CHAPTER XX
HOW GRANNY MARRABLE THOUGHT SHE OUGHT NOT TO GO TO SLEEP, BUT DID.
HOW A CRICKET WAS STILL AT IT, WHEN SHE WAKED. HOW MAISIE WAKED TOO. HOW THEY REMEMBERED THINGS TOGETHER, IN THE NIGHT. A SKULL TWENTY-SEVEN INCHES ROUND. HOW PHOEBE COULD NOT FORGIVE HER BROTHER-IN-LAW, GOD OR NO! HOW IT HAD ALL BEEN MAISIE'S FAULT. THE OTHER LETTER, IN THE WORKBOX, BEHIND THE SCISSORS. THE STORY OF THE SCORPION. ALL TRUE! ONLY IT WAS MRS. STENNIS, WHO DIED IN AGONY.
ELIZABETH-NEXT-DOOR'S IMMOVABLE HUSBAND. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE WAS RELIEVED ABOUT THAT SCORPION. HOW MAISIE'S HUSBAND HAD REALLY HAD A DEVIL--A BLACK MAN'S--WHICH MAISIE'S SON HAD INHERITED. A NEW INFECTION IN THINE EYE. HOW RUTH WENT FOR THE DOCTOR. HOW HE RECOMMENDED GWEN, AS WELL AS THE MIXTURE
The two old twins knew it all now, so far as it would ever be a matter of knowledge. They had got at the heart of each other's identity, before either really understood the cruel machination that had cancelled the life of either for the other.
Ruth Thrale left them alone together, and went back to force herself to eat. Keziah wanted to get back to her old man, and how could she go, unless Ruth kept in trim to attend to her two charges? Who could say that old Phoebe, at eighty, would not give in under the strain? Ruth had always a happy faculty of self-forgetfulness; and now, badly as she had felt the shock, she so completely lost sight of herself in the thought of the greater trouble of the principal actors, as to be fully alive to the one great need ahead, that of guarding and preserving what was left of the old life, the tending of which had come so strangely upon her.
She refused Keziah's offer to remain on. Elizabeth-next-door, she said, was always at hand for emergencies.
Keziah stayed late enough to see all arranged for the night, ending with a more or less successful effort to get old Maisie to swallow arrowroot.
She helped Ruth to establish the Granny in her own high-backed chair beside her sister--for neither would relinquish the other's hand--and took advantage of a very late return of Brantock, the carrier, to convey her home, where she arrived after midnight.
All know the feeling that surely must have been that of at least one of the old sisters, that sleep ought to be for some mysterious reason combated, or nonsuited rather, when the mind is at odds with grave events. One rises rebellious against its power, when it steals a march on wakefulness, catching the keenest vigilance unawares. There was no reason why Granny Marrable should not sleep in her own arm-chair--which she would say was every bit as good as bed, and used accordingly--except that yielding meant surrender of the faculties to unconsciousness of a problem not yet understood, with the sickening prospect of finding it unanswered on awakening. That seemed to be reason enough for many resentful recoils from the very portals of sleep; serving no end, as Maisie had been overcome without a contest, and lay still as an effigy on a tomb. A vague fear that she might die unwatched, looking so like Death already, may have touched Phoebe's mind. But fears and unsolved riddles alike melted away and vanished in the end; and when Ruth Thrale, an hour later, starting restless from her own couch near by, looked in to satisfy herself that all was well, both might have been leagues away in a dream-world, for any consciousness they showed of her presence.
That was on the stroke of one; and for two full hours after all was silence, but for the records of the clock at its intervals, and the cricket dwelling on the same theme our forefathers heard and gave no heed to, a thousand years ago. Then old Phoebe woke to wonder, for a blank moment, what had happened that she should be sitting there alone, with the lazy flicker of a charred faggot helping out a dim, industrious rushlight in a shade. But only till she saw that she was _not_ alone. It all came back then. The figure on the bed!--not _dead_, surely?
No--for the hand she held was warm enough to reassure her. It had been the terror of a moment, that this changed creature, with memories that none but Maisie could have known, had flashed into her life to vanish from it, and leave her bewildered, almost without a word of that inexplicable past. Only of a moment, for the hand she held tightened on hers, and the still face that was, and was not, her dead sister's turned to her, looked at her open-eyed, and spoke.
"I think I am not dreaming now, but I was.... I was dreaming of Phoebe, years ago.... But _you_ are Phoebe. Say that I am Maisie, that I may hear you. Say it!"
