MICHAEL RAGSTROAR'S SLIDE, AND THE MILK. CONCERNING DAVE'S RETURN TO SAPPS COURT, WHICH HAD SHRUNK IN HIS ABSENCE. OF THE PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF A WIDOW'S GRANDMOTHER. DAVE'S TALE OF THE WATER-MILL. SISTER NORA'S EXACTING FATHER. HOW DAVE WENT TO SCHOOL, AND UNCLE MO SOUGHT CONSOLATION IN SOCIETY, WHILE DOLLY TOOK STRUVVEL PETER TO VISIT MRS. PRICHARD. HOW THAT OLD LADY KNITTED A COMFORTER, AND TOLD AUNT M'RIAR OF HER CONVICT LOVER'S DEPARTURE

The heart of the ancient prizefighter in Sapps Court swelled with joy when the day of Dave's return was officially announced. He was, said Aunt M'riar, in and out all the afternoon, fidgeting-like, when it actually came. And the frost was that hard that ashes out of the dustbin had to be strewed over the paving to prevent your slipping. It might not have been any so bad though, only for that young Michael Ragstroar's having risen from his couch at an early hour, and with diabolical foresight made a slide right down the middle of the Court. He had chosen this hour so early, that he was actually before the Milk, which was always agreeable to serve the Court when the tenantry could do—taken collectively—with eightpennyworth. It often mounted up to thrice that amount, as a matter of fact. On this occasion it sat down abruptly, the Milk did, and gave a piece of its mind to Michael's family later, pointing out that it was no mere question of physical pain or ill-convenience to itself, but that its principal constituent might easily have been spilled, and would have had to be charged for all the same. The incident led to a collision between Michael and his father, the coster; who, however, remitted one-half of his son's deserts and let him off easy on condition of his reinstating the footway. Michael would have left all intact, he said, had he only been told that his thoughtfulness would provoke the Court's ingratitude. "Why couldn't they say aforehand they didn't want no slide?" said he. "I could just as easy have left it alone." It was rather difficult to be quite even with Michael Ragstroar.

However, the ground was all steady underfoot when Dave, in charge of Sister Nora, reappeared, looking quite rosy again, and only limping very slightly. He had deserted Ariadne altogether by now, and Dionysos may have done so, too, for anything the story knows. Anyhow, the instability of the planet that had resulted from local frost did not affect Dave at all, now that Michael had spilt them hashes over the ground. Dave was bubbling over with valuable information about the provinces, which had never reached the Metropolis before, and he was in such a hurry to tell about a recent family of kittens, that he scamped his greetings to his own family in order to get on to the description of it.

But neither this, nor public indignation against the turpitude of slide-makers generally and that young Micky in particular, could avert his relatives' acknowledgments of their gratitude—what a plague thanks are!—from a benefactress who was merely consulting a personal dilettantism in her attitude towards her species, and who regarded Dave as her most remunerative investment for some time past.

"We shall never know how to be grateful enough, ma'am, for your kindness to Dave," said Aunt M'riar. "No—never!"

"Not if we was to live for ever," said Uncle Mo. And he seemed to mean it, for he went on:—"It's a poor way of thanks to be redooced to at the best, just to be grateful and stop it off at that. But 'tis in the right of it as far as it goes. You take me, missis? I'm a bad hand to speak my mind; but you'll count it up for hearty thanks, anyhow."

"Of course I will, Mr. Wardle," said Sister Nora. "But, oh dear!—what a fuss one does make about nothing! Why, he's such a ducky little chap, anybody would be glad to."

Dave struck into the conversation perceiving an opportunity to say something appropriate: "There was sisk duskses in the pong in the field, and one of the duskses was a droyk with green like ribbings, and Mrs. Thrale she said a little boy stumbled in the pong and was took out green, and some day I should show Dolly the droyk and I should show Uncle Mo the droyk and I should show Aunt M'riar the droyk. And there was a bool." At which point the speaker suddenly became shyly silent, perhaps feeling that he was premature in referring thus early to a visit of his family to Chorlton-under-Bradbury. It would have been better taste to wait, he thought.

