A PROFESSIONAL CONSULTATION ACROSS A COUNTER, AND HOW THE STORY OF THE MAN IN HYDE PARK WAS TOLD BY DOLLY. HOW AUNT M'RIAR KNEW THE NAME WAS NOT "DARRABLE." HOW SHE TOLD UNCLE MO WHOSE WIFE SHE WAS AND WHOSE MOTHER MRS. PRITCHARD WAS. HOW POLLY DAVERILL JUNIOR HAD DIED UNBAPTIZED, AND ATTEMPTS TO BULLY THE DEVIL ARE FUTILE. HOW HER MOTHER WAS FORMERLY BARMAID AT THE ONE TUN, BUT BECAME AUNT M'RIAR LATER, AND HOW THE TALLOW CANDLE JUST LASTED OUT. HOW DOLLY, VERY SOUND ASLEEP, WAS GOOD FOR HER AUNT

"I shouldn't take any violent exercise, if I was you, Mr. Wardle," said Mr. Ekings, the Apothecary, whose name you may remember Michael Ragstroar had borrowed and been obliged to relinquish. "I should be very careful what I ate, avoiding especially pork and richly cooked food. A diet of fowls and fish—preferably boiled...."

"Can't abide 'em!" said Uncle Moses, who was talking over his symptoms with Mr. Ekings at his shop, with Dolly on his knee. "And whose a-going to stand Sam for me, livin' on this and livin' on that? Roasted chicking's very pretty eating, for the sake of the soarsages, when you're a Lord Mayor; but for them as don't easy run to half-crowns for mouthfuls, a line has to be drawed. Down our Court a shilling has to go a long way, Dr. Ekings."

The medical adviser shook his head weakly. "You're an intractable patient, Mr. Moses," he said. He knew that Uncle Moses's circumstances were what is called moderate. So are a church mouse's; and, in both cases, the dietary is compulsory. Mr. Ekings tried for a common ground of agreement. "Fish doesn't mount up to much, by the pound," he said, vaguely.

"Fishes don't go home like butcher's meat," said Uncle Moses.

"You can't expect 'em to do that," said Mr. Ekings, glad of an indisputable truth. "But there's a vast amount of nourishment in 'em, anyway you put it."

"So there is, Dr. Ekings. In a vast amount of 'em. But you have to eat it all up. Similar, grass and cows. Only there's no bones in the grass. Now, you know, what I'm wanting is a pick-me-up—something with a nice clean edge in the smell of it, like a bottle o' salts with holes in the stopper. And tasting of lemons. I ain't speaking of the sort that has to be shook when took. Nor yet with peppermint. It's a clear sort to see through, up against the light, what I want."

Mr. Ekings, a humble practitioner in a poor neighbourhood, supplied more mixtures in response to suggestions like Uncle Mo's, than to legitimate prescriptions. So he at once undertook to fill out the order, saying in reply to an inquiry, that it would come to threepence, but that Uncle Mo must bring or send back the bottle. He then added a few drops of chloric ether and ammonia, and some lemon to a real square bottleful of aq. pur. haust., and put a label on it with superhuman evenness, on which was written "The Mixture—one tablespoonful three times a day." Uncle Moses watched the preparation of this elixir vitÆ with the extremest satisfaction. He foresaw its beneficial effect on his system, which he had understood was to blame for his occasional attacks of faintness, which had latterly been rather more frequent. Anything in such a clean phial, with such a new cork, would be sure to do his system good.

Mrs. Riley came in for a bottle which was consciously awaiting her in front of the leeches, and identified it as "the liniment," before Mr. Ekings could call to mind where he'd stood it. She remarked, while calculating coppers to cover the outlay, that she understood it was to be well r-r-r-rhubbed in with the parrum of her hand, and that she was to be thr-rusted not to lit the patiint get any of it near his mouth, she having been borrun in Limerick morr' than a wake ago. She remarked to Uncle Mo that his boy was looking his bist, and none the wurruss for his accidint. Uncle Mo felt braced by the Celtic atmosphere, and thanked Mrs. Riley cordially, for himself and Dave.

"Shouldn't do that, if I was you, Mr. Wardle," said Mr. Ekings the Apothecary, as Uncle Mo hoisted Dolly on his shoulder to carry her home.

"No more shouldn't I, if you was me, Dr. Ekings," was the intractable patient's reply. "Why, Lard bless you, man alive, Dolly's so light it's as good as a lift-up, only to have her on your shoulders! Didn't you never hear tell of gravitation? Well—that's it!" But Uncle Mo was out of his depth.

"It'll do ye a powerful dale of good, Mr. Wardle," said Mrs. Riley. "Niver you mind the docther!" And Uncle Mo departed, braced again, with his elixir vitÆ in his left hand, and Dolly on his right shoulder, conversing on a topic suggested by Dr. Ekings's remarks about diet.

"When Dave tooktid Micky to see the fisses corched in the Turpentine, there was a jenklum corched a fiss up out of the water, and another jenklum corched another fiss up out of the water...." Dolly was pursuing the subject in the style of the Patriarchs, who took their readers' leisure for granted, and never grudged a repetition, when Uncle Mo interrupted her to point out that it was not Dave who took Michael Ragstroar to Hy' Park, but vice versa. Also that the whole proceeding had been a disgraceful breach of discipline, causing serious alarm to himself and Aunt M'riar, who had nearly lost their reason in consequence—the exact expression being "fritted out of their wits." If that young Micky ever did such a thing again, Uncle Mo said, the result would be a pretty how-do-you-do, involving possibly fatal consequences to Michael, and certainly local flagellation of unheard-of severity.

