Ruth Thrale had a bad report to give as she and her young ladyship recrossed the kitchen. It was summed up in the word Fever, restrained by "Not exactly delirium." Granny Marrable came out to meet them, and threw in a word or two of additional restraint. What they had at first thought delirium had turned out quite temperate and sane on closer examination.
"A deal about Australia, and the black witch-doctor," said Granny Marrable. "Now, if one could turn her mind off that, it might be best for her, and she would drop off, quiet." Perhaps her ladyship coming would do her good. The old lady ended with concession about the fever--was not quite sure Maisie had known her just now when she spoke to her.
"Poor old darling!" said Gwen. "You know, Granny, we must expect a little of this sort of thing. We couldn't hope to get off scot-free.
Have you had some sleep, yourself? Has she slept, Ruth?"
"Oh yes. Mother got some sleep in the chair beside--beside _her_, till four o'clock. Then she lay down, and had a good sleep, lying down.
Didn't you, mother?"
"You may be easy about me, child. I've done very well."
"And yourself, Ruth?" By now, Gwen always called Widow Thrale "Ruth."
"Who--I? I had quite a long sleep, while mother sat by--by _her_." This dreadful difficulty of what to call old Maisie! Her daughter was always at odds with it.
Gwen passed on into the bedroom. Just at the door she paused. "You wait outside, and hear," said she. They held back, in the passage, silent.
Old Maisie's voice, on the pillow; audible, not articulate. Two frail hands stretched out in welcome. Two grave eyes, made wild by the surrounding tangle of loose white hair. Those were Gwen's impressions as she approached the bed.
The voice grew articulate. "Oh, my darling, I knew you would come. I want you close, to tell me...."
"Yes, dear!--to tell you what?"
"I want you to tell me whether one of the things is a dream."
"One of which things, dear?" One has to be a hard old stager not to feel his flesh creep at delirium. Gwen had to fight against a shudder.
"There are so many, you know, now that they all come back at once. Tell me, darling, were my little boy and girl real, who came up into my room and played and gave me tea out of small cups? I called them Dave and Dolly. Dolly was very small. Oh, Dolly!" Dolly's size, and her tenderness on one's knee, were, so to speak, audible in the voice that became tender to apostrophise her.
"Dave and Dolly Wardle? Of course they are real! As real as you or me!
There they are in Sapps Court, with Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar. And Susan Burr," Then such a nice scheme crossed Gwen's mind.
But old Maisie seemed adrift, not able to be sure of any memory; past and present at war in her mind, either intolerant of the other. "Then tell me, dear," said she. "Is the other real too? Is it not a thing I have dreamed, a thing I have dreamed in the night, here in Widow Thrale's cottage ... where I came in the cart ... where I came from the great house where the sweet old gentleman was, that was your father ...
where I could see out over the tree lands ... where my Ruth came to me?..." The affection for her daughter, that had struck root firmly in her heart, remained a solid fact, whether she was thinking of her as before or after the revelation of her identity.
Gwen sat beside her on the bed-edge, her arm round her head on its pillow, her free hand soothing the restless fingers that would not be still. "What is it you think you have dreamed, Mrs. Picture dear?" said she.
"It was all a dream, I think. Just a mad dream--but then--but then--did not my Ruth think I was mad?..."
"But what was it? Tell it to me, now, quietly."
"It was that my Phoebe--my sister--oh, my dear sister!--dead so many years ago--sat by me here, as you sit now--and we talked and talked of the old time--and our young Squire, so beautiful, upon his horse.... Oh, but then--but then!..." She checked herself suddenly, and a look of horror came in her face; then went on:--"No, listen! There was an awful thing in the dream--a bad thing--about a letter.... Oh, how can I tell it?..."
Gwen caught at the pause to speak, saying gently but firmly:--"Dear Mrs.
Picture, it was no dream, but all true. Believe me, I know. When you are quite well and strong, I will tell you all over again about the letter, and how my dear old father found it all out for you. And I tell you what! You shall come and live here with your sister and daughter, instead of Sapps Court.... Oh no--you shall have Dave and Dolly. They shall come too." This was Gwen's scheme, but it was no older than the mention just made of it. "I can do these things," she added. "Papa lets me do what I choose."
Old Maisie lay back, looking at the beautiful face in a kind of wonderment. The feeling it gave her that she was in the hands of some superior power was the most favourable one possible in a case where fever was the result of mental disquiet. Presently the strain on the face abated, and the wild look in the eyes. The lids drooped, then closed over them. Something like sleep followed, leaving Gwen free to rejoin old Phoebe and Ruth, outside. They were still close at hand.
"Did you hear all that?" said Gwen. It appeared that they had, or the greater part. The account of how the night had passed was postponed, owing to the arrival of Dr. Nash.
"I would sooner give her no drugs of any sort," said he, when he had taken a good look at the patient. "I will leave something for her to take if she doesn't get sleep naturally. Otherwise the choice is between giving her something harmless to make her believe she is taking medicine, and telling her she has nothing whatever the matter with her.
I incline to the last. Get her to take food whenever you can. Always have something ready for her whenever's there a chance. I expect you to see to that, Widow Thrale. And, Lady Gwendolen, _you_ are good for her--remember that! You've got to pretend you're God Almighty--do you understand?" It goes without saying that by this time no one else was within hearing.
"I understand perfectly," said Gwen. "That little doze she had just now was because I pledged myself and my father to the reality of the whole thing. She had got to think it was all a dream."
