When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan · English · Gutenberg #30896 · 2,161,029 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: When Ghost Meets Ghost

Author: William De Morgan

Release date: January 9, 2010 [eBook #30896]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30896

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST ***

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online
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WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

WILLIAM DE MORGAN

Author of "Joseph Vance," "Alice-for-Short," Etc.

New York

Published February, 1914

Dedicated to The Spirit of Fiction

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

0. SAPPS COURT 3
I. DAVE AND HIS FAMILY 6
II. A SHORTAGE OF MUD 16
III. DAVE'S ACCIDENT 24
IV. BACK FROM THE HOSPITAL 30
V. MRS. PRICHARD 40
VI. THE STORY OF THE TWINS 45
VII. DAVE'S CONVALESCENT HAVEN 60
VIII. DAVE'S RETURN TO SAPPS COURT 72
IX. A VERDICT OF DEATH BY DROWNING 84
X. AT THE TOWERS 93
XI. MR. PELLEW AND MISS DICKENSON 110
XII. THE MAN WHO WAS SHOT 117
XIII. AN INQUIRY FOR A WIDOW 127
XIV. A SUCCESSFUL CAPTURE 134
XV. WHAT AUNT M'RIAR OVERHEARD 150
XVI. THE INNER LIFE OF SAPPS COURT 156
XVII. HOW ADRIAN WAS NURSED AT THE TOWERS 171
XVIII. HOW GWEN AND THE COUNTESS VISITED ADRIAN 185
XIX. GWEN'S VERY BAD NIGHT 200
XX. SLOW AND FAST APPROXIMATION 208
XXI. A RAPID ARRIVAL 220
XXII. A CONFESSION AND ITS EFFECTS 239
XXIII. GWEN'S VISIT TO MRS. MARRABLE 258
XXIV. THE SLOW APPROXIMATION GOES SLOWLY ON 272
XXV. A GAME OF WHIST 282
XXVI. HOW AUNT M'RIAR'S STORY CAME OUT 293
XXVII. HOW SAPPS HEARD A VISITOR WAS COMING 312
XXVIII. GWEN'S VISIT, AND WHAT ENDED IT 320
XXIX. HOW THE SLOW COUPLE BECAME ENGAGED 331
XXX. GWEN'S ACCOUNT OF THE CRASH 351
XXXI. MRS. PRICHARD AT CAVENDISH SQUARE 364
XXXII. AT THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 379

PART II

CHAPTER PAGE

I. AUNT M'RIAR'S HUSBAND 389
II. GWEN'S VISIT TO PENSHAM 412
III. HOW THE TWINS SAW EACH OTHER 429
IV. MAISIE AT THE TOWERS 444
V. MOTHERWARDS IN THE DARK 461
VI. HOW MAISIE LOVED POMONA 474
VII. GWEN'S NIGHT-FLIGHT TO LONDON 491
VIII. MAISIE AT STRIDES COTTAGE 498
IX. THE DUTIFUL SON 511
X. GWEN'S SECOND VISIT TO SAPPS COURT 528
XI. IN PARK LANE 543
XII. AN ENLIGHTENMENT 563
XIII. HOW GWEN TOLD SAPPS COURT 576
XIV. GWEN'S RETURN, AND THE TASK BEFORE HER 591
XV. GWEN FACES THE MUSIC 607
XVI. DR. NASH TELLS GRANNY MARRABLE 626
XVII. THE COUNTESS CALLS AT PENSHAM 646
XVIII. WHAT FOLLOWED AT CHORLTON 665
XIX. THE MEETING 677
XX. THE NIGHT AFTER THEY KNEW IT 686
XXI. SAPPS COURT AGAIN 703
XXII. STRIDES COTTAGE AGAIN 721
XXIII. GWEN'S VISIT TO PENSHAM 734
XXIV. PENSHAM AT STRIDES COTTAGE 751
XXV. A FESTIVITY AT THE TOWERS 764
XXVI. ANOTHER NIGHT WATCH 776
XXVII. HOW SHE SAW THE MODEL AGAIN 793
XXVIII. HOW HER SON CAME TOO LATE 807
XXIX. A RIGHT CROSS-COUNTER THAT LANDED 826
A BELATED PENDRIFT 853

WHEN GHOST MEETS GHOST

PART I

CHAPTER 0

A CONNECTING-LINK BETWEEN THE WRITER AND THE STORY, AMOUNTING TO
VERY LITTLE. THERE WAS A COURT SOME FIFTY YEARS SINCE IN LONDON,
SOMEWHERE, THAT IS NOW NOWHERE. THAT'S ALL!

Some fifty years ago there still remained, in a street reachable after
inquiry by turning to the left out of Tottenham Court Road, a rather
picturesque Court with an archway; which I, the writer of this story,
could not find when I tried to locate it the other day. I hunted for it
a good deal, and ended by coming away in despair and going for rest and
refreshment to a new-born teashop, where a number of young ladies had
lost their individuality, and the one who brought my tea was callous to
me and mine because you pay at the desk. But she had an orderly soul,
for she turned over the lump of sugar that had a little butter on it, so
as to lie on the buttery side and look more tidy-like.

If the tea had been China tea, fresh-made, it might have helped me to
recollecting the name of that Court, which I am sorry to say I have
forgotten. But it was Ceylon and had stood. However, it was hot. Only
you will never convince me that it was fresh-made, not even if you have
me dragged asunder by wild horses. Its upshot was, for the purpose of
this story, that it did not help me to recollect the name of that Court.

I have to confess with shame that I have written the whole of what
follows under a false pretence; having called it out of its name, to the
best of my belief, throughout. I know it had a name. It does not matter;
the story can do without accuracy--commonplace matter of fact!

But do what I will, I keep on recollecting new names for it, and each
seems more plausible than the other. Coltsfoot Court, Barretts Court,
Chesterfield Court, Sapps Court! Any one of these, if I add
seventeen-hundred-and-much, or eighteen-hundred-and-nothing-to-speak-of,
seems to fit this Court to a nicety. Suppose we make it Sapps Court, and
let it go at that!

Oh, the little old corners of the world that were homes and are gone!
Years hence the Court we will call Sapps will still dwell in some old
mind that knew its every brick, and be portrayed to credulous hearers
yet unborn as an unpretentious Eden, by some _laudator_ of its _tempus
actum_--some forgotten soul waiting for emancipation in an infirmary or
almshouse.

Anyhow, _I_ can remember this Court, and can tell a tale it plays a part
in, only not very quick.

Anybody might have passed down the main street and never noticed it,
because its arched entry didn't give on the street, but on a bay or
_cul-de-sac_ just long enough for a hansom to drive into but not to turn
round in. There was nothing to arrest the attention of the passer-by,
self-absorbed or professionally engaged; simultaneous possibilities, in
his case.

But if the passer-by forgot himself and neglected his proper function in
life at the moment that he came abreast of this _cul-de-sac_, he may
have thereby come to the knowledge of Sapps Court; and, if a Londoner,
may have wondered why he never knew of it before. For there was nothing
in the external appearance of its arched entry to induce him to face the
difficulties incidental to entering it. He may even have nursed
intentions of saying to a friend who prided himself on his knowledge of
town:--"I say, Old Cock, you think yourself mighty clever and all that,
but I bet you can't tell me where Sapps Court is." If, however, he never
went down Sapps Court at all--merely looked at his inscription and,
recollecting his own place in nature, passed on--I shouldn't be
surprised.

It went downhill under the archway when you did go in, and you came to a
step. If you did not tumble owing to the suddenness and depth of this
step, you came to another; and were stupefied by reaching the ground
four inches sooner than you expected, and made conscious that your
skeleton had been driven an equal distance upwards through your system.
Then you could see Sapps Court, but under provocation, from its entry.
When you recovered your temper you admitted that it was a better Court
than you had anticipated.

All the residences were in a row on the left, and there was a dead wall
on the right with an inscription on a stone in it that said the ground
twelve inches beyond belonged to somebody else. This wall was in the
confidence of the main street, lending itself to a fiction that the
houses therein had gardens or yards behind them. They hadn't; but the
tenants believed they had, and hung out chemises and nightgowns and
shirts to dry in the areas they built up their faith on; and really, if
they were properly wrung out afore hung up there was nothing to complain
of, because the blacks didn't hold on, not to crock, but got shook off
or blew away of theirselves. We put this in the language of our
informant.

However, the story has no business on the other side of this wall. What
concerns it is the row of houses on the left.

If ever a row of houses bore upon them the stamp of having been
overtaken and surrounded by an unexpected city, these did. The wooden
palings that still skirted the breathing-room in front of them almost
said aloud to every newcomer:--"Where is the strip of land gone that we
could see beyond, day by day; that belonged to God-knows-who; whose
further boundary was the road the haycarts brought their loads on, drawn
by deliberate horses that had bells?" The persistent sunflowers that
still struggled into being behind them told tales of how big they were
in youth, years ago, when they could turn to the sun and hope to catch
his eye. The stray wallflowers murmured to all who had ears to
hear:--"This is how we smelt in days gone by--but oh!--so much
stronger!" The wooden shutters, outside the ground-floors that really
stood upon the ground, told, if you chose to listen, of how they kept
the houses safe from thieves in moonlit nights a century ago; and the
doors between them--for each house was three windows wide--opened
straight into the kitchen. So they were, or had been, cottages. But the
miscreant in possession twenty years ago, instigated by a jerry-builder,
had added a storey and removed the tiled roofs whose garrets were every
bit as good as the jerry-built rooms that took their place. Sapp himself
may have done it--one knows nothing of his principles--and at the same
time in a burst of overweening vanity called his cottages his Court. But
one rather likes to think that Sapp was with his forbears when this came
about, when the wall was built up opposite, and the cottages could no
longer throw their dust everywhere, but had to resort to a common
dustbin at the end of the Court, which smelt so you could smell it quite
plain across the wall when the lid was off. That dustbin was the outward
and visible sign of the decadence of Sapp.

CHAPTER I

OF DAVE AND DOLLY WARDLE AND THEIR UNCLE MOSES, WHO HAD BEEN A
PRIZEFIGHTER, AND THEIR AUNT M'RIAR, WHO KEPT AN EYE ON THEM. OF
DAVE'S SERVICES TO THE PUBLIC, AND OF ANOTHER PUBLIC THAT NEARLY
MADE UNCLE MO BANKRUPT. OF HIS PAST BATTLES, NOTABLY ONE WITH A
SWEEP. OF MRS. PRICHARD AND MRS. BURR, WHO LIVED UPSTAIRS. OF A BAD
ACCIDENT THAT BEFELL DAVE, AND OF SIMEON STYLITES. HOW UNCLE MO
STRAPPED UP DAVE'S HEAD WITH DIACHYLUM BOUGHT BY A VERY BAD BOY,
MICHAEL RAGSTROAR, THE LIKE OF WHOM YOU NEVER! OF THE JUDGEMENT OF
SOLOMON, AND DAVE'S CAT

In the last house down the Court, the one that was so handy to the
dustbin, lived a very small boy and a still smaller sister. There were
other members of the household--to wit, their Uncle Moses and their Aunt
M'riar, who were not husband and wife, but respectively brother and
sister of Dave's father and mother. Uncle Moses' name was Wardle, Aunt
M'riar's that of a deceased or vanished husband. But Sapps Court was
never prepared to say offhand what this name was, and "Aunt M'riar" was
universal. So indeed was "Uncle Mo"; but, as No. 7 had been spoken of as
"Wardle's" since his brother took the lower half of the house for
himself and his first wife, with whom he had lived there fifteen years,
the name Wardle had come to be the name of the house. This brother had
been some ten years younger than Moses, and had had apparently more than
his fair share of the family weddings; as "old Mo," if he ever was
married, had kept the lady secret; from his brother's family certainly,
and presumably from the rest of the world.

Our little boy was the sort of boy you were sorry was ever going to be
eleven, because at five years and ten months he was that square and
compact, that chunky and yet that tender, that no right-minded person
could desire him to be changed to an impudent young scaramouch like
young Michael Ragstroar four doors higher up, who was eleven and a
regular handful.

His name was Dave Wardle, after his father; and his sister's Dorothea,
after her mother. Both names appeared on a tombstone in the parish
churchyard, and you might have thought they was anybody, said Public
Opinion; which showed that Dave and his sister were orphans. Both had
recollections of their father, but the funeral he indulged in three
years since had elbowed other memories out of court. Of their mother
they only knew by hearsay, as Dave was only three years old when his
sister committed matricide, quite unconsciously, and you could hear her
all the way up the Court. Pardon the story's way of introducing
attestations to some fact of interest or importance in the language in
which its compiler has received it.

They were good children to do with, said their Aunt M'riar, so long as
you kep' an eye. And a good job they were, because who was to do her
work if she was every minute prancing round after a couple of young
monkeys? This was a strained way of indicating the case; but there can
be no doubt of its substantial truth. So Aunt M'riar felt at rest so
long as Dave was content to set up atop of the dustbin-lid and shout
till he was hoarse; all the while using a shovel, that was public
property, as a gong.

Perhaps Dave took his sister Dolly into his confidence about the nature
of the trust he conceived himself to hold in connection with this
dustbin. To others of the inhabitants he was reticent, merely referring
to an emolument he was entitled to. "The man on the lid," he said, "has
a farden." He said this with such conviction that few had the heart to
deny the justice of the claim outright, resorting to subterfuges to
evade a cash settlement. One had left his change on the piano; another
was looking forward to an early liquidation of small liabilities on the
return of his ship to port; another would see about it next time Sunday
come of a Friday, and so on. But only his Uncle Moses ever gave him an
actual farthing, and Dave deposited it in a cat on the mantelshelf, who
was hollow by nature, and provided by art with a slot in the dorsal
vertebrae. It could be shook out if you wanted it, and Dave occasionally
took it out of deposit in connection with a course of experiments he was
interested in. He wished to determine how far he could spit it out.

This inquiry was a resource against ennui on rainy days and foggy days
and days that were going to clear up later. All these sorts were devised
by the malignity of Providence for the confusion of small boys yearning
to be on active service, redistributing property, obstructing traffic,
or calling attention to personal peculiarities of harmless passers-by.
But it was not so inexhaustible but that cases occurred when those
children got that unsettled and masterful there was no abiding their
racket; and as for Dolly, her brother was making her every bit as bad as
himself. At such times a great resource was to induce Uncle Moses to
tell some experiences of a glorious past, his own. For he had been a
member of the Prize Ring, and had been slapped on the back by Dukes, and
had even been privileged to grasp a Royal hand. He was now an unwieldy
giant, able to get about with a stick when the day was fine, but every
six months less inclined for the effort.

Uncle Moses, when he retired from public life, had put all his winnings,
which were considerable, into a long lease of a pot-house near Golden
Square, where he was well-known and very popular. If, however, there had
been a rock on the premises and he had had all the powers of his
namesake, four-half would have had to run as fast from it as ever did
water from the rock in Horeb, to keep down the thirst of Golden Square.
For Uncle Moses not only refused to take money from old friends who
dwelt in his memory, but weakly gave way to constructive allegations of
long years of comradeship in a happy past, which his powers of
recollection did not enable him to contradict. "Wot, old Moses!--you'll
never come for to go for to say you've forgot old Swipey Sam, jist along
in the Old Kent Road--Easy Shavin' one 'apenny or an arrangement come to
by the week!" Or merely, "Seein' you's as good as old times come alive
again, mate." Suchlike appeals were almost invariable from any customer
who got fair speech of Uncle Moses in his own bar. In his absence these
claims were snuffed out roughly by a prosaic barman--even the most
pathetic ones, such as that of an extinct thimblerigger for whom three
small thimbles and one little pea had ceased for ever, years ago, when
he got his fingers in a sausage-machine. But Uncle Moses was so much his
own barman that this generosity told heavily against his credit; and he
would certainly have been left a pauper but for the earnest counsels of
an old friend known in his circle of Society as Affability Bob, although
his real name was Jeremiah Alibone. By him he was persuaded to dispose
of the lease of the "Marquess of Montrose" while it still had some
value, and to retire on a pound a week. This might have been more had he
invested all the proceeds in an annuity. "But, put it I do!" said he. "I
don't see my way to no advantage for David and Dorothy, and this here
young newcome, if I was to hop the twig." For this was at the time of
the birth of little Dave, nearly six years before the date of this
story.

Affability Bob applauded his friend's course of action in view of its
motive. "But," said he, "I tell you this, Moses. If you'd 'a' gone on
standin' Sam to every narrycove round about Soho much longer, 'No
effects' would have been _your_ vardict, sir." To which Uncle Moses
replied, "Right you are, old friend," and changed the subject.

However, there you have plenty to show what a rich mine of past
experience Uncle Moses had to dig in. The wonder was that Dave and Dolly
refused to avail themselves of its wealth, always preferring a
monotonous repetition of an encounter their uncle had had with a Sweep.
He could butt, this Sweep could, like a battering-ram, ketching hold
upon you symultaneous round the gaiters. He was irresistible by ordinary
means, his head being unimpressionable by direct impact. But Uncle Moses
had been one too many for him, having put a lot of thinking into the
right way of dealing with his system.

He had perceived that the hardest head, struck evenly on both sides at
the same moment, must suffer approximately as much as if jammed against
the door-post and catched full with a fair round swing. Whereas had
these blows followed one another on a yielding head, the injury it
inflicted as a battering-ram might have outweighed the damage it
received in inflicting it. As it was, Peter--so Uncle Moses called the
Sweep--was for one moment defenceless, being preoccupied in seizing his
opponent by the ankles; and although his cranium had no sinuses, and was
so thick it could crush a quart-pot like an opera-hat, it did not court
a fourth double concussion, and this time he was destined to disappoint
his backers.

His opponent, who in those days was known as the Hanley Linnet, suffered
very little in the encounter. No doubt you know that a man in fine
training can take an amazing number of back-falls on fair ground, clear
of snags and brickbats; and, of course, the Linnet's seconds made a
special point of this, examining careful and keeping an eye to prevent
the introduction of broke-up rubbish inside the ropes by parties having
an interest, or viciously disposed.

