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She took both the old hands in hers, and all her beauty was in the eyes that looked up at the old face, as she said: "I will tell you. It is because I have to tell her to-day ... that she is ... that she is ... Mrs. Marrable's sister!" The last words might have been a cry for pity. Could old Maisie fail to catch a gleam of the truth? She did.
He climbed up the hill and walked round the church and looked up at the windows of Miss Marrable's house, of which he had learned the site; but he had no adventure, saw nothing that interested him, and at half-past nine took himself wearily to bed. That same day Captain Marrable had run down from London to Loring laden with terrible news. The money on which he had counted was all gone!
Nevertheless, it is probable that had Mr. Gilmore been less lugubrious, more sleek, less "seedy," she would have been more prone than she now was to have made instant use of Captain Marrable's loss of fortune on behalf of this other suitor. She would immediately have felt that perhaps something might be done, and she would have been tempted to tell him the whole story openly.
No it cannot be long! The light will come. And God be praised for His goodness! We shall lie in one grave, Maisie and I. We shall not be parted in Death." These last words Gwen accepted as conventional. She listened, somewhat as in a dream, to Granny Marrable's voice, going quietly on, with no very audible undertone of pain in it: "It is not of myself I am thinking, but my child.
"Why oh why why this?..." she began, wanting to say: "Why such concern on Mrs. Marrable's account?" and finding herself at fault for words, came to a dead stop. "You mean, why should I fret because of Mrs. Marrable's sister? Is it not that?" "Ye-es. I think ... I think that is what I meant to say." Gwen nerved herself for a great effort.
Give it to her ladyship." Gwen took the letter from Widow Thrale, but did not unfold it. "Mayn't I take it away," she said, "for me and Mrs. Picture to read at home? I want to get her back and give her some food. She's knocking up." Immediately Granny Marrable's heart and Widow Thrale's overflowed.
She said nothing of the money which Walter Marrable would have inherited had it not been for Colonel Marrable's iniquity; but she did tell him that the young people would have no income except the Captain's pay, and poor Mary's little fifty pounds a-year; and she went on to explain that, as far as she was concerned, and as far as her cousin the clergyman was concerned, everything would be done to prevent a marriage so disastrous as that in question, and the prospect of a life with so little of allurement as that of the wife of a poor soldier in India.
Old Maisie smiled happily at the thought of Dave. "His hands were quite purple with the juice," she said. "But he wouldn't come down, and went on eating the mulberries. It was the tree by itself behind the house, near the big hole where the sunflowers grew." Granny Marrable's memory spanned the chasm seventy years or so!
I knew the old lady when she came from Darenth, in Essex, to marry her second husband, Marrable." Norbury gave other particulars which the story knows. "Then Widow Thrale is not Granny Marrable's daughter, though she calls her mother?" "That is the case, my lord. She was a pretty little girl maybe eleven years old and was her mother's bridesmaid.... I should say her aunt's." "Who was her mother?"
For he had mistaken Granny Marrable's natural start at the too well-remembered name she had scarcely heard for fifty years, for a prompt recognition of his own rashness in assuming it had been intentionally discarded.
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