"Oh, my darling!--I know you are Maisie. But it is so hard to know."
"Yes--it is all so hard to know--so hard to think! But I know it is true.... Oh, Phoebe, where do you think I was but now, in my dream?...
Yes, where?--What place?... Guess!"
"I cannot tell ... back in the old time?"
"Back in the old time--back in the old place. I was shelling peas to help old Keturah--old Keturah that had had three husbands, and her old husband then was the sexton, and he had buried them all three! We were there, under her porch ... with the honeysuckle all in flower--and, oh, the smell of it in the heat!--it was all there in my dream! And you were there. Oh, Phoebe darling, how beautiful you were! We were seventeen."
"Ah, my dear, I know when that was. 'Twas the day _they_ came--came first. Oh, God be good to us!"
"Oh, Phoebe dear, why be so heartbroken? It was a merry time. Thank God for it with me, darling!... Ay, I know--all over now!..."
"I mind it well, dear. They came up on their horses."
"Thornton and Ralph. And made a pretext they would like to see inside the Church. Because old Keturah had the key."
"But 'twas an untruth! Little care they had for inside the Church! 'Twas ourselves, and they knew it."
"Oh, Phoebe!--but _we_ knew it too! I had no chance to dream how we showed them the Church and the crypt, for I woke up. Ah, but 'tis long ago now!--sixty-two--sixty-three years! I wonder, is the stack of bones in the crypt now that was then? There was a big skull that measured twenty-seven inches."
"That it was! Twenty-seven. Now, to think of us young creatures handling those old bones!"
"Then it was not long but they came again on their horses, and this time it was that their father the Squire would see father righted in his lawsuit about the upper waters of the millstream. That was how Thornton made a friend of father. And then it was we played them our trick, to say which was which. We changed our frocks, and they were none the wiser."
A recollection stirred in old Phoebe's mind, that could almost bring a smile to her lips, even now. "Ralph never was any the wiser. He went away to the Indies, and died there.... But not afore he told to my husband how Thornton came to tell us apart.... How did he? Why, darling, 'twas the way you would give him all your hand, and I stinted him of mine."
"You never loved him, Phoebe."
"Was I not in the right of it, Maisie?" She then felt the words were hasty, and would have been glad to recall them. She waited for an answer, but none came. The fire was all but out, and the morning chill was in the air. She rose from the bedside and crossed the room to help it from extinction. But she felt very shaky on her feet.
A little rearrangement convinced the fire that it had been premature; and an outlying faggot, brought into hotchpot, decided as an after-thought that it could flare. "I am coming back," said Granny Marrable. She was afraid her sister would think she was going to be left alone. But there was no need, for when she reached her chair again--and she was glad to do so--old Maisie was just as she had left her, quite tranquil and seeming collected, but with her eyes open, watching the welcome light of the new flicker. One strange thing in this interview was that her weakness seemed better able to endure the strain of the position than her sister's strength.
She picked up the thread of the conversation where that interlude of the fire had left it. "You never loved Thornton, Phoebe dearest. But he was mine, for my love. He was kind and good to me, all those days out there in the bush, till I lost him. He was a lawbreaker, I know, but he paid his penalty. And was I not to forgive, when I loved him? God forgives, Phoebe." Half of what she had come to know had slipped away from her already; and, though she was accepting her sister as a living reality, the forged letter, the cause of all, was forgotten.
Granny Marrable, on the contrary, kept in all her bewilderment a firm hold on the wickedness of Daverill the father. It was he that had done it all, and no other. Conceivably, her having set eyes on Daverill the son had made this hold the firmer. To her the name meant treachery and cruelty. Even in this worst plight of a mind in Chaos, she could not bear to see the rugged edges of a truth trimmed off, to soften judgment of a wicked deed. But had she been at her best, she might have borne it this time to spare her sister the pain of sharing her knowledge, if such ignorance was possible. As it was, she could not help saying:--"God forgives, Maisie, and I would have forgiven, if I could have had you back when he was past the need of you. Oh, to think of the long years we might still have had, but for his deception!"
"My dear, it may be you are right. But all my head is gone for thinking.
You are there, and that is all I know. How could I?... What _is_ it all?"