Dolly did not consider this was to the point, and pursued her narrative without taking notice of it. "There was a jenklum corched a long fiss, and there was another jenklum corched a short fiss, and there was another jenklum corched a short fiss...." This seemed to bear frequent repetition, but came to an end as soon as history ceased to supply the facts. Then another phase came, that of the fishers who didn't corch no fiss, whose name appeared to be Legion. They lasted as far as the arch into Sapps Court, and Uncle Mo seemed rather to relish the monotony than otherwise. He would have made a good Scribe in the days of the Pharaohs.

But Dolly came to the end of even the unsuccessful fishermen. Just as they reached home, however, she produced her convincing incident, all that preceded it having evidently been introduction pure and simple. "And there was a man saided fings to Micky, and saided fings to Dave, and saided fings to...." Here Dolly stuttered, became confused, and ended up weakly: "No, he didn't saided no fings, to no one else."

A little finesse was necessary to land the elixir vitÆ on the parlour chimney-piece, and Dolly on the hearthrug. Then Uncle Mo sat down in his own chair to recover breath, saying in the course of a moment:—"And what did the man say to Dave, and what did he say to young Sparrowgrass?" He did not suppose that "the man" was a person capable of identification; he was an unknown unit, but good to talk about.

"He saided Mrs. Picture." Dolly placed the subject she proposed to treat broadly before her audience, with a view to its careful analysis at leisure.

"What on 'arth did he say Mrs. Picture for? He don't know Mrs. Picture." The present tense used here acknowledged the man's authenticity, and encouraged the little maid—three and three-quarters, you know!—to further testimony. It came fairly fluently, considering the witness's recent acquisition of the English language.

"He doos know Mrs. Picture, ass he doos, and he saided Mrs. Picture to Micky, ass he did." This was plenty for a time, and during that time the witness could go on nodding with her eyes wide open, to present the subject lapsing, for she had found out already how slippery grown-up people are in argument. Great force was added by her curls, which lent themselves to flapping backwards and forwards as she nodded.

It was impossible to resist such evidence, outwardly at least, and Uncle Mo appeared to accept it. "Then the man said Mrs. Picture to Dave," said he. "And Dave told it on to you, was that it?" He added, for the general good of morality:—"You're a nice lot of young Pickles!"

But this stopped the nodding, which changed suddenly to a negative shake, of great decision. "The man never saided nuffint to Dave, no he didn't."

"Thought you said he did. You're a good 'un for a witness-box! Come up and sit on your old uncle. The man said Mrs. Picture to young Sparrowgrass—was that it?" Dolly nodded violently. "And young Sparrowgrass he passed it on to Dave?" But it appeared not, and Dolly had to wrestle with an explanation. It was too much involved for letterpress, but Uncle Mo thought he could gather that Dave had been treated as a mere bystander, supposed to be absorbed in angling, during a conversation between Michael Ragstroar and the Man. "Dave he came home and told you what the Man said to Micky—was that it?" So Uncle Mo surmised aloud, not at all clear that Dolly would understand him. But, as it turned out, he was right, and Dolly was glad to be able to attest his version of the facts. She resumed the nodding, but slower, as though so much emphasis had ceased to be necessary. "Micky toldited Dave," she said. She then became immensely amused at a way of looking at the event suggested by her uncle. The Man had told Micky; Micky had told Dave; Dave had told Dolly; and Dolly had told Uncle Mo, who now intensified the interest of the event by saying he should tell Aunt M'riar. Dolly became vividly anxious for this climax, and felt that this was life indeed, when Uncle Mo called out to Aunt M'riar:—"Come along here, M'riar, and see what sort of head and tail you can make of this here little Dolly!" Whereupon Aunt M'riar came in front out at the back, and listened to a repetition of Dolly's tale while she dried her arms, which had been in a wash-tub.

"Well, Mo," she said, when Dolly had repeated it, more or less chaotically, "if you ask me, what I say is—you make our Dave speak out and tell you, when he's back from school, and say you won't have no nonsense. For the child is that secretive it's all one's time is worth to be even with him.... What's the Doctor's stuff for you've been spending your money on at Ekingses?"

"Only a stimulatin' mixture for to give tone to the system. Dr. Ekings says it'll do it a world o' good. Never known it fail, he hasn't."

"Have you been having any more alarming symptoms, Mo, and never told me?"

"Never been better in my life, M'riar. But I thought it was getting on for time I should have a bottle o' stuff, one sort or other. Don't do to go too long without a dose, nowadays." Whereupon Aunt M'riar looked incredulous, and read the label, and smelt the bottle, and put it back on the mantelshelf. And Uncle Mo asked for the wineglass broke off short, out of the cupboard; because it was always best to be beforehand, whether you had anything the matter or not.

