordin' as we call it. And, as I make it out, she'll keep her there till so be as Mr. Bartlett gets through the repairs. Or she'll send her back to a lodgin'; or not, as may be. Either, or eye-ther." Having thus, as it were, saturated his speech with freedom of alternative, Uncle Mo dismissed the subject, in favour of Gwen's beauty. "But--to look at her!" said he. The old man was quite in love.

Mr. Jerry disturbed his contemplation of the image Gwen had left him. "How long does Bartlett mean to be over the job?" he asked.

"He means to complete in a month. If you trust his word. I can't say I do."

"When will he complete, Mo? That's the question. What's the answer?"

"The Lord alone knows." Uncle Mo shook his head solemnly. But he recalled his words. "No--He don't! Even the Devil don't know. I tell you this, Jerry--there never was a buildin' job finished at any time spoke of aforehand. It's always after any such a time. And if you jump on for to catch it up, it's afterer."

"Best to hold one's tongue about it, eh? Anyway, the old lady's got a berth for a time. Rum story! She'd have been put to it if it hadn't been for the turn things took. When's she to go?"

"To these here Towels, or Towers, whichever you call 'em? M'riar didn't spot that. When she's took back, I suppose. When the young lady goes."

"What'll your young customer say to Mrs. Prichard being gone, when his aunt brings him back?"

Uncle Mo seemed to cogitate over this. He had not perhaps been fully alive to the disappointment in store for Dave when he came back and found no Mrs. Picture at Sapps Court. Poor little man! The old prizefighter's tender heart was touched on his boy's behalf. But after all there would be worse trials than this on the rough road of life for Dave. "He'll have to lump it, I expect, Jerry," said he. "Besides, Mrs. P., she'll come back as soon as the new plaster's dry. She's not going to stop at the Towels--Towers--whatever they are!--for a thousand years."

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Chapter XXXI

HOW GWEN GOT AT MRS. PRICHARD's HISTORY, OR SOME OF IT. ONE CRIME MORE OF HER SON'S. THE WALLS OF TROY, AND THOSE OF SAPPS COURT. AUNT M'RIAR'S VISIT OF INSPECTION. HOW SHE CALLED ON MRS. RAGSTROAR, WHO SENT HER SECRETIVE SON ROUND. HIS MESSAGE FROM MR. WIX. WHO WAS COMING TO SEE HIS MOTHER, UNLESS SHE WAS SOMEBODY ELSE. A MESSAGE TO MR. WIX, UNDERTAKEN BY MICHAEL. UNCLE MO's JOY AT THE PROSPECT OF DAVE AND DOLLY

How very improbable the Actual would sometimes feel, were it not for our knowledge of the events which led up to it!

Nothing could have been more improbable per se than that old Mrs. Prichard, upstairs at No. 7, down Sapps Court, should become the guest of the Earl and Countess of Ancester, at The Towers in Rocestershire. But a number of improbable antecedent events combined to make it possible, and once its possibility was established, it only needed one more good substantial improbability to make it actual. Gwen's individuality was more than enough to supply this. But just think what a succession of coincidences and strange events had preceded the demand for it!

To our thinking the New Mud wanted for Dave's barrage was responsible for the whole of it. But for that New Mud, Dave would not have gone to the Hospital. But for the Hospital, he would never have excited a tender passion in the breast of Sister Nora; would never have visited Granny Marrowbone; would never have been sought for by The Aristocracy at his residence in Sapps Court. Some may say that at this point nothing else would have occurred but for the collapse of Mr. Bartlett's brickwork, and that therefore the rarity of sound bricks in that conglomerate was the vera causa of the events that followed. But why not equally the imperfection of old Stephen's aim at Achilles? If he had killed Achilles, it is ten to one Gwen would have gone abroad with her mother, instead of being spirited away to Cavendish Square by her cousin in order that she should thereby become entangled in slums. Or for that matter, why not the death of the Macganister More? Had he been living still, Cousin Clo would never have visited Ancester Towers at all.

No--no! Depend upon it, it was the New Mud. But then, Predestination would have been dreadfully put out of temper if, instead of imperious impulsive Gwen, ruling the roast and the boiled, and the turbot with mayonnaise, and everything else for that matter, some young woman who could be pulverised by a reproof for Quixotism had been her understudy for the part, and she herself had had mumps or bubonic plague at the time of the accident. In that case Predestination would hardly have known which way to turn, to get at some sort of compromise or accommodation that would square matters. For there can be no reasonable doubt that what did take place was quite in order, and that--broadly speaking--everyone had signed his name over the pencil marks, and filled in his witness's name and residence, in the Book of Fate. If Gwen's understudy had been called on, there would have been--to borrow a favourite expression of Uncle Mo's--a pretty how-do-you-do, on the part of Predestination.

Fortunately no such thing occurred, and Predestination's powers of evasion were not put to the test. The Decrees of Fate were fulfilled as usual, and History travelled on the line of least resistance, to the great gratification of The Thoughtful Observer. In the case of lines of compliance with the will of Gwen, there was no resistance at all. Is there ever any, when a spoiled young beauty is ready to kiss the Arbiters of Destiny as a bribe, rather than give way about a whim, reasonable or unreasonable?

And, after all, so many improbabilities having converged towards creating the situation, there was nothing so very unreasonable in Gwen's whim that old Mrs. Picture should go back with her to the Towers. It was only the natural solution of a difficulty in a conjunction of circumstances which could not have varied materially, unless Gwen and her cousin had devolved the charge of the old lady on some Institution--say the Workhouse Infirmary--or a neighbour, or had forsaken her altogether. They preferred carrying her off, as the story has seen, in a semi-insensible state from the shock, to their haven in Cavendish Square. Next day an arrangement was made which restored to Gwen--who had slept on a sofa, when she was not writing the letter quoted in the foregoing text--the couch she had insisted on dedicating to "Old Mrs. Picture," as she continued to call her.

* * * * *

It was very singular that Gwen, who had seen the old twin sister--as we know her to have been--should have fallen so in love with the one whose acquaintance she last made. The story can only accept the fact that it was so, without speculating on its possible connection with the growth of a something that is not the body. It may appear--or may not--to many, that, in old Maisie's life, a warp of supreme love, shuttle-struck by a weft of supreme pain, had clothed her soul, as it were, in a garment unlike her sister's; a garment some eyes might have the gift of seeing, to which others might be blind. Old Granny Marrable had had her share of trouble, no doubt; but Fate had shown her fair play. Just simple everyday Death!--maternity troubles lived through in shelter; nursing galore, certainly--who escapes it? Of purse troubles, debts and sordid plagues, a certain measure no doubt, for who escapes them? But to that life of hers the scorching fires that had worked so hard to slay her sister's heart, and failed so signally, had never penetrated. Indeed, the only really acute grief of her placid life had been the supposed death of this very sister, now so near her, unknown. Still, Gwen might, of course, have taken just as strongly to Granny Marrable if some slight chance of their introduction had happened otherwise.

The old lady remained at Cavendish Square three weeks, living chiefly in an extra little room, which had been roughly equipped for service, to cover the contingency. As Miss Lutwyche seemed to fight shy of the task, Maggie, the Scotch servant, took her in hand, grooming her carefully and exhibiting her as a sort of sweet old curiosity picked up out of a dustheap, and now become the possession of a Museum. Aunt Constance, who kept an eye of culture on Maggie's dialect, reported that she had said of the old lady, that she was a "douce auld luckie": and that she stood in need of no "bonny-wawlies and whigmaleeries," which, Miss Grahame said, meant that she had no need of artificial decoration. She was very happy by herself, reading any easy book with big enough print. And though she was probably not so long without the society of grown people as she had often been at Sapps Court, she certainly missed Dave and Dolly. But she seemed pleased and gratified on being told that Dave was not gone, and was at present not going, anywhere near old Mrs. Marrable in the country.

The young lady broached her little scheme to her venerable friend, or protegee, as soon as it became clear that a return to the desolation to which Mr. Bartlett had converted Sapps Court might be a serious detriment to her health. Mr. Bartlett himself admitted the facts, but disputed the inferences to be drawn from them. Yes--there was, and there would be, a trifle of myesture hanging round; nothing in itself, but what you might call traces of ewaporation. You saw similar phenomena in sinks, and at the back of cesterns. But you never come across anyone the worse for 'em. He himself benefited by a hatmosphere, as parties called it nowadays, such as warn't uncommon in basements of unoccupied premises, and in morasses. But you were unable to account for other people's constitutions not being identical in all respects with your own. Providence was inscrutable, and you had to look at the symptoms. These were the only guides vouchsafed to us. He would, however, wager that as soon as the paperhanger was out of the house and the plaster giv' a chance to 'arden, all the advantages of a bone-dry residence would be enjoyed by an incoming tenant.

Portions of this opinion leaked out during a visit of Aunt M'riar to Mrs. Prichard, at Cavendish Square, she having come from Ealing by the 'bus to overhaul the position with Uncle Mo, and settle whether she and Dave and Dolly could return next week with safety. They had decided in the negative, and Mr. Bartlett had said it was open to them to soote themselves. Uncle Mo's sleeping-room had, of course, been spared by the accident, so he only suffered from a clammy and depressing flavour that wouldn't hang about above a day or two. At least, Mr. Bartlett said so.

Gwen treated the idea that Mrs. Prichard should so much as talk about returning to her quarters, with absolute derision.

"I'm going to keep you here and see you properly looked after, Mrs. Picture, till I go to the Towers. And then I shall just take you with me." For she had installed the name Picture as the old lady's working designation with such decision that everyone else accepted it, though one or two used it in inverted commas. "I always have my own way," she added with a full, rich laugh that Lord William Bentinck might have heard on his black pedestal in the Square below.

Aunt M'riar departed, not to be too late for her 'bus, and Gwen stayed for a chat. She often spent half an hour with the old lady, trying sometimes to get at more of her past history, always feeling that she was met by reticence, never liking to press roughly for information.

The two thin old palms that had once been a beautiful young girl's closed on the hand that was even now scarcely in its fullest glory of life, as its owner's eyes looked down into the old eyes that had never lost their sweetness. The old voice spoke first. "Why--oh why," it said, "are you so kind to me? My dear!"

"Is it strange that I should be kind to you?" said Gwen, speaking somewhat to herself. Then louder, as though she had been betrayed into a claim to benevolence, and was ashamed:--"The kindness comes to very little, when all's said and done. Besides, you can ..." She paused a moment, taking in the pause a seat beside the arm-chair, without loosing the hand she held; then made her speech complete:--"Besides, you can pay it all back, you know!"

"I pay! How can I pay it back?"

"You can. I'm quite in earnest. You can pay me back everything I can do for you--everything and more--by telling me.... Now, you mustn't be put out, you know, if I tell you what it is." Gwen was rather frightened at her own temerity.

"My dear--just fancy! Why should I want you not to know--anything I can tell, if I can remember it to tell you? What is it?"

"How you come to be living in Sapps Court. And why you are so poor. Because you are poor."

"No, I have a pound a week still. I have been better off--yes! I have been well off."

"But how came you to live in Sapps Court?"

"How came I?... Let me see!... I came there from Skillicks, at Sevenoaks, where I was last. Six shillings was too much for me alone. It is only seven-and-sixpence at Sapps for both of us. It was through poor Susan Burr that I came there. To think of her in the Hospital!"

"She's going on very nicely to-day. I went to see her with my cousin. Go on. It was through her?..."

"Through her I came to Sapps. She wanted to be in town for her work, and found Sapps. She had no furniture, or just a bed. And I had been able to keep mine. Then, you see, I wanted a helping hand now and again, and she had her sight, and could make shift to keep order in the place. I had every comfort, be sure!" This was spoken with roused emphasis, as though to dissipate uneasiness about herself.

"I saw you had some nice furniture," said Gwen. "I was on the look out for your desk, where Dave's letters were written."

"Yes, it's mahogany. I was frightened about it, for fear it should be scratched. But Davy's Aunt Maria was saying Mr. Bartlett's men had been very civil and careful, and all the furniture was safe in the bedroom at the back, and the door locked."

"But where did the furniture come from?"

"From the house."

"The house where you lived with your husband?"

The old woman started. "Oh no! Oh no--no! All that was long--long ago." She shrank from disinterring all but the most recent past.

But it was the deeper stratum of oblivion that had to be reached, without dynamite if possible. "I see," Gwen said. "Your own house after his death?"

Memory was restive, evidently--rather resented the inquiry. Still, a false inference could not be left uncorrected. "Neither my husband's nor mine," was the answer. "It was my son's house, after my husband's death." Its tone meant plainly:--"I tell you this, for truth's sake. But, please, no more questions!"

Gwen's idea honestly was to drop the curtain, and her half-dozen words were meant for the merest epilogue. When she said:--"And he is dead, too?" she only wanted to round off the conversation. She was shocked when the two delicate old hands hers lay between closed upon it almost convulsively, and could hardly believe she heard rightly the articulate sob, rather than speech, that came from the old lady's lips.

"Oh, I hope so--I hope so!"

"Dear Mrs. Picture, you hope so?" For Gwen could not reconcile this with the ideal she had formed of the speaker. At least, she could not be happy now without an explanation.

Then she saw that it would come, given time and a sympathetic listener. "Yes, my dear, I hope so. For what is his life to him--my son--if he is alive? The best I can think of for him, is that he is long dead."

"Was he mad or bad?"

"Both, I hope. Perhaps only mad. Then he would be neither bad nor good. But he was lost for me, and we were well apart: before he was"--she hesitated--"sent away...."

"Sent away! Yes--where?"

"I ought not to tell you this ... but will you promise me?..."

"To tell no one? Yes--I promise."

"I know you will keep your promise." The old lady kept on looking into the beautiful eyes fixed on hers, still caressing the hand she held, and said, after a few moments' silence:--"He was sent to penal servitude, not under his own name. They said his name was ... some short name ... at the trial. That was at Bristol." Then, after another pause, as though she had read Gwen's thoughts in her scared, speechless face:--"It was all right. He deserved his sentence."

"Oh, I am so glad!" Gwen was quite relieved. "I was afraid he was innocent. I thought he could not be guilty, because of you. But was he really wicked--bad, I mean--as well as legally guilty?"

"I like to hope that he was mad. The offence that sent him to Norfolk Island was scarcely a wicked one. It was only burglary, and it was a Bank." The old face looked forgiving over this, but set itself in lines of fixed anger as she added:--"It was not like the thing that parted us."

"You wish not to tell me that?"

"My dear, it is not a thing for you to hear." The gentleness of the speaker averted the storm of indignation and contempt which similar expressions of the correctitudes had more than once excited in this rebellious young lady.

But Gwen felt at liberty to laugh a little at them, or could not resist the temptation to do so. "Oh dear!" she cried. "Am I a new-born baby, to be kept packed in cotton-wool, and not allowed to hear this and hear that? Do, dear Mrs. Picture--you don't mind my calling you by Dave's name?--do tell me what it was that parted you and your son. I shall understand you. I'm not Mary that had a little lamb."

"Well, my dear, when I was about your age, before I was married, I'm not at all sure that I should have understood. Perhaps that is really the reason why I took the girl's part...."

"Why you took the girl's part?" said Gwen, who had not understood, so far, and was puzzled at the expression.

"Yes. I believed her story. They tried to throw the blame on her; he did, himself. My dear, it was his cowardice and treachery that made me hate him. You are shocked at that?"

"No--at least, I mean, I don't believe you meant it."

"I meant it at the time, my dear. And I counted him as dead, and tried to forget him. But it is hard for a mother to forget her son."

"I should have thought so." Gwen was not quite happy about old Mrs. Picture's inner soul. How about a possible cruel corner in it?

The old lady seemed to suspect this question's existence, unexpressed. Apology in her voice hinted at need of forgiveness--pleaded against condemnation. "But," she said, after a faltered word or two, short of speech, "you do not know, my dear, how bad a man can be. How should you?"

Perhaps the tone of her voice threw a light on some obscurity accepted ambiguities had left. For Gwen said, rather suddenly: "You need not tell me any more. You have told me plenty and I understand it." And so she did, for working purposes, though perhaps some latitudes in the sea of this Ralph Daverill's iniquities were by her unexplored and unexplorable.

This particular atrocity of his has no interest for the story, beyond the fact that it was the one that led to his separation from his mother, and that it accounts for the very slight knowledge that she seems to have had of the details of his conviction and deportation. It must have happened between his desertion of his lawful wife, Dave's Aunt M'riar, and his ill-advised attempt at burglary. Whether his offence against "the girl" whose part his mother took was made the subject of a criminal indictment is not certain, but if it was he must have escaped with a slight punishment, to be able to give his attention to the strong room of that Bank so soon after. Those who are inclined to think that his mother was unforgiving towards her own son, to the extent of vindictiveness, may find an excuse for her in a surmise which some facts connected with the case made plausible, that he adduced some childish levities on this girl's part as a warrant for his atrocious behaviour towards her, and so escaped legal penalty. Those who know with what alacrity male jurymen will accept evasions of this sort, will admit that this is at least possible.

This is conjecture, by the way, as Gwen asked to know no more of the incident, seeming to shrink from further knowledge of it in fact. She allowed it to pass out of the conversation, retaining the pleasant and wholesome attempt to redistribute the Bank's property as at least fit for discussion, and even pardonable--an act due to a mistaken economic theory--redistribution of property by a free lance, not wearing the uniform of a School of Political Thought.

"But how long was his term of service?" she asked, coming back into the fresher air of mere housebreaking.

"I am afraid it was for fourteen years. But I have never known. I can hardly believe it now, but I know it is true for all that, that he was convicted and transported without the trial coming to my ears at the time. I only knew that he had disappeared, and thought it was by his own choice. And what means had I of finding him, if I had wanted to? That I never did."

"Because of ... because of the girl?"

"Because of the girl Emma.... Oh yes! I was his mother, but ..." She stopped short. Her meaning was clear; some sons would cripple the strongest mother's love.

"Then you had to give up the house," said Gwen, to help her away from the memory that stung her, vividly.

"I gave it up and sold the furniture, all but one or two bits I kept by me--Dave Wardle's desk, and the arm-chair. I went to a lodging at Sidcup--a pretty place with honeysuckles round my window. I lived there a many years, and had friends. Then the railway came, and they pulled the cottage down--Mrs. Hutchinson's. And all the folk I knew were driven away--went to America, many of them; all the Hutchinsons went. I remember that time well. But oh dear--the many moves I had after that! I cannot tell them all one from another...."

"It tires you to talk. Never mind now. Tell me another time."

"No--I'm not tired. I can talk. Where was I? Oh--the lodgings! I moved many times--the last time to Sapps Court, not so very long ago. I made friends with Mrs. Burr at Skillicks, as I told you."

"And that is what made you so poor?"

"Yes. I have only a few hundred pounds of my own, an annuity--it comes to sixty pounds a year. I have learned how to make it quite enough for me." Nevertheless, thought Gwen to herself, the good living in her temporary home in Cavendish Square had begun to tell favourably. Enough is seldom as good as a feast on sixty pounds a year. The old lady seemed, however, to dismiss the subject, going on with something antecedent to it:--"You see now, my dear, why I said 'I hope.' What could the unhappy boy be to me, or I to him? But I shall never know where he died, nor when."

Gwen tried to get at more about her past; but, at some point antecedent to this parting from her son, she seemed to become more reserved, or possibly she had overtasked her strength by so much talk. Gwen noticed that, in all she had told her, she had not mentioned a single name of a person. Some slight reference to Australia, which she had hoped would lead naturally to more disclosure, seemed rather, on second thoughts, to furnish a landmark or limit, with the inscription: "Thus far and no farther." You--whoever you are, reading this--may wonder why Gwen, who had so lately heard of Australia, and Mrs. Marrable's sister who went there over half-a-century ago, did not forthwith put two and two together, and speculate towards discovery of the truth. It may be strange to you to be told that she was reminded of old Mrs. Marrable's utterance of the word "Australia" when old Mrs. Prichard spoke it, and simply let the recollection drop idly, because it was so unlikely the two two's would add up. To be sure, she had quite forgotten, at the moment, what the old Granny at Chorlton had said about the Antipodes. It is only in books that people remember all through, quite to the end.

