"That was the name."
"Will she be able to tell more? Will she tell us who her husband was?"
"Her husband!" Ruth thought this was new trouble--that the Granny's head had given way under the strain. "Her husband was my father, mother,"
said she. "Think!"
But old Phoebe was quite clear. "I am all right, child," said she reassuringly. "Her _second_ husband. Marrable was _my_ second, you know, else I would still have been Cropredy. Why is she not Daverill?"
Ruth was really the less clear of the two. "Oh yes!" said she wonderingly. "She is Mrs. Prichard, still."
"Please God we shall know all!... What was that?"
"I must go to her.... Come!" For old Maisie had called out. Her daughter went back to her quickly, and Granny Marrable followed, not far behind.
"Come, dear, come.... I called for you to know.... Come, Phoebe, come near, and let me tell you.... He was not so wicked.... Oh no, oh no--it was none of his own doing--I shall be able ... directly...." Thus old Maisie, gasping for breath, and falling back on the pillow from which she had part risen. The hectic flush in her face was greater, and her eyes were wild under her tangle of beautiful silver hair. Both were afraid for her, for each knew what fever might, mean. They might lose her, almost without a renewal of life together.
Still, it might be no more than the agitation of a moment, a passing phase. They tried to pacify her. How _could_ the letter be none of Daverill's own doing? But she would not be soothed--would say the thing she had set her mind to say, but failed to find the words or breath for.
What was it she was trying to say? Was it about the letter?
Elizabeth-next-door came into the room, tentatively. Ostensible reason, inquiry about breakfast; actual reason, curiosity. Sounds of speech under stress had aroused, and a glance at old Maisie intensified it.
Widow Thrale would come directly, but for the moment was intent on hearing what Mrs. Prichard was saying. To Elizabeth, Maisie continued Mrs. Prichard.
She would not leave unsaid this thing she was bent on:--"No, dear! No, dear! It does not hurt me to talk, but I want time.... I will tell you ... I must tell you.... I know it.... It was not his own doing.... He was set on to do it by a devil that possessed him.... There are devils loose among the blacks...."
The pulse in the hand Ruth held was easy to find. Yes, that _was_ fever!
Ruth left her to speak with Elizabeth, and the hand went over to its fellow, in Granny Marrable's.
"Phoebe, dearest, that is so--and in those days there were a many blacks. But they were fewer and fewer after that, and none in our part when we came away, my son and I.... Phoebe!"
"What, dearest?"
"You must say nothing of _him_ to Ruth. He was her brother."
"Say nothing of him to Ruth--why not?" She had lost sight of her adventure with the convict, and did not identify him. She may have fancied some other son accompanied her sister home.
"Yes--yes--nothing to _her_! He is not fit to speak of--not fit to think of.... Do not ask about him. Forget him! I do not know if he be alive or dead."
Then an image of the convict, or madman, flashed across Phoebe's mind.
She dared not talk of him now, with that wild light and hectic flush in her sister's face; it would only make bad worse. But a recollection of her first association of him with the maniac in the Gadarene tombs was quick on the heels of this image, and prompted her to say:--"Had no evil spirit power over _him_, then, as well as his father?"
The wild expression on old Maisie's face died down, and gave place to one that was peace itself by comparison. "I see it all now," said she.
"Yes--you are right! It was after his father's death he became so wicked." It was the devil that possessed his father, driven out to seek a home, and finding it in the son. That was apparently what her words implied, but there was too much of delirium in her speech and seeming to justify their being taken as expressing a serious thought.
Old Phoebe sat beside her, trying now and again with quiet voice and manner to soothe and hush away the terrible memories of the audacious deception to which each owed a lifelong loss of the other. But when fever seizes on the blood, it will not relax its hold for words.
One effect of this was good, in a sense. It _is_ true, as the poet said, that one fire burns out another's burning--or at any rate that one pain is deadened by another anguish--and it was a Godsend to Granny Marrable and Ruth Thrale that an acupression of immediate anxiety should come to counteract their bewilderment, and to extinguish for the time the conflagration of a thousand questions--whys, whens, and wherefores innumerable--in their overburdened minds. Visible fever in the delicate frame, to which it seemed the slightest shock might mean death, was a summons to them to put aside every possible thought but that of preserving what Time had spared so long, though Chance had been so cruel an oppressor. It would be the cruellest stroke of all that she should be thus strangely restored to them, only to be snatched away in an hour.
