CHAPTER VIII

CUPID AND CATTLE

_Wit she hath without desire_

_To make known how much she hath;_

_And her anger flames no higher_

_Than may fitly sweeten wrath._

_Full of pity as may be,_

_Though perhaps not so to me._

BROWNE, “Britannia’s Pastorals.”

I

IT is to be feared that the sting of Mr. Will Flynt’s offence lay

precisely in Jinny’s ignorance of horses, and that if her old companion

had come to her aid more tactfully, she would have welcomed his

co-operation in the great purchase. But her pride in her work would

hardly allow her to admit even to herself that here was a commission

perhaps beyond her capacities. Had she not enjoyed an almost lifelong

experience of Methusalem? As a monogamist would resent being told he

knew nothing of matrimony, so Jinny repudiated the notion that she knew

nothing of equinity. Besides, the cattle-market was far from seeming so

strange a world to her as Will had imagined. Had her cart not often

conveyed thence or thither a netted calf, had she not marketed even his

own mother’s piglings? A fig for the masculine aura! If Mr. Flippance

exaggerated after his fashion in declaring she would have undertaken to

get him the moon—at any rate it was not the man in it that would have

kept her back.

It was, therefore, with a bruised and burning but indomitable heart that

Jinny went about her work these ever longer days. For women must work,

though men may mope. Poor Will, who had nothing to do but to chew his

bitter cud of memory, was the more pitiable, and his temper was not

improved when early Friday evening the comparatively clean Master Gale,

evidently caught on his way home from school, arrived with “the same as

uzual.” This apple-cheeked and white-collared understudy for Jinny was

no less an eyesore than Uncle Lilliwhyte, and Will made Martha refuse

the parcel on the ground that if they encouraged the lad, it would lead

to truancy. Such was his solicitude for the schoolboy whose copy-book he

had diverted from its scholastic function. But he was not less furious

when Farmer Gale brought back the parcel the next morning on horseback

and explained amiably that he had seen Jinny about it, and that

henceforward this overburdened damsel would leave the Flynt parcel with

his, and he would have pleasure in delivering it in the course of riding

about his farms.

The rain and the cold snap, that had come so suddenly after the quarrel

in the wood, was welcome to Jinny in her present mood. For her the

summer was over. True, she espied its first wild rose, but it reminded

her only of a round strawberry water-ice, such as her well-to-do clients

spooned at the Chipstone confectioner’s. Everything was gelid, except

Nip’s nose, and that but added to her depression. Was the darling

feverish from the scratches of his spiny crawlings, or did he share his

mistress’s heavy humours? Her distraction might have led to a nasty

accident had not the last of the trio kept his head, for in a lonely

lane Methusalem, who in these days seemed to whinny his sympathy and

nuzzle into her palm with enhanced tenderness, deftly avoided the

prostrate antlered trunk of an oak-tree which had been split and

splintered by lightning. Possibly it had lain there since that Sunday’s

storm, for her work had not brought her that way. The bark of the whole

tree had been peeled off, save for a small patch where a few buds still

suggested vitality, and Jinny had a grandiose sense that all nature

sympathized with the strange desolation that had come over her joyous

self.

Her mind turned to fate and constellations as she drew up at Miss

Gentry’s door and summoned with a blast that fantastic female, who was

feeding the chickens with which she variegated life and tantalized

Squibs. Miss Gentry did not need anything beyond her usual depilatory.

It was a standing grief and astonishment to her that though white lilies

(under the domain of the moon) will “trimly deck a blank place with

hair,” neither Culpeper nor the planets had provided against the

contrary contingency: even fig-wort (owned by Venus) merely removing

wens and freckles. Hence she was reduced to a mere chemist’s

prescription: a solution of barium sulphide swayed by no known planet.

The stuff came in a pot.

Miss Gentry in ordering it did not shirk the word “depilatory.” On the

contrary she pronounced the five syllables with a pomposity which was

the more impressive to Jinny because even “The Universal Spelling-Book”

stopped short at four syllables. Not for worlds—whether to her client

or the public at large—would Jinny have betrayed her knowledge that the

hair-destroyer represented a never-ending battle with Miss Gentry’s

moustache. And for the sensitive dressmaker herself the polysyllable was

a soothing cover. Ostrich-like she hid her head in its spacious

sandiness.

There was, however, the little matter of Martha’s bleached and

new-trimmed bonnet, which Jinny might convey to Frog Farm, and the

casual mention that it was Will who had brought it led to considerable

conversation. Jinny’s equipage was drawn up outside the little garden,

where tulips (red, damask, and pink) stood like tall guards before a

tropical palace; and Miss Gentry, despite the chill wind, leaned on her

garden-gate, carefully nursing her black cat against Nip’s possible

swoops.

The excellent lady, whose erudition Jinny had always absorbed with the

reverence due to a reader of _The Englishwoman’s Magazine_, was always

delighted to have the girl sitting at her feet—even though to the crude

physical vision Jinny always appeared to be sitting above her head, and

Miss Gentry to be looking up to her. Sometimes real information from the

aforesaid magazine, which bore the sub-title of “The Christian Mother’s

Miscellany,” was thus transmitted to Jinny; but Miss Gentry’s brain was

obviously too cluttered up with archaic notions to be really beneficial

to her young devotee. Thus, although Miss Gentry enlarged Jinny’s mind,

it was more a matter of range than of accuracy.

The conversation to-day, however, was on a more personal plane. Jinny

was resolved to speak no further word to Mr. William Flynt: his

interference was unforgivable. But when it transpired that he had

brought the bonnet, she did not attempt to check Miss Gentry’s flow of

favourable comment, still less to contradict it. For a Peculiar he was

quite the gentleman, Miss Gentry opined, especially after that coarse

and flippant Bundock. Not tall enough for her taste, because she thought

you ought always to look up to a man; still, handsome in a rough way,

despite his ginger hair.

“Not ginger!” Jinny protested.

“It shades to ginger,” the dressmaker replied severely, as an authority

upon colours. “But it served to brighten up his face, which was none too

cheerful. Born under Saturn, I should think, and the sign of the

Scorpion.”

“And what effect has that?” asked Jinny, alarmed.

“Well, for one thing it qualifies the unruly actions and passions of

Venus.”

“The goddess of Beauty,” observed Jinny, airing her Spelling-Book.

“Of Love,” corrected Miss Gentry.

Jinny’s face shaded towards the colour under discussion, and she cried:

“Down, Nip,” to that recumbent animal’s amusement. “He nearly jumped on

the bonnet-box,” she explained.

“He should eat herbs under the dominion of the Sun,” said Miss Gentry.

“Nip?”

“No—Mr. Flynt. He needs vital spirits.”

“Still, ginger is hardly the word,” murmured Jinny.

“It looks ginger against his clothes,” persisted Miss Gentry. “Of course

a man can’t understand dressing himself.”

“Why, he’s better dressed than anybody in Long Bradmarsh—except Mr.

Fallow,” said Jinny.

Miss Gentry was mollified by the compliment to her pastor. “All the same

his coat wrinkles at the shoulders,” she said. “You notice next time.”

“I’ve got better things to do than to look at Mr. Flynt’s coat-sleeves,”

said Jinny. “And I’ll be going on.”

“Well, if you do see him, give him my kind regards,” said Miss Gentry,

“and say that any time he’s passing and would like a cup of tea, I’d be

glad to discuss the tract I gave him.”

“Oh, it’s no use trying to convert him,” said Jinny. “He’s nothing at

all.”

“Then why did he go to your chapel the other Sunday?”

“Did he go?” said Jinny, amazed. “I dare say that’s what has depressed

him.”

“He not only went, but with your _peculiar_ ideas of the House of God,

he had his dinner there!”

“Oh, no! Why he was dining at ‘The Black Sheep.’”

“Nothing of the sort. A dressmaker has ears.”

“But a carrier has eyes. And I saw him there.”

“Then I’ll never believe Isabella Mawhood again.”

“I hope you haven’t been making her more vanities,” said Jinny, as she

slowly turned Methusalem’s nose the other way.

“Only a new bonnet, you funny little Peculiar. You see the case was

coming on at the Chelmsford Sessions, and I should have got a verdict

against Mr. Mawhood not only for his wife’s silk dress, but for the

chickens his ferrets killed——”

“You issued a replevin, I suppose,” put in Jinny grandly.

“I could have had a tort or a subpœna or anything,” assented Miss

Gentry, with equal magnificence. “But the defendant thought best to

compromise. He’s got to clear this cottage of rats for nothing this

winter—you know how they come gnawing my best stuffs—and in return my

landlady has to pay for a new bonnet for his wife.”

“But Mrs. Mawhood’s silk dress—who pays for that?” asked Jinny

mystified.

“Oh, Mrs. Mott pays for that.”

“But why Mrs. Mott?”

“She didn’t want to have a scandal in the community, and your so-called

Deacon swore he hadn’t got the money. They make Mrs. Mott pay for

everything nowadays.”

“It’s too bad,” said Jinny. “And Mrs. Mawhood comes out of it all with

her dress paid for and a new bonnet.”

“Well, she does become clothes more than her sister-Peculiars, I must

say that—present company excepted! That old rat-catcher’s lucky to have

got such a young wife for his second, even though he was _her_ third.”

“She’s not so young,” said Jinny.

“She’s no older than I am,” persisted Miss Gentry. “And born, like me,

under Venus.”

Jinny suppressed a smile. Despite her respect for Miss Gentry she had

never accepted her standing invitation to explore the Colchester

romance. Unread in the literature of love though she was, the girl’s

natural instinct refused to see the middle-aged moustachio’d dressmaker

as the heroine of a love-drama. Her affair with the angel seemed,

indeed, to place her apart. “I think it’s disgraceful to have had three

husbands,” she insisted.

“Not at all, when each is a Christian marriage, and the first two

spouses have been duly taken by an overruling Providence. Of course the

unhallowed romance one inspires is another thing. As I always say to

Bundock—oh, we ought not to have mentioned names, ought we, Squibs

dear? Please forget it.” She stroked the cat in her arms. “But there,

Jinny! You can’t understand these things—you too were born under

Saturn.”

“How do you know that?” Jinny was vaguely resentful.

“You’re so cold-blooded—perhaps it was even under the constellation of

the Pisces—the Fishes, that is. You’ve never taken the faintest

interest in Love. Do you know, I made a rhyme about you the other day.”

“A rhyme!” Jinny was excited. “Do tell me!”

Miss Gentry shook her head. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, but I _must_ hear it.”

Miss Gentry continued obstinately to stroke Squibs. But finally, as if

electrified by the fur, she broke out like an inspired pythoness, in a

weird chanting voice:

“_When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,_

_Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,_

_And Jinny shall then learn Passion’s force._”

Jinny was so overwhelmed with admiration at the poetry—quite on a par,

she felt, with the pieces of “The Universal Spelling-Book,” especially

as the Rhyme or “_jingle in the ear_” was on the very pattern of the

model verse there given:

_Prostrate my contrite Heart I bend,_

_My God, my Father and my Friend,_

_Do not forsake me in the end_

—that she could hardly take in the sense at the moment.

“How lovely!” she said.

“I’m glad you’re satisfied. It means, of course”—Miss Gentry firmly

explained the oracle—“that you’ll never marry, being as incapable of

Passion as the Brad of flowing backwards and forwards at the same time.”

A strange protest as written in letters of fire crept through all

Jinny’s veins. Even her face flamed. She began “clucking” to Methusalem

to start.

“And I’ve made one about Mrs. Mawhood too,” pursued the pythoness, now

irrepressible. “I don’t wish her ill, but I’m afraid it’ll prove true,

poor thing.” And without waiting to be discouraged, indeed, following

the already moving cart, she chanted:

“_She may look to South, she may look to North,_

_But the finger of fate hath forbidden a fourth,_

_And the rat-slayer, clinging to life and his gold,_

_Shall dance on the grave where she lieth cold._”

“Not dance!” laughed Jinny, relieved at this diversion.

“Well preach—it’s just as bad, when a man’s not ordained,” said Miss

Gentry, and this being the signal for a theological assault, Jinny drove

off rapidly.

II

But she had no intention of bearing the bonnet to Frog Farm. Nor,

despite the account that Farmer Gale had given of the new parcel

arrangement, had she really agreed to establish him as

sub-carrier-in-ordinary. He was too moneyed and important for that, and

she found it hard enough to accept the favour of being driven to and

from chapel in his dog-cart—a favour necessitated by her grandfather’s

and even her own ideas as to the indecorum of their business cart.

Besides, she had almost resolved to seek his advice, perhaps his help,

in the famous horse-purchase: anything rather than break down before

Will! So she must not overdo it. No, Master Peartree, for all his novel

churlishness, must convey the bonnet. He could scarcely be treated like

Farmer Gale’s boy, and if they did refuse it at his hands, still it

would only abide next door.

The shepherd-cowman was not, however, to be found in his accustomed

haunts, and she lost a good hour in hunting for him in the various

mutually distant pastures to which he led his ever-edacious sheep. None

of the men ploughing the great red fields for turnips had seen him pass.

At last, by the aid of a taciturn lout, who was driving a tumbril laden

with hurdles and backed with a tall crate, Master Peartree was located

in the farm buildings at the other extremity of Farmer Gale’s estate in

a barn-like structure facing a long row of cart-sheds.

Skirting a sunless pond that was scurvy and ill-smelling, she drew up at

the gate and blew a summons on her horn, but its only effect was to

startle the chickens pecking in the litter, and the piglings fighting to

snatch their mother’s garbage from her tub or to nuzzle at her teats.

There was nothing for it but to carry the bonnet-box to the barn, for

the great farmyard was too mucky to drag her cart through. Picking her

way among the strawy compost heaps, she divined why her horn had brought

no answer: it had been deadened by a melody proceeding in a lusty tenor

voice from the tall folding-doors, and this—somewhat to her

surprise—was none other than the air of “Buy a Broom.”