"There you are again, Uncle Mo, a-tellin' and a-tellin' and a-tellin'!"
So Aunt M'riar would say when she heard this narrative going over
well-known ground for the thousandth time. "And them children not
lettin' you turn round in bed, I call it!" This was in reference to Dave
and Dolly's severity about the text. The smallest departure from the
earlier version led to both them children pouncing at once. Dave would
exclaim reproachfully:--"You _did_ say a Sweep with one blind eye, Uncle
Mo!" and Dolly would confirm his words with as much emphasis as her
powers of speech allowed. "Essoodid, a 'Weep with one b'ind eye!"--also
reproachfully. Then Uncle Moses would supply a corrected version of
whatever was defective, in this case an eye not quite blind, but nearly,
owing to a young nipper, no older than Dave, aiming a broken bottle at
him as the orficers was conducting of him to the Station, after a fight
Wandsworth way, the other party being took off to the Horspital for
dead.

The Jews, I am told, won't stand any nonsense when they have their
sacred writings copied, always destroying every inaccurate MS. the
moment an error is spotted in it. Dave and Dolly were not the Jews, but
they were as intolerant of variation in the text of this almost sacred
legend of the Sweep. "S'ow me how you punched him, wiv Dave's head,"
Dolly would say; and she would be most exacting over the dramatic
rendering of this ancient fight. "Percisely this way like I'm showing
you--only harder," was Uncle Moses' voucher for his own accuracy. "Muss
harder?" inquired Dolly. "Well--a tidy bit harder!" said the veteran
with truth. The head of the Sweep's understudy, Dave, was not equal to a
full-dress rehearsal. So Dolly had to be content with the promise of a
closer reading of the part when her brother was growed up.

But it was rather like Aunt M'riar said, for Uncle Moses. Those two
young Turks didn't allow their uncle no latitude, in the manner of
speaking. He couldn't turn round in bed.

These rainy days, when the children could not possibly be allowed out,
taxed their guardians' patience just to the point of making
them--suppose we say--not ungrateful to Providence when old Mrs.
Prichard upstairs giv' leave for the children to come and play up in her
room. She was the only other in-dweller in the house, living in the
front and back attics with Mrs. Burr, who took jobs out in the
dressmaking, and very moderate charges. When Mrs. Burr worked at home,
Mrs. Prichard enjoyed her society and knitted, while Mrs. Burr cut out
and basted. Very few remarks were passed; for though Mrs. Burr was
snappish now and again, company was company, and Mrs. Prichard she put
up with a little temper at times, because we all had our trials; and
Mrs. Burr was considered good at heart, though short with you now and
again. Hence when loneliness became irksome, Mrs. Prichard found Dave
and Dolly a satisfaction, so long as nothing was broke. It was a
pleasant extension of the experience of their early youth to play at
monarchs, military celebrities, professional assassins, and so on, in
old Mrs. Prichard's room upstairs. And sometimes nothing _was_ broke.
Otherwise one day at No. 7, Sapps Court, was much the same as another.

Uncle Mo's residence in Sapps Court dated many years before the coming
of Aunt M'riar; in fact, as far back as the time he was deprived of his
anchorage in Soho. He was then taken in by his brother, recently a
widower; and no question had ever arisen of his quitting the haven he
had been, as it were, towed into as a derelict; until, some years later,
David announced that he was thinking of Dolly Tarver at Ealing. Moses
smoked through a pipe in silence, so as to give full consideration; then
said, like an easy-going old boy as he was:--"You might do worse, Dave.
I can clear out, any minute. You've only got to sing out." To which his
brother had replied:--"Don't you talk of clearing out, not till Miss
Tarver she tells you." Moses' answer was:--"I'm agreeable, Dave"; and
the matter dropped until some time after, when he had made Dolly
Tarver's acquaintance. She, on hearing that her union with David would
send Mo again adrift, had threatened to declare off if such a thing was
so much as spoke of. So Moses had remained on, in the character of a
permanency saturated with temporariness; and, when the little boy Dave
began to take his place in Society, proceeded to appropriate--so said
the child's parents--more than an uncle's fair share of him.

Then came the tragedy of his mother's death, causing the Court to go
into mourning, and leaving Dave with a sister, too young to be conscious
of responsibility for it. Not too young, however, to make her case
heard--the case all living things have against the Power that creates
them without so much as asking leave. The riot she made being
interpreted by both father and uncle as protest against Mrs. Twiggins, a
midwife who made herself disagreeable--or, strictly speaking, more
disagreeable; being normally unpleasant, and apt to snap when spoke to,
however civil--it was thought desirable to call in the help of her Aunt
M'riar, who was living with her family at Ealing as a widow without
incumbrance. Dolly junior appeared to calm down under Aunt M'riar's
auspices, though every now and then her natural indignation got the
better of her self-restraint. Dave junior was disgusted with his sister
at first, but softened gradually towards her as she matured.

His father did not long survive the death of his young wife. Even an
omnibus-driver is not exempt from inflammation of the lungs, although
the complaint is not so fatal among persons exposed to all weathers as
among leaders of indoor lives. A violent double pneumonia carried off
Uncle Mo's brother, six months after he became a widower, and about
three years before the date of this story.

Whether in some other class of life a marriageable uncle and aunt--sixty
and forty respectively--would have accepted their condominium of the
household that was left, it is not for the story to discuss. Uncle Moses
refused to give up the two babies, and Aunt M'riar refused to leave
them, and--as was remarked by both--there you were! It was an _impasse_.
The only effect it had on the position was that Uncle Mo's temporariness
got a little boastful, and slighted his permanency. The latter, however,
paid absolutely no attention to the insult, and the only change that
took place in the three following years at No. 7, Sapps Court, had
nothing to do with the downstairs tenants. Some months before the first
date of the story, a variation came about in the occupancy upstairs,
Mrs. Prichard and Mrs. Burr taking the place of some parties who, if the
truth was told, were rather a riddance. The fact is merely recorded as
received; nothing further has transpired regarding these persons.

Mrs. Prichard was a very old lady who seldom showed herself outside of
her own room--so the Court testified--but who, when she did so,
impressed the downstairs tenants as of unfathomable antiquity and a
certain pictorial appearance, causing Uncle Mo to speak of her as an old
picter, and Dave to misapprehend her name. For he always spoke of her as
old Mrs. Picture. Mrs. Burr dawned upon the Court as a civil-spoken
person who was away most part of the day, and who did not develope her
identity vigorously during the first year of her tenancy. One is
terribly handicapped by one's own absence, as a member of any Society.

* * * * *

As time went on, Dave and Dolly, who began life with an idea that Sapps
Court was the Universe, became curious about what was going on outside.
They grew less contented with the dustbin, and ambition dictated to Dave
an enthronement on an iron post at the entrance, under the archway. The
delight of sitting on this post was so great that Dave willingly faced
the fact that he could not get down, and whenever he could persuade
anyone to put him up ran a risk of remaining there _sine die_. When he
could not induce a native of the Court to do this, he endeavoured to
influence the outer public, not without success. For when it came to
understand--that public--that the grubby little tenant of Dave's grubby
little shirt and trousers was not asking the time nor for a hoyp'ny, but
was murmuring shyly:--"I soy, mawster, put me up atop," at the same
time slapping the post on either side with two grubby little, fat hands,
it would unbend and comply, telling Dave to hold on tight, and never
asking no questions how ever the child was to be got off of it when the
time came. Because people are that selfish and inconsiderate.

The difficulty of getting down off of it all by himself, without a
friendly supporting hand in the waistband of his trousers, was connected
with the form of this post's head. It was not a disused twenty-four
pounder with a shot in its muzzle, as so many posts are, but a real
architectural post, cast from a pattern at the foundry. Its capital
expanded at the top, and its projecting rim made its negotiation
difficult to climbers, if small; hard to get round from below, and
perilous to leave hold of all of a sudden-like, in order to grasp the
shaft in descent. But then, it was this very expansion that provided a
seat for Dave, which the other sort of post would hardly have afforded.

How did Simeon Stylites manage to scrat on? One prefers to think that an
angel put him on his column, carrying him somewhat as one carries a cat;
and called for him to be taken down at convenient intervals by
appointment. The mind revolts at the idea that he really never came
down, quite never! But then, when the starving man is on at the
Aquarium, we--that is to say, the humane public--are apt to give way to
mere maudlin sentimentalism, and hope he is cheating. And when a person
at a Music Hall folds backwards and looks through his legs at us
forwards, we always hope he feels no strain--nothing but a great and
justifiable professional pride. It is not a pleasant feeling that any of
these good people are suffering on our behalf. However, in the case of
Simeon Stylites there was a mixture of motives, no doubt.

Dave Wardle was too young to have motives, and had none, unless the
desire to surprise and impress Dolly had weight with him. But he had the
longing on him which that young gentleman in the poem expressed by
writing the Latin for _taller_ on a flag; and to gratify it had scaled
the dustbin as the merest infant. It was an Alpine record. But the iron
post was no mere Matterhorn. It was like Peter Bot's Mountain; and once
you was up, there you were, and no getting down!

The occasional phrases for which I am indebted to Aunt M'riar which have
crept into the text recently--not, as I think, to its detriment--were
used by her after a mishap which befell her nephew owing to the child's
impatience. If he'd only a had the sense to set still a half a minute
longer, she would have done them frills and could have run up the Court
a'most as soon as look at you. But she hoped what had happened would
prove a warning, not only to Dave, but to all little boys in a driving
hurry to get off posts. And not only to them either, but to Youth
generally, to pay attention to what was said to it by Age and
Experience, neither of which ever climb up posts without some safe
guarantee of being able to climb down again.

What had happened was that Dave had cut his head on the ornate plinth of
that cast-iron post, his hands missing their grip as his legs caught the
shaft, so that he turned over backwards and his occiput suffered. He
showed a splendid spirit--quite Spartan, in fact--bearing in mind his
uncle's frequent homilies on the subject of crying; a thing no little
boy, however young, should dream of. Dolly was under no such obligation,
according to Uncle Moses, being a female or the rudiment of one, and on
this occasion she roared for herself and her brother, too. Aunt M'riar
was in favour of taking the child to Mr. Ekins, the apothecary, for
skilled surgery to deal with the case, but Uncle Moses scouted the idea.

"Twopenn'orth o' stroppin' and a basin o' warm water," said he, "and
I'll patch him up equal to Guy's Hospital.... Got no diacklum? Then send
one of those young varmints outside for it.... You've no call to go
yourself." For a various crowd of various ages under twelve had come
from nowhere to enjoy the tragic incident.

"Twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary?"
said that young Michael Ragstroar, thrusting himself forward and others
backward; because, you see, he was such a cheeky, precocious young
vagabond. "Mean to say I can't buy twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off
of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary? Mean to say my aunt that orkupies a
'ouse in Chiswick clost to high-water mark don't send me to the
'poarthecaries just as often as not? For the mixture to be taken regular
... Ah!--where's the twopence? 'And over!"

Whereupon, such is the power of self-confidence over everyone else, that
Aunt M'riar entrusted twopence to this youth, quite forgetting that he
was only eleven. Yet her faith in him was not ill-founded, for he
returned like an echo as to promptitude. Only, unlike the echo, he came
back louder than he went, and more positive.

"There's the quorntity and no cheatin'," said he. "You can medger it up
with a rule if you like. It'll medger, you find if it don't! Like I
told you! And a 'apenny returned on the transaction." The tension of the
situation did not admit of the measuring test--nor indeed had Aunt
M'riar data to go upon--and as for the halfpenny, it stood over.

Uncle Moses had not laid false claim to surgical skill, and was able to
strap the wound a'most as if he'd been brought up to it. By the time it
was done Dave's courage was on the wane, and he wasn't sorry to lie his
head down and shut to his eyes. Because the lids thereof were like the
lids of plate-chests.

However, before he went off very sound asleep--so sound you might have
took him for a image--he heard what passed between Uncle Moses and
Michael, whose name has been spelt herein so that you should think of it
as Sapps Court did; but its correct form is Rackstraw.

"Now, young potato-peelin's, how much money did the doctor hand you back
for that diacklum?"

"Penny. Said he'd charge it up to the next Dook that come to his shop."

Thereupon Aunt M'riar taxed the speaker with perfidy. "Why, you little
untrue, lyin', deceitful story," she said. "To think you should say it
was only a ha'penny!"

"I never said no such a thing. S'elp me!"

"''Apenny returned on the transaction' was the very identical selfsame
words." Thus Aunt M'riar testified. "And what is more," she added
inconsecutively, "I do not believe you've any such an aunt, nor yet ever
been to Chiswick."

But young potato-peelings, so called from his father's vocation of
costermonger, defended himself with indignation. "Warn't that square?"
said he. "He never said I warn't to keep it all, didn't that doctor!"
Then he took a high position as of injured virtue. "There's your
'apenny! There's both your 'apennies! Mean to say I 'aven't kep' 'em
safe for yer?" Uncle Moses allowed the position of bailee, but disposed
of the penny as Solomon suggested in the case of the baby, giving one
halfpenny to Michael, and putting the other in Dave's cat on the
mantelshelf.

He justified this course afterwards on the ground that the doctor's
refund was made to the actual negotiator, and that Aunt M'riar had in
any case received full value for her money. Who could say that the
doctor, if referred to, would not have repudiated Aunt M'riar's claim
_in toto_?

Warnings, cautions, and moral lessons derived from this incident had due
weight with Dave for several days; in fact, until his cut healed over.
Then he forgot them and became as bad as ever.

CHAPTER II

HOW DAVE FAILED TO PROFIT BY HIS EXPERIENCE. OF PAOLO TOSCANELLI
AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. OF A NEW SHORE DAVE AND DOLLY REACHED BY
EXPLORATION, ROUND THE CORNER; AND OF OTHER NAVIGATORS WHO HAD, IN
THIS CASE, MADE IT FOR THEMSELVES. OF THE PUBLIC SPIRIT OF DAVE AND
DOLLY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A _BARRAGE_. HOW MRS. TAPPING AND
MRS. RILEY HEARD THE ENGINES. OF A SHORTAGE OF MUD, AND A GREAT
RESOLVE OF DAVE'S. WHY NOT SOME NEW MUD FROM THE NEW SHORE?

The interest of Dave's accident told in the last chapter is merely
collateral. It shows how narrow an escape the story that follows had not
only of never being finished, but even of never being written. For if
its events had never happened, it goes near to certainty that they would
never have been narrated. Near, but not quite. For even if Dave had
profited by these warnings, cautions, and moral lessons to the extent of
averting what now appears to have been Destiny, some imaginative author
might have woven a history showing exactly what might have happened to
him if he had not been a good boy. And that history, in the hands of a
master--one who had the organ of the conditional praeterpluperfect tense
very large--might have worked out the same as this.

The story may be thankful that no such task has fallen to its author's
lot. It is so much easier to tell something that actually did happen
than to make up as you go.

Dave was soon as bad as ever--no doubt of it. Only he kept clear of that
post. The burnt child dreads the fire, and the chances are that
admonitions not to climb up on posts had less to do with his abstention
from this one than the lesson the post itself had hammered into the back
of his head. Exploration of the outer world--of the regions imperfectly
known beyond that post--had so far produced no fatal consequences; so
that Aunt M'riar's and Uncle Mo's warnings to the children to keep
within bounds had not the same convincing character.

But a time was at hand for the passion of exploration to seize upon
these two very young people, and to become an excitement as absorbing to
them as the discovery of America to Paolo Toscanelli and Christopher
Columbus. At first it was satisfied by the _cul-de-sac_ recess on which
Sapps Court opened. But this palled, and no wonder! How could it compete
with the public highway out of which it branched, especially when there
was a new shore--that is to say, sewer--in course of construction?

To stand on the edge of a chasm which certainly reached to the bowels of
the earth, and to see them shovelled up from platform to platform by
agencies that spat upon their hands for some professional reason
whenever there came a lull in the supply from below, was to find life
worth living indeed. These agencies conversed continually about an
injury that had been inflicted on them by the Will of God, the selfish
caprice of their employers, or the cupidity of the rich. They appeared
to be capable of shovelling in any space, however narrow, almost to the
extent of surrendering one dimension and occupying only a plane surface.
But it hadn't come to that yet. The battens that kept the trench-sides
vertical were wider apart than what you'd have thought, when you come to
try 'em with a two-fut rule. And the short lengths of quartering that
kep' 'em apart were not really intersecting the diggers' anatomies as
the weaver's shuttle passes through the warp. That was only the
impression of the unconcerned spectator as he walked above them over the
plank bridge that acknowledged his right of way across the road. His
sympathies remained unentangled. If people navigated, it was their own
look out. You see, these people were navvies, or navigators, although it
strains one's sense of language to describe them so.

The best of it was to come. For in time the lowest navvy was threatened
with death by misadventure, unless he come up time enough to avoid the
water. The small pump the job had been making shift with was obliged to
acknowledge itself beaten, and to make way for one with two handles,
each with room for two pumpers; and this in turn was discarded in favour
of a noisy affair with a donkey-engine, which brought up the yellow
stream as fast as ever a gutter of nine-inch plank, nailed up to a =V=,
would carry it away. And it really was a most extraordinary thing that
of all those navigators there was not one that had not predicted in
detail exactly the course of events that had come about. Mr. Bloxam, the
foreman, had told the governor that there would be no harm in having the
pump handy, seeing they would go below the clay. And each of the others
had--so they themselves said--spoken in the same sense, in some cases
using a most inappropriate adjective to qualify the expected flood.
Why, even Sleepy Joe had seen that! Sleepy Joe was this same foreman,
and he lived in a wooden hutch on the job, called The Office.

But the watershed of any engine--whatever may be its donkey-power, and
whatever that name implies--slops back where a closed spout changes
suddenly to an open gutter, and sets up independent lakes and rivers.
This one sent its overflow towards Sapps Court, the incline favouring
its distribution along the gutter of the _cul-de-sac_, which lay a
little lower than the main street it opened out of. Its rich, ochrous
rivulets--containing no visible trace of haemorrhage, in spite of that
abuse of an adjective--were creeping slowly along the interstices of
cobblestone paving that still outlived the incoming of Macadam, when
Dave and Dolly Wardle ventured out of their archway to renew a survey,
begun the previous day, of the fascinating excavation in the main
street.

Here was an opportunity for active and useful service not to be lost.
Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came
ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment
to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian
lava, on the line of least resistance. Dolly followed his example,
filling a garment she called her pinafore with whatever mould or
_debris_ was attainable, and bringing it with much gravity and some
pride to help on the structure of the dyke. A fiction, rather felt than
spoken, got in the air that Sapps Court and its inhabitants would be
overwhelmed as by Noah's flood, except for the exertions of Dave and his
sister. It appealed to some friends of the same age, also inhabitants of
the Court, and with their assistance and sympathy it really seemed--in
this fiction--that a catastrophe might be averted. You may imagine what
a drove of little grubs those children looked in the course of half an
hour. Not that any of them were particularly spruce to begin with.

