"It makes a rest to do a little darning now and again." Aunt M'riar said this, choosing a worsted carefully, so it shouldn't quarrel with its surroundings. "I take a pleasure in it more than not. On'y as for knowing when to stop--there!"
"I mind what it was in my early days up-country," said the old woman.
"'Twas not above once in the year any trade would reach us, and suchlike things as woollen socks were got at by the moth or the ants. They would sell us things at a high price from the factory as a favour, but my husband could not abide the sight of them. It was small wonder it was so, Mrs. Wardle." That was the name that Aunt M'riar had come to be called by, although it was not her own real name. Confusion of this sort is not uncommon in the class she belonged to. Sapps Court was aware that she was not Mrs. Wardle, but she had to be accounted for somehow, and the name she bore was too serious a tax on the brain-power of its inhabitants.
She repeated Mrs. Prichard's words: "From the factory, ma'am? I see."
Because she did not understand them.
"It was always called the factory," said Mrs. Prichard. But this made Aunt M'riar none the wiser. _What_ was called the factory? The way in which she again said that she _saw_ amounted to a request for enlightenment. Mrs. Prichard gave it. "It was the Government quarters with the Residence, and the prisons where the convicts were detained on their arrival. They would not be there long, being told off to work in gangs up-country, or assigned to the settlers as servants. But I've never told you any of all this before, Mrs. Wardle." No more she had.
She had broached Van Diemen's Land suddenly, having gone no farther before than the mere fact of her son's birth at Port Macquarie.
Aunt M'riar couldn't make up her mind as to what was expected of her, whether sympathy or mere interest or silent acquiescence. She decided on a weak expression of the first, saying:--"To think of that now--all that time ago!"
"Fifty long years ago! But I knew of it before that, four years or more," said the old lady. It did not seem to move her much--probably felt to her like a previous state of existence. She went on talking about the Convict Settlement, which she had outlived. Her hearer only half understood most of it, not being a prompt enough catechist to ask the right question at the right time.
For Aunt M'riar, though good, was a slowcoach, backward in cross-examination, and Mrs. Prichard's first depositions remained unqualified, for discussion later with Uncle Mo. However, one inquiry came to her tongue. "Was you born in those parts yourself, ma'am?" said she. Then she felt a little sorry she had asked it, for a sound like annoyance came in the answer.
"Who--I? No, no--not I--dear me, no! My father was an Essex man.
Darenth, his place was called." Aunt M'riar repeated the name wrongly:--"Durrant?" She ought to have asked something concerning his status and employment. Who knows but Mrs. Prichard might have talked of that mill and supplied a clue to speculation?--not Aunt M'riar's; speculation was not her line. Others might have compared notes on her report, literally given, with Dave's sporting account of the mill-model.
And yet--why should they? With no strong leading incident in common, each story might have been discussed without any suspicion that the flour-mill was the same in both.
So that Mrs. Prichard's tale so far supplies nothing to link her with old Granny Marrable, as unsuspicious as herself. What Aunt M'riar found her talking of, half to herself, when her attention recovered from a momentary fear that she might have hurt the old lady's feelings, was even less likely to connect the two lives.
"I followed my husband out. My child died--my eldest--here in England. I went again to live at home. Then I followed him out. He wrote to me and said that he was free. Free on the island, but not to come home. We had been over four years parted then." She said nothing of the child she left behind in England. Too much to explain perhaps?
Aunt M'riar was struck by a painful thought; the same that had crossed her mind before, and that she had discarded as somehow inconsistent with this old woman. The convicts--the convicts? She had grasped the fact that this couple had lived in Van Diemen's Land, and inferred that children were born to them there. But--was the husband himself a convict? She repeated the words, "Free on the island, but not to come home?" as a question.
She was quite taken aback with the reply, given with no visible emotion.
"Why should I not tell you? How will it hurt me that you should know? My husband was convicted of forgery and transported."
"God's mercy on us!" said Aunt M'riar, dropping her work dumfoundered.
Then it half entered her thought that the old woman was wandering, and she nearly said:--"Are you sure?"
The old woman answered the thought as though it had been audible. "Why not?" she said. "I am all myself. Fifty years ago! Why should I begin to doubt it because of the long time?" She had ceased her knitting and sat gazing on the fire, looking very old. Her interlaced thin fingers on the strain could grow no older now surely, come what might of time and trouble. Both had done their worst. She went on speaking low, as one talks to oneself when alone. "Yes, I saw him go that morning on the river. They rowed me out at dawn--a pair of oars, from Chatham. For I had learned the day he would go, and there was a sure time for the leaving of the hulks; if not night, then in the early dawn before folk were on the move. This was in the summer."