It forced her to polka to it the rest of the way, and although she must

fain trip gingerly mid the manure-heaps and the melody had ended with

applause before she reached the thatched structure, still it was with a

brighter feeling that she found herself at the open doors. But the first

glimpse within made her turn pale and draw back a little. The scene she

had so unexpectedly stumbled upon was the stranger and grimmer for the

silence that had now fallen, though the faces of the shearers astride

the struggling sheep were still lively enough. Master Peartree had his

boot over the head of a recalcitrant lamb, which but for her recent

adventure she would have imagined choking.

But it was not the ungentle shepherd that made for her the centre of the

picture, for among these men in dirty green corduroys and rolled-up

check shirt-sleeves, whose legs gripped grunting, wheezing, struggling

or feebly kicking sheep, was one in cleaner clothes, whose bare, brawny

arms gave her a sharp sensation, almost as if he had nipped her with the

shears he held in his palm. Was it boredom or the need for his labour

that had enlisted Mr. William Flynt in this service? She did not know,

but pale and dumb she retreated from the unconscious Will, whose sheep,

wedged between his legs, hung limp with meek, helpless eye, the very

image of a sacrificial victim, and was being sheared with the meticulous

concentration of the outsider bent on showing he is not inferior to the

professional. And indeed Will’s was the sole sheep, she saw at once and

with admiration, that though nearly bare of its wool showed without

blood-fleck: a consummation to which its prudent lethargy had doubtless

contributed. Young Ravens, on the other hand, who was now lying with

both feet on his animal, had nicked it on ear, leg, and breast:

apparently one could not serve two masters—song and scissors.

Perceiving Jinny with her bonnet-box, this young humorist now sang out

the old street-cry: “Buy a band-box!”

The chaff stayed her retreat and stiffened her trembling form.

“Hullo!” she retorted, with less than her usual wit. “Back again like a

bad penny.”

Even as she spoke she saw Will and his sheep give a spasmodic start, and

the first speck of blood appear on the flawless skin. But the shearer

did not look up, although he automatically stretched out his hand for

the ointment.

“Do ye don’t struggle,” observed Master Peartree amiably to his youthful

ewe. “Oi’m not so strong.”

As nobody said anything further, and Master Peartree, intent on his

lamb, did not look up, Jinny too stood silent for a moment with her

incongruous bonnet-box; recovering her sang-froid, and watching a

catcher trying to drive in an unshorn lamb from the pen in which it had

cowered and which it now ran round, bleating, terror-stricken and

unseizable. She wondered if its heart were thumping more wildly than

hers. Not that there was terror in her own breast—rather a strange

exultation that her presence had had power to incarnadine the immaculate

sheepskin. But her eyes roamed shyly from Will and his nipped victim,

and studied with elaborate attention the divers coloured show-cards of

the successful ram lambs that made their vaunt upon the beams or along

the sloping walls, through which the thatching stuck pleasantly. Her

mind went back to that sunny, bracing day in February, to the immense

pastoral landscape of straw-roofed sheep-pens, ooze, mangold heaps, and

haystacks, on which she had chanced when the lambs now so agitated were

new-yeaned: some only an hour or two old, with long skeleton legs and

bodies smeared as with yellow gold. How friskily they had soon learnt to

leap on their mother’s back! That day she, too, had been as untroubled,

needing no outside melody to brisk up her pace.

Young Ravens, inspired by his new audience to a fresh burst of melody,

started on “The Mistletoe Bough,” the old ballad she had heard sung in

the cottages at Christmas sing-songs, and which she now for the first

time connected with the play on Mr. Flippance’s posters.

“Hullo, Jinny,” said Master Peartree at last, her presence slowly

percolating. He finished his rebellious lamb and patted it forgivingly

on the back, remarking genially: “Get up and let’s have a squint at

you.” And as it trotted out happily, he threw its fleece—too small to

wind up—on to a great heap in the corner and fell to work on a sheep.

“You’ve just done’em when it’s turned cold,” protested Jinny.

“Ay, ’tis a pity,” said Master Peartree. “But first we couldn’t get the

labour, and then that rined and their wool was too damp, but Oi need ’em

now for the early market.”

“I know. I’m buying a horse there,” said Jinny.

Another tinge of red appeared on the blameless skin of Will’s victim.

“Methusalem ain’t damaged hisself?” asked Master Peartree in concern.

“Oh, no, he’s outside your gate, damaging your hedge.”

“Then whatever do you need another for?”

“Oh, just to ride over somebody. But I wish I’d known you needed

labour.”

“Why, want a job?” grinned Jim Puddifoot, a giant in a brimless hat, who

was sharpening his shears on a piece of steel. There was a snigger from

his mates.

“What’s the pay?” said Jinny, who had been thinking of Uncle Lilliwhyte,

lately gravelled for lack of purchasers of his woodland pickings.

“There’s half a suvrin a hundred,” said Master Peartree as seriously,

“and four quarts o’ beer.”

A great shout of laughter rose from the hired men: only Will went on

shearing with apparent imperturbability, while a third carmine speck

defaced the smooth surface of his martyred sheep.

“Where’s the laugh?” inquired Master Peartree.

“_Don’t rob a poor man of his beer_,” carolled young Ravens. “She don’t

drink,” he broke off to explain.

“Yes, I do, I drink like a fish. Water, that is, like that does.”

This time even Master Peartree laughed, while Jim Puddifoot, raising his

tin mug without a handle to his mouth, cried “Here’s to you,” and young

Ravens lifting up his pleasant voice trolled forth:

“_Robin he married a wife in the West,_

_Moppety, moppety, mono._”

Little stabs and pricks were going through Will’s breast, and still more

through the skin of his sheep. As the chorus, from which Jinny’s little

trill was not excluded, took up:

“_With a high jig jiggity, tops and petticoats,_

_Robin-a-Thrush cries mono,_”

it seemed to Will as if Jinny was carrying on like a flash lady in a

boon company. A high jig jiggity, indeed! Releasing his victim at last,

he picked up its fleece sullenly and teased a tail out of it, wherewith,

rolling up the rest, he proceeded to tie the bundle in a silence that

the singing rendered still grimmer.

“What’s that you’ve got there, Jinny?” asked Master Peartree, becoming

suddenly aware of the bonnet-box.

“That’s for you,” she said.

“Me! Oi ain’t got no womankind, thank the Lord.”

Again Master Peartree had touched unintentionally the springs of

laughter. Will pinned the frightened ewe-lamb, now caught and as dumb as

himself, between his legs, and plucked a few preliminary bits from its

breast with his fingers.

“But it’s Mrs. Flynt’s bonnet,” explained Jinny, “and will you oblige me

by taking it back to-night?”

The snick of young Flynt’s shears sounded savage.

“That Oi won’t,” said Master Peartree, “seein’ as here stands her boy

Willie hisself.”

“Oh, does he?” said Jinny. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Ay, that he do. And even dedn’t, he arxed me not to do your job agen,

time Oi took in that liddle ole horn.”

The new ovine martyr bounded. Quite a patch of its skin had been

replaced by blood.

“Steady, Willie, steady!” cried Master Peartree. “Oi was afeared

musicianers ain’t no good for shearing.”

“It’s this silly, jumping beast,” growled Will, breaking his obstinate

silence.

Jinny was still tendering the bonnet-box to Master Peartree. “Well, give

it to him then.”

“Can’t he take it straight?” asked the shepherd, clipping busily.

“That silly, jumping beast is too much for him as it is. He daren’t let

go. I’ll leave the bonnet-box for him.”

“Ain’t no place here—’tis too mucky.”

“‘Buy a Broom,’” hummed Jinny, and young Ravens, smiling, seized a besom

and swept vigorously at the stale and droppings. “Oh, I can’t leave it

here—the sheep might stave it in,” she said.

“Leave it in the store acrost the yard—the key’s in the padlock,” said

the shepherd. “Oi count Willie’ll take it home, same as he ain’t cut

hisself to pieces.”

Another roar from the others—this time Master Peartree beamed, and it

might have gone ill with Will’s lamb had the shears not slipped from his

palm.

“Well, but when folks go woolgathering,” remarked Jinny blandly, “they

forget things. I’ll put it in the store, but I won’t be responsible.”

“Tell her I won’t forget it,” roared Will, who was picking up his shears

in the gymnastic attitude necessitated by the palpitating sheep between

his legs.

“Oi reckon she can yer for herself,” said the shepherd naïvely.

“Of course I can hear,” said Jinny. “But tell him to tell his mother

that the bill’s inside.”

“Oi reckon _he_ can yer too,” said the puzzled Peartree.

“He doesn’t listen much to women,” explained Jinny. “You ask him if his

family wants anything else from Chipstone.”

“Well, there he stands—you can arx him, can’t you?”

“Well, don’t I stand here, too?” said Jinny. “And why doesn’t he

answer?”

“He’s too shy,” sniggered Ravens, and burst out again:

“_With a high jig jiggity, tops and petticoats._”

“Shut up!” snarled Will.

“’Twas you asked me to sing,” retorted Ravens.

“That’s so, Willie,” said the shepherd. “You should say you loved to yer

‘Buy a Broom’ and all them old songs. Why don’t you answer, Willie?”

“Because there’s nothing to say,” Will roared. “We don’t want nothing

whatever from her.” He was not often so ungrammatical, but anger knows

no pedantry.

“Well, why couldn’t he say so at once?” said Jinny, and whistling “_A

dashing young man from Buckingham_,”—whistling was a new brazenness in

Will’s ears—she picked her way across the miry yard to the

weather-boarded, tarred, and tile-roofed structure that stood on six

mushroom-topped pillars, whose smoothness offered no purchase for rats.

Ascending the steep steps, she deposited the bonnet-box betwixt the

chicken-corn and the eggs. While padlocking the door again, she saw to

her surprise that Methusalem was inside the gate, labouring towards her

through the mud. The faithful animal, impatient for her, had evidently

lifted the latch with its nose, aided perhaps by its teeth. The tears

came into her eyes: some one at least did want her, and there was a

long, affectionate contact between that clever, velvety nose and Jinny’s

palm. Then she returned to the shearing-barn and handed Master Peartree

the key.

“Good day and thank you,” she said. “I reckon I shall meet you at the

cattle fair.”

She did not wait to see if she had drawn blood from the sacrificial

lamb; but, rounding her lips again, whistled her way jauntily back to

her cart. As she drove along, the sun, struggling through a high

cloud-rack, showed like a great worn silver coin, and the shorn sheep

gleamed fairily white on the great green pastures. But there was an ache

at her heart, which the delicious wafts from the early-mown hayfields

only made emptier.

III

The shabby little cart with the legend of “Daniel Quarles,” and the

smart dog-cart of Farmer Gale, rolled side by side of a Monday morning

in the restored June sunshine towards the Chipstone cattle-market. Jinny

had timed this coincidence, and meant to extract the farmer’s opinion of

the horses for sale. She had already gleaned from her grandfather what

particular teeth were chronological, but such confidence as she

possessed in her own “horse-sense” had been rudely dissipated by a

volume on the noble animal, which she had unearthed in Mother Gander’s

sanctum. The lists of diseases and defects from which it might suffer

was paralysing, and even when it was a thing she had heard of—like

grogginess—it grew more sinister by being called “navicular disease.”

Methusalem’s maladies had been simple enough, and she had dared to

drench or anoint him with divers remedies. But now that knowledge had

dissipated the bliss of ignorance—now that warts had enlarged into

“angleberries,” rheumatism had darkened into “felon,” and farcy,

quittor, _Ascaris megalocephala_, and countless other evils were seen

hovering around Methusalem, thick as summer gnats, she marvelled how he

had staved them off. That poor Methusalem! An affectionate animal by

nature was the horse,—the book told her—he _wanted_ to please man,

only sometimes he was in agony and the flesh could not obey. Good

heavens, what if sometimes when she was in a hurry to get home, she had

wronged Methusalem, even in her thoughts! Remorsefully, and with a new

and morbid anxiety, she caressed his delicate, nose, amazed at her

ancient, easy assurance of his immortality. It even shook her faith in

the all-sufficiency of the Spelling-Book that it contained no intimation

of the ills that horseflesh is heir to.

And the animal she had now to buy for Mr. Flippance might be affected

with all or any of these ills, and even if one could detect such obvious

defects as windgalls, spavin, thorough-pin, or broken wind, how avoid a

crib-biter or a wind-sucker, how grapple with the bot-fly, two hundred

of which could hook themselves horribly to a single equine stomach, or

with the still more formidable Palisade Worm, which even its name of

_Strongylus armatus_ could scarcely worsen, a thousand of it having been

counted by a patient authority on a surface of two inches, and its

census taken at a million for a single horse!

Farmer Gale, however, failed to throw much light on these alarming

questions, which he did not know, indeed, were being asked. His

conversation kept gliding away to his grievances, for it consisted, like

that of most farmers, of grumbles. Usually these started from the little

string-tied sample bags of threshed grain he carried in his pocket to be

blown and tasted by hard-bargaining customers. But to-day, though he was

not bound for the corn-market, he was nevertheless not to be baulked of

his grievances. They were not, this time, against Nature, but against

Man; for, as the fields they passed showed, the corn was particularly

forward. It was not Providence that had run down wheat to thirty

shillings a quarter. Free Trade was in reality the ruin of free Britain.

For the labour of Continental slaves, who went with the soil, and were

sold with it like cattle, who subsisted on black bread, skim-milk, and

onions, was brought into competition with that of the freeborn Briton,

who must thus be dragged down to the same level.

