The other convalescent boy here struck in, raising a vital question.
"Which is you, and which is her?" said he. He had come in as a new spectator; surrendering Dave's crutch, borrowed as needless to its owner, in compliance with a strange fascination, now waning in charm as the working model asserted its powers. Dionysos had deserted Ariadne again.
"This is me," said Granny Marrable. "And this is Maisie." And now you who read probably know, as clearly as he who writes, who she was, this octogenarian with such a good prospect of making up the hundred. She was Phoebe, the sister of old Mrs. Prichard, whose story was told in the last chapter. But most likely you guessed that pages ago.
I, who write, have no aim in telling this story beyond that of repeating as clearly and briefly as may be the bare facts that make it up--of communicating them to whoever has a few hours to spare for the purpose, with the smallest trouble to himself in its perusal. I feel often that my lack of skill is spoiling what might be a good story. That I cannot help; and I write with the firm conviction that any effort on my part to arrange these facts in such order that the tale should show dramatic force, or startle him with unexpected issues of event, would only procure derision for its writer, and might even obscure the only end he has at heart, that of giving a complete grasp of the facts, as nearly as may be in the order of their occurrence.
There is one feature in the story which the most skilful narrator might easily fail to present as probable--the separation of these twin sisters throughout a long lifetime, a separation contrary to nature; so much so, indeed, that tales are told of twins living apart, the death or illness of one of whom has brought about the death or similar illness of the other. One would at least say that neither could die without knowledge of the other; might even infer that either would go on thinking the other living, without some direct evidence of death, some seeming communication from the departed. But the separation of Phoebe from Maisie did not come under these conditions; each was the victim of a wicked fraud, carried out with a subtlety that might have deceived Scotland Yard. There can be no doubt that it would have had the force to obscure any phenomenon of a so-called telepathic nature, however vivid, as proof that either twin was still alive; as the percipient, in the belief that her sister's death was established beyond a doubt, would unhesitatingly conclude that the departed had revisited earth, or had made her presence felt by some process hard to understand from our side.
To see the story in its right light we must always keep in view the extraordinary isolation of the penal settlement. All convict life is cut off from the world, but in Van Diemen's Land even the freest of men out on ticket-of-leave--free sometimes so long that the renewal of their licence at its expiration became the merest form--was separated from the land of his birth, even from the mainland of Australia, by a barrier for him almost as impassable as the atmosphere that lies between us and the visible land of the moon. Keep in mind the hundred-and-odd miles of sea--are you sure you thought of it as so much?--that parts Tasmania from the nearest point of New South Wales, and picture to yourself the few slow sailing-ships upon their voyages from Sydney, five times as distant. To go and come on such a journey was little else to the stay-at-home in those days, than that he should venture beyond the grave and return.
No!--the wonder to my mind is not that the two sisters should have been parted so utterly, and each been so completely duped about the other's death, but that Maisie should have returned less than five-and-twenty years later, and that, so returning, she should not have come to the knowledge that her sister was still living.
CHAPTER VIII
MICHAEL RAGSTROAR'S SLIDE, AND THE MILK. CONCERNING DAVE'S RETURN TO SAPPS COURT, WHICH HAD SHRUNK IN HIS ABSENCE. OF THE PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF A WIDOW'S GRANDMOTHER. DAVE'S TALE OF THE WATER-MILL. SISTER NORA'S EXACTING FATHER. HOW DAVE WENT TO SCHOOL, AND UNCLE MO SOUGHT CONSOLATION IN SOCIETY, WHILE DOLLY TOOK STRUVVEL PETER TO VISIT MRS. PRICHARD. HOW THAT OLD LADY KNITTED A COMFORTER, AND TOLD AUNT M'RIAR OF HER CONVICT LOVER'S DEPARTURE
The heart of the ancient prizefighter in Sapps Court swelled with joy when the day of Dave's return was officially announced. He was, said Aunt M'riar, in and out all the afternoon, fidgeting-like, when it actually came. And the frost was that hard that ashes out of the dustbin had to be strewed over the paving to prevent your slipping. It might not have been any so bad though, only for that young Michael Ragstroar's having risen from his couch at an early hour, and with diabolical foresight made a slide right down the middle of the Court. He had chosen this hour so early, that he was actually before the Milk, which was always agreeable to serve the Court when the tenantry could do--taken collectively--with eightpennyworth. It often mounted up to thrice that amount, as a matter of fact. On this occasion it sat down abruptly, the Milk did, and gave a piece of its mind to Michael's family later, pointing out that it was no mere question of physical pain or ill-convenience to itself, but that its principal constituent might easily have been spilled, and would have had to be charged for all the same. The incident led to a collision between Michael and his father, the coster; who, however, remitted one-half of his son's deserts and let him off easy on condition of his reinstating the footway. Michael would have left all intact, he said, had he only been told that his thoughtfulness would provoke the Court's ingratitude. "Why couldn't they say aforehand they didn't want no slide?" said he. "I could just as easy have left it alone." It was rather difficult to be quite even with Michael Ragstroar.
