Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/72

68 those two to hear what I say. Can we go anywhere hereabouts where I can talk to you without the chance of being overheard?"

The old woman nodded assent, and led the way with feeble tottering steps out of the house, and through a gap in a hedge to some broken ground at the back of Blind Peter. Here the old crone seated herself upon a little hillock, Jabez standing opposite her, looking her full in the face.

"Now," said he, with a determined look at the grinning face before him, "now tell me,—what was the something that was put away so safely? And what relation is that man in there to me? Tell me, and tell me the truth, or" He only finishes the sentence with a threatening look, but the old woman finishes it for him,—

"Or you'll kill me—eh, deary? I'm old and feeble, and you might easily do it—eh? But you won't—you won't, deary! You know better than that! Kill me, and you'll never know the secret!—the secret that may be gold to you some day, and that nobody alive but me can tell. If you'd got some very precious wine in a glass bottle, my dear, you wouldn't smash the bottle now, would you? because, you see, you couldn't smash the bottle without spilling the wine. And you won't lay so much as a rough finger upon me, I know."

The usher looked rather as if he would have liked to lay the whole force of ten very rough fingers upon the most vital part of the grinning hag's anatomy at that moment—but he restrained himself, as if by an effort, and thrust his hands deep into his trousers-pockets, in order the better to resist temptation.

"Then you don't mean to tell me what I asked you?" he said impatiently.

"Don't be in a hurry, my dear! I'm an old woman, and I don't like to be hurried. What is it you want to know?"

"What that man in there is to me."

"Own brother—twin brother, my dear—that's all. And I'm your grandmother—your mother's mother. Ain't you pleased to find your relations, my blessed boy?"

If he were, he had a strange way of showing pleasure; a very strange manner of welcoming newly-found relations, if his feelings were to be judged by that contracted brow and moody glance.

"Is this true?" he asked.

The old harridan looked at him and grinned. "That's an ugly mark you've got upon your left arm, my dear," she said, "just above the elbow; it's very lucky, though, it's under your coat-sleeve, where nobody can see it."

Jabez started. He had indeed a scar upon his arm, though very few people knew of it. He remembered it from his earliest days in the Slopperton workhouse.