The bluff, freeborn Briton was Farmer Gale’s favourite rôle, and his

ruddy face, grey bowler, and smart gaiters made him sympathetic enough

superficially, while the potent landowner’s consideration for Jinny’s

religious necessities had not failed to evoke a flattered gratitude in

her humble breast when they drove together of a Sunday to their

respective chapels. This amiable image of himself the breezy Briton was

now destined to shatter. For after some critical comment on the

ploughing of the fields they passed and the activities of the

poachers—he would certainly have to get rid of that suspicious

character, “Uncle Lilliwhyte,” who occupied a cottage badly needed for a

farm-hand—he pointed out the impossibility of building another cottage

as Jinny had so crudely suggested. Prices were simply ruinous.

“I tell my labourers as man to man,” he said emphatically, “that they

can’t have regular employment _and_ their present wages. Take your

choice, boys, says I. Look at other countries, do they get more than

their six or seven shillings a week? No! Then that’s what you’ll have to

come down to.”

“But how can they live on it?” asked Jinny.

“How can farmers live?” he retorted. “We must go by the price of corn.”

“But did you go by the price of corn after the Battle of Waterloo?”

asked Jinny shrewdly. “For I remember Gran’fer once telling me you

got—I mean your father got—a hundred shillings a quarter then, yet

folks were so starved they went burning the ricks.”

“I was only a baby then. I can’t say what happened.”

“But the same thing happened nearer our time,” she reminded him,

thinking of the Bidlake tragedy.

“Oh, that silly rioting and machine-smashing. That always came out of

the poor not understanding politics. If things were bad after Waterloo,

it was all Bony’s work. And as for the unrest twenty years ago, we

caught that from France, too, I remember dad telling me. They had risen

against their king—such an unsettled people. But to-day it’s our own

British Government that’s the enemy, and the money we farmers have lost

this year is something dreadful.”

“But you don’t look as starved as some of our labourers’ families. I’ve

seen the Pennymole children crying for dry bread, and the father saying,

‘I darsn’t cut you no more—do, ye’ll have none Saturday.’ And Mr.

Pennymole’s always worked for you.”

“You don’t understand politics, Jinny.”

“I understand poverty. The Pennymoles are better off, now they’ve got

two boys grown up and earning sixpence a day. But I’ve seen Mrs.

Pennymole making tea with charred bread, and her husband compelled to

steal the cabbages left for the cows. . . . Oh, I oughtn’t to have said

that,” she added in alarm.

“You certainly oughtn’t! _Compelled_ to break the Eighth Commandment—a

pretty doctrine! And such liars, too. I saw quite a little girl munching

a turnip she’d just filched from my field, and when I complained to her

mother, the woman unblushingly said, ‘’Tis me fats her up with swedes

and turnips.’”

“They can’t see their children hunger.”

“They can put some of them in the poorhouse.”

“Look at the mites there, white and half-starved. Sometimes I’ve got to

deliver a parcel to Mr. Jims, the porter, and I hear the Master

thrashing ’em with a stick.”

“And it’s what boys need—even my brat. Carrying parcels, indeed!” He

stopped abruptly.

“Well, but they make the old folks of eighty and ninety scour the stone

steps and do the washing!”

“They needn’t go in—they can get relief from the parish.”

“The parish! Eighteenpence a week for the family when the father’s

bedridden.”

“There’s the parish loaves!”

“Have you ever seen one? Half-baked, without real crust, all raw and

soft, where it stuck to the next loaf.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, there’s plenty of work after

harvest.”

“Yes, even for babies of six,” said Jinny bitterly. “And to keep boys

from their beds after hard field-work. And at White Notley where they

make the silk, there’s little girls standing on stools to reach the

weaving-desk.”

“If you understood politics,” Farmer Gale persisted, “you’d understand

that prices make themselves, and that what we get with one hand we have

to give away with the other. Have you ever heard of the Income Tax now?”

“No,” admitted Jinny.

“Ha! You’d change your tune if you had to pay a shilling on every pound

you earned. But that’s merely the last straw that breaks the camel’s

back, for it isn’t only as a farmer I’m put upon. But think of the Malt

Tax! It’s simply a scandal.”

“Is it? I should have thought ’twas six shillings a week would be the

scandal.” Her eyes and cheeks blazed prettily, and she was beginning to

shelve the idea of consulting her companion at the horse-market.

“I don’t say you’re altogether wrong,” conceded Farmer Gale, admiring,

despite himself, her fire and sparkle. “But it’s the Government that’s

responsible. There was a great old meeting t’other day at Drury Lane

Theatre in London. Two thousand people, if a man. The Duke of Richmond

he up and said by Heaven we’ve got to have Protection, and we will have

it. Oh, it was a grand speech. I went up for it express. And we’ve had a

meeting of farmers down here, too, and we’re going to wake up the

country, we Essex chaps.”

“Are you?” said Jinny, secretly amused at this “furriner’s” complacent

identification of himself with her county.

“You wait! We’re going to come out with a Proclamation.”

“But that’s a Royal thing,” said Jinny.

“Not always: besides we shall end with _God save the Queen_. Yes, that’s

it: ‘Down with the Malt Tax and God save the Queen!’ And the beginning:

‘To our worthy labourers, greeting.’ I’ll draw that up soon as I get

home.”

“I should offer ’em ten shillings a week,” said Jinny.

“You’re joking!”

“I’m dead earnest. A family can’t live under ten shillings a week. Then

they wouldn’t want to shoot your rabbits and steal your turnips and

cabbages.”

“Prices make themselves, I tell you. Folks can’t have more than they’re

worth. Why, my dad paid as much as thirteen shillings a week to our old

looker, Flynt, when he had his strength. Yes, though nobody ever

suspected he got more than twelve.”

“But besides his duties as bailiff he had to see after feeding the stock

night and morning, including Sundays.”

“That was why my father paid him the extra shilling. And you can’t say I

haven’t treated him generously over the farmhouse.”

“I wonder he could bring up such a large family so genteelly,” mused

Jinny at a tangent.

“The more the easier. A brat of four can scare the crows: the only pity

is that his boys wouldn’t stay on the land.”

“What was there to stay for? I think there ought to be a law that nobody

gets under ten shillings,” persisted Jinny.

“What a blessing we haven’t got women over us,” said the farmer, smiling

at a heresy too unreasonable for argument. “Men Governments are bad

enough, but women would drive us to the workhouse.”

“And what about the Queen?” asked Jinny.

“Well, _what_ about the Queen?” he repeated vaguely.

“Isn’t the Queen a woman?”

“The Queen a woman!” He was dazed. “But she doesn’t really govern—not

nowadays. It’s Lord John!”

“Well then, what about Queen Elizabeth?”

“Ah, that was some time back,” he said evasively.

“Yes, she put on the crown in 1558, November 17,” quoted Jinny from that

Spelling-Book.

“I didn’t know you were so well up in history,” he said admiringly. “I

reckon you’re ready at ciphering too?”

“How could I do my work without it?”

“Ah, that’s true. And a good hand at a pen, I suppose?”

“I can scratch what I want.”

“Ah!”

He fell silent.

“You don’t play the piano?” he asked after a pause.

“No,” said Jinny. “Only the horn.” And she blew gaily upon it: whereupon

to her surprise and satisfaction—for she had forgotten him, and it was

necessary to tie him up against the sheep—Nip appeared, tearing from

the rear. Farmer Gale watched musingly the operation of confining him to

his basket by one of those pieces of hoop-borne rope that had excited

the speculation of Mr. Elijah Skindle.

“I suppose you could play a polka on it,” he remarked.

Jinny obliged with a few bars of the “Buy a Broom.”

“If you had a piano,” he observed with growing admiration, “I expect

you’d soon learn to play it on that.”

Jinny shook her head. “I shall never have the time. There’s the goats,

and the garden, and Gran’fer, and Methusalem——”

“Nearly all g’s,” laughed Farmer Gale, exhilarated by his own erudition.

“And isn’t Methusalem a gee?” flashed Jinny, and exhilarated him further

by her prodigious wit.

They were both smiling broadly as, just outside the market, they came

upon Will leaning against a lime-tree, a pipe between his teeth and a

darkness palpable on his forehead despite its “ginger” aureola.

Jinny’s smile died and her heart thumped. Instantaneously she decided

that as the farmer had seen them together at “The Black Sheep,” to

ignore Will absolutely would be to betray their quarrel to the world.

“Fine morning!” she cried as the vehicles passed. Will sullenly touched

his hat.

He was amazed that the Cornish potentate should countenance her

presence, so incongruous amid this orgie of untempered masculinity, this

medley of unpetticoated humanity of every rank and class, of which

drovers twirling branches or leaning on sticks formed the ground

pattern: small farmers rubbing shoulders with smart-gaitered gentry in

frilled shirts; blue-aproned butchers with scissors at breast jostling

peasants in grimy smock-frocks and squash hats or ruddy, whiskered old

squires and great grazier farmers in blue, gilt-buttoned coats, white

flap buff waistcoats, and white pot or broad-brimmed hats; still more

elegant town types in glossy, straight-brimmed cylinders and

double-breasted, green frock-coats galling the kibes of bucolic,

venerable-bearded ancients in fusty sleeved waistcoats and greasy

high-hats, who blew their noses with black fingers. It was a fantasia of

pipes and caps, of immaculate collars and dirty scarves, of broadcloth

cutaways and filthy Cardigan jackets, of top-booted buckskins and

corduroy trousers tied with string below the knee. As Jinny and Farmer

Gale alighted, and mingled with this grotesque mob swirling around the

pens in the sunshine, Will’s heart was hot with resentment against the

girl who, while rejecting the counsel and co-operation of her old friend

in the great horse-deal, had brazenly accepted the guidance of a

bumptious “furriner.” How shamelessly she walked amid that babel of

moos, baas, grunts, shouts, and bell-ringing, as if here was her natural

place. Really, to see smoke puffing publicly out of her mouth, as it had

puffed privately out of that Polly’s, would hardly be surprising now.

And the men were looking after her, there could be no doubt of that,

appraising her as if she, too, was in the market. He could not but feel

a faint relief that she was under substantial masculine escort, however

abhorred.

The market-place, along which our quite unconscious Jinny was now making

so indiscreet a tourney, was constructed outside the town proper,

bordered on two sides by lime-trees and open to the sky save in the

auction-room and bar, where walls and roofing gave a grateful shade,

though the company in either did not contribute coolness. The cattle

were shuffling about restlessly, jostling, mounting. The store calves

and bullocks lay in pens; the fatted calves had already been sold:

pathetic plumpnesses about to be butchered. Butchers, indeed, were

already emerging from the auction-room leading struggling strap-muzzled

calves by head-ropes, and holding on—for extra precaution—to their

tails.

“Poor creatures!” said Jinny, with tears coming to her eyes.

“Yes, a poor lot!” assented Farmer Gale, and if Will could have felt the

flash of scorn that went through Jinny’s heart, he would have scowled

less. There was a store calf, stamped in blue, so tiny that Jinny longed

to mother it. Here again the farmer blundered: he doubted if anybody

would buy it; at least it would be killed instanter to be mixed with

pork for sausages.

He was a widower, Jinny remembered, and the line in the Spelling-Book

defining that word floated suddenly before her illumined mind:

“Widower—_One who has buried his wife._” There had always seemed to her

something superfluously sinister in that definition—as if the husband

had personally put his wife out of the way, or at least made sure she

was disposed of. Was a man a widower whose wife had been burnt up, she

had wondered whimsically. Or if Miss Gentry had been married and gone to

sea and been duly drowned, would her husband have been free to remarry?

But for Farmer Gale at least, how pat was the definition, she felt. He

assuredly suggested the wilful widower: this man without entrails of

mercy, whether for the poor or for beasts.

She moved away silently, trying to lose him, looking for the horses. She

passed pens of sheep, and dogs (only a few of these, and tied), and cows

with swollen, oozy udders. There was a sheep nibbling at a fallen lime

branch outside its pen, and another shoving hard to displace him. Jinny

picked it up and gave it to this covetous creature, who sniffed and then

turned away. There seemed to be a sort of Spelling-Book moral in it.

Before the pigs (red-crossed and blue-marked) she found Master Peartree

in rapt contemplation.

“The pegs be lookin’ thrifty and prosperous,” he observed, in response

to her asking how _he_ found himself. “They don’t need no auctioneer’s

gammon.”

“No pig does,” punned Jinny.

“Ah, here we are!” said a less welcome voice—Jinny maliciously referred

Farmer Gale’s “we” to his juxtaposition with the pigs. The uneasy

capping and ducking of the shepherd-cowman before his master, and his

moving off towards his own animals, suggested that pigs were a private

passion with Master Peartree. But he had brought up the memory of the

shearing-shed, and with it the renewed thought of Will, and it was a

tenderer thought than for the potentate at her side. Will might be

stubborn and silly, but never, surely, would he deny that no family

should have less than ten shillings a week: she felt relieved she had

broken the ice between them, even though “Fine morning” was only a

little hole in it.

As if echoing her thoughts, “Fine morning!” said the pig-auctioneer to

Farmer Gale. It was a special mark of attention from this

gentlemanly-looking man, elevated on a massive stool, who wore gaiters

and a great gleaming signet-ring that showed as he turned the pages of a

written catalogue. This was kept by elastic strings in a grand calf

cover, though pigskin would have seemed more in keeping. Two acolytes,

standing on the ground, scribbled in their lowliness. Buyers sat on the

rim of the pens, with their feet dangling over the pigs, and the

pig-drovers hovered near, in their long high aprons of coarse brown

sacking.

Soon Farmer Gale became as fascinated as Master Peartree, for the pigs

did indeed look “thrifty and prosperous,” and as the penful was on the

point of falling to a low bid, he nipped in and secured a bargain. While

he was complacently cutting away bristles, signing his acquisition with

his scissors, Jinny stole away, feeling he was safely penned.

IV

Will had long since disappeared from her ken, but when she came to the

long roofed place, open at the side, where beribboned and straw-plaited

hacks and draught-horses were tied to their staples, there he was,

chained just as firmly by a sort of sentinel stubbornness. It was as if

he was saying “Through my body first!” The thrill his proximity gave her

was shot through with a renewed resentment against this obviously

undiminished opposition of his. But she was resolved to meet him with

banter rather than with anger.

