Chapter 11

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.