Whatever Aunt M'riar said, Dave was not secretive. Probably she meant communicative, and was referring to the fact that Dave, whenever he was called on for information, though always prompt to oblige, invariably made reply to his questioner in an undertone, in recognition of a mutual confidence, and exclusion from it of the Universe. He had a soul above the vulgarities of publication. Aunt M'riar merely used a word that sounded well, irrespective of its meaning—a common literary practice.

Therefore Dave, when applied to by Uncle Mo for particulars of what "the Man" said, made a statement of which only portions reached the general public. This was the usual public after supper; for Mr. Alibone's companionship in an evening pipe was an almost invariable incident at that hour.

"What's the child a-sayin' of, Mo?" said Aunt M'riar.

"Easy a bit, old Urry Scurry!" said Uncle Mo, drawing on his imagination for an epithet. "Let me do a bit of listening.... What was it the party said again, Davy—just precisely?..." Dave was even less audible than before in his response to this, and Uncle Mo evidently softened it for repetition:—"Said if Micky told him any—etceterer—lies he'd rip his heart out? Was that it, Dave?"

"Yorce," said Dave, aloud and emphatically. "This time!" Which seemed to imply that the speaker had refrained from doing so, to his credit, on some previous occasion. Dave laid great stress on this point.

Aunt M'riar seemed rather panic struck at the nature of this revelation. "Well now, Mo," said she, "I do wonder at you, letting the child tell such words! And before Mr. Alibone, too!"

Mr. Jerry's expression twinkled, as though he protested against being credited with a Pharisaical purity, susceptible to shocks. Uncle Mo said, with less than usual of his easy-going manner:—"I'm a going, M'riar, to get to the bottom of this here start. So you keep outside o' the ropes!" and then after a little by-play with Dave and Dolly, which made the hair of both rougher than ever, he said suddenly to Dave:—"Well, and wasn't you frightened?"

"Micky wasn't frightened," said Dave, discreetly evasive. He objected to pursuing the subject, and raised a new issue. The sketch that followed of the interview between Micky and the Man was a good deal blurred by constant India-rubber, but its original could be inferred from it—probably as follows, any omissions to conciliate public censorship being indicated by stars. Micky speaks first:

"Who'll you rip up? You lay 'ands upon me, that's all! You do, and I'll blind your eyesight, s'elp me! Why, I'd summing a Police Orficer, and have you took to the Station, just as soon as look at you...." It may be imagined here that Michael's voice rose to a half-shriek, following some movement of the Man towards him. "I would, by Goard! You try it on, that's all!"

"Shut up with your * * row, you * * young * * ... No, master, I ain't molestin' of the boy; only just frightening him for a bit of a spree! I don't look like the sort to hurt boys, do I, guv'nor?" This was addressed to a bystander, named in Dave's report as "the gentleman." Who was accompanied by another, described as "the lady." The latter may have said to the former:—"I think he looks a very kind-hearted man, my dear, and you are making a fuss about nothing." The latter certainly said "Hggrromph!" or something like it, which the reporter found difficult to render. Then the man assumed a hypocritical and plausible manner, saying to Michael:—"I'm your friend, my boy, and there's a new shilling for you, good for two * * tanners any day of the week." Micky seemed to have been softened by this, and entered into a colloquy with the donor, either not heard or not understood by Dave, whose narrative seemed to point to his having been sent to a distance, with a doubt about inapplicable epithets bestowed on him by the Man, calling for asterisks in a close report. Some of these were probably only half-understood, even by Micky; being, so to speak, the chirps of a gaol-bird. But Dave's report seemed to point to "Now, is that * * young * * to be trusted not to split?" although he made little attempt to render the asterisky parts of speech.

Uncle Mo and Mr. Jerry glanced at one another, seeming to understand a phrase that had puzzled Aunt M'riar.

"That was it, Mo," said Mr. Jerry, exactly as if Uncle Mo had spoken, "spit upon meant split upon." Dave in his innocence had supposed that a profligacy he was himself sometimes guilty of had been referred to. He felt that his uncle's knee was for the moment the stool of repentance, but was relieved when a new reading was suggested. There could be no disgrace in splitting, though it might be painful.

"And, of course," said Uncle Mo, ruffling Dave's locks, "of course, you kept your mouth tight shut—hay?" Dave, bewildered, assented. He connected this bouche cousue with his own decorous abstention, not without credit to himself. Who shall trace the inner workings of a small boy's brain? "Instead of telling of it all, straight off, to your poor old uncle!" There was no serious indignation in Uncle Mo's tone, but the boy was too new for nice distinctions. The suggestion of disloyalty wounded him deeply, and he rushed into explanation. "Becorze—becorze—becorze—becorze," said he—"becorze Micky said not to!" He arrived at his climax like a squib that attains its ideal.

"Micky's an owdacious young varmint," said Uncle Mo. "Small boys that listened to owdacious young varmints never used to come to much good, not in my time!" Dave looked shocked at Uncle Mo's experience. But he had reservations to offer as to Micky, which distinguished him from vulgar listeners to incantations. "Micky said not to, and Micky said Uncle Mo didn't want to hear tell of no Man out in Hoy' Park, and me to keep my mouth shut till I was tolded to speak."

"And you told him to speak, and he spoke!" said Mr. Jerry, charitably helping Dave. "You couldn't expect any fairer than that, old Mo." Public opinion sanctioned a concession in this sense, and Dave came off the stool of repentance.

