"You mean the girl I married?" He had had to marry one of them, but could only marry one. That was how he classed her. "What became of that girl, I wonder? Maybe you know? Is she alive or dead?"
"I couldn't say, at this len'th of time." Then, she remembered a servant, at the house where her child was born, and saw safety for her own fiction in assuming this girl's identity. Invention was stimulated by despair. "She was confined of a girl, where I was in service. She gave me letters to post to her husband. R. Thornton Daverill." That was safe, anyhow. For she remembered giving letters, so directed, to this girl.
The convict sat down on the table, looking at her no longer, which she found a relief. "Did that kid live or die?" said he. "Blest if I recollect!"
"Born dead. She had a bad time of it. She came back to London, and I never see any more of her." Aunt M'riar should have commented on this oblivion of his own child. She was letting her knowledge of the story influence her, and endangering her version of it.
The man stopped and thought a little. Then he turned upon her suddenly.
"How came you to remember that name for twenty-two years?" said he.
A thing she recollected of this servant-girl helped her at a pinch. "She asked me to direct a letter when she hurt her hand," she said. "When you've wrote a name, you bear it in mind."
"What did she call the child?"
"It was born dead."
"What did she mean to call it?"
The answer should have been "She didn't tell me." But Aunt M'riar was a poor fiction-monger after all. For what must she say but "Polly, after herself"?
"Not Mary?"
Then Aunt M'riar forgot herself completely. "No--Polly. After the name you called her, at The Tun." She saw her mistake, too late.
Daverill turned his gaze on her again, slowly. "You seem to remember a fat lot about this and that!" said he. He got down off the table, and stepped between Aunt M'riar and the door, saying: --"Come you here, mistress!" The harshness of his voice was hideous to her. He caught her wrist, and pulled her to the window. The only gas-lamp the Court possessed shone through it on her white face. "Now--what's your * * *
married name?"
Aunt M'riar could not utter a word.
"I can tell you. You're that * * * young Polly, and your name's Daverill. You're my lawful wife--d'ye hear?" He gave a horrible laugh.
"Why, I thought you was buried years ago!"
She began gasping hysterically:--"Leave me--leave me--you are nothing to me now!" and struggled to free herself. Yet, inexpressibly dreadful as the fact seemed to her, she knew that her struggle was not against the grasp of a stranger. Think of that bygone time! The thought took all the spirit out of her resistance.
He returned to his seat upon the table, drawing her down beside him.
"Yes, Polly Daverill," said he, "I thought you dead and buried, years ago. I've had a rough time of it, since then, across the water." He paused a moment; then said quite clearly, almost passionlessly:--"God curse them all!" He repeated the words, even more equably the second time; then with a rough bear-hug of the arm that gripped her waist:--"What have _you_ got to say about it, hay? Who's your * * *
husband now? Who's your prizefighter?"
The terrified woman just found voice for:--"He's not my husband." She could not add a word of explanation.
The convict laughed unwholesomely, beneath his breath. "_That's_ what you've come to, is it? Pretty Polly! Mary the Maid of the Inn! The man you've got is not your husband. Sounds like the parson--Holy Scripture, somewhere! I've seen him. He's at the lush-ken down the road. Now you tell the truth. When's he due back here?"
She had only just breath for the word seven, which was true. It was past the half-hour, and he would not have believed her had she said sooner.
But it was as though she told him that she knew she was helplessly in his power for twenty-five minutes. Helplessly, that is, strong resolution and desperation apart!
"Then he won't be here till half-past. Time and to spare! Now you listen to me, and I'll learn you a thing or two you don't know. You are my--lawful--wife, so just you listen to me! Ah, would you?..." This was because he had supposed that a look of hers askant had rested on a knife upon the table within reach. It was a pointed knife, known as "the bread knife," which Dolly was never allowed to touch. He pulled her away from it, caught at it, and flung it away across the room. "It's a narsty, dangerous thing," he said, "safest out of the way!" Then he went on:--"You--are--my--lawful--wife, and what St. Paul says mayhap you know? 'Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.' ... What!--me not know my * * * Testament! Why!--it's the only *
* * book you get a word of when you're nursing for Botany Bay fever. God curse 'em all! Why--the place was Hell--Hell on earth!"