“You buying horses?” she said genially.

“No, I am not buying horses!” he answered roughly. “But aren’t you

ashamed to be here—the only one of your sex?”

“Surely not!” said Jinny. “Where’s your eyes?”

He looked round, wonderingly.

“Under your nose!” guided Jinny. “There, isn’t that a mare? And I passed

sows and ewes and heifers by the score.”

“And that’s what you class yourself with? And then you deny you are

lowering yourself!”

“I always lower myself when I get off my cart.”

“Well, you get up again! That’s the best advice I can give you. Drive

home!”

“And shirk my job!”

“_I’ll_ do your job.”

“You! I thought you were not buying horses.”

“You know what I mean. How much does old Flippance want to give?”

“Oh, he’s not so old,” she said evasively. She was scanning the horses

with troubled eye, perturbed even more than by her own affairs by the

thought of the innumerable diseases and defects and doctorings which

might be lurking beneath their sheen of health and vigour. Her innocent

faith undermined by literature and Mr. Flippance’s experience, she had a

cynical sense of horsey hypocrisy, of whited, blacked, or browned

sepulchres, within which fearsome worms burrowed in their millions. She

would have gladly consulted Will, had he not been so tactlessly

intrusive. Even as it was, she murmured encouragingly: “There doesn’t

seem much choice to-day.” Indeed, the animals were mostly huge shire

horses with their heavily feathered fetlocks. Of hackneys there were

only two or three.

“I should take that Suffolk Punch,” advised Will, indicating a chestnut.

“He’ll have the strength to draw the caravan, and doesn’t look so clumsy

and hairy-legged as the others.”

“I like the star on his forehead,” said Jinny. “But I can’t bear a

cropped tail, it’s cruel. Besides, Mr. Flippance hasn’t got a caravan.”

“Well, how does he carry all that truck I saw?”

“Oh, that goes in wagons with horses just hired from town to town. They

don’t even live in a caravan like Mr. Duke’s got. No, but they have a

trap that they drive over in, ahead, and then Mr. Flippance uses the

trap to look for a pitch to hire, or to bring home naphtha for the lamps

or timber for mending the theatre—something always goes wrong, he

says.”

“Then I’d have the Cleveland?”

“Which is the Cleveland?”

“That tall bay with black points and clean legs. I’ve hardly ever seen

one at an Essex fair, but they’re strong as plough-horses and handsome

as hackneys.”

“But don’t you think that couple there are handsomer?”

“The black—of course! They’re a pair of real carriage horses. Splendid

action, I reckon. But Mr. Flippance won’t want anything so showy as

that.”

“Just what a show does want,” laughed Jinny. “You see he also rides

about the town, blowing on the horn and scattering handbills.”

“I didn’t understand that. And can he blow a horn as well?”

“As well as who?”

“As me!” said Will boldly. “And when am I to have my gloves?” He sought

her hand in the press and it was not withdrawn.

“When you go blowing it for Mr. Flippance in his next town,” she laughed

happily.

“Then I must choose the horse I blow behind,” he said with an air of

lightness. “What’s the most old Flippance will go to?”

“Thirty pounds is his last word, I’m afraid.”

“Much too little. But we’ll see. Now I’ll take you back to your cart.”

“What for?” Her hand unclasped. “I’ve got to buy the horse, I must wait

here.”

“But they’ll be taken in there.” He pointed to the cattle

auction-chamber. “And there’s no need for you to bid personally.”

“I shall enjoy bidding.”

“Among all those men? You won’t even get a look in.”

The chamber was indeed besieged by a seething crowd, some standing on

tiptoe, astrain to get their bids marked.

“I’ll borrow one of those pig-dealers’ stools,” she said.

“Do be serious, Jinny.”

“And do you suppose my work is a joke?”

“But you can’t squeeze in that crowd? Suppose we find out the owner and

get one of the black horses by private treaty?”

“And pay the market fee? Not me! Besides, he’ll want a top price and

there’s more fun and chances in bidding. Oh look! that poor Cleveland’s

got himself all tangled up! Do help him!”

It was not easy to release the animal which, having encoiled its legs in

the rope attached to its staple, was getting more and more frightened as

its own efforts lassoed it the tighter. Jinny’s heart beat fast lest

Will should get kicked, and still faster at the nonchalance with which

he accomplished his dangerous task.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly, when the animal stood shaking, but quiet.

“It’s not your horse.”

“But I asked you to do it.”

“Then you might do what I ask _you_?” he retorted.

She frowned. She did not like this tricky tit-for-tat. It was

unchivalrous. It undid his deed of derring-do.

“You must not interfere with my business,” she said severely, and swept

to the nearest door.

“Jinny! Where are you going?” He had followed her.

“To the bar!” she said solemnly, perceiving the nature of the forbidden

chamber. “Why can’t I have a drink and a smoke? What will you take?”

He gasped, believing her serious. So female smoking even in public was

no impossible foreboding. To this buffet, blockaded by laughing,

swilling, tobacco-clouded masculinity, mitigated only—if not indeed

aggravated—by a barmaid, Jinny was actually going to wriggle her way!

And the buffet did not even sell milk!

“You shan’t go,” he said in a low hoarse tone, clutching at her arm. “By

God, you shan’t!”

But he succeeded only in grasping her dangling horn, and, in her dart

forward, it was left in his hand. “I didn’t ask you to ‘take’ that!” she

laughed back as she crossed the threshold. “I meant, what’s your drink?”

“Jinny!” he breathed, his voice frozen.

“Mine’s ink!” she called out gaily, and the males, now aware of her

presence, vied with one another to pass the bottle and pen on the

counter to her, together with the little bowl of sand, all of which she

bore to the quiet side of the room, where a protracted desk supplied

facilities for notes and accounts. Reassured, but still resentful, Will

stood at the door, awkwardly holding her horn with its bit of broken

girdle, and watching her protectively as she scribbled on a piece of

paper, and blotted it with the sand. Then coming back to him, she took

away her horn—not without a reproachful glance at the snapped cord—and

putting her folded paper into his hand instead, glided past him and was

lost in the hurly-burly.

Disconsolate, yet excited, he opened the note, and read this wholly

unexpected quatrain:

SWEARING

_Of all the nauseous complicated crimes_

_That both infect and stigmatize the Times;_

_There’s none that can with impious Oaths compare,_

_Where Vice and Folly have an equal Share._

This rebuke, drawn from the endless thesaurus of “The Universal

Spelling-Book,” and not original even in spelling, Will believed to be

Jinny’s own composition, and as inspired as it was, alas! deserved.

Wonderful that Jinny could sit down in all that turmoil, in that smoky,

gin-laden atmosphere, and pour out these pure bursts of song. Surely

Martin Tupper, the mighty bard of the day, whose renown had reached even

Will’s illiterate ears, could not better them. And what was he, Will,

beside her, he whose own claim to literature rested upon an imaginary

exposition of Daniel! Smarting with self-reproach, he deposited the note

where once her glove had rested—it should be a text of warning

henceforward.

But if she was thus marvellous, still more necessary was it to withdraw

her from these unfitting atmospheres, and he returned more tenaciously

than ever to his equine watch, like a picket in a camp.

V

Meanwhile Jinny had blotted herself out in the crowd around the

sheep-auctioneer, who towered in the midst of his dirty-white sea,

yelling “All going at thirty-five shillings apiece!” or striding from

pen to pen across the bars, while the buyers ruddled their lots with

their mark, and the drovers cleared for him ever fresh passages among

the swirling sheep, and acolytes kept parallel to him outside the fold

with their ink-horns and notebooks.

But she had only fallen from the frying-pan into the oven, for suddenly

she became conscious that Farmer Gale was again at her side.

“Got your horse yet?” he inquired, with his breeziest British smile.

“Sale not on yet,” she answered coldly.

“Then come and see the bullocks sell.”

Jinny, pleading she must go to the horse sale-room, moved away towards

the congested chamber. He followed, smiling.

“Why, that _is_ where they’re selling the bullocks now,” he said.

Her brain was seeking for a further pretext, when she caught sight of

the sentinel Will frowning furiously in her direction. If she slipped in

now, further argument from him would be nipped in the bud, and silently

she followed the robustious widower through the hole he bored into the

seething mass.

The entry of a female attracted no general attention, for it was

impossible for the squeezed buyers to see more than the backs and sides

of their immediate neighbours, even if all eyes had not been on the

auctioneer and on the beasts which occupied the central ring, in the

brief moments of their glory.

He stood at a raised desk, this master of the revels, in his

shirt-sleeves, with a little stick for hammer: a clean-shaven man, with

the back of his long head almost straight, and further lengthened and

straightened by the continuation down it of the central parting of his

neatly combed hair; the face bulging forward and into a massive mouth

and chin. He was flanked by two young bookkeepers, one spotty-faced and

spectacled in a Scotch cap and loud tweeds, and one bareheaded and

demure; and around him on the rising benches of an amphitheatre rose a

mass of masculinity surmounted by small boys. Drovers chevied in the

“lots”—stuck with paper numbers—through large double wooden gates, and

back—after their great moments in the ring—to their pens, through a

smaller folding gate. The beasts did not always listen proudly to their

praises: the more modest, instead of showing off their beauties,

preferred to nose restfully about the straw of the floor, and had to be

prodded into circular activity by the sticks of drovers who, as the

bullocks went sullenly round, looked like a prose variety of picador in

a toy arena. And throughout fell the auctioneer’s patter, sometimes

suave and slow, but for the most part staccato and breathless. “Who will

say seventy shillings? Property of Mr. Purley of Foxearth Farm. And a

crown. You all know Foxearth Farm. You all know the hurdle-maker. And

his herds are even better than his hurdles! Who makes level money?

Going, going——”

“No, don’t _you_ be going,” said Farmer Gale smilingly. For the girl had

begun to edge out. She felt herself uncomfortably pressed. Why, it

almost seemed as if Farmer Gale’s arm were round her waist. Good

heavens, it was! And what was more, his body barred her movement

outwards.

“Take away your arm,” she whispered fiercely.

“I’m protecting you from the crowd,” he whispered back. “They’ll break

your ribs in.”

“Take it away!” she hissed. But he feigned not to hear, and his eye

being now on the arena, not on her, she was too shy to struggle and make

a sensation. The horn in her hand also impeded her efforts to extricate

herself. Furious and flushing, she was forced to stand there, while the

auctioneer’s prosy patter beat down on her brain in a maddening

ceaseless pour: “Selling to the highest bidder—no reserve. A big

bullock. In your hands. Start the bidding, please. To be sold without

reserve, I say. How much? Come on! Look at his fat! Thank you. Seven

pound, fifteen—nine pound, ten—a great big bullock. I’m selling him

without reserve. He is to be sold whatever he fetches. Ten pound, two

and six. Going! No, not gone yet! Going——!”

“I must go!” repeated Jinny. “I must inspect the horses.”

“You’ll see them better in the ring here.”

“Let me go! I’ll never drive to chapel with you again!”

“Why not, Jinny?” He bent down with sudden passion, all the cautious

Cornishman’s long-wavering desires clenched by the discovery of her high

educational endowments and concreted by actual contact with the

desirable waist. “Why not go to chapel together and be done with it,

once for all?”

“Done with what?” she murmured, reddening.

“Separating. Let me keep off the crowd always.”

“Hush! They’ll hear you.”

“No, they won’t. What do you say?”

“Be quiet! I want to hear the bidding.”

“Shall we publish the banns?”

Jinny closed her lips obstinately.

“Won’t you speak? You know I can buy out half Little Bradmarsh.”

In her silence the voice of the auctioneer possessed the situation.

“The best heifer for the last—maiden heifer, beautiful quality.

Fourteen pound. Marvellous creature, marvellously cheap. Won’t anybody

start me?” The drover prodded the prodigy up, and she trotted round

dismally.

“Fifteen,” cried a squeaky voice.

“Fifteen,” echoed the auctioneer, cheering up. But his gloom soon

returned. For the bidding refused to advance. “Being badly sold, this

heifer,” he wailed.

“By crum, he’s right!” quoth the Cornishman, pricking up his ears.

“Sixteen pound!” he cried aloud, and was already congratulating himself

upon his bargain, when, like the voice of doom, came the squeaky

“Seventeen!”

Farmer Gale was piqued. “Eighteen,” he said surlily.

“Twenty!”

It was a staggering blow. But it only raised the farmer’s blood.

“Guineas!” he cried.

“Twenty-two pounds!” chirped the voice.

“Twenty-two pounds!” repeated the auctioneer insatiably.

Beads of perspiration and hesitation appeared on the farmer’s brow. In

his concentration on the problem his arm relaxed. Jinny stepped aside,

and men unconsciously made way for her.

“Guineas!” cried the farmer.

“Twenty-two guineas!” repeated the auctioneer. “A beautiful maiden

heifer—never had a calf. Going——”

But this time Jinny was really gone. She would not even risk waiting

outside to hear the result, but in generous gratitude at her escape, she

hoped he would at least secure the maiden heifer.

VI

The sight of Will still at his post suggested to her with a little qualm

that he was not so wrong: these male environments were not without their

drawbacks.

“Those horses seem to fascinate you,” she said, with a little tremor in

her voice. Whether Will or the violence just done to her was the cause

of it, she did not quite know. But her mood was melting and her eye the

brighter for a soft moisture.

But how was Will to follow her vagaries and adventures?

“That’s my business,” he answered gruffly.

“I thought it was mine,” she laughed. She was quite prepared now to make

it a joint affair.

“You know my opinion on that,” he said icily.

“You haven’t changed it yet?” she bantered.

“Why, what should happen in these few minutes to make me change it?”

“Things do happen in a few minutes,” she said mysteriously. “Why, I

might have come back and bought up the whole show.” She waved her horn

comprehensively over the horses.

