Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
ZOE
BY THE AUTHOR OF
'LADDIE,' 'DON,' 'POMONA,' 'BELLE,' 'PHOEBE'S HERO,' 'MISS TOOSEY'S
MISSION,' 'TIP CAT,' ETC.
[Transcriber's note: The British Library Integrated Catalogue cites
Evelyn Whitaker as the author of this book.]
LONDON: 38 Soho Square. W.1
W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED
EDINBURGH: 339 High Street
1890
[Transcriber's note: The source book had varying page headers. They
have been collected at the start of each chapter as an introductory
paragraph, and here as the Table of Contents.]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
The Christening--An Outlandish Name--The Organist's
Mistake--Farm-work--Tom and Bill--The Baby--Baby and All
CHAPTER II.
Mr Robins--Village Choirs--Edith--An Elopement--A Father's Sorrow--An
Unhappy Pair--The Wanderer's Return--Father!--A Daughter's
Entreater--No Favourable Answer--A Sleepless Pillow
CHAPTER III.
Something on the Doorstep--Bill Gray--Is That a Cat?--She's Like
Mother--A Baby's Shoe--Jane Restless
CHAPTER IV.
Village Evidence--'Gray' on the Brain--Too Well He Knew--Mr Robins and
the Baby--He Had Not Done Badly
CHAPTER V.
Jane Hard at Work--Clothes for the Baby--Jane Returns--Jane Singing
over her Work--Jane's Selfish Absorption--For a Poor Person's
Child--The Organist in Church
CHAPTER VI.
The Good Baby--Mr Robins Comes and Goes--A Secret Power--Mr Robins
Happy--A Naughty Tiresome Gal!--The Gypsy Child
CHAPTER VII.
Gray Taken to the Hospital--Bill and the Baby--Mrs Gray Home
Again--Edith, Come Home!
CHAPTER VIII.
Preparation--The Room Furnished--Mrs Gray at Work--The Baby Gone--The
Gypsy Mother--The Gypsy's Story--A Foolish Fancy--Something Has
Happened--The Real Baby
ZOE.
CHAPTER I.
The Christening--An Outlandish Name--The Organist's
Mistake--Farm-work--Tom and Bill--The Baby--Baby and All
'Hath this child been already baptised, or no?'
'No, she ain't; leastwise we don't know as how she 've been or no, so
we thought as we 'd best have her done.'
The clergyman who was taking Mr Clifford's duty at Downside for that
Sunday, thought that this might be the usual undecided way of answering
among the natives, and proceeded with the service. There were two
other babies also brought that afternoon, one of which was crying
lustily, so that it was not easy to hear what the sponsors answered;
and, moreover, the officiating clergyman was a young man, and the
prospect of holding that screaming, red-faced, little object made him
too nervous and anxious to get done with it to stop and make further
inquiries.
The woman who returned this undecided answer was an elderly woman, with
a kind, sunburnt, honest face, very much heated just now, and
embarrassed too; for the baby in her arms prevented her getting at her
pocket handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her brow and pulling
her bonnet on to its proper position on her head. The man beside her
was also greatly embarrassed, and kept shuffling his large hob-nailed
shoes together, and turning his hat round and round in his fingers.
I think that really that hat was the chief cause of his discomfort, for
he was so accustomed to have it on his head that he could not feel
quite himself without it; and, indeed, his wife could hardly recognise
him, as she had been accustomed to see him wearing it indoors and out
during the twenty years of their married life; pushed back for meals or
smoking, but always on his head, except in bed, and even there, report
says, on cold winter nights, he had recourse to it to keep off the
draught from that cracked pane in the window. His face, like his
wife's, was weatherbeaten, and of the same broad, flat type as hers,
with small, surprised, dazzled-looking, pale blue eyes, and a tangle of
grizzled light hair under his chin. He was noticeable for the green
smock-frock he wore, a garment which is so rapidly disappearing before
the march of civilisation, and giving place to the ill-cut, ill-made
coat of shoddy cloth, which is fondly thought to resemble the squire's.
The christening party was completed by a hobbledehoy lad of about
sixteen, who tried to cover his invincible shyness by a grin, and to
keep his foolish eyes from the row of farm boys in the aisle, whose
critical glances he felt in every pore. He was so like both father and
mother, that there was no mistaking his parentage; but when Mrs Gray
took off the shepherd's-plaid shawl in which the baby was wrapped, such
a little dark head and swarthy face were exposed to view as might have
made intelligent spectators (if there were any in Downside church that
afternoon, which I doubt) reflect on the laws of heredity and reversion
to original types.
