CHAPTER X

HORSE, GROOM, AND BRIDE

_Then lay my tott’ring legs so low_

_That have run very far,_

_O’er hedges and o’er ditches,_

_O’er turnpike gate and bar,_

_Poor old horse! Poor old horse!_

Somerset Song.

I

NORMALLY the nonagenarian preserved scant memory of the happenings of

the present, vivid though his youthful recollections were: But the great

wedding-cake, served up at every meal for days, co-operated with the

intensity of the scene to stamp his quarrel with Will upon his feebly

registering brain. Especially did Nip’s standing supplication for his

quota revive and deepen the impression. “On your hands and knees!” he

would cry savagely, as he threw the lucky dog a luscious morsel. And

even when Nip was absent at meal-times—as his mistress contrived more

than once, in her anxiety to pamper neither him nor her grandfather’s

resentment—the old man would growl grimly: “Carry him in!” Aching

enough at heart from her own quarrel with Will, she had the wretched

feeling that if by some impossibility she and her rival could ever again

come together, the grotesque oaths of these two obstinate males would

keep the family breach unhealed.

But sentiment cannot retain its acuteness under business worries and

carking household cares. The rich cake eaten through so monotonously

became to Jinny a sort of ironic symbol of the declining fortunes of

Blackwater Hall. It contributed indeed no little to the decay of the old

business, not merely by the great sum that had to be paid to the

confectioner, but through the loss of the considerable customer whose

hymeneal festivities its absence overgloomed. Marie Antoinette’s advice

to the starving to eat cake did not come into the Spelling-Book,

otherwise Jinny might have reflected how near they were come to adopting

it. Not that her grandfather had as yet occasion to suspect the bareness

of the larder. Unlike Mother Hubbard he never went to the cupboard, the

cupboard always comfortably coming to him. Moreover, some rabbits shot

by the farmers as the falling crops uncovered them, and presented to the

ancient by annual custom, served to postpone the evil day. Jinny was

hardly conscious how much she stinted herself for his sake, so poor was

her appetite become. It was only once—-when passing the big Harvest

Dinner barn where Farmer Gale’s men roared drunken choruses—that she

felt a craving for food. This valuable freedom from hunger she

attributed to the heat: in the winter, she told herself, she could

always stoke for the week at the Tuesday and Friday meals so amiably

provided at Mother Gander’s. That worthy lady would also doubtless

refill grandfather’s beer-barrel at cost price. It was fortunate he did

not smoke or snuff. Methodism had its points.

A more serious problem was presented by Methusalem—growing distended by

overmuch grass—and even her goats coveted an occasional supplement to

the hedgerows and the oak scrub if their milk was to run freely. But of

hay or cabbages her store was small, and these finicking feeders, though

they condescended to eat horse-chestnuts, would not even accept a gnawed

apple. The poultry, too, must soon be eaten, if they could not be

properly fed, and the thought of instructing her grandfather to twist a

familiar neck made her blood run cold. With such a varied household to

cater for, our little housekeeper began to envy Maria, who, according to

Mrs. Flynt, raised her large and frequent families on everything and

anything on earth, rhubarb-leaves being the one and only pabulum pigs

turned up their snouts at. It was not the least painful part of this

novel pinch of poverty that Jinny felt herself compelled to forgo those

calls with little presents for the Pennymoles, the Bidlakes, and the

poor and the bed-ridden in general, with which she had diversified her

deliveries: she did not realize that her mere presence would have been a

creature comfort.

But of these pangs and problems the world knew naught, hearing her

little horn making its gay music and seeing her still jauntily perched

on her driving-board in her elegant rose-pink frock and with the latest

fancy whipcord edge to the straw of her bonnet. Her music, indeed, was

far livelier than the wheezy notes of the Flynt Flyer’s guard, though

otherwise the red-coated clodhopper who had been stuck up on the coach a

few days after its visit to Blackwater Hall, lent the last touch to its

fascinations. But if passengers, other than Elijah Skindle and one or

two equally unbusinesslike young men, were no longer content to crawl

along in her cart, that historic vehicle showed scant sign of defeat.

Already when the removal of the hoops in the hot weather had threatened

to expose too clearly the nakedness of the land, parcels of stones on

the model of the swain-chaser had begun to cumber it up, and when one

Monday morning the Flynt Flyer came swaggering in new pea-green paint,

the Quarles Crawler turned up on Tuesday mountainous with the old boxes

and cypress clothes-chests routed out of the ante-room, and emptied of

their litter.

It was at this point that the Gaffer had had to be put into the plot. He

had long since begun to smell a rat—having a super-sense for his

business, however his other senses might fail—and it would have been

impossible to heave up the boxes without him, or to explain their

removal without imparting some notion of the tragic truth. And the truth

did not diminish his resentment against young Caleb’s boy or his

vigilance against further robbers. “Carry him in!” he would cackle and

croak as he bore out the emptied “spruce-hutches” to the cart or

carefully permutated their positions in it. Then with hoarse thunder:

“On your hands and knees, ye pirate thief!”

But these ostentated boxes—while they saved the pride of the

Quarleses—did but damage the remainder of their custom. The faithful

few had been held back by solicitude for Jinny’s livelihood: seeing her

now so flourishing, the very tail-board lowered on its chains and

groaning under protruding “portmantles,” her last clients save Peculiars

lapsed in silent relief, one after another. Daily, poor Jinny expected

to see four horses on the rival vehicle and its circuit extended to

Colchester. But that would have meant for Will a grandeur inconsistent

with the petty commissions which he still deigned to execute: it would

have allowed some of her old custom to return to her. And he was

sullenly bent on driving her—literally—out of the business. But he

enhanced the dignity of his profession by copying from an old inn of the

pack-horse days its signboard of “The Carriers’ Arms,” depicting a rope,

a wanty-hook, and five packing skewers. These, painted in black on the

pea-green, seemed to proclaim his formal annexation and monopoly of the

local carrying trade.

Jinny began to think seriously of buying up from the barns some straw

from the reaped sheaves and competing with the cottagers in the

all-pervasive plaiting industry. Splitting straws was no despicable

occupation in the valley of the Brad, where it was done by enginery, and

provided even children of six and old men of eighty with the opportunity

of adding to the family income. Tambour-lace and other things also

entered into her thoughts. The only thing that never entered into them

was the idea of ceasing to ply. So long as the boxes and the cart held

together, the Flynt Flyer should always see the rival vehicle

imperturbably jogging. In every sense she would “carry on.”

II

August was ending aridly. Methusalem’s sensitive nose was protected from

flies by green bracken. Calves snuggled in the hot meadows, meditatively

chewing, an image of somnolence, their tails flicking whitely. Stooks or

manure-heaps had reduced the fields to geometrical patterns. Tall

hollyhocks leaned dustily like ruined towers. Bucolic conversation was

of the absent rain. Rooks were more destructive than ever. Swedes were

doing badly and every one had waited to sow turnips, rape, or mustard.

They had no fodder even for winter stock. Master Peartree began to worry

over his sheep as they munched the sapless grass. In the waterless

little villages the ground was hard as iron, and Bundock strode over the

swamps around Frog Farm as fearlessly as now frequently. “A regular

doucher” was the general demand upon Providence, though it was

couched—for church and chapel—in less vivid terms. These prayers

enabled Bundock to work off one of his old aphorisms, saved for a

rainless day. “It’s no use praying for rain,” he chuckled to the

countryside, “till you see the storm-clouds.” “But you don’t scarce need

to pray then,” the countryside pointed out, to his disgust.

