"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."