However, there was the embankment holding back the dirty yellow water;
and now the pump was running on steady-like, there didn't so much come
slopping over to add to the deluge that threatened Sapps Court. The
policeman--the only one supposed to exist, although in form he varied
slightly--made an inquiry as to what was going on, to be beforehand with
Anarchy. He said:--"What are you young customers about, taking the
Company's water?" That seemed to embody an indictment without committing
the accuser to particulars. But he took no active steps, and a very old
man with a fur cap, and no teeth, and big bones in his cheeks,
said:--"It don't make no odds to we, I take it." He was a prehistoric
navvy, who had become a watchman, and was responsible for red lanterns
hooked to posts on the edge of chasms to warn carts off. He was going to
sleep in half a tent, soothed or otherwise by the unflagging piston of
that donkey-engine, which had made up its mind to go till further
notice.

The men were knocking off work, and it was getting on for time for those
children to have their suppers and be put to bed. But as Aunt M'riar had
some trimming to finish, and it was a very fine evening, there was no
harm in leaving them alone a few minutes longer. As for any attractive
influences of supper, those children never come in of theirselves, and
always had to be fetched.

An early lamplighter--for this was in September, 1853--passed along the
street with a ladder, dropping stars as he went. There are no
lamplighters now, no real ones that run up ladders. Their ladders
vanished first, leaving them with a magic wand that lighted the gas as
soon as you got the tap turned; only that was ever so long, as often as
not. Perhaps things are better now that lamps light themselves
instinctively at the official hour of sunset. At any rate, one has the
satisfaction of occasionally seeing one that won't go out, but burns on
into the daylight to spite the Authorities.

They were cold stars, almost green, that this lamplighter dropped; but
this was because the sun had left a flood of orange-gold behind it,
enough to make the tune from "Rigoletto" an organ was playing think it
was being composed in Italy again. The world was a peaceful world,
because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the
former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings
at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull
that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or
backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and
personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly
ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit
as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's the
tallow-chandler's--where you got tallow candles and dips, as well as
composites; for in those days they still chandled tallow--didn't have a
single customer in for ten whole minutes by the clock. In that interval
Mrs. Tapping seized the opportunity to come out in the street and
breathe the air. So did Mrs. Riley next door, and they stood conversing
on the topics of the day, looking at the sunset over the roofs of the
_cul-de-sac_ this story has reference to. For Mrs. Tapping's shop was in
the main road, opposite to where the embankment operations were in hand.

"Ye never will be tellin' me now, Mrs. Tapping, that ye've not hur-r-rd
thim calling 'Fire!' in the sthrate behind? Fy-urr, fy-urr, fy-urr!"
This is hard to write as Mrs. Riley spoke it, so great was her command
of the letter _r_.

"Now you name it, Mrs. Riley, deny it I can't. But to the point of
taking notice to bear in mind--why no! It was on my ears, but only to be
let slip that minute. Small amounts and accommodations frequent, owing
to reductions on quantity took, distrack attention. I was a-sayin' to my
stepdaughter only the other day that hearin' is one thing and listenin'
is another. And she says to me, she says, I was talking like a book, she
says. Her very expression and far from respectful! So I says to her, not
to be put upon, 'Lethear,' I says, 'books ain't similar all through but
to seleck from, and I go accordin'....'" Mrs. Tapping, whose system was
always to turn the conversation to some incident in which she had been
prominent, might have developed this one further, but Mrs. Riley
interrupted her with Celtic _naivete_.

"D'ye mane to say, me dyurr, that ye can't hearr 'em now? Kape your
tongue silent and listen!" A good, full brogue permits speech that would
offend in colourless Saxon; and Mrs. Tapping made no protest, but
listened. Sure enough the rousing, maddening "Fire, fire, fire, fire,
fire!" was on its way at speed somewhere close at hand. It grew and
lessened and died. And Mrs. Riley was triumphant. "That's a larrudge
fire, shure!" said she, transposing her impression of the enthusiasm of
the engine to the area of the conflagration. Cold logic perceives that
an engine may be just as keen to pump on a cottage as on a palace,
before it knows which. Mrs. Riley had come from Tipperary, and had
brought a sympathetic imagination with her, leaving any logic she
possessed behind.

A few minutes before the lamplighter passed--saying to the old
watchman:--"Goin' to bed, Sam?" and on receiving the reply, "Time enough
yet!" rejoining sarcastically:--"Time enough for a quart!"--the
labourers at the dyke had recognised the fact that unless new material
could be obtained, the pent-up waters would burst the curb and bound,
rejoicing to be free, and rush headlong to the nearest drain. All the
work would be lost unless a fresh supply could be obtained; the ruling
fiction of a new Noachian deluge might prove a deadly reality instead
of, as now, a theoretical contingency under conditions which engineering
skill might avert. The Sappers and Miners who were roused from their
beds to make good a dynamited embankment and block the relentless Thames
did not work with a more untiring zeal to baffle a real enemy than did
Dave and Dolly to keep out a fictitious one, and hypothetically save
Uncle Moses and Aunt M'riar from drowning. But all efforts would be
useless if there was to be a shortage of mud.

The faces of our little friends, and their little friends, were
earnestness itself as they concentrated on the great work in the glow of
the sunset. They had no eyes for its glories. The lamplighter even,
dropping jewels as he went, passed them by unheeded. The organ
interpreted Donizetti in vain. Despair seemed imminent when Dolly, who,
though small, was as keen as the keenest of the diggers, came back after
a special effort with no more than the merest handful of
gutter-scrapings, saying with a most pathetic wail:--"I tan't det no
more!"

Then it was that a great resolve took shape in the heart of Dave. It
found utterance in the words:--"Oy wants some of the New Mud the Men
spoyded up with their spoyds," and pointed to an ambitious scheme for
securing some of the fine rich clay that lay in a tempting heap beyond
the wooden bridge across the sewer-trench. The bridge that Dave had
never even stood upon, much less crossed!

The daring, reckless courage of the enterprise! Dolly gasped with awe
and terror. She was too small to find at a moment's notice any terms in
which she could dissuade Dave from so venturesome a project. Besides,
her faith in her brother amounted to superstition. Dave _must_ know what
was practicable and righteous. Was he not nearly six years old? She
stood speechless and motionless, her heart in her mouth as she watched
him go furtively across that awful bridge of planks and get nearer and
nearer to his prize.

There were lions in his path, as there used to be in the path of
knights-errant when they came near the castles of necromancers who held
beautiful princesses captive--to say nothing of full-blown dragons and
alluring syrens. These lions took in one case, the form of a
butcher-boy, who said untruthfully:--"Now, young hobstacle, clear out o'
this! Boys ain't allowed on bridges;" and in another that of Michael
Ragstroar, who said, "Don't you let the Company see you carryin' off
their property. They'll rip you open as soon as look at you. You'll be
took afore the Beak." Dave was not yet old enough to see what a very
perverted view of legal process these words contained, but his blue eyes
looked mistrustfully at the speaker as he watched him pass up the street
towards the Wheatsheaf, swinging a yellow jug with ridges round its neck
and a full corporation. Michael had been sent to fetch the beer.

If the blue eyes had not remained fixed on that yellow jug and its
bearer till both vanished through the swing-door of the Wheatsheaf--if
their owner's mistrust of his informant had been strong enough to cancel
the misgivings that crossed his baby mind, only a few seconds sooner,
would things have gone otherwise with Dave? Would he have used that
beautiful lump of clay, as big as a man of his age could carry, on the
works that were to avert Noah's flood from Sapps Court? Would he and
Dolly not probably have been caught at their escapade by an indignant
Aunt M'riar, corrected, duly washed and fed, and sent to bed sadder and
wiser babies? So few seconds might have made the whole difference.

Or, if that heap of clay had been thrown on the other side of the
trench, on the pavement instead of towards the traffic--why then the
children might have taken all they could carry, and Old Sam would have
countenanced them, in reason, as like as not. But how little one gains
by thinking what might have been! The tale is to tell, and tells that
these things were not otherwise, but thus.

* * * * *

Uncle Moses was in the room on the right of the door, called the
parlour, smoking a pipe with the old friend whose advice had probably
kept him from coming on the parish.

"Aunt M'riar!" said he, tapping his pipe out on the hob, and taking care
the ashes didn't get in the inflammable stove-ornament, "I don't hear
them young customers outside. What's got 'em?"

"Don't you begin to fret and werrit till I tell you to it, Moses. The
children's safe and not in any mischief--no more than usual. Mr. Alibone
seen 'em." For although the world called this friend Affability Bob and
Uncle Moses gave him his christened name, Aunt M'riar always spoke of
him, quite civil-like, thus.

"You see the young nippers, Jerry?" said the old prizefighter; who
always got narvous, as you might say, though scarcely alarmed, when they
got out of sight and hearing; even if it was for no more time than what
an egg takes.

"Jist a step beyond the archway, Mosey," said Mr. Alibone. "Paddlin'
and sloppin' about with the water off o' the shore-pump. It's all clean
water, Mrs. Catchpole, only for a little clay." Aunt M'riar, whose
surname was an intrinsic improbability in the eyes of Public Opinion,
and who was scarcely ever called by it, except by Mr. Jerry, expressed
doubts. So he continued:--"You see, they're sinking for a new shore
clear of the old one. So nothing's been opened into."

"Well," said Aunt M'riar, "I certainly did think the flaviour was being
kep' under wonderful. But now you put it so, I understand. What I say
is--if dirt, then clean dirt; and above all no chemicals!... What's that
you're saying, Uncle Mo?"

"Why, I was a-thinking," said Uncle Moses, who seemed restless, "I _was_
a-thinking, Bob, that you and me might have our pipes outside, being dry
underfoot." For Uncle Moses, being gouty, was ill-shod for wet weather.
He was slippered, though not lean. And though Mrs. Burr, coming in just
then, added her testimony that the children were quite safe and happy,
only making a great mess, Uncle Moses would not be content to remain
indoors, but must needs be going out. "These here young juveniles," said
he, outside in the Court, "where was it you took stock of 'em, did you
say?"

"Close to hand," said Affability Bob. "One step out of the archway.
There you'll find 'em, old man. Don't you fret your kidneys. _They're_
all right. Hear the engines?"

"Whereabouts is the fire?"

"Somewhere down by Walworth. I saw the smoke, crossing Hungerford
Bridge. This engine's coming down our road outside."

"I reckon she may be, by the sound. She'll be half-way to Blackfriars
before we're out of this here Court. If she gets by where the road's up!
Maybe she'll have to go back."

"There she stops! What's the popilation shoutin' at?" For the tramp of
the engine's horses, heard plain enough on the main road, came to an end
abruptly, and sounds ensued--men's shouts, women's cries--not
reconcilable with the mere stoppage of a fire-engine by unexpected
narrows or an irregular coal-cart.

"Couldn't say, I'm sure. They're a nizy lot in these parts." So said
Uncle Moses, and walked slowly up the Court, stopping for breath
half-way.

CHAPTER III

WHY THAT ENGINE STOPPED. BUT THE WHEELS HAD NOT GONE OVER DAVE. HOW
PETER JACKSON CARRIED HIM AWAY TO THE HOSPITAL. OF DOLLY'S DESPAIR
AT THE COLLAPSE OF THE _BARRAGE_, AND OF AN OLD COCK, NAMED SAM.
MRS. TAPPING'S EXPERIENCES, AND HER DAUGHTER, ALETHEA. OF THE
VICISSITUDES OF THE PUBLIC, AND ITS AMAZING RECUPERATIVE POWERS.
HOW UNCLE MOSES AND MR. ALIBONE WENT TO THE HOSPITAL

So few seconds would have made the whole difference. But so engrossing
had Dave found the contemplation of Michael Ragstroar and his yellow
jug, so exciting particularly was its disappearance into the swing-door
of the Wheatsheaf, that he forgot even the new mud that the men had
spaded up with their spades. And these seconds slipped by never to
return. Then when Michael had vanished, the little man stooped to secure
his cargo. It was slippery and yet tenacious; had been detachable with
difficulty from the spade that wrenched it from the virgin soil of its
immemorial home, and was now difficult to carry. But Dave grappled
bravely with it and turned to go back across the bridge.

A coming whirlwind, surely, in the distance of the street--somewhere now
where all the gas-lamps' cold green stars are merged in one--now nearer,
nearer still; and with it, bringing folk to doors and windows to see
them pass, the war-cry of the men that fight the flames. Charioteers
behind blood-horses bathed in foam; heads helmeted in flashing
splendour; eyes all intent upon the track ahead, keen to anticipate the
risks of headlong speed and warn the dilatory straggler from its path.
Nearer and nearer--in a moment it will pass and take some road unknown
to us, to say to fires that even now are climbing up through roof and
floor, clasping each timber in a sly embrace fatal as the caress of
Death itself:--"Thus far shalt thou go and no farther!" Close upon us
now, to be stayed with a sudden cry--something in the path! Too late!

Too late, though the strong hand that held the reins brought back the
foaming steeds upon their haunches, with startled eyes and quivering
nostrils all agape. Too late, though the helmeted men on the engine's
flank were down, almost before its swerve had ceased, to drag at every
risk from beneath the plunging hoofs the insensible body of the child
that had slipped from a clay heap by the roadside, on which it stood to
gaze upon the coming wonder, and gone headlong down quite suddenly upon
the open road.

You who read this, has it ever fallen to your lot to guide two swift
horses at a daring speed through the narrow ways, the ill-driven
vehicles, the careless crowds and frequent drunkards of the slum of a
great city? If so, you have earned some right to sit in judgment on the
fire-engine that ran our little friend down. But you will be the last of
all men to condemn that fire-engine.

"Dead, mate?" One of the helmeted men asks this of the other as they
escape from the plunging hoofs. They are used to this sort of thing--to
every sort of thing.

"Insensible," says the other, who holds in his arms the rescued child, a
mere scrap of dust and clay and pallor and a little blood.

A fire-engine calculates its rights to pause in fractions of a minute.
The unused portion of twenty seconds the above conversation leaves,
serves for a glance round in search of some claimant of the child, or a
responsible police-officer to take over the case. Nothing presents
itself but Mrs. Tapping, too much upset to be coherent, and not able to
identify the child; Mrs. Riley, little better, but asking:--"Did the
whales go overr it, thin?" The old man Sam, the watchman, is working
round from his half-tent, where he sleeps in the traffic, but cannot
possibly negotiate the full extent of trench and bridge for fifty
seconds more. Time cannot be lavished waiting for him. The man at the
reins, with seeming authority, clinches the matter.

"You stop, Peter Jackson. _Hospital!_ Don't you let the child out of
your hands before you get there. Understand?--All clear in front?" Two
men, who have taken the horses' heads, to soothe their shaken nerves
with slaps and suitable exclamations, now give them back to their
owners, leaving them free to rear high once or twice to relieve feeling;
while they themselves go back, each to his own place on the engine. A
word of remonstrance from the driver about that rearing, and they are
off again, the renewed fire-cry scarcely audible in the distance by the
time Old Sam gets across the wooden bridge.

To him, as to a responsible person, says Peter Jackson:--"Know where he
belongs?"--and to Mrs. Riley, as to one not responsible, but deserving
of sympathy:--"No--the wheels haven't been over him."

"Down yonder Court, I take it. Couldn't say for sartin." So says Sam;
and Mrs. Tapping discerns with pious fervour the Mercy of God in this
occurrence, He not having flattened the child out on the road outright.

But Peter Jackson's question implied no intention to communicate with
the little victim's family. To do so would be a clear dereliction of
duty; an offence against discipline. He has his instructions, and in
pursuance of them strides away to the Hospital without another word,
bearing in his arms a light burden so motionless that it is hard to
credit it with life. So quickly has the whole thing passed, that the
drift of idlers hard on his heels is a fraction of what a couple more
minutes would have made it. It will have grown before they reach the
Middlesex, short as the distance is. Then a police-sergeant, who joins
them half-way, will take notes and probably go to find the child's
parents; while Peter Jackson, chagrined at this hitch in his day's
fire-eating, will go off Walworth way at the best speed he may, after
handing over his charge to an indisputable House-Surgeon.

One can picture to oneself how the whole thing might pass as it did,
between the abrupt check of the engine's career, heard by Uncle Moses
and his friend, and the two or three minutes later when they emerged
through the archway to find Dolly in despair; not from any knowledge of
the accident to Dave, for intense preoccupation and a rampart of clay
had kept her in happy ignorance of it, but because the water had broken
bounds and Noah's flood had come with a vengeance. Questioned as to
Dave's whereabouts, she embarked on a lengthy stuttered explanation of
how Dave had dode round there--pointing to the clay heap--to det some of
the new mud the men had spoyded up with their spoyds. She reproduced his
words, of course. Uncle Moses was trying to detect her meaning without
much success, when he became aware that the old man in the fur cap who
had shouted more than once, "I say, master!" was addressing him.

"Is that old cock singing out to one of we, Jerry?" said Uncle Moses.
And then replied to the old cock:--"Say what you've got to say, mate!
Come a bit nigher."

Thereupon Old Sam crossed the bridge, slowly, as Uncle Moses moved to
meet him. "Might you happen to know anything of this little boy?" said
old Sam.

Uncle Moses caught the sound of disaster in his accent, before his words
came to an end. "What's the little boy?" said he. "Where have you got
him?" And Dolly, startled by the strange sound in her uncle's voice,
forgot Noah's flood, and stood dumb and terrified with outstretched
muddy hands.

"I may be in the wrong of it, master"--thus Old Sam in his slow way, a
trial to impatience--"but maybe this little maid's brother. They've took
him across to the Hospital." Old Sam did not like to have to say this.
He softened it as much as he could. Do you not see how? Omit the word
"across," and see how relentless it makes the message. Do you ask why?
Impossible to say--but it _does_!

Then Uncle Moses shouted out hoarsely, not like himself: "The
Hospital--the Hospital--hear that, Bob! Our boy Dave in the Hospital!"
and, catching his friend's arm, "Ask him--ask more!" His voice dropped
and his breath caught. He was a bad subject for sudden emotions.

