Martha was momentarily baffled by Elijah’s ascension, but recovering her nerve, she dealt John iii. 13, “No man hath ascended up to heaven.”
Partly to soothe the old man, partly to give Martha a chance of speaking out, Jinny here intervened with the suggestion that he himself should ascend up to his room and bring down the telescope to amuse his guest withal. Obviously relieved—for he felt himself in a tight textual corner—he hastened upstairs.
It was then that the old woman, bursting into tears, and clutching at Jinny’s arm, sobbed out: “Oh, Jinny, you’ve got to come back with me—you’ve got to come back at once!”
Jinny turned cold and sick. What had happened to Will?
“But what for?” she gasped.
“To Willie!”
Her worst fears were confirmed. “Is he hurt?”
“I wish he was a little,” Martha sobbed. “But even his arm’s all right now.” What Martha went on to say Jinny never remembered, for she was suddenly sobbing with Martha. But hers was the hysteria of relief, and when she at last understood that what Martha was asking was that she should come back and marry Will, so that he should stay near his mother, her heart hardened again. It was not that she made any attempt to deny her love—things seemed suddenly to have got beyond that—but Martha, she felt, knew not what she asked, seeming to have divined from her boy’s demeanour a lover’s quarrel, but without any inkling of the real tangle and deadlock. Even if she humiliated herself, as Martha half unwittingly suggested, it was all a blind-alley.
“My making it up won’t keep him in England,” she urged. “He’s got no money. And no more have I.”
She might have been more willing to make a last desperate dash of her head against the brick wall, had she understood how Martha had fought against her from the first and how pitiable was her surrender now, but no suspicion of that underground opposition had ever crossed her mind, nor did Martha now confess what indeed she no longer remembered clearly.