In Jinny’s soul, too, there was drought, and she seemed to share

Bundock’s view that prayer was waste of breath. Not that her evening

prayers were left unsaid, but in her apathy and weariness no private

plea was added to the prescribed form, though the Spelling-Book

commended the asking for extra mercies, provided also one begged for a

perpetual continuance of the Protestant Succession. What deliverance

could there be for her? God Himself, she felt obscurely, could not help

her, any more than she had ever been able to help little mavises fallen

from their nests and deserted by their mothers. Their thrilling-eyed

vitality and exquisite flutterings had only made her miserable. But

perhaps God was now as sorry for her.

One grown-up mavis, too, she remembered, a victim to the winter battle

of life, the neck half severed from the half-plucked body, the liquid

eye gazing appealingly at her, the legs stirring feebly in a welter of

feathers. She had nerved herself to grant its dumb plea: she had stamped

sharply on its skull and seen its eye fly out on the path like a bright

bead. Could God do aught less drastic for her? Not that she ever dreamed

of dying: she must live on, however mutilated, for it was impossible to

conceive her grandfather getting along without her. Consider only his

trousers! How loosely they were now flapping round his shrunken calves,

almost like a sailor’s. Soon the winter winds would be piping through

them. Without her to take in a tuck, where would he be? And who would

cut his hair and trim his beard?

It was her grandfather who was mainly responsible for the discontinuance

of her chapel habit on Lord’s Day. His increased fretfulness and

fractiousness since he was become aware of the rival power, made it

imprudent to leave him for long except unavoidably—not to mention the

danger to herself of awkward meetings at chapel with that rival

power—and there was the further difficulty of getting to Chipstone, now

Farmer Gale’s trap was out of the question. But she was not without a

nearer place of worship—for to the scandal of the Peculiars,

particularly Bundock, she now began to attend the parish church of

Little Bradmarsh, whose emptiness with its parade of free seats after

eleven o’clock was a standing pleasantry in the spheres of Dissent. The

convenience of proximity was not, however, its main attraction for

Jinny, and Miss Gentry would have rejoiced less had she understood that

a change of heart or doctrine or the magnetism of the Reverend Mr.

Fallow had as little to do with Jinny’s apparent conversion; though the

fact that Jinny had never forgotten her one childish glimpse of the

prayer-absorbed pastor doubtless served to reassure the girl as to the

not altogether ungodly character of his edifice.

She had entered to cart over to the Chipstone hospital some fruit laid

before the altar at the Harvest Thanksgiving by the one prosperous

worshipper. For Mr. Fallow was still an unwavering client of hers,

almost the last outside her own communion, possibly because having

neither family nor flock to distract him from his classics, he had

scarcely observed the coach.

In the “Speculi Britanniæ Pars,” in which he had once hunted out her

genealogy—to his own satisfaction and nobody’s hurt—Essex was compared

to Palestine for its flow of “milke and hunny.” And “hunny” was still

her staple link with the tall fusty-coated, snuff-smeared figure,

stooping over his hives or his Virgil, both sacredly fused for him in

the Fourth Georgic. She marketed his surplus, exchanging it for firkins

of butter and—O aberrations of the godliest—canisters of Lundy Foot.

And it was after disposing of some of his smaller tithes—for the parish

had remained outside the recent Commutation Act of 1836—that Jinny had

been thus led to set foot in his church. There were in those days no

floral decorations to mar the completeness with which the arches and

pillars ministered to her troubled mood. The outside she had always

found soothing, with its grey old stonework and its lichened tower

rising amid haystacks and thatched cottages with dormer windows. But how

much cooler the peace that fell upon her, when she passed through the

old, spiky, oak door and under the long, wooden, vaulted roof into a

dimness shot with rich stained glass. Mr. Fallow had been one of the

earliest clergymen of the century to remove the whitewash from the old

painted walls of his church, and though the royal arms—the lion and the

unicorn—still lingered over the chancel, there was no other jar in the

spiritual harmony except the stove, whose pipe went hideously up and

along the ceiling. Ignoring that, however, in the effect of the whole

and forgetting everything else, Jinny sank upon a pew-bench and

abandoned herself to the unholy influences of architecture, so restful

after her chapel with its benches and table-desk, ugliness unadorned.

Not even a gradual consciousness of neglected duty could impair the

divine tranquillity.

But the sober beauty of the place might not have sufficed to draw her

again, but for a strange circumstance. One of the stained-glass figures,

dully familiar to her from without as a leaden glaze, proved when seen

from within in all the glory of art to be an angel of the very type

under which her childish vision had imagined her hovering mother. And

that it actually was mystically interfused with her mother, as her

emotion had immediately intertwined it, was demonstrated by the fact

that even when she at last went forward to gather up the plums and

apples, the eyes followed her about in protection and benediction. Miss

Gentry’s legend of her moving angel lost its last shade of

improbability, and it was with a new humility that Jinny repeated to her

at the first opportunity her remorse for the permuted pot.

Nor did the angel’s emanation of guardianship prove illusory, for

outraged though Miss Gentry had been by the suggestion that her

moustache needed a hair-restorer, she graciously intimated—after the

second Sunday of Jinny’s attendance—that the debt for the dress could

be worked off in commission charges. It was a vast relief, for the

Bundock-borne rumour of her apostacy had alienated the bulk of her

co-religionists and exchanged the lingering remorse of earlier deserters

for a sense of rectitude and foresight. Bundock’s sympathy with the

Brotherhood almost reinstated him in its good graces. “But it brings its

own punishment,” he pointed out consolingly. “Fancy putting a parson

over herself to poke his snuffy nose into everything. That’s a pretty

dress, Jinny, he’ll say, is it paid for? Or, that’s a cranky old grandpa

you’ve got—why don’t ye put him in the poorhouse?”

It was as well poor Jinny did not overhear him, or she might have

doubted whether her load of boxes was so uniformly imposing as she

imagined. The Deacon, who did hear him, and who spent his life poking

into holes and reprimanding sinners, was even more righteously indignant

at the interference of parsons. “Inquisitive as warmin in a larder,” he

described them. “Fussing around the poor, but without a drop of rum in

their milk of human koindness.” Mr. Fallow—it would appear—had

interfered on behalf of his parishioner in the threatened lawsuit with

Miss Gentry: he had persuaded the guileless rat-catcher to promise to

clear her cottage for nothing, and this although Mrs. Mott was paying

her in full for his wife’s silk dress, the responsibility for which he

had righteously repudiated.

“_Oi’ll_ clear her cottage,” he added darkly, and it seemed to Bundock

that the parson had succeeded only in patching up the feud. But what was

to be expected of the canting crew, the postman inquired. The new

Chipstone curate had called on his father, and Bundock related with a

chuckle how the bed-ridden old boy had patronizingly regretted that,

being on his back, he could do nothing to help his visitor. “He sent him

away with a bed-flea in his ear,” gloated Bundock. Mr. Joshua Mawhood

recalled a bigger flea in the same clerical ear. The hapless curate had

offered him a ticket for a lecture on “Economy.” “Come with me Bradmarsh

way,” the rat-catcher had retorted, “and Oi’ll show you Mrs. Pennymole’s

cottage, and if you’ll show me how she can bring up her nine childer on

eleven shillings a week, Oi’ll eat your shovel-hat.” Bundock, unable to

find a still larger flea, fell back on hypothesis. “If I’d been a

Churchman and a chap in a white choker came to mine,” he said, “I’d tell

him to mind his own business, and I dare say he’d be insulted, though

I’d be giving him splendid advice. You know where the door is, I’d say,

for you didn’t come in by the chimney. Now walk out, or else——!” And

carried away by his own drama, Bundock administered a hearty kick to the

apparently still-lingering phantom.