The despair in her voice did not unnerve her sister more. Rather, if anything, it strengthened her, as did anything that drew her own mind out of itself to think only of her fellow-sufferer. She could but answer, hesitatingly:--"My dear, was I not here all the while you thought me dead?... If you had known ... oh, if you had known!... you might have come." She could not keep back the sound of her despair in her own voice.
Maisie started spasmodically from her pillow.
"Oh, God have mercy on me! Save me, Phoebe, save me!" she cried. She clung with both hands to her sister, and gasped for breath. Then the paroxysm of her excitement passed, and she sank back, whispering aloud in broken speech:--"I mean ... it came back to me ... the tale ... the letter.... Oh, but it cannot be true!... Tell it me again--tell me what you know."
Phoebe's response flagged. What could her old brain be said to _know_, yet, in such a whirl? "I'll try, my dear, to say it out right, for you to hear. But 'tis a hard thing to know, and 'tis hard to have to know it. Dr. Nash said it to me, that it was Thornton, your husband. And our young lady of the Towers--she, my dear, you know, that is Lady Gwendolen Rivers--said it to me again." Old Maisie clung closer to the hand she held, and trembled so that Phoebe stopped, saying:--"Ought I to tell?"
"Yes--go on! You know, dear, I know it all--half know it--but I cannot hold it for long--it goes. Go on!"
"He wrote to me--he wrote to you--saying, we were dead. O God, forgive him for his cruelty! Why, oh why?" She fixed her eyes on her sister, and seemed to wait for an answer to the question.
And yet she wondered in her heart when the answer came. It came with a light that broke through the speaker's face, a sound of relief in her words:--"It was his love for me, Phoebe dearest--it was his love for me!
He would not have me go from him to my sister in England, even for the time I would have wanted, to see her again. The fault was mine, dear, the fault was mine! I was ever on at him--plaguing--plaguing him to spare me for the time. Oh--'twas I that did it!"
Let her believe it! Let her see a merit in it for the man she loved!
That was Phoebe's thought.
"He was always good to me," Maisie continued. "He never thought of what might come of it. All his desire was I should not leave him. Oh, Phoebe, Phoebe, if only I might have died there and then, out in the Colony!"
"To see me no more? Not this once? I thank God that has spared ye to me, Maisie, just but to hear your voice and hold your hand and kiss your face. If I be dreaming, I be dreaming. Only I would not wake, not I. But I can scarce bear myself for the wonderment of it all. How could you come back alone--my Maisie, alone and old!--back again to England--in a ship--through the storms?" For all the mind that Granny Marrable had left after the bewildering shock was aching to know more.
Old Maisie was almost too weak for anything like curiosity about the past; she simply submitted--acquiesced. This was her sister, not dead by some miracle. When in dreams we see again the departed, do we speak of the interim? Surely never? Neither did Maisie. She could not even look forward to knowing more. She could talk on, with no difficulty of speech--indeed, seemed talkative. She could reply now to Phoebe's question:--"But, my dear, I was not alone, nor old. I was not much older than my Ruth that I have found.... Where is she?--she is not gone?" She looked round, frightened, trying to raise herself.
"She is gone away to sleep. It is night, you know. There goes the clock.
Four. She will come again.... But, oh, Maisie, was it as long ago as that? 'Tis but a very little while back Ruth turned fifty."
"Is my girl turned of fifty, then?--yes! it must be so. Fifty years past I landed ashore in Hobart Town, and it was a babe of four I had to leave behind. Well--I was a bit older. I was fifty-seven when I lost my son."
This seemed to mean the death of some son unknown to Granny Marrable.
The convict was never farther from her mind. "'Tis twenty-five years I have been in England--all of twenty-five years, Phoebe."
"Oh, God have pity on us all! Twenty-five years!" It was a cry of pain turned into words. Had she had to say what stung her most, she would probably have said the thought that Maisie might have seen her daughter's wedding, or at least the babyhood of her children. So much there was to tell!--would she live to hear it? And so much to hear!--would she live to tell it? She could not understand her sister's words that followed:--"All of twenty years alone," referring to the period since her son's transportation. It was really longer. But memory of figures is insecure in hours of trial.
Maisie continued:--"When I came back, I went straight to our old home, long ago--to Darenth Mill, to hear what I might, and old Keturah was dead, and her husband was dead, and ne'er a soul knew aught to tell me.
And there was father's grave in the churchyard, and no other. So what could I think but what the letter said, that all were drowned in the cruel sea, your husband Nicholas, and my little one, all three?"