Bear this in mind, that this sisterhood of Maisie and Phoebe was entrenched in its own improbability, and that one antecedent belief of another mind at least would have been needed to establish it. A hint, a suggestion, might have capitalised a dozen claims to having said so all along. But all was primeval silence. There was not a murmur in Space to connect the two.

* * * * *

Mr. Bartlett, the builder, after inspecting the collapse of the wall, lost no time in drawing up a contract to reinstate same and make good roof, replacing all defective work with new where necessary; only in his haste to come to his impressive climax--"the work to be done to the satisfaction of yourself or your Surveyor for the sum of L99.8.4 (ninety-nine pounds eight shillings and fourpence),"--he spelt this last word nesseracy. He called on the landlord, the gentleman of independent means at Brixton, with this document in his pocket and a strong conviction of his own honesty in his face, and pointed out that what he said all along had come to pass. As his position had been that unless the house was rebuilt--by him--at great expense, it was pretty sure to come tumbling down, as these here old houses mostly did, it was difficult for the gentleman of independent means to gainsay him, especially as the latter's wife became a convert to Mr. Bartlett on the spot. It was his responsible and practical manner that did it. She directed her husband--a feeble sample of the manhood of Brixton--not to set up his judgment against that of professional experience, but to affix his signature forthwith to the document made and provided. He said weakly:--"I suppose I must." The lady said:--"Oh dear, no!--he must do as he liked." He naturally surrendered at discretion, and an almost holy expression of contentment stole over Mr. Bartlett's countenance, superseding his complexion, which otherwise was apt to remain on the memory after its outlines were forgotten.

To return once more to the drying of the premises after their reconstruction. The accepted view seemed to be that as soon as Mr. Bartlett and his abettors cleared out and died away, the walls would begin to dry, and would make up for lost time. Everyone seemed inclined to palliate this backwardness in the walls, and to feel that they, themselves, had they been in a like position, could not have done much drying--with all them workmen in and out all day; just think!

But now a new era had dawned, and what with letting the air through, and setting alight to a bit of fire now and again, and the season keeping mild and favourable, with only light frosts in the early morning--only what could you expect just on to Christmas?--there seemed grounds for the confidence that these walls would do themselves credit, and yield up their chemically uncombined water by evaporation. HO2, who existed in those days, was welcome to stay where he was.

However, these walls refused to come to the scratch on any terms. Homer is silent as to how long the walls of Ilium took to dry; they must have been wet if they were built by Neptune. But one may be excused for doubting if they took as long as wet new plaster does, in premises parties are waiting to come into, and getting impatient, in London. Ascribe this laxity of style to the historian's fidelity to his sources of information.

Not that it would be a fair comparison, in any case. For the walls of Troy were peculiar, having become a meadow with almost indecent haste during the boyhood of Ascanius, who was born before Achilles lost his temper; and before the decease of Anchises, who was old enough to be unable to walk at the sacking of the city. But no doubt you will say that that is all Virgil, and Virgil doesn't count.

The point we have to do with is that the walls at No. 7 did not dry. And you must bear in mind that it was not only Mrs. Prichard's apartment that was replastered, but that there was a lot done to the ceiling of Aunt M'riar's room as well, and a bit of the cornice tore away where the wall gave; so that the surveyor he ordered, when he come to see it, all the brickwork to come down as far as flush with the window, which had to be allowed extra for on the contract. Hence the decision--and even that was coming on to November--that the children should stop with their granny at Ealing while their aunt come up to get things a little in order, and the place well aired.

Aunt M'riar's return for this purpose drags the story on two or three weeks, but may just as well be told now as later.

When she made this second journey up to London, she found Mr. Bartlett's ministrations practically ended, his only representatives being a man, a boy, and a composite smell, whereof one of the components was the smell of the man. Another, at the moment of her arrival, putty, was going shortly to be a smell of vivid green paint, so soon as ever he had got these two or three panes made good. For he was then going to put a finishing coat on all woodwork previously painted, and leave his pots in the way till he thought fit to send for them, which is a house-painter's prerogative. He seemed to be able to absorb lead into his system without consequences.

"There's been a young sarsebox making inquiry arter you, missis," said this artist, striving with a lump of putty that no incorporation could ever persuade to become equal to new. He was making it last out, not to get another half-a-pound just yet a while. "Couldn't say his name, but I rather fancy he belongs in at the end house."

Aunt M'riar identified the description, and went up to her room wondering why that young Micky had been asking for her. Uncle Moses was away, presumably at The Sun. She busied herself in endeavours to reinstate her sleeping-quarters. Disheartening work!--we all know it, this circumventing of Chaos. Aunt M'riar worked away at it, scrubbed the floor and made the bed, taking the dryness of the sheets for granted because it was only her and not Dolly to-night, and she could give them a good airing in the kitchen to-morrow. The painter-and-glazier, without, painted and glazed; maintaining a morose silence except when he imposed its observance also on a boy who was learning the trade from him very gradually, and suffering from ennui very acutely. He said to this boy at intervals:--"You stow that drumming, young Ebenezer, and 'and me up the turps"--or some other desideratum. Which suspended the drumming in favour of active service, after which it was furtively resumed.

Uncle Mo evidently meant to be back late. The fact was, his home had no attraction for him in the absence of his family, and the comfort of The Sun parlour was seductive. Aunt M'riar's visit was unexpected, as she had not written in advance. So when the painter-and-glazier began to prepare to leave his tins and pots and brushes and graining-tools behind him till he could make it convenient to call round and fetch them, Aunt M'riar felt threatened by loneliness. And when he finally took his leave, with an assurance that by to-morrow morning any person so disposed might rub his Sunday coat up against his day's work, and never be a penny the worse, Aunt M'riar felt so forsaken that she just stepped up the Court to hear what she might of its news from Mrs. Ragstroar, who was momentarily expecting the return of her son and husband to domestic dulness, after a commercial career out Islington way. They had only got to stable up their moke, whose home was in a backyard about a half a mile off, and then they would seek their Penates, who were no doubt helping to stew something that smelt much nicer than all that filthy paint and putty.

"That I could not say, ma'am," said Mrs. Ragstroar, in answer to an inquiry about the object of Micky's visit. "Not if you was to offer five pounds. That boy is Secrecy Itself! What he do know, and what he do not know, is 'id in his 'art; and what is more, he don't commoonicate it to neither me nor his father. Only his great-aunt! But I can send him round, as easy as not."

Accordingly, about half an hour later, when Aunt M'riar was beginning to wonder at the non-appearance of Uncle Mo, Master Micky knocked at her door, and was admitted.

"'Cos I've got a message for you, missis," said he. He accepted the obvious need of his visit for explanation, without incorporating it in words. "It come from that party--party with a side-twist in the mug--party as come this way of a Sunday morning, askin' for old Mother Prichard--party I see in Hy' Park along of young Dave...."

Aunt M'riar was taken aback. "How ever come you to see more of him?" said she. For really this was, for the moment, a greater puzzle to her than why, being seen, he should send her a message.

Micky let the message stand over, to account for it. "'Cos I did see him, and I ain't a liar. I see him next door to my great-aunt, as ever is. Keep along the 'Ammersmith Road past the Plough and Harrow, and so soon as ever you strike the Amp'shrog, you bear away to the left, and anybody'll tell you The Pidgings, as soon as look at you. Small 'ouse, by the river. Kep' by Miss Horkings, now her father's kicked. Female party." This was due to a vague habit of the speaker's mind, which divided the opposite sex into two genders, feminine and neuter; the latter including all those samples, unfortunate enough--or fortunate enough, according as one looks at it--to present no attractions to masculine impulses. Micky would never have described his great-aunt as a female party. She was, though worthy, neuter beyond a doubt.

Aunt M'riar accepted Miss Hawkins, without further analysis. "She don't know me, anyways," said she. "Nor yet your Hyde Park man, as far as I see. How come he to know my name? Didn't he never tell you?" She was incredulous about that message.

"He don't know nobody's name, as I knows on. Wot he said to me was a message to the person of the house at the end o' the Court. Same like you, missis!"

"And what was the message?"

"I'll tell you that, missis, straight away and no lies." Micky gathered himself up, and concentrated on a flawless delivery of the message:--"He said he was a-coming to see his mother; that's what he said--his mother, the old lady upstairs. Providin' she wasn't nobody else! He didn't say no names. On'y he said if she didn't come from Skillick's she was somebody else."

"Mrs. Prichard, she came from Skillick's, I know. Because she said so. That's over three years ago." Aunt M'riar was of a transparent, truthful nature. If she had been more politic, she would have kept this back. "Didn't he say nothing else?" she asked.

"Yes, he did, and this here is what it was:--'Tell the person of the house,' he says, 'to mention my name,' he says. 'Name o' Darvill,' he says. So I was a-lyin', missis, you see, by a sort o' chance like, when I said he said no names. 'Cos he did. He said his own. Not but what he goes by the name of Wix."

"What does he want of old Mrs. Prichard now?"

"A screw. Sov'rings, if he can get 'em. Otherwise bobs, if he can't do no better."

"Mrs. Prichard has no money."

"He says she has and he giv' it her. And he's going to have it out of her, he says."

"Did he say that to you?"

"Not he! But he said it to Miss Horkings. Under his nose, like." No doubt this expression, Michael's own, was a derivative of "under the rose." It owed something to sotto voce, and something to the way the finger is sometimes laid on the nose to denote acumen.

"Look you here, Micky! You're a good boy, ain't you?"

"Middlin'. Accordin'." An uncertain sound. It conveyed a doubt of the desirability of goodness.

"You don't bear no ill-will neither to me, nor yet to old Mrs. Prichard?"

"Bones alive, no!" This also may have been coined at home. "That was the idear, don't you twig, missis? I never did 'old with windictiveness, among friends."

"Then you do like I tell you. When are you going next to your aunt at Hammersmith?"

Micky considered a minute, as if the number of his booked engagements made thought necessary, and then said decisively: "To-morrow mornin', to oblige."

"Very well, then! You go and find out this gentleman...."

"He ain't a gentleman. He's a varmint."

"You find him out, and say old Mrs. Prichard she's gone in the country, and you can't say where. No more you can't, and I ain't going to tell you. So just you say that!"

"I'm your man, missis. On'y I shan't see him, like as not. He don't stop in one place. The orficers are after him--the police."

Then Aunt M'riar showed her weak and womanish character. Let her excuse be the memory of those six rapturous weeks, twenty-five years ago, when she was a bride, and all her life was rosy till she found herself deserted--left to deal as she best might with Time and her loneliness. You see, this man actually was her husband. Micky could not understand why her voice should change as she said:--"The police are after him--yes! But you be a good boy, and leave the catching of him to them. 'Tain't any concern of yours. Don't you say nothing to them, and they won't say nothing to you!"

The boy paused a moment, as though in doubt; then said with insight:--"I'll send 'em the wrong way." He thought explanation due, adding:--"I'm fly to the game, missis." Aunt M'riar had wished not to be transparent, but she was not good at this sort of thing. True, she had kept her counsel all those years, and no one had seen through her, but that was mere opacity in silence.

She left Micky's apprehension to fructify, and told him to go back and get his supper. As he opened the door to go Uncle Mo appeared, coming along the Court. The sight of him was welcome to Aunt M'riar, who was feeling very lonesome. And as for the old boy himself, he was quite exhilarated. "Now we shall have those two young pagins back!" he said.

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Chapter XXXII

WHY NOT KEEP COMPANY WHEN YOU HAVE A CHANCE? GUIZOT AND MONTALEMBERT. MRS. BEMBRIDGE CORLETT's EYEGLASSES. KINKAJOUS. THE PYTHON'S ATTITUDE. AN OSTRICH'S CARESS. HOW SIR COUPLAND MERRIDEW CALLED ON LADY GWENDOLEN WITH A LETTER. ROYALTY. NECROSIS. ILLEGIBILITY. SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS. HOW GWEN CALLED AGAIN IN SAPPS COURT, AND KNOCKED IN VAIN. HOW OLD MRS. PRICHARD WAS SPIRITED AWAY TO ROCESTERSHIRE, AND THOUGHT SHE WAS DREAMING

Mr. Percival Pellew and Miss Constance Smith-Dickenson had passed, under the refining influence of Love, into a new phase, that of not being formally engaged. It was to be distinctly understood that there was to be nothing precipitate. This condition has its advantages; very particularly that it postpones, or averts, family introductions. Yet it cannot be enjoyed to the full without downright immorality, and it always does seem to us a pity that people should be forced into Evil Courses, in order to shun the terrors of Respectability. Why should not some compromise be possible? The life some couples above suspicion contrive to lead, each in the other's pocket as soon as the eyes of Europe wander elsewhere, certainly seems to suggest a basis of negotiation.

No doubt you know that little poem of Browning about the lady and gentleman who watched the Seine, and saw Guizot receive Montalembert, who rhymed to "flare"? Of course, the case was hardly on all fours with that of our two irreproachables, but we suspect a point in common. We feel sure that those lawless loiterers in a dissolute capital were joyous at heart at having escaped the fangs of the brothers of the one, and the sisters of the other, respectively, although at the cost of having the World's bad names applied to both. In this case there were no brothers on the lady's part, and only one sister on the gentleman's. But Aunt Constance was not sorry for a breathing-pause before being subjected to an inspection through glasses by the Hon. Mrs. Bembridge Corlett, which was the name of the unique sister-sample, and herself subjecting Mr. Pellew to a similar overhauling by her own numerous relatives. She had misgivings about the accolade he might receive from Mrs. Amphlett Starfax, and also about the soul-communion which her sister Lilian, who had a sensitive nature, demanded as the price of recognition in public a second time of all persons introduced to her notice.

Mr. Pellew's description of the Hon. Mrs. Corlett had impressed her with the necessity of being ready to stand at bay when the presentation came off.

"Dishy will look at you along the top of her nose, with her chin in the air," said he. "But you mustn't be alarmed at that. She only does it because her glasses--we're all short-sighted--slip off her nose at ordinary levels. And when you come to think of it, how can she hold them on with her fingers when she looks at you. Like taking interest in a specimen!"

"I am a little alarmed at your sister Boadicea, Percy, for all that," said Miss Dickenson, and changed the conversation. This was only a day or two after the Sapps Court accident, and the phase of not being formally engaged had begun lasting as long as possible, being found satisfactory. So old Mrs. Prichard was a natural topic to change to. "Isn't it funny, this whim of Gwen's, about the old lady you carried upstairs?"

"What whim of Gwen's?"

"Oh, don't you know. Of course you don't! Gwen's fallen in love with her, and means to take her to the Towers with her when she goes back."

"Very nice for the old girl. What's she doing that for?"

"It's an idea of hers. However, there is some reason in it. The old lady's apartments must be dry before she goes back to them, and that may be weeks."

"Why can't she stop where she is?"

"All by herself? At least, only the cook! When Miss Grahame goes to Devonshire, Maggie goes with her, to lady's-maid her."

"I thought we were going to be pastoral, and only spend three hundred a year on housekeeping."

"So we are--how absurdly you do put things, Percy!--when we make a fair start. But just till we begin in earnest, there's no need for such strictness. Anyhow, if Maggie doesn't go to Devonshire, she'll go back to her parents at Invercandlish. So the old lady can't stop. And Gwen will go back to the Towers, of course. I don't the least believe they'll hold out six months, those two.... What little ducks Kinkajous are! Give me a biscuit.... No--one of the soft ones!"

For, you see, they were at the Zoological Gardens. They had felt that these Gardens, besides being near at hand, were the kind of Gardens in which the eyes of Europe would find plenty to occupy them, without staring impertinently at a lady and gentleman who were not formally engaged. Who would care to study them and their ways when he could see a Thibetan Bear bite the nails of his hind-foot, or observe the habits of Apes, or sympathize with a Tiger about his lunch? Our two visitors to the Gardens had spent an hour on these and similar attractions, noting occasionally the flavour that accompanies them, and had felt after a visit to the Pythons, that they could rest a while out of doors and think about the Wonders of Creation, and the drawbacks they appear to suffer from. But a friendly interest in a Python had lived and recrudesced as the Kinkajou endeavoured to get at some soft biscuit, in spite of a cruel wire screen no one bigger than a rat could get his little claw through.

"I don't believe that fillah was moving. He was breathing. But he wasn't moving. I know that chap perfectly well. He never moves when anyone is looking at him, out of spite. He hears visitors hope he'll move, and keeps quite still to disappoint them." It was Mr. Pellew who said this. Miss Dickenson shook her head incredulously.

"He was moving, you foolish man. You should use your eyes. That long straight middle piece of him on the shelf moved; in a very dignified way, considering. The move moved along him, and went slowly all the way to his tail. When I took my eyes off I thought the place was moving, which is a proof I'm right.... Oh, you little darling, you've dropped it! I'm so sorry. I must have another, because this has been in the mud, and you won't like it." This was, of course, to the Kinkajou.

Mr. Pellew supplied a biscuit, but improved the occasion:--"Now if this little character could only keep his paws off the Public, he wouldn't want a wire netting. Couldn't you give him a hint?"

"I could, but he wouldn't take it. He's a little darling, but he's pig-headed...." A pause, and then a quick explanatory side-note:--"Do you know, I think that's Sir Coupland Merridew coming along that path. I hope he isn't coming this way.... I'm afraid he is, though. You know who I mean? He was at the Towers...."

"I know. Yes, it's him. He's coming this way. If he sees it's us, he'll go off down the side-path. But he won't see--he's too short-sighted. Can't be helped!"

"Oh dear--what a plague people are! Let's be absorbed in the Kinkajou. He'll pass us."

But the great surgeon did nothing of the sort. On the contrary he said:--"I saw it was you, Miss Dickenson." Then he reflected about her companion, and said he was Mr. Pellew, he thought, and further:--"Met you at Ancester in July." It was a great relief that he did not say:--"You are a lady and gentleman, and can perhaps explain yourselves. I can't!" He appeared to decide on silence about them, as irrelevant, and went on to something more to the purpose--"Perhaps you know if the family are in town--any of them?" Miss Dickenson testified to the whereabouts of Lady Gwendolen Rivers, and Sir Coupland wrote it in a notebook. There seemed at this point to be an opportunity to say how delightful the Gardens were this time of the year, so Miss Dickenson seized it.

"I didn't come to enjoy the gardens," said the F.R.C.S. "I wish I had time. I came to see to a broken scapula. Keeper in the Ostrich House--bird pecked him from behind. Did it from love, apparently. Said to be much attached to keeper. Two-hundred-and-two, Cavendish Square, is right, isn't it?"

"Two-hundred-and-two; corner house.... Must you go on? Sorry!--you could have told us such interesting things." The effect of this one word "us," indiscreetly used, was that Sir Coupland, walking away to his carriage outside the turnstiles, wondered whether it would come off, and if it did, would there be a family? Which shows how very careful you have to be, when you are a lady and gentleman.

The former, in this case, remained unconscious of her lapsus linguae; saying, in fact:--"I think we did that very well! I wonder whether he will go and see Gwen!"

"I hope he will. Do you know, I couldn't help suspecting that he had something to say about Torrens's eyesight--something good. Perhaps it was only the way one has of catching at straws. Still, unless he has, why should he want to see Gwen? He couldn't want to tell her there was no hope--to rub it in!"

"I see what you mean. But I'm afraid he only put down the address for us to tell her he did so--just to get the credit of a call without the trouble."