Needless to say, Mr. Fallow exercised none of this imagined prying into

Jinny’s affairs. Like his pew-opener, whose long caped coat with the

official red border found now a fresh justification, he was only too

glad of her uninvited attendance, and the considerable accretion she

brought to his congregation. Her presence freshened up for himself his

old sermons: for her sake he even put in new Latin quotations. But Jinny

enjoyed more the three musicians in the gallery—’cellist, flautist, and

bassoonist—whose black frock-coats and trousers made them as important

in quality as they were in quantity, and when after they had played a

few bars the congregation sang:

“_Awake my soul, and with the sun_

_Thy daily stage of duty run,_”

Jinny felt herself rapt far indeed from her daily stage of duty. Even

the pew-opener shuffling about in his list slippers to poke up the stove

or a small boy, or to snuff the guttering tallow candles on dark

mornings, could not bring her to earth.

And another factor than the church and its mother-angel helped Jinny

over this dreary time. This was her dog. For only now did Nip emerge

into his full caninity, or at least only now did Jinny learn to

appreciate him to the full. In howsoever leaden a mood she started her

carrying work, Nip’s ecstasy soon tinged it with gold. His blissful

staccato barks, his tall inflated tail, his upleapings at her as she

harnessed Methusalem, his gallopings and gambollings round that stolider

fellow-quadruped, his crazy friskings and curvetings—who could resist

such joy of life? Often it seemed to Jinny that he was returning thanks

to his Maker for the sunshine or the good smells, rebuking unconsciously

her heart-heaviness, bidding her cry no more over spilt milk, but just

lap up what she could. “Cheer up, Jinny!” she heard him bark. “Men are

brutes and women fools and gran’fers grumpy and customers cruel, but

life is jolly and odours numerous and where there’s a way there’s a

Will.” And infected by these sentiments of his, she would crack her

whip, and Methusalem would prick up his ears and pretend for her sake to

go faster, and there would be a lull in the ache at her heart.

Nip, however, was less consoling when the rival carriers met on the

road. Then his invincible persuasion that the two were one brought Jinny

considerable discomfort. For Will persisted in his later tactics of

slowing down, whether to take stock of her appearance or to rub in the

odious comparison of their respective equipages, so that while these

were in proximity, Nip was able to feel himself shepherding them, and he

ran from one to the other, rounding them up. Even when Jinny manœuvred

off down the first by-way, Nip, not to be baulked, would travel between

one and the other, growing more and more desperate as they grew more and

more distant, till at last, fearful of losing both, he exchanged his

frenzied shuttling between them for a still more frenzied standstill

midway between the mutually receding vehicles—you saw him almost

literally torn in two. Finally, after plaintive ululations of protest,

he would trot back, with hang-dog look and drooping tail, to the shabby

cart, where his mistress throned, grim and pale, amid her manifold mock

parcels.

III

But it was neither Mr. Fallows sermons nor Nip’s that gave Jinny her

first real sense of religion; not even the bass-viol and flute, though

she heard them with ecstasy, nor the collects and litanies, though she

perused them with interest. It came to her one pitch-black night when

she had too confidently ventured out to bring first aid—a jug of real

tea with some bread and butter—to poor rheumatic Uncle Lilliwhyte, whom

earlier that day, while gathering mushrooms for supper, she had

discovered in a deserted charcoal-burner’s hut.

She had not known before that Farmer Gale had carried out his threat of

evicting the nondescript from his cottage on the plea of needing it for

a labourer, and although she had been compelled to suspend the

ministrations which had set Mr. Fallow looking for the Lady Bountiful in

her blood, she felt vaguely responsible for Uncle Lilliwhyte’s declined

fortunes, so parallel to her own. Would, in fact, the Cornishman have

turned him out if Jinny had allowed that all-powerful arm to remain

round her waist at the cattle-market; nay, could she not have cheered

and nourished a subject countryside?

The unsavoury ancient was lying on some coarse sacking in a clearing

still half charred. Literally “sackcloth and ashes,” Jinny thought, as

she groped her way along the glade by the twinkle of his candle through

the chinks of his ramshackle hut. An old flintlock, some snares, nets

and rods, and a cooking-pot seemed all its furniture. She was horrified

to think—as she gazed at the gaps in the roof—that the prayer for rain

might be granted. But to her surprise the old man was sharing the

communal aspiration—“a good rine as’ll make the seeds spear”—though

not hopeful of the boon immediately. He did not want to be a “wet-’ead,”

he declared paradoxically, but the ground would be harder before the sun

met the wind. Such solicitude on behalf of soil belonging so largely to

the farmer who had evicted him seemed to Jinny touchingly Christian.

It was only when she had turned her back on his glimmering light and got

into the thick of the woods that they became curiously unfamiliar. Great

trees that she did not know existed came colliding against her, tangles

of roots tripped her up on her favourite paths; she stumbled into

unfriendly pricklinesses of every species. She seemed, indeed,

ridiculously lost within a furlong of her own door: how this black

labyrinth had got there she could not understand, but it looked as if

she might be all night escaping from it. She was even uneasily expecting

one of the snakes Uncle Lilliwhyte hunted to glide perversely under her

feet, she bruising its head and it biting her heel as the curse in

Genesis predicted. Of course, if she could spit into its mouth after

chewing some Spanish bugloss, it would instantly die. So at least Miss

Gentry had assured her. But how find the rare bugloss in this blackness,

or how spit accurately into the serpent’s mouth?

Why had she not brought a lantern, she asked herself. Was it really

because she was jug and package laden, or had it been only conceit? She

asked the question still more self-reproachfully when, after smashing

the empty jug in a stumble which left her knuckles bleeding, she heard

the gurgle of a water-hen and realized that she was far off her track

and nearly into the Brad. She could not swim, but even a swimmer in such

a moonless, starless void would not see the shore. Cautiously feeling

her way among the willows, she groped towards the pasture-land,

paradoxically pleased when she fell over a sleeping cow. She lay there

some minutes in the warm darkness, not anxious to move on, for the river

wound perilously in and out, one could still hear it rippling

deliciously in the reeds, and the odours of the night were as exquisite.

And then through the measureless blackness a faint suggestion of grey

began to make itself perceptible or rather divinable, so shadowy was it,

a lesser shade of black rather than an adumbration of light; it was as

if behind the blank firmament some star was striving to shine.

And suddenly, mystically, she felt that this hinted radiance was God,

the Light behind life’s darkness, and the words of the twenty-third

Psalm came to her mind with all the force of a revelation. “_The Lord is

my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures.

He leadeth me beside the still waters._” How divinely apt was every

word! So long as she had not wanted for aught, so long as she had not

needed to be led, she had not really felt the meaning of the words: now

that she was strayed and a-hungered, she knew overpoweringly that she

had a shepherd. He was behind her watching, as surely as she watched

over her grandfather. Now she understood what the Peculiars meant when

they got up to testify. She must go back to them, bear witness this very

next Sunday. Mr. Fallow’s church had no place for such testimonies.

Women could not speak even at Morning Service.

