"That won't soote Aunt M'riar." Micky had only known old Maisie by repute, but he knew the Court's love for her. A wish for some confirmation of the convict's statement arose in his mind. "How's she to know it's not a lie?" said he.
"She'll know, fast enough! Say I told you. Say who I am. She'll twig, when you tell her.... Stop a bit!" He was thinking how to authenticate the death without telling the boy overmuch about himself. "Look here—I'll tell you what you've got to say. Say her son—old mother Prichard's son—was just up from Rocestershire, and he'd seen her dead, with his own eyes. Dead as a boiled lobster. That's your message."
If Micky had known that this man was speaking of himself and his own mother! Perhaps it was some instinctive inwardness that made him glad he had got his message and could be gone. He made short work of his exit, saying:—"All right, mister, I'm your man"—and departed after a word in the bar to Miss Julia:—"Right you are, missis! Don't you let him have another half-a-quartern." For Mr. Nixon being a penny short, her anxiety that he should observe his own rules of life had been reinforced by commercialism. She drew the line of encouraging drunkenness at integers—halves not counting as fractions, by tacit consent. They are not hard enough.
Miss Hawkins had placed herself in a difficulty by that indiscreet tampering with Aunt M'riar's letter. She had done it in a fit of furious exasperation with Daverill, immediately the result of an interview with him on his reappearance at The Pigeons some weeks ago. Some whim had inclined him towards the exhibition of a better selfhood than the one in daily use; perhaps merely to assert the power he still possessed over the woman; more probably to enable him to follow it up with renewed suggestions that she should turn the freehold Pigeons into solid cash, and begin with him a new life in America. She had kept her head in spite of kisses and cajolery, which appealed with some success to her memories of twenty years ago, and had refused to entertain any scheme in which lawful marriage was postponed till after the sale of her property. The parson was to precede the auctioneer.
But an escaped convict with the police inquiring for him cannot put up the banns. Had Daverill seen his way to doing so he would have made light of bigamy. Besides, was it likely his first wife would claim him? He preferred to suppress his real reason for refusing to "make an honest woman" of Miss Julia, and to take advantage of the fact that his "real wife" Polly was still living.
Then Miss Hawkins had made a proposal which showed a curious frame of mind about marriage law. Her idea may be not unknown in the class she belonged to, still. It certainly existed in the fifties of last century. If Aunt M'riar could be deprived of her "marriage lines" her teeth would be drawn, not merely practically by making proof of a marriage difficult, but definitely by the removal of a mysterious influence—most to be likened to the key of a driving-pulley, whose absence from its slot would leave the machinery of Matrimony at a deadlock. Let Mr. Wix, by force or fraud, get possession of this charter of respectability, and he and his lawful wife would come apart, like a steamed postage-stamp and its envelope. Nothing would be lacking then but a little fresh gum, and reattachment. This expresses Miss Julia's idea, however faulty the simile may be in itself.
"She's got her lines to show"—So the lady had been saying, shortly before Michael came into the bar.—"But she won't have them long, if you put your mind on making her give 'em up. You can do it, Wix." She seemed to have a strong faith in the convict's cunning.
He appeared to ponder over it, saying finally:—"Right you are, Juliar! I see my way."
"What are you going to do?"
"That's tellings. I'll get the dockyment out of her. That's enough for you, without your coming behind to see. I'll make you a New Year's present of it, gratish. What'll you do with it?"