So that Mrs. Prichard's tale so far supplies nothing to link her with old Granny Marrable, as unsuspicious as herself. What Aunt M'riar found her talking of, half to herself, when her attention recovered from a momentary fear that she might have hurt the old lady's feelings, was even less likely to connect the two lives.
"I followed my husband out. My child died--my eldest--here in England. I went again to live at home. Then I followed him out. He wrote to me and said that he was free. Free on the island, but not to come home. We had been over four years parted then." She said nothing of the child she left behind in England. Too much to explain perhaps?
Aunt M'riar was struck by a painful thought; the same that had crossed her mind before, and that she had discarded as somehow inconsistent with this old woman. The convicts--the convicts? She had grasped the fact that this couple had lived in Van Diemen's Land, and inferred that children were born to them there. But--was the husband himself a convict? She repeated the words, "Free on the island, but not to come home?" as a question.
She was quite taken aback with the reply, given with no visible emotion. "Why should I not tell you? How will it hurt me that you should know? My husband was convicted of forgery and transported."
"God's mercy on us!" said Aunt M'riar, dropping her work dumfoundered. Then it half entered her thought that the old woman was wandering, and she nearly said:--"Are you sure?"
The old woman answered the thought as though it had been audible. "Why not?" she said. "I am all myself. Fifty years ago! Why should I begin to doubt it because of the long time?" She had ceased her knitting and sat gazing on the fire, looking very old. Her interlaced thin fingers on the strain could grow no older now surely, come what might of time and trouble. Both had done their worst. She went on speaking low, as one talks to oneself when alone. "Yes, I saw him go that morning on the river. They rowed me out at dawn--a pair of oars, from Chatham. For I had learned the day he would go, and there was a sure time for the leaving of the hulks; if not night, then in the early dawn before folk were on the move. This was in the summer."