However, no offence seemed to be taken. Uncle Mo said: "Oh, that was it—was it? I hope the bull had a ring on his nose." Dave appeared doubtful, with a wish to assent. Then Aunt M'riar, who—however good she was—certainly had a commonplace mind, must needs say she hoped Dave had been a very good little boy. The banality of it!

Dave felt that an effort should be made to save the conversation. The bull's nose and its ring suggested a line to go on. "The lady," said he decisively, "had rings on her fingers. Dimings and pearls and scrapphires"—he took this very striking word by storm—"and she giv' 'em me for to hold one at a time.... Yorce she did!" He felt sure of his facts, and that the lady's rings on her fingers made her a legitimate and natural corollary to a bull with one on its nose.

"The lady would be my Cousin Philippa," said Sister Nora. "She's always figged up to the nines. Dave took her for a drive in the carriage—didn't you, Dave?" There was misrepresentation in this, but a way grown-up people have of understanding each other over the heads of little boys prevented the growth of false impressions. Uncle Mo and Aunt M'riar quite understood, somehow, that it was the lady that had taken Dave for a drive. Dave allowed this convention to pass without notice, merely nodding. He reserved criticism for the days to come, when he should have a wider vocabulary at command.

Then Sister Nora had gone, and Dave was having his first experience of the shattered ideal. Sapps Court was neither so large nor so distinguished as the conception of it that he had carried away into the country with him; with the details of which he had endeavoured to impress Granny Marrable and the ogress. Dolly was not so large as he had expected to find her; but then he had had that expectation owing to a message, which had reached him in his absence, that she was growing out of all knowledge. His visit was inside three months; so this was absurd. One really should be careful what one says to six-year-olds. The image of Dolly that Dave brought back from the provinces nearly filled up the Sapps Court memory supplied. It was just the same shape as Dolly, but on a much larger scale. The reality he came back to was small and compact, but not so influential.

Dolly's happiness at his return was great and unfeigned, but its expression was handicapped by her desire that a doll Sister Nora brought her should be allowed to sleep off the effects of an exhausting journey. Only Shakespearean dramatic power could have ascribed sleep to this doll, who was a similitude of Struvvel Peter in the collected poems of that name just published. Still, Dolly gave all of herself that this matronly preoccupation could spare to Dave. She very soon suggested that they should make a joint visit to old Mrs. Picture upstairs. She could carry Struvvel Peter in her arms all the time, so that his sleep should not be disturbed.

This was only restless love of change on Dolly's part, and Uncle Mo protested. Was his boy to be carried off from him when only just this minute he got him back? Who was Mrs. Prichard that such an exaggerated consideration should be shown to her? Dave expressed himself in the same sense, but with a less critical view of Mrs. Prichard's pretensions.

Aunt M'riar pointed out that there was no call to be in a driving hurry. Presently, when Mr. Alibone come in for a pipe, like he said he would, then Dave and Dolly might go up and knock at Mrs. Prichard's door, and if they were good they might be let in. Aunt M'riar seized so many opportunities to influence the young towards purity and holiness that her injunctions lost force through the frequency of their recurrence, always dangling rewards and punishments before their eyes. In the present case her suggestions worked in with the general feeling, and Dave and Dolly sat one on each knee of Uncle Mo, and made intelligent remarks. At least, Dave did; Dolly's were sometimes confused, and very frequently uncompleted.

Uncle Mo asked questions about Dave's sojourn with Widow Thrale. Who was there lived in the house over and above the Widow? Well—said Dave—there was her Granny. Uncle Mo derided the idea of a Widow's Granny. Such a thing was against Nature. Her mother was possible but uncommon. But as for her Granny!—draw it mild, said Uncle Mo.

"But my dear Mo," said Aunt M'riar. "Just you give consideration. You're always for sayin' such a many things. Why, there was our upstairs old lady she says to me she was plenty old enough to be my grandmother. Only this very morning, if you'll believe me, she said that very selfsame thing. 'I'm plenty old enough to be your grandmother,' she says."