"When did you take to Cynicism, madam?... No--come, I say--that's not fair! It's only my second cigar since I came to the Gardens...." The byplay needed to make this intelligible may be imagined, without description.

Does not the foregoing lay further stress on the curious fact that the passee young lady and the oscillator between Pall Mall and that Club at St. Stephen's--this describes the earlier seeming of these two--have really vanished from the story? Is it not a profitable commentary on the mistakes people make in the handling of their own lives?

* * * * *

Sir Coupland Merridew was not actuated by the contemptible motive Aunt Constance had ascribed to him. Moreover, the straw Mr. Pellew caught at was an actual straw, though it may have had no buoyancy to save a swimmer. It must have had some though, or Sir Coupland would never have thrown it to Gwen, struggling against despair about her lover's eyesight. Of course he did not profess to do so of set purpose; that would have pledged him to an expression of confidence in that straw which he could hardly have felt.

When he called at Cavendish Square two days later at an unearthly hour, and found Gwen at breakfast, he accounted for his sudden intrusion by producing a letter recently received from Miss Irene Torrens, of which he said that, owing to the peculiarity of the handwriting, he had scarcely been able to make out anything beyond that it related to her brother's blindness. Probably Lady Gwendolen knew her handwriting better than he did. At any rate, she might have a shot at trying to make it out. But presently, when she had time! He, however, would take a cup of coffee, and would then go on and remove a portion of a diseased thigh-bone from a Royal leg--that of Prince Hohenslebenschlangenspielersgeiststein--only he never could get the name right.

The story surmises that, having carefully read every word of the letter, he chose this way of letting Gwen know of a fluctuation in Adrian's eye-symptoms; which, he had inferred, would not reach her otherwise. But he did not wish false hopes to be built on it. The deciphering of the illegibilities by Gwen, under correctives from himself, would exactly meet the case.

"I can not see that 'Rene's writing is so very illegible," said Gwen. "Now be quiet and let me read it." She settled down to perusal, while Sir Coupland sipped his coffee, and watched her colour heighten as she read. That meant, said he to himself, that he must be ready to throw more cold water on this letter than he had at first intended.

Said Gwen, when she had finished:--"Well, that seems to me very plain and straightforward. And as for illegibility, I know many worse hands than 'Re's."

"What's that word three lines down?... Yes, that one!"

"'Dreaming.'"

"I thought it was 'drinking.'"

"It certainly is 'dreaming' plain enough!"

"What do you make of it? Don't read it all through. Tell me the upshot."

"I don't mind reading it. But I'll tell it short, as you're in a hurry. Adrian dropped asleep on the sofa, and woke with a start, saying:--'What's become of Septimius Severus on the bookshelf?' It was a bust, it seems. 'Re said:--'How did you know it had been moved?' and he seemed quite puzzled and said:--'I can't tell. I forgot I was blind, and saw the whole room.' Then 'Re said, he must have been dreaming. 'But,' said he, 'you say it has been moved.' So what does 'Re do but say he must have heard somehow that it was moved, because it was impossible that he should have been able to see only just that much and no more.... Oh dear!" said Gwen, breaking off suddenly. "What a pleasure people do seem to take in being silly!"

Sir Coupland proceeded to show deference to correct form. "It is far more likely," said he, "that Mr. Torrens had heard someone say the bust was moved, and had forgotten it till he woke up out of a dream, than that he should have a sudden flash of vision." A more cautious method than Irene's, of assuming the point at issue.

Gwen paid no attention to this, putting it aside to apologize to Irene. "However, 'Re had the sense to write straight to you about it. I'll say that for her." Then she read the letter again while Sir Coupland spun out his cup of coffee. She was still dwelling on it when he looked at his watch suddenly and said: "I must be off. Consider Prince Hohenschlangen's necrosis!" Then said Gwen, pinning him to truth with the splendour of her eyes:--"You are perfectly and absolutely certain, Dr. Merridew, that a momentary gleam of true vision in such a case would be impossible?"

"I never said that," said Sir Coupland.

"What did you say?" said Gwen.

"As improbable as you please, short of impossible. Now I'm off. Impossible's a long word, you know, and very hard to spell." Sir Coupland went off in a hurry, leaving Irene's letter in Gwen's possession, which was dishonourable; because he had really read the injunction it contained, on no account to show it to Gwen in case she should build false hopes on it. But then Gwen had not read this passage aloud to him, so he did not know it officially.

Lunch was the next conclave of the small household, and although Mr. Pellew was there--it was extraordinary how seldom he was anywhere else!--Irene's letter was freely handed round the table and made the subject of comment.

"It won't do to build upon it," said Cousin Clo.

"Why not?" said Gwen.

"It never does to be led away," said Miss Dickenson. Her reputation for sagacity had to be maintained.

"Doesn't it?" said Gwen.

Mr. Pellew was bound, in consideration of his company, to dwell upon the desirableness of keeping an even mind. Having done full justice to this side of the subject, he added a rider. He had always said the chances were ten to one Torrens would recover his eyesight, and this sort of thing looked uncommonly like it. Now didn't it? Whereupon Gwen, who shook hands with him across the table to show her approval, said that anyhow she must hear Adrian's own account of this occurrence from his own mouth forthwith, and she should go back to-morrow to the Towers, and insist upon driving over to Pensham Steynes, whether or no!

Miss Grahame remonstrated with her later, when Aunt Constance and her swain had departed to some dissipation--the story is not sure it was not Madame Tussaud's--and pointed out that she really had solemnly promised not to see Mr. Torrens for six months. She admitted this, but counterpointed out that she could just see him for half an hour to hear his own account of the incident, and then they could begin fair. She was a girl of her word, and meant to keep it. Only, no date had been fixed. As for her pledges to assist her cousin's schemes for benefiting Sapps Court and its analogues, in Drury Lane or elsewhere, was she not going to carry off the old fairy godmother she had discovered and give her such a dose of fresh air and good living as she had not had for twenty years past? Could any Patron Saint of Philanthropy ask more?

Gwen, of course, had her way. She did not cut her visit to Cavendish Square needlessly short. She remained there long enough to give some colour to the pretext that she was exploring slums with philanthropy in view, and actually to make a visit with her cousin to the reconstructed home of the Wardles in Sapps Court. But no response came to knocking at door or window, and it was evident that Aunt M'riar had not returned. Michael Ragstroar, the making of whose acquaintance on this occasion gratified both ladies, offered to go to The Sun for Uncle Mo and bring him round; but his offer was declined, as their time was limited. This must have been a few days before the return of Aunt M'riar and the children, and in the interim her young ladyship had taken flight to the home of her ancestors, contriving somehow to convey away with her her new-made old friend, and to provide her with comfortable lodgment in the housekeeper's quarters, making Mrs. Masham, the housekeeper, responsible for her comforts.

As for the old lady herself, she was very far from being sure that she was not dreaming.

END OF PART I

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

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Chapter I

MICKY'S AUNT, WHO HAD A COLD. MASCHIL THE CHIEF MUSICIAN, AND DOEG THE EDOMITE. A SUNDAY-RAPTURE. THE BEER. HOW MISS JULIA HAWKINS THOUGHT THE GLASS A FRAUD. HOW MICKY DELIVERED HIS MESSAGE. A CONDITIONAL OFFER OF MARRIAGE. JANUS HIS BASKET. ALETHEA'S AUNT TREBILCOCK. A SHREWD AND HOOKY KITTEN WHO GOT OUT. HER MAJESTY'S HORSE-SLAUGHTERER. OF A LEAN LITTLE GIRL. HER BROTHER'S NOSE. HOW MR. WIX KNOCKED AT AUNT M'RIAR'S DOOR. THE CHAIN. HOW AUNT M'RIAR IMPRESSED MR. WIX AS AN IDIOT. WHO WAS THE WOMAN? HOW SHE OPENED THE DOOR FOR MICKY'S SAKE, AND LOOKED HARD AT HER HUSBAND. HIS LAWFUL WIFE! SCRIPTURE READINGS IN HELL. HOW SHE WENT TO FETCH ALL THE MONEY SHE HAD IN THE HOUSE. HOW MR. WIX CAPTURED UNCLE MO'S OLD WATCH. HOW AUNT M'RIAR TRIPPED UNCLE MO UP

The return of the two young pagans to Sapps Court, and the complete re-establishment of Uncle Mo's household, had to be deferred yet one or two more days, to his great disappointment. On the morning following Aunt M'riar's provisional return, the weather set in wet, and the old boy was obliged to allow that there ought to be a fire in the grate of Aunt M'riar's wrecked bedroom for at least a couple of days before Dolly returned to sleep in it. He attempted a weak protest, saying that his niece was a dry sort of little party that moisture could not injure. But he conceded the point, to be on the safe side.

Aunt M'riar said never a word to him about the message she had received from the convict through the boy Micky, and the answer she had returned. She had not forgotten Uncle Mo's communications with that Police Inspector, and felt confident that her reception of a message from Mr. Wix at his old haunt would soon be known to the latter if she did not keep her counsel about it. The words she used in her heart about it were nearly identical with Hotspur's. Uncle Moses would not utter what he did not know. She had not a thought of blame for Mo, for she knew that her disposition to shield this man was idiosyncrasy--could not in the nature of things be shared, even by old and tried friends.

There was a fine chivalric element about this defensive silence of hers. The man was now nothing to her--dust and ashes, dead and done with! This last phrase was the one her heart used about him--not borrowed from Browning any more than its other speech from Shakespeare. "I've done with him for good and all," said she to herself. "But the Law shall not catch him along o' me." He was vile--vile to her and to all women--but she could bear her own wrong, and she was not bound to fight the battles of others. He was a miscreant and a felon, the mere blood on those hands was not his worst moral stain. He was foul from the terms of his heritage of life, with the superadded foulness of the galleys. But she had loved him once, and he was her husband.

Micky kept his word, going over to his great-aunt the following Sunday; to oblige, as he said. Mrs. Treadwell had a cold, and was confined to the house; but the boy was a welcome visitor. "There now, Michael," said she, "I was only just this minute thinking to myself, if Micky was here he could go on reading me the Psalms, where I am, instead of me putting my eyes out. For the sight is that sore and inflamed, and my glasses getting that wore out from being seen through so much, that I can't hardly make out a word."

Micky's only misgivings on his visits to Aunt Elizabeth Jane were connected with a Family Bible to which his old relative was devoted, and with her disposition to make him read the Psalms aloud. Neither of them attached any particular meaning to the text; she being contented with its religious aura and fitness for Sunday, and he absorbed in the detection of correct pronunciation by spelling, a syllable at a time. So early an allusion to this affliction disheartened Micky on this occasion, and made him feel that his long walk from Sapps Court had been wasted, so far as his own enjoyment of it was concerned.

"Oh, 'ookey, Arntey," said he dejectedly, "I say now--look here! Shan't I make it Baron Munch Hawson, only just this once?" For his aunt possessed, as well as the Holy Scriptures, a copy of Baron Munchausen's Travels and a Pilgrim's Progress. Conjointly, they were an Institution, and were known as Her Books.

But she resisted the secular spirit. "On Sunday morning, my dear!" she exclaimed, shocked. "How ever you can! Now if on'y your father was to take you to Chapel, instead of such a bad example, see what good it would do you both."

The ounce of influence that Aunt Elizabeth Jane alone possessed told on Michael's stubborn spirit, and he did not contest the point. "Give us the 'Oly Bible!" said he briefly. "Where's where you was?"

"That's a good boy! Now you just set down and read on where I was. 'To, the, chief, musician,' and the next word's a hard word and you'll have to spell it." For, you see, Aunt Elizabeth Jane's method was to go steadily on with a text, and not distinguish titles and stage directions.

So her nephew, being docile, tackled the fifty-second Psalm, and did not flinch from m, a, s, mass--c, h, i, l, chill; total, Mass-Chill--nor from d, o, do; e, g, hegg; total, Do-Hegg. But when he came to Ahimelech, he gave him up, and had to be told. However, he laboured on through several verses, and the old charwoman listened in what might be called a Sunday-rapture, conscious of religion, but not attaching any definite meaning to the words. As for Micky, he only perceived that David and Saul, Doeg the Edomite, and Ahimelech the Priest, were religious, and therefore bores. He had a general idea that the Psalmist could not keep his hair on. He might have enjoyed the picturesque savagery of the story if Aunt Elizabeth Jane had known it well enough to tell him. But when you read for flavour, and ignore import, the plot has to go to the wall.

Aunt Elizabeth Jane kept her nephew to his unwelcome devotional enterprise until the second "Selah"--a word which always seemed to exasperate him--provoked his restiveness beyond his powers of restraint. "I say, Aunt Betsy," said he, "shan't I see about gettin' in the beer?" This touched a delicate point, for his visit being unexpected, rations were likely to be short.

Some reproof was necessary. "There now, ain't you a tiresome boy, speaking in the middle!" But this was followed by: "Well, my dear, I can't take anything myself, the cold's that heavy on me. But that's no reason against a glass for you, after your walk. On'y I tell you, you'll have to make your dinner off potatoes and a herring, that you will, by reason there's nothing else for you. And all the early shops are shut an hour ago."

Then Michael showed how great his foresight and resource had been. "Bought a mutting line-chop coming along, off of our butcher. Fivepence 'a'pen'y. Plenty for two if you know how to cook it right, and don't cut it to waste." In this he showed a thoughtfulness beyond his years, for the knowledge that the amount of flesh, on any bone, may be doubled--even quadrupled--by the skill of its carver, is rarely found except in veterans.

Aunt Elizabeth Jane paid a tribute of admiration. "My word!" said she, "who ever would have said a boy could! Now you shall cook that chop while I tell you how." So the fifty-second Psalm lapsed, and Michael was at liberty to forget Doeg the Edomite.

But the glass of beer claimed attention first, because it would never do to leave that chop to get cold while he went for it next door. Aunt Elizabeth Jane allowed Michael to take the largest glass, as he had read so good and bought his own chop, and with it he crossed the wall into the garden of The Pigeons, as the story has seen him do before.

Miss Juliarawkins, summoned by a whistle through the keyhole, looked a good deal better in sackcloth and ashes than she had done in several discordant colours. She was going to stop as long as ever she could in mourning for her father, so as to get the wear out of the stuff, and make it of some use. Some connection might die, by good luck. She was one of those that held with making the same sackcloth and ashes do for two.

She looked critically at the rather large tumbler Micky had brought for his beer, and made difficulties about filling of it right up, even with the top. For this was a supply under contract. A glass full was to be paid for as a short half-pint. But as Miss Hawkins truly said, no glass had any call to be half as big as Saint Paul's. Her customer, however, was not to be put off in this way. A glass was a glass, and a half-pint was a half a pint. There was no extry reduction when the glass was undersized. You took the good with the bad.

A voice Micky knew growled from a recess:--"Give the young beggar full measure, Juli_ar_. What he means is, you go by a blooming average."

Miss Hawkins filled up the glass this once, but said:--"You tell your Aunt Treadwell she'll have to keep below the average till Christmas. I never see such a glass!"

Micky was not sorry to find that he could deliver his message direct. He had not hoped to come upon the man himself. He paid for his beer on contract terms, and said confidentially:--"I say, missis, I got a message for him in there."

"Mrs. Treadwell's nephew Michael from next door says he's got a message for you, and you can say if you'll see him. Or not." This was spoken snappishly, as though a coolness were afoot.

The man replied with mock amiability, meant to irritate. "You can send him in here, Juliar. You're open to." But when in compliance with the woman's curt:--"You hear--you can go in," the boy entered the little back-parlour, he turned on him suddenly and fiercely, saying:--"You're the * * * young nark of some damned teck--some * * * copper, by Goard!"

If the boy had flinched before this accusation, which meant that he was a police-spy employed by a detective, he might have repented it. But Micky was no coward, and stood his ground; all the more firmly that he fully grasped the man's precarious position, in the very house where he had been once before captured. He answered resolutely:--"I could snitch upon you this minute, master, if I was to choose. But you aren't no concern of mine, further than I've got a message for you."

"The boy's all safe," said Miss Hawkins briefly, outside. Whereupon the man, after a subsiding growl or two, said:--"You gave the party my message? What had she got to say back again? You may mouth it out and cut your lucky."

Micky gave his message in a plain and business-like manner. "Mrs. Wardle she's back after the accident, and Mrs. Prichard she's in the country, and she don't know where."

"Who don't know where? Mrs. Prichard?"

"Mrs. Wardle. I said you was a-coming to see your mother, onlest the old lady wasn't your mother. Then you shouldn't come."

"What did she say about Skillicks?"

"Said Mrs. Prichard come from Skillickses. Three year agone."

"You hear that, Miss Hawkins?" Mr. Wix seemed pleased, as one who had scored, adding:--"I knew it was the old woman.... Anything else she said?"

Micky appeared to consider his answer; then replied:--"Said I wasn't to split upon you."

"What the Hell does she say that for? She don't know who I am."

Micky considered again, and astutely decided, perceiving his mistake, to say as little as possible about Aunt M'riar's seeming interest in Mr. Wix's safety from the Law. Then he said:--"She don't know nothing about you, but when I says to her the Police was after you, she cuts in sharp, and says, she does, that was no concern o' mine, and I was to say nothing to them, and they wouldn't say nothing to me."

Mr. Wix said, "Rum!" and Miss Hawkins, who had been keeping her ears open close at hand, looked in through the barcasement to say:--"You go there, Wix, and back to gaol you go! I only tell you." And retired, leaving the convict knitting tighter the perplexed scowl on his face. He called after her:--"Come back here, you Juliar!"

"I can hear you."

"What the Devil do you mean?"

"Can't you see for yourself? This woman don't want the boy to get fifty pound. If I was in her shoes, I shouldn't neither." Micky only heard this imperfectly.

"You wouldn't do anything under a hundred, you wouldn't. Good job for me they don't double the amount.... Easy does it, Juliar--only a bit of my fun!" For Miss Hawkins, even as a woman stung by a cruel insult, had shown her flashing eyes, heightened colour, and panting bosom at the bar-opening as before. Mr. Wix seemed gratified. "Pity you don't flare up oftener, Juliar," said he. "You've no idea what a much better woman you look. Damn it, but you do!"

The woman made an effort, and choked her anger. "God forgive you, Wix!" said she, and fell back out of sight. Michael thought he heard her sob. He was not too young to understand this little drama, which took less time to act than to tell.

The convict had lost the thread of his examination, and had to hark back. Why was it, Mrs. Prichard had gone away into the country?... Oh, the house had fallen down, had it? But, then, how came Mrs. Wardle to be living in it still? Because, said Michael, it was only the wall fell off of the front, and now Mr. Bartlett he'd made all that good, and Mrs. Prichard was only kep' out by the damp. Did Mrs. Wardle really not know where Mrs. Prichard was? She had not told Michael, that was all he could say. Old Mo he'd never slept out of the house, only the family. And they was coming back soon now. Was old Mo an invalid, who never went out? "No fear!" said Michael. "He's all to rights, only a bit oldish, like. He spends the afternoons round at The Sun, and then goes home to supper." The interview ended with a present of half-a-bull to Micky from the convict, which the boy seemed to stickle at accepting. But he took it, and it strengthened his resolution not to turn informer, which was probably Mr. Wix's object.

He came away with an impression that Miss Hawkins had said:--"The boy's lying. How could the front-wall of a house fall down?" But he had heard no more and was glad to come away. He went back to his Aunt Betsy and cooked his chop under her tutelage. What a time he had been away, said she!

If Micky had remembered word for word the whole of this interview, he might have had misgivings of the effect of one thing he had said unawares. It was his reference to Uncle Mo's absence at The Sun during the late afternoon. Manifestly, it left the house in Mr. Wix's imagination untenanted, during some two hours of the day, except by Aunt M'riar, and the children perhaps. And what did they matter?

