"What was it, M'riar? Don't you bottle it up."
"Why, Mr. Jeffcoat he said, after passing the time of day, round in Clove Street, 'I look to Mr. Wardle to keep up the character of The Sun,' he said. So you bear in mind, Mo."
Whereupon Uncle Mo departed, and Aunt M'riar was left to her own reflections, the children being abed and asleep by now; Dolly certainly, probably Dave.
Presently the door to the street was pushed open, and Mr. Jerry appeared. "I don't see no Moses?" said he.
Aunt M'riar gave her message, over her shoulder. To justify this she should have been engaged on some particular task of the needle, easiest performed when seated. Mr. Alibone, to whom her voice sounded unusual, looked round to see. He only saw that her hands were in her lap, and no sign was visible of their employment. This was unlike his experience of Aunt M'riar. "Find the weather trying, Mrs. Wardle?"
"It don't do me any harm."
"Ah--some feels the heat more than others."
Aunt M'riar roused herself to reply:--"If you're meaning me, Mr.
Alibone, it don't touch me so much as many. Only my bones are not so young as they were--that's how it came I was sitting down. Now, supposin' you'd happened in five minutes later, you might have found me tidin' up. I've plenty to do yet awhile." But this was not convincing, although the speaker wished to make it so; probably it would have been better had less effort gone to the utterance of it. For Aunt M'riar's was too obvious.
Mr. Jerry laughed cheerfully, for consolation. "Come now, Aunt M'riar,"
said he, "_you_ ain't the one to talk as if you was forty, and be making mention of your bones. Just you let them alone for another fifteen year.
That'll be time." Mr. Jerry had been like one of the family, so pleasantry of this sort was warranted.
It was not unwelcome to Aunt M'riar. "I'm forty-six, Mr. Jerry," she said. "And forty-six is six-and-forty."
"And fifty-six is six-and-fifty, which is what I am, this very next Michaelmas. Now I call that a coincidence, Mrs. Wardle."
Aunt M'riar reflected. "I should have said it was an accident, Mr.
Jerry. Like anythin' else, as the sayin' is. You mention to Mo, not to be late, no more than need be. Not to throw away good bedtime!" Mr.
Jerry promised to impress the advantages of early hours, and went his way. But his reflections on his short interview with Aunt M'riar took the form of asking himself what had got her, and finding no answer to the question. Something evidently had, from her manner, for there was nothing in what she said.
He asked the same question of Uncle Mo, coming away from The Sun, where they did not wait for the very last tune on the piano, to the disgust of Mr. Jeffcoat, the proprietor. "What's got Aunt M'riar?" said Uncle Mo, repeating his words. "Nothin's got Aunt M'riar. She'd up and tell me fast enough if there was anything wrong. What's put you on that lay, Jerry?"
"I couldn't name any one thing, Mo. But going by the looks of it, I should judge there was a screw loose in somebody's wheelbarrow. P'r'aps I'm mistook. P'r'aps I ain't. S'posing you was to ask her, Mo!--asking don't cost much."
Uncle Moses seemed to weigh the outlay. "No," he said. "Asking wouldn't send me to the work'us." And when he had taken leave of his friend at their sundering-point, he spent the rest of his short walk home in speculation as to what had set Jerry off about Aunt M'riar. It was with no misgiving of hearing of anything seriously amiss that he said to her, as he sat in the little parlour recovering his breath, after walking rather fast, while she cultured the flame of a candle whose wick had been cut off short:--"Everything all right, M'riar?" He was under the impression that he asked in a nonchalant, easy-going manner, and he was quite mistaken. It was only perfectly palpable that he meant it to be so, and he who parades his indifference is apt to overreach himself.
Aunt M'riar had been making up her mind that she must tell Mo what she knew about this man Daverill, at whatever cost to herself. It would have been much easier had she known much less. Face to face with an opportunity of telling it, her resolution wavered and her mind, imperfectly made up, favoured postponement. To-morrow would do. "Ho yes," said she. "Everything's all right, Mo. Now you just get to bed.
Time enough, I say, just on to midnight!" But her manner was defective and her line of argument ill-chosen. Its result was to produce in her hearer a determination to discover what had got her. Because it was evident that Jerry was right, and that _something_ had.
"One of the kids a-sickenin' for measles! Out with it, M'riar! Which is it--Dave?"
"No, it ain't any such a thing. Nor yet Dolly.... Anyone ever see such a candle?"
"Then it's scarlatinar, or mumps. One or other on 'em!"
"Neither one nor t'other, Mo. 'Tain't neither Dave nor Dolly, this time." But something or other was somebody or something, that was clear!
Aunt M'riar may have meant this, and yet not seen how very clear she made it. She recurred to that candle, and a suggestion of Uncle Mo's.
"It's easy sayin', 'Run the toller off,' Mo; but who's to do it with such a little flame?"
Presently the candle, carefully fostered, picked up heart, and the tension of doubt about its future was relieved. "She'll do now," said Uncle Mo, assigning it a gender it had no claim to. "But what's gone wrong, M'riar?"
