"It came out by little things--odd talk at times.... It got in the air, and then I saw the word on their lips.... I never _heard_ it, you know.... What was I saying?"
"You were calling something to mind, all next day, you said. What was that?"
"A man my husband would talk about, in Macquarie Gaol, whose head would be all right so long as no cat came anigh him. So the others would find a cat to start him off. Only my Ruth thought to take away what upset _me_. 'Tis the same thing, turned about like."
Gwen allowed the illustration. "But why _did_ Mrs. Thrale think you mad, over the mill-model?"
"My dear, because to her I must have _seemed_ mad, to say that was my father's mill, and not her grandfather's."
Gwen kept a lock on her tongue. How easy to have said:--"Your father _was_ her grandfather!" She said nothing.
"And yet, you know, how could I be off the thought it was so, with it there before me, seeming like it did? I do assure you, there it seemed to be--the very mill! There was my father, only small, and not much to know him by, smoking. And there was our man, Muggeridge, that saw to the waggon. And there was Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, our horses. And there was the great wheel the water shot below, to turn it, and the still water above where Phoebe saw the heron, and called me--but it was gone!"
Tears were filling the old eyes, as the old lips recalled that long-forgotten past. Then, as she went on, her voice broke to a sob, and failed of utterance. But it came. "And there--and there--were I and my darling, my Phoebe, that died in the cruel sea! Oh, my dear--that I might have seen her once again! But once again!..." She stopped to recover calm speech; and did it, bravely. "It was all in the seeming of it, my dear, but all the same hard for me to understand. Very like, my dear Ruth here was right and wise to keep it away from me. It might have set me off again. I'm not what I was, and things get on my mind....
There now--my dear. See how I've made you cry!"
Gwen felt that this could not go on much longer without producing some premature outbreak of her overtaxed patience; but she could sit still and say nothing; for a little time yet, certainly. "I'm not crying, dear Mrs. Picture," said she. "It was riding against the cold wind. Go on and tell me more." Then a thought occurred to her--a means to an end. "Tell me about your father. You have never told me about him. When did he die?"
"My father? That I could not tell you, my dear, for certain. For no letter reached me when he died, nor yet any letter since his own, that told me of Phoebe's death. Oh, but it is a place for letters to go astray! Why, before they gave my husband charge over the posts, and made him responsible, the carrier would leave letters for the farm on a tree-stump two miles away, and we were bound to send for them there--no other way! And there was none I knew to write to, for news, when Phoebe was gone, and our little Ruth, and Uncle Nick. Such an odd name he had.
I never told it you. Nicholas Cropredy."
"I knew it," said Gwen heedlessly. Then, to recover her foothold:--"Somehow or other! You _must_ have told it me. Else how could I have known?"
"I _must_ have.... No, I never knew when my father died. But I should have known. For I stood by his grave when I came back. Such a many years ago now--even that! But I read it wrong. 'May, 1808....' How did I know it was wrong, what I read? Because I looked at his own letter, telling me of the wreck, and it was that very year--but June, not May. And my son was with me then, and he looked at the letter, too, and said it must have been 1818--eighteen, not eight."
Gwen saw the way of this. Phoebe's letter, effaced to make way for the forgery, was to announce Isaac Runciman's death, and was probably written during the first week of June, and posted even later. The English postmark showed two figures for the date; indistinct, as a postmark usually is. Could she utilise this date in any way to sow the seeds of doubt of the authenticity of the letter? She saw no way open.
The letter was a thing familiar to Mrs. Prichard, but a sudden thunderbolt to Ruth Thrale. Had Gwen been in possession of Daverill's letter announcing Maisie's own death, she might have shown it to her.
But _could_ such old eyes have read it, or would she have understood it?
No--it was impossible to do anything but speak. The next opportunity _must_ be seized, for talk seemed only to erect new obstacles to action.
The perplexities close at hand, there in Strides Cottage, were the things to dwell on. Better go back to them! "But Mrs. Thrale did not think you mad only because you thought that about the mill," Gwen said this to coax the conversation back.
"No, my dear! I think, for all I found to say that night, she might have thought it no more than a touch of fever. And little wonder, too, for her to hear me doubt her grandfather's mill being his own. But what put me past was to see how the bare truth I told of my father's name, and my sister's, and the name of the mill my father would say was older than the church-tower itself--just that and no more--to make her"--here the old lady lowered her voice, and glanced round as though to be sure they were alone--"to make her turn and run from me, quite in a maze, as though I was a ghost to frighten her, that was what unsettled me!" She fixed her eyes on Gwen, and her hands were restless with her distressing eagerness to get some clue to a solution of her perplexity.
Gwen could say nothing, short of everything. She simply dared not try to tell the whole truth, with a rush, to a hearer so frail and delicate. It seemed that any shock must kill. The musical voice went on, its appealing tone becoming harder and harder for her hearer to bear.
"Why--oh why--when I was telling just the truth, that my father's name was Isaac Runciman, and my sister was Phoebe, and our mill was Darenth Mill, why should she not have heard me through to the end, to make it all clear? Indeed, my dear, she put me on thinking I was not saying the words I thought, and I was all awake and clear the whole time. Was I not?"
Gwen's response:--"I will ask her what it was," contained, as a temporary palliative, as much falsehood as she dared to use; just to soothe back the tears that were beginning to get the better of speech.