Aunt M'riar now saw too late that she should not have opened that door, at any cost. But how about Micky? Surely, however, that was a mere threat. What had this man to gain by carrying it out? Why had she not seen that he would never run needless risk, to gain no end?
The worst thorn in her heart was that, changed as he was from the dissolute, engaging youth that she had dreamed of reforming, she still knew him for himself. He was, as he said, her husband. And, for all that she shrank from him and his criminality with horror, she was obliged to acknowledge--oh, how bitterly!--that she wanted help against herself as much as against him. She was obliged to acknowledge the grisly force of Nature, that dictated the reimposition of the yoke that she had through all these years conceived that she had shaken off. And she knew that she might look in vain for help to Law, human or theological. For each in its own way, and for its own purposes, gives countenance to the only consignment of one human creature to the power of another that the slow evolution of Justice has left in civilised society. Each says to the girl trapped into unholy matrimony, from whom the right to look inside the trap has been cunningly withheld:--"Back to your lord and master! Go to him, he is your husband--kiss him--take his hand in thine!" Neither is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one human being to another, when that human being is a woman. And yet Nature is so inexorable that the victim of a cruel marriage often needs help sorely--help against herself, to enable her, on her own behalf, to shake off the Devil some mysterious instinct impels her to cling to. Such an instinct was stirring in Aunt M'riar's chaos of thought and feeling, even through her terror and her consciousness of the vileness of the man and the vileness of his claim over her. The idea of using the power that her knowledge of his position gave her never crossed her mind. Say rather that the fear that a call for help would consign him to a just retribution for his crimes was the chief cause of her silence.
A dread that she might be compelled to do so was lessened by his next speech. "You've no call to look so scared, Polly Daverill. You do what I tell you, and be sharp about it. What are you good for?--that's the question! Got any money in the house?"
She felt relieved. Now he would take his arm away. That arm was all the worse from the fact that her shrinking from it was one-sided. "A little," she answered. "It's upstairs. Let me get it."
He relaxed the arm. "Go ahead!" he said. "I'll follow up."
She cried out with sudden emphasis:--"No--I will not. I will not." And then with subdued earnestness:--"Indeed I will bring it down. Indeed I will."
"You won't stick up there, by any chance, till your man that's not your husband happens round?"
She addressed him by name for the first time. "Thornton, did I ever tell you a lie?"
"I never caught you in one, that I know of. Cut along!"
She went like a bird released. Once in her room, and clear of him, she could lock her door and cry for help. She turned the key, and had actually thrown up the window-sash, when her own words crossed her mind--her claim to veracity. No--she would keep a clear conscience, come what might. She glanced up the Court, and saw Micky coming through the arch; then closed the window, and took an old leather purse from the drawer of the looking-glass Mr. Bartlett's men had not broken. It contained the whole of her small savings.
After she left the room, Daverill had glanced round for valuables. An old silver watch of Uncle Mo's, that always stopped unless allowed to lie on its back, was ticking on the dresser. The convict slipped it into his pocket, and looked round for more, opening drawers, looking under dish-covers. Finding nothing, he sat again on the table, with his hands in the pockets of his velveteen corduroy coat. His face-twist grew more marked as he wrinkled the setting of a calculating eye. "I should have to square it with Miss Juliar," said he, in soliloquy. He was evidently clear about his meaning, whatever it was.
The boy came running down the Court, and entering the front-yard, whose claim to be a garden was now _nil_, tapped at the window excitedly.
Daverill went to the door and opened it.
"Mister Moses coming along. Stopping to speak to Tappingses. You'd best step it sharp, Mister Wix!"