However, the ground was all steady underfoot when Dave, in charge of Sister Nora, reappeared, looking quite rosy again, and only limping very slightly. He had deserted Ariadne altogether by now, and Dionysos may have done so, too, for anything the story knows. Anyhow, the instability of the planet that had resulted from local frost did not affect Dave at all, now that Michael had spilt them hashes over the ground. Dave was bubbling over with valuable information about the provinces, which had never reached the Metropolis before, and he was in such a hurry to tell about a recent family of kittens, that he scamped his greetings to his own family in order to get on to the description of it.
But neither this, nor public indignation against the turpitude of slide-makers generally and that young Micky in particular, could avert his relatives' acknowledgments of their gratitude--what a plague thanks are!--from a benefactress who was merely consulting a personal dilettantism in her attitude towards her species, and who regarded Dave as her most remunerative investment for some time past.
"We shall never know how to be grateful enough, ma'am, for your kindness to Dave," said Aunt M'riar. "No--never!"
"Not if we was to live for ever," said Uncle Mo. And he seemed to mean it, for he went on:--"It's a poor way of thanks to be redooced to at the best, just to be grateful and stop it off at that. But 'tis in the right of it as far as it goes. You take me, missis? I'm a bad hand to speak my mind; but you'll count it up for hearty thanks, anyhow."
"Of course I will, Mr. Wardle," said Sister Nora. "But, oh dear!--what a fuss one does make about nothing! Why, he's such a ducky little chap, anybody would be glad to."
Dave struck into the conversation perceiving an opportunity to say something appropriate: "There was sisk duskses in the pong in the field, and one of the duskses was a droyk with green like ribbings, and Mrs.
Thrale she said a little boy stumbled in the pong and was took out green, and some day I should show Dolly the droyk and I should show Uncle Mo the droyk and I should show Aunt M'riar the droyk. And there was a bool." At which point the speaker suddenly became shyly silent, perhaps feeling that he was premature in referring thus early to a visit of his family to Chorlton-under-Bradbury. It would have been better taste to wait, he thought.
However, no offence seemed to be taken. Uncle Mo said: "Oh, _that_ was it--was it? I hope the bull had a ring on his nose." Dave appeared doubtful, with a wish to assent. Then Aunt M'riar, who--however good she was--certainly had a commonplace mind, must needs say she hoped Dave had been a very good little boy. The banality of it!
Dave felt that an effort should be made to save the conversation. The bull's nose and its ring suggested a line to go on. "The lady," said he decisively, "had rings on her fingers. Dimings and pearls and scrapphires"--he took this very striking word by storm--"and she giv'
'em me for to hold one at a time.... Yorce she did!" He felt sure of his facts, and that the lady's rings on her fingers made her a legitimate and natural corollary to a bull with one on its nose.
"The lady would be my Cousin Philippa," said Sister Nora. "She's always figged up to the nines. Dave took her for a drive in the carriage--didn't you, Dave?" There was misrepresentation in this, but a way grown-up people have of understanding each other over the heads of little boys prevented the growth of false impressions. Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar quite understood, somehow, that it was the lady that had taken Dave for a drive. Dave allowed this convention to pass without notice, merely nodding. He reserved criticism for the days to come, when he should have a wider vocabulary at command.
Then Sister Nora had gone, and Dave was having his first experience of the shattered ideal. Sapps Court was neither so large nor so distinguished as the conception of it that he had carried away into the country with him; with the details of which he had endeavoured to impress Granny Marrable and the ogress. Dolly was not so large as he had expected to find her; but then he had had that expectation owing to a message, which had reached him in his absence, that she was growing out of all knowledge. His visit was inside three months; so this was absurd.
One really should be careful what one says to six-year-olds. The image of Dolly that Dave brought back from the provinces nearly filled up the Sapps Court memory supplied. It was just the same shape as Dolly, but on a much larger scale. The reality he came back to was small and compact, but not so influential.
Dolly's happiness at his return was great and unfeigned, but its expression was handicapped by her desire that a doll Sister Nora brought her should be allowed to sleep off the effects of an exhausting journey.
Only Shakespearean dramatic power could have ascribed sleep to this doll, who was a similitude of Struvvel Peter in the collected poems of that name just published. Still, Dolly gave all of herself that this matronly preoccupation could spare to Dave. She very soon suggested that they should make a joint visit to old Mrs. Picture upstairs. She could carry Struvvel Peter in her arms all the time, so that his sleep should not be disturbed.
