Village Evidence--'Gray' on the Brain--Too Well He Knew--Mr Robins and
the Baby--He Had Not Done Badly
There is certainly a penalty paid by people who keep entirely clear of
gossip, though it is not by any means in proportion to the advantages
they gain. The penalty is that when they particularly want to hear any
piece of news, they are not likely to hear it naturally like other
people, but must go out of their way to make inquiries and evince a
curiosity which at once makes them remarkable.
Now every one in the village except Mr Robins heard of the baby found
in the Grays' garden, and discussed how it came there, but it was only
by overhearing a casual word here and there that the organist gathered
even so much as that the Grays had resolved to keep the child, and were
not going to send it to the workhouse. Even Bill Gray knew the
organist's ways too well to trouble him with the story, though he was
too full of it himself to give his usual attention at the next choir
practice, and, at every available pause between chant and hymn, his
head and that of the boy next him were close together in deep discourse.
It had occurred to Mr Robins' mind, in the waking moments of that
restless night, that there might have been--nay, most probably
was--some mark on the child's clothes which would lead to its
identification, and, for the next few days, every glance in his
direction, or, for the matter of that, in any other direction, was
interpreted by him as having some covert allusion to this foundling
grandchild of his; but the conversation of some men outside his
yew-hedge, which he accidentally overheard one day, set his anxiety at
rest.
From this he gathered that it was generally supposed to be a child
belonging to a gypsy caravan that had passed through the village that
day.
'And I says,' said one of the men with that slow, emphatic delivery in
which the most ordinary sentiments are given forth as if they were
wisdom unheard and undreamt of before; 'and I don't mind who hears me,
as Gray did oughter set the perlice on to 'un to find the heartless
jade as did 'un.'
'Ay, sure! so he did oughter; but he ain't on gumption, Gray ain't;
never had neither, as have known him man and boy these fifty year.'
'My missus says,' went on the first speaker, 'as she seed a gypsy gal
with just such a brat as this on her arm. She come round to parson's
back door--my Liza's kitchen gal there and telled her mother. She were
one of them dressed-up baggages with long earrings and a yeller
handkercher round her head, a-telling fortunes; coming round the poor,
silly gals with her long tongue and sly ways. She went in here, too.'
Mr Robins guessed, though he could not see the jerk of the thumb in his
direction. 'Mrs Sands told me so herself--the organist's listening was
quickened to yet sharper attention--'she says she had quite a job to
get rid of her, and thought she were after the spoons belike. But she
says as she'd know the gal again anywheres, and my missus says she'd
pretty near take her davy to the child, though as I says, one brat's
pretty much like another--haw, haw! though the women don't think it.'
And the two men parted, laughing over this excellent joke.
It was most curious how that little out-of-the-way house of the Grays
and its unremarkable inmates had suddenly become conspicuous; the very
cottage was visible from all directions--from the churchyard gate, from
the organist's garden, from various points along the Stokeley road; but
perhaps this may have been because Mr Robins had never cared to
identify one thatched roof from another hitherto. As for the Grays,
they seemed to be everywhere; that man hoeing in the turnip-field was
Gray, that boy at the head of the team in the big yellow wagon was Tom,
and Bill seemed to be all over the place, whistling along the road or
running round the corner, or waiting to change his book at the
organist's gate. If Mr Clifford spoke to Mr Robins it was about
something to do with the Grays, and even Mr Wilson of Stokeley stopped
him in the road to ask if some people called Gray lived at Downside.
It was most extraordinary how these people, so insignificant a week
ago, were now brought into prominence.
Even before Mr Robins had overheard that conversation he had had a
fidgety sort of wish to go up to the Grays' cottage, and now he made a
pretext of asking for a book he had lent Bill, but went before the
school came out, so that only Mrs Gray was at home as he opened the
gate and went up the path.
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and Mrs Gray was sitting outside
the door, making, plain as she was, a pretty picture with the shadows
of the young vine-leaves over the door dappling her print gown and
apron and the baby's little dark head and pink pinafore, a garment that
had once been Bill's, who had been of a more robust build than this
baby, and moreover, had worn the pinafore at a more advanced age, so
that the fit left a good deal to be desired, and the colour had
suffered in constant visits to the wash-tub, and was not so bright as
it had been originally.