The appeal for information was too simple and direct to allow of keeping it back; without, at least, increasing its implied importance. Aunt M'riar only intensified this when she answered:--"Nothing at all! At least, nothing to nobody but me. Tell you to-morrow, Mo! It's time we was all abed. Mind you don't wake up Dave!" For Dave was becoming his uncle's bedfellow, and Dolly her aunt's; exchanges to vary monotony growing less frequent as the children grew older.
But Uncle Mo did not rise to depart. He received the candle, adolescent at last, and sat holding it and thinking. He had become quite alive now to what had impressed Mr. Jerry in Aunt M'riar's appearance and manner, and was harking back over recent events to find something that would account for it. The candle's secondary education gave him an excuse. Its maturity would have left him no choice but to go to bed.
A light that flashed through his mind anticipated it. "It's never that beggar," said he, and then, seeing that his description was insufficient:--"Which one? Why, the one we was a-talking of only this morning. Him I've been rounding off with Inspector Rowe--our boy's man he saw in the Park. You've not been alarmin' yourself about _him_?" For Uncle Mo thought he could see his way to alarm for a woman, even a plucky one, in the mere proximity of such a ruffian. He would have gone on to say that the convict was, by now, probably again in the hands of the police, but he saw as the candle flared that Aunt M'riar's usually fresh complexion had gone grey-white, and that she was nodding in confirmation of something half-spoken that she could not articulate.
He was on his feet at his quickest, but stopped at the sound of her voice, reviving. "What--what's that, M'riar?" he cried. "Say it again, old girl!" So strange and incredible had the words seemed that he thought he heard, that he could not believe in his own voice as he repeated them:--"_Your_ husband!" He was not clear about it even then; for, after a pause long enough for the candle to burn up, and show him, as he fell back in his seat, Aunt M'riar, tremulous but relieved at having spoken, he repeated them again:--"Your _husband_! Are ye sure you're saying what you mean, M'riar?"
That it was a relief to have said it was clear in her reply:--"Ay, Mo, that's all right--right as I said it. My husband. You've known I had a husband, Mo." His astonishment left him speechless, but he just managed to say:--"I thought him dead;" and a few moments passed. Then she added, as though deprecatingly:--"You'll not be angry with me, Mo, when I tell you the whole story?"
Then he found his voice. "Angry!--why, God bless the wench!--what call have I to be angry?--let alone it's no concern of mine to be meddlin'
in. Angry! No, no, M'riar, if it's so as you say, and you haven't gone dotty on the brain!"
"I'm not dotty, Mo. You'll find it all right, just like I tell you...."
"Well, then, I'm mortal sorry for you, and there you have it, in a word.
Poor old M'riar!" His voice went up to say:--"But you shan't come to no harm through that character, if that's what's in it. I'll promise ye that." It fell again. "No--I won't wake the children.... I ain't quite on the shelf yet, nor yet in the dustbin. There's my hand on it, M'riar."
"I know you're good, Mo." She caught at the hand he held out to give her, and kept it. "I know you're good, and you'll do like you say. Only I hope he won't come this way no more. I hope he don't know I'm here."
She seemed to shudder at the thought of him.
"Don't he know you're here? That's rum, too. But it's rum, all round.
Things _are_ rum, sometimes. Now, just you take it easy, M'riar, and if there's anything you'll be for telling me--because I'm an old friend like, d'ye see?--why, just you tell me as much as comes easy, and no more. Or just tell me nothing at all, if it sootes you better, and I'll set here and give an ear to it." Uncle Mo resumed his former seat, and Aunt M'riar put back the hand he released in her apron, its usual place when not on active service.
"There's nothing in it I wouldn't tell, Mo--not to you--and it won't use much of the candle to tell it. I'd be the easier for you to know, only I'm not so quick as some at the telling of things." She seemed puzzled how to begin.
Uncle Moses helped. "How long is it since you set eyes on him?"
"Twenty-five years--all of twenty-five years."
Uncle Mo was greatly relieved at hearing this. "Well, but, M'riar--twenty-five years! You're shet of the beggar--clean shet of him!
You are _that_, old girl, legally and factually. But then," said he, "when was you married to him?"
"I've got my lines to show for that, Mo. July six, eighteen twenty-nine."
Uncle Mo repeated the date slowly after her, and then seemed to plunge into a perplexing calculation, very distorting to the natural repose of his face. Touching his finger-tips appeared to make his task easier.
After some effort, which ended without clear results, he said:--"What I'm trying to make out is, how long was you and him keeping house?
Because it don't figure up. How long should you say?"
"We were together six weeks--no more."
"And you--you never seen him since?"
"Never since. Twenty-five years agone, this last July!" At which Uncle Mo was so confounded that words failed him. His only resource was a long whistle. Aunt M'riar, on the contrary, seemed to acquire narrative powers from hearing her own voice, and continued:--"I hadn't known him a twelvemonth, and I should have been wiser than to listen to him--at my age, over one-and-twenty!"
"But you made him marry you, M'riar?"
"I did that, Mo. And I have the lines and my ring, to show it. But I never told a soul, not even mother. I wouldn't have told her, to be stopped--so bad I was!... What!--Dolly--Dolly's mother? Why, she was just a young child, Dave's age!... How did I come to know him? It was one day in the bar--he came in with Tom Spring, and ordered him a quart of old Kennett. He was dressed like a gentleman, and free with his money...."