He was the first to speak. "You'll know me again, mistress," he said. He took his eyes off her to look attentively round the room. Uncle Mo's sporting prints, prized records of ancient battles, caught his eye. "Ho—that's it, is it?" said he, with a short nod of illumination, as though he had made a point as a cross-examiner. "That's where we are—Figg and Broughton—Corbet—Spring?... That's your game, is it? Now the question is, where the devil do I come in? How come you to know my name's Thornton? That's the point!"
Now nothing would have been easier for Aunt M'riar than to say that Mrs. Prichard had told her that her only surviving son bore this name. But the fact is that the old lady, quite a recent experience, had for the moment utterly vanished from her thoughts, and the man before her had wrenched her mind back into the past. She could only think of him as the cruel betrayer of her girlhood, none the less cruel that he had failed in his worst plot against her, and used a legitimate means to cripple her life. She could scarcely have recalled anything Mrs. Prichard had said, for the life of her. She was face to face with the past, yet standing at bay to conceal her identity.
Think how hard pressed she was, and forgive her for resorting to an excusable fiction. It was risky, but what could she do? "I knew your wife," said she briefly. "Twenty-two years agone."
"You mean the girl I married?" He had had to marry one of them, but could only marry one. That was how he classed her. "What became of that girl, I wonder? Maybe you know? Is she alive or dead?"
"I couldn't say, at this len'th of time." Then, she remembered a servant, at the house where her child was born, and saw safety for her own fiction in assuming this girl's identity. Invention was stimulated by despair. "She was confined of a girl, where I was in service. She gave me letters to post to her husband. R. Thornton Daverill." That was safe, anyhow. For she remembered giving letters, so directed, to this girl.
The convict sat down on the table, looking at her no longer, which she found a relief. "Did that kid live or die?" said he. "Blest if I recollect!"
"Born dead. She had a bad time of it. She came back to London, and I never see any more of her." Aunt M'riar should have commented on this oblivion of his own child. She was letting her knowledge of the story influence her, and endangering her version of it.
The man stopped and thought a little. Then he turned upon her suddenly. "How came you to remember that name for twenty-two years?" said he.
A thing she recollected of this servant-girl helped her at a pinch. "She asked me to direct a letter when she hurt her hand," she said. "When you've wrote a name, you bear it in mind."
"What did she call the child?"