“What rubbish you do talk!” he said impatiently.

“Do I?” She fired up. “There’s others think differently.”

“If they think differently, it’s because they think lightly of you.”

“Lightly, indeed!”

“Yes—they do. To drag you into an indecent sale-room!”

“Indecent?” She flushed, wondering if Will had seen that circumambient

arm.

“It’s all indecent—all that talk about heifers. I don’t wonder you

blush.”

She laughed, relieved. “I’m blushing for you. You do talk such rubbish!”

“There you go with your cheek!”

“It’s only what you just said to me.”

“I said it because you do talk rubbish.”

“And you talk rubbish in saying it.”

“Well, go to those who talk sense, Miss Boldero!” And he pulled out his

pipe and matches with a symbolic gesture.

“What an obstinate creature you are, Will!”

“Me obstinate! Why, ain’t it your obstinacy that keeps you here, when

I’m ready to do your job?”

“I told you I preferred to do my own jobs.” And with that she went

straight up to the black hackneys, and while Will puffed volcanically,

she learnedly examined their teeth through tear-misted eyes that saw

neither incisors nor age-marks. Then, after carefully prodding their

ribs and punching and poking them about, as she had seen purchasers do

with bullocks, she swept haughtily towards the auction arena, but afraid

of encountering the farmer, she hovered uncertainly on the threshold,

feeling like a bundle of straw between two donkeys.

Gradually she realized, and with enhanced resentment, that _she_ was the

donkey; that both these men had deceived her in representing the

cattle-arena as the selling-place for the horses. By the crowd that

began to accumulate round the horses, and to blot out the patient

sentinel, as the hour for their sale approached, it became plain that

they would be sold where they were tied, and presently the motley crowd,

swollen by many of the cattle-auctioneer’s audience, thrilled with the

coming of this heavy-jowled worthy, who had not turned a hair of his

neatly combed chevelure.

The biddings were not brisk. To Jinny’s joy only the heavier animals,

the plough-horses and the cart-horses, seemed in demand; the cobs and

the ponies went for a song. The sable steeds she had selected as the

only suitable ones came late—most of the animals had been released from

their staples and led off by their new masters. To her dismay the

hackneys were put up as a pair, and all her pride seemed falling into

ruin. Fortunately, not provoking a bid, they were then put up

separately, and Jinny set the ball rolling for the first with a brazen

offer of ten pounds.

For a moment she thought gleefully that the horse was to be hers at

that—for nobody there seemed in quest or in need of carriage

horses—but under the auctioneer’s scoff a few bargain-hunters soon

raised it to twenty, and then to Jinny’s alarm—for her margin was

getting dangerously narrow—to twenty-four. At twenty-five the

bargain-hunters fell off, and a new voice intervened—a husky voice that

seemed to mean business, and whose every counter-bid filled her with

dismay. At its twenty-eight pounds the auctioneer still upheld his stick

with scorn and incredulity. She was almost at her bids’ end.

“Twenty-nine pounds,” she cried crushingly. This time the voice seemed

indeed silenced. She fully expected the stick to fall. But at the first

“Going,” though there had been no sound, the auctioneer cried cheerily,

“Thirty pounds.” Evidently somebody else had nodded or held up a finger.

Inflamed by the fever of the struggle, she was impelled to risk even her

own earnings, if Flippance would not go so far. “Thirty-one pounds,” she

cried ringingly. “Thirty-one pounds,” echoed the auctioneer with a

promising accent of finality. “Thirty-two pounds,” he added instantly,

and this silent competition was even more crushing than the huskiest

bid. It put out her flame of recklessness, and her heart sank with the

stick, as despite all the auctioneer’s derisory deprecation, that wooden

finger of fate fell finally at this truly absurd figure.

Then the name of the unseen silent buyer transpired. “Mr. William

Flynt!” proclaimed a familiar voice. A blaze of positive hatred ran

through all Jinny’s being. The brute! The obstinate pig! To come

interfering with her daily work, with her bread and butter! To ride his

will roughshod over hers! And not only roughrider, but coward, sneak,

traitor! Had he not wormed and wheedled out of her the limit of her

commission and thus romped in, an easy winner! And he would take his

purchase to Mr. Flippance, she supposed. Yes, he was already paying in

full—she saw him now, near one of the clerks, drawing a pocket-book out

of the region of his black heart; he was in a hurry, he would hasten

with the animal to Tony Flip. But not so fast, O dashing young man from

Canada! Flippance is a man of honour, he will repudiate the purchase.

And the second hackney still remains. The biter is bit—the pit you have

digged shall engulf you.

But what was Jinny’s horror and indignation when this young man from

Canada, now shamelessly revealed, instead of going off with his spoil to

Mr. Flippance, remained and ran up the second horse with his serpent’s

tongue at still greater speed, as now cocksure of her limit. This time

in her fury she ventured as far as thirty-five—it was useless. With a

recklessness still more magnificent he cried “Forty,” and with a chill

at her heart in curious contrast with the glow of hate at it, she felt

that all was over. Was it of any use bidding even for the few mediocre

animals still possible? Would not this brutal monopolist buy up the

whole bunch—even as _she_ had, oddly enough, hinted a few minutes

before about doing? Yes, there was nothing his masterful obstinacy would

boggle at in its resolve to crush her will. He still stood by the

horse-enclosure in unrelaxed vigilance. Before she could arrive at any

decision, her mind was still further unhinged by the simultaneous

appearance of Nip and the advent of pandemonium.

Whether it was Nip that had produced the pandemonium, or the pandemonium

that had liberated Nip, Jinny never knew. The fact was, however, that

Farmer Gale, waking to find himself outbidden for the heifer and

disappointed of his maiden, had retreated fuming to his trap, and

hearing Nip’s revolutionary yaps for freedom in the adjacent cart, had

loosed him out of some vague instinct of malice—kindness he called it

to himself, so unacknowledged was his desire to thwart the will of the

creature’s mistress. A final kick administered to the retreating

jump—also apparently as a kindly encouragement to the freed dog’s

progress—had not proved conducive to the equilibrium of an animal

already deranged by a long-iterated grievance and an unexpected freedom,

and his helter-skelter pelt through the market-place not unnaturally

startled the nerves of not a few fellow-quadrupeds, already shaken by

the strange journeyings and novel experiences of the day. But it was not

until the sheep were reached, that Nip’s passing became a public

episode.

There had even before been numberless difficult scenes with the sold

lots; the effort to muster them for their new journeyings had

sufficiently taxed the lungs and tempers of men and sheep-dogs. When Nip

appeared, the normally stolid Master Peartree was waving a giant red

handkerchief and screaming wildly, while demented-seeming drovers,

formed into a half-ring, danced and shrieked like savages at a religious

service, and waved sticks with a ritual air, and the sheep-dog leapt

round and round, chevying the flock in the desired direction. In this

delicate crisis, Nip’s rush of recognition at Master Peartree proved the

last straw. One super-terrified wether threw the flock into a panic. The

sheep rushed to and fro and everywhere (save where the sticks and

shrieks pointed); and going thus everywhere, they went nowhere, jumping

on and over one another’s backs as in a game of leap-lamb. Some darted

back into alien pens, and the sheep-dog, itself distracted, leapt from

back to back of these, baying and menacing with feverish futility. It

was like a stormy sea of sheep, in which man was tossed about as in a

tempest. There were sheep standing on their hind legs as if dancing,

there were men clinging on to these legs or to tails or to rumps, and

pushing, pulling, and wrestling with them, but never ceasing to yell and

chevy. Finally a rescue party appeared with a five-barred gate, which

they moved this way and that, striving to cut off at least one of the

ways of escape. But this only drove more sheep back into the wrong pens,

where they seemed hopelessly mixed up with lots still unsold. Jinny had

never imagined sheep such lively and individual lunatics. Now the

intruders were being dragged out by the wool of the head or the rump, or

half-carried, or wholly kicked; again the five-barred gate was brought

into play, this time to keep them away from the pens, and then, wherever

the eye turned, were these tempestuous billows of sheep. They bounded,

reared, wrestled, danced, pranced, flew wildly at tangents: some escaped

towards the town, and everywhere men screamed, scurried, bellowed, waved

hands, or brandished sticks. Nip, his head equally lost, seemed to be

doing every one of these things at once, whether ovine or human. And

Jinny, in her anxiety to capture him, to remove him, unseen, from the

Witches’ Sabbath she feared he had called into being, forgot all about

the other possible, if inferior, horses. By the time she had refastened

Nip and returned to the sale, the stick had fallen for the last bid. She

was just in time to see Will springing on one barebacked steed, and

leading his beribboned brother by a cord. And despite all her anger and

contempt, she could not avoid a thrill of admiration for the grace of

his poise and the fearlessness of his carriage. And a dull aching pain

began at her heart. She felt she wanted something; she had missed

getting something—and obscurely she told herself it was the horses he

was leading away. Yes, as a Carrier she was a failure.

VII

And then suddenly the jovial figure of the Showman panted into view. His

face was unshorn, unwashed even, although abundantly irrigated with

perspiration, and he wore a low-crowned vast-brimmed hat and an

unseasonable fur-lined cloak reaching almost to his slippers and

fastened at the neck by a brass buckle. Although Jinny always had a soft

place in her maternal heart for Mr. Flippance, nobody could have been

more unwelcome at this moment of her professional humiliation. But

before she could confess her failure, Tony Flip gasped out: “A horse! A

horse! My kingdom not to have it!”

“How do you mean?”

“Am I too late? Have you bought it yet?”

“Not yet!” said Jinny.

“Thank God!” He grasped effusively at her hand, but encountering the

horn first, shook that instead, without apparently noticing the

difference. “Just as I woke up, it popped into my nut that this was the

morning of the cattle fair. Out of bed I flew like from that bed in the

Crystal Palace that chucks you out by a spring, and though I mayn’t have

beat the half-mile record, I’m beat myself! Whew! Not a bad gag, that!”

And mopping his brow, he grinned through a grimy handkerchief.

“I thought you looked odd,” said Jinny, equally relieved.

“Yes, I know my collar’s a rag. But better sweat than debt, eh?”

“It’s not your collar—it’s seeing you out of your dressing-gown at this

hour!”

“You’re a quiz, that’s what you are,” laughed Tony.

“Never mind! That cloak comes nigh it, and you’ve still got your carpet

slippers.”

“Have I? O Lord! I thought the road was feeling hard. Is that a bar I

see before me?”

“It is,” said Jinny severely. “But while you’re still sober, perhaps you

will tell me why you’ve changed your mind about the horse?”

“Because I’ve done with marionettes. I’m going back to the legitimate.”

Jinny was puzzled. “To your wife, do you mean? I thought she was dead.”

Tony roared with laughter. “You little country mouse! And yet you’re

right. The legitimate is the missus I should never have left—the drama

with a big D. I don’t mean the drama with swear words—ha, ha, ha! but

the real live article. You see, Duke and me, we’ve agreed to swop back.”

“What for?”

“What for? Why, that’s just the trouble. For a consideration, says that

son of a horse-leech. And I say that’s blood-sucking. Good idea! Why

shouldn’t you be arbitrator?”

The word, which was unfortunately absent from the Spelling-Book,

suggested nothing to her but being hanged, drawn, and quartered, like a

rebel whom Gran’fer had once seen executed. But she was afraid of being

again set down as a country mouse, so she replied cautiously: “I haven’t

the time!”

“Oh, I’ll pay you your time. Yes, you’d be the ideal arbitrator,” cried

Mr. Flippance, catching fire at his own idea. “To begin with, you know

nothing about it. So that’s settled, and you shall drive me to Duke’s

caravan this very morning.”

“Not if I have to wait for your drink.”

“The way you drive a man not to drink is awful,” he groaned. “Never

mind. I’ve got cool again. Talking to you is as good as a drink.

Guardian angel!” He squeezed her horn.

“You see,” he narrated, as they drove townwards, “Duke turned up here

with the Flippance Fit-Up on Saturday night, and struck an awful frost.”

“So he told me,” said Jinny. “I met him yesterday when I came out of

chapel, and I told him what a roaring trade you were doing.”

“My preserver! Then it’s to you I owe it he’s hankering for his own show

back again! Not that he could expect to do any business in my own town,

or indeed any other. He forgot that while I, unseen, can be Duke, the

public won’t look at him for a moment as Flippance. He takes the name of

Flippance in vain—the public knows the difference between a barnstormer

and their own Tony. To say nothing of that mincing little Duchess after

my full-throated, full-bosomed Polly. Poor dear Polly—pining away

pulling strings!”

“Why, she told me,” said the astonished Jinny, “that she wouldn’t go

back on the stage for all the treasures of the Crystal Palace.”

“Ah, that’s her unselfishness—bless her!—her own crystal soul. She

knows how the stage tries her pa’s nerves. But haven’t I stood by her

side as we jogged the figures and seen her poor phiz working at the

thought of being cut off from her public like in a diving-bell? She

takes things hard, does Polly, not like the Duchess, who’s got no more

temperament than a tinned sardine. You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

“If you mean Mrs. Duke, she was with him yesterday. A pretty, blue-eyed

woman, with golden hair.”

“Oh, is it golden this season? But have you seen her act, I mean?”

“I’ve never seen a play at all!”

“Tut, tut, tut! Then you’ve never seen Me!”

“Oh—you seem to me a play all the time,” she said candidly.

He was not displeased. “Then you do have an idea what a play is?”

“I’ve seen _Punch and Judy_—and the Christmas mummers.”

He laughed. “Well, if Polly was working _Punch and Judy_ from behind,

there’d be more life and go in her than there is to the Duchess when

she’s on the stage playing Juliet. The public won’t pay to see a china

doll. But my Polly! I tell you that standing with the strings in her

hand, with nobody’s eye on her but mine and her Maker’s, and in a space

where there isn’t room to swing a cat, I’ve seen that girl raging and

shouting and tearing about with the passion of the scene till I’ve had

to wake up too, and we’ve gone at it ding-dong, hammer and tongs. And

with three figures each to work, and voices to keep changing, it’s no

mean feat, I can tell you. Duke and his Duchess now, when they worked

the figures, used to just stand like stocks, saying the words, no

expression or movement, except in the marionettes.”