"You're mighty wise, Juliar, about the party of the house and the fifty-pun' reward." So said the convict when the woman came back, after seeing that Micky had crossed the wall unmolested by authority. "Folk ain't in any such a hurry to get a man hanged when they know what'll happen if they fail of doing it. Not even for fifty pound!"

"What will happen?"

"Couldn't say to a nicety. But she would stand a tidy chance of getting ripped up, next opportunity." He seemed pleased at his expression of this fact, as he took the first pulls at a fresh pipe, on the window-seat with his boots against the shutter and a grip of interlaced fingers behind his close-cut head for support. Why in Heaven's name does the released gaol-bird crop his hair? One would have thought the first instinct of regained freedom would have been to let it grow.

Miss Hawkins looked at him without admiration. "I often wonder," said she, "at the many risks I run to shelter you, for you're a bloody-minded knave, and that's the truth. It was a near touch but I might have lost my licence, last time."

"The Beaks were took with your good looks, Juliar. They're good judges of a fine woman. An orphan you was, too, and the mourning sooted you, prime!" He looked lazily at her, puffing--not without admiration, of a sort. Her resentment seemed to gratify him more than any subserviency. He continued:--"Well, nobody can say I haven't offered to make an honest woman of you, Juliar."

"Much it was worth, your offer! As if you was free! And me to sell The Pigeons and go with you to New York! No--no! I'm better off as I am, than that."

"I'm free, accordin' to Law. Never seen the girl, nor heard from her--over twenty years now--twenty-three at least. Scot-free of her, anyhow! Don't want none of her, cutting in to spoil my new start in life. Re-spectable man--justice of peace, p'r'aps." He puffed at his pipe, pleased with the prospect. Then he sounded the keynote of his thought, adding:--"Why--how much could you get for the freehold of this little tiddleywink?"

If Miss Julia had been ever so well disposed towards being made technically an honest woman by her betrayer of auld lang syne, this declaration of his motives might easily have hardened her heart against him. What fatuity of affection could have survived it? Yet his candour was probably his only redeeming feature. He was scarcely an invariable hypocrite; he was merely heartless, sensual, and cruel to the full extent of man's possibilities. Nevertheless, he could and would have lied black white with a purpose. He was, this time, thrown off his guard, as it were, and truthful by accident. Whether the way in which the woman silently repelled his offer was due to her disgust at its terms, or whether she had her doubts of the soundness of his jurisprudence, the story can only guess. Probably the latter. She merely said:--"I'm going to open the house," and left his inquiry unanswered. This was notice to him that his free run of the lower apartments was ended. He went upstairs to some place of concealment.

* * * * *

"What was you and young Carrots so busy about below here?" said Uncle Mo next day, coming down the stairs to breakfast in the kitchen an hour later than Aunt M'riar.

"Telling me of his Aunt Betsy yesterday. Mind your shirt-sleeve. It's going in the butter."

"What's Aunt Betsy's little game?... No, it's all right--the butter's too hard to hurt.... Down Chiswick way, ain't she?"

"Hammersmith." Aunt M'riar wasn't talkative; but then, this morning, it was bloaters. They should only just hot through, or they dry.

"Who was the bloke he was talking about? Somebody he called him." Uncle Mo's ears had been too sharp.

"There!--I've no time to be telling what a boy says. No one any good, I'll go bail!" Whereupon, as Uncle Mo's curiosity was not really keenly excited, the subject dropped.

But, as a matter of fact, Michael had contrived in a short time to give an account of his experience of yesterday. And he had left Aunt M'riar in a state of disquiet and apprehension which had to be concealed, somehow. For she was quite clear that she would not take Mo into her confidence. She saw she had to choose between risking an interview with this convict husband of hers, and giving him up to the Law, probably to the gallows.

The man would come again to seek out his old mother, to extort money from her; that was beyond a doubt. But would he of necessity recognise the wife of twenty-three years ago in the very middle-aged person Aunt M'riar saw in the half of a looking-glass that Mr. Bartlett's careful myrmidons had not broken? Would she recognise him? Need either see the other? Well--no! Communications might be restricted to speech through a door with the chain up.

She took the boy Michael freely into her confidence about her unwillingness to see this man. But that she could do on the strength of his bad character; her own relation to him of course remained concealed. She puzzled her confidant not a little by her seeming inconsistency--so repugnant was she to the miscreant himself, yet so anxious that he should not fall into the hands of the Police. Micky kept his perplexity to himself, justifying his mother's estimate of his character.

But this much was clearly understood between them, that should the convict be seen by Micky on his way to the house, he should forthwith take one of two courses. If Uncle Mo was absent at the time, he was to warn Aunt M'riar of Mr. Wix's approach. If otherwise, he was to warn the unwelcome visitor of the risk he would run if he persisted in his attempt to procure an interview. Of course the chances were that Micky would be away on business, selling apples, potatoes, and turnips.

As it turned out, however, he was able to observe one of the conditions of this compact.

* * * * *

It was on the Tuesday following the boy's visit to his great-aunt that Mrs. Tapping had words with her daughter Alethea. They arose out of Alethea's young man, an upstart. At least, he was so designated by Mrs. Tapping, for aspiring to the hand of this young lady; who, though plain by comparison with her mother at the same age, and no more figure than what you see, was that sharp with her tongue when provoked, it made your flesh curdle within you to hear her expressions. We need hardly say that we have to rely on her mother for these facts. It was, however, the extraction of Alethea that determined the presumptuousness of her young man's aspirations. He was marrying into two families, the Tappings and the Davises, which, though neither of them lordly, had always held their heads high and their behaviour according. Whereas this young Tom was metaphorically nobody, though actually in a shoe-shop and giving satisfaction to his employers, with twenty-one shillings a week certain and a rise at Christmas. You cannot do that unless you are a physical entity, but when your grandmother is in an almshouse and your father met his death in an inferior capacity at a Works, you have no call to give yourself airs, and the less you say the better.

This brief sketch of the status quo was given to Mrs. Riley by Mrs. Tapping, in her woollen shawl for the first time, because of the sharp edge in the wind, with a basket on her arm that Janus would have found useful, owing to its two lids, one each side the handle. They were at the entrance to Mrs. Riley's shop, and that good woman was bare-armed and bonnetless in the cold north wind. She had not lost her Irish accent.

"It is mesilf agrays with you intoirely," said she sympathetically.

"Not but what I do freely admit," said Mrs. Tapping, pursuing her topic in a spirit of magnanimity, "that young Rundle himself never makes bold, and is always civil spoke, which we might expect, seeing what is called for, measuring soles. For I always do say that the temptation to forget theirself is far more than human, especially flattenin' down the toe to get the len'th, though of course the situation would be sacrificed, and no character." This was an allusion to the delicacy of the position of one who adjusts a sliding spanner to the foot of Beauty, to determine its length to a nicety. The subject suggests curious questions. Suppose--to look at its romantic side, as easier of discussion--that you, young lady, were passionately adored by the young man at your shoe-shop, and he were to kiss your foot as Vivien did Merlin's, could you--would you--complain at the desk and lose him his situation? And how about the Pope? Is his Holiness never measured--sal a reverentia!--for his shoes? Or does the Oecumenical Council guess, and strike an average? However, the current of the story need not be interrupted to settle that.

"He intinds will," said Mrs. Riley. This was merely a vague compliment to Alethea's suitor. "Ye see, me dyurr, it's taking the young spalpeen's part she'll be, for shure! It is the nature of thim." That is to say, lovers.

"But never to the point of calling tyrant, Mrs. Riley. Nor ojus vulgarity. Nor epithets I will not repeat, relating to family connections. Concerning which, I say, God forgive Alethear! For the accommodation at a nominal rent of persons in reduced circumstances is not an almshouse, say what she may. And her Aunt Trebilcock is not a charitable object, nor yet a deserving person, having mixed with the best. And in so young a girl texts are not becoming, to a parent."

"Which was the tixt, thin?" said Mrs. Riley, interested. "I'm bel'avin' ye, me dyurr!" This was to encourage Mrs. Tapping, and disclaim incredulity.

"Since you're asking me, Mrs. Riley ma'am, I will not conceal from you the Scripture text used only this morning by my own daughter, to my face. 'Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.' Whereupon I says to Alethear, 'Alethear,' I says, 'be truthful, and admit that old Mrs. Rundle and your Aunt Trebilcock are on a dissimular footing, one being distinctly a Foundation in the Whitechapel Road, and the other Residences, each taking their own Milk.'" Some further particulars came in here, relating to the bone of that mornin's contention, which had turned on Mrs. Tapping's objections to her daughter's demeaning, or bemeaning, herself, by marrying into a lower rank of life than her own.

All this conversation of these two ladies has nothing to do with the story. The only reason for referring to it is that it took place at this time, just opposite Mrs. Riley's shop, and led her to remark:--"You lave the young payple alone, Mrs. Tapping, and they'll fall out. You'll only kape thim on, by takin' order with thim. Thrust me. Whativer have ye got in the basket?"

Mrs. Tapping explained that she was using it to convey a kitten, born in her establishment, to Miss Druitt at thirty-four opposite, who had expressed anxiety to possess it. It was this kitten's expression of impatience with its position that had excited Mrs. Riley's curiosity. "Why don't ye carry the little sowl across in your hands, me dyurr?" said she; not unreasonably, for it was only a stone's-throw. Mrs. Tapping added that this was no common kitten, but one of preternatural activity, and possessed of diabolical tentacular powers of entanglement. "I would not undertake," said she, "to get it across the road, ma'am, only catching hold. Nor if I got it safe across, to onhook it, without tearing." Mrs. Riley was obliged to admit the wisdom of the Janus basket. She knew how difficult it is to be even with a kitten.

This one was destined to illustrate the resources of its kind. For as Mrs. Tapping endeavoured to conduct the conversation back to her domestic difficulties, she was aware that the Janus basket grew suddenly lighter. Mrs. Riley exclaimed at the same moment:--"Shure, and the little baste's in the middle of the road!" So it was, hissing like a steam-escape, and every hair on its body bristling with wrath at a large black dog, who was smelling it in a puzzled, thoughtful way, sans rancune. A cart, with an inscription on it that said its owner was "Horse-Slaughterer to Her Majesty," came thundering down the street, shaking three drovers seriously. The dog, illuminated by some new idea, started back to bark in a sudden panic-stricken way. Who could tell what new scourge this was that dogdom had to contend with?

Her Majesty's Horse-Slaughterer pulled his cart up just in time. It would else have run over a man who was picking the kitten up. All the males concerned exchanged execrations, and then the cart went on. The dog's anxiety to smell the phenomenon survived, till the man kicked him and told him to go to Hell.

"Now who does this here little beggar belong to?" said the man, whom Mrs. Riley did not like the looks of. Mrs. Tapping claimed the cat, and expressed wonder as to how it had got out of the basket. Heaven only knew! It is only superhuman knowledge, divine or diabolical, that knows how cats get out of baskets; or indeed steel safes, or anything.

"As I do not think, mister," said Mrs. Tapping--deciding at the last moment not to say "my good man"--"it would be any use to try getting of it inside of this basket out here in the street, let alone its aptitude for getting out when got in, I might trouble you to be so kind as to fetch it into my shop next door here, by the scruff of its neck preferable.... Thank you, mister!" She had had some idea of making it "Sir," but thought better of it.

The kitten, deposited on the counter, concerned itself with a blue-bottle fly. The man remarked that it was coming on to rain. Mrs. Tapping had not took notice of any rain, but believed the statement. Why is it that one accepts as true any statement made by a visibly disreputable male? Mrs. Tapping did not even look out at the door, for confirmation or contradiction. She was so convinced of this rain that she suggested that the man should wait a few minutes to see if it didn't hold up, because he had no umbrella. His reply was:--"Well, since you're so obliging, Missis, I don't mind if I do. My mate I'm waiting for, he'll be along directly." He declined a chair or stool, and waited, looking out at the door into the cul de sac street that led to Sapps Court, opposite. Mrs. Tapping absented herself in the direction of a remote wrangle underground, explaining her motive. She desired that her daughter, whose eyesight was better than her own, should thread a piece of pack-thread through a rip in the base of the Janus basket, which had to account for the kitten's appearance in public. She did not seem apprehensive about leaving the shop ungarrisoned.

But had she been a shrewder person, she might have felt misgivings about this man's character, even if she had acquitted him of such petty theft as running away with congested tallow candles. For no reasonable theory could be framed of a mate in abeyance, who would emerge from anywhere down opposite. A mate of a man who seemed to be of no employment, to belong to no recognised class, to wear description-baffling clothes--not an ostler's, nor an undertaker's, certainly; but some suspicion of one or other, Heaven knew why!--and never to look straight in front of him. Without some light on his vocation, imagination could provide no mate. And this man looked neither up nor down the street, but remained watching the cul de sac from one corner of his eye. It was not coming on to rain as alleged, and he might have had a better outlook nearer the door. But he seemed to prefer retirement.

The wrangle underground fluctuated slightly, went into another key, and then resumed the theme. A lean little girl came in, who tapped on the counter with a coin. She called out "'A'p'orth o' dips!" taking a tress of her hair from between her teeth to say it, and putting it back to await the result. She had a little brother with her, who was old enough to walk when pulled, but not old enough to discipline his own nose, being dependent on his sister's good offices, and her pocket-handkerchief. He offered a sucked peardrop to the kitten, who would not hear of it.

There certainly was no rain, or Mrs. Riley would never have remained outside, with those bare arms and all. There she was, saying good-evening to someone who had just come from Sapps Court. The man in the shop listened, closely and curiously.

"Good-avening, Mr. Moses, thin! Whin will we see the blessed chilther back? Shure it's wakes and wakes and wakes!" Which written, looks odd; but, spoken, only conveyed regretful reference to the time Dave and Dolly had been away, without taxing the hearer's understanding. "They till me your good lady's been sane, down the Court."

Uncle Mo had just come out, on his way to a short visit to The Sun. He was looking cheerful. "Ay, missis! Their aunt's bringin' of 'em back to-morrow from Ealing. I'll be glad enough to see 'em, for one."

"And the owld sowl upstairs. Not that I iver set my eyes on her, and that's the thrruth."

"Old Mother Prichard? Why--that's none so easy to say. So soon as her swell friends get sick of her, I suppose. She's being cared for, I take it, at this here country place."

"'Tis a nobleman's sate in the Norruth, they sid. Can ye till the name of it, to rimimber?" Mrs. Riley had an impression shared by many, that noblemen's seats are, broadly speaking, in the North. She had no definite information.

Uncle Mo caught at the chance of warping the name, uncorrected. "It's the Towels in Rocestershire," said he with effrontery. "Some sort of a Dook's, good Lard!" Then to change the subject:--"She won't have no place to come back to, not till Mrs. Burr's out and about again."

"The axidint, at the Hospital. No, indade! And how's the poor woman, hersilf? It was the blissin' of God she wasn't kilt on the spot!"

"It warn't a bad bit of luck. She'll be out of hospital next week, I'm told. They're taking their time about it, anyhow! Good-night to ye, missis! The rain's holdin' off." And Uncle Mo departed. Aunt M'riar had insisted on his not discontinuing any of his lapses into bachelorhood proper; which implies pub or club, according to man's degree.

* * * * *

Just a few minutes ago--speaking abreast of the story--Aunt M'riar, getting ready at last to do a little work after so much tidying up, had to go to the door to answer a knock. Its responsible agent was Michael, excited. "It's him!" said he. "I seen him myself. Over at Tappingses. And Mr. Moses, he's a-conversing with Missis Riley next door." He went on to offer to make an affidavit, as was his practice, not only on the Testament, but on most any book you could name.

It was not necessary: Aunt M'riar believed him. "You tell him," she replied, "that Mrs. Prichard's gone away, and no time fixed for coming back. Then he'll go. If he don't go, and comes along, just you say to him Mr. Wardle he'll be back in a minute. He'll be only a short time at The Sun."

"I'll say wotsumever you please, Missis Wardle. Only that won't carry no weight, not if I says it ever so. He's a sly customer. Here he is a-coming. Jist past the post!" That is, the one Dave broke his head off.

Aunt M'riar's heart thumped, and she felt sick. "You say there's no one in the house then," said she. This was panic, and loss of judgment. For the interview was palpable to anyone approaching down the Court. Micky must have felt this, but he only said:--"I'll square him how I can, missis," and withdrew from the door. Mr. Wix's lurching footstep, with the memory of its fetters on it, approached at its leisure. He stopped and looked round, and saw the boy, who acknowledged his stare. "I see you a-coming," said Michael.

Mr. Wix said:--"Young Ikey." He appeared to consider a course of action. "Now do you want another half-a-bull?"

"Ah!" Micky was clear about that.

"Then you do sentry-go outside o' this, in the street, and if you see a copper turning in here, you run ahead and give the word. Understand? This is Wardle's, ain't it?"

"That's Wardle's. But there ain't nobody there."

"You young liar. I saw you talking through the door, only this minute."

"That warn't anybody, only Aunt M'riar. Party you wants is away--gone away for a change. Mr. Moses ain't there, but he'll be back afore you can reckon him up. You may knock at that door till you 'ammer in the button, and never find a soul in the house, only Aunt M'riar. You try! 'Ammer away!" There was a faux air of self-justification in this, which did not bear analysis. Possibly Micky thought so himself, for he vanished up the Court. He would at least be able to bring a false alarm if any critical juncture arose.

The ex-convict watched him out of sight, and then knocked at the door, and waited. The woman inside had been listening to his voice with a quaking heart--had known it for that of her truant husband of twenty years ago, through all the changes time had made, and in spite of such colour of its own as the prison taint had left in it. And he stood there unsuspecting; not a thought in his mind of who she was, this Aunt M'riar! Why indeed should he have had any?

She could not trust her voice yet, with a heart thumping like that. She might take a moment's grace, at least, for its violence to subside. She sat down, close to the door, for she felt sick and the room went round. She wanted not to faint, though it was not clear that syncope would make matters any the worse. But the longer he paused before knocking again, the better for Aunt M'riar.

The knock came, a crescendo on the previous one. She had to respond some time. Make an effort and get it over!

"That * * * young guttersnipe's given me a bad character," muttered Wix, as he heard the chain slipped into its sheath. Then the door opened, and a tremulous voice came from within.

"What is it ... you want?" it said. Its trepidation was out of all proportion to the needs of the case. So thought Mr. Wix, and decided that this Aunt M'riar was some poor nervous hysteric, perhaps an idiot outright.

"Does an old lady by the name of Prichard live here, mistress?" He hid his impatience with this idiot, assuming a genial or conciliatory tone--a thing he perfectly well knew how to do, on occasion. "An old lady by the name of Prichard.... You've got nothing to be frightened of, you know. I'm not going to do her any harm, nor yet you." He spoke as to the idiot, in a reassuring tone. For the hysterical voice had tried again for speech, and failed.

Aunt M'riar mustered a little more strength. "Old Mrs. Prichard's away in the country," she said almost firmly. "She's not likely to be back yet awhile. Can I take any message?"

"Are you going in the country?"

"For when she comes back, I should have said."

"Ah--but when will that be? Next come strawberry-time, perhaps! I'll write to her."

"I can't give her address." Aunt M'riar had an impression that the omission of "you" after "give" just saved her telling a lie here. Her words might have meant: "I am not at liberty to give her address to anyone." It was less like saying she did not know it.

His next words startled her. "I know her address. Got it written down here. Some swell's house in Rocestershire." He made a pretence of searching among papers.

Aunt M'riar was so taken by surprise at this that she had said "Yes--Ancester Towers" before she knew it. She was not a person to entrust secrets to.

"Right you are, mistress! Ancester Towers it is." He was making a pretence, entirely for his own satisfaction, of confirming this from a memorandum. Mr. Wix had got what he wanted, but he enjoyed the success of his ruse. Of course, he had only used what he had just overheard from Uncle Moses.