"As for the being old enough, M'riar," said Uncle Mo, "there's enough and to spare old enough for most anything if you come to that. But this partick'lar sort don't come off. Just you ask anybody. Why, I'll give ye all England to hunt 'em up. Can't say about foreigners, they're a queer lot; but England's a Christian country, and you may rely upon it, and so I tell you, you won't light on any one or two widders' Grannies in the whole show. You try it!" Uncle Moses was not the first nor the only person in the world that ever proposed an impracticable test to be carried out at other people's expense, or by their exertions. It was, however, a mere faÇon de parler, and Aunt M'riar did not show any disposition to start on a search for widows' grandmothers.

The discussion was altogether too deep for Dave. So after a moment of grave perplexity he started a new topic, dashing into it without apology, as was his practice. "Granny Marrowbone's box on the chimley-piece is got glast you can see in, and she's got two horses in a wagging, and the wheels goes round and round and round like a clock, and there was her daddy stood at the window and there was saskses was took up froo a hole, and come back froo a hole, and there was Muggeridge that see to loading up the cart, and there was her and her sister bofe alike of one size, and there was the water run over...." Here Dave flagged a little after so much eloquence, and no wonder. But he managed to wind up:—"And then Granny Marrowbone put it back on the mankleshelf for next time."

This narrative was, of course, quite unintelligible to its hearers; but we understand it, and its mention of the carman's name. A child that has to repeat a story will often confuse incidents limitlessly, and nevertheless hold on with the tenacity of a bull-pup to some saving phrase heard distinctly once and for ever. Even so, Dave held on to Muggeridge, that see to loading up the cart, as a great fact rooted in History.

"H'm!" said Uncle Mo. "I don't make all that out. Who's Muggeridge in it?"

"He sees to the sacks," said Dave.

"Counting of 'em out, I reckon." Uncle Mo was thinking of coal-sacks, and the suggestions of a suspicious Company. Dave said nothing. Probably Uncle Mo knew. But he was all wrong, perhaps because the association of holes with coals misled him.

"Was it Mrs. Marrable and her sister?" asked Aunt M'riar. "Why was they both of a size?"

Dave jumped at the opportunity of showing that he had profited by rÉsumÉs of this subject with his hostess. "Because they were the soyme oyge," said he. "Loyke me and Dolly. We aren't the soyme oyge, me and Dolly." That is to say, he and Dolly were an example of persons whose relative ages came into court. Their classification differed, but that was a detail.

Aunt M'riar was alive to the possibility that the sister of Granny Marrable was her twin, and said so. But Uncle Mo took her up short for this opinion. "What!" said he, "the same as the old party two pair up? No, no!—you won't convince me there's two old parties at once with twin sisters. One at a time's plenty on the way-bill." Because, you see, Aunt M'riar had had a good many conversations with Mrs. Prichard lately, and had repeated words of hers to Uncle Moses. "I was a twin myself," she had said; and added that she had lost her sister near upon fifty years ago.

The truth was too strange to occur to even the most observant bystander; videlicet, on the whole, Mr. Alibone; who, coming in and talking over the matter anew, only said it struck him as a queer start. This expression has somehow a sort of flavour of its user's intention to conduct inquiry no farther. Anyhow, the subject simply dropped for that time being, out of sight and out of mind.

It was very unfair to Dave, who was, after all, a model of veracity, that he should be treated as a romancer, and never confronted with witnesses to confirm or contradict his statements. Even Uncle Mo, who took him most seriously, continued to doubt the existence of widows' grandmothers, and to accept with too many reservations his account of the mill-model. Sister Nora, as it chanced, did not revisit Sapps Court for a very long time, for she was called away to Scotland by the sudden illness of her father, who showed an equivocal affection for her by refusing to let anyone else nurse him.

So it came about that Dave, rather mortified at having doubt thrown on narratives he knew to be true, discontinued his attempts to establish them. And that the two old sisters, so long parted, still lived on apart; each in the firm belief that the other was dead a lifetime since. How near each had been to the knowledge that the other lived! Surely if Dave had described that mill-model to old Mrs. Picture, suspicions would have been excited. But Dave said little or nothing about it.