“But if the public sees only the marionettes——!” said Jinny.

Mr. Flippance shook his head. “There’s no art in cold blood. Not that

marionette art hasn’t got its own special beauties, and I freely admit

that in puppetry proper I’m not in it with Duke, who was born into the

business, and who cut and fitted the figures himself. Lazy though you

think me, how I’ve sweated to get those things right! What an ungrateful

swine the public can be for one’s pearls!”

“What kind of pearls?” asked Jinny.

“Why, when a character takes up a glass of wine, for instance, and

drinks it.”

“Well, I shouldn’t applaud that,” laughed Jinny.

“There you are!” he said with gloomy triumph. “The public can’t see the

cleverness of it. But if you remember the delicacy it takes to

manipulate the figure from behind, to make it clutch the glass just

right, instead of pawing the air, to make that glass come accurately to

the mouth, you’ll see the countless chances against perfection. Talk of

the corkscrew equilibrist at Astley’s! Why, Jinny, when that glass sets

itself down again without accident, there ought to be applause to make

the welkin ring. But not a hand, not a hand!”

“Well, but it can’t seem very wonderful from the front,” said Jinny.

“It would if people had brains to think. For every joint in the human

body there’s a joint in Duke’s marionette, and for every joint in Duke’s

marionette there’s a separate string to pull. Every art has its own

ideal, and for a puppet to sit down safely is a greater success than for

a Kean to play Shylock. Though, of course, all this must be Greek to

you.”

“But when I’m thinking of the _fun_ of _Punch and Judy_,” said Jinny

shrewdly, “I can’t think of the cleverness of the showman pulling the

strings—otherwise I should forget the figures weren’t alive, nor the

story real—the two things contradict one another.”

“By Jove! I think you’ve hit it,” said Mr. Flippance, more gloomily than

ever. “They take the standard of drama—not of mechanical miracles. And

that’s why they applaud most at the easiest effects, just shouting and

blood and thunder, and that’s why I’m sick, I mean, why Polly is sick of

the whole business. Take our tight-rope dancer now. I don’t say she’s as

graceful as a live dancer at Richardson’s, or pirouettes like the Cairo

Contortionist of my young days at Vauxhall. But she’s far more

wonderful. A live tight-rope dancer can, after all, only fall downwards

if she makes a slip. But ours, instead of tumbling down, might fly up

like a balloon, or even just miss the tight-rope and dance on nothing

like you see a murderer at Newgate. But the public take the standard of

the ballet or the queens of the tight-rope, and instead of giving us a

hand for the cleverness in the making and dressing of the puppet, and

another hand for the putting life into it, and a third hand for the

dexterity of the manipulation, there’s times when we get no more

recognition than if ’twas a monkey-on-a-stick. I tried to educate ’em by

letting ’em see the strings or the wires—I mustn’t tell an outsider

what they are exactly—I flooded my stage with light. Duke, now, used to

keep his scene particularly dark with the _fantoccini_.”

“What’s fantokeeny?” asked Jinny, imitating his mispronunciation as best

she could.

“They’re the figures that are more mechanism than character—balancers,

pole-carriers, stilt-walkers, spiral ascensionists, and this tight-rope

dancer I’m telling you of. Duke’s idea was to keep the mechanism dark.”

“That seems to me best,” said Jinny.

“I don’t agree,” said Mr. Flippance. “There’s the scenic effects to

consider. Darken your scene and you hide it.”

“But if you light it, you show up the way it’s done,” Jinny urged.

“Unless you show ’em the way it’s done, how can they appreciate the way

you do it? But there, I’m done with it! Let Duke have his pony. Polly

shall tread the boards once more.”

“Does he want you to give him a pony then to change back?”

“That’s it, the son of a Shylock.”

“Then you will want a horse after all?”

“A pony—you little innocent—means twenty-five pounds. I suppose,

though, that’s about the value of a pony.”

“It depends who’s bidding against you,” said Jinny ruefully.

“Well, anyhow, that’s what the bloodsucker wants—the twenty-five pounds

he gave me he wants back again.”

“But if he gave it you, why isn’t it fair to give it back?”

“Ah! You’re beginning to arbitrate, are you? Well, then! It isn’t fair

because I get back the Flippance Fit-Up tarnished and depreciated by the

performances of that howling amateur and his squeaking doll of a

Duchess. Besides, I don’t want the ‘Fit-Up’ particularly, only my

trade-mark back, the world-famous word, Flippance, for I am going to

stay the whole year here in Chipstone—you see what lots of people there

are on market days—-Mother Gander’s buying a bigger hall for you

Peculiars—haven’t you heard?—and me and Charley have worked it with

her to sell me the old chapel. I’ll easily get it mortgaged, licensed,

knocked into shape, and enlarged—that piece of ground between the gate

and the doors is wasted at present, and there’s an American capitalist

keen to come in—I met him just now riding a black horse and leading

another—and what better omen could man desire? The Flippance Palace I

shall call my theatre—suggests the Hyde Park success, d’ye see? And

when that Crystal show is over—it won’t run beyond October—I’ll have

the Queen’s elephant standing in my lobby! Lord, it’ll draw all Essex!

Chipstone’ll become the capital!”

These sudden pieces of information left Jinny gasping. The old chapel

thus whisked away from under her feet, and turned into a gigantic

Punch-and-Judy show sent her world reeling; while Will, transformed into

a theatre proprietor, seemed rapt away to unimaginable heights—or

depths. But she did not quite believe it all.

“And what does Miss Flippance say?” she murmured.

“Polly? She’ll be off her nut with joy. Why, she’s such a glutton for

work, is that girl, that when we played _The Mistletoe Bough_ she used

to play Lady Agnes in Act I and her spirit in Act II (after she’s killed

by being shut up in the box, you know), and actually double the part

with that of her maid, Maud, who has two quick changes from jacket and

petticoat to tunic and trunks, and back again to bodice and skirt, not

to mention slipping to and fro ’twixt spirit and flesh. She’s pining

away to a spirit herself, poor dear, for lack of her real work. Only we

mustn’t break it to her before the deed is done—or rather signed. The

poor girl would insist on sacrificing herself. But after all I’ve saved

thirty pounds—you realize I won’t need a horse now—so even if I pay

him twenty-five, I make a fiver. Not a bad morning’s work, eh, my dear?

We’ll get a good stock company and give ’em everything from the Bard to

burletta, and I’ve got some lovely ideas for taking plays out of Mr.

Dickens’s novels. Oh, we’ll wake up the old place. Charley knows some

local girls that would come in splendidly for ballets and choruses, and

there’s a wonderful scene-painter, too, down here—a chap I knew at the

‘Eagle’ in London—he’s lost his job and come down to his folks to get

cured—his hand shakes a bit still, but he’s a marvel, I promise you,

the days he’s not sewn up.”

Accepting this synonym for intoxication as referring to the medical

operations upon the unfortunate artist, Jinny received the statement

with an admiring commiseration.

“And haven’t you got a friend, a wonderful expert in costumes?” Tony

rattled on.

“Me?” she murmured, puzzled.

“A sort of bearded lady from a French convent, a cranky old Catholic who

talks with angels, but is a dab all the same at dressmaking——!”

“You don’t mean Miss Gentry?”

“That’s the name. We’ll appoint her wardrobe mistress.” Never had Jinny

known him so happy and gaseous—and, paradoxically enough, the more he

poured out, the more inflated he got!

“Miss Gentry’ll never enter a theatre,” said Jinny assuredly.

“We shall see. Wardrobe Mistress to the Flippance Palace, Chipstone.

Think how that will improve her billheads! And there’s you, too! Why

should you waste a first-class stage presence on carrying? You carry

yourself too well for that, eh? Ha, ha, ha! A thinking part, perhaps, to

begin with, but with your good speaking voice——”

Before Jinny had encountered the full shock of this new proposition, Mr.

Flippance broke off and besought her frenziedly to drive down a side

street. As she obeyed, she realized that they had just escaped

Polly—though a Polly hardly recognizable in that houri in white,

creamily jacketed, bonneted, gloved, and, above all, veiled, whom only

her massive tread betrayed as charmless.

“You see,” explained Polly’s pa, “it doesn’t do to argue with women

you’re fond of: you’ve just got to do what’s best for ’em. Duke now,

he’s very weak with women: ’twixt you and I, he only got my Fit-Up

because the Duchess, tired of working in the dark and of blushing

unseen, wanted to show off what you call her blue eyes and golden hair.

She tried pulling his strings—see?—and he, having no backbone, jigged

about at her pleasure. But now, to my thinking, Duke’s found out what a

fool she’s made of him and of herself, too. For, of course, she’s mucked

up his business. Polly mayn’t be a Venus, but she’s stunning in her

make-ups—I assure you such a great artist is that woman, that seeing

her standing in the wings at the first dress rehearsal, I’ve more than

once fallen in love with her myself—till, of course, she opened her

mouth. Yes, Polly can always have blue eyes and golden hair, but the

Duchess will never have talent if she rehearses till doomsday.”

“Then is Mr. Duke satisfied to go back to the illegitimate?” asked

Jinny.

He laughed at the word. “To the marionettes? That’s what Duke wants the

twenty-five pounds for,” he answered. “He’s lost heavily, and he’ll be

able to show her a _quid pro quo_—or rather twenty-five of ’em—ha, ha,

ha! All the same, we’d better not talk business if the Duchess happens

to be at home. She may have her hand too tight on his strings.”

“But what shall we do if she’s in?”

“I shall only say I’ve looked in to congratulate her on her successes!”

“Oh!” Jinny was seriously shocked, and Mr. Flippance, realizing that her

conscience was as “country” as her vocabulary, had the shrewdness to say

he was only joking. “Besides,” he added, “she’s sure not to be at home

in the morning.”

“Why not?”

“Because she won’t have her hair on.”

“But how could she go out then without it?”

Tony made as if to pinch her cheek, as if nothing else could adequately

express his acute sense of her simplicity, but she guarded deftly with

the horn; rapping him, indeed, on the knuckles with it.

“Why, Jinny, you hurt me,” he said ruefully.

“Well, remember I’m not a marionette.”

“You’re certainly not a woman of the world. The Duchess wouldn’t let us

in, I mean, but that’s just what we want, provided we can get Duke to

exit.”

In another minute or two she drove him up to the back of “The Learned

Pig,” and alighting, they picked their way through the undulating and

muddy enclosure, grass-grown, and strewn with logs, where the caravan

was stationed. There was really a pig there (duly styed in his very

dirty academy), besides pecking poultry and pathetic rabbit-hutches

agleam with eager sniffing noses, and a flutter of washing, and two

shabby traps, holding up their shafts like beggars’ arms. But the

caravan itself illumined the untidy space with its gay green paint, its

high yellow wheels, its spick-and-span air, culminating in the lace

curtain of its tiny arched window. Mr. Flippance dragged his slippers up

the step-ladder, and Jinny, having by this time gathered what an

arbitrator was, followed in his wake, prepared to undertake this or any

other job.

But the Duchess did let them in—more, she opened the door herself,

looking indeed too lovely for anything but a doll, and suggesting by her

rising and falling eyelids, her smiling lips, and her mobile hands that

she was equipped with all the most expensive devices.

Duke, habited in an old-fashioned blue coat with brass buttons, was

discovered poring at a desk over a long, narrow account book: he was an

elderly and melancholy young man, with bristly black-and-white hair and

small pig-eyes set close together. The stamp of aspiration and defeat

was set pathetically upon the sallow face he turned over his shoulder to

his visitors.

Jinny was not edified by Mr. Flippance’s pretence that she—Jinny—was

the sole ground for the visit. She had, he said, been driving him home

from the market, where he had gone to dispose of a horse, and he had

taken the liberty of bringing her to see their “wonderful” caravan,

finding, to his amazement, that she had never been inside. For once the

stock Essex epithet was justified—it was indeed a “wonderful” caravan,

and the interior so took up her attention that for some time she failed

to follow the conversation, though she had a dim uneasy sense that it

continued—as it began—with scant regard to the ethics of the

Spelling-Book. The gay paint and the neat lace curtains had prepared her

for an elegance, and even an airiness, that were not to be found within

the caravan. But little else seemed lacking. For into this cramped

wheeled chamber, looking scarce larger than her own cart, and certainly

not so large as Commander Dap’s cabin in the Watch Vessel, was packed

not only a complete cottage with its parlour, living-room, bedroom,

scullery, and kitchen, but the mantelpieces and chests of drawers were

as crowded with china dogs and shepherdesses as Blackwater Hall itself,

besides a wealth of pictures, objects of art, posters, and inhabited

birdcages, to which Daniel Quarles’s domain could lay no claim. Not that

there was really more than one undivided space, or that you could tell

where one room ended and the other began. Nevertheless, all the

different sections were clearly visible, though a square yard here or

there did double or treble service, forming part of this or that room

according as you looked at it. Most clearly marked, of course, was the

bedroom, consisting of a raised, neatly counterpaned bed, like an upper

berth in a ship, and a chest of drawers topped with ornaments, though

the kitchen with its grate and oven and flap-table ran it close, in

every sense of the phrase. Amid these poky surroundings, the Duchess’s

blue eyes and golden hair shone so sunnily and veraciously—taken

unawares as she seemed—that Jinny, ignorant she was expecting a

visitor, felt that Mr. Flippance was as unjust of judgment as he was

loose of statement.

But an interior so foreign to her experience affected her with all the

pleasurable interest of drama, apart from the comedy of which she felt

it to be the setting, as, awaking again to the conversation, she heard

the two males still keeping it carefully away from the negotiation

pending between them, and evidently hard exercised—despite gin from an

improbable corner cupboard—to keep the ball of nothingness rolling.