"Very good, then!" said Uncle Mo. "That's all squared, and we can cross it off. But what I'm trying after is, how did this here ... bad-languagee"—he halted a minute to make this word—"come to know anything about Goody Prichard upstairs?"

"Did he?" said Mr. Jerry, who of course had only heard Dave on the subject.

"This young party said so," said Uncle Mo, crumpling Dolly to identify her, "at the very first go off. Didn't you, little ginger-pop, hay?" This new epithet was a passing recognition of the suddenness with which Dolly had broken out as an informant. It gratified her vanity, and made her chuckle.

Dave meanwhile had been gathering for an oratorical effort, and now culminated. "I never told Dolly nuffint about Mrs. Picture upstairs. What I said was 'old widder lady.'"

"Dolly translated it, Mo, don't you see?" said Mr. Jerry. Then, to illuminate possible obscurity, he added:—"Off o' one slate onto the other! Twig?"

"I twig you, Jerry." Uncle Mo winked at his friend to show that he was alive to surroundings and tickled Dave suddenly from a motive of policy. "How come this cove to know anything about any widder lady—hay? That's a sort of p'int we've got to consider of." Dave was impressed by his uncle's appearance of profound thought, and was anxious not to lag behind in the solution of stiff problems. He threw his whole soul into his answer. "Because he was The Man." Nathan the prophet can scarcely have been more impressive. Perhaps, on the occasion Dave's answer recalls, someone said:—"Hullo!" in Hebrew, and gave a short whistle. That was what Mr. Jerry did, this time.

Uncle Mo enjoined self-restraint, telegraphically; and said, verbally:—"What man, young Legs? Steady a minute, and tell us who he was." Which will be quite intelligible to anyone whose experience has included a small boy in thick boots sitting on his knee, and becoming excited by a current topic.

Dave restrained his boots, and concentrated his mind on a statement. It came with pauses and repetitions, which may be omitted. "He worze the same Man as when you and me and Micky, only not Dolly, see him come along down the Court Sunday morning. Munce ago!" This was emphatic, to express the date's remoteness. "He wanted for to be told about old Widow Darrable who lived down this Court, and Micky he said no such name, nor yet anywhere's about this neighbourhood, he said. And the Man he said Micky was a young liar. And Micky he said who are you a-callin' liar?..."

"What name did he say?" Uncle Mo interrupted, with growing interest. Dave repeated his misapprehension of it, which incorporated an idea that similar widows would have similar surnames. If one was Marrable, it was only natural that another should be Darrable.

Aunt M'riar, whose interest also had been some time growing, struck in incisively. "The name was Daverill. He's mixed it up with the old lady in the country he calls his granny." She was the more certain this was so owing to a recent controversy with Dave about this name, ending in his surrender of the pronunciation "Marrowbone" as untenable, but introducing a new element of confusion owing to Marylebone Church, a familiar landmark.

There was something in Aunt M'riar's manner that made Uncle Mo say:—"Anything disagreed, M'riar?" Because, observe, his interest in this mysterious man in the Park turned entirely on Mrs. Prichard's relations with him, and he had never imputed any knowledge of him to Aunt M'riar. Why should he? Indeed, why should we, except from the putting of two and two together? Of which two twos, Uncle Mo might have known either the one or the other—according to which was which—but not both. This story has to confess occasional uncertainty about some of its facts. There may have been more behind Uncle Mo's bit of rudeness about Aunt M'riar's disquiet than showed on the surface. However, he never asked any questions.

Those who have ever had the experience of keeping their own counsel for a long term of years know that every year makes it harder to take others into confidence. A concealed troth-plight, marriage, widowhood—to name the big concealments involving no disgrace—gets less and less easy to publish as time slips by, even as the hinges rust of doors that no man opens. There may be nothing to blush about in that cellar, but the key may be lost and the door-frame may have gripped the door above, or the footstone jammed it from below, and such fungus-growth as the darkness has bred has a claim to freedom from the light. Let it all rest—that is its owner's word to his own soul—let it rest and be forgotten! All the more when the cellar is full of garbage, and he knows it.

There was no garbage in Aunt M'riar's cellar that she was guilty of, but for all that she would have jumped at any excuse to leave that door tight shut. The difficulty was not so much in what she had to tell—for her conscience was clear—as in rousing an unprepared mind to the hearing of it. Uncle Mo, quite the reverse of apathetic to anything that concerned the well-being of any of his surroundings, probably accounted Aunt M'riar's as second to none but the children's. Nevertheless, the difficulty of rousing him to an active interest in this hidden embarrassment of hers, of which he had no suspicion, was so palpable to Aunt M'riar, that she was sorely put to it to decide on a course of action. And the necessity for action was not imaginary. Keep in mind that all Uncle Mo's knowledge of Aunt M'riar's antecedents was summed up in the fact of her widowhood, which he took for granted—although he had never received it totidem verbis when she first came to supplant Mrs. Twiggins—and which had been confirmed as Time went on, and no husband appeared to claim her. Even if he could have suspected that her husband was still living, there was nothing in the world to connect him with this escaped convict. No wonder Uncle Mo's complete unconsciousness seemed to present an impassable barrier to a revelation. Aunt M'riar had not the advantages of the Roman confessional, with its suggestive guichet. Had some penitent, deprived of that resource, been driven back on the analogous arrangement of a railway booking-office, the difficulty of introducing the subject could scarcely have been greater.