This was only restless love of change on Dolly's part, and Uncle Mo protested. Was his boy to be carried off from him when only just this minute he got him back? Who was Mrs. Prichard that such an exaggerated consideration should be shown to her? Dave expressed himself in the same sense, but with a less critical view of Mrs. Prichard's pretensions.
Aunt M'riar pointed out that there was no call to be in a driving hurry.
Presently, when Mr. Alibone come in for a pipe, like he said he would, then Dave and Dolly might go up and knock at Mrs. Prichard's door, and if they were good they might be let in. Aunt M'riar seized so many opportunities to influence the young towards purity and holiness that her injunctions lost force through the frequency of their recurrence, always dangling rewards and punishments before their eyes. In the present case her suggestions worked in with the general feeling, and Dave and Dolly sat one on each knee of Uncle Mo, and made intelligent remarks. At least, Dave did; Dolly's were sometimes confused, and very frequently uncompleted.
Uncle Mo asked questions about Dave's sojourn with Widow Thrale. Who was there lived in the house over and above the Widow? Well--said Dave--there was her Granny. Uncle Mo derided the idea of a Widow's Granny. Such a thing was against Nature. Her mother was possible but uncommon. But as for her Granny!--draw it mild, said Uncle Mo.
"But my dear Mo," said Aunt M'riar. "Just you give consideration. You're always for sayin' such a many things. Why, there was our upstairs old lady she says to me she was plenty old enough to be my grandmother. Only this very morning, if you'll believe me, she said that very selfsame thing. 'I'm plenty old enough to be your grandmother,' she says."
"As for the being old enough, M'riar," said Uncle Mo, "there's enough and to spare old enough for most anything if you come to that. But this partick'lar sort don't come off. Just you ask anybody. Why, I'll give ye all England to hunt 'em up. Can't say about foreigners, they're a queer lot; but England's a Christian country, and you may rely upon it, and so I tell you, you won't light on any one or two widders' Grannies in the whole show. You try it!" Uncle Moses was not the first nor the only person in the world that ever proposed an impracticable test to be carried out at other people's expense, or by their exertions. It was, however, a mere _facon de parler_, and Aunt M'riar did not show any disposition to start on a search for widows' grandmothers.
The discussion was altogether too deep for Dave. So after a moment of grave perplexity he started a new topic, dashing into it without apology, as was his practice. "Granny Marrowbone's box on the chimley-piece is got glast you can see in, and she's got two horses in a wagging, and the wheels goes round and round and round like a clock, and there was her daddy stood at the window and there was saskses was took up froo a hole, and come back froo a hole, and there was Muggeridge that see to loading up the cart, and there was her and her sister bofe alike of one size, and there was the water run over...." Here Dave flagged a little after so much eloquence, and no wonder. But he managed to wind up:--"And then Granny Marrowbone put it back on the mankleshelf for next time."
This narrative was, of course, quite unintelligible to its hearers; but we understand it, and its mention of the carman's name. A child that has to repeat a story will often confuse incidents limitlessly, and nevertheless hold on with the tenacity of a bull-pup to some saving phrase heard distinctly once and for ever. Even so, Dave held on to Muggeridge, that see to loading up the cart, as a great fact rooted in History.
"H'm!" said Uncle Mo. "I don't make all that out. Who's Muggeridge in it?"
"He sees to the sacks," said Dave.
"Counting of 'em out, I reckon." Uncle Mo was thinking of coal-sacks, and the suggestions of a suspicious Company. Dave said nothing. Probably Uncle Mo knew. But he was all wrong, perhaps because the association of holes with coals misled him.
"Was it Mrs. Marrable and her sister?" asked Aunt M'riar. "Why was they both of a size?"
Dave jumped at the opportunity of showing that he had profited by _resumes_ of this subject with his hostess. "Because they were the soyme oyge," said he. "Loyke me and Dolly. We aren't the soyme oyge, me and Dolly." That is to say, he and Dolly were an example of persons whose relative ages came into court. Their classification differed, but that was a detail.
Aunt M'riar was alive to the possibility that the sister of Granny Marrable was her twin, and said so. But Uncle Mo took her up short for this opinion. "What!" said he, "the same as the old party two pair up?
No, no!--you won't convince me there's two old parties at once with twin sisters. One at a time's plenty on the way-bill." Because, you see, Aunt M'riar had had a good many conversations with Mrs. Prichard lately, and had repeated words of hers to Uncle Moses. "I was a twin myself," she had said; and added that she had lost her sister near upon fifty years ago.