Presently she seemed quieter; the fever came in gusts, and rose and fell. She had once or twice seemed almost incoherent, but it passed away. Meanwhile Granny Marrable's memory of that madman or criminal, who had at least known the woman he claimed as his mother well enough to be mystified by her twin sister, rankled in her mind, and made it harder and harder for her to postpone speech about him. She would not tell the incident--she was clear of _that_--but would it harm Maisie to talk of him? She asked herself the question the next time her sister referred to him, and could not refrain from letting her speech about him finish.
It came of her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell, goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:--"But do you not see, Phoebe dear, do you not see how good his father must have been, to do no worse than he did? See what the devil that possessed him could do with Ralph--my youngest, he was; Isaac died--a good boy, quite a good boy, till I lost his father! Oh--see what he came to do!"
"He ... he was sent to prison, was he not?" After saying it, old Phoebe was afraid she might have to tell the whole tale of how she knew it.
But she need not have feared. Old Maisie was in a kind of dreamland, only half-cognisant of what was going on about her.
Her faint voice wandered on. "I was not thinking of that. That was nothing! He stole some money, and it cost him dear.... No!--it was worse than that--a bad thing!... It was _not_ the girl's fault.... Emma was a good girl...."
Granny Marrable was injudicious. But it was an automatic want of judgment, bred of mind-strain. She could not help saying:--"Was that Emma Drax?" For the name, which she had heard from the convict, had hung on her mind, always setting her to work to fashion some horrible story for its owner.
"Yes--Emma Drax.... They found her guilty.... I do not mean that....
What is it I mean?... I mean they laid it all at her door.... Men do!"
This seemed half wandering, and Granny Marrable hoped it meant a return of sleep. She was disappointed. For old Maisie became more restless and hot, starting convulsively, catching at her hand, and exclaiming:--"But how came you to know?--how came you to know? You were not there then.
Oh, Phoebe dearest, you were not there _then_." She kept on saying this, and Granny Marrable despaired of finding words to explain, under such circumstances. The tale of her meeting with the convict was too complex.
She thought to herself that she might say that Maisie had spoken the name as a dream-word, waking. But that would have been a fib, and fibs were not her line.
"I went myself to get him," said Ruth, reappearing after a longer absence than old Phoebe had anticipated. She was removing an out-of-door cloak, and an extempore headwrap, when she entered the room. "How is she?" she asked.
Old Phoebe shook her head doubtfully. "Whom did you go for, child? The doctor? I'm glad."
"I thought it better.... Mother darling!--how are you?" She knelt by the bed, held the burning hands, looked into the wild eyes. "Yes--I did quite right," she said.
Dr. Nash came, not many minutes later. Whether the mixture to be taken every two hours, fifty years ago, was the same as would have been given now, does not concern the story. It, or the reassurance of the doctor's visit, had a sedative effect; and old Maisie seemed to sleep, to the great satisfaction of her nurses. What really did credit to his professional skill was that he perceived that a visit from Lady Gwendolen would be beneficial. A message was sent at once to John Costrell, saying that an accompanying letter was to be taken promptly to the Towers, to catch her ladyship before she went out. We have seen that it reached her in time.
"You found that all I told you was true, Granny Marrable," said the doctor, after promising to return in time to catch her ladyship.
"I shall live to believe it true, doctor, please God!"
"Tut tut! You see that it _is_ true."
"Yes, indeed, and I know that yonder is Maisie, come back to life. I know it by thinking; but 'tis all I can do, not to think her still dead."
"She can talk, I suppose--recollects things? Things when you were kids?"
"God 'a' mercy, yes, doctor! Why--hasn't she told me how she drew my tooth, with a bit of silk and a candle, and knew which drawer-knob it was, and the days she saw her husband first, a-horseback?... Oh, merciful Heavens, how had he the heart?"
"Some chaps have the Devil in 'em, and that's the truth!"
"That's what she says. She just made my flesh creep, a-telling how the devils come out of the black savages, to seize on Christians!"
But the doctor was not prepared to be taken at his word, in this way.
Devils are good toys for speech, but they are not to be real. "Lot of rum superstitions in those parts!" said he. "Now look you here, ma'am!
When I come back, I shall expect to hear that you and your daughter....
Oh ah!--she's not your daughter! What the deuce is she?"
"Ruth has always been my niece, but we have gone near to forget it, times and again. 'Tis so many a long year!"