"No—for God's sake!" Aunt M'riar stopped her ears tight as she had done before. "Don't you tell me nothing, Mo, more than I know already. That's plenty." Uncle Mo nodded, pointed to tightly closed lips to express assent, and she resumed speech with hearing. "Capital offence means ... means?..."
"Means he would go to the scragging-post, arter breakfast one morning. There's no steering out o' that fix, M'riar. He's just got to, one day, and there's an end of it!"
"And how ever could I be off knowing it at the time? Oh, but it makes me sick to think of! The night before—the night before, Mo! Supposin' I wake in the night, and think of him, and hear the clocks strike! He'll hear them too, Mo."
"Can't be off it, M'riar! But what of that? He won't be a penny the worse, and he'll know what o'clock it is." Remember that Uncle Mo had some particulars of Daverill's career that Aunt M'riar had not. For all she knew, the criminal's capital offence might have been an innocent murder—a miscarriage in the redistribution of some property—a too zealous garrotting of some fat old stockjobber. "I'm thinkin' a bit of the other party, M'riar," said Mo. He might have said more, but he was brought up short by his pledge to say nothing of the convict's last atrocity. How could he speak the thought in his mind, of the mother of the victim in a madhouse? For that had made part of the tale, as it had reached him through the police-sergeant. So he ended his speech by saying:—"What I do lies at my own door, M'riar. You're out of it. So I shan't say another word of what I will do or won't do. Only I tell you this, that if I could get a quiet half an hour with the gentleman, I'd ... What would I do?... Well!—I'd save him from the gallows—I would! Ah!—and old as I am, I'd let him keep a hold on his knife.... There—there, old lass! I do wrong to frighten ye, givin' way to bad temper. Easy does it!"
For a double terror of the woman's position was bred of that mysterious, inextinguishable love that never turns to hate, however hateful its object may become; and her dread that if this good, unwieldy giant—that was what Mo seemed—crossed his path, that jack-knife might add another to her husband's many crimes. This dread and counter-dread had sent all Aunt M'riar's blood to her heart, and she might have fallen, but that Mo's strong hand caught her in time, and landed her in a chair. "I was wrong—I was wrong!" said he gently. All the fires had died down before the pallor of her face, and his only thought was how could she be spared if the destroyer of her life was brought to justice.
They said no more; what more was there to be said? Aunt M'riar came round, refusing restoratives. Oh no, she would be all right! It was only a turn she got—that common event! They adjourned, respectively, to where Dolly and Dave were sleeping balmily, profoundly.
But Uncle Mo was discontented with the handiwork of Creation. Why should a cruel, two-edged torture be invented for, and inflicted on, an inoffensive person like M'riar? There didn't seem any sense in it. "If only," said he to his inner soul, "they'd a-let me be God A'mighty for five minutes at the first go-off, I'd a-seen to it no such a thing shouldn't happen." Less than five minutes would have been necessary, if a full and unreserved concession of omnipotence had been made.
Dave was a man of his word, though a very young one. He seized the earliest opportunity to indite two letters of congratulation to his honorary grandmothers, including Dolly in his rejoicing at the discovery of their relationship. He wrote as though such discoveries were an everyday occurrence.
His mistakes in spelling were few, the principal one arising from an old habit of thought connecting the words sister and cistern, which had survived Aunt M'riar's frequent attempts at correction. When he exhibited his Identical Notes to the Powers for their sanction and approval, this was pointed out to him, and an allegation that he was acting up to previous instructions disallowed nem. con. He endeavoured to lay to heart that for the future cistern was to be spelt sister, except out on the leads. A holographic adjustment of the c, and erasure of the n, was scarcely a great success, but the Powers supposed it would do. Uncle Mo opposed Aunt M'riar's suggestion that the two letters should go in one cover to Strides Cottage, for economy, as mean-spirited and parsimonious, although he had quite understood that the two Grannies were under one roof; otherwise Dave would have directed to Mrs. Picture at the Towers. So to Strides Cottage they went, some three days later.