It is nowise strange to think that the bitter, simultaneous grief in the heart of either twin, now nearly fifty years ago, still survived in two hearts that were not too old to love; for even those who think that love can die, and be as though it had never been, may make concession to its permanency in the case of twins—may even think concession scientific. But it is strange—strange beyond expression—that at the time of this story each should have had love in her heart for the same object, our little Dave Wardle; that Master Dave's very kissable countenance had supplied the lips of each with a message of solace to a tired soul. And most of all that the tears of each, and the causes of them, had provoked the inquisitiveness of the same pair of blue eyes and set their owner questioning, and that through all this time the child had in his secret consciousness a few words that would have fired the train. Never was a spark so near to fuel, never an untold tale so near its hearer, never a draught so near to lips athirst.

But Dave's account of the mill was for the time forgotten. It happened that old Mrs. Prichard was not receiving just at the time of his return, so his visits upstairs had to be suspended. By the time they were renewed the strange life in the country village had become a thing of the past, and important events nearer home had absorbed the mill on the mantelshelf, and the ducks in the pond and Widow Thrale and Granny Marrable alike. One of the important events was that Dave was to be took to school after Christmas.

It was in this interim that old Mrs. Prichard became a very great resource to Aunt M'riar, and when the time came for Dave to enter on his curriculum of scholarship, the visiting upstairs had become a recognised institution. Aunt M'riar being frequently forsaken by Uncle Mo, who marked his objection to the scholastic innovation by showing himself more in public, notably at The Rising Sun, whose proprietor set great store by the patronage of so respectable a representative of an Institution not so well thought of now as formerly, but whose traditions were still cherished in the confidential interior of many an ancient pot-house of a like type—Aunt M'riar, so forsaken, made these absences of her brother-in-law a reason for conferring her own society and Dolly's on the upstairs lodger, whenever the work she was engaged on permitted it. She felt, perhaps, as Uncle Mo felt, that the house warn't like itself without our boy; but if she shared his feeling that it was a waste of early life to spend it in learning to read slowly, write illegibly, and cypher incorrectly, she did so secretly. She deferred to the popular prejudice, which may have had an inflated opinion of the advantages of education; but she acknowledged its growth and the worldly wisdom of giving way to it.

Old Mrs. Prichard and Aunt M'riar naturally exchanged confidences more and more; and in the end the old lady began to speak without reserve about her past. It came about thus. After Christmas, Dave being culture-bound, and work of a profitable nature for the moment at a low ebb, Aunt M'riar had fallen back on some arrears of stocking-darning. Dolly was engaged on the object to which she gave lifelong attention, that of keeping her doll asleep. I do not fancy that Dolly was very inventive; but then, you may be, at three-and-a-half, seductive without being inventive. Besides, this monotonous fiction of the need of her doll for sleep was only a scenario for another incident—the fear of disturbance by a pleace'n with two heads, a very terrible possibility.

Old Mrs. Prichard, whom I call by that name because she was known by no other in Sapps Court, was knitting a comforter for Dave. It went very slowly, this comforter, but was invaluable as an expression of love and goodwill. She couldn't get up and downstairs because of her back, and she couldn't read, only a very little, because of her eyes, and she couldn't hear—not to say hear—when read aloud to. This last may have been no more than what many of us have experienced, for she heard very plain when spoke to. That is Aunt M'riar's testimony. My impression is that, as compared with her twin sister Phoebe, Maisie was at this date a mere invalid. But she looked very like Phoebe for all that, when you didn't see her hands. The veins were too blue, and their delicacy was made more delicate by the aggressive scarlet she had chosen for the comforter.

"It makes a rest to do a little darning now and again." Aunt M'riar said this, choosing a worsted carefully, so it shouldn't quarrel with its surroundings. "I take a pleasure in it more than not. On'y as for knowing when to stop—there!"

"I mind what it was in my early days up-country," said the old woman. "'Twas not above once in the year any trade would reach us, and suchlike things as woollen socks were got at by the moth or the ants. They would sell us things at a high price from the factory as a favour, but my husband could not abide the sight of them. It was small wonder it was so, Mrs. Wardle." That was the name that Aunt M'riar had come to be called by, although it was not her own real name. Confusion of this sort is not uncommon in the class she belonged to. Sapps Court was aware that she was not Mrs. Wardle, but she had to be accounted for somehow, and the name she bore was too serious a tax on the brain-power of its inhabitants.