And as if to complete her conversion, there was a swift pattering, a

joyous bark, and a cold nose in her fevered palm. She had only to attach

her handkerchief to Nip’s collar to be guided safely home. But it was

Nip that was really her shepherd, she told herself, or at least her

sheep-dog: it was Nip that was leading her beside the still waters. Dog

was after all only God spelt backwards, she thought, with a sense of

mystic discovery. And remembering all that Nip had done to bring her

back to faith in life, she felt he was indeed a divine messenger. But

then it was borne in upon her that if she testified her true thoughts,

the Brethren would deem her irreverent. After all, it was Mr. Fallow who

might understand better, he who spoke of his bees with love, and had

once cited to her a passage from a Roman poet about bees being part of

the divine mind. The Roman writer was not a Catholic, he had explained

carefully, seeing her dubious face.

IV

In her gratitude to the dressmaker, Jinny had become more than ever her

intellectual parasite, and a wealth of information from “The Christian

Mother’s Miscellany” and “Culpeper’s Herbal”—to say nothing of the

spinster’s own sibylline rhymes—enriched the walk to and from church,

which Miss Gentry graciously permitted her carrier and debtor to take in

her society next Sunday morning. They parted indeed inside, Miss Gentry

plumping herself unrebuked into the curtained three-benched pew of the

dead and gone squire whom old Farmer Gale had dispossessed. Jinny was

thus unable to exchange glances with her at the thrilling announcement

read out by the cleric, who after the Second Lesson declared curtly—as

if it were the most natural thing in the world—that Mr. Anthony

Flippance, widower, of Frog Farm, and Miss Bianca Cleopatra Jones,

spinster, of Foxearth Farm, both of this parish, proposed to enter into

holy matrimony. At once a whirligig of images circled round Jinny and

she saw dizzily the explanation of a disappearance that had puzzled her,

for Tony had vanished from “The Black Sheep” without leaving a tip, the

old waiter grumbled. What had led up to this adventure, she wondered,

and how was Polly taking her intended stepmother?

“Isn’t that the Showman you’ve spoken of?” Miss Gentry inquired, as the

congregation of seven streamed out, swollen by musicians, sexton, clerk,

and pew-opener. “The fomenter of ungodliness?”

“It certainly seems my old customer,” replied Jinny, somewhat evasively.

“But I didn’t know he was living at Frog Farm.”

“Didn’t you tell me he was going to turn your chapel into a playhouse?”

“So he said once, but nothing seems to have come of it.”

“More’s the pity,” Miss Gentry surprised Jinny by commenting. She added,

“Even a playhouse would do less harm.”

“I—I don’t see that,” Jinny stammered, protesting.

“It’s as clear as daylight. The Devil stamps his sign plainly on a

playhouse: he forges God’s name on a chapel. And who is this Miss

Jones?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of any girl at Foxearth Farm called

Cleopatrick—what a funny name!”

“Cleopatra,” corrected Miss Gentry grandly, her bosom expanding till it

strained her Sunday silk. “A great Queen of Egypt in the days of old.

Born under Venus and died of the bite of an asp!”

“What’s an asp?” said Jinny.

“It’s what they call the serpent of old Nile!”

“Good gracious!” Jinny exclaimed. “Couldn’t they have given Her Majesty

agrimony wine?”

“Neither horse-mint nor wild parsnip could avail: there is no ointment

against suicide,” Miss Gentry explained. “She killed herself.”

“A queen kill herself! What for?”

“What does one kill oneself for?” Miss Gentry demanded crushingly. “For

love, of course. But I hope her namesake is more respectable. Cleopatra

never published the banns. But how comes this Miss Jones to be at

Foxearth Farm? I thought the people were called Purley—hurdle-makers,

aren’t they?”

“Yes—it must be a lodger. They do take lodgers. I must ask Barnaby—I

meet him on the road sometimes.” She stood still suddenly, going red and

white by turns like the revolving lens of a lighthouse.

Miss Gentry stared, then smiled in sentimental sympathy “Is he a nice

boy?” she cooed.

“Who? Ye-es, very nice,” Jinny stammered. “But I’ve just remembered Miss

Jones isn’t his sister!”

“Who said she was? Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” Miss Gentry sometimes became

roguish.

“She’s only his stepsister,” Jinny explained desperately. “Mrs. Purley’s

first husband was called Jones.”

If the bride should really be the Purley creature—the fair charmer who

rode so often in Will’s coach as to be almost “keeping company” with

him! What a lifting of a nightmare! What a sudden horizon of rose! But

no, it was too good to be true!

“But I never heard she was called Cleopatra,” she wound up sadly.

“People often have a second name hidden away like a tuck,” said Miss

Gentry.

“But her first name isn’t the same either, it’s Blanche.”

“But Bianca _is_ Blanche!” bayed Miss Gentry, like an excited

bloodhound. “Only more grand and foreign-like.”

Jinny’s colours revolved again.

“Is it?” she breathed. But she remembered Mr. Flippance’s address had

been announced as Frog Farm. If he had thus ousted young Mr. Flynt, she

urged, how could he be living so amicably under his rival’s roof?

Besides, how should Mr. Purley’s second wife, a matron as famous for her

cheeses as her spouse for his hurdles, have christened her girl so

outlandishly? No, Joneses were as abundant as hips and haws, and this

Miss Jones could only have come to their out-of-the-way parish—like Mr.

Flippance—for reasons of statutory residence, though why the Showman

should bury himself to be married, Miss Gentry declared to be an

exciting enigma. Perhaps he liked a quiet wedding, Jinny suggested,

having too many acquaintances in towns, and with that she dismissed the

hope from her mind.

But it was not so easy to dismiss the topic from Miss Gentry’s. That

lady was rolling the hymeneal discussion under her tongue. She pointed

out that Foxearth Farm was not in Little Bradmarsh and was prepared to

discuss the romantic ramifications, if it should turn out on the

wedding-day that the bride was disqualified. But Jinny cruelly took the

sweet out of her mouth. Foxearth Farm _was_ in the parish, she declared.

“It’s one of those funny bits, lost, stolen, or strayed into other

parishes. I know because of the women from there who come upon our

parish for blankets when they’re laid aside——”

“Oh, Jinny!” deprecated Miss Gentry, to whom, maternity was as sordid

and surreptitious as matrimony was righteously romantic.

But Jinny, innocently misunderstanding, persisted. “Why, I remember the

fuss when the steam-roller tried to charge our parish for doing up a

scrap of the road beyond Foxearth Farm.”

They walked through the sunlit churchyard in constrained silence, Miss

Gentry feeling as if the steam-roller had gone over roses. But

stimulated by the iron pole and the four steps, by which ladies who rode

pillion anciently mounted and dismounted, she began wondering who would

be making the bride’s dress. That gave Jinny a happy idea. How if she

got Miss Gentry the work—that would be a slight return for all she owed

her!

“Why shouldn’t _you_ make it?” she inquired excitedly. “I could speak to

Mr. Flippance, now that I know where he is.”

“Hush, child, don’t profane the Sabbath! Men don’t count in wedding

matters,” said Miss Gentry in complex correction. “Nor would I care

about the patronage of stage people.”

“But she mayn’t be stage.”

“Like runs to like,” Miss Gentry sighed, and Jinny felt the Colchester

romance hovering again. But it did not descend. Instead, Miss Gentry

remarked that she ought to have known that it could not be a local

beauty. No play-actor with any brains at all could be attracted by

anything hereabouts, especially when they could not achieve the

acquaintance of women of real attraction and intellect, these preferring

the company of cats to that of strolling sinners. Nevertheless, far be

it from her wilfully to rob Jinny of a commission.

“I wasn’t thinking of my commission,” Jinny protested with a little

flush.

“I couldn’t dream of it otherwise. Squibs and I need so little and have

more work than we can manage.”