But altogether, the faded pinafore and the vine-leaf shadows, and the
love in the woman's face, made a harmonious whole, and the song she was
singing, without a note of sweetness or tune in it, did not jar on the
organist's ear, as you might have supposed, knowing his critical and
refined taste.
'Good afternoon, Mrs Gray,' he said; 'I came for the book I lent your
son the other day. Why, is this your baby?' he added with
unnecessarily elaborate dissimulation. 'I did not know you had any so
young.'
'Mine? Lor' bless you, no. Ain't you heard? Why, I thought it was
all over the place. Gray, he found it in the garden just there where
you be standing, a week ago come to-morrow. Ain't she a pretty dear,
bless her! and takes such notice too, as is wonderful. Why, she's
looking at you now as if she 'd aknown you all her life. Just look at
her! if she ain't smiling at you, a little puss!'
'Where did she come from?'
'Well, sure, who 's to know? There was some gypsy folks through the
place, and there 've been a lot of tramps about along of Milton Fair,
and there was one of 'em, they say, a week or two ago with just such a
baby as this 'un. My master he 've made a few inquirements; but there!
for my part I don't care if we don't hear no more of her folks, and
Gray's much of the same mind, having took a terrible fancy to the
child. And it's plain as she ain't got no mother worth the name, as
would leave her like that, and neglected too shameful. As there ain't
no excuse, to my way of thinking, for a baby being dirty, let folks be
as poor as they may.'
Somewhere deep down in Mr Robins's mind, unacknowledged to himself,
there was a twinge of resentment at this reflection on the mother's
treatment of the baby.
'She 's as sweet as a blossom now,' went on Mrs Gray, tossing the baby
up, who laughed and crowed and stretched its arms. Yes, he could see
the likeness, he was sure of it; and it brought back to his mind with
sudden vividness a young mother's look of pride and love as she held up
her little girl for the father's admiration. Mother and child had then
been wonderfully alike, and in this baby he could trace a likeness to
both.
Mrs Gray went maundering on, as her manner was, interspersing her
narrative with baby nonsense and endearments, and Mr Robins forgot his
errand, which was, after all, only a pretext, and stood half-listening,
and more than half back in the old days of memory, and once he so far
forgot himself as to snap his fingers at the child, and touch one of
its warm, little hands, which immediately closed round his finger with
a baby's soft, tenacious grasp, from which it required a certain gentle
effort to escape.
'A pleasant, chatty sort of man the organist,' Mrs Gray said, having
talked nearly all the time herself, with only a word or two from him
now and then as reply; 'and not a bit of pride about him, let folks say
what they like. Why, he stopped ever so long and had a deal to say;
and there, Bill, you just run down with the book, as he went off after
all without it.'
Mr Robins went home slowly across the fields in a curiously softened
frame of mind. Perhaps it was the soft west wind, fragrant with sweet
spring scents of cowslips and cherry blossom, or the full glad sunshine
on all the varied green of tree and hedge, a thousand tints of that
'shower of greennesses' poured down so lavishly by the Giver of all
good things; perhaps it was the larks springing up from the clover in
such an ecstasy of song; or perhaps it was the clasp of a baby's hand
on his finger. He noticed the spring beauty round him as he had not
noticed such things for many a day, stooping to pick a big, tasselled,
gold-freckled cowslip, and stopping to let a newly-fledged, awkward,
young bird hop clumsily out of the way, with a sort of tenderness and
consideration for young things unusual to him.
His mind was more at rest than it had been for the last three weeks.
The baby's crowing laughter seemed to drive out of his memory the
wailing cry and the hollow cough and the sad, beseeching voice saying
'Father,' and then the pitiless beating rain, which had been haunting
him for the last three weeks. The sight of the baby, loved and cared
for, had taken away a misgiving, which he had hardly been conscious of
himself. After all, he had not done badly by the child. Mrs Gray was
a kind motherly sort of body, and used to babies, which Jane Sands was
not, and she would do well by the child, and he himself could see,
without any one being the wiser, that the child did not want for
anything, though he would not be held responsible in any way for it.