Mrs. Trevanard still kept her room. She was able to move about a little—able to keep watch and ward upon Muriel, but she preferred the retirement of her own chamber to her old corner in the family sitting-room.
‘The place would seem strange to me without Bridget,’ she told Maurice, when he expressed his regret at finding her still in her own room. ‘It’s not so much the rheumatics that keep me here as the thought of that. Bridget was all in all in this house. The old room would seem desolate without her. So I just keep by my own bit of fire, and knit my stocking, and think of old times.’
‘I dare say your memory is a better one than many young people can boast of,’ said Maurice, who had taken the empty chair by the fireplace, opposite Mrs. Trevanard.
‘Well, I haven’t much to complain of in that respect,’ answered the old woman, with a sigh. ‘I have sometimes thought that it is better for old people when their memories are not quite so strong as mine. But then, perhaps, that’s owing to my blindness. I have nothing left me but memory, I can’t see to read, not even my Bible, and I haven’t many about me that care to read to me. So the past is my book, and I’m always reading the saddest chapters in it. It’s a pity Providence has made us so that our minds dwell longest on sorrowful things.’
Maurice related his discovery gently and with some preparation to Muriel’s grandmother. When she heard that Muriel was sinless, that her marriage with George Penwyn was an established fact, the blind woman lifted up her voice in thanksgiving to her God.
‘I always thought as much,’ she said, after that first outpouring of prayer and praise. ‘I always thought my poor lamb was innocent, but Bridget would not have it so. Bridget hugged the notion of our wrong. She was always talking of God’s vengeance on the wrong-doer, and when he met with that cruel death she declared that it was a judgment, forgetting that the judgment fell heaviest on our poor Muriel.’
They talked long and earnestly of the hapless daughter of the house, Maurice confiding unreservedly in Mrs. Trevanard, who evinced a shrewd sense that filled him with hope. Old and blind though she was, this was not a witness to be brow-beaten by a cross-examining counsel, should the issue ever be tried in a court of justice.