"Dolly translated it, Mo, don't you see?" said Mr. Jerry. Then, to illuminate possible obscurity, he added:—"Off o' one slate onto the other! Twig?"
"I twig you, Jerry." Uncle Mo winked at his friend to show that he was alive to surroundings and tickled Dave suddenly from a motive of policy. "How come this cove to know anything about any widder lady—hay? That's a sort of p'int we've got to consider of." Dave was impressed by his uncle's appearance of profound thought, and was anxious not to lag behind in the solution of stiff problems. He threw his whole soul into his answer. "Because he was The Man." Nathan the prophet can scarcely have been more impressive. Perhaps, on the occasion Dave's answer recalls, someone said:—"Hullo!" in Hebrew, and gave a short whistle. That was what Mr. Jerry did, this time.
Uncle Mo enjoined self-restraint, telegraphically; and said, verbally:—"What man, young Legs? Steady a minute, and tell us who he was." Which will be quite intelligible to anyone whose experience has included a small boy in thick boots sitting on his knee, and becoming excited by a current topic.
Dave restrained his boots, and concentrated his mind on a statement. It came with pauses and repetitions, which may be omitted. "He worze the same Man as when you and me and Micky, only not Dolly, see him come along down the Court Sunday morning. Munce ago!" This was emphatic, to express the date's remoteness. "He wanted for to be told about old Widow Darrable who lived down this Court, and Micky he said no such name, nor yet anywhere's about this neighbourhood, he said. And the Man he said Micky was a young liar. And Micky he said who are you a-callin' liar?..."
"What name did he say?" Uncle Mo interrupted, with growing interest. Dave repeated his misapprehension of it, which incorporated an idea that similar widows would have similar surnames. If one was Marrable, it was only natural that another should be Darrable.
Aunt M'riar, whose interest also had been some time growing, struck in incisively. "The name was Daverill. He's mixed it up with the old lady in the country he calls his granny." She was the more certain this was so owing to a recent controversy with Dave about this name, ending in his surrender of the pronunciation "Marrowbone" as untenable, but introducing a new element of confusion owing to Marylebone Church, a familiar landmark.
There was something in Aunt M'riar's manner that made Uncle Mo say:—"Anything disagreed, M'riar?" Because, observe, his interest in this mysterious man in the Park turned entirely on Mrs. Prichard's relations with him, and he had never imputed any knowledge of him to Aunt M'riar. Why should he? Indeed, why should we, except from the putting of two and two together? Of which two twos, Uncle Mo might have known either the one or the other—according to which was which—but not both. This story has to confess occasional uncertainty about some of its facts. There may have been more behind Uncle Mo's bit of rudeness about Aunt M'riar's disquiet than showed on the surface. However, he never asked any questions.
Those who have ever had the experience of keeping their own counsel for a long term of years know that every year makes it harder to take others into confidence. A concealed troth-plight, marriage, widowhood—to name the big concealments involving no disgrace—gets less and less easy to publish as time slips by, even as the hinges rust of doors that no man opens. There may be nothing to blush about in that cellar, but the key may be lost and the door-frame may have gripped the door above, or the footstone jammed it from below, and such fungus-growth as the darkness has bred has a claim to freedom from the light. Let it all rest—that is its owner's word to his own soul—let it rest and be forgotten! All the more when the cellar is full of garbage, and he knows it.
There was no garbage in Aunt M'riar's cellar that she was guilty of, but for all that she would have jumped at any excuse to leave that door tight shut. The difficulty was not so much in what she had to tell—for her conscience was clear—as in rousing an unprepared mind to the hearing of it. Uncle Mo, quite the reverse of apathetic to anything that concerned the well-being of any of his surroundings, probably accounted Aunt M'riar's as second to none but the children's. Nevertheless, the difficulty of rousing him to an active interest in this hidden embarrassment of hers, of which he had no suspicion, was so palpable to Aunt M'riar, that she was sorely put to it to decide on a course of action. And the necessity for action was not imaginary. Keep in mind that all Uncle Mo's knowledge of Aunt M'riar's antecedents was summed up in the fact of her widowhood, which he took for granted—although he had never received it totidem verbis when she first came to supplant Mrs. Twiggins—and which had been confirmed as Time went on, and no husband appeared to claim her. Even if he could have suspected that her husband was still living, there was nothing in the world to connect him with this escaped convict. No wonder Uncle Mo's complete unconsciousness seemed to present an impassable barrier to a revelation. Aunt M'riar had not the advantages of the Roman confessional, with its suggestive guichet. Had some penitent, deprived of that resource, been driven back on the analogous arrangement of a railway booking-office, the difficulty of introducing the subject could scarcely have been greater.