She co-operated in domesticities with her useful neighbour, glancing once or twice at the figure on the bed, and reinforced in the belief that all was safe there, for the time. For she saw what seemed slight natural movement, for ease. Presently she went to hear how it fared with her other mother, her normal one. The cross purposes of her relations to the two old sisters were an entanglement of perplexities.
Granny Marrable, asleep when Ruth looked stealthily in at her, was waked by a creak with which the door just contrived to disappoint hopes of a noiseless escape. She called after her:—"Yes, who's that?" Whereupon Ruth returned. It was their first real word alone since the disclosure.
"Oh, mother, have you slept?" She kissed the old worn-out face tenderly; feeling somehow the reserve of strength behind the response she met. "Oh, can you—can you—make it out?... Yes, she is lying still. She has seen that letter." She dropped her voice, and shuddered to name it.
"My dear," said Granny Marrable, answering her question, "I cannot say truly yet that I can make it out. But I thank God for letting me be able to know that this must be Maisie. For I know her for Maisie, when she talks of the bygone time. And that letter—God is good, for that! For it was that told of how she died—that wicked poison-bite! My child, it has never gone quite out of my heart to think your mother died so far away in such pain—never in all these years! And now I know it for an untruth. I thank God for that, at least!"
"She says," said Ruth, checkmated in an attempt to use any name she could call her real mother by, without some self-blame for the utterance, "she says the story is one-half true, but 'twas her best friend died of the bite—not she! But she died in great suffering."
"Ah—the poor thing! Mary Ann Stennis."
"That was the name."
"Will she be able to tell more? Will she tell us who her husband was?"
"Her husband!" Ruth thought this was new trouble—that the Granny's head had given way under the strain. "Her husband was my father, mother," said she. "Think!"
But old Phoebe was quite clear. "I am all right, child," said she reassuringly. "Her second husband. Marrable was my second, you know, else I would still have been Cropredy. Why is she not Daverill?"