"Tell it out, friend--any word that comes first!" says Mr. Alibone. And
then Old Sam, tongue-freed, gives the facts as known to him. He ends
with:--"Th' young child could never have been there above a minute, all
told, before the engine come along, and might have took no warning at
twice his age for the vairy sudden coming of it." He dwells upon the
shortness of the time Dave had been on the spot as though this minimised
the evil. "I shouldn't care to fix the blame, for my own part," says he,
shaking his head in venerable refusal of judicial functions not assigned
to him so far.

"Is the child killed, man? Say what you know!" Thus Mr. Alibone
brusquely. For he has caught a question Uncle Moses just found voice
for:--"Killed or not?"

The old watchman is beginning slowly:--"That I would not undertake to
say, sir...." when he is cut off short by Mrs. Riley, anxious to attest
any pleasant thing, truly if possible; but if otherwise, anyhow!--"Kilt
is it? No, shure thin! Insinsible." And then adds an absolutely
gratuitous statement from sheer optimism:--"Shure, I hur-r-d thim say so
mesilf, and I wouldn't mislade ye, me dyurr. Will I go and till his
mother so for ye down the Court? To till her not to alarrum hersilf!"

But by this time Uncle Moses had rallied. The momentary qualm had been
purely physical, connected with something that a year since had caused a
medical examination of his heart with a stethoscope. He had been too
great an adept in the art of rallying after knock-down blows in his
youth to go off in a faint over this. He had felt queer, for all that.
Still, he declined Mrs. Riley's kindly meant offer. "Maybe I'll make the
best job of it myself," said he. "Thanking you very kindly all the
same, ma'am!" After which he and his friend vanished back into Sapps
Court, deciding as they went that it would be best to persuade Aunt
M'riar to remain at home, while they themselves went to the Hospital, to
learn the worst. It would never do to leave Dolly alone, or even in
charge of neighbours.

Mrs. Riley's optimism lasted till Uncle Moses and Mr. Alibone
disappeared, taking with them Dolly, aware of something terrible afoot;
too small to understand the truth, whatever it was; panic-stricken and
wailing provisionally to be even with the worst. Then, all reason for
well-meaning falsehood being at an end, the Irishwoman looked facts in
the face with the resolution that never flinches before the mishaps of
one's fellow-man, especially when he is a total stranger.

"The power man!" said she. "He'll have sane the last of his little boy
alive, only shure one hasn't the harrut to say the worrd. Throubles make
thimsilves fast enough without the tilling of thim, and there'll be
manes and to spare for the power payple to come to the knowledge without
a worrd from you or me, Mrs. Tapping."

Then said Mrs. Tapping, on the watch for an opening through which she
could thrust herself into the conversation; as a topic, you
understand:--"Now there, Mrs. Riley, you name the very reason why I
always stand by like, not to introduce my word. Not but that I will
confess to the temptation undergone this very time to say that by God's
will the child was took away from us, undeniable. Against that
temptation I kep' my lips shut. Only I will say this much, and no
concealment, that if my husband had been spared, being now a widow
fourteen years, and heard me keep silence many a time, he might have
said it again and again, like he said it a hundred times if he said it
once when alive and able to it:--'Mary Ann Tapping, you do yourself no
justice settin' still and list'nin', with your tongue in your mouth God
gave you, and you there to use it!' And I says to Tapping, fifty times
if I said it once, 'Tapping,' says I, 'you better know things twiced
before you say 'em for every onced you say 'em before you know 'em.'
Then Tapping, he says, was that to point at 'Lethear? And I says yes,
though the girl was then young and so excusable. But she may learn
better, I says, and made allowance though mistaken...." This is just as
good a point for Mrs. Tapping to cease at as any other in the story. In
reality Heaven only knows when she ceased.

A very miscellaneous public gathered round and formed false ideas of
what had happened from misinformants. The most popular erroneous report
ran towards connecting it somehow with the sewer-trench, influencing
people to look down into its depths and watch for the reappearance of
something supposed to be expected back. So much so that more than one
inoffensive person asked the man in charge of the pumping engine--which
went honourably on without a pause--whether "it" was down there. He was
a morose and embittered man--had been crossed in love, perhaps--for he
met all inquiries by another:--"Who are you a-speaking to?" and, on
being told, added:--"Then why couldn't you say so?" Humble apology had
then to be content with, "No, it ain't down there and never has been, if
you ask me,"--in answer to the previous question.

Old Sam endeavoured more than once to point out that the accident need
not necessarily end fatally. He invented tales of goods-trains that had
passed over him early in life, and the surgical skill that had left him
whole and sound. Trains were really unknown in his boyhood, but there
was no one to contradict him. The public, stimulated to hopefulness,
produced analogous experiences. It had had a hay-cart over it, with a
harvest-home on the top, such as we see in pictures. It had had the
Bangor coach over it, going down hill, and got caught in the skid. It
had been under an artillery corps and field-guns at a gallop, when the
Queen revoo'd the troops in Hyde Park. And look at it now! Horse-kicks
and wheel-crushing really had a bracing tendency; gave the constitution
tone, and seldom left any ill effects.

Only their consequences must be took in time. Well!--hadn't the child
gone to the Hospital? Dissentients who endeavoured to suggest that
broken bones and dislocations were unknown before the invention of
surgeons, were rebuked by the citation of instances of neglected
compound fractures whose crippled owners became athletes after their
bones had been scientifically reset, having previously been rebroken in
the largest number of places the narrator thought he could get credence
for. Hope told her flattering tale very quickly, for when Dave's uncle
and Jerry Alibone reappeared on their way to find the truth at the
Hospital, her hearers were ready with encouragement, whether they knew
anything about the matter or not. "I don't believe they do," said Uncle
Moses, and Mr. Alibone replied--"Not they, bless your heart!" But it was
refreshing for all that.

They met the police-sergeant on the way, coming from the Hospital to
bring the report and make inquiry about the child's belongings. They
credited him with superhuman insight when he addressed them
with:--"Either of you the father of a child knocked down by Fire-engine
67A in this street--taken into accident ward?" He spoke just as though
Engine 68B had knocked another child down in the next street, and so on
all over London.

But his sharpness was merely human. For scarcely a soul had passed but
paused to look round after them, wondering at the set jaw and pallid
face of the huge man who limped on a stick, seeming put to it to keep
the speed. Uncle Moses, you see, was a fine man in his own way of the
prizefighter type; and now, in his old age, worked out a little like Dr.
Samuel Johnson.

The report, as originally received by the police-officer, was that the
child was not killed but still unconscious. A good string of injuries
were credited to the poor little man, including a dislocated femur and
concussion of the brain. Quite enough, alone!--for the patient, his
friends and relations. The House-Surgeon, speaking professionally, spoke
also hopefully of undetected complications in the background. We might
pull him through for all that. This report was materially softened for
the child's family. Better not say too much to the parents at present,
either way!

CHAPTER IV

HOW UNCLE MO AND HIS FRIEND COULD NOT GET MUCH ENCOURAGEMENT.
DOLLY'S ATTITUDE. ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE, AND DOLLY'S PUDDING.
HOW UNCLE MO'S SPIRITS WENT DOWN INTO HIS BOOTS. HOW PETER JACKSON
THE FIREMAN INTERVIEWED MICHAEL RAGSTROAR, UPSIDE DOWN, AND BROUGHT
AUNT M'RIAR'S HEART INTO HER MOUTH. HOW DAVE CAME HOME IN A CAB,
AND MICHAEL RAGSTROAR GOT A RIDE FOR NOTHING. OF SISTER NORA, WHO
GOT ON THE COURT'S VISITING LIST BEFORE IT CAME OUT THAT SHE WAS
MIXED UP WITH ARISTOCRATS

The present writer, half a century since--he was then neither _we_ nor a
writer--trod upon a tiny sapling in the garden of the house then
occupied by his kith and kin. It was broken off an inch from the ground,
and he distinctly remembers living a disgraced life thereafter because
of the beautiful tree that sapling might have become but for his
inconsiderate awkwardness. If the censorious spirit that he aroused
could have foreseen the tree that was to grow from the forgotten
residuum of the accident, the root that it left in the ground, it would
not perhaps have passed such a sweeping judgment. Any chance wayfarer in
St. John's Wood may see that tree now--from the end of the street, for
that matter.

So perhaps the old prizefighter might have mustered more hope in
response to Aunt M'riar's plucky rally against despair. The tiny, white,
motionless figure on the bed in the accident ward, that had uttered no
sound since he saw it on first arriving at the Hospital, might have been
destined to become that of a young engineer on a Dreadnought, or an
unfledged dragoon, for any authenticated standard of Impossibility.

The House-Surgeon and his Senior, one of the heads of the
Institution,--interviewed by Uncle Moses and Aunt M'riar when they came
late by special permission and appointment, hoping to hear the child's
voice once more, and found him still insensible and white--testified
that the action of the heart was good. The little man had no intention
of dying if he could live. But both his medical attendants knew that the
tremulous inquiry whether there was any hope of a recovery--within a
reasonable time understood, of course--was really a petition for a
favourable verdict at any cost. And they could not give one, for all
they would have been glad to do so. They have to damn so many hopes in a
day's work, these Accident Warders!

"It's no use asking us," said they, somehow conjointly. "There's not a
surgeon in all England that could tell you whether it will be life or
death. _We_ can only say the patient is making a good fight for it."
They seemed very much interested in the case, though, and in the queer
old broken-hearted giant that sobbed over the half-killed baby that
could not hear nor answer, speak to it as he might.

"What did you say your name was?" said the Senior Surgeon to Uncle
Moses.

"Moses Wardle of Hanley, called the Linnet. Ye see, I was a Member of
the Prize Ring, many years. Fighting Man, you might say."

"I had an idea I knew the name, too. When I was a youngster thirty odd
years ago I took an interest in that sort of thing. You fought Bob
Brettle, and the umpires couldn't agree."

"That was it, master. Well, I had many a turn up--turn up and turn down,
either way as might be. But I had a good name. I never sold a backer. I
did my best by them that put their money on me." For the moneychanger,
the wagermonger, creeps in and degrades the noble science of damaging
one's fellow-man effectively; even as in old years he brought discredit
on cock-fighting, in which at least--you cannot deny it--the bird cuts a
better figure than he does in his native farmyard.

"Come round after twelve to-morrow, and we may know more," said the
House-Surgeon. "It's not regular--but ask for me." And then the older
Surgeon shook Uncle Moses by the hand, quite respectful-like--so Mr.
Jerry said to Aunt M'riar later--and the two went back, sad and
discouraged, to Sapps Court.

What made it all harder to bear was the difficulty of dealing with
Dolly. Dolly knew, of course, that Dave had been took to the
Horsetickle--that was the nearest she could get to the word, after
frequent repetitions--and that he was to be made well, humanly speaking,
past a doubt. The little maid had to be content with assurances to this
effect, inserting into the treaty a stipulation as to time.

"Dave's doin' to tum home after dinner," said she, when that meal seemed
near at hand. And Uncle Moses never had the heart to say no.

Then when no Dave had come, and Dolly had wept for him in vain, and a
cloth laid announced supper, Dolly said--moved only by that landmark of
passing time--"Dave _is_ a-doin' to tum home after supper; he _is_
a-doin', Uncle Mo, he _is_ a-doin'!" And what could her aunt and uncle
do but renew the bill, as it were; the promise to pay that could only be
fulfilled by the production of Dave, whole and sound.

She refused food except on condition that an exactly similar helping
should be conveyed to Dave in the Horsetickle. She withdrew the
condition that Uncle Moses and herself should forthwith convey Dave's
share of the repast to him, in consideration of a verbal guarantee that
little girls were not allowed in such Institutions. Why she accepted
this so readily is a mystery. Possibly the common form of instruction to
little girls, dwelling on their exclusion by statute or usage from
advantages enjoyed by little boys, may have had its weight. Little
girls, _exempli gratia_, may not lie on their backs and kick their legs
up. Little boys are at liberty to do so, subject to unimportant
reservations, limiting the area at their disposal for the practice. It
is needless--and might be thought indelicate--to instance the numerous
expressions that no little girl should use under any circumstances,
which are regarded as venial sin in little boys, except of course on
Sunday. Society does not absolutely countenance the practices of
spitting and sniffing in little boys, but it closes its eyes and passes
hypocritically by on the other side of the road; while, on the other
hand, little girls indulging in these vices would either be cast out
into the wilderness, or have to accept the _role_ of penitent Magdalens.
Therefore when Dolly was told that little girls were not allowed in
Hospitals, it may only have presented itself to her as another item in a
code of limitations already familiar.

The adhibition in visible form of a pendant to her own allowance of
pudding or bread-and-milk, to be carried to the Horsetickle by Uncle
Moses on his next visit, had a sedative effect, and she was contented
with it, without insisting on seeing the pledge carried out. Her
imagination was satisfied, as a child's usually is, with any objective
transaction. Moreover, a dexterous manipulation of the position improved
matters. The portion allotted to Dave was removed, ostensibly to keep it
warm for him, but reproduced to do duty as a second helping for Dolly.
Of course, it had to be halved again for Dave's sake, and an ancient
puzzle solved itself in practice. The third halving was not worth
sending to the Hospital. Even so a step too small to take was left for
Achilles when the tortoise had only just started. "Solvitur ambulando,"
said Philosophy, and _a priori_ reasoning took a back place.

Her constant inquiries about the date of Dave's cure and return were an
added and grievous pain to her aunt and uncle. It was easy for the
moment to procrastinate, but how if the time should come for telling her
that Dave would never come back--no, never?

But the time was not to come yet. For a few days Life showed indecision,
and Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar had a thumping heart apiece each time they
stood by the little, still, white figure on the bed and thought the
breath was surely gone. They were allowed in the ward every day,
contrary to visitor-rule, apparently because of Uncle Mo's professional
eminence in years gone by--an odd reason when one thinks of it! It was
along of that good gentleman, God bless him!--said Aunt M'riar--that
knew Uncle Mo's name in the Ring. In fact, the good gentleman had said
to the House-Surgeon in private converse: "You see, there's no doubt the
old chap ended sixteen rounds with Brettle in a draw, and Jem Mace had a
near touch with Brettle. No, no--we must let him see the case day by
day." So Uncle Mo saw the case each day, and each day went away to
transact such business with Hope as might be practicable. And each day,
on his return, there was a voice heard in Sapps Court, Dolly weeping for
her elder brother, and would not be comforted. "Oo _did_ said oo would
fess Dave back from the Horsetickle, oo know oo did, Uncle Mo"; and
similar reproaches, mixed themselves with her sobs. But for many days
she got no consolation beyond assurance that Dave would come to-morrow,
discharged cured.

Then, one windy morning, a punctual equinoctial gale, gathering up its
energies to keep inoffensive persons awake all night and, if possible,
knock some chimney-stacks down, blew Uncle Mo's pipelight out, and
caused him to make use of an expression. And Aunt M'riar reproved that
expression, saying:--"Not with that blessed boy lying there in the
Hospital should you say such language, Moses, more like profane
swearing, I call it, than a Christian household."

"He's an old Heathen, ma'am, is Moses," said Mr. Alibone, who was
succeeding in lighting his own pipe, in spite of the wind in at the
street door. Because, as we have seen, in this Court--unlike the Courts
of Law or Her Majesty's Court of St. James's--the kitchens opened right
on the street. Not but what, for all that, there was the number where
you would expect, on a shiny boss you could rub clean and give an
appearance. Aunt M'riar said so, and must have known.

Uncle Moses shook his head gravely over his own delinquency, as if he
truly felt it just as much as anybody. But when he got his pipe lighted,
instead of being cheerful and making the most of what the doctor had
said that very day, his spirits went down into his boots, which was a
way they had.

"'Tain't any good to make believe," said he. "Supposin' our boy never
comes back, M'riar!"

"There, now!" said Aunt M'riar. "To hear you talk, Mo, wouldn't anybody
think! And after what Dr. Prime said only this afternoon! I should be
ashamed."

"What was it Dr. Prime said, Mo?" asked Mr. Alibone, quite
cheerful-like. "Tell us again, old man." For you see, Uncle Moses he'd
brought back quite an encouraging report, whatever anyone see fit to
say, when he come back from the Hospital. Dr. Prime was the
House-Surgeon.

"I don't take much account of him," said Uncle Mo. "A well-meanin' man,
but too easy by half. One o' your good-natured beggars. Says a thing to
stuff you up like! For all I could see, my boy was as white as that bit
of trimmin' in your hand, M'riar."

"But won't you tell us what the doctor _said_, Mo?" said Mr. Alibone. "I
haven't above half heard the evening's noose." He'd just come in to put
a little heart into Moses.

"Said the little child had a better colour. But I don't set any store by
that." And then what does Uncle Moses do but reg'lar give away and go
off sobbing like a baby. "Oh, M'riar, M'riar, we shall never have our
boy back--no, never!"

And then Aunt M'riar, who was a good woman if ever Mr. Alibone come
across one--this is what that gentleman could and did tell a friend
after, incorporated verbatim in the text--she up and she says:--"For
shame of yourself, Mo, for to go and forget yourself like that before
Mr. Alibone! I tell you I believe we shall have the boy back in a week,
all along o' what Dr. Prime said." On which, and a further
representation that he would wake Dolly if he went on like that, Uncle
Mo he pulled himself together and smoked quiet. Whereupon Aunt M'riar
dwelt upon the depressing effect a high wind in autumn has on the
spirits, with the singular result referred to above, of their
retractation into their owner's boots, like quicksilver in a thermometer
discouraged by the cold. After which professional experience was allowed
some weight, and calmer counsels prevailed.

About this time an individual in a sort of undress uniform, beginning at
the top in an equivocal Tam-o'-Shanter hat, sauntered into the
_cul-de-sac_ to which Sapps Court was an appendix. He appeared to be
unconcerned in human affairs, and indeed independent of Time, Space, and
Circumstance. He addressed a creature that was hanging upside down on
some railings, apparently by choice.

"What sort of a name does this here archway go by?" said he, without
acute curiosity.

"That's Sappses Court," said the creature, remaining inverted. "Say it
ain't?" He appeared to identify the uniform he was addressing, and
added:--"There ain't a fire down that Court, 'cos I knows and I'm a
telling of yer. You'd best hook it." The uniform hooked nothing. Then,
in spite of the creature--who proved, right-side-up, to be Michael
Ragstroar--shouting after him--"You ain't wanted down that Court!" he
entered it deliberately, whistling a song then popular, whose singer
wished he was with Nancy, he did, he did, in a second floor, with a
small back-door, to live and die with Nancy.