She felt vaguely about for a straw to catch at--something that might soften the revelation that had to come. "Did you tell her your sister was Phoebe?"
"I told her Phoebe--only Phoebe. I never said her married name."
"Did you tell her you and your sister were twins?"
"Oh yes--I told her that. And I think she understood. But she did not say."
"I think, dear Mrs. Picture, I can tell you why she was astonished. It was because _her_ mother had a twin sister."
The old lady's pathetic look of perplexity remained unchanged. "Was that enough?" she said. The mere coincidence of the twinship did not seem to her to have warranted the effect it produced.
"I am not sure that it was not. There are other things. Did she ever tell you her mother's story? I suppose she told you she is only her mother by adoption? You know what I mean?"
"Oh yes, perfectly! No--Ruth has not told me that. We have not talked much of old Mrs. Marrable, but I shall see her before I go back to Sapps Court. Shall I not? My Davy's other Granny in the country!" It did her good to think and speak of Dave.
"You shall go back to Davy," said Gwen. "Or Davy shall come to you. You may like to stay on longer with Mrs. Thrale."
"Oh, indeed I should ... if only ... if only ..."
"If only she hadn't thought you had delusions!--isn't that it?... Well, let me go on and tell you some more about her mother--or aunt, really.
It is quite true that she was one of twin sisters, and the sister married and went abroad."
Mrs. Prichard was immensely relieved--almost laughed. "There now!--if she had told me _that_, instead of running away with ideas! We would have found it all out, by now."
Gwen felt quite despairing. She had actually lost ground. Was it conceivable that the whole tale should become known to Mrs. Prichard--or to both sisters, for that matter--and be discredited on its merits, with applause for its achievements in coincidence? It looked like it! Despair bred an idea in her mind; a mad one, perhaps, a stagey one certainly.
How would it be to tell Maisie Phoebe's story, seen from Phoebe's point of view?
Whenever an exciting time comes back to us in after-life, the incident most vividly revived is usually one of its lesser ones. Years after, when Gwen's thoughts went back to this trying hour at Strides Cottage, this moment would outstep its importance by reminding her how, in spite of the pressure and complexity of her embarrassment, an absurd memory _would_ intrude itself of an operatic tenor singing to the soprano the story of how she was changed at birth, and so forth, the _diva_ listening operatically the while. It went so far with her now, for all this tension, as to make a comment waver about her innermost thought, concerning the strange susceptibility of that soprano to conviction on insufficient evidence. Then she felt a fear that her own power of serious effort might be waning, and she concentrated again on her problem. But no solution presented itself better than the stagey one. Is the stage right, after all?
"The sister married and went abroad. Her husband was a bad man, whom she had married against the consent of her family." Gwen looked to see if these words had had any effect. But nothing came of them. She continued:--"Poor girl! her head was turned, I suppose."
"My dear--'twas the like case with me! 'Tis not for me, at least, to sit in judgment."
"No, dear Mrs. Picture, nor any of us. But if she had been as bad as the worst, she could hardly have deserved what came about. I told you she had married a bad man, and I am going to tell you how bad he was." It was as well that Gwen should rouse her hearer's attention by a sure and effective expedient, for it was flagging slightly. Dave's other Granny's sister's misadventures seemed to have so little to do with the recent mystery of the mill-model. But a genuine bad man enthrals us all.
"What did he do?" said his unconscious widow.
"He forged a letter to his own wife, saying that her sister was dead, and she believed it."
"But did her sister never write, to say she was alive?"
"Old Mrs. Marrable? No--because she received a letter at the same time saying that _her_ sister.... You see which I mean?..."
"Oh yes--the bad man's wife, who was abroad."
"... Was also dead. Do you think you see how it was? He told each sister the other was dead."
"Oh, I see _that_! But did they both believe it?"
"Both believed it."
"Then did Mrs. Marrable's sister die without knowing?"
Gwen had it on her lips to say:--"She is not dead," before she had had time to foresee the consequences. She had almost said it when an apprehension struck across her speech and cut it short. How could she account to Mrs. Prichard for this knowledge of Mrs. Marrable's sister without narrowing the issue to the simple question:--"Who and where is she?" And if those grave old eyes, at rest now that the topic had become so impersonal to them, were fixed upon her waiting for the answer, how could she find it in her heart to make the only answer possible, futile fiction apart:--"It is _you_ I am speaking of--_you_ are Mrs. Marrable's sister, and each has falsely thought the other dead for a lifetime"? All her elaborate preparation had ended in an _impasse_, blocked by a dead wall whose removal was only possible to the bluntest declaration of the truth, almost more cruel now than it would have been before this factitious abatement of the agitation in which Gwen had found her.
And then the long tension that had kept Gwen on the rack, more or less, since the revelation of the letter, keenly in this last hour or so, began to tell upon her, and her soul came through into her words. "Oh no--oh no! Mrs. Marrable's sister did not die without knowing--at least, I mean ... I mean she has not died.... She may ..." She was stopped by the danger of inexplicable tears, in time as she thought.
But old Mrs. Prichard, always on the alert for her Guardian Angel, caught the slight modulation of her voice, and was alive with ready sympathy. "Why--oh why--why this?..." she began, wanting to say:--"Why such concern on Mrs. Marrable's account?" and finding herself at fault for words, came to a dead stop.
"You mean, why should _I_ fret because of Mrs. Marrable's sister? Is it not that?"