The truth was too strange to occur to even the most observant bystander; _videlicet_, on the whole, Mr. Alibone; who, coming in and talking over the matter anew, only said it struck him as a queer start. This expression has somehow a sort of flavour of its user's intention to conduct inquiry no farther. Anyhow, the subject simply dropped for that time being, out of sight and out of mind.
It was very unfair to Dave, who was, after all, a model of veracity, that he should be treated as a romancer, and never confronted with witnesses to confirm or contradict his statements. Even Uncle Mo, who took him most seriously, continued to doubt the existence of widows'
grandmothers, and to accept with too many reservations his account of the mill-model. Sister Nora, as it chanced, did not revisit Sapps Court for a very long time, for she was called away to Scotland by the sudden illness of her father, who showed an equivocal affection for her by refusing to let anyone else nurse him.
So it came about that Dave, rather mortified at having doubt thrown on narratives he knew to be true, discontinued his attempts to establish them. And that the two old sisters, so long parted, still lived on apart; each in the firm belief that the other was dead a lifetime since.
How near each had been to the knowledge that the other lived! Surely if Dave had described that mill-model to old Mrs. Picture, suspicions would have been excited. But Dave said little or nothing about it.
It is nowise strange to think that the bitter, simultaneous grief in the heart of either twin, now nearly fifty years ago, still survived in two hearts that were not too old to love; for even those who think that love can die, and be as though it had never been, may make concession to its permanency in the case of twins--may even think concession scientific.
But it is strange--strange beyond expression--that at the time of this story each should have had love in her heart for the same object, our little Dave Wardle; that Master Dave's very kissable countenance had supplied the lips of each with a message of solace to a tired soul. And most of all that the tears of each, and the causes of them, had provoked the inquisitiveness of the same pair of blue eyes and set their owner questioning, and that through all this time the child had in his secret consciousness a few words that would have fired the train. Never was a spark so near to fuel, never an untold tale so near its hearer, never a draught so near to lips athirst.
But Dave's account of the mill was for the time forgotten. It happened that old Mrs. Prichard was not receiving just at the time of his return, so his visits upstairs had to be suspended. By the time they were renewed the strange life in the country village had become a thing of the past, and important events nearer home had absorbed the mill on the mantelshelf, and the ducks in the pond and Widow Thrale and Granny Marrable alike. One of the important events was that Dave was to be took to school after Christmas.
It was in this interim that old Mrs. Prichard became a very great resource to Aunt M'riar, and when the time came for Dave to enter on his curriculum of scholarship, the visiting upstairs had become a recognised institution. Aunt M'riar being frequently forsaken by Uncle Mo, who marked his objection to the scholastic innovation by showing himself more in public, notably at The Rising Sun, whose proprietor set great store by the patronage of so respectable a representative of an Institution not so well thought of now as formerly, but whose traditions were still cherished in the confidential interior of many an ancient pot-house of a like type--Aunt M'riar, so forsaken, made these absences of her brother-in-law a reason for conferring her own society and Dolly's on the upstairs lodger, whenever the work she was engaged on permitted it. She felt, perhaps, as Uncle Mo felt, that the house warn't like itself without our boy; but if she shared his feeling that it was a waste of early life to spend it in learning to read slowly, write illegibly, and cypher incorrectly, she did so secretly. She deferred to the popular prejudice, which may have had an inflated opinion of the advantages of education; but she acknowledged its growth and the worldly wisdom of giving way to it.
Old Mrs. Prichard and Aunt M'riar naturally exchanged confidences more and more; and in the end the old lady began to speak without reserve about her past. It came about thus. After Christmas, Dave being culture-bound, and work of a profitable nature for the moment at a low ebb, Aunt M'riar had fallen back on some arrears of stocking-darning.
Dolly was engaged on the object to which she gave lifelong attention, that of keeping her doll asleep. I do not fancy that Dolly was very inventive; but then, you may be, at three-and-a-half, seductive without being inventive. Besides, this monotonous fiction of the need of her doll for sleep was only a _scenario_ for another incident--the fear of disturbance by a pleace'n with two heads, a very terrible possibility.
Old Mrs. Prichard, whom I call by that name because she was known by no other in Sapps Court, was knitting a comforter for Dave. It went very slowly, this comforter, but was invaluable as an expression of love and goodwill. She couldn't get up and downstairs because of her back, and she couldn't read, only a very little, because of her eyes, and she couldn't hear--not to say _hear_--when read aloud to. This last may have been no more than what many of us have experienced, for she heard very plain when spoke to. That is Aunt M'riar's testimony. My impression is that, as compared with her twin sister Phoebe, Maisie was at this date a mere invalid. But she looked very like Phoebe for all that, when you didn't see her hands. The veins were too blue, and their delicacy was made more delicate by the aggressive scarlet she had chosen for the comforter.