"And did you see him?" said Aunt M'riar, hoping to hear more, and taking much for granted that she did not understand, lest she should be the loser by interruption.
"I saw him. I saw him. I did not know then that _he_ saw _me_. They dared not row me near the wicked longboat that was under the hulk's side waiting--waiting to take my heart away. They dared not for the officers.
There was ten men packed in the stern of the boat, and he was in among them. And, as they sat, each one's hand was handcuffed to his neighbour.
I saw him, but he could not raise his hand; and he dared not call to me for the officers. I could not have known him in his prison dress--it was too far--but I could read his number, 213M. I know it still--213M....
How did I know it? Because he got a letter to me." She then told how a man had followed her in the street, when she was waiting in London for this chance of seeing her husband, and how she had been afraid of this man and taken refuge in a shop. Then how the shopkeeper had gone out to speak to him and come back, saying:--"He's a bad man to look at, but he means no harm. He says he wants to give you a letter, miss." How she then spoke with the man and received the letter, giving him a guinea for the rolled-up pencil scrawl, and he said:--"It's worth more than that for the risk I ran to bring it ye. But for my luck I might be on the ship still." Whereupon, she gave him her watch. That was how she came to know 213M.
"But did you see your husband again?" asked Aunt M'riar, listening as Dave might have done; and, like him, wanting each instalment of the tale rounded off.
"Yes. Climbing up the side of the great ship half-way to the Nore. It was a four-hours' pull for the galley--six oars--each man wristlocked to his oar; and each officer with a musket. But we had a little sail and kept the pace, though the wind was easterly. Then, when we reached the ship where she lay, we went as near as ever my men dared. And we saw each one of them--the ten--unhandcuffed to climb the side, and a cord over the side made fast to him to give him no chance of death in the waters--no chance! And then I saw my husband and knew he saw me."
"Did he speak?"
"He tried to call out. But the ship's officer struck him a cruel blow upon the mouth, and he was dragged to the upper deck and hidden from me.
We saw them all aboard, all the ten. It was the last boat-load from the hulk, and all the yards were manned by now, and the white sails growing on them. Oh, but she was beautiful, the great ship in the sunshine!" The old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore--why, Heaven knows!--and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was a new experience for her--this ship with hundreds of souls on board, men and women who had all had a fair trial and been represented by counsel, so had nothing to complain of even if innocent. But all souls in Hell, for all that!
The old voice seemed quite roused to animation--a sort of heart-broken animation--by the recollection of this ship. "Oh, but she was beautiful!" she said again. "I've dreamed of her many's the time since then, with her three masts straight up against the blue; you could see them in the water upside down. I could not find the heart to let my men row away and leave her there. I had come to see her go, and it was a long wait we had.... Yes, it was on towards evening before the breeze came to move her; and all those hours we waited. It was money to my men, and they had a good will to it." She stopped, and Aunt M'riar waited for her to speak again, feeling that she too had a right to see this ship's image move. Presently she looked up from her darning and got a response. "Yes, she did move in the end. I saw the sails flap, and there was the clink of the anchor-chain. I've dreamt it again many and many a time, and seen her take the wind and move, till she was all a mile away and more. We watched her away with all aboard of her. And when the wind rose in the night I was mad to think of her out on the great sea, and how I should never see him again. But the time went by, and I did."
This was the first time old Mrs. Prichard spoke so freely about her former life to Aunt M'riar. It was quite spontaneous on the old lady's part, and she stopped her tale as suddenly as it had begun. The fragmentary revelations in which she disclosed much more of her story, as already summarised, came at intervals; always dwelling on her Australian experiences, never on her girlhood--never on her subsequent life in England. The reason of this is not clear; one has to accept the fact. The point to notice is that nothing she said could possibly associate her with old Mrs. Marrable, as told about by Dave. There had been mention of Australia certainly. Yet why should Granny Marrable's sister having died there forty-odd years ago connect her with an old woman of a different name, now living? Besides, Dave was not intelligible on this point.
Whatever she told to Aunt M'riar was repeated to Uncle Mo--be sure of that! Still, fragmentary stories, unless dressed up and garnished by their retailer, do not remain vividly in the mind of their hearer, and Uncle Mo's impressions of the upstairs tenant's history continued very mixed. For Aunt M'riar's style was unpolished, and she did not marshall her ideas in an impressive or lucid manner.