“Squibs?” Jinny murmured.

“The place is overrun with rats,” Miss Gentry explained. “What will it

be when the cold drives them in from the ditches? However, fortunately

that horrible old Mawhood stands compelled to clear the cottage before

winter. That was the compromise our too kindly pastor let him off with.”

“So you told me. Shall I order the Deacon at once?”

“The Deacon?” Miss Gentry sniffed. “Bishops they’ll call themselves

next.”

“There _is_ a bishop,” Jinny reminded her. “Bishop Harrod.”

“Wretched little rat-catchers!” Miss Gentry hissed. “Setting themselves

up against the Church Established. I’m so glad you’re done with them.”

“But I’m not,” Jinny confessed shyly. “I’m still Peculiar.”

“You are, indeed!” Miss Gentry cried, startled. “Do you mean to tell me

that after the glorious privilege of sitting under Mr. Fallow——!”

Words failed her, and they also failed Jinny, to whom this unfamiliar

metaphor conjured up a puzzling picture of the vicar perched on her

Sunday bonnet. The girl was the first to recover her breath.

“Gran’fer told me my mother wanted me to be Peculiar,” she explained. “I

can’t go against my Angel-Mother.” Then she blushed prettily, never

having mentioned the angel mother since childhood, and feeling somehow

as if she had profaned a sacred secret.

“If your angel mother was alive,” cried Miss Gentry with conviction,

“it’s to our church that she would come—to our grand old church with

its storied windows!”

A divine thrill ran through all Jinny’s frame. Her belief that her

mother and the painted angel were mysteriously one was sealed. The

oracle had spoken.

Miss Gentry, swelling at her silence—Jinny heard the silk

crackling—felt herself indeed an oracle. Squibs had his pick of the

plates at that Sunday dinner, enjoying a Sabbath rest from rats, and

basking in his mistress’s lap, a black curled-up breathing mass of

felicity.

V

As Jinny jogged along next Tuesday morning, diverging from her usual

beat to take in the hurdle-maker’s home, that lay—like a geological

“fault”—in the wrong parish, the plan that formed itself in her mind

was to approach the question of the bride and the wedding-dress by way

of Barnaby Purley, the youth who had so chivalrously come to her rescue

by delivering at Uckford Manor the keg of oil overlooked by her on that

memorable journey with Elijah Skindle. It was because Foxearth Farm

possessed this hobbledehoy scion and a trap of its own that Jinny had

never done its marketing, nor come face to face with the creature of

whom with sidelong eye she caught tantalizing glimpses in the Flynt

Flyer. “Not bad-lookin’” was the countryside’s appraisal of her, which

was rather ominous, indicating as it did considerable beauty, and

conjoined as it was with a rumour of easy conquests, culminating in the

coach-owner. But a good square look at her had not been attainable, even

on Sunday, for though the family was Church of England—Mr. Giles Purley

being even a churchwarden—it preferred to worship in the parish church

to which it did not parochially belong. Jinny told herself she was

hastening at this first opportunity purely in Miss Gentry’s interest,

for fear the bridal gown had been ordered elsewhere. But she could not

quite disguise from herself her consuming anxiety to discover whether

this everyday Miss Jones was really a Cleopatra, though she called her

poignant emotion mere curiosity, and deemed herself as apathetic at

heart as the bumble-bees now crawling miserably about her cart, which

could be flicked into a feeble flight and drone, but which soon relapsed

into their torpor.

In truth the suppressed hope of finding Blanche safely paired with the

Showman was now quickening her pulses and restoring the wild rose to her

cheeks. The September day, too, for all the long-continued drought, and

despite the drowsy bumble-bees, was not devoid of animating influences,

especially the delicious smell of burnings from the fields, where men

tossed from their prongs brown masses of weed into red and smoking

heaps, or carried like merry devils fiery forks from one pile to

another. Monstrous fungi clove in pied picturesqueness to the

elm-trunks, and a hawthorn grove with its scarlet berries was like a

vast radiant smile. Overhead the sun, a shimmery thin-clouded sphere,

showed like an eye in a great white peacock’s wing. The hips and

blackberries were interfused in the hedges, the ivy flowered on the

squat church towers, the Virginia creepers were reddening the cottages,

and the dahlias grew tall in the little front gardens. In the orchards

the pear-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit. Around them the

turnip-fields looked more like spreads of mustard, so thick were the

slender yellow-flowering stems pushing between the crop proper. And

everywhere was life; pecking poultry scattering before Methusalem’s

feet, and little frogs playing leapfrog; swarms of the Daddy-long-legs

and gigantic spiders, great quarrelling families of rooks, quiet chewing

cattle, pigs nosing for acorns or windfall apples, hares or great rats

or weasels scuttling across the road, partridges straying fearlessly in

the stubble, swallows darting unpromisingly high, and when Jinny passed

over the little brick bridge, at which a black drainage-mill waved what

seemed its four crossed white combs, a pair of superb swans hissed their

proud protectiveness over a very drab cygnet.

Driving through an avenue of firs and hornbeam, and past a dirty pond

with two flagged mounds in the middle, she reached the clearing where

the hurdle-maker operated, with his farmhouse for base of his combined

industrial, agricultural, and pastoral occupations.

Mr. Giles Purley, a rosy-wrinkled apple-faced ancient, stood in his

shirt-sleeves, looking as pleasantly untidy as his farmyard, which was

full of felled logs and split wood, and bean and corn stacks, and

ramshackle sheds. He was planing off knots with a bill-hook, and as

Jinny drove up to the gate of the old timbered red house, he greeted her

with a cheery grumble at the drought which forced such winter work

prematurely upon him. Jinny was abashed to find no pretext for her visit

coming to her tongue, so she stammered out that she wanted to see

Barnaby, and the droll look that twinkled across his father’s face sent

her colour up still higher. “Always wants a change, they youngsters,” he

chuckled benevolently, “whether ’tis of work or sweet-hearts.”

At this point Jinny became aware of Barnaby himself, who, equally in his

shirt-sleeves, was smiling sheepishly up at her from the ditch which he

was discumbering with a hook. “Lilies of the walley they stick in their

buttonholes,” went on his father waggishly, “as if weeds was ever aught

but weeds. There ain’t one that showlders his sack o’ corn or sticks to

his dearie. Sheep’s eyes they can make, but as for sheep-hurdles——!”

The note was now earnest. It seemed an unpropitious moment to tackle

Barnaby.

And to make it more impossible, Blanche herself suddenly bounded from

the orchard, flourishing a great corroded pear.

“Nipped thirteen!” she cried gaily.

“Not bad-lookin’,” forsooth! To Jinny she appeared in her bloom and

colour like a rich peach dipped in cream: overripeness was the only flaw

her beauty suggested to this girl in her teens. But the chill at Jinny’s

heart did not prevent her crying out with equal gaiety, “What an unlucky

number—for the wasps!”

Barnaby laughed adoringly from his ditch, Mr. Giles Purley in simple joy

of the slaughter. The pigs, he explained gleefully, had gnawed at the

pear-bags and Blanche was “wunnerful masterous” at nipping the wasps as

they crawled out of the forbidden fruit. Asps, Jinny found herself

thinking, would have a bad time at such bold hands, though they made the

Cleopatra likelier—she slued her eyes round to see the rings on them,

but the engagement finger was hidden by the big pear, and Miss Jones,

her gaiety checked, was eyeing her like the intruder she was.

“She can kill two at once,” Barnaby called up.

“Like you with the lasses,” flashed his father, to his confusion.