However, Aunt M'riar was not going to be left absolutely without assistance. That evening—the evening, that is, of the day when Dave told the tale of the Man in the Park—Uncle Moses showed an unusual restlessness, following on a period of thoughtfulness and silence. After supper he said suddenly:—"I'm a-going to take a turn out, M'riar. Any objection?"

"None o' my making, Mo. Only Mr. Jerry, he'll be round. What's to be told him?"

"Ah—I'll tell you. Just you say to Jerry—just you tell him...."

"What'll I tell him?" For Uncle Mo appeared to waver.

"Just you tell him to drop in at The Sun, and bide till I come. They've a sing-song going on to-night, with the pianner. He'll make hisself happy for an hour. I'll be round in an hour's time, tell him."

"And where are you off for all of an hour, Mo?"

"That's part of the p'int, M'riar. Don't you be too inquis-eye-tive.... No—I don't mind tellin' of ye, if it's partic'lar. I'm going to drop round to the Station to shake hands with young Simmun Rowe—they've made him Inspector there—he's my old pal Jerky Rowe's son I knew from a boy. Man under forty, as I judge. But he won't let me swaller up his time, trust him! Tell Jerry I'll jine him at half-after nine, the very latest."

"I'll acquaint him what you say, Mo. And you bear in mind what Mr. Jeffcoat at The Sun had to say about yourself, Mo."

"What was it, M'riar? Don't you bottle it up."

"Why, Mr. Jeffcoat he said, after passing the time of day, round in Clove Street, 'I look to Mr. Wardle to keep up the character of The Sun,' he said. So you bear in mind, Mo."

Whereupon Uncle Mo departed, and Aunt M'riar was left to her own reflections, the children being abed and asleep by now; Dolly certainly, probably Dave.

Presently the door to the street was pushed open, and Mr. Jerry appeared. "I don't see no Moses?" said he.

Aunt M'riar gave her message, over her shoulder. To justify this she should have been engaged on some particular task of the needle, easiest performed when seated. Mr. Alibone, to whom her voice sounded unusual, looked round to see. He only saw that her hands were in her lap, and no sign was visible of their employment. This was unlike his experience of Aunt M'riar. "Find the weather trying, Mrs. Wardle?"

"It don't do me any harm."

"Ah—some feels the heat more than others."

Aunt M'riar roused herself to reply:—"If you're meaning me, Mr. Alibone, it don't touch me so much as many. Only my bones are not so young as they were—that's how it came I was sitting down. Now, supposin' you'd happened in five minutes later, you might have found me tidin' up. I've plenty to do yet awhile." But this was not convincing, although the speaker wished to make it so; probably it would have been better had less effort gone to the utterance of it. For Aunt M'riar's was too obvious.

Mr. Jerry laughed cheerfully, for consolation. "Come now, Aunt M'riar," said he, "you ain't the one to talk as if you was forty, and be making mention of your bones. Just you let them alone for another fifteen year. That'll be time." Mr. Jerry had been like one of the family, so pleasantry of this sort was warranted.

It was not unwelcome to Aunt M'riar. "I'm forty-six, Mr. Jerry," she said. "And forty-six is six-and-forty."

"And fifty-six is six-and-fifty, which is what I am, this very next Michaelmas. Now I call that a coincidence, Mrs. Wardle."

Aunt M'riar reflected. "I should have said it was an accident, Mr. Jerry. Like anythin' else, as the sayin' is. You mention to Mo, not to be late, no more than need be. Not to throw away good bedtime!" Mr. Jerry promised to impress the advantages of early hours, and went his way. But his reflections on his short interview with Aunt M'riar took the form of asking himself what had got her, and finding no answer to the question. Something evidently had, from her manner, for there was nothing in what she said.

He asked the same question of Uncle Mo, coming away from The Sun, where they did not wait for the very last tune on the piano, to the disgust of Mr. Jeffcoat, the proprietor. "What's got Aunt M'riar?" said Uncle Mo, repeating his words. "Nothin's got Aunt M'riar. She'd up and tell me fast enough if there was anything wrong. What's put you on that lay, Jerry?"

"I couldn't name any one thing, Mo. But going by the looks of it, I should judge there was a screw loose in somebody's wheelbarrow. P'r'aps I'm mistook. P'r'aps I ain't. S'posing you was to ask her, Mo!—asking don't cost much."

Uncle Moses seemed to weigh the outlay. "No," he said. "Asking wouldn't send me to the work'us." And when he had taken leave of his friend at their sundering-point, he spent the rest of his short walk home in speculation as to what had set Jerry off about Aunt M'riar. It was with no misgiving of hearing of anything seriously amiss that he said to her, as he sat in the little parlour recovering his breath, after walking rather fast, while she cultured the flame of a candle whose wick had been cut off short:—"Everything all right, M'riar?" He was under the impression that he asked in a nonchalant, easy-going manner, and he was quite mistaken. It was only perfectly palpable that he meant it to be so, and he who parades his indifference is apt to overreach himself.