"Polly Daverill, look alive!" The convict shouted at the foot of the stairs, and Aunt M'riar came running down. "Where's the * * * cash?"
said he.
"It's all I've got," said poor Aunt M'riar. She handed the purse to him, and he caught it and slipped it in a breast-pocket, and was out in the Court in a moment, running, without another word. He vanished into the darkness.
Five minutes later, Uncle Mo, escaping from Mrs. Tapping, came down the Court, and found the front-door open and no light in the house. He nearly tumbled over Aunt M'riar, in a swoon, or something very like it, in the chair by the door.
CHAPTER II
HOW ADRIAN TORRENS COULD SING WITHOUT WINCING. FIGARO. DICTATION OF LETTERS. HOW ADRIAN BROKE DOWN. THE LERNAEAN HYDRA'S EYE-PEEPS. HOW ADRIAN COULD SEE NOTHING IN ANY NUMBER OF LOOKING-GLASSES. HOW GWEN, IN SPITE OF APPEARANCES, HELD TO THE SOLEMN COMPACT. SIR MERRIDEW'S TREACHERY. SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS. HOW GWEN HAD BEEN TO LOOK AT ARTHUR'S BRIDGE. A KINKAJOU IS NOT A CARCAJOU. OF THE PECULIARITIES OF FIRST-CLASS SERVANTS. MRS. PICTURE'S STORY DIVULGED BY GWEN. HOW DAVE'S RIVAL GRANNIES WERE SAFEST APART
Old folk and candles burn out slowly at the end. But before that end comes they flicker up, once, twice, and again. The candle says:--"Think of me at my best. Remember me when I shone out thus, and thus; and never guttered, nor wanted snuffing. Think of me when you needed no other light than mine, to look in Bradshaw and decide that you had better go early and ask at the Station." Thus says the candle.
And the old man says to the old woman, and she says it back to him:--"Think of me in the glorious days when we were dawning on each other; of that most glorious day of all when we found each other out, and had a tiff in a week and a reconciliation in a fortnight!" Then each is dumb for a while, and life ebbs slowly, till some chance memory stirs among the embers, and a bright spark flickers for a moment in the dark.
The candle dies at last, and smells, and mixes with the elements. And some say you and I will do the very same--die and go out. Possibly! Just as you like! Have it your own way.
It is even so with the Old Year in his last hours. Is ever an October so chill that he may not bid you suddenly at midday to come out in the garden and recall, with him, what it was like in those Spring days when the first birds sang; those Summer days when the hay-scent was in Cheapside, and a great many roses had not been eaten by blights, and it was too hot to mow the lawn? Is ever a November so self-centred as to refuse to help the Old Year to a memory of the gleams of April, and the nightingale's first song about the laggard ash-buds? Is icy December's self so remorseless, even when the holly-berries are making a parade of their value as Christmas decorations?--even when it's not much use pretending, because the Waits came last night, and you thought, when you heard them, what a long time ago it was that a little boy or girl, who must have been yourself, was waked by them to wonder at the mysteries of Night? But nothing is of any use in December, because January will come, and this year will be dead and risen from its tomb, and the metaphorically disposed will be hoping that Resurrection is not so uncomfortable as all that comes to.
That time was eight weeks ahead one morning at Pensham Steynes, which has to be borne in mind, as the residence of Sir Hamilton Torrens, Bart., when the blind man, his son, was dictating to his sister Irene one of the long missives he was given to sending to his _fiancee_ in London. It was just such a late October day as the one indirectly referred to above; in fact, it would quite have done for a Spring day, if only you could have walked across the lawn without getting your feet soaked. The chance primroses that the mild weather had deluded into budding must have felt ashamed of their stupidity, and disgusted at the sight of the stripped trees, although they may have reaped some encouragement from a missel-thrush that had just begun again after the holiday, and been grateful to the elms and oaks that had kept some decent clothing on them. Irene had found one such primrose in a morning walk, and a confirmation of it in the morning's _Times_.