“It’s nothing,” said Blanche coldly. “They haven’t time to curl their

tails round.”

“Who? The lasses?” asked Jinny, and to her relief the beautiful Blanche

vouchsafed a smile.

“You won’t be stung if you don’t think you’ll be,” the girl explained

more cordially. Then, unable to retain the proud secret longer, even

from the Carrier, she burst forth, “I’m going on the stage with it.”

“What!” Jinny gasped.

“Only as a beginning, of course. ‘Bianca, The Bare-Handed Wasp-Killer,’

it’ll be on the bills.”

“Rubbidge!” came explosively from Mr. Purley. “And where will Mr.

Flippance get the wapses in the winter? A circus-slut indeed—I wonder

what your mother can be thinkin’ of! And what’s Mr. Honeytongue going to

bill _you_ as, Barnaby? Not champion hurdle-maker, I’ll go gaff!”

“Wait till you see me,” said Barnaby with sullen mysteriousness. “You

don’t know a circus from a theaytre.”

“You’ll stick to your shackles and bolts,” said his parent grimly, “and

peel the bark off, too!”

At the mention of Mr. Flippance, Jinny’s heart beat fast: she felt

hovering on the verge of the revelation, and the Bianca and the

stage-project rekindled her hope. But Mr. Purley’s grievance had to be

worked off first. “They’re too lazy to peel the wood,” he explained to

Jinny. “But that’s the main thing for hurdles—to strip ’em well against

rain. Same as you was full-dressed in a pouring rain—the time it ’ud

take you to dry! If you was naked now——”

“Oh, dad!” Barnaby remonstrated, to his parent’s confusion, and enjoyed

this tit-for-tat.

“When do you expect Mr. Flippance, Mr. Purley?” Jinny asked him hastily.

“Oh, he never comes in the mornings,” Blanche replied, and this

appropriation of the question seemed to Jinny to continue the promise of

Bianca and the stage-project.

“Then can I speak to—to his intended?” she flashed brilliantly, with a

clever smile.

“She’s gone to her dressmaker,” said Blanche simply.

It was a double blow, and Jinny winced before it. In that twinkling of

her eye Blanche seemed years younger, diabolically handsome, a nipper of

buds as well as of wasps. But a worse blow awaited her, for she had

scarcely regained her composure when the distant sound of a wheezy horn

and a sense of an impending avalanche brought Blanche into bounding

activity again.

“Why, there’s Will!” she exclaimed with a comic, happy start. “And me

not dressed yet!” And without a word to the little Carrier, she ran

gaily into the house.

Frantically clutching Nip who was about to spring to meet the coach,

Jinny cried vague thanks to the hurdle-maker and hurried Methusalem down

a by-way so narrow that she could hardly squeeze through the untrimmed

“werges” neglected of Barnaby.

VI

When she heard the coach well on its way again on the Chipstone road,

with Blanche divined within, she found herself possessed by an

unexpected urging towards Mr. Flippance. She had no real round any

longer—only the hours to fill and her grandfather to half deceive—and

perhaps, despite Miss Gentry’s own opinion, the bridegroom might yet be

able to prevent her being cut out by the rival pair of scissors. The

truth was, Jinny felt a physical need of the toning up the Showman

somehow imparted to life. To drive around the rest of the day with

practically no business but her own thoughts would be too dreadful. He

must surely babble happily about his bride, and apart from the interest

of her identity, some of his glow could not but radiate to her. And

there was Caleb and Martha to see, too—how were they faring, these

dear, simple creatures, too long unvisited? But then—thought that froze

the heart!—had she not declared she would never set foot in Frog Farm

again? No, she answered herself defiantly—and no memory of hereditary

quibbling, nothing of her sense of humour, rose to trouble the

reply—all she had said was that Will should never _see_ her there. And

Will was safely chained to the Chipstone road.

All the same she looked round apprehensively and with wildly beating

heart before she allowed Methusalem to lift the latch of the familiar

gate, and she had somehow expected so great a transformation in the

farmhouse under its new and sinister activities, and was conscious of so

vast a change in herself since she had last seen it, that its primitive

black front almost startled her, so unchanged did it appear. True, the

ferrets’ cages were gone, but their absence only made it more its old

self, and the moan of the doves was as reassuring as the singing of the

kettle on her own hearth. Caleb’s red shirt-sleeves looked for once in

keeping with the scene, arising as they did out of yellow flame-tinged

clouds from the rubbish-heap which he was burning, and the pleasant

pungent smell of which filled her eyes with tears, half smoke, half

emotion. Even in that glow the homely hair-circled face was capable of a

new illumination.

“Gracious goodness, there’s Jinny!” He ran to the house-door. “Mother!

Mother!” he cried in jubilant agitation.

Martha emerged at a hobbling run, apron-girded. Despite the glow, _her_

face darkened.

“You give a body a turn,” she grumbled. “I almost thought ’twas the

Golden City coming down.”

“’Tis nigh as good,” he retorted boldly, “bein’ as Jinny was same as

gone there. And bless me, ef she don’t look ghosty!”

“Good morning, Jinny!” said Martha coldly. “We don’t need a carrier

now—with our coach to get everything.”

Jinny’s cheeks turned far from “ghosty.” “I haven’t come to you—only to

Mr. Flippance.”

“But he gets everything, too, through Willie.”

“I know that—I merely want to speak to him.”

“You can’t now.”

“The missus means he’s abed,” Caleb explained, rushing to Jinny’s

relief, and indeed the information brought a smile back to her twitching

lips. “Minds me of a great old tortoise, diggin’ hisself into his

blankets. Do him good to be up with the sun, same as when Oi was a

scarecrow, soon as the wheat was sown.”

“You don’t want to tell everybody you began as a scarecrow,” said Martha

frigidly.

“Ef we’re rich now, dear heart, and can ride in our own coach, ’tis the

Lord’s hand, not ours. Oi watched over wheat and winter beans, and ’arly

peas, and winter oats, and then spring barley, but all the time the Lord

was watchin’ over me.”

“Not as a scarecrow,” said Martha severely.

“Oi warn’t a scarecrow ploughin’-time, bein’ set on the middle hoss to

flick the whip, and chance times when ’twas too frosty to plough Oi went

to Dame Pippler’s to school.”

“I never heard that before,” said Martha.

“Dedn’t like to tell ye,” he confessed, “being as ’twas too cowld to

howd the slate-pencil, and the book-larnin’ leaked out ’twixt the

frosts. ’Twas a penny a week wasted.”

Martha saw their visitor was amused at this revelation after fifty years

of wedlock. “Jinny wants to be going on,” she observed testily. “Look at

all her boxes.”

“Oi’m proper pleased to see ’em, for as Oi says to Willie, Oi hope as

you ain’t hart Jinny’s business and grieved the Lord. Ye can’t sleep, Oi

says, ef ye’ve grieved the Lord.”

“Then Mr. Flippance must be a saint,” laughed Jinny. But she was touched

to tears.

Caleb had, however, not finished his apologia for his lack of learning,

and was to be diverted neither by Jinny’s jests nor his wife’s grimaces.

“And in the summer,” he explained carefully, “Oi got to goo out with my

liddle old gun agin they bird-thieves, though peas and pebbles was all

the shot my feyther——”

“Can’t you try some at Mr. Flippance’s window?” interrupted Jinny,

fearful the fretful Martha would soon close her door upon her.

“Oi’d have to stand sideways for that!” He pointed to a hooked-back

casement. “Fust he kivers hisself up, then he opens hisself out”—he

chuckled contemptuously—“’tis ‘in dock, out nettle,’ as the sayin’

goos.”