CHAPTER IX
OF A WATERSIDE PUBLIC-HOUSE, AT CHISWICK, AND TWO MEN IN ITS BACK GARDEN. HOW THE RIVER POLICE TOOK AN INTEREST IN THEM. A TROUBLESOME LANDING AND A BAD SPILL. HOW FOUR MEN WENT UNDER WATER, AND TWO WERE NOT DROWNED. OF THE INQUEST ONE OF THE OTHERS TOOK THE STAR PART IN. A MODEL WITNESS, AND HIS GREAT-AUNT
Just off the Lower Mall at Hammersmith there still remains a scrap of the waterside neighbourhood that, fifty years ago, believed itself eternal; that still clung to the belief forty years ago; that had misgivings thirty years ago; and that has suffered such inroads from eligible residences, during the last quarter of a century, that its residuum, in spite of a superficial appearance of duration, is really only awaiting the expiration of leases to be given over to housebreakers, to make way for flats.
Fifty years ago this corner of the world was so self-reliant that it was content--more than content--to be unpatrolled by police; in fact, felt rather resentful when an occasional officer passed through, as was inevitable from time to time. It would have been happier if its law-abiding tendencies had always been taken for granted. Then you could have drunk your half a pint, your quart, or your measurable fraction of a hogshead, in peace and quiet at the bar of the microscopic pub called The Pigeons, without fear of one of those enemies of Society--_your_ Society--coming spying and prying round after you or any chance acquaintance you might pick up, to help you towards making that fraction a respectable one. If it was summer-time, and you sat in the little back-garden that had a ladder down to the river, you might feel a moment's uneasiness when the river-police rowed by, as sometimes happened; only, on the other hand, you might feel soothed by their appearance of unconcern in riparian matters, almost amounting to affectation. If any human beings took no interest in your antecedents, surely it would be these two leisurely rowers and the superior person in the stern, with the oilskin cape?
It was not summer-time--far from it--on the day that concerns this story, when two men in the garden of The Pigeons looked out over the river, and one said to the other:--"Right away over yonder it lies, halfway to Barn Elms." They were so busy over the locating of it, whatever it was, that they did not notice the police-wherry, oarless in the swift-running tide, as it slipped down close inshore, and was abreast of them before they knew it. Perhaps it was the fact that it was not summer, and that these men must have left a warm fire in the parlour of The Pigeons, to come out into a driving north-east wind bringing with it needle-pricks of microscopic snow, hard and cold and dry, that made the rowers drop their oars and hold back against the stream, to look at them.
Or was it that the man in the stern had an interest in one of them. An abrupt exclamation that he uttered at this moment seemed, to the man rowing stroke, who heard more than his mate, to apply to the thicker and taller man of the two. This one, who seemed to treat his pal as an inferior or subordinate, met his gaze, not flinching. His companion seemed less at his ease, and to him the big man said, scarcely moving his lips to say it:--"Steady, fool!--if you shy, we're done." On which the other remained motionless. What they said was heard by a boy close at hand; but for whose version, given afterwards, this story would have been in the dark about it.
The two rowers kept the boat stationary, backing water. The steersman's left hand played with the tiller-rope, and the boat edged slowly to the shore. There was a grating thrown out over the water from the parapet of the river-wall, to the side of which was attached a boat-ladder, now slung up, for no boat's crew ever stopped here at this season. The boat was nearing this--all but close--when the bigger man spoke, on a sudden.
But he only said it was a rough night, sergeant!
It was a rough night, or meant to be one in an hour or so. But it was impossible for an Official to accept another person's opinion without loss of dignity. Therefore the sergeant, always working the boat edgewise towards the ladder, only responded, "Roughish!" qualifying the night, and implying a wider experience of rough nights than his hearer's. If impressions derived from appearance are to be relied on, his experience must have been a wide one. For one thing, he himself seemed a dozen years at least the younger of the two. He added, as the boat touched the ladder, bringing each in full view of the other, and making speech easy between them:--"A man don't make the voyage out to Sydney without seeing some rough weather."
A very attentive observer might have said that he watched the man he addressed more closely than the talk warranted, and certainly would have seen that the latter started. He half began "Who the Hell ...?" but flagged on the last word--just stopped short of Sheol--and the growl that accompanied it turned into "I've never been in those parts, master."