Aunt M'riar had been making up her mind that she must tell Mo what she knew about this man Daverill, at whatever cost to herself. It would have been much easier had she known much less. Face to face with an opportunity of telling it, her resolution wavered and her mind, imperfectly made up, favoured postponement. To-morrow would do. "Ho yes," said she. "Everything's all right, Mo. Now you just get to bed. Time enough, I say, just on to midnight!" But her manner was defective and her line of argument ill-chosen. Its result was to produce in her hearer a determination to discover what had got her. Because it was evident that Jerry was right, and that something had.

"One of the kids a-sickenin' for measles! Out with it, M'riar! Which is it—Dave?"

"No, it ain't any such a thing. Nor yet Dolly.... Anyone ever see such a candle?"

"Then it's scarlatinar, or mumps. One or other on 'em!"

"Neither one nor t'other, Mo. 'Tain't neither Dave nor Dolly, this time." But something or other was somebody or something, that was clear! Aunt M'riar may have meant this, and yet not seen how very clear she made it. She recurred to that candle, and a suggestion of Uncle Mo's. "It's easy sayin', 'Run the toller off,' Mo; but who's to do it with such a little flame?"

Presently the candle, carefully fostered, picked up heart, and the tension of doubt about its future was relieved. "She'll do now," said Uncle Mo, assigning it a gender it had no claim to. "But what's gone wrong, M'riar?"

The appeal for information was too simple and direct to allow of keeping it back; without, at least, increasing its implied importance. Aunt M'riar only intensified this when she answered:—"Nothing at all! At least, nothing to nobody but me. Tell you to-morrow, Mo! It's time we was all abed. Mind you don't wake up Dave!" For Dave was becoming his uncle's bedfellow, and Dolly her aunt's; exchanges to vary monotony growing less frequent as the children grew older.

But Uncle Mo did not rise to depart. He received the candle, adolescent at last, and sat holding it and thinking. He had become quite alive now to what had impressed Mr. Jerry in Aunt M'riar's appearance and manner, and was harking back over recent events to find something that would account for it. The candle's secondary education gave him an excuse. Its maturity would have left him no choice but to go to bed.

A light that flashed through his mind anticipated it. "It's never that beggar," said he, and then, seeing that his description was insufficient:—"Which one? Why, the one we was a-talking of only this morning. Him I've been rounding off with Inspector Rowe—our boy's man he saw in the Park. You've not been alarmin' yourself about him?" For Uncle Mo thought he could see his way to alarm for a woman, even a plucky one, in the mere proximity of such a ruffian. He would have gone on to say that the convict was, by now, probably again in the hands of the police, but he saw as the candle flared that Aunt M'riar's usually fresh complexion had gone grey-white, and that she was nodding in confirmation of something half-spoken that she could not articulate.

He was on his feet at his quickest, but stopped at the sound of her voice, reviving. "What—what's that, M'riar?" he cried. "Say it again, old girl!" So strange and incredible had the words seemed that he thought he heard, that he could not believe in his own voice as he repeated them:—"Your husband!" He was not clear about it even then; for, after a pause long enough for the candle to burn up, and show him, as he fell back in his seat, Aunt M'riar, tremulous but relieved at having spoken, he repeated them again:—"Your husband! Are ye sure you're saying what you mean, M'riar?"

That it was a relief to have said it was clear in her reply:—"Ay, Mo, that's all right—right as I said it. My husband. You've known I had a husband, Mo." His astonishment left him speechless, but he just managed to say:—"I thought him dead;" and a few moments passed. Then she added, as though deprecatingly:—"You'll not be angry with me, Mo, when I tell you the whole story?"

Then he found his voice. "Angry!—why, God bless the wench!—what call have I to be angry?—let alone it's no concern of mine to be meddlin' in. Angry! No, no, M'riar, if it's so as you say, and you haven't gone dotty on the brain!"

"I'm not dotty, Mo. You'll find it all right, just like I tell you...."

"Well, then, I'm mortal sorry for you, and there you have it, in a word. Poor old M'riar!" His voice went up to say:—"But you shan't come to no harm through that character, if that's what's in it. I'll promise ye that." It fell again. "No—I won't wake the children.... I ain't quite on the shelf yet, nor yet in the dustbin. There's my hand on it, M'riar."

"I know you're good, Mo." She caught at the hand he held out to give her, and kept it. "I know you're good, and you'll do like you say. Only I hope he won't come this way no more. I hope he don't know I'm here." She seemed to shudder at the thought of him.

"Don't he know you're here? That's rum, too. But it's rum, all round. Things are rum, sometimes. Now, just you take it easy, M'riar, and if there's anything you'll be for telling me—because I'm an old friend like, d'ye see?—why, just you tell me as much as comes easy, and no more. Or just tell me nothing at all, if it sootes you better, and I'll set here and give an ear to it." Uncle Mo resumed his former seat, and Aunt M'riar put back the hand he released in her apron, its usual place when not on active service.

"There's nothing in it I wouldn't tell, Mo—not to you—and it won't use much of the candle to tell it. I'd be the easier for you to know, only I'm not so quick as some at the telling of things." She seemed puzzled how to begin.

Uncle Moses helped. "How long is it since you set eyes on him?"

"Twenty-five years—all of twenty-five years."

Uncle Mo was greatly relieved at hearing this. "Well, but, M'riar—twenty-five years! You're shet of the beggar—clean shet of him! You are that, old girl, legally and factually. But then," said he, "when was you married to him?"

