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 THEBARRAGE, 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
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 THEBARRAGE, 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 swervehad 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 strangesound 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 itdoes!
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 mostpopular 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 whenhe addressed them with:—"Either of you the father of a child knocked down by Fire-engine67Ain this street—taken into accident ward?" He spoke just as though Engine68Bhad 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!
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
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 neitherwenor 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 thetree 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.Wecan 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—"Daveisa-doin' to tum home after supper; heisa-doin', Uncle Mo, heisa-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 absolutelycountenance 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 therôleof 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, anda priorireasoning 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. Andeach day, on his return, there was a voice heard in Sapps Court, Dolly weeping for her elder brother, and would not be comforted. "Oodidsaid 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 doctorsaid, 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 thecul-de-sacto 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 tomustbe 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. Byreason 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, andvice 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 wereau faitenough 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 byher 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—alldorn!"—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 thecul-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 Endwas 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.
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
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. Itscaput mortuumwas 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 Dollywould 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 assheknew, 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." Thenshe 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, lookinginto 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"—youknow!—and consequently hermoyen agehad 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 oldwoman'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—thebacilliof 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, andtheyreally 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.
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
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, orvice 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 brotheras 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 marriageex cathedra paternæ 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 ownroom. 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 thefullmeaning 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 flimsymise en scèneof 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 simulatingthe 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 thetapisthan 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 underthe 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!" toherKing 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 wayto 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. Allthat 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.