She repeated Mrs. Prichard's words: "From the factory, ma'am? I see." Because she did not understand them.

"It was always called the factory," said Mrs. Prichard. But this made Aunt M'riar none the wiser. What was called the factory? The way in which she again said that she saw amounted to a request for enlightenment. Mrs. Prichard gave it. "It was the Government quarters with the Residence, and the prisons where the convicts were detained on their arrival. They would not be there long, being told off to work in gangs up-country, or assigned to the settlers as servants. But I've never told you any of all this before, Mrs. Wardle." No more she had. She had broached Van Diemen's Land suddenly, having gone no farther before than the mere fact of her son's birth at Port Macquarie.

Aunt M'riar couldn't make up her mind as to what was expected of her, whether sympathy or mere interest or silent acquiescence. She decided on a weak expression of the first, saying:—"To think of that now—all that time ago!"

"Fifty long years ago! But I knew of it before that, four years or more," said the old lady. It did not seem to move her much—probably felt to her like a previous state of existence. She went on talking about the Convict Settlement, which she had outlived. Her hearer only half understood most of it, not being a prompt enough catechist to ask the right question at the right time.

For Aunt M'riar, though good, was a slowcoach, backward in cross-examination, and Mrs. Prichard's first depositions remained unqualified, for discussion later with Uncle Mo. However, one inquiry came to her tongue. "Was you born in those parts yourself, ma'am?" said she. Then she felt a little sorry she had asked it, for a sound like annoyance came in the answer.

"Who—I? No, no—not I—dear me, no! My father was an Essex man. Darenth, his place was called." Aunt M'riar repeated the name wrongly:—"Durrant?" She ought to have asked something concerning his status and employment. Who knows but Mrs. Prichard might have talked of that mill and supplied a clue to speculation?—not Aunt M'riar's; speculation was not her line. Others might have compared notes on her report, literally given, with Dave's sporting account of the mill-model. And yet—why should they? With no strong leading incident in common, each story might have been discussed without any suspicion that the flour-mill was the same in both.

So that Mrs. Prichard's tale so far supplies nothing to link her with old Granny Marrable, as unsuspicious as herself. What Aunt M'riar found her talking of, half to herself, when her attention recovered from a momentary fear that she might have hurt the old lady's feelings, was even less likely to connect the two lives.

"I followed my husband out. My child died—my eldest—here in England. I went again to live at home. Then I followed him out. He wrote to me and said that he was free. Free on the island, but not to come home. We had been over four years parted then." She said nothing of the child she left behind in England. Too much to explain perhaps?

Aunt M'riar was struck by a painful thought; the same that had crossed her mind before, and that she had discarded as somehow inconsistent with this old woman. The convicts—the convicts? She had grasped the fact that this couple had lived in Van Diemen's Land, and inferred that children were born to them there. But—was the husband himself a convict? She repeated the words, "Free on the island, but not to come home?" as a question.

She was quite taken aback with the reply, given with no visible emotion. "Why should I not tell you? How will it hurt me that you should know? My husband was convicted of forgery and transported."

"God's mercy on us!" said Aunt M'riar, dropping her work dumfoundered. Then it half entered her thought that the old woman was wandering, and she nearly said:—"Are you sure?"

The old woman answered the thought as though it had been audible. "Why not?" she said. "I am all myself. Fifty years ago! Why should I begin to doubt it because of the long time?" She had ceased her knitting and sat gazing on the fire, looking very old. Her interlaced thin fingers on the strain could grow no older now surely, come what might of time and trouble. Both had done their worst. She went on speaking low, as one talks to oneself when alone. "Yes, I saw him go that morning on the river. They rowed me out at dawn—a pair of oars, from Chatham. For I had learned the day he would go, and there was a sure time for the leaving of the hulks; if not night, then in the early dawn before folk were on the move. This was in the summer."

"And did you see him?" said Aunt M'riar, hoping to hear more, and taking much for granted that she did not understand, lest she should be the loser by interruption.