'Name this child!'
The clergyman had got successfully through his business with the
roaring George Augustus and the whimpering Alberta Florence, and had
now the little, quiet, brown-faced baby in his arms. Even a young and
unmarried man was fain to confess that it was an unusually pretty
little face that lay against his surplice, with a pointed chin, and
more eyebrows and lashes than most young babies possess, and with dark
eyes that looked up at him with a certain intelligence, recognisable
even to an unprejudiced observer.
'Name this child!'
Mrs Gray had taken advantage of this opportunity to mop her forehead
with her blue and white pocket handkerchief, and wrestle with her
bonnet's unconquerable tendency to slip off behind, and the clergyman
passed the question on to her husband, who fixed his eye on a
bluebottle buzzing in one of the windows, and jerked out what sounded
like 'Joe.'
'I thought it was a girl,' whispered the clergyman. 'Joe, did you say?'
'No, it ain't that 'zactly. Here, 'Liza, can't you tell the gentleman?
You knows best what it be.'
The next attempt sounded like 'Sue,' and the clergyman suggested Susan
as the name, but that would not do.
'Zola' seemed to him, though not a reader of French novels, unsuitable,
and 'Zero,' too, he could not quite appreciate.
'I can't make it out, an outlandish sorter name!' said Gray, with a
terrible inclination to put on his hat in the excitement of the moment,
only checked by a timely nudge from his wife's elbow; 'here, ain't you
got it wrote down somewheres? Can't you show it up?'
And after a lengthened rummage in a voluminous pocket, and the
production of several articles irrelevant to the occasion--a thimble, a
bit of ginger, and part of a tract--Mrs Gray brought to light a piece
of paper, on which was written the name 'Zoe.'
'Zoe, I baptise thee'----
A sudden crash on the organ-pedals followed these words. Mr Robins,
the organist, had, perhaps, been asleep and let his foot slip on to the
pedals, or, perhaps, he had thought there was no wind in the instrument
and that he could put his foot down with impunity. He was plainly very
much ashamed of himself for what had happened, and it was only right
that he should be, for, of course, it made all the school children
giggle, and a good many of their elders too, who should have known
better.
The boy who blew the organ declared that he turned quite red and bent
his head over the keys as if he were examining something on them, and
he was evidently nervous and upset, for he made ever so many mistakes
in the concluding parts of the service, and, to the great surprise and
to the satisfaction of the blower, cut the voluntary at the end
unusually short, ending it in an abrupt and discordant way, which, I am
sorry to say, the blower described as 'a 'owl,' though any shock that
the boy's musical taste sustained was compensated for by the feeling
that he would be at home at least ten minutes earlier than usual to tea.
Now it so happened that Mr Robins was in the vestry when the
christening party came in to give the particulars about the babies to
be entered in the register. He had come to fetch a music-book, which,
however, it appeared after all had been left at home; but the clergyman
was glad of his help in making out the story of the little Zoe who had
just been baptised.
I have spoken before of intelligent observers noticing and drawing
arguments from the entire want of likeness between Zoe and her parents;
but all the observers on this occasion whether intelligent or not, with
the exception of the officiating clergyman, were quite aware that Zoe
was not the Grays' baby, but was a foundling child picked up one night
by Gray in his garden.
Of her antecedents nothing was known, and, of course, any sensible
people would have sent her to the workhouse--every one agreed on this
point and told the Grays so; and yet, I think, half the women who were
so positive and severe on Mrs Gray's folly would have done just the
same.
We do not half of us know how kind-hearted we are till we are tried, or
perhaps it is our foolishness that we do not realise.
Gray was only a labourer with twelve shillings a week and a couple of
pounds more at harvest; and, of course, in bad weather there was no
work and no wages, which is the rule among the agricultural labourers
about Downside, as in many other parts, so did not present itself as a
grievance to Gray's mind, though, to be sure, in winter or wet seasons
it was a hard matter to get along. But it was neighbours' fare, and
none of them felt hardly used, for Farmer Benson, what with bad seasons
and cattle plague, was not much better off than they were, and the men
knew it.