The thought then crossed Aunt M'riar's mind that unless she inquired of him who he was, or why he wanted Mrs. Prichard, he would guess that she knew already. It was the reaction of her concealed knowledge--a sort of innocent guilty conscience. It was not a reasonable thought, but a vivid one for all that--vivid enough to make her say:--"Who shall I say asked for her?"

"Any name you like. It don't matter to me. I shall write to her myself."

Guilty consciences--even innocent ones--can never leave well alone. The murderer who has buried his victim must needs hang about the spot to be sure no one is digging him up. One looks back into the room one lit a match in, to see that it is not on fire. A diseased wish to clear herself from any suspicion of knowing anything about her visitor, impelled Aunt M'riar to say:--"Of course I don't know the name you go by." Obviously she would have done well to let it alone.

A person who had never borne an alias would have thought nothing of Aunt M'riar's phrase. The convict instantly detected the speaker's knowledge of himself. Another thought crossed his mind:--How about that caution this woman had given to Micky? Why was she so concerned that the boy should not "split upon" him? "Who the devil are you?" said he suddenly, half to himself. It was not the form in which he would have put the question had he reflected.

The exclamation produced a new outcrop of terror or panic in Aunt M'riar. She found voice to say:--"I've told you all I can, master." Then she shut the door between them, and sank down white and breathless on the chair close at hand, and waited, longing to hear his footsteps go. She seemed to wait for hours.

Probably it was little over a minute when the man outside knocked again--a loud, sepulchral, single knock, with determination in it. Its resonance in the empty house was awful to the lonely hearer.

But Aunt M'riar's capacity for mere dread was full to the brim. She was on the brink of the reaction of fear, which is despair--or, rather, desperation. Was she to wait for another appalling knock, like that, to set her heartstrings vibrating anew? To what end? No--settle it now, under the sting of this one.

She again opened the door as before. "I've told you all I know about Mrs. Prichard, and it's true. You must just wait till she comes back. I can't tell you no more."

"I don't want any more about Mrs. Prichard. I want to see side of this door. Take that * * * chain off, and speak fair. I sent you a civil message through that young boy. He gave it you?"

"He told me what you said."

"What did he say I said? If he told you any * * * lies, I'll half murder him! What did he say?"

"He said you was coming to see your mother, and Mrs. Prichard she must be your mother if she comes from Skillicks. So I told him she come from Skillicks, three year agone. Then he said you wanted money of Mrs. Prichard...."

"How the devil did he know that?"

"He said it. And I told him the old lady had no money. It's little enough, if she has."

"And that was all?"

"All about Mrs. Prichard."

"Anything else?"

"He told me your name."

"What name?"

"Thornton Daverill." The moment Aunt M'riar had said this she was sorry for it. For she remembered, plainly enough considering the tension of her mind, that Micky had only given her the surname. Her oversight had come of her own bitter familiarity with the name. Think how easy for her tongue to trip!

"Anything else?"

"No--nothing else."

"You swear to Goard?"

"I have told you everything."

"Then look you here, mistress! I can tell you this one thing. That young boy never told you Thornton. I've never named the name to a soul since I set foot in England. How the devil come you to know it?"

Aunt M'riar was silent. She had given herself away, and had no one but herself to thank for it.

"How the devil come you to know it?" The man raised his voice harshly to repeat the question, adding, more to himself:--"You're some * * * jade that knows me. Who the devil are you?"

The woman remained dumb, but on the very edge of desperation.

"Open this damned door! You hear me? Open this door--or, look you, I tell you what I'll do! Here's that * * * young boy coming. I'll twist his neck for him, by Goard, and leave him on your doorstep. You put me to it, and I'll do it. I'm good for my word." A change of tone, from savage anger to sullen intent, conveyed the strength of a controlled resolve, that might mean more than threat. At whatever cost, Aunt M'riar could not but shield Micky. It was in her service that he had provoked this man's wrath.

She wavered a little, closed the door, and slipped the chain-hook up to its limit. Even then she hesitated to withdraw it from its socket. The man outside made with his tongue the click of acceleration with which one urges a horse, saying, "Look alive!" She could see no choice but to throw the door open and face him. The moment that passed before she could muster the resolution needed seemed a long one.

That she was helped to it by an agonising thirst, almost, of curiosity to see his face once more, there can be no doubt. But could she have said, during that moment, whether she most desired that he should have utterly forgotten her, or that he should remember her and claim her as his wife? Probably she would not have hesitated to say that worse than either would be that he should recognise her only to slight her, and make a jest, maybe, of the memories that were his and hers alike.

She had not long to wait. It needed just a moment's pause--no more--to be sure no sequel of recognition would follow the blank stare that met her gaze as she threw back the door, and looked this husband of hers full in the face. None came, and her heart throbbed slower and slower. It would be down to self-command in a few beats. Meanwhile, how about that chance slip of her tongue? "Thornton" had to be accounted for.

The man's stare was indeed blank, for any sign of recognition that it showed. It was none the less as intent and curious as was the scrutiny that met it, looking in vain for a false lover long since fled, not a retrievable one, but a memory of a sojourn in a garden and a collapse in a desert. So little was left, to explain the past, in the face some violence had twisted askew, close-shaved and scarred, one white scar on the temple warping the grip in which its contractions held a cold green orb that surely never was the eye that was a girl-fool's ignis fatuus, twenty odd years ago. So little of the flawless teeth, which surely those fangs never were!--fangs that told a tale of the place in which they had been left to decay; for such was prison-life three-quarters of a century since. It was strange, but Aunt M'riar, though she knew that it was he, felt sick at heart that he should be so unlike himself.

He was the first to speak. "You'll know me again, mistress," he said. He took his eyes off her to look attentively round the room. Uncle Mo's sporting prints, prized records of ancient battles, caught his eye. "Ho--that's it, is it?" said he, with a short nod of illumination, as though he had made a point as a cross-examiner. "That's where we are--Figg and Broughton--Corbet--Spring?... That's your game, is it? Now the question is, where the devil do I come in? How come you to know my name's Thornton? That's the point!"

Now nothing would have been easier for Aunt M'riar than to say that Mrs. Prichard had told her that her only surviving son bore this name. But the fact is that the old lady, quite a recent experience, had for the moment utterly vanished from her thoughts, and the man before her had wrenched her mind back into the past. She could only think of him as the cruel betrayer of her girlhood, none the less cruel that he had failed in his worst plot against her, and used a legitimate means to cripple her life. She could scarcely have recalled anything Mrs. Prichard had said, for the life of her. She was face to face with the past, yet standing at bay to conceal her identity.

Think how hard pressed she was, and forgive her for resorting to an excusable fiction. It was risky, but what could she do? "I knew your wife," said she briefly. "Twenty-two years agone."

"You mean the girl I married?" He had had to marry one of them, but could only marry one. That was how he classed her. "What became of that girl, I wonder? Maybe you know? Is she alive or dead?"

"I couldn't say, at this len'th of time." Then, she remembered a servant, at the house where her child was born, and saw safety for her own fiction in assuming this girl's identity. Invention was stimulated by despair. "She was confined of a girl, where I was in service. She gave me letters to post to her husband. R. Thornton Daverill." That was safe, anyhow. For she remembered giving letters, so directed, to this girl.

The convict sat down on the table, looking at her no longer, which she found a relief. "Did that kid live or die?" said he. "Blest if I recollect!"

"Born dead. She had a bad time of it. She came back to London, and I never see any more of her." Aunt M'riar should have commented on this oblivion of his own child. She was letting her knowledge of the story influence her, and endangering her version of it.

The man stopped and thought a little. Then he turned upon her suddenly. "How came you to remember that name for twenty-two years?" said he.

A thing she recollected of this servant-girl helped her at a pinch. "She asked me to direct a letter when she hurt her hand," she said. "When you've wrote a name, you bear it in mind."

"What did she call the child?"

"It was born dead."

"What did she mean to call it?"

The answer should have been "She didn't tell me." But Aunt M'riar was a poor fiction-monger after all. For what must she say but "Polly, after herself"?

"Not Mary?"

Then Aunt M'riar forgot herself completely. "No--Polly. After the name you called her, at The Tun." She saw her mistake, too late.

Daverill turned his gaze on her again, slowly. "You seem to remember a fat lot about this and that!" said he. He got down off the table, and stepped between Aunt M'riar and the door, saying: --"Come you here, mistress!" The harshness of his voice was hideous to her. He caught her wrist, and pulled her to the window. The only gas-lamp the Court possessed shone through it on her white face. "Now--what's your * * * married name?"

Aunt M'riar could not utter a word.

"I can tell you. You're that * * * young Polly, and your name's Daverill. You're my lawful wife--d'ye hear?" He gave a horrible laugh. "Why, I thought you was buried years ago!"

She began gasping hysterically:--"Leave me--leave me--you are nothing to me now!" and struggled to free herself. Yet, inexpressibly dreadful as the fact seemed to her, she knew that her struggle was not against the grasp of a stranger. Think of that bygone time! The thought took all the spirit out of her resistance.

He returned to his seat upon the table, drawing her down beside him. "Yes, Polly Daverill," said he, "I thought you dead and buried, years ago. I've had a rough time of it, since then, across the water." He paused a moment; then said quite clearly, almost passionlessly:--"God curse them all!" He repeated the words, even more equably the second time; then with a rough bear-hug of the arm that gripped her waist:--"What have you got to say about it, hay? Who's your * * * husband now? Who's your prizefighter?"

The terrified woman just found voice for:--"He's not my husband." She could not add a word of explanation.

The convict laughed unwholesomely, beneath his breath. "That's what you've come to, is it? Pretty Polly! Mary the Maid of the Inn! The man you've got is not your husband. Sounds like the parson--Holy Scripture, somewhere! I've seen him. He's at the lush-ken down the road. Now you tell the truth. When's he due back here?"

She had only just breath for the word seven, which was true. It was past the half-hour, and he would not have believed her had she said sooner. But it was as though she told him that she knew she was helplessly in his power for twenty-five minutes. Helplessly, that is, strong resolution and desperation apart!

"Then he won't be here till half-past. Time and to spare! Now you listen to me, and I'll learn you a thing or two you don't know. You are my--lawful--wife, so just you listen to me! Ah, would you?..." This was because he had supposed that a look of hers askant had rested on a knife upon the table within reach. It was a pointed knife, known as "the bread knife," which Dolly was never allowed to touch. He pulled her away from it, caught at it, and flung it away across the room. "It's a narsty, dangerous thing," he said, "safest out of the way!" Then he went on:--"You--are--my--lawful--wife, and what St. Paul says mayhap you know? 'Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.' ... What!--me not know my * * * Testament! Why!--it's the only * * * book you get a word of when you're nursing for Botany Bay fever. God curse 'em all! Why--the place was Hell--Hell on earth!"

Aunt M'riar now saw too late that she should not have opened that door, at any cost. But how about Micky? Surely, however, that was a mere threat. What had this man to gain by carrying it out? Why had she not seen that he would never run needless risk, to gain no end?

The worst thorn in her heart was that, changed as he was from the dissolute, engaging youth that she had dreamed of reforming, she still knew him for himself. He was, as he said, her husband. And, for all that she shrank from him and his criminality with horror, she was obliged to acknowledge--oh, how bitterly!--that she wanted help against herself as much as against him. She was obliged to acknowledge the grisly force of Nature, that dictated the reimposition of the yoke that she had through all these years conceived that she had shaken off. And she knew that she might look in vain for help to Law, human or theological. For each in its own way, and for its own purposes, gives countenance to the only consignment of one human creature to the power of another that the slow evolution of Justice has left in civilised society. Each says to the girl trapped into unholy matrimony, from whom the right to look inside the trap has been cunningly withheld:--"Back to your lord and master! Go to him, he is your husband--kiss him--take his hand in thine!" Neither is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one human being to another, when that human being is a woman. And yet Nature is so inexorable that the victim of a cruel marriage often needs help sorely--help against herself, to enable her, on her own behalf, to shake off the Devil some mysterious instinct impels her to cling to. Such an instinct was stirring in Aunt M'riar's chaos of thought and feeling, even through her terror and her consciousness of the vileness of the man and the vileness of his claim over her. The idea of using the power that her knowledge of his position gave her never crossed her mind. Say rather that the fear that a call for help would consign him to a just retribution for his crimes was the chief cause of her silence.

A dread that she might be compelled to do so was lessened by his next speech. "You've no call to look so scared, Polly Daverill. You do what I tell you, and be sharp about it. What are you good for?--that's the question! Got any money in the house?"

She felt relieved. Now he would take his arm away. That arm was all the worse from the fact that her shrinking from it was one-sided. "A little," she answered. "It's upstairs. Let me get it."

He relaxed the arm. "Go ahead!" he said. "I'll follow up."

She cried out with sudden emphasis:--"No--I will not. I will not." And then with subdued earnestness:--"Indeed I will bring it down. Indeed I will."

"You won't stick up there, by any chance, till your man that's not your husband happens round?"

She addressed him by name for the first time. "Thornton, did I ever tell you a lie?"

"I never caught you in one, that I know of. Cut along!"

She went like a bird released. Once in her room, and clear of him, she could lock her door and cry for help. She turned the key, and had actually thrown up the window-sash, when her own words crossed her mind--her claim to veracity. No--she would keep a clear conscience, come what might. She glanced up the Court, and saw Micky coming through the arch; then closed the window, and took an old leather purse from the drawer of the looking-glass Mr. Bartlett's men had not broken. It contained the whole of her small savings.

After she left the room, Daverill had glanced round for valuables. An old silver watch of Uncle Mo's, that always stopped unless allowed to lie on its back, was ticking on the dresser. The convict slipped it into his pocket, and looked round for more, opening drawers, looking under dish-covers. Finding nothing, he sat again on the table, with his hands in the pockets of his velveteen corduroy coat. His face-twist grew more marked as he wrinkled the setting of a calculating eye. "I should have to square it with Miss Juliar," said he, in soliloquy. He was evidently clear about his meaning, whatever it was.

The boy came running down the Court, and entering the front-yard, whose claim to be a garden was now nil, tapped at the window excitedly. Daverill went to the door and opened it.

"Mister Moses coming along. Stopping to speak to Tappingses. You'd best step it sharp, Mister Wix!"

"Polly Daverill, look alive!" The convict shouted at the foot of the stairs, and Aunt M'riar came running down. "Where's the * * * cash?" said he.

"It's all I've got," said poor Aunt M'riar. She handed the purse to him, and he caught it and slipped it in a breast-pocket, and was out in the Court in a moment, running, without another word. He vanished into the darkness.

Five minutes later, Uncle Mo, escaping from Mrs. Tapping, came down the Court, and found the front-door open and no light in the house. He nearly tumbled over Aunt M'riar, in a swoon, or something very like it, in the chair by the door.

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Chapter II

HOW ADRIAN TORRENS COULD SING WITHOUT WINCING. FIGARO. DICTATION OF LETTERS. HOW ADRIAN BROKE DOWN. THE LERNAEAN HYDRA'S EYE-PEEPS. HOW ADRIAN COULD SEE NOTHING IN ANY NUMBER OF LOOKING-GLASSES. HOW GWEN, IN SPITE OF APPEARANCES, HELD TO THE SOLEMN COMPACT. SIR MERRIDEW'S TREACHERY. SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS. HOW GWEN HAD BEEN TO LOOK AT ARTHUR'S BRIDGE. A KINKAJOU IS NOT A CARCAJOU. OF THE PECULIARITIES OF FIRST-CLASS SERVANTS. MRS. PICTURE'S STORY DIVULGED BY GWEN. HOW DAVE'S RIVAL GRANNIES WERE SAFEST APART

Old folk and candles burn out slowly at the end. But before that end comes they flicker up, once, twice, and again. The candle says:--"Think of me at my best. Remember me when I shone out thus, and thus; and never guttered, nor wanted snuffing. Think of me when you needed no other light than mine, to look in Bradshaw and decide that you had better go early and ask at the Station." Thus says the candle.

And the old man says to the old woman, and she says it back to him:--"Think of me in the glorious days when we were dawning on each other; of that most glorious day of all when we found each other out, and had a tiff in a week and a reconciliation in a fortnight!" Then each is dumb for a while, and life ebbs slowly, till some chance memory stirs among the embers, and a bright spark flickers for a moment in the dark. The candle dies at last, and smells, and mixes with the elements. And some say you and I will do the very same--die and go out. Possibly! Just as you like! Have it your own way.

It is even so with the Old Year in his last hours. Is ever an October so chill that he may not bid you suddenly at midday to come out in the garden and recall, with him, what it was like in those Spring days when the first birds sang; those Summer days when the hay-scent was in Cheapside, and a great many roses had not been eaten by blights, and it was too hot to mow the lawn? Is ever a November so self-centred as to refuse to help the Old Year to a memory of the gleams of April, and the nightingale's first song about the laggard ash-buds? Is icy December's self so remorseless, even when the holly-berries are making a parade of their value as Christmas decorations?--even when it's not much use pretending, because the Waits came last night, and you thought, when you heard them, what a long time ago it was that a little boy or girl, who must have been yourself, was waked by them to wonder at the mysteries of Night? But nothing is of any use in December, because January will come, and this year will be dead and risen from its tomb, and the metaphorically disposed will be hoping that Resurrection is not so uncomfortable as all that comes to.

That time was eight weeks ahead one morning at Pensham Steynes, which has to be borne in mind, as the residence of Sir Hamilton Torrens, Bart., when the blind man, his son, was dictating to his sister Irene one of the long missives he was given to sending to his fiancee in London. It was just such a late October day as the one indirectly referred to above; in fact, it would quite have done for a Spring day, if only you could have walked across the lawn without getting your feet soaked. The chance primroses that the mild weather had deluded into budding must have felt ashamed of their stupidity, and disgusted at the sight of the stripped trees, although they may have reaped some encouragement from a missel-thrush that had just begun again after the holiday, and been grateful to the elms and oaks that had kept some decent clothing on them. Irene had found one such primrose in a morning walk, and a confirmation of it in the morning's Times.

"Why didn't you say the ground was covered with them, 'Re? I could have believed in any number on your authority. Surely, a chap with his eyes out is entitled to the advantages which seeing nothing confers on him. Do please perjure yourself about violets and crocuses on my behalf. It is quite a mistake to suppose I shall be jealous. You've no idea what a magnanimous elder brother you've got." So Adrian had said when they came in, and had felt his way to the piano--it was extraordinary how he had learned to feel his way about--and had played the air of "Sumer is ycumin in, lhude sing cucu," with the courage of a giant. Not only that, but actually sang it, and never flinched from:--"Groweth seed and bloweth meed and springeth wood anew." And his heart was saying to him all the while that he might never again see the springing of the young corn, and the daisies in the grass, and the new buds waiting for the bidding of the sun.

Irene, quite alive to her brother's intrepidity, but abstaining resolutely from spoken acknowledgment--for would not that have been an admission of the need for courage?--had gone through a dramatic effort on her own behalf, a kind of rehearsal of the part she had to play. She had arranged writing materials for action, and affected the attitude of a patient scribe, longing for dictation. She had assumed a hardened tone, to say:--"When you're ready!" Then Adrian had deserted the piano, and addressed himself to dictation. "Where were we?" said he. For the letter was half written, having been interrupted by visitors the day before.

"When the Parysfort women came in?" said Irene. "We had got to the old woman. After the old woman--what next?"

