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. Its _caput mortuum_ was
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 Dolly would 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
as _she_ knew, 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." Then she 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, looking into 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"--_you_
know!--and consequently her _moyen age_ had 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
old woman'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--the _bacilli_ of 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, and _they_ really
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.