She suppressed, as the sort of thing for London, a thought that came into her head at this moment, that it was the first time the family coronet had been of the slightest use to any living creature! Not here, with the hush of the Feudal System still on the land, and the old church at Chorlton's monotonous belfry calling its flock to celebrate the Third Sunday in Advent. For next Sunday was Christmas Eve, and old Maisie's eighty-first birthday. Next Monday was old Phoebe's, with just the stroke of midnight between them.
Gwen seized the opportunity to get from Dr. Nash a fuller account of his disclosure to old Phoebe. He told her what we know already.
"Only I'm due at the other end of the village," said he, ending up. He looked at his watch. "I've got five minutes.... Yes--it was the small boy's letter that did the job. I had been hammering away at the old lady to get the thin of the wedge in, and I assure you it was useless. Worse than useless! So I gave it up. But I suspect that some shot of mine hit the mark, without my seeing it. Something had made her susceptible. And when the kid's letter came, that did it. I wasn't there."
"Oh--then you only heard...."
"I was called back. I found the old body gone off in a faint, and the letter on the floor--at least, on the baby. I've got it in my pocket, I do believe.... No, I haven't!"
"What's this on the window-ledge? This is Dave's hand." But Gwen saw that it was directed to "Old Mrs. Picture Strides Cotage Chorlton under bradBury." She opened it without remorse, and the doctor said:--"Of course! He wrote two. That one's to t'other old lady. Just the same, I expect."
It was, word for word. But it had a short postscript:--"When you come back me and Dolly shall give you tea it is stood ready and grany maroBone too."
"Poor little people!" said Gwen. "How they will feel it! But I mustn't keep you, doctor."
And then, after a word or two to Widow Thrale, Dr. Nash drove off through the snow, now thickening.
Gwen, you see, was quite alive to the situation; perhaps indeed she was ready to put a worse construction on it than the doctor. He had seen so many a spark of life, far nearer extinction than old Maisie's, flicker up and grow and grow, and end by steady burning through its appointed time, that no amount of mere attenuation frightened him. Gwen, on the other hand, could not bring herself to believe that any creature so frail would stand the strain of such an earthquake of sensibilities.
Unless indeed some change for the better showed itself in a few hours, she _must_ succumb. Probably she was only relieving the tension of her own feelings by looking facts fiercely in the face. It is a common attitude of inexperience, under like circumstances. Dr. Nash certainly had said to her that "the strength was well maintained." But do we not all of us accept that phrase as an ill-omen--a vulture in the desert?
No--no! Look the facts in the face! Glare at them!
Returning to the bedside, where Granny Marrable was sitting in her arm-chair beside her sister, who was quiet--possibly sleeping--she took the opportunity to note the changes that Time had wrought in each twin.
The moment she came to look for them, she began to marvel that she had never seen the similarities; for instance, scarcely a month since, when the two were face to face outside this house, and each looked at the other, and neither said or thought:--"How like myself!" Was it possible that they were really _more_ unlike then?--that the storm which had passed over both had told more, relatively, on the healthy village dame, kept blooming by a life whose cares were little more than healthy excitements, than on the mere derelict of so many storms, any one enough to send it to the bottom? There was little work left for Time or Calamity to do on that old face on the pillow; while even this four-and-twenty-hours of overwrought excitement had left its mark upon old Phoebe. Gwen saw that the faces _were_ the same, past dispute, as soon as she compared them point by point.
Once seen, the thing grew, and became strange and unearthly, almost a discomfort. Gwen went back into the kitchen, where she found Ruth, affecting some housework but without much heart in it. She too was showing the effects of the night and day just passed, her heavy eyelids fighting with their weight, not successfully; her restless hands protesting against yawns; trying to curb rebellious lips, in vain.
"I can see the likeness now," said Gwen, thinking it best to talk.
"Between mother and--my mother?" was Ruth's reply. How else could she have said it, without beginning to call old Phoebe her aunt?
Gwen saw the embarrassment, and skipped explanation. "Why not call her Mrs. Picture--little Dave's name?" Then she felt this was a mistake, and added:--"No, I suppose that wouldn't do!"
"Something will come, to say, in time. One's head goes, now." Ruth went on to speak of her childish recollection of the news of her mother's death--quite a vivid memory--when she was nearly nine years old. "I was quite a big little maid when the letter came. We got it out, you know, just now. And, oh, how sick it made me!"
"I should like so much to see it," said Gwen. Her young ladyship's lightest wish was law, and Ruth nearly went to seek the letter. Gwen had to be very emphatic that another time would do, to stop her.
"Then I will get it out presently, and give it to your ladyship to take away and read," said Ruth, and went back to what she was saying. "That is how I came to be able to call her my mother, at once. I mean the moment I knew she was not Mrs. Prichard. Now that I know it, I keep looking at her dear old face to make it out the same face that I kept on thinking my mother in Australia had, all the time I thought she was living there away from us. And if I had never known she died--I mean had we never thought her dead--I would have gone on thinking the same face. Oh, such a beautiful young face! Exactly like what mother's was then!--the same face for her that it was when I last saw it...."
"I see. And when you look at your--your aunt's face, you naturally do not look for what she was forty years ago."
"That is it, your ladyship. Because I have had mother to go by, all the time. She has always been the same she was last week--last month--last year--any time. What must it be to _her_, to see me what I am!"
"I don't believe it is harder for her to think about than it is for you.