"Never said you had. _I_ have though." One might have thought, by his tone, that this officer chuckled secretly over something. He was pleased, at least. But he gave no clue to his thoughts. He seemed disconcerted at the height above the water of the projecting grating and slung-up ladder. An active man, unencumbered, might easily enough have landed himself on it from the boat. Yet a boy might have made it impossible, standing on the grating. A resolute kick on the first hand-grip, or in the face of the climber, would have met the case, and given him a back-fall into the boat or the water. A chilly thought that, on a day like this. But why should such a thought cross the mind of this man, now? It did, probably, and he gave up the idea of landing.
Instead, he felt in his pocket, and drew out a spirit-flask. "Maybe,"
said he, "your mate would oblige so far as to ask the young lady at the bar to fill this up with Kinahan's LL? _She_ won't make any bones about it if he says it's for me, Sergeant Ibbetson--_she'll_ know." He inverted it to see that it was empty, and the man who had not spoken accepted the mission at a nod from his companion, whose social headship the speech of the policeman seemed somehow to have taken for granted.
The sergeant watched him out of sight; then, the moment he had vanished, said:--"Now I come to think of it, Cissy Tuttle that was here has married a postman, and the young lady that's took it over may not know my name." His speech had not the appearance of a sudden thought, and the less so that he began to get rid of his oilskin incumbrance almost before he had uttered it.
The understanding of what then happened needs a clear picture of the exact position of things at this moment. The boat, held back by the dipped oars, but steadied now and again by the hand of the sergeant on the grating or ladder, lay uneasily between the wind and the current.
The man on the grating showed some unwillingness to lend the hand-up that was asked for; and took exception, it seemed, to the safety of the landing on any terms. "Maybe you want a dip in the river, master?" said he. "It's no concern of mine. Only I don't care to take your weight on this greasy bit of old iron. I'm best out of the water."
The sergeant paused, looked at the grating, which certainly sloped outwards, then at the boat and at the ladder. "Catch hold!" said he.
But the other held back. "Why can't your mate there hand me the end of that painter, and slue her round? That's easy! Won't take above a half a minute, and save somebody a wet shirt. Tie her nose to the ring yonder!--just bring you up oppo_site_ to where I'm standing! Think it out, master."
The sergeant, however, seemed to have made up his mind in spite of the reasonableness of this suggestion. For when the man rowing bow stooped back and reached out for the painter--the course seemed the obvious and natural one--he was stopped by his chief, who said rather tartly:--"You take your orders from me, Cookson!" and then held out his hand as before, saying:--"You're a tidy weight, my lad. _I_ shan't pull you overboard."
He did, nevertheless, and it came about thus. The two men at the oars saw the whole thing, and were clear in their account of it after.
Ibbetson, their sergeant, did _not_ take the hand that was proffered him, but seized its wrist. It seemed to them that he made no attempt to lift himself up from the boat; and the nearer one, pulling stroke, would have it that Ibbetson even hooked the seat with his foot, as though to get a purchase on the man's wrist that he held. Anyhow, the result was the same. The man lost his footing under the strain, and pitched sheer forward on his assailant; for the aggressive intention of the latter may be taken as established beyond a doubt. As he fell, he struck out with his left hand, landing on Ibbetson's mouth, and cutting off his last words, an order, shouted to the rowers:--"Sheer off, and row for the bridge ... I can ..." Both of them believed he would have said:--"I can manage him by myself."
But nothing further passed. For the boat, not built to keep an even keel with two strong men struggling together in the stern, lurched over, shipping water the whole length of the counter. The rowers tried to obey orders, the more readily--so they said after--that their chief seemed quite a match for his man. There was a worse danger ahead, a barge moored in the path, and they had to clear, one side or the other. The best chance was outside, and they would have succeeded but for the cable that held her. It just caught the bow oar, and the boat swung round, the stroke being knocked down between the seats in his effort to back water and keep her clear. Half-crippled already and at least one-third full of water, she was in no trim to dodge the underdraw of the sloping bows of an empty barge, at the worst hour of ebb-tide. The boy in the garden, next door to The Pigeons, whom curiosity had kept on the watch, saw the swerve off-shore; the men struggling in the stern; the collision with the moorings; and the final wreck of the boat. Then she vanished behind the barge, and was next seen, bottom-up, by children on the bridge over the little creek three minutes lower down the stream, whose cries roused those in hearing and brought help. When the man came back with the whisky-flask, his mate had vanished, and the boat with its crew. If he guessed what had passed, it was from the running and shouting on the bank, and the boats that were putting off in haste; and then, well over towards Hammersmith Bridge, that they reached their quarry and were trying to right her on the water, possibly thinking to find some former occupant shut in beneath. He did not wait to see the upshot; but, pocketing the flask, got away unnoticed by anyone, all eyes being intent upon the incident on the river.