Jinny lifted her little horn to her lips and blew a blast so literally

rousing that hardly had its echoes died than from the black casement

framework a red unshaven face, like the rayed rising sun on an inn

signboard, dawned above clouds of flamboyant dressing-gown.

“Jinny! Hurrah!” cried the apparition in delighted surprise. “The very

person I’ve been wanting for weeks!”

In the effulgence of that great rubicund sphere of a face Jinny’s mists

began to dissolve—after all, with all his faults he belonged to her

rosy past, to the good old times ere black horses or red men had arisen

to rend her. “Then why didn’t you let me know?” she smiled.

“Just what I was thinking of doing. So glad you’ve saved me a letter.

Never was so hard-worked in my life. Good morning, ma,” he threw to Mrs.

Flynt, whose set face now relaxed into a maternal mildness, “do I smell

breakfast?”

“Ye could ha’ smelt it afore seven, friend,” said Caleb, growing dour as

Martha grew soft. “And the missus a bit paltry to-day, too!”

“Am I late? I’m so sorry. Why, I thought it was Will’s horn!”

“Mr. Flippance overslept himself, dearie,” Martha said reproachfully.

“But you hate food spilin’,” Caleb protested.

“Not so much as _I_ hate spoilt food!” said Tony. “Not that a good

housekeeper like Mrs. Flynt would really let food spoil—any more than

you your wheat-patch.”

“Ef ye had helped gittin’ that bit o’ corn in,” retorted Caleb, “ye’d

fare to have more to sleep on.”

“There’s more than one kind of work, Caleb,” said Martha severely.

“There’s brain-work for them that have never been scarecrows.”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Flynt!” said Tony earnestly. “I’m worked to a

shadow.”

“And there was no such hurry to get the corn in,” Martha added.

“With all they prayers for rine gooin’ on, ye can’t be too careful,”

Caleb urged.

“But what work had you got, Mr. Flippance?” Jinny laughed.

“Getting married. Didn’t you know?”

She was startled. “But you’re not married already?”

“No such luck. When the lady says ‘Yes,’ you think all your troubles are

over. But they’re only beginning.”

Caleb’s face relaxed in a grin, whereupon Martha’s hardened to a frown.

“Marriage is no laughing matter,” she said, with a glower at her

husband.

“No, indeed, Mrs. Flynt!” endorsed Tony. “What with the forms and

questions and ceremonies and witnesses and what not, and rings to buy

and bouquets to order—it’s worse than a dress rehearsal!”

“But you’ve had the rehearsal,” Jinny reminded him.

“I was young and strong. Now you’ve got to help me.”

“_Me?_” Jinny was enchanted at this smoothing of the path for Miss

Gentry. “But I’m so busy,” she protested professionally. “I can’t wait

till you’re up.”

“Jinny’s too busy,” Martha corroborated. And in her eagerness to be rid

of the girl, she unconsciously clucked to Methusalem, and so exactly

like Jinny that the noble animal actually started.

“Wait! Wait!” Mr. Flippance shouted down wildly. “Do wait! Such a lot to

consult you about. Haven’t even got a best man yet. Find me one and I’ll

call down blessings on your head!”

“I don’t want you to call them _down_,” she jested up. “That’s the

trouble.”

“I’ll be down before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.’”

“I wasn’t going to suggest _him_!” And she reined in her fiery steed.

Martha had hurried to her kitchen to bring in the belated breakfast, and

the convulsion into which Jinny’s last remark appeared to throw Caleb

was left unchecked by wifely grimaces. The veteran alternated between

gurgles and roars so continuously that Jinny, flattered as she was by

the reception of her jest, began to feel uneasy.

“That fair flabbergasted him,” he gasped, getting his breath at last.

“How can Oi, says Oi, ef Oi’m a buoy-oy, Oi says.” He wiped the tears

from his whiskered cheeks and blew his nose into his great “muckinger.”

“But he didn’t ask _you_ to be best man,” she said, puzzled. “And you

aren’t a boy.”

“’Twas master as called me a buoy-oy,” he explained, his eyes still

dancing, “so as to keep down my wages. Oi’ve got three hosses same as

the min, Oi says, and can plough my stetch similar-same as them and cut

and trave up my corn better’n Bill Ravens as felt the teeth of the

sickle two days arter he started and couldn’t work no more, though

double-money time, as Oi can sartify bein’ as ’twar me what tied my

neckercher round his arm with the blood pourin’ down like sweat, and

lucky ’twarn’t his wife, Oi says, but another woman gooin’ behind him to

be larnt how, she bein’ in confinement. But master he wouldn’t listen to

nawthen. Oi’ll give you easy ploughin’ was all he promised, ye’re onny a

buoy-oy, he says, obstinacious like, and Oi stayed on a bit, not

mislikin’ the cans of tea the wives brought, all hot and sweet, and the

big granary with pillars and fower on us thrashin’ and rattlin’ on the

big oak floor, jolly as a harvest supper, and Bill Ravens—that be the

feyther of the rollin’ stone as shears chance times for Master

Peartree—singin’ like the saints in Jerusalem, all except for the

words. But at last, bein’ as feyther wanted the money and Oi needed time

to look for a farmer not so nippy, gimme a week off, says Oi to old

Skindflint. A week off! says master. What for? Gooin’ to git married?”

At this point the convulsion recommenced, and Jinny, though she

understood how the Flippance wedding had set his memories agog, had

still to wait for enlightenment as to why they were agrin.

“Married, Oi says! How can Oi git married, ef Oi’m a buoy-oy?”

It was out at last, the great repartee of his life, and Jinny felt he

was right to cherish its memory. She occupied the period of his renewed

cachinnation in descending from her seat and giving Methusalem his

impoverished nosebag. Her action reminded Caleb to offer to show her the

enlarged stables, with the old roof raised to admit the coach. Then,

colouring as if at an indelicacy, he hastily inquired how her

grandfather was, remarking with commiseration that he must be getting a

bit elderly.

Never had Jinny known him so loquacious—the absence of Martha was

combining with her own advent to loosen his usually ruly member. And at

last the pent-up flood of his grievances against the Showman burst

forth. The return of Will, Jinny gathered, had been dislocating enough,

even before his new-fangled coach had brought the stir of the great

world and Bundock almost daily, but now the house and the hours were all

“topsy-tivvy,” worse than in Cousin Caroline’s time. He would do Will

the justice to say that it wasn’t his fault—Will had been against

putting up a “furriner” in their spare bedroom—but the “great old

sluggaby” had come and ingratiated himself so with the rheumatic but

romantic Martha, and offered such startling prices—a pound a week for

board and lodging—“enough to feed the whole Pennymole family for a

fortnight”—that she had forced her will upon both the male Flynts. “The

trouble with Martha is,” Caleb summed up, “she allus wants what she

wants.” Mr. Flippance, he explained, “got a piper for her from her

Lunnon Sin Agog—funny name that for the Lord’s House, even in

Lunnon—and that piper fared to be all about the Christy Dolphins and

their doin’s—the _Loightstand_, Martha called it. And she read me a

piece out of it how Mr. Somebody, husband o’ Sister T’other, was

baptized by Elder Somebody Else; and she wanted me to goo and do

likewise.”

“But you _are_ nearly one of them, aren’t you?” Jinny smiled.

He looked uneasy.

