He said no more for a while, and when I had remained silent long enough, he went on, very deliberately and impressively:
“One yarn is that the girl wasn’t any good; that when she was married to Brassington, and as soon as they got to Sydney, she met a chap she’d been carrying on with before she married Brassington (or that she’d been married to in secret), an’ she cleared off with him, leaving her fortnight-old husband. That was one yarn.”
“Was it?” I said.
“Yes,” said the publican. “That yarn was a lie.” He opened a flask of whisky and passed it round.
“There was madness in the family,” he said, after a nip.
“Whose?” I asked. “Brassington’s?”
“No,” said the publican, in a tone that implied contempt at my ignorance, in spite of its innocence, “the girl’s. Her mother had been in a ’sylum, and so had her grandmother. It was—it was heridited. Some madnesses is heridited, an’ some comes through worry and hard graft (that’s mine), an’ some comes through drink, and some through worse, and, but as far as I’ve heard, all madnesses is pretty much the same. My old man was a warder in a ’sylum. They have their madnesses a bit different, the same as boozers has their d.t.’s different; but, takin’ it by the lump, it’s pretty much all the same. The difference is accordin’ to their natures when they’re sane. All men are—”
“But about young Mrs Brassington,” I interrupted.
“Young Mrs Brassington? Rosy Webb she was, daughter of Webb the squatter. Rosy was the brightest, best, good-heartedest, an’ most ladylike little girl in the district, an’ the heriditry business come on her in Sydney, about a week after she was married to young Brassington. She was only twenty. Here—” He passed the flask round.
“And what happened?” I asked.