When Ghost Meets Ghost Part 92

"Ye-es. I think ... I think that is what I meant to say."

Gwen nerved herself for a great effort. She took both the old hands in hers, and all her beauty was in the eyes that looked up at the old face, as she said:--"I will tell you. It is because--_I_--have to tell _her_ to-day ... that she is ... that she is ... Mrs. Marrable's sister!" The last words might have been a cry for pity.

Could old Maisie fail to catch a gleam of the truth? She did. She only saw that her sweet Guardian Angel was in trouble, and thought to herself:--"Can I not help her?" She immediately said, quite quietly and clearly:--"My dear--my dear! But it will give you such pain. Why not let _me_ tell her? I am old, and my time is at hand. It would be nothing to me. For see what trouble I have had myself. And I could say to her ..."

"What could you say to her?" Desperation was in Gwen's voice. How could this awful barrier be pa.s.sed? Could it be past at all--ever?

"I could tell her of all the trouble of my own life, long ago. I do think, if I told her and said, 'See--it might have been me,' that might make it easy." The suggestion was based on a perfectly reasonable idea.

Gwen felt that her own task would have been more achievable had her own record been one of sorrow and defeat. Old Maisie took her silence--which was helplessness against new difficulties--for an encouragement to her proposal, and continued:--"Why, my dear, look at it this way! If my dear sister Phoebe had lived, anyone bad enough out there in the Colony, might have written a lie that I was dead, and who would have known?...

But, my dear, you are ill? You are shaking."

It was a climax. The perfect serenity, the absolute unconsciousness, of the speaker had told the tale of Gwen's failure more plainly than any previous rebuff. And here was the old lady trying to get up from her chair to summon Widow Thrale! Gwen detained her gently; as, having risen from the stool at her feet, she kneeled beside her.

"No, no--I am not ill.... I will tell you directly."

Moments pa.s.sed that, to Gwen's impatience for speech she could neither frame nor utter, might have been hours. Old Maisie's growing wonderment was bringing back the look she had had over that mill-model. But she said nothing.

Gwen's voice came at last, audibly to herself, scarcely more. "I want you--I want you to tell me something...."

"What, my dear?... Oh--to tell you something! Yes--what is it?"

Was the moment at hand, at last? Gwen managed to raise her voice. "I want you to tell me this:--Has Mrs. Thrale ever told you her mother's name--I mean her aunt's--Granny Marrable's?"

"Her christened name?--her own name?"

"Yes!"

"No!"

"Shall I tell it you?"

"Why not?... Oh, I am frightened to see you so white. My dear!"

"Listen, dear Mrs. Picture, and try to understand. Mrs. Thrale's aunt's name is Phoebe."

"_Is Phoebe!_"

"Is Phoebe." Gwen repeated it again, looking fixedly at the old face, now rapidly resuming its former utter bewilderment.

"Is ... Phoebe!" Old Maisie sat on, after echoing back the word, and Gwen left her to the mercy of its suggestion. She had done her best, and could do no more.

She saw that some new thought was at work. But it had to plough its way through stony ground. Give it time!

Watching her intently, she could see the critical moment when the new light broke. A moment later the hand she held clutched at hers beyond its strength, and its owner's voice was forcing its way through gasps.

"But ... but ... but ... Widow Thrale's name is _Ruth_!"

"Is Ruth." Yes--leave the fact there, and wait! That was Gwen's decision.

A moment later what she waited for had come. Old Maisie started, crying out aloud:--"Oh, what is this--what _is_ it?" as she had done when she first saw the mill-model. Then on a sudden a paroxysm seized on the frail body, so terrifying to Gwen that her heart fairly stood still to see it.

It did not kill. It seemed to pa.s.s, and leave a chance for speech. But not just yet. Only a long-drawn breath or two, ending always in a moan!

Then, with a sudden vehemence:--"Who was it--who was it--that forged the letter that came--_that came to my husband and me_?" Her voice rose to a shriek under the sting of that terrible new knowledge. But she had missed a main point in Gwen's tale. Her mind had received the forgery, but not its authorship.

Gwen saw nothing to wonder at in this. The thing was done, and that was enough. "It was your husband himself," said she, and would have gone on to ask forgiveness for her own half-distortion of the facts, and told how she came to the knowledge. But the look on her hearer's face showed her that this must be told later, if indeed it were ever told at all.

She was but just in time to prevent old Maisie falling forward from her chair in a dead swoon. She could not leave her, and called aloud for help.

She did not need to call twice. For Widow Thrale, unable to keep out of hearing through an interview so much longer than her antic.i.p.ation of it, had come into the house from the back, and was already in the pa.s.sage; had, indeed, been waiting in feverish anxiety for leave to enter.

"Take her--take her!" cried Gwen. "No--never mind me!" And then she saw, almost as in a dream, how the daughter's strong arms clasped her mother, and raising the slight unconscious figure, that lay as if dead, bore it away towards the door. "Yes," said she, "that is right! Lay her on the bed!"

What followed she scarcely knew, except that she caught at a chair to save herself from falling. For a reaction came upon her with the knowledge that her task was done, and she felt dizzy and sick. Probably she was, for a minute or more, practically unconscious; then recovered herself; and, though feeling very insecure on her feet, followed those two strange victims of a sin half a century old. Not quite without a sense of self-reproach for weakness; for see how bravely the daughter was bearing herself, and how immeasurably worse it was for her!