Adrian repeated, "After the old woman--after the old woman." Then he said suddenly:--"Bother the old woman. I tell you what, 'Re, we must tear this letter up, and start fair. Those people coming in spoiled it." His tone was vexed and restless. The weariness of his blindness galled him. This fearful inability to write was one of his worst trials. He fought hard against his longing to cry out--to lighten his heart, ever so little, by expression of his misery; but then, the only one thing he could do in requital of the unflagging patience of this dear amanuensis, was to lighten the weight of her sorrow for him. And this he could only do by showing unflinching resolution to bear his own burden. One worst unkindest cut of all was that any word of exasperation against the cruelty of a cancelled pen might seem an imputation on her of ineffective service, almost a reproach. It was perhaps because the visitors of yesterday were so evidently to blame for the miscarriage of this letter, that Adrian felt, in a certain sense, free to grieve aloud. It was a relief to him to say:--"The Devil fly away with the Honourable Misses Parysforts!"

"Suppose we have a clean slate, darling, and I'll tear the letter up, old woman and all. Or shall I read back a little, to start you?"

"Oh no--please! On no account read anything again.... Suppose I confess up! Make some stars, and go on like this:--'These are not Astronomy, but to convey the idea that I have forgotten where I was, and that we have to make it a rule never to re-read, for fear I should tear it up. I believe I was trying to find a new roundabout way of saying how much more to me you were than anything in Heaven or Earth.'" The dictation paused.

"Go on," said the amanuensis. "After 'Heaven and Earth'?" She paused with an expectant pen, her eyes on the paper. Then she looked up, to see that her brother's face was in his hands, dropped down on the side-cushion of the sofa. She waited for him to speak, knowing he would only think she did not see him. But she had to wait overlong for the lasting powers of this excuse; so she let it lapse, and went to sit beside him, and coaxed his hands from his face, kissing away something very like a tear. "But why now, darling?" said she. "You know what I mean. What was it in the letter?"

"Why--I was going to say," replied Adrian, recovering himself, "I was going on to 'the thing that makes day of my darkness' or something of that sort--some poetical game, you know--and then I thought what a many things I could write if I could write them myself, and shut them in the envelope for Gwen alone, that I can't say now, though the dearest sister ever man had yet writes them for me. I can say to her, darling, that if I were offered my eyesight back, by some irritating fairy godmother--that kind of thing--in exchange for the Gwen that is mine, I would not accept her boon upon the terms. I should, on the contrary, wish I were the Lernaean Hydra, that I might give the balance of seven pairs of eyes rather than ..."

"Rather than lose Gwen." Irene spoke, because he had hesitated.

"Exactly. But I got stuck a moment by the reflection that Gwen's sentiments might not have remained altogether unchanged, in that case. In fact, she might have run away, at Arthur's Bridge. It is an obscure and difficult subject, and the supply of parallel cases is not all one could wish."

"I don't see why we shouldn't put all or any of that in the letter." For Irene always favoured her brother's incurable whimsicality as a resource against the powers of Erebus and dark Night, and humoured any approach to extravagance, to disperse the cloud that had gathered. This one pleased him.

"How shall we put it?... somehow like this.... By-the-by, do you know how to spell Lernaean?..." He paused abruptly, and seemed to listen. "Sh--sh a minute! What's that outside? I thought I heard somebody coming." Irene listened too.

"Ply hears somebody," she said. And then she had all but said "Look at him!" in an unguarded moment.

An instant later the dog had started up and scoured from the room as if life and death depended on his presence elsewhere. Adrian heard something his sister did not, and exclaimed "What's that?"

"Nothing," said Irene. "Only someone at the front-door. Ply's always like that."

"I didn't mean Ply. Listen! Be quiet." The room they were in was remote from the front-door of the house, and the voice they heard was no more than a musical modulation of silence. It had a power in it, for all that, to rouse the blind man to excitement. He had to put a restraint on himself to say quietly:--"Suppose you go and see! Do you mind?" Irene left the room.

Anyone who had seen Adrian then for the first time, and watched him standing motionless with his hands on a chairback and the eyes that saw nothing gazing straight in front of him, but not towards the door, would have wondered to see a man of his type apparently so interested in his own image, repeated by the mirror before him as often as eyesight could trace its give-and-take with the one that faced it on the wall behind him. He was the wrong man for a Narcissus. The strength of his framework was wrong throughout. Narcissus had no bone-distances, as artists say, and his hair was in crisp curls, good for the sculptor. No one ever needed to get a pair of scissors to snip it. But though anyone might have marvelled at Adrian Torrens's seeming Narcissus-like intentness on his own manifold image, he could never have surmised that cruel blindness was its apology. He could never have guessed, from anything in their seeming, that the long perspective of gazing orbs, vanishing into nothingness, were not more sightless than their originals.

He only listened for a moment. For, distant as she was, Irene's cry of surprise on meeting some new-comer was decisive as to that new-comer's identity. It could be no one but Gwen. Irene's welcome settled that.

The blind man was feeling his way to the door when Gwen opened it. Then she was in his arms, and what cared he for anything else in the heavens above or the earth beneath? His exultation had to die down, like the resonant chords in the music he had played an hour since, before he could come to the level of speech. Then he said prosaically:--"This is very irregular! How about the solemn compact? How are we going to look our mamma in the face?"

"Did it yesterday evening!" said Gwen. "We had an explosion.... Well, I won't say that--suppose we call it a warm discussion, leading to a more reasonable attitude on the part of ... of the people who were in the wrong. The other people, that is to say!"

"Precisely. They always are. I vote we sit on the sofa, and you take your bonnet off. I know it's on by the ribbons under your chin--not otherwise."

"What a clever man he is--drawing inferences! However, bonnets have got very much out of sight, I admit. Hands off, please!... There!--now I can give particulars."

Irene, who--considerately, perhaps--had not followed closely, here came in, saying:--"Stop a minute! I haven't heard anything yet.... There!--now go on."

She found a seat, and Gwen proceeded.

"I came home yesterday, with an old woman I've picked up, who certainly is the dearest old woman...."

"Never mind the old woman. Why did you come?"

"I came home because I chose. I came here because I wanted to.... Well, I'll tell you directly. What I wish to mention now is that I have not driven a coach-and-six through the solemn compact. I assented to a separation for six months, but no date was fixed. I assure you it wasn't. I was looking out all the time, and took good care."

"Wasn't it fixed by implication?" This was Irene.

"Maybe it was. But I wasn't. We can put the six months off, and start fair presently. Papa quite agreed."

"Mamma didn't?" This was Adrian.

"Of course not. That was the basis of the ... warm discussion which followed on my declaration that I was coming to see you to-day. However, we parted friends, and I slept sound, with a clear conscience. I got up early, to avoid complications, and made Tom Kettering drive me here in the dog-cart. It took an hour and a half because the road's bad. It's like a morass, all the way. I like the sound of the horse's hoofs when I drive, not mud-pie thuds."

"We didn't hear any sound at all, except Ply.... Yes, dear!--of course you heard. I apologize." Irene said this to Achilles, who, catching his name, took up a more active position in the conversation, which he conceived to be about himself. Some indeterminate chat went on until Gwen said suddenly:--"Now I want to talk about what I came here for."

"Go it!" said Adrian.

"I want to know all about what 'Re said to Dr. Merridew in her letter.... Well, what's the matter?"

Amazement on Irene's fact had caused this. "And that man calls himself an F.R.C.S.!" said she.

Adrian, uninformed, naturally asked why not. Gwen supplied a clue for guessing. "He said he couldn't read your handwriting, and gave me your letter to make out."

"What nonsense! I write perfectly plainly."

"So I told him. But he maintained he had hardly been able to make out a word of it. Of course I read it. Your caution to him not to tell me was a little obscure, but otherwise I found it easy enough. Anyhow, I read all about it. And now I know."

"Well--I'll never trust a man with letters after his name again. Of course he was pretending."

"But what for?"

"Because he wanted to tell you, and didn't want to get in a scrape for betraying my confidence."

Adrian struck in. Might he ask what the rumpus was about? Why Sir Merridew, and why letters?

Irene supplied the explanation. "I wrote to him about you and Septimius Severus.... Don't you recollect? And I cautioned him particularly not to tell Gwen.... Why not? Why--of course not! It was sheer, inexcusable dishonesty, and I shall tell him so next time I see him."

Gwen appeared uninterested in the point of honour. "I wonder," she said, "whether he thought telling me of it this way would prevent my building too much on it, and being disappointed. That would be so exactly like Dr. Merridew."

"I think," said Adrian deliberately, "that I appreciate the position. Septimius Severus figures in it as a bust, or as an indirect way of describing a circumstance; preferably the latter, I should say, for it must be most uncomfortable to be a bust. As an Emperor he is inadmissible. I remember the incident--but I suspect it was only a dream." His voice fell into real seriousness as he said this; then went back to mock seriousness, after a pause. "However, I am bound to say that 'inexcusable dishonesty' is a strong expression. I should suggest 'pliable conscience,' always keeping in view the motive of ... Yes, Pelides dear, but I have at present nothing for you in the form of cake or sugar. Explain yourself somehow, to the best of your ability." For Achilles had suddenly placed an outstretched paw, impressively, on the speaker's knee.

"I see what it was," said Gwen. "You said 'pliable conscience'--just now."

"Well?"

"He thought he was the first syllable. Never mind him! I want you to tell me about Septimius Severus. He's what I came about. What was it that happened, exactly?" Thereupon Adrian gave the experience which the story knows already, in greater detail.

In the middle, a casual housekeeper was fain to speak to Miss Torrens, for a minute. Who therefore left the room and became a voice, housekeeping, in the distance.

Then Gwen made Adrian tell the story again, cross-examining him as one cross-examines obduracy in the hope of admissions that will at least countenance a belief in the truth that we want to be true. If Adrian had seen his way to a concession that would have made matters pleasant, he would have jumped at the chance of making it. But false hope was so much worse than false despair. Better, surely, a spurious growth of the latter, with disillusionment to come, than a stinted instalment of the former with a chance of real despair ahead. Adrian took the view that Sir Coupland was really a weak, good-natured chap who had wanted Gwen to have every excuse for hope that could be constructed, even with unsound materials; but who also wanted the responsibilities of the jerry-builder to rest on other shoulders than his own. Gwen discredited this view of the great surgeon's character in her inner consciousness, but hardly had courage to raise her voice against it, because of the danger of fostering false hopes in her lover's mind. Nevertheless she could not be off fanning a little flame of comfort to warm her heart, from the conviction that so responsible an F.R.C.S. would never have gone out of his way to show her the letter if he had not thought there was some chance, however small, of a break in the cloud.

After Sir Coupland's letter and its subject had been allowed to lapse, Gwen said:--"So now you see what I came for, and that's all about it. What do you think I did, dearest, yesterday as soon as I had seen my old lady comfortably settled? She was dreadfully tired, you know. But she was very plucky and wouldn't admit it."

"Who the dickens is your old lady?"

"Don't be impatient. I'll tell you all in good time. First I want to tell you where I went yesterday afternoon. I went across the garden through the rose-forest ... you know?--what you said must be a rose-forest to smell like that...."

"I know. And you went through the gate you came through,"--even so a Greek might have spoken to Aphrodite of "the sea-foam you sprang from"--"and along the field-path to the little bridge fat men get stuck on...." This was an exaggeration of an overstatement of a disputed fact.

"Yes, my dearest, and I was there by myself. And I stood and looked over to Swayne's Oak and thought to myself if only it all could happen again, and a dog might come with a rush and kiss me, and paw me with his dirty paws! And then if you--you--you were to come out of the little coppice, and come to the rescue, all wet through and dripping, how I would take you in my arms, and keep you, and not let you go to be shot. I would. And I would say to you:--'I have found you in time, my darling, I have found you, in time to save you. And now that I have found you, I will keep you, like this. And you would look at me, and see that it was not a forward girl, but me myself, your very own, come for you.... I wonder what you would have said."

"I wonder what I should have said. I think I know, though. I should have said that although a perfect stranger, I should like, please, to remain in Heaven as long--I am quoting Mrs. Bailey--as it was no inconvenience. I might have said, while in Heaven, that we were both under a misapprehension, having taken for granted occurrences, to the development of which our subsequent experiences were essential. But I should have indulged the misapprehension...."

"Of course you would. Any man in his senses would...."

"I agree with you."

"Unless he was married or engaged or something."

"That might complicate matters. Morality is an unknown quantity.... But, darling, let's drop talking nonsense...."

"No--don't let's! It's such sensible nonsense. Indeed, dearest, I saw it all plain, as I stood there yesterday at Arthur's Bridge. I saw what it had all meant. I did not know at the time, but I should have done so if I had not been a fool. I did not see then why I stood watching you till you were out of sight. But I do see now."

Adrian answered seriously, thoughtfully, as one who would fain get to the heart of a mystery. "I knew quite well then--I am convinced of it--why I turned, when I thought I was out of sight, to see if you were still there. I turned because my heart was on fire--because my world was suddenly filled with a girl I had exchanged fifty words with. I was not unhappy before you dawned--only tranquil."

"What were you thinking of, just before you saw me, when you were wading through the wet fern? I think I was only thinking how wet the ferns must have been. How little I thought then who the man was, with the dog! You were only 'the man' then."

"And then--I got shot! I'm so glad. Just think, dearest, what a difference it would have made to me if that ounce of lead had gone an inch wrong...."

"And you had been killed outright!"

"I didn't mean that. I meant the other way. Suppose it had missed, and I had finished my walk with my eyes in my head, and come back here and got an introduction to the girl I saw in the Park, and not known what to say to her when I got it!"

"I should have known you at once."

"Dearest love, some tenses of verbs are kittle-cattle to shoe behind. 'Should have' is one of the kittlest of the whole lot. You would have thought me an interesting author, and I should have sent you a copy of my next book. And then we should have married somebody else."

"Where is the organ of nonsense in Poets' heads, I wonder. It must be this big one, on the top."

"No--that's veneration. My strong point. It shows itself in the readiness with which I recognise the Finger of Providence. I discern in the nicety with which old Stephen's bullet did its predestined work a special intervention on my behalf. A little more and I should have been sleeping with my fathers, or have joined the Choir of Angels, or anyhow been acting up to my epitaph to the best of my poor ability. A little less, and I should have gone my way rejoicing, ascribing my escape from that bullet to the happy-go-lucky character of the Divine disposition of human affairs. I should never have claimed the attentions due to a slovenly, unwholesome corpse...."

"You shall not talk like that. Blaspheme as much as you like. I don't mind blasphemy."

Adrian kissed the palm of the hand that stopped his mouth, and continued speech, under drawbacks. "An intelligent analysis will show that my remarks are reverential, not blasphemous. You will at least admit that there would have been no Mrs. Bailey."

Gwen removed her hand. "None whatever! Yes, you may talk about Mrs. Bailey. There would have been no Mrs. Bailey, and I should never have lain awake all night with your eyes on my conscience.... Yes--the night after mamma and I had tea with you...."

"My eyes on your conscience! Oh--my eyes be hanged! Would I have my eyes back now?--to lose you! Oh, Gwen, Gwen!--sometimes the thought comes to me that if it were not for my privation, my happiness would be too great to be borne--that I should scarcely dare to live for it, had the price I paid for it been less. What is the loss of sight for life to set against...."

"Are you aware, good man, that you are talking nonsense? Be a reasonable Poet, at least!"

She was drawing her hand caressingly over his, and just as she said this, lifted it suddenly, with a start. "Your ring scratches," said she.

"Does it?" said he, feeling it. "Oh yes--it does. I've found where. I'll have it seen to.... I wonder now why I never noticed that before."

"It's a good ring that won't scratch its wearer. I suppose I was unpopular with it. It didn't hurt. Perhaps it was only in fun. Or perhaps it was to call attention to the fact that you have never told me about it. You haven't, and you said you would."

"So I did, when we had The Scene." He meant the occasion on which, according to Gwen's mamma, she had made him an offer of her affections in the Jacobean drawing-room. "It's a ring with magic powers--nothing to do with any young lady, as you thought. It turns pale at the approach of poison."

"Let's get some poison, and try. Isn't there some poison in the house?"

"I dare say there is, in the kitchen. You might touch the bell and ask."

"I shall do nothing of the sort. I mean private poison--doctor's bottles--blue ones with embossed letters.... You know?"

"I know. My maternal parent has any number. But all empty, I'm afraid. She always finishes them. Besides--don't let's bring her in! She has such high principles. However, I've got some poison--what an Irish suicide would consider the rale cratur--only I won't get it out even for this experiment, because I may want it...."

"You may want it!"

"Of course." He suddenly deserted paradox and levity, and became serious. "My dearest, think of this! Suppose I were to lose you, here in the dark!... Oh, I know all that about duty--I know! I would not kill myself at once, because it would be unkind to Irene. But suppose I lost Irene too?"

"I can't reason it out. But I can't believe it would ever be right to destroy oneself."

"Possibly not, but once one was effectually destroyed...."

"That sounds like rat-paste." Gwen wanted to joke her way out of this region of horrible surmise.

But Adrian was keen on his line of thought. "Exactly!" said he. "Vermin destroyer. I should be the vermin. But once destroyed, what contrition should I have to endure? Remorse is a game that takes two selves to play at it--a criminal and a conscientious person! Suppose the rat-paste had destroyed them both!"

"But would it?"

"Absolute ignorance, whether or no, means an even chance of either. I would risk it, for the sake of that chance of rich, full-blown Non-Entity. Oh, think of it!--after loneliness in the dark!--loneliness that once was full of life...."

"But suppose the other chance--how then?"

"Suppose I worked out as a disembodied spirit--and I quite admit it's as likely as not, neither more nor less--it does not necessarily follow that Malignity against Freethinkers is the only attribute of the Creator. When one contemplates the extraordinary variety and magnitude of His achievements, one is tempted to imagine that He occasionally rises above mere personal feeling. It certainly does seem to me that damning inoffensive Suicides would be an unwarrantable abuse of Omnipotence. The fact is, I have a much better opinion of the Most High than many of His admirers."

"But, nonsense apart.... Yes--it is nonsense!... do you mean that you would kill yourself about me?"

"Yes."

"I'm so glad, because I shan't give you the chance. But dear, silly man--dearest, silliest man!--I do wish you would give me up that bottle. I'll promise to give it back if ever I want to jilt you. Honour bright!"

"I dare say. With the good, efficacious poison emptied away; and tea, or rum, or Rowland's Macassar instead! I cannot conceive a more equivocal position than that of a suicide who has taken the wrong poison under the impression that he has launched himself into Eternity."

"Oh no--I could never do that! It would be such a cruel hoax. Now, dearest love, do let me have that bottle to take care of. Indeed, if ever I jilt you, you shall have it back. Engaged girls--honourable ones!--always give presents back on jilting. Do let me have it!"

Adrian laughed at her earnestness. "I'm not going to poison myself," said he. "Unless you jilt me! So it comes to exactly the same thing, either way. There--be easy now! I've promised. Besides, the Warroo or Guarano Indian who gave it me--out on the Essequibo; it was when I went to Demerara--told me it wouldn't keep. So I wouldn't trust it. Much better stick to nice, wholesome, old-fashioned Prussic Acid." He had quite dropped his serious tone, and resumed his incorrigible levity.

"Did you really have it from a wild Indian? Where did he get it? Did he make it?"

"No--that's the beauty of it. The Warroos of Guiana are great dabs at making poisons. They make the celebrated Wourali poison, the smallest quantity of which in a vein always kills. It has never disappointed its backers. But he didn't make this. He brought it from the World of Spirits, beyond the grave. It is intended for internal use only, being quite inoperative when injected into a vein. Irene unpacked my valise when I came back, and touched the bottle. And an hour afterwards she saw that her white cornelian had turned red."

"Nonsense! It was a coincidence. Stones do change."

"I grant you it was a coincidence. Sunrise and daybreak are coincidences. But one is because of t'other. Irene believed my poison turned her stone red, or she would never have refused to wear it a minute longer, from an unreasonable dislike of the Evil One, whose influence she discerned in this simple, natural phenomenon. I considered myself justified in boning the ring for my own use, so I had it enlarged to go on my finger, and there it is, on! I shall never see it again, unless Septimius Severus turns up trumps. What colour should you say it was now?"