"I've got my lines to show for that, Mo. July six, eighteen twenty-nine."

Uncle Mo repeated the date slowly after her, and then seemed to plunge into a perplexing calculation, very distorting to the natural repose of his face. Touching his finger-tips appeared to make his task easier. After some effort, which ended without clear results, he said:—"What I'm trying to make out is, how long was you and him keeping house? Because it don't figure up. How long should you say?"

"We were together six weeks—no more."

"And you—you never seen him since?"

"Never since. Twenty-five years agone, this last July!" At which Uncle Mo was so confounded that words failed him. His only resource was a long whistle. Aunt M'riar, on the contrary, seemed to acquire narrative powers from hearing her own voice, and continued:—"I hadn't known him a twelvemonth, and I should have been wiser than to listen to him—at my age, over one-and-twenty!"

"But you made him marry you, M'riar?"

"I did that, Mo. And I have the lines and my ring, to show it. But I never told a soul, not even mother. I wouldn't have told her, to be stopped—so bad I was!... What!—Dolly—Dolly's mother? Why, she was just a young child, Dave's age!... How did I come to know him? It was one day in the bar—he came in with Tom Spring, and ordered him a quart of old Kennett. He was dressed like a gentleman, and free with his money...."

"I knew old Tom Spring—he's only dead this two years past. I s'pose that was The Tun, near by Piccadilly, I've heard you speak on."

"... That was where I see him, Mo, worse luck for the day! The One Tun Inn. They called him the gentleman from Australia. He was for me and him to go to Brighton by the coach, and find the Parson there. But I stopped him at that, and we was married in London, quite regular, and we went to Brighton, and then he took me to Doncaster, to be at the races. There's where he left me, at the Crown Inn we went to, saying he'd be back afore the week was out. But he never came—only letters came with money—I'll say that for him. Only no address of where he was, nor scarcely a word to say how much he was sending. But I kep' my faith towards him; and the promise I made, I kep' all along. And I've never borne his name nor said one word to a living soul beyond one or two of my own folk, who were bound to be quiet, for their sake and mine. Dolly's mother, she came to know in time. But the Court's called me Aunt M'riar all along."

A perplexity flitted through Uncle Mo's reasoning powers, and vanished unsolved. Why had he accepted "Aunt M'riar" as a sufficient style and title, almost to the extent of forgetting the married name he had heard assigned to its owner five years since? He would probably have forgotten it outright, if the post had not, now and then—but very rarely—brought letters directed to "Mrs. Catchpole," which he had passed on, if he saw them first, with the comment:—"I expect that's meant for you, Aunt M'riar"; treating the disposition of some person unknown to use that name as a pardonable idiosyncrasy. When catechized about her, he had been known to answer:—"She ain't a widder, not to my thinking, but her husband he's as dead as a door-nail. Name of Scratchley; or Simmons—some such a name!" As for the designation of "Mrs. Wardle" used as a ceremonial title, it was probably a vague attempt to bring the household into tone. Whoever knows the class she moved in will have no trouble in recalling some case of a similar uncertainty.

This is by way of apology for Uncle Mo's so easily letting that perplexity go, and catching at another point. "What did he make you promise him, M'riar? Not to let on, I'll pound it! He wanted you to keep it snug—wasn't that the way of it?"

"Ah, that was it, Mo. To keep it all private, and never say a word." Then Aunt M'riar's answer became bewildering, inexplicable. "Else his family would have known, and then I should have seen his mother. Seein' I never did, it's no wonder I didn't know her again. I might have, for all it's so many years." It was more the manner of saying this than the actual words, that showed that she was referring to a recent meeting with her husband's mother.

Uncle Mo sat a moment literally open-mouthed with astonishment. At length he said:—"Why, when and where, woman alive, did you see his mother?"

"There now, Mo, see what I said—what a bad one I am at telling of things! Of course, Mrs. Prichard upstairs, she's Ralph Daverill's mother, and he's the man who got out of prison in the Mornin' Star and killed the gaoler. And he's the same man came down the Court that Sunday and Dave see in the Park. That's Ralph Thornton Daverill, and he's my husband!"

Uncle Mo gave up the idea of answering. The oppression of his bewilderment was too great. It seemed to come in gusts, checked off at intervals by suppressed exclamations and knee-slaps. It was a knockdown blow, with no one to call time. But then, there were no rules, so when a new inquiry presented itself, abrupt utterance followed:—"Wasn't there any?... wasn't there any?..." followed by a pause and a difficulty of word-choice. Then in a lowered voice, an adjustment of its terms, due to delicacy:—"Wasn't there any consequences—such as one might expect, ye know?"

Aunt M'riar did not seem conscious of any need for delicacies. "My baby was born dead," she said. "That's what you meant, Mo, I take it?" Then only getting in reply:—"That was it, M'riar," she went on:—"None knew about it but mother, when it was all over and done with, later by a year and more. I would have called the child Polly, being a girl, if it had lived to be christened.... Why would I?—because that was the name he knew me by at The Tun."