Having identified Sapps, he seemed to know quite well which house he
wanted, for he went straight to the end and knocked at No. 7.

"Sakes alive!" said Aunt M'riar, responsive to the knock. "There's no
fire here."

"I'm off duty," said the fireman briefly. "I've come to tell you about
your young customer at the Hospital."

Aunt M'riar behaved heroically. There was only, to her thinking, one
chance in ten that this strange, inexplicable messenger should have
brought any other news to their house than that of its darling's death;
but that one chance was enough to make her choke back a scream, lest
Uncle Mo should have one moment of needless despair. And else--it shot
across her mind in a second--might not a sudden escape from despair even
be fatal to that weak heart of his? So Aunt M'riar pulled to the door
behind her to say, with an effort:--"Is he dead?" The universe swam
about outside while she stood still, and something hummed in her head.
But through it she heard the fireman say:--"Not he!" as of one endowed
with a great vitality, one who would take a deal of killing. When he
added:--"He's spoke," though she believed her ears certainly, for she
ran back into the kitchen crying out:--"He's spoke, Mo, he's spoke!" she
did it with a misgiving that the only interpretation she could see her
way to _must_ be wrong--was altogether too good to be true.

Uncle Mo fairly shouted with joy, and this time woke Dolly, who thought
it was a calamity, and wept. Fully five minutes of incoherent rejoicing
followed, and then details might be rounded off. The fireman had to
stand by his engine on the night-shift in an hour's time, but he saw his
way to a pipe, and lit it.

"They're always interested to hear the ending-up of things at the
Station," said he, to account for himself and his presence, "and I made
it convenient to call round at the Ward. The party that took the child
from me happened to be there, and knew me again." He, of course--but you
would guess this--was Peter Jackson of Engine 67A. He continued:--"The
party was so obliging as to take me into the Ward to the bedside. And it
was while I was there the little chap began talking. The party asked me
to step in and mention it to you, ma'am, or his uncle, seeing it was in
my road to the Station." Then Peter Jackson seemed to feel his words
needed extenuation or revision. "Not but I would have gone a bit out of
the way, for that matter!" said he.

"'Twouldn't be any use my looking round now, I suppose?" said Uncle Mo.
Because he always was that restless and fidgety.

"Wait till to-morrow, they said, the party and the nurse. By reason the
child might talk a bit and then get some healthy sleep. What he's had
these few days latterly don't seem to count." Thus Peter Jackson, and
Uncle Moses said he had seen the like. And then all three of them made
the place smokier and smokier you could hardly make out across the room.

"Mo's an impatient old cock, you see!" said Mr. Alibone, who seemed to
understand Peter Jackson, and _vice versa_. And Uncle Mo said:--"I
suppose I shall have to mark time." To which the others replied that was
about it.

"Only whatever did the young child say, mister?" said Aunt M'riar; like
a woman's curiosity, to know. But those other two, they was curious
underneath-like; only denied it.

"I couldn't charge my memory for certain, ma'am," said Peter Jackson,
"and might very easy be wrong." He appeared to shrink from the
responsibility of making a report, but all his hearers were agreed that
there was no call to cut things so very fine as all that. A rough
outline would meet the case.

"If it ran to nonsense in a child," said Uncle Mo--"after all, what
odds?" And Aunt M'riar said:--"Meanin' slips through the words
sometimes, and no fault to find." She had not read "Rabbi Ben Ezra," so
this was original.

Peter Jackson endeavoured to charge his memory, or perhaps more
properly, to discharge it. Dave had said first thing when he opened his
eyes:--"The worty will be all over the hedge. Let me go to stop the
worty." Of course, this had been quite unintelligible to his hearers.
However, Mr. Alibone and Uncle Mo were _au fait_ enough of the
engineering scheme that had led to the accident, to supply the
explanation. Dave's responsibility as head engineer had been on his
conscience all through his spell of insensibility, and had been the
earliest roused matter of thought when the light began to break.

Besides, it so chanced that testimony was forthcoming to support this
view and confirm Dave's sanity. Dolly, who had been awakened by the
noise, had heard enough to convey to her small mind that something
pleasant had transpired in relation to Dave. Though young, she had a
certain decision of character. Her behaviour was lawless, but not
unnatural. She climbed out of her wooden crib in Aunt M'riar's bedroom,
and slipping furtively down the stair which led direct to the kitchen,
succeeded in bounding on to the lap of her uncle; from which, once
established, she knew it would be difficult for her aunt to dislodge
her. She crowed with delight at the success of this escapade, and had
the satisfaction of being, as it were, confirmed in her delinquency by
her aunt wrapping a shawl round her. This was partly on the score of the
cold draughts in such a high wind, partly as a measure of public
decency. She was in time to endorse her uncle's explanation of Dave's
speech intelligibly enough, with a due allowance of interpretation.

Closely reported, the substance of her commentary ran as follows--"Dave
tooktited the mud when I fessed him the mud in my flock"--this was
illustrated in a way that threatened to outrage a sensitive propriety,
the speaker's aunt's--"and spooshed up the worty and spooshed up the
worty"--this repetition had great value--"and spooshtited the worty
back, and then there wasn't no more mud ... it was all fessed away in my
flock ... All dorn!--ass, it was--_all_ dorn!"--this was in a minor key,
and thrilled with pathos--"and Dave dode to fess more where the new mud
was, and was took to the Horsetickle and never come back no more ..." At
this point it seemed best to lay stress upon the probable return of
Dave, much to Dolly's satisfaction; though she would have been better
pleased if a date had been fixed.

Our own belief is that Dolly thought the Horsetickle was an institution
for the relief of sufferers from accidents occasioned by horses, and
that no subsequent experience ever entirely dissipated this impression.
The chances are that nine or ten of the small people one sees daily and
thinks of as "the children," are laying up, even at this moment, some
similar fancy that will last a lifetime. But this is neither here nor
there.

What is more to the purpose is that a fortnight later Dave was brought
home in a cab--the only cab that is recorded in History as having ever
deliberately stood at the entrance to Sapps Court, with intent. Cabs may
have stood there in connection with other doorways in the _cul-de-sac_,
but ignoring proudly the archway with the iron post. Dave was carried
down the Court by his uncle with great joy, and Michael Ragstroar seized
the opportunity to tie himself somehow round the axle of the cab's
backwheels, and get driven some distance free of charge.

Dave, as seen by Dolly on his return, was still painfully white, and
could not walk. And Dolly might not come banging and smashing down on
him like a little elephant, because it would hurt him; so she had to be
good. The elephant simile was due to a lady--no doubt well-meaning--who
accompanied Dave from the Hospital, and came more than once to see him
afterwards. But it was taking a good deal on herself to decide what
Dolly ought or ought not to do to Dave.

In those days slumming proper had not set in, and the East End was only
known geographically, except, no doubt, to a few enthusiasts--the sort
that antedates first discovery after the fact, and takes a vicious
pleasure in precursing its successors. But unassuming benefactresses
occurred at intervals whom outsiders knew broadly as Sisters of Charity.
Such a one was this lady, between whom and Aunt M'riar a sympathetic
friendship grew up before the latter discovered that Dave's hospital
friend was an Earl's niece, which not unnaturally made her rather
standoffish for a time. However, a remark of Mr. Alibone's--who seemed
to know--that the lady's uncle was a belted Earl, and no mistake,
palliated the Earldom and abated class prejudice. The Earl naturally
went up in the esteem of the old prizefighter when it transpired that he
was belted. What more could the most exacting ask?

But it was in the days when this lady was only "that party from the
Hospital," that she took root at No. 7, Sapps Court. No. 7 was content
that she should remain nameless; but when she said, in some affair of a
message to be given at the Hospital, that its bearer was to ask for
Sister Nora, it became impossible to ignore the name, although certainly
it was a name that complicated matters. She remained, however, plain
Sister Nora, without suspicion of any doubtful connections, until a
scheme of a daring character took form--nothing less than that Dave
should be taken into the country for change of air.

Uncle Mo was uneasy at the idea of Dave going away. Besides, he had
always cherished the idea that the air of Sapps Court was equal to that
of San Moritz, for instance. Look at what it was only a few years before
Dave's father and mother first moved in, when it was all fields along
the New Road--which has since been absurdly named Euston and Marylebone
Road! Nothing ever come to change the air in Sapps Court that Uncle Mo
knew of. And look at the wallflowers growing out in front the same as
ever!

Uncle Mo, however, was not the man to allow his old-fashioned prejudices
to stand in the way of the patient's convalescence, and an arrangement
was made by Sister Nora that Dave should be taken charge of, for a
while, by an old and trustworthy inhabitant of the Rocestershire village
of which her uncle, the belted Earl, was the feudal lord and master, or
slave and servant, according as you look at it. It was during the
arrangement of this plan that his Earldom leaked out, creating serious
misgivings in the minds of Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar that they would be
ill-advised if they allowed themselves to get mixed up with that sort of
people.

CHAPTER V

OF DOLLY'S CRACKNELL BISCUIT, THAT SHE MISTOOK FOR DAVE. OF HER
UNSEAWORTHY BOX, AND HER VISITS TO MRS. PRICHARD UPSTAIRS. HOW SHE
HAD NEVER TOLD MRS. BURR A WORD ABOUT VAN DIEMEN'S LAND. CONCERNING
IDOLATRY, AND THE LIABILITY OF TRYING ON TO TEMPER. UNCLE MO'S
IDEAS OF PENAL SETTLEMENTS

They were sad days in Sapps Court after Sister Nora bore Dave away to
Chorlton-under-Bradbury; particularly for Dolly, whose tears bathed her
pillow at night, and diluted her bread-and-milk in the morning. There
was something very touching about this little maid's weeping in her
sleep, causing Aunt M'riar to give her a cracknell biscuit--to consume
if possible; to hold in her sleeping hand as a rapture of possession,
anyhow. Dolly accepted it, and contrived to enjoy it slowly without
waking. What is more, she stopped crying; and my belief is, if you ask
me, that sleep having deprived her of the power of drawing fine
distinctions, she mistook this biscuit for Dave. Its _caput mortuum_ was
still clasped to her bosom when, deep unconsciousness merging all
distinctions in unqualified existence, she was having her sleep out next
day.

Dolly may have felt indignant and hurt at the audacious false promises
of her uncle and aunt as to Dave's return. He had come home, certainly,
but badly damaged. It was a sad disappointment; the little woman's first
experience of perfidy. Her betrayers made a very poor show of their
attempts at compensation--toys and suchlike. There was a great dignity
in Dolly's attitude towards these contemptible offerings of a penitent
conscience. She accepted them, certainly, but put them away in her bots
to keep for Dave. Her box--if one has to spell it right--was an
overgrown cardboard box with "Silk Twill" written on one end, and blue
paper doors to fold over inside. It had been used as a boat, but
condemned as unseaworthy as soon as Dolly could not sit in it to be
pushed about, the gunwale having split open amidships. Let us hope this
is right, nautically.

Considered as a safe for the storage of valuables, Dolly's box would
have acquitted itself better if fair play had been shown to it. Its lid
should have been left on long enough to produce an impression, and not
pulled off at frequent intervals to exhibit its contents. No sooner was
an addition made to these than Dolly would say, for instance, that she
must s'ow Mrs. Picture upstairs the most recent acquisitions. Then she
would insist on trying to carry it upstairs, but was not long enough in
the arms, and Aunt M'riar had to do it for her in the end. Not, however,
unwillingly, because it enabled her to give her mind to pinking or
gauffering, or whatever other craft was then engaging her attention. We
do not ourself know what pinking is, or gauffering; we have only heard
them referred to. A vague impression haunts us that they fray out if not
done careful. But this is probably valueless.

No doubt Dolly's visits upstairs in connection with this box were
answerable for Aunt M'riar's having come to know a good deal
about old Mrs. Prichard's--or, according to Dave and Dolly,
Picture's--antecedents. A good deal, that is, when it came to be put
together and liberally helped by inferences; but made up of very small
deals--disjointed deals--in the form in which they were received by Aunt
M'riar. As, for instance, on the occasion just referred to, shortly
after Dave had gone on a visit to the tenant of the belted Earl, Uncle
Mo having gone away for an hour, to spend it in the parlour of The
Rising Sun, a truly respectable house where there were Skittles, and
Knurr and Spell. He might, you see, be more than an hour: there was no
saying for certain.

"I do take it most kind of you, ma'am," said Aunt M'riar for the
fiftieth time, with departure in sight, "to keep an eye on the child.
Some children nourishes a kind of ap'thy, not due to themselves, but
constitutional in their systems, and one can leave alone without fear by
reason of it. But Dolly is that busy and attentive, and will be up and
doing, so one may easy spoil a tuck or stand down an iron too hot if
called away sudden to see after the child."

The old woman seemed to Aunt M'riar to respond vaguely. She loved to
have the little thing anigh her, and hear her clacket. "All my own
family are dead and gone, barring one son," said she. And then added,
without any consciousness of jarring ideas:--"He would be forty-five."
Aunt M'riar tried in vain to think of some way of sympathizing, but was
relieved from her self-imposed duty by the speaker continuing--"He was
my youngest. Born at Macquarie Harbour in the old days. The boy was born
up-country--yes, forty-five years agone."

"Not in England now, ma'am, I suppose," said Aunt M'riar, who could not
see her way to anything else. The thought crossed her mind that, so far
as _she_ knew, no male visitor for the old tenant of the attics had so
far entered the house.

The old woman shook her head slowly. "I could not say," she said. "I
cannot tell you now if he be alive or dead." Then she became drowsy, as
old age does when it has talked enough; so, as Aunt M'riar had plenty to
see to, she took her leave, Dolly remaining in charge as per contract.

Aunt M'riar passed on these stray fragments of old Mrs. Prichard's
autobiography to Uncle Mo when he came in from The Rising Sun. The old
boy seemed roused to interest by the mention of Van Diemen's Land. "I
call to mind," said he, "when I was a youngster, hearing tell of the
convicts out in those parts, and how no decent man could live in the
place. Hell on Earth, they did say, those that knew." Thereupon old Mrs.
Prichard straightway became a problem to Aunt M'riar. If there were none
but convicts in Van Diemen's Land, and all Mrs. Prichard's boys were
born there, the only chance of the old woman not having been the mother
of a convict's children lay in her having been possibly the wife of a
gaoler, at the best. And yet--she was such a nice, pretty old thing! Was
it conceivable?

Then in subsequent similar interviews Aunt M'riar, inquisitive-like,
tried to get further information. But very little was forthcoming beyond
the fact that Mrs. Prichard's husband was dead. What supported the
convict theory was that his widow never referred to any relatives of his
or her own. Mrs. Burr, her companion or concomitant--or at least
fellow-lodger--was not uncommunicative, but knew "less than you might
expect" about her. Aunt M'riar cultivated this good woman with an eye to
information, holding her up--as the phrase is now--at the stairfoot and
inveigling her to tea and gossip. She was a garrulous party when you
come to know her, was Mrs. Burr; and indeed, short of intimacy, she
might have produced the same impression on any person well within
hearing.

"Times and again," said she in the course of one such conversation,
which had turned on the mystery of Mrs. Prichard's antecedents, "have I
thought she was going to let on about her belongings, and never so much
as a word! Times and again have I felt my tongue in the roof of my
mouth, for curiosity to think what she would say next. And there, will
you believe me, missis?--it was no better than so much silence all said
and done! Nor it wasn't for want of words, like one sits meanin' a great
deal and when it comes to the describin' of it just nowhere! She was by
way of keeping something back, and there was I sat waiting for it, and
guess-working round like, speculating, you might say, to think what it
might be when it come. Thank you, ma'am--not another cup!"

"There's more in the pot, ma'am," said Aunt M'riar, looking into it to
see, near the paraffin lamp which smelt: they all did in those days. But
Mrs. Burr had had three; and three does, mostly. If these excellent
women's little inflections of speech, introduced thus casually, are
puzzling, please supply inverted commas. Aunt M'riar organized the
tea-tray to take away and wash up at the sink, after emptying
saucer-superfluities into the slop-basin. Mrs. Burr referred to the
advantages we enjoy as compared with our forbears, instancing especially
our exemption from the worship of wooden images, Egyptian Idles--a
spelling accommodated to meet an impression Mrs. Burr had derived from a
Japanese Buddha--and suchlike, and Tea.

"However they did without it I cannot think," said she. "On'y, of
course, not having to stitch, stitch, stitch from half-past six in the
morning till bedtime made a difference." Her ideas of our ancestors were
strongly affected by a copper-plate engraving in a print-shop window in
Soho, even as idolatry had been presented to her by a Tea-Man and Grocer
in Tottenham Court Road. It was Stothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims"--_you_
know!--and consequently her _moyen age_ had a falcon on its wrist, and a
jester in attendance, invariably. "They was a good deal in the open air,
and it tells," was her tribute to the memory of this plate. She
developed the subject further, incidentally. "Tryin' on is a change, of
course, but liable to temper, and vexatious when the party insists on
letting out and no allowance of turn-over. The same if too short in
front. What was I a-sayin'?... Oh, Mrs. Prichard--yes! You was
inquiring, ma'am, about the length of time I had known her. Just four
years this Christmas, now I think of it. Time enough and to spare to
tell anything she liked--if she'd have liked. But you may take it from
me, ma'am, on'y to go no further on any account, that Mrs. Prichard is
not, as they say, free-spoke about her family, but on the contrary the
contrairy." Mrs. Burr was unconsciously extending the powers of the
English tongue, in varying one word's force by different accents.

Uncle Moses he cut in, being at home that time:--"Was you saying, ma'am,
that the old widder-lady's husband had been a convict in Australia?"