Gwen took the hand with the mystic ring on it, turning it this way and that, to see the light reflected. "Pale pink," she said. "Yes--certainly pale pink." She appeared amused, and unconvinced. "I had no idea 'Re was superstitious. You are excusable, dearest, because, after all, you are only a man. One expects a woman to have a little commonsense. Now if...." She appeared to be wavering over something--disposed towards concessions.

"Now if what?"

"If the ring had had a character from its last place--if it had distinguished itself before...."

"Oh, I thought I told you about that. I forgot. It was a ring with a story, that came somehow to my great-great-grandfather, when he was in Paris. It had done itself great credit--gained quite a reputation--at the Court of Louis Quatorze, on the fingers I believe of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers and Louise de la Valliere.... Yes, I think both, but close particulars have always been wanting. 'Re only consented to wear it on condition she should be allowed to disbelieve in it, and then when this little stramash occurred through my bringing home the Warroo poison, her powers of belief at choice seem to have proved insufficient.... Isn't that her, coming back?"

It was; and when she came into the room a moment later, Gwen said:--"We've been talking about your ring, and a horrible little bottle of Red Indian poison this silly obstinate man has got hidden away and won't give me."

"I know," said Irene. "He's incorrigible. But don't you believe him, Gwen, when he justifies suicide. It's only his nonsense." Irene had come back quite sick and tired of housekeeping, and was provoked by the informal status quo of the young lady and gentleman on the sofa into remarking to the latter:--"Now you're happy."

"Or ought to be," said Gwen.

"Now, go on exactly where you were," said Irene.

"I will," said Adrian. "I was just expressing a hope that Gwen had been regular in her attendance at church while in London." He did not seem vitally interested in this, for he changed almost immediately to another subject. "How about your old lady, Gwen? She's your old lady, I suppose, whose house tumbled down?"

"Yes, only not quite. We got her out safe. The woman who lived with her, Mrs. Burr.... However, I wrote all that in my letter, didn't I?"

"Yes--you wrote about Mrs. Burr, and how she was a commonplace person. We thought you unfeeling about Mrs. Burr."

"I was, quite! I can't tell you how it has been on our consciences, Clo's and mine, that we have been unable to take an interest in Mrs. Burr. We tried to make up for it, by one of us going every day to see her in the hospital. I must say for her that she asked about Mrs. Prichard as soon as she was able to speak--asked if she was being got out, and said she supposed it was the repairs. She is not an imaginative or demonstrative person, you see. When I suggested to her that she should come to look after Mrs. Prichard in the country, till the house was rebuilt, she only said she was going to her married niece's at Clapham. I don't know why, but her married niece at Clapham seemed to me indisputable, like an Act of Parliament. I said 'Oh yes!' in a convinced sort of way, as if I knew this niece, and acknowledged Clapham."

"Then you have got the old lady at the Towers?"

"Yes--yesterday. I don't know how it's going to answer."

Adrian said: "Why shouldn't it answer?"

Irene was sharper. "Because of the servants, I suppose," said she.

Gwen said:--"Ye-es, because of the household."

"I thought," said Adrian, "that she was such a charming old lady." This took plenty of omissions for granted.

"So she is," said Gwen. "At least, I think her most sweet and fascinating. But really--the British servant!"

"I know," said Irene.

"Especially the women," said Gwen. "I could manage the men, easily enough."

"You could," said Adrian, with expressive emphasis. And all three laughed. Indeed, it is difficult to describe the subserviency of her male retinue to "Gwen o' the Towers." To say that they were ready to kiss the hem of her garment is but a feeble expression of the truth. Say, rather, that they were ready to fight for the privilege of doing so!

"I can't say," Gwen resumed, "precisely what I found my misgivings on. Little things I can't lay hold of. I can't find any fault with Lutwyche when she was attending on the dear old soul in Cavendish Square. But I couldn't help thinking...."

"What?"

"Well--I thought she showed a slightly fiendish readiness to defer to my minutest directions, and perhaps, I should say, a fell determination not to presume." Telegraphies of slight perceptive nods and raised eyebrows, in touch with shoulder shrugs not insisted on, expressed mutual understanding between the two young ladies. "Of course, I may be wrong," said Gwen. "But when I interviewed Mrs. Masham last thing last night, it was borne in upon me, Heaven knows how, that she had been in collision with Lutwyche about the old lady."

"What is it you call her?" said Irene. "Old Mrs. Picture? There's nothing against her, is there?"

Adrian had seemed to be considering a point. "Did you not say something--last letter but one, I think--about the old lady's husband having been convicted and transported?"

"Oh yes!--but that's not to be talked about, you know! Besides, it was her son, not her husband, that I wrote about. I only found out about the husband a day or two ago. Only you must be very careful, dearest, and remember it's a dead secret. I promise not to tell things, and then of course I forget, when it's you. Old Mrs. Picture would quite understand, though, if I told her."

Adrian said that he really must have some more of the secret to keep, or it would not be worth keeping.

So Gwen told them then and there all that old Mrs. Picture had told her of her terrible life-story. It may have contained things this present narrative has missed, or vice versa, but the essential points were the same in both.

"What a queer story!" said Adrian. "Did the old body cry when she told it?"

"Scarcely, if at all. She looked very beautiful--you've no idea how lovely she is sometimes--and told it all quite quietly, just as if she had been speaking of someone else."

"I have always had a theory," said Adrian, "that one gets less and less identical, as Time goes on...."

"What do you mean by that?" said Gwen.

"Haven't the slightest idea!" Adrian had been speaking seriously, but at this point his whimsical mood seized him. He went on:--"You don't mean to say, I hope, that you are going to make meaning a sine qua non in theories? It would be the death-knell of speculation."

"You don't know what a goose you are engaged to, Gwen," said Irene parenthetically.

"Yes, I do. But he meant something this time. He does, you know, now and again, in spite of appearances to the contrary. What did you mean, please?"

"I can only conjecture," said Adrian incorrigibly. Then, more in earnest:--"I think it was something like this. I know that I am the same man that I was last week so long as I remember what happened last week. Suppose I forget half--which I do, in practice--I still remain the same man, according to my notion of identity. But it is an academical notion, of no use in everyday life. A conjurer who forgets how to lay eggs in defiance of natural law, or how to find canaries in pocket-handkerchiefs, is not the same conjurer, in practical politics. And yet he is the same man. Dock and crop his qualities and attributes as you will, he keeps the same man, academically. But not for working purposes. By the time you can say nothing about him, that was true of him last week, he may just as well be somebody else."

"Mind you recollect all that, and it will do in a book," said his sister. "But what has it to do with Gwen's old woman?"

"Yes--what has it to do with my old woman?" said Gwen.

"Didn't you say," Adrian asked, "that the old lady told all about her past quite quietly, just as if she had been speaking of somebody else? Your very expression, ma'am! You see, she was to all intents and purposes somebody else then, or has become somebody else now. I always wonder, whether, if one had left oneself--one of one's selves--behind in the past, like old Mrs. Picture, and some strange navigation on the sea of life were to land one in a long-forgotten port, where the memory still hung on, in a mind or two, of the self one had left behind--would the self one had grown to be bring conviction to the mind or two? Wouldn't the chance survivors who admitted that you were Jack or Jim or Polly be discouraged if they found that Jack or Jim or Polly had forgotten the old pier that was swept away, or the old pub which the new hotel was, once. Wouldn't they discredit you? Wouldn't they decide that, for all your bald, uninteresting identity--mere mechanical sameness--you wouldn't wash?"

"Rip van Winkle washed," said Gwen.

"Because Washington Irving chose. I sometimes imagine Rip isn't really true. Anyhow, his case doesn't apply. He remembered everything as if it was yesterday. For him, it was yesterday. So he was the same man, both in theory and practice. Jack and Jim and Polly were to forget, by hypothesis."

"Does old Mrs. Picture?" asked Irene.

"I should say--very little," said Gwen. "Less now than when I took her first to Cavendish Square. She'll get very communicative, I've no doubt, if she's fed up, in the country air. I shall see to that myself. So Mrs. Masham had better look out."

"There's mamma!" said Irene suddenly. "I'll go and see that she gets her writing things.... No--don't you move! She won't come in here. She wants to write important letters. You sit still." And Irene went off to intercept the Miss Abercrombie her father had married all those years ago instead of Gwen's mother. She does not come much into this story, but its reader may be interested to know that she was an enthusiastic Abolitionist, and a friend of the Duchess of Sutherland. There was only one thing in those days that called for abolition--negro slavery in America; so everyone who recollects the fifties will know what an Abolitionist was. Nevertheless, though Lady Torrens happens to keep outside the story, it would have been quite another story without her.

Adrian was a good son, and loved his mother duly. She returned his affection, but could not stand his poetical effusions, which she thought showed an irreverent spirit. We are not quite sure they did not.

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Chapter III

HOW AN OLD LADY WAS TAKEN FOR A DRIVE, AND SAW JONES'S BULL, ALL IN A DREAM. STRIDES COTTAGE AND A STRANGE CONTIGUITY. AFTER SIXTY YEARS! HOW TOBY SMASHED A PANE OF GLASS WITH A HORSE-CHESTNUT, AND NEARLY HAD NO SUGAR IN HIS BREAD-AND-MILK. HOW THE OLD BODY CURTSIED AND THE OLD SOUL DIDN'T GO TO SLEEP. HOW GWEN NEARLY FORGOT TO INTRODUCE THEM. HOW MRS. PICTURE KNOCKED UP AND RAN DOWN,--BUT WOULD NOT HAVE MUTTON BROTH. BUT NEITHER KNEW! HOW MRS. PICTURE THOUGHT MRS. MARRABLE A NICE PERSON. HOW GWEN LUNCHED WITH HER PARENTS. "REALLY, OUR DAUGHTER!" HOW LOOKING AMUSED DOES NO GOOD. WAS GWEN JONES'S BULL, OR HOW? NORBURY AS AN ORACLE. HOW THE EARL WENT ROUND TO SEE THE FAIRY GODMOTHER

It had all come on the old woman like a bewildering dream. It began with the sudden appearance, as she dozed in her chair at Sapps Court, all the memories of her past world creeping spark-like through its half-burned scroll, a dream of Gwen in her glory, heralded by Dave; depositing Dolly, very rough-headed, on the floor, and explaining her intrusion with some difficulty owing to those children wanting to explain too. This was dreamlike enough, but it had become more so with the then inexplicable crash that followed a discomfort in the floor; more so with that strange half-conscious drive through the London streets in the glow of the sunset; more so yet, when, after an interval of real dreams, she woke to the luxury of Sister Nora's temporary arrangements, pending the organization of the Simple Life; more dreamlike still when she woke again later, to wonder at the leaves of the creeper that framed her lattice at the Towers, ruby in the dawn of a cloudless autumn day, and jewelled with its dew. She had to look, wonderingly, at her old unchanged hands, to be quite sure she was not in Heaven. Then she caught a confirmatory glimpse of her old white head in a mirror, and that settled it. Besides, her old limbs ached; not savagely, but quite perceptibly, and that was discordant with her idea of Heaven.

Her acquiescence was complete in all that had happened. Not that it was clearly what she would have chosen, even if she could have foreseen all its outcomings, and pictured to herself what she would have been refusing, had refusal been practicable. Her actual choice, putting aside newly kindled love for this mysterious and beautiful agency, half daughter and half Guardian Angel, that had been sprung upon her life so near its close, might easily have been to face the risks of some half-dried plaster, and go back to her old chair by the fire in Sapps Court, and her day-dreams of the huge cruel world she had all but seen the last of; to watch through the hours for what was now the great relaxation of her life, the coming of Dave and Dolly, and to listen through the murmur of the traffic that grew and grew in the silence of the house, for the welcome voices of the children on the stairs. But how meet Gwen's impulsive decisions with anything but acquiescence? It was not, with her, mere ready deference to the will of a superior; she might have stickled at that, and found words to express a wish for her old haunts and old habits of life. It was much more nearly the feeling a mother might have had for a daughter, strangely restored to her, after long separation that had made her a memory of a name. It was mixed with the ready compliance one imputes to the fortunate owner of a Guardian Angel, who is deserving of his luck. No doubt also with the fact that no living creature, great or small, ever said nay to Gwen. But, for whatever reason, she complied, and wondered.

Remember, too, the enforced associations of her previous experience. Think how soon the conditions of her early youth--which, if they afforded no high culture, were at least those of a respected middle class in English provincial life--came to an end, and what they gave place to! Then, on her return to England, how little chance her antecedents and her son's vicious inherited disposition gave her of resuming the position she would have been entitled to had her exile, and its circumstances, not made the one she had to submit to abnormal! Aunt M'riar and Mrs. Burr were good women, but those who study class-niceties would surely refuse to ranger either with Granny Marrable. And even that old lady is scarcely a fair illustration; for, had her sister's bridegroom been what the bride believed him, the social outcome of the marriage would have been all but the same as of her own, had she wedded his elder brother.

It is little wonder that old Mrs. Picture, who once was Maisie, should succumb to the influences of this dazzling creature with all the world at her feet. And less that these influences grew upon her, when there was none to see, and hamper free speech with conventions. For when they were alone, it came about that either unpacked her heart to the other, and Gwen gave all the tale of the shadow on her own love in exchange for that of the blacker shadows of the galleys--of the convict's cheated wife, and the terrible inheritance of his son.

The story is sorry to have to admit that Gwen's bad faith to the old lady, in the matter of her pledge of secrecy, did not show itself only in her repetition of the story to her lover and his sister. She told her father, a nobleman with all sorts of old-fashioned prejudices, among others that of disliking confidences entrusted to him in disregard of solemn oaths of secrecy. His protest intercepted his daughter's revelation at the outset. "Unprincipled young monkey!" he exclaimed. "You mustn't tell me when you've promised not to. Didn't you, now?"

"Of course I did! But you don't count. Papas don't, when trustworthy. Besides, the more people of the right sort know a secret, the better it will be kept." Gwen had to release her lips from two paternal fingers to say this. She followed it up by using them--she was near enough--to run a trill of kisslets across the paternal forehead.

"Very good!" said the Earl. "Fire away!" It has been mentioned that Gwen always got her will, somehow. This how was the one she used with her father. She told the whole tale without reserves; except, perhaps, slight ones in respect of the son's misdeeds. They were not things to be spoken of to a good, innocent father, like hers.

She answered an expression on his face, when she had finished, with:--"As for any chance of the story not being true, that's impossible."

"Then it must be true," was the answer. Not an illogical one!

"Don't agree meekly," says Gwen. "Meek agreement is contradiction.... What makes you think it fibs?"

"I don't think it fibs, my darling. Because I attach a good deal of weight to the impression it has produced upon you. But other people might, who did not know you."

"Other people are not to be told, so they are out of it.... Well, perhaps that has very little to do with the matter."

"Not very much. But tell me!--does the old lady give no names at all?"

"N-no!--I can remember none. Her real name is not Picture, of course ... I should have said Prichard."

"I understand. But couldn't you get at her husband's name, to verify the story?"

"I don't want it verified. Where's the use?... No, she hasn't told me a single surname of any of the people.... Oh yes--stop a minute! Of course she told me Prichard was a name in her family--some old nurse's. But it's such a common name."

"Did she not say where she came from--where her family belonged?"

"Yes--Essex. But Essex is like Rutlandshire. Nobody has ever been to either, or knows anyone that is there by nature."

"I didn't know that was the case, but I have no interest in proving the contrary. Suppose you try to get at her husband's name--her real married name. I could tell my man in Lincoln's Inn to hunt up the trial. Or even if you could get the exact date it might be enough. There cannot have been so very many fathers-in-laws' signatures forged in one year."

But Gwen did not like to press the old lady for information she was reluctant to give, and the names of the family in Essex and the delinquent remained untold; or, if told to Gwen, were concealed more effectually by her than the narrative they were required to fill out. And as the confidants to whom she had repeated that narrative were more loyal to her than she herself had been to its first narrator, it remained altogether unknown to the household at the Towers; and, indeed, to anyone who could by repeating it have excited suspicion of the twinship of the farmer's widow at Chorlton-under-Bradbury and the old lady whom her young ladyship's eccentricities had brought from London.

Apart from their close contiguity, nothing occurred for some time to make mutual recognition more probable than it had been at any moment since Dave's visit to Chorlton had disclosed to each the bare fact of the other's existence. They were within five miles of one another, and neither knew it; nor had either a thought of the other but as a memory of long ago; still cherished, as a sepulchral stone cherishes what Time leaves legible, while his slow hand makes each letter fainter day by day.

And yet--how near they went on one occasion to what must have led to recognition, had the period of their separation been less cruelly long, and its strange conditions less baffling! How near, for instance, three or four days after old Maisie's arrival at the Towers, when Gwen the omnipotent decided that she would take Mrs. Picture for a long drive in the best part of the day--the longest drive that would not tire her to death!

Whether the old soul that her young ladyship had taken such a fancy to--that was how Blencorn the coachman and Benjamin the coachboy thought of her--really enjoyed the strange experience of gliding over smooth roads flanked by matchless woodlands or primeval moorland; cropless Autumn fields or pastures of contented cattle; through villages of the same mind about the undesirableness of change that had been their creed for centuries, with churches unconscious of judicious restoration and an unflawed record of curfews; by farms with all the usual besetting sins of farms, black duck-slush and uncaptivating dung-heaps; cattle no persuasion weighs with; the same hen that never stops the same dissertation on the same egg, the same cock that has some of the vices of his betters, our male selves to wit--whether the said old soul really enjoyed all this, who can say? She may have been pretending to satisfy her young ladyship. If so, she succeeded very well, considering her years. But it was all part of a dream to her.

In that dream, she waked at intervals to small realities. One of these was Farmer Jones's Bull. Not that she had more than a timid hope of seeing that celebrated quadruped himself. She was, however, undisguisedly anxious to do so; inquiring after him; the chance of his proximity; the possibility of cultivating his intimate acquaintance. No other bull would serve her purpose, which was to take back to Dave, who filled much of her thoughts, an authentic report of Farmer Jones's.

"Dave must be a very nice little boy," said Gwen. "Anyhow, he's pretty. And Dolly's a darling." This may have been partly due to the way in which Dolly had overwhelmed the young lady--the equivalent, as it were, of a kind of cannibalism, or perhaps octopus-greed--which had stood in the way of a maturer friendship with her brother. However, there had really been very little time.

"You see, my dear," said the old lady, "if I was to see Farmer Jones's Bull, I could tell the dear child about him in London. Isn't that a Bull?" But it wasn't, though possibly a relation he would not have acknowledged.

"I think Blencorn might make a point of Farmer Jones's Bull," said Gwen. "Blencorn!"

"Yes, my lady."

"I want to stop at Strides Cottage, coming back. You know--Mrs. Marrable's!"

"Yes, my lady."

"Well--isn't that Farmer Jones's farm, on the left, before we get there? Close to the Spinney." Now Mr. Blencorn knew perfectly well. But he was not going to admit that he knew, because farms were human affairs, and he was on the box. He referred to his satellite, the coachboy, whose information enabled him to say:--"Yes, my lady, on the left." Gwen then said:--"Very good, then, Blencorn, stop at the gate, and Benjamin can go in and say we've come to see the Bull. Go on!"

"I wonder," said old Mrs. Prichard, with roused interest, "if that is Davy's granny I wrote to for him. Such a lot he has to say about her! But it was Mrs.... Mrs. Thrale Dave went to stop with."

"Mrs. Marrable--Granny Marrable--is Mrs. Thrale's mother. A nice old lady. Rather younger than you, and awfully strong. She can walk nine miles." In Rumour's diary, the exact number of a pedestrian's miles is vouched for, as well as the exact round number of thousands Park-Laners have per annum. "I dare say we shall see her," Gwen continued. "I hope so, because I promised my cousin Clo to give her this parcel with my own hands. Only she may be out.... Aren't you getting very tired, dear Mrs. Picture?"