Painful silences fell, which a linnet and a goldfinch mule strove

loyally to fill, but which remained so awkward that she herself was

constrained to enter into the conspiracy, though only by way of genuine

admiration. Admiration of the caravan—a ready-made thing that went with

Duke—was by no means, however, the admiration the Duchess wanted, and

as she failed to extract it from poor Mr. Flippance, fidgeting under

Jinny’s Puritan eye, she fell back on a tribute of her own to herself,

recounting tediously the triumphs of her tour, and calling on her

partner for corroboration, which he supplied in joyless monosyllables.

All Flippance’s interjections with a view to stem the stream and divert

the conversation to a pretext for Duke’s exit with him were like straws

tossed before a torrent. But presently there came relief—though the

plot thickened, Jinny felt. There was a sound of footsteps on the

ladder, and, “Ah, there’s Polly!” the monologist broke off.

If Jinny was already steeped in a sense of the dramatic, if, stimulated

by the novel setting, she had begun to feel that in such cross-currents

and mutual deceptions must lie the substance of that unknown article of

commerce these people lived by—a play—how strongly was this intuition

confirmed and this sense enhanced when Mr. Flippance, whispering in

apparent facetiousness, “I’m in my slippers—she’ll rag me,” kicked them

off under a chair, slid back mahogany panels below the bed, disclosing a

lower berth, and tumbled in, with his finger roguishly on his lips,

closing the panels from within!

“_The Mistletoe Bough!_” he sibilated. So there it was! They were

actually imitating a play before her very eyes. Duke and the Duchess,

grinning, drew the panels tighter. The theatre was so in their blood,

Jinny felt, that these things came as natural to them as carrying to

her.

It was thus that Jinny saw her first farce—unless the high tragedy of

_Punch and Judy_ be degraded by that name.

VIII

Polly, it soon transpired, was come to the midday dinner with her

friend, and the dinner itself was coming in presently from “The Learned

Pig.” The real purpose of the invitation was, it transpired equally,

that Polly might explain to the Duchess the reading of a part alleged to

be confused in the manuscript acquired with the Flippance Fit-Up: she

was obviously fishing for tips. While these things were transpiring,

poor Flippance in his fur was perspiring. Gradually Jinny saw a rift

appearing in the bed-panels and widening to a cautious chasm of a few

inches. It made her feel choky herself, especially as the caravan’s

little window was closed. She signed apprehensively to Mr. Duke, who,

however, was already revolving feverishly how to clear the stage for

himself and his fellow-negotiator. And presently he broke into the

feminine dialogue with, “I’m sure, dearest, Polly wouldn’t mind acting

that bit for you. But there ain’t room for Polly’s genius here—she’d be

breaking up the happy home! Hadn’t you better go into the inn-parlour,

Bianca? There’ll be nobody there yet.”

The Duchess might have lacked talent, but she had not played in farces

without learning how to behave in them: so without even needing a wink

from her spouse, she made a kindly exit behind Polly, not, however,

without turning back a grinning doll’s head at Mr. Flippance’s beaded

countenance emerging gaspingly from his berth. But Jinny, who had

already witnessed comedy and farce, was now more conscious of the

tragedy of the situation than of its humours, as she saw the Duchess

tripping down the ladder, with silken stockings revealed by the raised

skirt. It seemed to Jinny that the poor lady was tripping thus blithely

to her dark doom, behind the scenes of the puppet show; that her blue

eyes and golden hair had flaunted their last upon the stage. And the

irony of her grinning exit was accented by the manuscript in her hand:

she was going off to study a part she would nevermore play. It all gave

Jinny a sense of the Duchess being herself a puppet, with an ironic fate

pulling the strings, and she was frightened by a thought hitherto beyond

the reach of her soul; by a dim feeling that perhaps she too—and

everybody else—was similarly mocked. Who was perpetually jerking her

towards that young man, and then jerking her back? What force was always

putting into her mouth words of fleer and flout, and pulling away the

hand she yearned to lay in his?

“Whew!” exclaimed Mr. Anthony Flippance, as Jinny shut the door safely

on the Duchess—for that lady never shut doors, partly because the

process interfered with the sweep of one’s exit, partly because what

concerned a scene from which she was absent never entered her golden

head.

“Whew!” repeated Mr. Flippance, scrambling out. “I know now what Lady

Agnes felt like. ‘_Help, Lovel!—Father, help!—I faint—I die—Oh!

Oh!_’ But I’m disappointed in Polly,” he added, diving under a chair.

“Fancy being all her life on the stage, and not espying these slippers!”

He dug his feet into them.

“There’s no time for joking,” said Duke anxiously, as he tugged open the

drawer of a desk in his “parlour.” “I suppose Jinny is in the know?”

“Jinny’s come as arbitrator!”

“What!” Duke wheeled round, his hair still more on end.

“Get on with your mystery-desk. It stands to reason a runaway financial

imagination like yours needs a brake.”

“Ain’t you brake enough?” Mr. Duke’s tone was bitter.

“And you want me to be broke!” retorted Tony. “I give you my beautiful

marionettes, life-sized and life-painted, all carved by the best

maker——”

“Oh, I know all about that!” interrupted Duke impatiently.

“Well, you’re not going to deny your own skill, I hope?”

Duke glared impotently with his little pig-eyes.

“And with the costliest costumes,” Tony went on blandly. “And all these

puppets moreover with the latest mechanical contrivances, regardless of

expense——”

“And don’t I give you the finest goodwill in East Anglia,” burst in Mr.

Duke, “the Flippance Fit-Up with all its plays, prestige, and unique

takings?”

“One thing at a time, old cock. Packed into a box that itself opens out

and forms part of the stage, combining portability of props with——”

“Do dry up!” cried the maddened Duke. “If you’re not quick, Bianca will

be back.”

“What’s that to me? To cut it short, I give you the finest marionette

show in the world, with scenery, sky-borders, and plays complete, and an

old-established reputation, a show that has played before the crowned

heads of Europe, America, and Australia, and, like the workhouse boy in

Mr. Dickens’s book, you ask for more. What say _you_, Jinny? Thinkest

thou the Duke should have more?”

“We all want more,” said Jinny. “Air! Mayn’t I open the window?”

“Oh, excuse me.” Mr. Duke, evidently trained by his big doll, rushed to

do it. “But haven’t I lost enough without losing my twenty-five pounds

too?”

He turned back to his desk, and extricating from its remoter recesses

another large narrow fat account book—the twin of that he had been

poring over—held it up theatrically. “Here’s my marionette accounts for

sixteen years—look through ’em and see if you can find any single

week—ay, even the week of King William’s funeral—as low as the best of

the weeks since I touched your wretched show.”

“My wretched show!” Mr. Flippance lost his blandness. “Why, if that’s

the case, it’s you that have depreciated it. _You_ ought to pay _me_

compensation.”

But Duke had dramatically dumped the book down side by side with its

twin. “Look on this picture and on that!” he said. “Duke’s Marionettes,

week ending March 10th, 1849, Colchester. Total, £23 18s. 10d. Flippance

Fit-Up, Colchester Corn Exchange, week ending March 8th, 1851. Monday.

Eleven shillings. _There’s_ an opening! Tuesday——”

“Oh, come to the d——d total!” said Tony impatiently.

“There ain’t any total,” said Duke crushingly. “Tuesday, sixteen

shillings and sixpence.”

“Always rising, you see!” said Tony.

“Wednesday,” Duke went on implacably, “nine shillings and fourpence——”

“Why, how do you get fourpence?” interrupted Tony severely. “You haven’t

been letting down the prices, I hope.”

“That’s noted at the side. See!” said the careful Duke. “A swindler

passed off a groat as a tanner. Thursday, Eight and sixpence—imagine

the Colchester Corn Exchange with eight and sixpence! Friday. Nine

shillings——”

“Rising again, you see,” chirruped Tony.

“Saturday. One pound thirteen and six.”

“There you are! That pulls you up.”

“Saturday evening,” concluded Duke. “Two pounds eight.”

“And then he grumbles!” Mr. Flippance raised his great ringed hands

towards Jinny.

“Total, six pounds five and tenpence!”

“And isn’t that enough to live on?” cried Tony. “Only two in family and

a little bird or so! And if your box-office man had been smart enough to

tell a groat from a tester, you’d have had six guineas!”

“He wasn’t such a fool,” said Duke dryly, “for on another night it’s

noted that a half-sovereign was passed off on him for sixpence.”

“And then you outrage Providence by complaining of the takings,” said

Tony.

“Rent of Corn Exchange,” continued Duke doggedly, “three guineas.

Salaries (to company, including check-taker), four pounds eight.

Lighting, a pound. Advertising (including bill-poster), three pounds

ten——”

“But, my dear chap, what extravagance! No wonder——”

“Travelling expenses (company and scenery, excluding caravan), eighteen

and ninepence. Drinks to Pressmen—one and sixpence——”

“Oh, not enough! No wonder——!”

“Net deficit, seven pounds sixteen and threepence, _plus_ the salary of

Bianca and me!”

“What! Why, you said salary of company, four pounds eight!”

“You don’t suppose I included ourselves with the check-taker!”

“You didn’t? Oh, my dear fellow,” said Tony sympathetically, “no wonder

you’re down in the mouth. A wise manager always pays his salary before

any other expense; then he’s always sure of a stand-by!”

“It isn’t the money that’s the worst,” Duke explained. “It’s the

dreadful loneliness.”

“Why didn’t you stuff the house with paper and put up ‘Free List

Absolutely Suspended’?”

“Easier said than done in a place where you don’t know a soul. Why,

Bianca had a Benefit Night, and how many do you think were in the

stalls? Two women and a boy.”

“I’ve known only the theatre cat——” began Tony cheerfully.

“And the boy went to sleep!”

“Wasn’t it his bedtime? But I _will_ say it’s not entirely the fault of

your acting. I’ve noticed ever since that Crystal Palace loomed on the

horizon, it’s unsettled the public within at least fifty miles from Hyde

Park. I was talking to a showman who told me that in March and April

this year business fell off everywhere—there was no interest in giants,

dwarfs, fat men, pig-faced ladies, and even jugglers, animal

magnetizers, lion-tamers, performing elephants, ventriloquists,

prestidigitators, and professors of necromancy. Didn’t you hear of the

fate of poor Wishbone, the conjurer, at Chelmsford Fair? Not even a kid

dropped into his booth, so he went out to perform outside, but before he

could ‘hey, presto!’ the purse back to the owner, the peeler copped him.

The magistrate wouldn’t listen to his patter, and he can’t tap himself

out of quod either, poor chap. Besides, we all remember the awful

weather in March, yes and up to the very opening of the Crystal

Palace—rain, rain, rain.”

“Well, take the March of 1849,” said Duke, turning back his oblong

pages, “and don’t forget people’ll sit in Assembly Rooms or a Corn

Exchange when they won’t risk a draughty tent. Now look at the weather

that year—when I pulled my own strings. Tuesday, W.S.—that is, wet,

snow. Wednesday, R.N. (rough night). Thursday, S.H.T. (storm, hail, and

thunder). Saturday, W.T. (wind, tilt OFF!). Come now, you could hardly

have a worse week, could you? Everything except B.F.1 or B.F.2 (black

fog or big funeral). Yet see, my takings for that week were——”

Tony flipped away the book with his jewelled hand. “What you’ve got to

compare with your Colchester week,” he said, “is not your marionette

week in March ’49, but my Fit-Up week for that date.”

“I don’t see that.”

“It stands to reason.”

They debated the point warmly: finally Tony referred it to Jinny: that

was what she was there for, he recalled.

“I certainly think,” arbitrated the little Carrier, “that we ought to

see what Mr. Flippance’s live theatre could do in the same weather.”

“Oh, very well,” acquiesced Duke sulkily. “And what _did_ you do that

week?”

“Heavens, man, how on earth can I remember?”

“But haven’t you got it written down?”

“What do you take me for?” asked Tony. “A tradesman? A bookkeeper?

Unless Polly——”

“You told me the other Christmas that you averaged twenty-five,” said

Duke bitterly, “and I paid you one week’s takings by way of douceur.”

“Well, then you do know my weekly takings,” said Tony loftily.

“I can’t stay here for ever,” put in Jinny. “I’ve got my work.”

“I’m paying you, ain’t I?” Tony rebuked her.

“But not giving me work.” She assumed a judicial air. “Do you, Mr.

Flippance, maintain that your theatre is a more valuable concern than

Mr. Duke’s marionettes?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then,” said the young Solomon in petticoats, “surely if you get it

back, you ought to pay him the difference in value.”

“Bravo! Bravo!” Mr. Duke’s little pig-eyes gleamed. “A sensible girl!”

“Oh, Jinny!” groaned Mr. Flippance: “To desert your old pal!”

“And do you, Mr. Duke,” went on Jinny imperturbably, “maintain that your

marionettes are a better property than the Flippance Fit-Up?”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Duke, not to be caught.

“The marionettes are a worse property then?” she asked.

Duke banged his book. “Much worse.”

“Then why do you want it back?”

Tony uttered a shriek of delight. “A Daniel come to judgment! Oh, Jinny,

I could hug you!”

A sweep of her horn kept him at arm’s length. “You say, Mr. Duke, that

the Fit-Up property is the better, and yet you want to give it up?”

Mr. Duke leaned his elbows on the desk, and dropped his head in his

hands. “You confuse me—I must have time to think.”

“Hamlet!” observed Tony pleasantly. “But I don’t think the ghost will

walk.” His hand moved towards the gin decanter, but again that baffling

horn intervened.

“Look here!” said Duke, rummaging in his drawer. “I’ve got the transfer

written out, ready for signature, two copies—the exact words of our

last agreement, only turned the other way, of course. I’m a plain

man—is it to be or not to be?”