Oh no!--Mrs. Burr had never got that far. So she testified. Aunt M'riar,
speaking from the sink, where she was extracting out the tea-leaves from
the pot, was for calling Uncle Moses over the coals. Anybody might soon
be afraid to say anything, to have been running away with an idea like
that. No one had ever said any such a thing. Indeed, the convict was
entirely inferential, and had no foundation except in the fact that the
old woman's son had been born at Macquarie Harbour. Uncle Mo's
impression that Van Diemen's Land was a sort of plague-spot on the
planet--the _bacilli_ of the plague being convicted criminals--was no
doubt too well grounded. But it was only a hearsay of youth, and even
elderly men may now fail to grasp the way folk spoke and thought of
those remote horrors, the Penal Settlements, in the early days of last
century--a century with whose years those of Uncle Moses, after
babyhood, ran nearly neck and neck. That fellow-creatures, turned
t'other way up, were in Hell at the Antipodes, and that it was so far
off it didn't matter--that was the way the thing presented itself, and
supplied the excuse for forgetting all about it. Uncle Mo had "heard
tell" of their existence; but then they belonged to the criminal
classes, and he didn't. If people belonged to the criminal classes it
was their own look out, and they must take the consequences.

So that when the old boy referred to this inferential convict as a
presumptive fact, the meaning of his own words had little force for
himself. Even if the old lady's husband had been a convicted felon, it
was now long enough ago to enable him to think of him as he thought of
the chain-gangs eight thousand miles off as the crow flies--or would fly
if he could go straight; the nearest way round mounts up to twelve.
Anyhow, there was no more in the story than would clothe the widowhood
of the upstairs tenant with a dramatic interest.

So, as it appeared that Mrs. Prichard's few words to Aunt M'riar were
more illuminating than anything Mrs. Burr had to tell, and _they_ really
amounted to very little when all was said and done, there was at least
nothing in the convict story to cause misgivings of the fitness of the
upstairs attic to supply a haven of security for Dolly, while her aunt
went out foraging for provisions; or when, as we have seen sometimes
happened, Dolly became troublesome from want of change, and kep' up a
continual fidget for this or that, distrackin' your--that is, Aunt
M'riar's--attention.

CHAPTER VI

PHOEBE AND THE SQUIRE'S SON. HER RUNAWAY MARRIAGE WITH HIM. HOW
HE DABBLED IN FORGERY AND BURNED HIS FINGERS. OF A JUDGE WHO TOOK
AFTER THE PSALMIST. VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, AND HOW PHOEBE GOT OUT
THERE. HOW BOTH TWINS WERE PROVED DEAD BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE,
EACH TO EACH. HOW THORNTON FORGOT THAT PHOEBE COULD NEVER BE
LEGALLY HIS WIDOW. HOW HIS SON ACTED WELL UP TO HIS FATHER'S
STANDARD OF IMMORALITY. MARRIAGE A MEANS TO AN END, BUT ONLY ONCE.
AN ILL-STARRED BURGLARY. NORFOLK ISLAND. WHY BOTH MRS. DAVERILLS
CHANGED THEIR NAMES

If this story should ever be retold by a skilful teller, his power of
consecutive narrative and redisposition of crude facts in a better order
will be sure to add an interest it can scarcely command in its present
form. But it is best to make no pretence to niceties of construction,
when a mere presentation of events is the object in view. The following
circumstances in the life of old Mrs. Prichard constitute a case in
point. The story might, so to speak, ask its reader's forgiveness for so
sudden a break into the narrative. Consider that it has done so, and
amend the tale should you ever retell it.

Maisie Runciman, born in the seventies of the previous century, and
close upon eighty years of age at the time of this story, was the
daughter of an Essex miller, who became a widower when she and her twin
sister Phoebe were still quite children. His only other child, a son
many years their senior, died not long after his mother, leaving them to
the sole companionship of their father. He seems to have been a
quarrelsome man, who had estranged himself from both his wife's
relatives and his own. He also had that most unfortunate quality of
holding his head high, as it is called; so high, in fact, that his twin
girls found it difficult to associate with their village neighbours, and
were driven back very much on their own resources for society. Their
father's morose isolation was of his own choosing. He was, however,
affectionate in a rough way to them, and their small household was
peaceful and contented enough. The sisters, wrapped up in one another,
as twins so often are, had no experience of any other condition of life,
and thought it all right and the thing that should be.

All went well enough--without discord anyhow, however
monotonously--until Maisie and Phoebe began to look a little like women;
which happened, to say the truth, at least a year before their father
consented to recognise the fact, and permit them to appear in the robes
of maturity. About that time the young males of the neighbourhood became
aware, each in his private heart, of an adoration cherished for one or
other of the beautiful twins from early boyhood. Would-be lovers began
to buzz about like flies when fruit ripens. If any one of these youths
had any doubt about the intensity and immutability of his passion, it
vanished when the girls announced official womanhood by appearing at
church in the costume of their seniors. Some students of the mysterious
phenomena of Love have held that man is the slave of millinery, and that
women are to all intents and purposes their skirts. It is too delicate a
question for hurried discussion in a narrative which is neither
speculative nor philosophical, but historical. All that concerns its
writer is that no sooner did the costume of the miller's daughters
suggest that they would be eligible for the altar, than they grew so
dear, so dear, that everything masculine and unattached was ambitious to
be the jewel that trembled at their ear, or the girdle about their
dainty, dainty waist.

The worst of it for these girls was that their likeness to one another
outwent that of ordinary twinship. It resembled that of the stage where
the same actor personates both Dromios; and their life was one perpetual
Comedy of Errors. Current jest said that they themselves did not know
which was which. But they did know, perfectly well, and had no
misgivings whatever about becoming permanently confused; even when,
having been dressed in different colours to facilitate distinction, they
changed dresses and produced a climax of complication. Even this was not
so bad as when Phoebe had a tiff with Maisie--a rare thing between
twins--and Maisie avenged herself by pretending to be Phoebe, affecting
that all the latter's protests of identity were malicious
misrepresentation. Who could decide when they themselves were not of a
tale? What settled the matter in the end was that Phoebe cried bitterly
at being misrepresented, while Maisie was so ill-advised as not to do
the same, and even made some parade of triumph. "Yow are Maisie. I heerd
yow a-crowun'," said an old stone-dresser, who, with other mill-hands,
was referred to for an opinion.

This was when they were quite young, before slight variations of
experience had altered appearance and character to the point of making
them distinguishable when seen side by side. Not, however, to the point
of rendering impossible a trick each had played more than once on too
importunate male acquaintances. What could be more disconcerting to the
protestations of a rustic admirer than "Happen you fancy you are
speaking to my sister Phoebe, sir?" from Maisie, or _vice versa_? It was
absolutely impossible to nail either of these girls to her own identity,
in the face of her denial of it in her sister's absence. Perhaps the
only real confidence on the point that ever existed was their mother's,
who knew the two babies apart--so she said--because one smelt of roses,
the other of marjoram.

It may easily have been that the power of duping youth and shrewdness,
as to which sister she really was, weighed too heavily with each of
these girls in their assessment of the value of lovers' vows. And still
more easily that--some three years later than the girlish jest related a
page since--when Maisie, playing off this trick on a wild young son of
the Squire's, was met by an indignant reproach for her attempted
deception, she should have been touched by his earnestness and seeming
insight into her inner soul, and that the incident should have become
the cornerstone of a fatal passion for a damned scoundrel. "Oh,
Maisie--Maisie!"--thus ran his protestation--"Dearest, best, sweetest of
girls, how can you think to dupe me when your voice goes to my heart as
no other voice ever can--ever will? How, when I know you for mine--mine
alone--by touch, by sight, by hearing?" The poor child's innocent little
fraud had been tried on a past-master in deception, and her own arrow
glanced back to wound her, beyond cure perhaps. His duplicity was proved
afterwards by the confession of his elder brother Ralph, a young man
little better than himself, that the two girls had been the subject of a
wager between them, which he had lost. This wager turned on which of the
two should be first "successful" with one of the beautiful twins; and
whether it showed only doubtful taste or infamous bad feeling depended
on what interpretation was put on the word "success" by its
perpetrators. A lenient one was possible so long as no worse came of it
than that Thornton Daverill, the younger brother, became the accepted
suitor of Maisie, and Ralph, the elder, the rejected one of Phoebe.
Thornton's success was no doubt due in a great measure to Maisie's
failure to mislead him about her identity, and Ralph's rejection
possibly to the poor figure he cut when Phoebe played fast and loose
with hers. That there was no truth or honour in Thornton's protestations
to Maisie, or even honest loss of self-control under strong feeling, is
evident from the fact that he told his brother as a good joke that his
power of distinguishing between the girls was due to nothing more
profound than that Maisie always gave him her hand to shake and Phoebe
only her fingers. Possibly this test would only have held good in the
case of men outside the family. It was connected with some minute
sensitiveness of feeling towards that class, not perceptible by any
other.

But in whatever sense Thornton and Maisie were trothplight, her father
opposed their marriage, although it would no doubt have been a social
elevation for the miller's daughter. It must be admitted that for once
the inexorable parent may have been in the right. Tales had reached him,
unhappily too late to prevent the formation of an acquaintance between
the young squires and his daughters, of the profligacies--dissoluteness
with women and at the gaming-table--of both these young men. And it is
little wonder that he resolutely opposed the union of Thornton and
Maisie--she a girl of nineteen!--at least until there was some sign of
reform in the youth, some turning from his evil ways.

It was a sad thing for Maisie that her father's exclusiveness had
created so many obstacles to the associations of his daughters with
older women. No one had ever taken the place of a mother to them. It is
rare enough for even a mother to speak explicitly to her daughter of
what folk mean when they tell of the risks a girl runs who weds with a
man like Thornton Daverill. But she may do so in such a way as to excite
suspicion of the reality, and it is hard on motherless girls that they
should not have this slender chance. A father can do nothing, and old
fulminations of well-worn Scriptural jargon--hers was an adept in
texts--had not even the force of their brutal plain speech. For to these
girls the speech was not plain--it was only what Parson read in Church.
That described and exhausted it.

The rest of the story follows naturally--too naturally--from the
position shown in the above hasty sketch. Old Isaac Runciman's
ill-temper, combined with an almost ludicrous want of tact, took the
form of forbidding Thornton Daverill the house. The student of the art
of dragging lovers asunder cannot be too mindful of the fact that the
more they see of each other, the sooner they will be ripe for
separation. If Maisie had been difficult to influence when her father
contented himself with saying that he forbade the marriage _ex cathedra
paternae auctoritatis_, she became absolutely intractable when, some time
after, this authority went the length of interdicting communications.
Secret interviews, about double the length of the public ones they
supplanted, gave the indignant parent an excuse for locking the girl
into her own room. All worked well for the purpose of a thoroughly
unprincipled scoundrel. Thornton, who would probably have married Maisie
if nothing but legal possession had been open to him, saw his way to the
same advantages without the responsibilities of marriage, and jumped at
them. Do not blame Maisie overmuch for her share of what came about. The
step she consented to was one of which the _full_ meaning could only be
half known to a girl of her age and experience. And the man into whose
hands it threw her past recovery was in her eyes the soul of honour and
chivalry--ill-judging, if at all, from the influence of a too passionate
adoration for herself. Conception of the degree and nature of his
wickedness was probably impossible to her; and, indeed, may have been so
still--however strange it may seem--to the very old lady whom, under the
name of Mrs. Prichard, Dolly Wardle used to visit in Sapps Court, "Mrs.
Picture in the topackest" being the nearest shot she was able to make at
her description.

Whether it was so or not, this old, old woman was the very selfsame
Maisie that sixty odd years before lent a too willing ear to the
importunities of a traitor, masquerading with a purpose; and ultimately
consented to a runaway marriage with him, he being alone responsible for
the arrangement of it and the legality of the wedding. The most flimsy
_mise en scene_ of a mock ceremony was sufficient to dupe a simplicity
like hers; and therein was enacted the wicked old tragedy possible only
in a world like ours, which ignores the pledge of the strong to the
weak, however clearly that pledge may be attested, unless the wording of
it jumps with the formularies of a sanctioned legalism. A grievous wrong
was perpetrated, which only the dishonesty of Themis permits; for an
honest lawgiver's aim should be to find means of enforcing a sham
marriage, all the more relentlessly in proportion to the victim's
innocence and the audacity of the imposture.

The story of Maisie's after-life need hardly have been so terrible, on
the supposition that the prayer "God, have mercy upon us!" is ever
granted. Surely some of the stabs in store for her need not have gone to
the knife-hilt. Much information is lacking to make the tale complete,
but what follows is enough. Listen to it and fill in the blanks if you
can--with surmise of alleviation, with interstices of hypothetical
happiness--however little warrant the known facts of the case may carry
with them.

Thornton Daverill was destined to bring down Nemesis on his head by
touching Themis on a sensitive point--monetary integrity. Within five
years, a curious skill which he possessed of simulating the handwriting
of others, combined with a pressing want of ready money, led him to the
commission of an act which turned out a great error in tactics, whatever
place we assign it in morality. Morally, the forgery of a signature,
especially if it be to bring about a diminution of cash in a well-filled
pocket, is a mere peccadillo compared with the malversation of a young
girl's life. Legally it is felony, and he who commits it may get as long
a term of penal servitude as the murderer of whose guilt the jury is not
confident up to hanging point.

The severity of the penal laws in the reign of George III. was due no
doubt to a vindictiveness against the culprit which--in theory at any
rate--is nowadays obsolete, legislation having for its object rather the
discouragement of crime on the _tapis_ than the meting out of their
deserts to malefactors. In those days the indignation of a jury would
rise to boiling-point in dealing with an offence against sacred
Property, while its blood-heat would remain normal over the deception
and ruin of a mere woman. Therefore the jury that tried Thornton
Daverill for forging the signature of Isaac Runciman on the back of a
promissory note found the accused guilty, and the judge inflicted the
severest penalty but one that Law allows. For Thornton might have been
hanged.

But neither judge nor jury seemed much interested in the convict's
behaviour to the daughter of the man he had tried to swindle out of
money. On the contrary, they jumped to the conclusion that his wife was
morally his accomplice; and, indeed, if it had not been for her great
beauty she would very likely have gone to the galleys too. There was,
however, this difference between their positions, that the prosecution
was dependent on her father's affidavit to prove that the signature was
a forgery, and so long as only the man he hated was legally involved,
he was to be relied on to adhere to his first disclaimer of it. Had
Maisie been placed beside her husband in the dock, how easily her
father might have procured the liberation of both by accepting his
liability--changing his mind about the signature and discharging the
amount claimed! If the continuance of the prosecution had depended on
either payer or payee, this would have been the end of it. What the
creditor--a usurer--wanted was his money, not revenge. Indeed, Thornton
would never have been made the subject of a criminal indictment at his
instance, except to put pressure on Isaac Runciman for payment for his
daughter's sake.

The bringing of the case into Court created a new position. An
accommodation that would have been easy enough at first--an excusable
compounding of a felony--became impossible under the eyes of the Bench.
And this more especially because one of the Judges of Assize who tried
the case acquired an interest in Maisie analogous to the one King David
took in the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and perceived the advantages he
would derive if this forger and gambler was packed off to a life far
worse than the death the astute monarch schemed for the great-hearted
soldier who was serving him. Whether the two were lawfully man and wife
made no difference to this Judge. Maisie's devotion to her scoundrel was
the point his lordship's legal acumen was alive to, and he himself was
scarcely King of Israel. One wonders sometimes--at least, the present
writer has done so--what Bathsheba's feelings were on the occasion
referred to. We can only surmise, and can do little more in the case of
Maisie. The materials for the retelling of this story are very slight.
Their source may be referred to later. For the moment it must be content
with the bare facts.

This Bathsheba was able to say "Hands off!" to _her_ King David, and
also able--but Heaven knows how!--to keep up a correspondence with the
worthless parallel of the Hittite throughout the period of his detention
in an English gaol, or, it may be, on the river hulks, until his
deportation in a convict ship to Sydney, from which place occasional
letters reached her, which were probably as frequent as his
opportunities of sending them, until, a considerable time later--perhaps
as much as five years; dates are not easy to fix--one came saying that
he expected shortly to be transferred to the new penal settlement in Van
Diemen's Land.

At the beginning of last century the black hulks on the Thames and
elsewhere were known and spoken of truly as "floating Hells." Any penal
colony was in one point worse; he who went there left Hope behind, so
far as his hopes were centred in his native land. For to return was
Death.

After his transfer to Van Diemen's Land, no letter reached her for some
months. Then came news that Thornton had benefited by the extraordinary
fulness of the powers granted to the Governors of these penal
settlements, who practically received the convicts on lease for the term
of their service. They were, in fact, slaves. But this told well for
Maisie's husband, whose father had been at school with the then supreme
authority at Macquarie Harbour. This got him almost on his arrival a
ticket-of-leave, by virtue of which he was free within the island during
good behaviour. He soon contrived, by his superior education and
manners, to get a foothold in a rough community, and saw his way to
rising in the world, even to prosperity. In a very short time, said a
later letter, he would save enough to pay Maisie's passage out, and then
she could join him. The only redeeming trait the story shows of this man
is his strange confidence that this girl, whom he had cruelly betrayed,
would face all the terrors of a three-months' sea-voyage and travel,
alone in a strange land, to become the slave and helpless dependent of a
convict on ticket-of-leave.

She had returned to her father's house a year after the trial, her
sister having threatened to leave it unless her father permitted her to
do so, taking with her her two children; a very delicate little boy,
born in the first year of her marriage, and a girl baby only four months
old, which had come into the world eight months after its wretched
parent's conviction. During this life at her father's the little boy
died. He had been christened, after his father and uncle, Phoebe's
rejected suitor--Ralph Thornton Daverill. The little girl she had
baptized by the name of Ruth. This little Ruth she took with her, when,
on Phoebe's marriage two years later, she went to live at the house of
the new-married couple; and one would have said that the twins lived in
even closer union than before, and that nothing could part them again.

It would have been a mistake. Within three years Maisie received a
letter enclosing a draft on a London bank for more than her
passage-money, naming an agent who would arrange for her in everything,
and ending with a postscript:--"Come out at once." Shortly after, no
change having been noticeable in her deportment, except, perhaps, an
increased tenderness to her child and her sister, she vanished suddenly;
leaving only a letter to Phoebe, full of contrition for her behaviour,
but saying that her first duty was towards her husband. She had not
dared to take with her her child, and it had been a bitter grief to her
to forsake it, but she knew well that it would have been as great a
bitterness to Phoebe to lose it, as she was herself childless at the
time; and, indeed, her only consolation was that Phoebe would still
continue to be, as it were, a second mother to "their child," which was
the light in which each had always looked upon it.

