“I dare say. How old were you when you first came here?”
“How old? Old enow and young enow to taste wormwood in the sarce gleeted fro’ three Winton brats.”
“That’s no answer, you know. What’s your present age?”
“One hundred, mebbe.”
“Was Modred born when you came?”
“Born? Eighteen bard months, to my sorrow. A rare gross child, to be sure; wi’ sprawling fat puds like the feet o’ them crocodillies in the show.”
If Peggy could be trusted, I had got an answer which barred further pursuit in that direction. She could never, I calculated, have been personally acquainted with my mother or the circumstances of the latter’s death. Indeed, I could not imagine her tolerated in a house over which any self-respecting woman presided.
Elsewhere I must look for some solution of the puzzle that had added its complexity to a life already laboring under a burden of mystery.
But in the meantime, an older vital question re-reared its head from the very hearthstone of the mill, whereon it had lain so long in stupor that I might have fancied it dead.