"There was a creature they hunt with dogs, that leaps on its hind-legs to any height."
"Oh yes—the Kangaroo."
"She called it something else—something like 'Boomer.'" This did not matter. Granny Marrable went on to repeat how a "boomer," chased by the dogs, had made straight for her sister's husband, whose gun, missing fire, had killed his best dog; while the quarry, unterrified by the report, sprang at a bound over his head and got away scathless. This, and other incidents of the convict's after-life in Van Diemen's Land, told without leading to the crime of the forged letter, had shown how completely separate in Maisie's mind were the memories of her not unhappy life with her husband in the past, and that of the recent revelation of his iniquity. She somehow dissociated the two images of him, and her mind could dwell easily on his identity as it had appeared to her during her thirty years of widowhood, without losing the new-found consciousness of Phoebe's.
But Granny Marrable had taken special note of the fact that her sister never referred to the son who had come with her from Australia, and had herself been scrupulously careful not to do so. She did not really know whether Maisie was alive to the possibility of his reappearance at any moment; and, indeed, could not have said positively whether allusion had or had not been made to her own alarming experience of him. Her own shock and confusion had been too great for accurate recollection. Silence about him was to her thought the wisest course, and she had remained silent.
She seemed to Gwen a wonderful old woman, this Granny Marrable. Her untiring patience and strength, at her great age; her simple theism, constantly in evidence; her resolute calmness in facing a second time the harrowing grief of a twin sister's death—for that she saw it at hand, Gwen was convinced—were surely the material of which heroism is made, when heroism is in the making. To Gwen's thought, the miraculous news that had been broken to her so suddenly might easily have prostrated many a younger person, even without that mysterious unknown factor, the twinship, the force of which could only be estimated by the two concerned. As the old lady sat there at the supper-table, breaking her resumptions of her sister's Australian tales by gaps of listening to catch any sound from the bedroom, she seemed to Gwen a duplicate of the old Mrs. Prichard of Sapps Court, spared by time or with some reserve of constitutional energy, grey rather than white, resolute rather than resigned. The different inflexion of voice helped Gwen against that perplexing sense of her likeness to her twin, which would assert itself whenever she became silent.
It was to fend this off, in such a pause, that she said:—"You are both just eighty this year, Granny, are you not?"
"Eighty-one, my lady. When our clock strikes midnight Maisie will have been eighty-one years in the world, and myself with but a few minutes to make up the tale. My mother told me so when I was still too young to understand, but I bore her words in mind. She was dead a year when my brother dressed those little dolly figures in the mill. I mind that he put it off, so we should not be in black for our mother. He died himself, none so long after that."
The foolish lines of keeping up hope mechanically to the last did not recommend themselves to Gwen. But she could trust herself to say, seeing the strength on the old face before her:—"Oh, Granny, do not let us despair too soon!" The phrase acknowledged Death, and did not choke her like the sham.
"My lady, have you felt her feet?"
"No—are they so cold?"