Both of them seemed to have been under an impression that only one of
two twins can ever become a mother. Whether there is any foundation for
this, or whether it is a version of a not uncommon belief that twins are
always childless, the story need not stop to inquire. It was falsified
in this case by the birth of a son to Phoebe, _en secondes noces_, many
years later. But this hardly touches the story, as this son died in his
childhood. All that is needed to be known at present is that, as the
result of Maisie's sudden disappearance, Phoebe was left in sole
possession of her four-year-old daughter, to whose young mind it was a
matter of indifference which of two almost indistinguishable identities
she called by the name of mother. With a little encouragement she
accepted the plenary title for the then childless woman to whom the name
gave pleasure, and gradually forgot the mother who had deserted her;
who, in the course of very little time, became the shadow of a name. All
she knew then was that this mother had gone away in a ship; and, indeed,
for months after little more was known to her aunt.

However, a brief letter did come from the ship, just starting for
Sydney, and the next long-delayed one announced her arrival there, and
how she had been met at the port by an agent who would make all
arrangements for her further voyage. How this agency managed to get her
through to Hobart Town in those days is a mystery, for there was no free
immigration to the island till many years after, only transports from
New South Wales being permitted to enter the port. She got there
certainly, and was met by her husband at the ship. And well for her that
it was so, for in those days no woman was safe by herself for an hour in
that country.

It may seem wonderful that so vile a man should have set himself to
consult the happiness of a woman towards whom he was under no
obligation. But her letters to her sister showed that he did so; and
those who have any experience of womanless lands men have to dwell in,
whether or no, know that in such lands the market-value of a good sample
is so far above rubies, that he who has one, and could not afford
another if he lost the first, will be quite kind and nice and
considerate to his treasure, in case King Solomon should come round,
with all the crown-jewels to back him and his mother's valuation to
encourage a high bid. Phoebe had for four or five years the satisfaction
of receiving letters assuring her of her sister's happiness and of the
extraordinary good fortune that had come to the reformed gambler and
forger, whose prison-life had given him a distaste for crimes actively
condemned by Society.

Among the items of news that these letters contained were the births of
two boys. The elder was called Isaac after his grandfather at the urgent
request of Maisie; but on condition that if another boy came he should
be called Ralph Thornton, a repetition of the name of her first baby,
which died in England. This is done commonly enough with a single name,
but the duplication is exceptional. Whether the name was actually used
for the younger child Phoebe never knew. Probably a letter was lost
containing the information.

When Isaac Runciman died Phoebe wrote the news of his death to Maisie
and received no reply from her. In its stead--that is to say, at about
the time it would have been due--came a letter from Thornton Daverill
announcing her sister's death in Australia. It was a brief, unsatisfying
letter. Still, she hoped to receive more details, especially as she had
followed her first letter, telling of her father's death, with another a
fortnight later, giving fuller particulars of the occurrence. In due
course came a second letter from her brother-in-law, professing
contrition for the abruptness of his first, but excusing it on the
ground that he was prostrated with grief at the time, and quite unable
to write. He added very full and even dramatic particulars of her
sister's death, giving her last message to her English relatives, and so
forth.

But that sister was _not_ dead. And herein follow the facts that have
come to light of the means her husband employed to make her seem so, and
of his motives for employing them.

To see these clearly you must keep in mind that Thornton was tied for
life within the limits of the penal settlements. Maisie was free to go;
with her it was merely a question of money. As time went on, her
yearning to see her child and her twin-sister again grew and grew, and
her appeals to her husband to allow her sometime to revisit England in
accordance with his promise became every year more and more urgent. He
would be quite a rich man soon--why should she not? Well--simply that
she might not come back! That was his view, and we have to bear in mind
that it would have been impossible for him to replace her, except from
among female convicts assigned to settlers; nominally as servants, but
actually as mates on hire--suppose we call them. One need not say much
of this unhappy class; it is only mentioned to show that Thornton could
have found no woman to take the place of the beautiful and devoted
helpmeet whose constancy to him had survived every trial. No wonder he
was ill at ease with the idea of her adventuring back to England alone.
But it took a mind as wicked as his to conceive and execute the means by
which he prevented it. It seems to have been suggested by the fact that
the distribution of letters in his district had been assigned to him by
the Governor. This made it easy to deliver them or keep them back, when
it was in his interest to do so, without fear of detection. The letters
coming from England were few indeed, so he was able to examine them at
leisure.

At first he was content to withhold Phoebe's letters, hoping that
Maisie would be satisfied with negative evidence of her death, which he
himself suggested as the probable cause of their suspension. But when
this only increased her anxiety to return to her native land, he cast
about for something he could present as direct proof. The death of her
father supplied the opportunity. A black-edged sheet came, thickly
written with Phoebe's account of his last illness, in ink which, as the
event showed, did not defy obliteration. Probably Thornton had learned,
among malefactors convicted of his own offence, secrets of forgery that
would seem incredible to you or me. He contrived to obliterate this
sheet all but the date-stamps outside, and then--the more readily that
he had been informed that only fraud for gain made forgery
felony--elaborated as a palimpsest a most careful letter in the
handwriting of the father announcing Phoebe's own death, and also that
of the daughter whom Maisie had bequeathed to her care. He must have
been inspired and upborne in this difficult task by the spirit of a true
artist. No doubt all _faussure_, to any person with an accommodating
moral sense, is an unmixed delight. This letter remains, and has been
seen by the present writer and others. The dexterity of the thing almost
passes belief, only a few scarcely perceptible traces of the old writing
being visible, the length of the new words being so chosen as to hide
most of the old ones. What is even more incredible is that the original
letter from Phoebe was deciphered at the British Museum by the courtesy
of the gentlemen engaged in the deciphering and explanation of obscure
inscriptions.

The elaborate fiction the forger devised may have been in part due to a
true artist's pleasure in the use of a splendid opportunity, such as
might never occur again. But on close examination one sees that it was
little more than a skilful recognition of the exigencies of the case.
The object of the letter was to remove once and for ever all temptation
to Maisie to return to her native land. Now, so long as either her
sister or her little girl were living in England the old inducement
would be always at work. Why not kill them both, while he had the
choice? It would be more troublesome to produce proof of the death of
either, later. But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal
illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!--he knew something
better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a
drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel?
Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his
wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business--to Antwerp,
say--and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a
fever. Their ship could go to the bottom, with a stroke of his pen.
Only, while he was about it, why not clear away the brother-in-law--send
them all out in the same ship? No--_that_ would not do! Where would the
motive be, for all those three to leave England? A commercial mission
for the man alone would be quite another thing. Very perplexing!...
Yes--no--yes!... There--he had got it! Let them go out and nurse him
through a fever, and all be drowned together, returning to England.

That was a triumph. And the finishing touch to the narrative he based on
it was really genius. Little hope was entertained of the recovery of the
remains, but it was not impossible. The writer's daughter might rest
assured that if any came to the surface, and were identified, they
should be interred in the family grave where her mother reposed in the
Lord, in the sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.

Was it to be wondered at that so skilful a contrivance duped an
unsuspicious mind like Maisie's? The only thing that could have excited
suspicion was that the letter had been delayed a post--time, you see,
was needed for the delicate work of forgery--and the date of despatch
from London was in consequence some two months too old. But then the
letter was of the same date; indeed, the forgery was a repeat of the
letter it effaced, wherever this was possible. Besides, the delay of a
letter from England could never occasion surprise.

She took the sealed paper from her husband, breaking the seals with
feverish haste, and destroying the only proof that it had been opened on
the way. For the wax, of course, broke, as her husband had foreseen, on
its old fractures, where he had parted them carefully and reattached
them with some similar wax dissolved in spirit. He watched her reading
the letter, not without an artist's pride at her absolute unsuspicion,
and then had to undergo a pang of fear lest the news should kill her.
For she fell insensible, only to remain for a long time prostrate with
grief, after a slow and painful revival.

There was little need for Thornton to reply to Phoebe's letter that he
had effaced. Nevertheless, he did so; partly, perhaps, from the pleasure
he naturally took in playing out the false _role_ he had assigned
himself. Yes--he was a widower. But the poignancy of his grief had
prevented him writing all the particulars of his wife's death. He now
gave the story of the death of a woman on a farm near, with changed
names and some clever addenda, the composition of which amused his
leisure and gratified a spirit of falsehood which might, more
fortunately employed, have found an outlet in literary fiction. The
effect of this letter on Phoebe was to satisfy her so completely of her
sister's death that, had it ever been called in question, she would have
been the hardest to convert to a belief in the contrary. On the other
hand, Maisie's belief in _her_ death was equally assured, and her
quasi-husband rested secure in his confidence that nothing would now
induce her to leave him. Should he ever wish to be rid of her, he had
only to confess his deception, and pack her off to seek her sister. That
no news ever came of her father's death was not a matter of great
surprise to Maisie. She had no surviving correspondent in England who
would have written about it. Her husband may have practised some
_finesse_ later to convince her of it, but its details are not known to
the writer of the story.

They, however, were never parted until, twenty years later, his death
left Maisie a widow, as she believed. It would have been well for her
had it been so, for he died after making that very common testamentary
mistake--a too ingenious will. It left to "my third son Ralph Thornton
Daverill," on coming of age, all his property after "my wife Maisie,
_nee_ Runciman," had received the share she was "legally entitled to."
But she was unable to produce proof of her marriage when called on to do
so, and was, of course, legally entitled to nothing. Thornton had been
so well off that "widow's thirds" would have placed her in comfortable
circumstances. As it was, the whole of his property went to her only
surviving son, a youth who had inherited, with some of his father's good
looks, all his bad principles; and in addition a taint--we may
suppose--of the penal atmosphere in which he was born. But there was not
a shadow of doubt about his being the person named in the will. Perhaps,
if it had been worded "my lawful son," Themis would have jibbed.

The young man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his
father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and
debauchery. His mother, however, retained some influence over him, and
persuaded him, a year later, before he had had time to dissipate the
whole of his inheritance, to return with her to England, hoping that the
moral effect of a change from the gaol-bird atmosphere of felony that
hung over the whole land of his birth would develop whatever germ of
honour or right feeling he possessed.

She was not very sanguine, for his boyhood had been a cruel affliction
to her. And the results showed that whatever hopes she had entertained
were ill-founded. Arrived in London, with money still at command, he
plunged at once into all the dissipations of the town, and it became
evident that in the course of a year or so he would run through the
remainder of his patrimony.

About this time he met with an experience which now and then happens to
men of his class. He fell violently in love--or in what he called
love--with a girl who had very distinct ideas on the subject of
marriage. One was that the first arrangement of their relations which
suggested themselves to her lover were not to be entertained, and
therefore she refused to entertain them. He tried ridicule, indignation,
and protestation--all in vain! She appeared not to object to
persecution--rather liked it. But she held out no hopes except
legitimate ones. At last, when the young man was in a sense
desperate--not in a very noble sense, but desperate for all that--she
intimated to him that, unless he was prepared to accept her scheme of
life, she knew a very respectable young man who was; a young man in
Smithfield Market with whom she had walked out, and you could never have
told. Which means that this young man disguised himself so subtly on
Sunday to go into Society, that none would have guessed that he passed
the week in contact with grease and blood, and dared to twist the tails
of bullocks in revolt against their fate, shrinking naturally from the
axe. His intentions were, nevertheless, honourable, and Polly, the
barmaid at the One Tun Inn, honoured them, while her affections were
disposed towards her Australian suitor whose intentions were not. The
young reprobate, however, had to climb down; but he made his surrender
conditional on one thing--that his marriage with Polly should remain a
secret. No doubt parallel enterprises would have been interrupted by its
publication. Anyhow, his mother never knew of his marriage, nor set eyes
on her daughter-in-law.

His marriage was, in fact, merely a means to an end, and was a most
reluctant concession to circumstances on his part. It was true he
deprived himself of all chance of offering the same terms again for the
same goods, unless, indeed, he ran the risks of a bigamist. But what can
a man do under such circumstances? He is what he is, and it does seem a
pity sometimes that he was made in the image of God, whether for God's
sake or his own. Young Daverill's end attained, he flung away his prize
almost without a term of intermediate neglect to save his face. She,
poor soul, who had lived under the impression that all men were "like
that" but that honourable marriage "reformed" them, was desperate at
first when she found her mistake. Her "lawful husband," having attained
his end, announced his weariness of lawful marriage with a candour even
coarser than that of Browning's less lawful possessor of Love--he who
"half sighed a smile in a yawn, as 'twere." He replied, to all Polly's
passionate claims to him as a legal right, and hints that she could and
would enforce her position:--"Try it on, Poll--you and your lawyers!"
And, indeed, we have never been able to learn how the strong arm of the
Law enforces marital obligations; barring mere cash payments, of which
Polly's attitude was quite oblivious. Moreover, he was at that time
prepared with money, and did actually maintain his wife up to the point
of every possible legal compulsion until the end of his solvency, not a
very long period.

For his life-drama, or the first act of it, was soon played out. It was
substantially his father's over again. He ran through what was left of
his money in a little over a year--so splendid were the gambler's
opportunities in these days; for the Georgian era had still a short
lease of years to run, and folly dies hard. His attempts to reinstate
himself at the expense of a Bank, by a simple process of burglary, in
partnership with a professional hand whose acquaintance he had made at
"The Tun," led to disastrous failure and the summary conviction of both
partners.

None of this came to the knowledge of his wife, as how should it? He
wrote no news of it to her, and their relation was known to very few.
Moreover, the burglary was in Bristol and Polly was at a farmhouse in
Lincolnshire, awaiting a birth which only added another grief to her
life, for her child was born dead. She recovered from a long illness
which swallowed up the remains of the money her husband had given her,
to find herself destitute and minus most of the good looks which had
obtained for her her previous situation. She succeeded thereafter in
maintaining herself by needlework--she was an adept in that--and so
avoided becoming an incumbrance on her family, which she could no longer
help now as she had done in her prosperity. But of her worthless
husband's fate she never knew anything, the trial having taken place
during an illness which nearly ended all her miseries for her. By the
time she was on the way to recovery it would have been difficult to
trace her husband, even had she had any motive for doing so.

As for him--a convict and the son of a convict--his period of detention
in the hulks on the Thames was followed by the usual voyage to the
Antipodes; but this time the vessel into which he was transhipped at
Sydney sailed for Norfolk Island, not Hobart Town nor Macquarie Harbour.
Maisie's son was not destined to revisit the land of his birth. The
early deliverance from actual bondage to a condition free in all but
the name, which had led to his father's successful later career, was
impossible in an island half the size of the Isle of Wight, and the man
grew to his surroundings. A soul ready to accept the impress of every
stamp of depravity in the mint of vice was soon well beyond the reach of
any possible redemption in contact with the moral vileness of the
prisons on what was, but for their contamination, one of the loveliest
islands in the Pacific.

After his departure his mother may have been influenced by a wish to
obliterate her whole past, and this wish may have been the cause of her
adoption of a name not her own. Some lingering reluctance to make her
severance from her own belongings absolute may have dictated the choice
of the name of Prichard, which was that of an old nurse of her
childhood, who had stood by her mother's dying bed. It would serve every
reasonable purpose of disguise without grating on memories of bygone
times. A shred of identity was left to cling to. It is less clear why
the quasi-daughter whom she had never seen should have repudiated her
married name. Polly was under no obligation not to call herself Mrs.
Daverill, unless it were compliance with her promise to keep the
marriage secret. She, however, acquiesced in the Mrs., and supplied a
name as a passport to a respectable widowhood. But she did not dress the
part very vigorously, and report soon accepted the husband as a bad lot
and a riddance. Nothing very uncommon in that!

CHAPTER VII

OF DAVE WARDLE'S CONVALESCENCE. OF MRS. RUTH THRALE, WIDOW AND
OGRESS, WHO APPRECIATED HIM. HIS ACCOUNT OF HIS HOSPITAL
EXPERIENCE. HOW HE MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A COUNTESS, AND TOLD
HER ABOUT WIDOW THRALE'S GRANDFATHER'S WATER-MILL. CONCERNING JUNO
LUCINA. THESEUS AND ARIADNE. HOW DAVE DETECTED A FAMILY LIKENESS,
AND NEARLY RUBBED HIS EYES OUT. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE SHOWED HIM THE
MILL AT WORK AND MR. MUGGERIDGE

If the daylight were not so short in October at Chorlton-under-Bradbury,
in Rocestershire, that month would quite do for summer in as many
autumns as not. As it is, from ten till five, the sun that comes to say
goodbye to the apples, that will all be plucked by the end of the
month, is so strong that forest trees are duped, and are ready to do
their part towards a green Yule if only the midday warmth will linger on
to those deadly small hours of the morning, when hoarfrost gets the thin
end of its wedge into the almanack, and sleepers go the length of coming
out of bed for something to put over their feet, and end by putting it
over most of their total. From ten till five, at least, the last
swallows seem to be reconsidering their departure, and the skylarks to
be taking heart, and thinking they can go on ever so much longer. Then,
not unfrequently, day falls in love with night for the sake of the
moonrise, and dies of its passion in a blaze of golden splendour. But
the memory of her does not live long into the heart of the night, as it
did in the long summer twilights. Love cools and the dews fall, and the
winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon
scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass
is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the
leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below
their old boughs stript and cold. And he goes home and has all sorts of
things for breakfast, being in England.

But no early riser had had this experience at Chorlton-under-Bradbury on
that October afternoon when Dave Wardle, personally conducted by Sister
Nora, and very tired with travelling from a distant railway-station--the
local line was not there in the fifties--descended from the coach or
omnibus at the garden gate of Widow Thrale, the good woman who was going
to feed him, sleep him, and enjoy his society during convalescence.

The coach or omnibus touched its hat and accepted something from Sister
Nora, and went on to the Six Bells in High Street, where the something
took the form of something else to drink, which got into its head. The
High Street was very wide, and had more water-troughs for horses than
recommended themselves to the understanding. But they might have
succeeded in doing so before the railway came in these parts, turning
everything to the rightabout, as Trufitt phrased it at the Bells. There
were six such troughs within a hundred yards; and, as their contents
never got into the horses' heads, what odds if there were? When the
world was reasonable and four or five horns were heard blowing at once,
often enough, in the high road, no one ever complained, that old Trufitt
ever heard tell of. So presumably there were no odds.