Uncle Mo began to say:—"If the Devil lets him off easy, I'll.... and stopped short. It may have been because he reflected on the limitations of poor Humanity, and the futility of bluster in this connection, or because he had a question to ask. It related to Aunt M'riar's unaccountable ignorance throughout of Daverill's transportation to Norfolk Island, and the particular felony that led to it. "If you was not by way of seeing the police-reports, where was all your friends, to say never a word?"

"No one said nothing to me," said Aunt M'riar. She seemed hazy as to the reason at first; then a light broke:—"They never knew his name, ye see, Mo." He replied on reflection:—"Course they didn't—right you are!" and then she added:—"I only told mother that; and she's no reader."

A mystery hung over one part of the story—how did she account for herself to her family? Was she known to have been married, or had popular interpretation of her absence inclined towards charitable silence about its causes—asked no questions, in fact, giving up barmaids as past praying for? She seemed to think it sufficient light on the subject to say:—"It was some length of time before I went back home, Mo," and he had to press for particulars.

His conclusion, put briefly, was that this deserted wife, reappearing at home with a wedding-ring after two years' absence, had decided that she would fulfil her promise of silence best by giving a false married name. She had engineered her mother's inspection of her marriage-lines, so as to leave that good woman—a poor scholar—under the impression that Daverill's name was Thornton; not a very difficult task. The name she had chosen was Catchpole; and it still survived as an identifying force, if called on. But it was seldom in evidence, "Aunt M'riar" quashing its unwelcome individuality. The general feeling had been that "Mrs. Catchpole" might be anybody, and did not recommend herself to the understanding. There was some sort o' sense in "Aunt M'riar."

The eliciting of these points, hazily, was all Uncle Mo was equal to after so long a colloquy, and Aunt M'riar was not in a condition to tell more. She relit another half-candle that she had blown out for economy when the talk set in, and called Uncle Mo's attention to the moribund condition of his own:—"There's not another end in the house, Mo," said she. So Uncle Mo had to use that one, or get to bed in the dark.

He had been already moved to heartfelt anger that day against this very Daverill, having heard from his friend the Police-Inspector the story of his arrest at The Pigeons, at Hammersmith; and, of course, of the atrocious crime which had been his latest success with the opposite sex. This Police-Inspector must have been Simeon Rowe, whom you may remember as stroke-oar of the boat that was capsized there in the winter, when Sergeant Ibbetson of the river-police met his death in the attempt to capture Daverill. Uncle Mo's motive in visiting the police-station had not been only to shake hands with the son of an old acquaintance. He had carried what information he had of the escaped convict to those who were responsible for his recapture.

If you turn back to the brief account the story gave of Maisie Daverill's—or Prichard's—return to England, and her son's marriage, and succeed in detecting in Polly the barmaid at the One Tun any trace of the Aunt M'riar with whom you were already slightly acquainted, it will be to the discredit of the narrator. For never did a greater change pass over human identity than the one which converted the beautÉ de diable of the young wench just of age, who was serving out stimulants to the Ring, and the Turf, and the men-about-town of the late twenties, to that of the careworn, washtub-worn, and needle-worn manipulator of fine linen and broidery, who had been in charge of Dolly and Dave Wardle since their mother's death three years before. Never was there a more striking testimony to the power of Man to make a desolation of the life of Woman, nor a shrewder protest against his right to do so. For Polly the Barmaid, look you, had done nothing that is condemned by the orthodox moralities; she had not even flown in the face of her legal duty to her parents. Was she not twenty-one, and does not that magic numeral pay all scores?

The Australian gentleman had one card in his pack that was Ace of Trumps in the game of Betrayal. He only played it when nothing lower would take the trick. And Polly got little enough advantage from the sanction of the Altar, her marriage-lines and her wedding-ring, in so far as she held to the condition precedent of those warrants of respectability, that she should observe silence about their existence. The only duplicity of which she had been guilty was the assumption of a false married name, and that had really seemed to her the only possible compromise between a definite breach of faith and passive acceptance of undeserved ill-fame. And when the hideous explanation of Daverill's long disappearance came about, and Éclaircissement seemed inevitable, she saw the strange discovery she had made of his relation to Mrs. Prichard, as an aggravation to the embarrassment of acknowledging his past relation to herself.

There was one feeling only that one might imagine she might have felt, yet was entirely a stranger to. Might she not have experienced a longing—a curiosity, at any rate—to set eyes again on the husband who had deserted her all those long years ago? And this especially in view of her uncertainty as to how long his absence had been compulsory? As a matter of fact, her only feeling about this terrible resurrection was one of shrinking as from a veritable carrion, disinterred from a grave she had earned her right to forget. Why need this gruesome memory be raked up to plague her?

The only consolation she could take with her to a probably sleepless pillow was the last charge of the old prizefighter to her not to fret. "You be easy, M'riar. He shan't come a-nigh you. I'll square him fast enough, if he shows up down this Court—you see if I don't!" But when she reached it, there was still balm in Gilead. For was not Dolly there, so many fathoms deep in sleep that she might be kissed with impunity, long enough to bring a relieving force of tears to help the nightmare-haunted woman in her battle with the past?

As for Mo, his threat towards this convicted miscreant had no connection with his recent interview with his police-officer friend—no hint of appeal to Law and Order. The anger that burnt in his heart and sent the blood to his head was as unsullied, as pure, as any that ever Primeval Man sharpened flints to satisfy before Law and Order were invented.