But out of these wages it was hardly to be expected of the most
provident of people that anything could be laid by for old age or a
rainy day; indeed, there seemed so many rainy days in the present that
it was not easy to give much thought to those in the future. Of course
too the local provident club had come to utter and hopeless grief. Is
there any country place where this has not been the case? Gray had
paid into it regularly for years and had gone every Whitmonday to its
dinner, his one voluntary holiday during the year, on which occasion he
took too much beer as a sort of solemn duty connected with his
membership. When it collapsed he was too old to join another club, and
so was left stranded. He bore it very philosophically; indeed, I think
it was only on Whitmonday that he felt it at all, as it seemed strange
and unnatural to go to bed quite sober on that day, as he did on all
other days of the year.
On all other occasions he was a thoroughly sober man, perhaps, however,
more from necessity than choice, as the beer supplied by Farmer Benson
in the hayfield was of a quality on which, as the men said, you got 'no
forrarder' if you drank a hogshead, and Gray had no money to spare from
the necessaries of life to spend on luxury, even the luxury of getting
drunk.
He was in one way better off than his neighbours from a worldly point
of view, in that he had not a large family as most of them were blessed
with; for children are a blessing, a gift and heritage that cometh of
the Lord, even when they cluster round a cold hearth and a scanty
board. But Gray had only two sons, the elder of whom, Tom, we have
seen at Zoe's christening, and who had been at work four years, having
managed at twelve to scramble into the fifth standard, and at once left
school triumphantly, and now can neither read nor write, having clean
forgotten everything drummed into his head, but earns three shillings
and sixpence a week going along with Farmer Benson's horses, from five
o'clock in the morning till six in the evening, the long wet furrows
and heavy ploughed land having made havoc of his legs, as such work
does with most plough-boys.
The younger boy, Bill, is six years younger and still at school, and
having been a delicate child, or as his mother puts it, 'enjoying bad
health,' is not promising for farm-work, and, being fond of his book
and a favourite at school, his mother cherishes hopes of his becoming a
school-teacher in days to come.
But such is the perversity of human nature, that though many a Downside
mother with a family of little steps envied Mrs Gray her compact family
and the small amount of washing attached to it, that ungrateful woman
yearned after an occupant for the old wooden cradle, and treasured up
the bits of baby things that had belonged to Tom and Bill, and nursed
up any young thing that came to hand and wanted care, bringing up a
motherless blind kitten with assiduous care and patience, as if the
supply of that commodity was not always largely in excess of the
demand, and lavishing more care on a sick lamb or a superfluous young
pig than most of the neighbours' babies received.
So when one evening in May, Gray came in holding a bundle in his arms
and poked it into her lap as she sat darning the holes in Tom's
stockings (she was not good at needlework, but she managed, as she
said, to 'goblify' the holes), he knew pretty well that it was into no
unwilling arms that he gave the baby.
'And a mercy it was as the darning-needle didn't run right into the
little angel,' Mrs Gray always said in recounting the story.
He had been down to the village to fetch some tobacco, for the Grays'
cottage was right away from the village, up a lane leading on to the
hillside, and there were no other cottages near. Tom was in bed,
though it was not eight yet--but he was generally ready for bed when he
had had his tea; and Bill was up on the hill, a favourite resort of
his, and especially when it was growing dark and the great indigo sky
spread over him, with the glory of the stars coming out.
'He never were like other lads,' his mother used to say with a mixture
of pride and irritation; 'always mooning about by himself on them old
hills.'
The cottage door stood open as it always did, and Mrs Gray sat there,
plainly to be seen from the lane, with Tom's gray stocking and her eyes
and the tallow candle as near together as possible. She did not hear a
sound, though she was listening for Bill's return, and, even though
Tom's snores penetrated the numerous crevices in the floor above, they
were hardly enough to drown other sounds.
So there was no knowing when the bundle was laid just inside the
cottage gate, not quite in the middle of the brick path, but on one
side against the box edging, where a clump of daffodils nodded their
graceful heads over the dark velvet polyanthus in the border. Gray
nearly stepped upon the bundle, having large feet, and the way of
walking which covers a good deal of ground to right and left, a way
which plough-driving teaches.
Mrs Gray heard an exclamation.
And then Gray came in, and, as I have said, did his best to impale the
bundle, baby and all, on the top of his wife's darning-needle.