Widow Thrale lived with an old lady of eighty, who was also a widow;
or, one might have said, even more so, seeing that her widowhood was a
double one, her surname, Marrable, being the third she had borne. She
was, however, never called Widow Marrable, but always Granny Marrable;
and Dave's hostess, who was to take charge of him, was not her daughter,
as might have seemed most probable, but a niece who had filled the place
of a daughter to her and was always so spoken of. What an active and
vigorous octogenarian she was may be judged from the fact that, at the
moment of the story, she was taking on herself the task of ushering into
the world her first great-grandchild, the son or daughter--as might turn
out--of her granddaughter, Maisie Costrell, the only daughter of Widow
Thrale. For this young woman had ordained that "Granny" should officiate
as high-priestess on this occasion, and we know it is just as well to
give way to ladies under such circumstances.

So when Dave and Sister Nora were deposited by the coach at Strides
Cottage, it was Widow Thrale who received them. She did not produce on
the lady the effect of a _bona-fide_ widow of fifty-five--this
description had been given of her--not so much because of the
non-viduity of her costume, for that was temperate and negative, as
because Time seemed to have let his ravages stand over for the present.
Very few casual observers would have guessed that she was over
forty-five. Ruth Thrale--that was her name in full--had two sons
surviving of her own family, both at sea, and one daughter, Maisie
Costrell aforesaid. So she was practically now without incumbrances, and
terribly wanting some to kiss, had hit upon the expedient of taking
charge of invalid children and fostering them up to kissing-point. They
were often poor, wasted little articles enough at the first go off, but
Mrs. Ruth usually succeeded in making them succulent in a month or so.
It was exasperating, though, to have them go away just as they were
beginning to pay for fattening. The case was analogous to that of an
ogress balked of her meal, after going to no end of expense in humanised
cream and such-like.

All the ogress rose in her heart when she saw our little friend Dave
Wardle. But she was very careful about his stiff leg. Her eyes gleamed
at the opportunities he would present for injudicious overfeeding--or
suppose we say stuffing at once and have done with it. A banquet was
ready prepared for him, to which he was adapted in a chair of suitable
height, and which he began absorbing into his system without apparently
registering any date of completion. You must not imagine he had been
stinted of food on the journey: indeed, he may be said to have been
taking refreshment more or less all the way from London. But he was one
of the sort that can go steadily on, converting helpings into small boy,
apparently without intermediate scientific events--gastric juice and
blood-corpuscles, and so forth. He was able to converse affably the
while, accepting suggestions as to method in the spirit in which they
were given. In reporting his remarks the spelling cannot be too
phonetical; if unintelligible at first, read them literally aloud to a
hearer who does not see the letterpress. The conversation had turned on
Dave's accident.

"Oy sawed the firing gin coming, and oy said to stoarp, and the firing
gin didn't stoarpt, and it said whoy--whoy--whoy!" This was an attempt
to render the expressive cry of the brigade; now replaced, we believe,
by a tame bell. "Oy sawed free men shoyning like scandles, and Dolly
sawed nuffink--no, nuffink!" The little man's voice got quite sad here.
Think what he had seen and Dolly had missed!

Mrs. Ruth was harrowed by what the child must have suffered. She
expressed her feelings to Sister Nora. Not, however, without Dave
catching their meaning. He was very sharp.

"It hurted at the Hospital," said he. That is, the accident itself had
been too sudden and overwhelming to admit of any estimate of the pain it
caused; the suffering came with the return of consciousness. Then he
added, rather inexplicably:--"It didn't hurted Dolly."

Sister Nora, looking with an amused, puzzled face at the small
absurdity, assimilating suitable nourishment and wrestling with his
mother-tongue at its outset, said:--"Why didn't it hurted Dolly, I
wonder?" and them illuminated:--"Oh--I see! It balances Dolly's account.
Dolly was the loser by not seeing the fire-engine, but she escaped the
accident. Of course!" Whereupon the ogress said with gravity, after due
reflection: "I think you are right, ma'am." She then pointed out to Dave
that well-regulated circles sit still at their suppers, whereas he had
allowed his feelings, on hearing his intelligibility confirmed, to break
out in his legs and kick those of the table. He appeared to believe his
informant, and to determine to frame his behaviour for the future on the
practices of those circles. But he should have taken his spoon out of
his mouth while forming this resolution.

He then, as one wishing to entertain in Society, went on to detail his
experiences in the Hospital, giving first--as it is always well to begin
at the beginning--the names of the staff as he had mastered them. There
was Dr. Dabtinkle, or it might have been Damned Tinker, a doubtful name;
and Drs. Inkstraw, Jarbottle, and Toby. His hearers were able to
identify the names of Dalrymple, Inglethorpe, and Harborough. They were
at work on Toby, who defied detection, when it became evident that sleep
was overwhelming their informant. He was half roused to be put in a
clean nightgown that smelt of lavender, and then curled round his hands
and forgot the whole Universe.

"What a nice little man he is!" said Sister Nora. "He's quite a baby
still, though he's more than six. Some of the London children are so
old. But this child's people seem nice and old-fashioned, although his
uncle was a prizefighter."

"Laws-a-me!" said Mrs. Ruth. "To think of that now! A prizefighter!" And
she had to turn back to Dave's crib, which they were just leaving, to
see whether this degraded profession had set its stamp on her prey....
No, it was all right! She could gloat over that sleeping creature
without misgiving.

"I've just thought who Toby is," said Sister Nora. "Of course, it's Dr.
Trowbridge, the head surgeon. I fancy, now I come to think of it, the
juniors are apt to speak of him without any Dr. I don't know why. I
shall tell Dr. Damned Tinker his name.... Oh no--he won't be offended."

Sister Nora was driven away to the mansion of her noble relative, three
miles off, in a magnificent carriage that was sent for her, in which she
must have felt insignificant. Perhaps she got there in time to dress for
dinner, perhaps not. Wearers of uniforms wash and brush up: they don't
dress.

She reappeared at Mrs. Marrable's cottage two days later, in the same
vehicle, accompanied by the Countess her aunt, who remained therein.
Dave was brought out to make her acquaintance, but not to be taken for a
long drive--only a very short one, just up and down and round, because
Sister Nora wouldn't be more than five minutes. He was relieved when he
found himself safe inside the carriage with her, out of the way of her
haughty and overdressed serving-men, whom he mistrusted. The coachman,
Blencorn, was too high up in the air for human intercourse. Dave found
the lady in the carriage more his sort, and told her, in Sister Nora's
absence--she having vanished into the house--many interesting
experiences of country life. The ogress had taken off his clean shirt,
which he had felt proud of, and looked forward to a long acquaintance
with; substituting another, equally good, perhaps, but premature. She
had fed him well; he gave close particulars of the diet, laying especial
stress on the fact that he had requisitioned the outside piece,
presumably of the loaf, but possibly of some cake. Her ladyship seemed
to think its provenance less important than its destination. She was
able to identity from her own experience a liquid called scream, of
which Dave had bespoken a large jug full, to be taken to Dolly on his
return home. He went on to relate how he had been shown bees, a calf,
and a fool with long legs; about which last the lady was for a moment at
fault, having pictured to herself a Shakespearean one with a bauble. It
proved to be a young horse, a very young one, whose greedy habits Dave
described with a simple but effective directness. But he was destined to
puzzle his audience by his keen interest in something that was on the
mantleshelf, his description of which seemed to relate to nothing this
lady's recollection of Strides interior supplied.

"What on earth does the little man mean by a water-cart on the
mantelshelf, Mrs. Thrale?" said the Countess on leavetaking. The widow
had come out to reclaim her young charge, who seemed not exactly
indignant but perceptibly disappointed, at her ladyship's slowness of
apprehension. He plunged afresh into his elucidation of the subject.
There _was_ a water-cart with four horses, to grind the flour to make
the bread, behind a glast on the chimley-shelf. He knew he was right,
and appealed to Europe for confirmation, more to reinstate his character
for veracity than to bring the details of the topic into prominence.

"That is entirely right, my lady," said Widow Thrale, apologetic for
contradiction from her duty to conscience on the one hand, and her
reluctance to correct her superiors on the other, but under compulsion
from the former. "Quite correct. He's chattering about my grandfather's
model of his mill. He doesn't mean water-cart. He means water-mill. Only
there's a cart with horses in the yard. It's a hundred years old. It's
quite got between the child's mind and his reason, and he wants to see
it work like I've told him."

"Yes," said Dave emphatically, "with water in the cistern." He stopped
suddenly--you may believe it or not--because of a misgiving crossing his
mind that he was using some of Sister Nora's name too freely. Find out
where for yourself.

However, nothing of the sort seemed to cross anyone else's mind, so Dave
hoped he was mistaken. His hostess proceeded to explain why she could
not gratify his anxiety to see this contrivance at work. "I could show
it to him perfectly well," she said, "only to humour a fancy of
Granny's. She never would have anyone touch it but herself, so we shall
have to have patience, some of us." Dave wondered who the other
spectators would be when the time came--would the Countess be one of
them? And would she get down and come into the house, or have it
brought out for her to see in the carriage?

Mrs. Thrale continued:--"I should say it hadn't been set a-going now for
twenty years.... No, more! It was for the pleasuring and amusement of my
little half-brother Robert she made it work, and we buried him more
years ago than that." And then they talked about something else, which
Dave did not closely follow, because he was so sorry for Mrs. Thrale. He
could not resist the conviction that her little half-brother Robert was
dead. Because, if not, they surely never would have buried him. He was
unable to work this out to a satisfactory conclusion, because Sister
Nora was waiting to resume her place in the carriage, and he had no
sooner surrendered it to her than the lateness of the hour was
recognised, and the distinguished visitors drove away in a hurry.

* * * * *

Although Mrs. Marrable had gone away from home ostensibly to welcome
into the world a great-grandchild, the announcement that one had arrived
preceded her return nearly a week. Other instances might be adduced of
very old matriarchs who have imagined themselves Juno, as she certainly
did. Juno, one may reasonably suppose, did not feel free to depart until
matters had been put on a comfortable footing. Of course, the goddess
had advantages; omnipresence, for instance, or at least presence at
choice. One official visit did not monopolize her. Old Mrs.
Marrable--Granny Marrable _par excellence_--had but one available
personality, and had to be either here or there, never everywhere! So
Dave and another convalescent had Strides Cottage all to themselves and
their ogress, for awhile.

The country air did wonders for the London child. This is always the
case, and contains the truth that only strong children outlive their
babyhood in London, and these become normal when they are removed to
normal human conditions. Dave began becoming the robust little character
Nature had intended him to be, and evidently would soon throw off the
ill-effects of his accident, with perhaps a doubt about how long the leg
would be stiff.

So by the time Granny Marrable returned into residence she was not
confronted with an invalid still plausibly convalescent, but an eatable
little boy, from the ogress point of view, who used a crutch when
reminded of his undertaking to do so. Otherwise he preferred to neglect
it; leaving it on chairs or on the settle by the fireplace, like Ariadne
on Naxos; evidently feeling, when he was recalled to his duty towards
it, as Theseus might have felt if remonstrated with by Minos for his
desertion of his daughter. In reinstating it he would be acting for the
crutch's sake. And why should he trouble to do this, when the other
little boy, Marmaduke, who had nothing whatever the matter with _his_
leg, was always ambitious to use this crutch, or scrutch. He was the
Dionysos of the metaphor.

However, the crutch was not in question when Dave first set eyes on
Granny Marrable. It was at half-past seven o'clock on a cold morning,
when the last swallow had departed, and the skylarks were flagging, and
the tragedy of the ash-leaves was close at hand, that Dave awoke
reluctantly from a remote dream-world with Dolly in it, and Uncle Mo,
and Aunt M'riar, and Mrs. Picture upstairs, to hear a voice, that at
first seemed Mrs. Picture's in the dream, saying: "Well, my little
gentleman, you _do_ sleep sound!"

But it wasn't Mrs. Prichard's, or Picture's, voice; it was Granny
Marrable's. For all her eighty years, she had walked from Costrell's
farm, her great-grandson's birthplace, three miles off, or thereabouts;
and had arrived at her own door, ten minutes since, quite fresh after an
hour's walk. She was that sort of old woman.

Dave was almost as disconcerted as when he woke at the Hospital and saw
no signs of his home, and no old familiar faces. He sat up in bed and
wrestled with his difficulties, his eyelids being among the chief. If he
rubbed them hard enough, no doubt the figure before him would cease to
be Mrs. Picture, even as the other figure the dream had left had ceased
to be Aunt M'riar, and had become Widow Thrale. Not but that he would
have accepted her as Mrs. Picture, being prepared for almost anything
since his accident, if it had not been for the expression, "My little
gentleman," which quarrelled with her seeming identity. Oh no!--if he
rubbed away hard enough at those eyes with his nightgown-sleeve, this
little matter would right itself. Of course, Mrs. Picture would have
called him Doyvy, or the name he gave that inflection to.

"Child!--you'll rub your pretty eyes out that fashion," said Granny
Marrable. And she uncrumpled Dave's small nightgown-sleeve the eyes were
in collision with, and disentangled their owner from the recesses of his
bedclothes. Then Dave was quite convinced it was not Mrs. Picture, who
was not so nearly strong as this dream-image, or waking reality.

"He'll come awake directly," said the younger widow. "He do sleep,
Granny!" For Widow Thrale often called her aunt "Granny" as a tribute to
her own offspring. Otherwise she thought of her as "Mother." Her own
mother was only a half-forgotten fact, a sort of duplicate mother, who
vanished when she was almost a baby. She continued:--"He goes nigh to
eating up his pillow he does. There never was a little boy sounder; all
night long not a move! Such a little slugabed I never!" And then this
ogress--for she really was no better--was heartless enough to tickle
Dave and kiss him, with an affectation of devouring him. And he, being
tickled, had to laugh; and then was quite awake, for all the world as if
he could never go to sleep again.

"I fought," said he, feeling some apology was due for his
misapprehension, "I fought it was old Mrs. Picture on the top-landing in
the hackicks."

"He's asleep still," said the ogress. "Come along, and I'll wash your
sleep out, young man!" And she paid no attention at all to Dave's
attempted explanations of his reference to old Mrs. Picture or Prichard.
He may be said to have lectured on the subject throughout his ablutions,
and really Widow Thrale was not to blame, properly speaking, when he got
the soap in his mouth.

Dave lost no time in mooting the subject of the water-mill, and it was
decided that as soon as he had finished dictating a letter he had begun
to Dolly, Granny Marrable--whom he addressed as "Granny
Marrowbone"--would exhibit this ingenious contrivance.

He stuck to his letter conscientiously; and it was creditable to him,
because it took a long time. Yet the ground gone over was not extensive.
He expressed his affection for Dolly herself, for Uncle Mo and Aunt
M'riar, and subordinately for Mrs. Picture, and even Mrs. Burr. He added
that there was ducks in the pond. That was all; but it was not till late
in the morning that the letter was completed. Then Dave claimed his
promise. He was to see the wheel go round, and the sacks go up into the
granary above the millstones. It was a pledge even an old lady of eighty
could not go back on.

Nor had she any such treacherous intention. So soon as ever the
dinner-things were cleared away, Granny Marrable with her own hands
lifted down the model off of the mantelshelf, and removing the glass
from the front of the case, brought the contents out on the oak table
the cloth no longer covered, so that you might see all round. Then the
cistern--which after all had nothing to do with Sister Nora--was
carefully filled with water so that none should spill and make marks,
neither on the table nor yet on the mill itself, and then it was wound
up like a clock till you couldn't wind no further and it went click. And
then the water in the cistern was let run, and the wheels went round;
and Dave knew exactly what a water-mill was like, and was assured--only
this was a pious fiction--that the water made the wheels go round. The
truth was that the clockwork worked the wheels and made them pump back
the water as fast as ever it came down. And this is much better than in
real mills, because the same water does over and over again, and the
power never fails. But you have to wind it up. You can't expect
everything!

Granny Marrable gave a brief description of the model. Her brother, who
died young, made it because he was lame of one leg; which meant that
enforced inactivity had found a sedentary employment in mechanisms, not
that all lame folk make mills. Those two horses were Mr. Pitt and Mr.
Fox. That was her father standing at the window, with his pipe in his
mouth, a miracle of delicate workmanship. And that was the carman, Mr.
Muggeridge, who used to see to loading up the cart.

Children are very perverse in their perception of the relative
importance of things they are told, and Dave was enormously impressed
with Mr. Muggeridge. Silent analysis of the model was visible on his
face for awhile, and then he broke out into catechism:--"Whoy doesn't
the wheel-sacks come down emptied out?" said he. He had not got the
expression "wheat-sacks" right.

"Well, my dear," said Granny Marrable, who felt perhaps that this
question attacked a weak point, "if it was the mill itself, they would.
But now it's only done in small, we have to pretend." Dave lent himself
willingly to the admission of a transparent fiction, and it was
creditable to his liberality that he did so. For though the sacks were
ingeniously taken into the mill-roof under a projecting hood, they
reappeared instantly to go up again through a hole under the cart. Any
other arrangement would have been too complex; and, indeed, a pretence
that they took grain up and brought flour down might have seemed
affectation. A conventional treatment was necessary. It had one great
advantage, too: it liberated the carman for active service elsewhere. It
was entirely his own fault, or his employer's, that he stood bolt
upright, raising one hand up and down in time with the movement of the
wheels. The miller did not seem to mind; for he only kept on looking out
of window, smoking.

But the miller and the carman were not the only portraitures this model
showed. Two very little girls were watching the rising grain-sacks, each
with her arm round the other. The miller may have been looking at them
affectionately from the window; but really he was so very
unimpressive--quite inscrutable! Dave inquired about these little girls,
after professing a satisfaction he only partly felt about the
arrangements for receiving the raw material and delivering it ground.

"Whoy was they bofe of a size?" said he, for indeed they were exactly
alike.

"Because, my dear, that is the size God made them. Both at the same
time!"

"Who worze they?" asked Dave, clinching the matter abruptly--much too
interested for circumlocution.

"Myself, my dear, and my little sister, born the same time. With our
lilac frocks on and white bonnets to shade the sun off our eyes. And
each a nosegay of garden flowers." There was no more sorrow in the old
woman's voice than belongs to any old voice speaking thoughtfully and
gently. Her old hand caressed the crisp locks of the little, interested
boy, and felt his chin appreciatively, as she added:--"Three or four
years older than yourself, my dear! Seventy years ago!" with just the
ring of sadness--no more--that always sounds when great age speaks of
its days long past.

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 l

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