"Aye; they only tried to kill one of my sons, Hugh, who I thought had gone overboard, whom they thought they had drowned, but who has come and told me. But—" and she fixed her eyes on mine, "they did kill my other son; I know that now. My other son of the heart, not the belly. And that son, my Lady, was your brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Brandling."
And then Davies made a strange imperious gesture, and I must needs listen to her talk. I have since pieced it together out of her odd enigmatic sentences. My late brother-in-law, after years of passive connivance in their doings, which paid for his debaucheries in foreign lands, became restive, or was suspected by his uncles, and condemned by them to death as a danger to their evil association. Sir Thomas was decoyed home, and, according to their habit in case of mutiny, taken out, a prisoner, to the deepest part of the channel, and drowned. The report was spread that he had been killed in a drunken brawl at Bristol, a show of legal proceedings was instituted by his uncle in that city (naturally to no effect, there being no murderer there to discover), and a corpse brought back by them for solemn burial at St. Salvat's. But instead of being interred in the family vault, the body of the false Sir Thomas was destroyed by the burning of the Chapel during his wake. The suspicions of Mrs. Davies appeared to have been awakened by this fact, and by the additional one that she was not allowed to see the corpse of her beloved foster-son. Her own son Hugh, Sir Thomas's foster brother, disappeared about this time; and Hubert appears to have made the distracted mother believe that her own boy was the murderer of Sir Thomas, and had met with death at his hands; the whole unlikely story being further garnished for the poor credulous woman with a doubt that the murder of her foster-son had been, in some manner, the result of a conspiracy to bring about the succession of my husband. All this she seems to have believed at the time of our coming, and for this reason to have lent herself most willingly to spy upon my husband and me, in hopes of getting the proofs of his guilt. But her suspicions gradually changed, and her whole attitude in the matter was utterly reversed when, a few days before the wreck of the great Indiaman and my adventure on the sea-wall, her son, whom she believed dead, had stolen back in disguise and told her of an expedition in which the uncles had carried a man to the high seas, gagged and bound, and drowned him: a man who was not one of their crew and whose stature and the colour of whose hair answered to those of the nominal master of St. Salvat's. Her son, in an altercation over some booty, had let out his suspicion to my uncles, and had escaped death only by timely flight masked under accidental drowning from a fishing boat. Since this revelation Davies's devotion to the dead Sir Thomas had transferred itself to Eustace and me, and her one thought had become revenge against the men who had killed her darling.
Davies told me all this, as I said, in short, enigmatic sentences; and I scarcely know whether her tale seemed to me more inevitably true or more utterly false in its hideous complication of unlikely horrors. When she had done:
"Davies," I ask her solemnly, "you have been a spy, you have, by your saying, been the accomplice of the most horrid criminals that ever disgraced the world. Why should I believe one word of what you tell me?"
Davies hesitated as before, then looked me full in the face "If Lady Brandling cannot believe what it is needful that she should believe, let her ask her husband whether I am telling her a lie. Lady Brandling's husband knows, and he is afraid of telling her because he is afraid of them." Davies had been kneeling by the dressing-table, as if to make herself heard to me without speaking above a whisper.
I mustered all my courage, for these last words touched me closer, filled me with a far more real and nearer horror than all her hideous tales.
"Davies," I said, "kindly finish brushing my hair. When it is brushed I can do it up myself; and you may go and wash that handkerchief."
The old woman rose from her knees without a word, and finished brushing my hair very carefully. Then she handed me the hairpins and combs ceremoniously. As she did so she murmured beneath her breath:
"Lady Brandling is a courageous lady. I love Lady Brandling for her courage." She curtsied and withdrew. When the door was well closed on her I felt I could bear the strain no more; I leaned my head on the dressing table and burst into a flood of silent tears.
At that moment Eustace came in. "Good God!" he said, "what is the matter?" taking my hand and trying to raise me up.