Mrs. Picture was getting tired, and admitted it. "But I must see the Bull," said she. She closed her eyes and leaned back, and Gwen said:--"You can drive a little quicker, Blencorn." There had been plenty of talk through a longish drive, and Gwen was getting afraid of overdoing it.

This was the gate of the farm, my lady. Should Benjamin go across to the house, and express her ladyship's wishes? Benjamin was trembling for the flawless blacking of his beautiful boots, and the unsoiled felt of his leggings. Yes, he might go, and get somebody to come out and speak to her ladyship, or herself, as convenient. But while Benjamin was away on this mission, the unexpected came to pass in the form of a boy. We all know how rarely human creatures occur in fields and villages, in England. This sporadic example, in answer to a question "Are you Farmer Jones's boy?" replied guardedly:--"Ees, a be woon."

"Very well then," said Gwen. "Find Farmer Jones, to show us his Bull."

The boy shook his head. "Oo'r Bull can't abide he," said he. "A better tarry indowers, fa'ather had, and leave oy to ha'andle un. A be a foine Bull, oo'r Bull!"

"You mean, you can manage your Bull, and father can't. Is that it?" Assent given. "And how can you manage your Bull?"

"Oy can whistle un a tewun."

"Is he out in the field, or here in his stable or house, or whatever it's called?"

"That's him nigh handy, a-roomblin'." It then appeared that this youth was prepared, for a reasonable consideration, to lead this formidable brute out into the farmyard, under the influence of musical cajolery. He met a suggestion that his superiors might disapprove of his doing so, by pointing out that they would all keep "yower side o' th' gayut" until the Bull--whose name, strange to say, seemed to be Zephyr--was safe in bounds, chained by his nose-ring to a sufficient wall-staple.

Said old Mrs. Picture, roused from an impending nap by the interest of the event:--"This must be the boy Davy told about, who whistled to the Bull. Why--the child can never tire of telling that story." It certainly was the very selfsame boy, and he was as good as his word, exhibiting the Bull with pride, and soothing his morose temper as he had promised, by monotonous whistling. Whether he was more intoxicated with his success or with a shilling Gwen gave him as recompense, it would have been hard to say.

The old lady was infinitely more excited and interested about this Bull, on Dave's account, than about any of the hundred-and-one things Gwen had shown her during her five-mile drive. When Gwen gave the direction:--"Go on to Strides Cottage, Blencorn," and Blencorn, who had scarcely condescended to look at the Bull, answered:--"Yes, my lady," her interest on Dave's account was maintained, but on a rather different line. She was, however, becoming rapidly too fatigued to entertain any feelings of resentment against her rival, and none mixed with the languid interest the prospect of seeing her aroused during the three-minutes' drive from Farmer Jones's to Strides Cottage.

* * * * *

This story despairs of showing to the full the utter strangeness of the position that was created by this meeting of old Maisie and old Phoebe, each of whom for nearly half a century had thought the other dead. It is forced to appeal to its reader to make an effort to help its feeble presentations by its own powers of imagery.

Conceive that suddenly a voice that imposed belief on its hearers had said to each of them:--"This is your sister of those long bygone years--slain, for you, by a cunning lie; living on, and mourning for a death that never was; dreaming, as you dreamed, of a slowly vanishing past, vanishing so slowly that its characters might still be visible at the end of the longest scroll of recorded life. Look upon her, and recognise in that shrunken face the lips you kissed, the cheeks you pressed to yours, the eye that laughed and gave back love or mockery! Try to hear in that frail old voice the music of its speech in the years gone by; ask for the song it knew so well the trick of. Try to caress in those grey, thin old tresses the mass of gold from whose redundance you cut the treasured locks you almost weep afresh to see and handle, even now." Then try to imagine to yourself the outward seeming of its hearers, always supposing them to understand. It is a large supposition, but the dramatist would have to accept it, with the ladies in the stalls getting up to go.

Are you prepared to accept, off the stage, a snapshot recognition of each other by the two old twins, and curtain? It is hard to conceive that mere eyesight, and the hearing of a changed voice, could have provoked such a result. However, it is not for the story to decide that in every case it would be impossible. It can only record events as they happened, however much interest might be gained by the interpolation of a little skilful fiction.

* * * * *

That morning, at Strides Cottage, a regrettable event had disturbed Granny Marrable's equanimity. A small convalescent, named Toby, who was really old enough to know better, had made a collection of beautiful, clean, new horse-chestnuts from under the tree in the field behind the house. Never was the heart of man more embittered by this sort being no use for cooking than in the case of these flawless, glossy rotundities. Each one was a handful for a convalescent, and that was why Toby so often had his hands in his pockets. He was, in fact, fondling his ammunition, like Mr. Dooley. For that was, according to Toby, the purpose of Creation in the production of the horse-chestnut tree. He had awaited his opportunity, and here it was:--he was unwatched in the large room that was neither kitchen nor living-room, but more both than neither, and he seized it to show his obedience to a frequent injunction not to throw stones. He was an honourable convalescent, and he proved it in the choice of a missile. His first horse-chestnut only gave him the range; his second smashed the glass it was aimed at. And that glass was the door or lid of the automatic watermill on the chimney-piece!

The Granny was quite upset, and Widow Thrale was downright angry, and called Toby an undeserving little piece, if ever there was one. It was a harsh censure, and caused Toby to weep; in fact, to roar. Roaring, however, did nothing towards repairing the mischief done, and nearly led to a well-deserved penalty for Toby, to be put to his bed and very likely have no sugar in his bread-and-milk--such being the exact wording of the sentence. It was not carried out, as it was found that the watermill and horses, the two little girls in sun-bonnets, and the miller smoking at the window, were all intact; only the glass being broken. There was no glazier in the village, which broke few windows, and was content to wait the coming round of a peripatetic plumber, who came at irregular intervals, like Easter, but without astronomical checks. So, as a temporary expedient to keep the dust out, Widow Thrale pasted a piece of paper over the breakage, and the mill was hidden from the human eye. Toby showed penitence, and had sugar in his bread-and-milk, but the balance of his projectiles was confiscated.

Consequently, old Mrs. Marrable was not in her best form when her young ladyship arrived, and Benjamin the coachboy came up the garden pathway as her harbinger to see if she should descend from the carriage to interview the old lady. She did not want to do so, as she felt she ought to get Mrs. Prichard home as soon as possible; but wanted, all the same, to fulfil her promise of delivering Sister Nora's parcel with her own hands. She was glad to remain in the carriage, on hearing from Benjamin that both Granny Marrable and her daughter were on the spot; and would, said he, be out in a minute.

"They'll curtsey," said Gwen. "Do, dear Mrs. Picture, keep awake one minute more. I want you so much to see Dave's other Granny. She's such a nice old body!" Can any student of language say why these two old women should be respectively classed as an old soul and an old body, and why the cap should fit in either case?

"I won't go to sleep," said Mrs. Prichard, making a great effort. "That must be Dave's duck-pond, across the road." The duck-pond had no alloy. She did not feel that her curiosity about Dave's other Granny was quite without discomfort.

"Oh--had Dave a duck-pond? It looks very black and juicy.... Here come the two Goodies! I've brought you a present from Sister Nora, Granny Marrable. It's in here. I know what it is because I've seen it--it's nice and warm for the winter. Take it in and look at it inside. I mustn't stop because of Mrs.... There now!--I was quite forgetting...." It shows how slightly Gwen was thinking of the whole transaction that she should all but tell Blencorn to drive home at this point, with the scantiest farewell to the Goodies, who had curtsied duly as foretold. She collected herself, and continued:--"You remember the small boy, Mrs. Marrable, when I came with Sister Nora, whose letter we read about the thieves and the policeman?"

"Ah, dear, indeed I do! That dear child!--why, what would we not give, Ruth and me, to see him again?"

"Well, this is Mrs. Picture, who wrote his letter for him. This is Granny Marrable, that Dave told you all about. She says she wants him back."

And then Maisie and Phoebe looked each other in the face again after half a century of separation. Surely, if there is any truth in the belief that the souls of twins are linked by some unseen thread of sympathy, each should have been stirred by the presence of the other. If either was, she had no clue to the cause of her perturbation. They looked each other in the face; and each made some suitable recognition of her unknown sister. Phoebe hoped the dear boy was well, and Maisie heard that he was, but had not seen him now nigh a month. Phoebe had had a letter from him yesterday, but could not quite make it out. Ruth would go in and get it, for her ladyship to see. Granny Marrable made little direct concession to the equivocal old woman who might be anything, for all she was in her ladyship's carriage.

"I suppose," said Gwen, "the boy has tried to describe the accident, and made a hash of it. Is that it?"

"Indeed, my lady, he does tell something of an accident. Only I took it for just only telling--story-book like!... Ah, yes, that will be the letter. Give it to her ladyship."

Gwen took the letter from Widow Thrale, but did not unfold it. "Mayn't I take it away," she said, "for me and Mrs. Picture to read at home? I want to get her back and give her some food. She's knocking up."

Immediately Granny Marrable's heart and Widow Thrale's overflowed. What did the doubts that hung over this old person matter, whatever she was, if she was running down visibly within the zone of influence of perceptible mutton-broth; which was confirming, through the door, what the wood-smoke from the chimney had to say about it to the Universe? Let Ruth bring out a cup of it at once for Mrs. Picture. It was quite good and strong by now. Granny Marrable could answer for that.

But it was one thing to be generous to a rival, another to accept a benevolence from one. Mrs. Picture quite roused herself to acknowledge the generosity, but she wouldn't have the broth on any terms, evidently. Gwen thought she could read the history of this between the lines. As we have seen, she was aware of the sort of jealousy subsisting between these two old Grannies about their adopted grandson. She thought it best to favour immediate departure, and Blencorn jumped at the first symptom of a word to that effect. The carriage rolled away, waving farewells to the cottage, and the tenants of the latter went slowly back to the mutton-broth.

And neither of the two old women had the dimmest idea whose face it was that she had looked at in the broad full light of a glorious autumn day; not passingly, as one glances at a stranger on the road, who comes one knows not whence, to vanish away one knows not whither; but inquiringly, as when a first interview shows us the outward seeming of one known by hearsay--one whom our mind has dwelt on curiously, making conjectural images at random, and wondering which was nearest to the truth. And to neither of those who saw this meeting, for all they felt interest to note what each would think of the other, did the thought come of any very strong resemblance between them. They were two old women--that was all!

And yet, in the days of their girlhood, these old women had been so much alike that they were not allowed to dress in the same colour, for mere mercy to the puzzled bystanders. So much alike that when, for a frolic, each put on the other's clothes, and answered to the other's name, the fraud went on for days, undetected!

It seems strange, but gets less strange as all the facts are sorted out, and weighed in the scale. First and foremost the whole position was so impossible per se--one always knows what is and is not possible!--that any true version of the antecedents of the two old women would have seemed mere madness. Had either spectator noted that the bones of the two old faces were the same, she would have condemned her own powers of observation rather than doubt the infallibility of instinctive disbelief, which is the attitude of the vernacular mind not only to what it wishes to be false, but to anything that runs counter to the octave-stretch forlorn--as Elizabeth Browning put it--of its limited experience. Had either noted that the eyes of the two were the same, she would have attached no meaning to the similarity. So many eyes are the same! How many shades of colour does the maker of false eyes stock, all told? Guess them at a thousand, and escape the conclusion that in a world of a thousand million, a million of eyes are alike, if you can. If they had compared the hair still covering the heads of both, they would have found Dave's comparison of it with Pussy's various tints a good and intelligent one. Maisie was silvery white, Phoebe merely grey. But the greatest difference was in the relative uprightness and strength of the old countrywoman, helped--and greatly helped--by the entire difference in dress.

No!--it was not surprising that bystanders should not suspect offhand that something they would have counted impossible was actually there before them in the daylight. Was it not even less so that Maisie and Phoebe, who remembered Phoebe and Maisie last in the glory and beauty of early womanhood, should each be unsuspicious, when suspicion would have gone near to meaning a thought in the mind of each that the other had risen from the grave? It is none the less strange that two souls, nourished unborn by the same mother, should have all but touched, and that neither should have guessed the presence of the other, through the outer shell it dwelt in.

How painfully we souls are dependent on the evidence of our existence--eyes and noses and things!

To get back to the thread of the story. Mrs. Picture, on her part, seemed--so far as her fatigue allowed her to narrate her impressions--to take a more favourable view of her rival than the latter of herself. She went so far as to speak of her as "a nice person." But she was in a position to be liberal; being, as it were, in possession of the bone of contention--unconscious Dave, equally devoted to both his two Grannies! Would she not go back to him, and would not he and Dolly come up and keep her company, and Dolly bring her doll? Would not Sapps Court rise, metaphorically speaking, out of its ashes, and the rebuilt wall of that Troy get bone-dry, and the window be stood open on summer evenings by Mrs. Burr, for to hear Miss Druitt play her scales? It was much easier for Maisie to forgive Phoebe her claim on Dave's affection than vice versa.

She was, however, so thoroughly knocked up by this long drive that she spoke very little to Gwen about Strides Cottage or anything else, at the time. Gwen saw her on the way to resuscitation, and left her rather reluctantly to Mrs. Masham and Lutwyche; who would, she knew, take very good care that her visitor wanted for nothing, however much she suspected that those two first-class servants were secretly in revolt against the duty they were called on to execute. They would not enter their protest against any whim of her young ladyship, however mad they might think it, by any act of neglect that could be made the basis of an indictment against them.

She herself was overdue at the rather late lunch which her august parents were enjoying in solitude. They were leaving for London in the course of an hour or so, having said farewell in the morning to such guests as still remained at the Towers; and intended, after a short stay in town, to part company--the Earl going to Bath, where it was his practice each year to go through a course of bathing, by which means he contended his life might be indefinitely prolonged--to return in time for Christmas, which they would probably celebrate--or, as the Earl said, undergo--at Ancester Towers, according to their usual custom.

"What on earth have you been doing, Gwen, to make you so late?" said the Countess. "We couldn't wait."

"It doesn't matter," was her daughter's answer. "I can gobble to make up for lost time. Don't bring any arrears, Norbury. I can go on where they are. What's this--grouse? Not if it's grousey, thank you!... Oh--well--perhaps I can endure it ... What have I been doing? Why, taking a drive!... Yes--hock. Only not in a tall glass. I hate tall glasses. They hit one's nose. Besides, you get less.... I took my old lady out for a drive--all round by Chorlton, and showed her things. We saw Farmer Jones's Bull."

"Is that the Bull that killed the man?" This was the Earl. His eyes were devouring his beautiful daughter, as they were liable to do, even at lunch, or in church.

"I believe he did. It was a man that beat his wife. So it was a good job. He's a dear Bull, but his eyes are red. He had a little boy ... Nonsense, mamma!--why don't you wait till I've done? He had a little boy to whistle to him and keep his nerves quiet. The potatoes could have waited, Norbury." The story hopes that its economies of space by omitting explanations will not be found puzzling.

The Countess's mien indicated despair of her daughter's manners or sanity, or both. Also that attempts to remedy either would be futile. Her husband laughed slightly to her across the table, with a sub-shrug--the word asks pardon--of his shoulders. She answered it by another, and "Well!" It was as though they had said:--"Really--our daughter!"

"And where else did you go?" said the Earl, to re-rail the conversation. "And what else did you see?"

"Mrs. Picture was knocking up," said Gwen. "So we didn't see so much as we might have done. We left a parcel from Cousin Clo at Goody Marrable's, and then came home as fast as we could pelt. You know Goody Marrable, mamma?"

"Oh dear, yes! I went there with Clo, and she gave us her strong-tea."

Gwen nodded several times. "Same experience," said she. "Why is it they will?" The story fancies it referred, a long time since, to this vice of Goody Marrable's. No doubt Gurth the Swineherd would have made tea on the same lines, had he had any to make.

The Countess lost interest in the tea question, and evidently had something to say. Therefore Gwen said:--"Yes, mamma! What?" and got for answer:--"It's only a suggestion."

"But what is a suggestion?" said the Earl.

"No attention will be paid to it, so it's no use," said her ladyship.

"But what is it?" said the Earl. "No harm in knowing what it is, that I can see!"

"My dear," said the Countess, "you are always unreasonable. But Gwen may see some sense in what I say. It's no use your looking amused, because that doesn't do any good." After which little preliminary skirmish she came to the point, speaking to Gwen in a half-aside, as to a fellow-citizen in contradistinction to an outcast, her father. "Why should not your old woman be put up at Mrs. Marrable's? They do this sort of thing there. However, perhaps Mrs. Marrable is full up."

"I didn't see anybody there but the two Goodies. I didn't go in, though. But why is Mrs. Picture not to stop where she is?"

"Just as you please, my dear." Her ladyship abdicated with the promptitude of a malicious monarch, who seeks to throw the Constitution into disorder. "How long do you want to stop here yourself?"

"I haven't made up my mind. But why is Mrs. Picture not to stop where she is?" This was put incisively.

Her ladyship deprecated truculence. "My dear Gwen!--really! Are you Farmer Jones's Bull, or who?" Then, during a lull in the servants, for the moment out of hearing, she added in an undertone:--"You can ask Norbury, and see what he thinks. Only wait till Thomas is out of the room." To which Gwen replied substantially that she was still in possession of her senses.

Now Norbury stood in a very peculiar relation to this noble Family. Perhaps it is best described as that of an Unacknowledged Deity, tolerating Atheism from a respect for the Aristocracy. He was not allowed altars or incense, which might have made him vain; but it is difficult to say what questions he was not consulted on, by the Family. Its members had a general feeling that opinions so respectful as his must be right, even when they did not bear analysis.

Gwen let the door close on Thomas before she approached the Shrine of the Oracle. It must be admitted that she did so somewhat as Farmer Jones's Bull might have done. "You've heard all about old Mrs. Picture, Norbury?" said she.

Why should it have been that Mr. Norbury's "Oh dear, yes, my lady!" immediately caused inferences in his hearers' minds--one of which, in the Countess's, caused her to say to Gwen, under her voice:--"I told you so!"?

But Gwen was consulting the Oracle; what did it matter to her what forecasts of its decisions the Public had made? "But you haven't seen her?" said she. No--Mr. Norbury had not seen her; perfect candour must admit that. She was only known to him by report, gathered from conversations in which he himself was not joining. How could he be induced to disclose that part of them that was responsible for a peculiar emphasis in his reply to her ladyship's previous question?

Not by the Countess's--"She is being well attended to, I suppose?" spoken as by one floating at a great height above human affairs, but to a certain extent responsible if they miscarried. For this only produced a cordial testimonial from the Oracle to the assiduity, care, and skill with which every want of the old lady was being supplied. Gwen's method was likely to be much more effective, helped as it was by her absolute licence to be and to do whatever she liked, and to suffer nothing counter to her wishes, though, indeed, she always gained them by omnipotent persuasion. She had also, as we have seen, a happy faculty of going straight to the point. So had Farmer Jones's Bull, no doubt, on occasion shown.

"Which is it, Lutwyche or Mrs. Masham?" said she. What it was that was either remained indeterminate.

Mr. Norbury set himself to say which, without injustice to anyone concerned. He dropped his voice to show how unreservedly he was telling the truth, yet how reluctant he was that his words should be overheard at the other end of the Castle. "No blame attaches," said he, to clear the air. "But, if I might make so bold, the arrangement would work more satisfactory if put upon a footing."

The Countess said:--"You see, Gwen. I told you what it would be." The Earl exchanged understandings with Norbury, which partly took the form of inaudible speech. The fact was that Gwen had sprung the old lady on the household without doing anything towards what Mr. Norbury called putting matters on a footing.

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