“That is the question,” said Tony sepulchrally. “But you see it isn’t so

plain as you. You’ve depreciated my theatre and it’s not worth the extra

pony. Why can’t you make a reasonable compromise and just swap back?”

“What! And be a pony out of pocket?”

“You’ll be an elephant out of pocket if you don’t,” Jinny reminded him.

“Seven pounds sixteen and threepence a week mount up.”

“Ah, that was a particularly bad week.”

“Then there _were_ good weeks?” flashed Tony.

“I tell you the best weren’t as good as the marionettes’ worst.”

“Come, come, old cock, draw it mild!”

“If you don’t believe me,” said Duke, firing up, “look for yourself! And

what’s more, if you find I’m wrong, keep the pony and be hanged to you!”

“Easy! Easy! But I was never a man to refuse a sporting offer—tip us

the tomes!”

Duke handed him the twin account books, but soon, tiring of the rows of

figures, Mr. Flippance begged Jinny to pursue the investigation while he

studied the document of transfer.

It was not without a thrill that, setting the volumes on a hanging flap

that Duke had changed for her into a table, she went back over the pages

of faded ink that told of toils and tribulations in the years before she

had come into being: as a carrier she was peculiarly sensitive to these

records of wrecked tents and ruined takings. Through the peace of the

summer morning in that poky caravan, the winds from that pre-natal

period seemed to be rushing, its snows falling, its hails and thunders

crashing, and with these imagined tempests came up the thought of Will.

What was he doing now, with his beautiful black horses? Was he looking

for Mr. Flippance at “The Black Sheep”? But the thought of him was too

agitating; she crushed it down and got absorbed in her task and the

tales the figures told: the blanks carefully explained by Good Friday or

royal mourning or the journey to some distant pitch; the varying cost of

these pitches in publicans’ meadows; the varying expense of cartage; the

sudden jumps in the takings, due—as annotated—to high days and

holidays, or to royal weddings, or to favourite pieces. She wondered why

Mr. Duke ever played any others. “What is D.F.N.?” she asked suddenly.

“Dismissed. Fine night,” said Mr. Duke in melancholy accents. It was the

supreme tragedy. “_Although_ a fine night,” he explained, rubbing it in

to himself, “not enough to be worth playing to.”

“You didn’t always do good business, you see,” gurgled Tony from the

gin-glass he had imperceptibly acquired.

“Accidents will happen,” Duke retorted.

“And what is D.S.?” put in Jinny. “Dismissed. Snow?”

“D.S. is diddling show,” explained Duke gloomily. “I struck one only

last week at the very public-house I hired my pitch from.”

“That wasn’t playing fair,” said Tony.

“No, indeed. They stuck a placard in the window, ‘Great Water Otter.

Free.’ And when you’d had your drink they took you to the stables to see

it in its tub. There were crowds every night. It was put in the paper.”

Tony grinned. “‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’”

“But why?” asked Jinny. “I’d rather see a water-otter than a dancing

doll.”

“You’re not even a country mouse,” said Tony. “When the fools push and

squeeze to get near the tub, they warn ’em, ‘Don’t go too near!’ And all

the while it’s only a big iron kettle—a water-’otter. See!”

Jinny laughed.

“Yes, that’s what they all do,” said Duke dismally. “Laugh and help to

gull the others. And between them the legitimate goes to the dogs.”

“Or the otters.” Jinny bent in lighter spirits over the twin volumes.

“I’m afraid you’ve lost, Mr. Flippance,” she announced at last. “I can’t

see any drama week of Mr. Duke’s that goes as high as the worst of his

marionette weeks.”

“Right you are!” said Tony, cheerful under his liquid. “Sport is sport

and the pony is yours. Here goes!” And picking up a pen from the desk,

he signed one of the documents with a long thick line sweeping backward

from his final “e.” Duke signed the other copy more soberly, and Jinny

witnessed both signatures with careful calligraphy. “It only remains,

old cock,” said Tony, “to deliver the twenty-five pounds.”

“Hear, hear,” agreed Duke.

“You don’t suppose I carry it about with me?”

Duke’s face fell. “But without money passing, it ain’t legal.”

“But I jumped out of bed in a hurry—Jinny’ll bear me out. I mean,” he

added hurriedly, as a dramatic interest flickered across Duke’s face,

“look at my slippers!”

“Oh, I’ve seen your stinking old slippers!” Duke was getting unpleasant.

“What I want to see is my money.”

“Sorry, old boy—no use letting your dander rise—it’s a case of

H.G.I.—haven’t got it, and M.O.I.U.—must owe it you! Still, I dare say

we can rake up something on account, to make a legal consideration.

Doubtless Jinny has got half a crown. Give me one, Jinny, till I get

home.”

Jinny, who had always hitherto dealt with Polly, and been scrupulously

paid, had no hesitation in handing him the coin. She did not know it was

the cost of her arbitration. Duke accepted it ungraciously as earnest

money.

“And if I may advise you how to run your own show, now you’ve got it

back,” said Tony handsomely, “don’t go so much by the fairs. There’s not

only the waste of time and travel in between one and t’other, it’s

lowering a fine art to the level of a merry-go-round or the talking

lobst——”

“I can’t wait for ever,” interposed Jinny. “Are you coming?” She opened

the door.

“Your time’s paid,” said Mr. Flippance severely. “However, Duke takes my

meaning. Here’s luck to him!” And with a last gulp at Duke’s gin, he

followed her to the door. “Send me my scenery and props and the same

cart can take back yours and the box of figures.”

“No, no,” said Duke, “that’ll need several journeys or carts. We divide

the freightage.”

“What! When I throw in twenty-five pounds! O Duke, Duke, if you ain’t

careful there’ll be a show of the meanest man on earth.” And shaking his

fat jewelled forefinger waggishly at the caravan proprietor, he followed

the Carrier. “Now for a last kick at the company,” he observed to her,

as the door closed upon the dismal Duke.

IX

But at that moment the ground resounded with gallant hoofs, and a

handsome red-haired cavalier riding a barebacked black horse and leading

another steed of Satan, and followed by a bounding little white dog,

brought life and spirit into the scene. The rabbits poked their noses

greedily through their wires, and the pig grunted in perturbation.

Jinny, shrinking back behind Mr. Flippance, remained paralysed on the

steps of the caravan, while Tony, unconscious that he was needed as a

screen, hurried forward with a joyous greeting and a query which served

the purpose as effectually, for Jinny was left unnoted on her pedestal.

“You looking for me?” asked Tony.

“I was,” answered the horseman. “But now I’m looking for the stables.

‘The Black Sheep’s’ full up, and I thought I’d put up my spare horse at

‘The Learned Pig’ till I could find you. However, here you are.”

“But you crossed me, man, just outside the market!”

“Did I? Is Jinny here? I see her cart outside.”

“Never mind Jinny—you’re just in the nick of time. I want to talk

business to you.”

“And so do I to you. If I crossed you, ’twas because I was galloping to

you with the horse you ordered through Jinny.”

“And I was galloping to her to cancel it!”

“What!” cried Will. But the joyous rush and gambollings of Nip now

directed his attention to Nip’s statuesque mistress.

“I’m afraid you’ve let yourself in for those horses,” she said,

descending. She did not speak maliciously—the sting of her defeat was

over, now that his victory had recoiled on the victor, and she was

really a little sorry for him. But all other feelings were overwhelmed

for the moment by this new sense of dash and grace, in which he and the

beautiful pawing steeds were mixed up centaur-like, his figure looking

so much taller on horseback that it almost corresponded to Miss Gentry’s

ideal. Unfortunately Will himself had no sense of the horses except as a

costly and burdensome mistake: the iron issuing from Jinny’s soul was

entering into his.

“But surely you want one of ’em,” he said, addressing Mr. Flippance. He

had cherished a dim hope that the Showman might launch out into binary

grandeur, but at the worst he was prepared to keep one horse—it would

be useful for riding into Chipstone—pending its sale. But to have two

horses on his hands, eating their heads off, after consuming practically

the whole of his capital—this was too much. Nor could he believe that

Jinny was not gloating over the Nemesis that had overtaken his attempt

to crush her will.

“I don’t see what I should do with a horse,” said Tony, “seeing that I’m

setting up the Flippance Palace Theatre as a local landmark. Of course I

might have a play written round him,” he mused, “or even round ’em both.

They would certainly ‘draw’ all Chipstone, especially with a carriage

behind ’em. Odd, isn’t it? There’ll be scores of carriages waiting

outside my theatre, yet to see one on the stage gives everybody a

thrill. Lord, how the public does love to see natural things in

unnatural places! As my old pa used to say—my real pa, I mean—put an

idiot on the stage and he gives pleasure, put him in the stalls and he

writes dramatic criticism! Ha, ha, ha!”

“Then you do want ’em?” said Will eagerly.

“If you’re ready to bring in the noble animals as part of the capital,

I’ll look around for a dramatist to work ’em in.”

“You’d best look around for a capitalist,” retorted Will in angry

disappointment. “I’ve told you before, I’m going into farming.”

“Then you’ll want the horses yourself.”

“They’re no good for farming,” Jinny corrected.

“Ain’t they?” said Tony, surveying them with a fresh eye. “Then why did

he buy them?”

Will got angrier. “That’s my business. Do you want them or not?”

“I can always do with anything. A play’s a pie you can shove anything

into. You’d look bully yourself, as you Americans say, riding just as

you are: just a cowboy costume, that’s all you need. Will you do it?”

“Will I do what?”

“Play lead and supply your own horses.”

“Don’t be a fool—or try to make me one. I’m a plain farmer.”

Tony grinned. “Jinny don’t seem to think ’em suitable for plain farming.

I reckon you’d better set up as undertaker. They’ll go lovely with a

hearse. All you need is a corpse.”

“And I shan’t be long finding one!” hissed Will.

Tony clapped his hands. “That’s the style. Lord, man, what a wasted

actor!”

Jinny could not suppress a smile. It brought Will’s temper to

breaking-point. “These horses at least won’t be wasted,” he said to her

at a white heat. “For I’ll take our friend’s advice.”

“Harness ’em to a hearse?” murmured Jinny.

“No, to a coach. I’ll put an end, miss, to your mannish ways.”

“Indeed!” Jinny bridled up, without, however, quite following the

threat.

“You’ve done for yourself,” he explained. “You’ve forced me into

competition. You’ve got me the horses—there’s no end of out-of-work

coaches on the market to be got for an old song. I’ll carry passengers

and luggage faster and cheaper than you, and heavier stuff too, and I’ll

wipe you out.”

Jinny grew white, but at the venom of his words, not their business

significance. Her instinct retorted with a smile. “And I got you the

horn, too, don’t forget that.”

“I don’t—I was thinking of that. It’s all your doing—and serve you

jolly well right.” He turned sneeringly to Mr. Flippance. “So I won’t be

a wasted musician either.”

“Oho!” said Jinny. “And shall we see you on the box-seat all a-crowing

and a-blowing?”

“I know you still think I can’t blow—but you shall see.”

“_Seeing_ isn’t believing,” said Jinny.

“Had you there, old cock,” said Tony.

“She knows what I mean, right enough. I’ll start a coach-service ’twixt

Little Bradmarsh and Chipstone, ay and farther too, passengers inside,

luggage on the roof. I’ll wake up this sleepy old spot.” And his vigour

seemed to communicate itself to his horses: they caracoled and stamped.

“Better let sleeping spots lie,” said Jinny. “I thought you hated Yankee

going-ahead.”

“It’ll save _you_ going ahead, anyhow,” said Will. “Why didn’t you let

things sleep?”

“Me! How could I help helping Gran’fer?”

“Women have always got an excuse. ‘And the man gave unto me and I did

eat.’”

“Lord! He’s been reading the Bible!” laughed Tony.

Will flushed. All those hours in quest of orthography passed through his

mind. And what had all his painstaking letters led to? Quarrels,

recriminations, miseries. Well, let him have done with it all. Ignore

her, crush her, that was the best way. Once he had driven her out of the

business, that tongue of hers would wag more meekly. Then, perhaps——!

A rousing blast on Jinny’s horn cut defiantly into his thoughts. It was

at once a challenge and a mockery. Will turned his horses’ heads sharply

and trotted out, Nip at their heels. But at the edge of the enclosure

Nip looked back wistfully to beg his mistress to join the party. She,

however, lowering her horn, cried, “Come here, you naughty dog. Come

here at once.”

Nip stood in pathetic hesitation.

“It’s that animal my play shall be written round,” said Tony decisively.

“How much do you want for him?”

“You know I wouldn’t, part with him for love or money,” said Jinny.

“Well, I haven’t got any money,” said Tony slowly. “But if you’d like

the other thing——”

“Don’t be silly!” Jinny moved towards her cart.

“I mean it—a wife like you would be the making of a man.”

“Now you’ll have to walk home!” said Jinny, springing into her seat. It

was too ironic a climax to the morning.

“Not in my slippers!” gasped Tony.

“You should have put on your boots!” said Jinny sternly.

“But listen!” He clung to the cart as if he would stop it. “It’s a

heaven-sent opportunity.”

“It must be sent back,” said Jinny gravely.

“I mean for me,” he explained desperately. “You know how Polly objects

to my marrying again. But I’ve got to break the deal with Duke to her,

so I could work in the two at once. It couldn’t be worse.”

“I shall never marry,” said Jinny. “Gee up!”

“But whoa, whoa, you don’t carry only your husbands,” cried Tony.

“Stop!”

He pursued Methusalem for some yards, but even Methusalem was too quick

for him. And then, as he stood panting and perspiring and overcome by a

dark upwelling of disbelief in life, he perceived the Duchess with her

manuscript and his daughter returning from the histrionic consultation

at “The Learned Pig.”

“Thank the Lord, Polly’s feeding out,” he murmured, as he slunk into a

doorway. Then his face brightened up. “After all,” he thought, “I’ve

only got to break to her about the theatre.”