She could not but falter between the doors, still standing open. How could she dare to enter the room where she might find the mother dead?

That was her fear. And a more skilful, a gentler revelation, might have left her a few years with the other little twin of the mill-model, still perhaps with a decade of life to come.

She heard the undertones of the daughter's voice, using the name of mother. What was she saying?

"My mother--my mother--my mother!" And then, with a strange acceptance of the name in another sense:--"But when will mother know?"

Gwen entered noiselessly, and stood by the bedside. She began to speak, but shrank from her last word:--"She is not...?"

Widow Thrale looked up from the inanimate form she was clasping so closely in her arms, to say, quite firmly:--"No, she is not dead." Then back again, repeating the words:--"My mother!" as though they were to be the first the unconscious ears should hear on their revival. Then once more to Gwen, as in discharge of a duty omitted:--"G.o.d bless you, my lady, for your goodness to us!"

Gwen's irresistible vice of anticlimax nearly made her say:--"Oh bother!" It was stopped by a sound she thought she heard. "Is she not speaking?" she said.

Both listened, and Widow Thrale heard, being the nearer, "Who called you her mother?" she repeated. "_I_ did." And then Gwen said, clearly and fearlessly:--"Your daughter Ruth!"

CHAPTER XVI

SIR CROPTON FULLER'S LUNCH. LAZARUS'S FAMILY. HOW HIS GREAT-GRANNY CATECHIZED A TOOTHLESS HUMAN PUPPY THIRTEEN MONTHS OLD. HOW DR.

NASH DRAGGED MRS. PRICHARD IN. A VERY TAKING OLD PERSON, BUT QUITE CRACKED. G.o.d'S MERCY IN LEAVING US OUR NATURAL FACULTIES. THAT WAS A SEVERE CASE AMONG THE TOMBS. HOW DR. NASH HAD ALL THE MODEL STORY OUT AGAIN, AND ABOUT MUGGERIDGE'S DON GIOVANITIES. MRS. PRICHARD HAD KNOWN MAISIE, CLEARLY. EVERYTHING EXPLAINED. THE FUTILITY OF HYPOTHESES. HOW A MEMORY OF HER MADMAN-CONVICT MADE OLD PHOEBE FEEL BEWITCHED. OBSTINATE PATERNITY. THE MEASUREMENT OF THAT MODEL.

WHY ARM-MEASUREMENT? KID'S JARGON. MR. BARLOW. DAVE'S LETTER DELIVERED. A SORT OF FAINT. VINEGAR. DR. NASH PURSUED AND BROUGHT BACK. HOW OLD PHOEBE CAME TO KNOW THE TRUTH THROUGH A CHILD'S DIRECT SPEECH. HER PRESENCE OF MIND. AND HOW SHE WENT STRAIGHT HOME, TO LOOK BACK ON FIFTY LOST YEARS

The madman who had claimed as his mother the old woman at Strides Cottage, whom Granny Marrable had not yet seen, had certainly no statutory powers to impose an oath. But this did not stand in the way of her keeping hers, religiously. That is to say, she kept her tongue silent on every point that she could reasonably suppose to call for secrecy, whether from his point of view or this old Mrs. Prichard's.

She felt at liberty to repeat what she remembered of his shocking ravings about his prison life, and to dwell on the fact that he appeared to have mistaken her for his mother. But this could be told without connecting him with any person in or near the village. He was a returned convict who had not seen his mother for twenty years, and meeting an old woman who closely resembled her, or his idea of what she must have become, had made a decisive mistake in ident.i.ty.

As to the name he had written down for her, she simply shrank from it; and destroyed it promptly, as soon as she collected her faculties after the shock it gave her. She framed a satisfactory theory to account for it, out of materials collected by foraging among her memories of fifty years ago. It turned on these facts:--That the name Ralph Thornton Daverill was the baptismal name of her sister's little boy that died in England, and that Maisie had repeated to her what her husband had said after the child's death, that the name would do over again if ever she had another son; but had added that she herself would never consent to its adoption. Granny Marrable was sure on both these points, but so uncertain about what she had heard of the christenings of her nephews born in Van Diemen's Land, that she had no scruple in deciding that her sister had dissuaded her brother-in-law from his intention. For this madman was clearly not Maisie's son, if Mrs. Prichard was his mother.

But what would be more natural and probable than that if Daverill married again, he should make use of the name a second time? He might have married again more than once, for anything Granny Marrable knew. So might his widow--might have married a man named Prichard. Why not? Those were considerations she need not weigh or speculate about.

Nevertheless, though she had destroyed the signed name, it was a cobweb in her memory she would have gladly brushed away altogether. How she would have liked to tell the whole to Ruth, when--as once or twice happened--she walked over from Chorlton to get a report of progress, leaving old Mrs. Prichard in charge of that loyal dog, supported by Elizabeth-next-door, if need were. But she was sworn to silence on matters she dared not provoke inquiry about. So her tale of her meeting with the convict was minimised.

On the other hand, Ruth was scrupulously uncommunicative of everything connected with Mrs. Prichard's supposed delusions. So was Dr. Nash, on the one or two occasions when he looked in at Costrell's Farm, prophylactically. Where was the use of upsetting Juno Lucina by telling her that her daughter had taken a lunatic inmate? All the circ.u.mstances considered, he would have much preferred that Mrs. Maisie's mother should take charge of her. But this young woman liked to have her own way.