"I saw him. I saw him. I did not know then that he saw me. They dared not row me near the wicked longboat that was under the hulk's side waiting—waiting to take my heart away. They dared not for the officers. There was ten men packed in the stern of the boat, and he was in among them. And, as they sat, each one's hand was handcuffed to his neighbour. I saw him, but he could not raise his hand; and he dared not call to me for the officers. I could not have known him in his prison dress—it was too far—but I could read his number, 213M. I know it still—213M.... How did I know it? Because he got a letter to me." She then told how a man had followed her in the street, when she was waiting in London for this chance of seeing her husband, and how she had been afraid of this man and taken refuge in a shop. Then how the shopkeeper had gone out to speak to him and come back, saying:—"He's a bad man to look at, but he means no harm. He says he wants to give you a letter, miss." How she then spoke with the man and received the letter, giving him a guinea for the rolled-up pencil scrawl, and he said:—"It's worth more than that for the risk I ran to bring it ye. But for my luck I might be on the ship still." Whereupon, she gave him her watch. That was how she came to know 213M.

"But did you see your husband again?" asked Aunt M'riar, listening as Dave might have done; and, like him, wanting each instalment of the tale rounded off.

"Yes. Climbing up the side of the great ship half-way to the Nore. It was a four-hours' pull for the galley—six oars—each man wristlocked to his oar; and each officer with a musket. But we had a little sail and kept the pace, though the wind was easterly. Then, when we reached the ship where she lay, we went as near as ever my men dared. And we saw each one of them—the ten—unhandcuffed to climb the side, and a cord over the side made fast to him to give him no chance of death in the waters—no chance! And then I saw my husband and knew he saw me."

"Did he speak?"

"He tried to call out. But the ship's officer struck him a cruel blow upon the mouth, and he was dragged to the upper deck and hidden from me. We saw them all aboard, all the ten. It was the last boat-load from the hulk, and all the yards were manned by now, and the white sails growing on them. Oh, but she was beautiful, the great ship in the sunshine!" The old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore—why, Heaven knows!—and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was a new experience for her—this ship with hundreds of souls on board, men and women who had all had a fair trial and been represented by counsel, so had nothing to complain of even if innocent. But all souls in Hell, for all that!

The old voice seemed quite roused to animation—a sort of heart-broken animation—by the recollection of this ship. "Oh, but she was beautiful!" she said again. "I've dreamed of her many's the time since then, with her three masts straight up against the blue; you could see them in the water upside down. I could not find the heart to let my men row away and leave her there. I had come to see her go, and it was a long wait we had.... Yes, it was on towards evening before the breeze came to move her; and all those hours we waited. It was money to my men, and they had a good will to it." She stopped, and Aunt M'riar waited for her to speak again, feeling that she too had a right to see this ship's image move. Presently she looked up from her darning and got a response. "Yes, she did move in the end. I saw the sails flap, and there was the clink of the anchor-chain. I've dreamt it again many and many a time, and seen her take the wind and move, till she was all a mile away and more. We watched her away with all aboard of her. And when the wind rose in the night I was mad to think of her out on the great sea, and how I should never see him again. But the time went by, and I did."

This was the first time old Mrs. Prichard spoke so freely about her former life to Aunt M'riar. It was quite spontaneous on the old lady's part, and she stopped her tale as suddenly as it had begun. The fragmentary revelations in which she disclosed much more of her story, as already summarised, came at intervals; always dwelling on her Australian experiences, never on her girlhood—never on her subsequent life in England. The reason of this is not clear; one has to accept the fact. The point to notice is that nothing she said could possibly associate her with old Mrs. Marrable, as told about by Dave. There had been mention of Australia certainly. Yet why should Granny Marrable's sister having died there forty-odd years ago connect her with an old woman of a different name, now living? Besides, Dave was not intelligible on this point.

Whatever she told to Aunt M'riar was repeated to Uncle Mo—be sure of that! Still, fragmentary stories, unless dressed up and garnished by their retailer, do not remain vividly in the mind of their hearer, and Uncle Mo's impressions of the upstairs tenant's history continued very mixed. For Aunt M'riar's style was unpolished, and she did not marshall her ideas in an impressive or lucid manner.