“Oi don’t want to be baptized a Jew,” he said plaintively. “Martha she

argufies as Paul says _we_ are the Jews, bein’ Abraham’s seed in our

innards. So long as she calls us the Lord’s people, Oi fair itches to be

one, but that goos agin the stomach like to call yourself a Jew. Same as

she was satisfied with the New Jerusalem part, Oi’d goo with her. For ef

the Book says, ‘No man hath gone up to heaven,’ or ‘Whither Oi goo, ye

cannot come,’ that proves as heaven’s got to come to us, and happen

Oi’ll live to see it droppin’ down with its street of pure gold same as

transparent brass. But Oi won’t be swallowed up whole like a billy-owl

swallows a mouse.”

“What’s that you’re saying, Caleb?” said Martha, now perceived back at

her house-door.

“He was telling me about the _Lightstand_,” said Jinny glibly.

Martha beamed again. “Ah, it won’t be long before that light spreads,

though now the world is all shrouded in darkness and superstition. But

salvation is of the Jews.”

“That ain’t writ in the Book?” inquired Caleb anxiously.

“Salvation is of the Jews,” repeated Martha implacably. “John iv. 22.

There’s nine of us now in Essex alone, the _Lightstand_ says, not

reckoning London. They don’t know about another that’s on the way

Zionwards,” she added mysteriously.

“Meaning me?” said Caleb nervously.

“Meaning a man with brains and book-learning,” said Martha sternly, “and

he’s ready to see you now, Jinny.”

“Well, nine ain’t no great shakes,” Caleb murmured.

“We are the salt of the earth,” Martha reminded him. “A pinch of salt

goes a long way.”

“Ay, when it rolls in a pill-box,” Caleb reflected ruefully. “And hows

the old chapel, Jinny?” he said aloud. “Willy never goos now.”

Jinny coloured up: one of her pretexts for apostacy seemed null and

void.

“I’ll see you when I come out, I suppose,” she said evasively, as she

followed Martha within.

VII

The parlour of Frog Farm had not the peculiar mustiness which greeted

Jinny’s nostrils when last she peeped into it that tragic morning of

Maria’s illness, but there was by way of compensation a reek of stale

tobacco and the odours of the breakfast bacon and mushrooms, while in

lieu of the sacrosanct tidiness there was a pervasion of papers, with a

whole mass of scripts sliding steadily from the slippery sofa. The

brown-lozenged text on the wall: “When He giveth quietness, who then can

make trouble?” seemed to shriek for Caleb’s answer: “Friend Flippance.”

Other documents bulged and bristled from both pockets of the

dressing-gown as from greasy paniers.

“Bless you, Jinny,” Tony gurgled from his breakfast-cup. He eyed her

rapturously. “What a pretty pair you’ll make at the wedding!”

“It’s no use, Mr. Flippance,” said Martha, beaming, “I’ve told you

before I won’t go into a church.”

Mr. Flippance, who had been mentally coupling his bride and Jinny,

replied with but the briefest muscular quiver, that the only thing that

reconciled him to Martha’s absence was that she was incapacitated by

matrimony from the rôle of bridesmaid. This morning he would not trouble

her to wait. “You can ‘withdraw’ from me,” he said jocosely.

Martha was jarred by this profane use of the sacred vocabulary, and

moreover felt it almost as improper to leave Jinny alone in her house,

even with a budding bridegroom. “Jinny’s got no secrets from me,” she

said tartly; and Mr. Flippance, divining his error, remarked blandly,

“Nor have I.” And as Martha started to dust the mantelpiece ornaments

and to discover cigar-ash in her china shoes, he drew Jinny’s attention

to the “beautiful” silk sampler that hung over them. “And all worked

with Mrs. Flynt’s own hand! What a wonderful lion—and as for the

unicorn, she’s got it to the life!”

“Oh, it’s only what I did when a girl,” said Martha, blushing modestly.

“Only I didn’t like to hang it up then, because I’d left no room for the

foreign trees like my sisters put in!”

“Well, but you’ve got in the alphabet, big and little, and all the

figures! Wonderful!”

“That’s where Willie learnt his A B C from,” said Martha, radiant.

“Ah, that gay deceiver!” sighed Mr. Flippance. “He told me he was a

Yankee, but now I find he’s only a yumorist. Still he’s a chap any woman

can be proud of—what do _you_ say, Jinny?”

Jinny, who had seated herself on the sofa, carefully steadied the

slipping manuscripts as she replied with a forced lightness:

“I say, if you want a best man, you can’t find a better.”

“Ah, that’s the trouble. He won’t take part in a Church ceremony

neither, he says he’s got to consider the old folks—at the chapel,” he

added promptly. “But at any rate we shall have the best bridesmaid.”

“You don’t mean me?” said Jinny, colouring under his admiring gaze.

“Because it’s impossible. I haven’t the time—or the money.”

“Is it the dress you’re thinking of? Surely the Theatre Royal,

Chipstone, can run to that?” And pulling a protrusive scroll from a

pocket of his dressing-gown, he unfurled it beatifically, exposing a

poster with the coupled names of Anthony Flippance and Cleopatra Jones

in giant letters.

“Anthony and Cleopatra!” he breathed in a ravishment. “The moment she

told me her second name was Cleopatra I knew it was useless fighting

against the fates.”

“But have you bought our chapel then?” Jinny inquired.

“Bought your chapel?” Mr. Flippance was mystified. “Why on earth should

I buy your chapel?”

“You—you might have turned it into a theatre!” she stammered

apologetically.

He waved the suggestion away with a jewelled hand. “Only a new Temple of

Thespis could live up to Anthony and Cleopatra. We are building!”

“Where?” Now it was Jinny that was mystified—she had seen no such

enterprise afoot.

“Here!” He tapped the other pocket of his dressing-gown. “Plans!” He

rolled up his poster reluctantly. “Cleopatra wanted to see it in print.

Didn’t I say what a work getting married was? But now that the

bridesmaid’s settled——!”

“But she’s not!” said Jinny, more alarmed than when he was trying to

cast her for the bride, perhaps because the danger of being sucked in

was greater.

“Oh, Jinny!” He looked at her with large reproachful eyes and

mechanically threw bacon to Nip, who had at last sniffed his way in, and

who, fortunately for Martha’s composure, caught it ere it reached her

carpet. “You see she wants to have the thing all regular and

respectable, and all her family are in Wales. She hasn’t got a parent

handy to give her away. And having led a wandering life, she hadn’t even

a parish to marry in. I never thought you’d desert an old pal.”

“But I’m no pal of hers—I don’t even know her.”

“Oh, Jinny!” And just arresting a paper-slide, he extricated a

photograph from the imperilled mass. “The new Scott Archer process,” he

declared proudly. “Knocks your daguerreotypes into the middle of last

week. Good gag that, eh?”

But it was Jinny who seemed knocked into that period; and not only by

this new triumph of the camera. For in this wonderful breathing image

she recognized—in all save size, for this seemed a Cleopatra swelling

to regal stature—the beauteous human doll she had last seen walking

down the steps of a toy house, conning a part.

“But she’s married!” she gasped.

“Not yet. Would to heaven it _were_ all over!” said Mr. Flippance

airily, but his great brow grew black for an instant ere he turned it

sunnily on Martha. “Oh, ma, _could_ I have more of these marvellous

mushrooms?”

“I’ll see, you greedy boy,” she smiled, retreating.

“Well, who could help saying encore to such items?” He turned

reproachfully on Jinny. “You nearly shocked the old lady.”

“But didn’t you—didn’t you call her the Duchess?” Jinny stammered. “Oh,

but perhaps it is Mrs. Duke’s sister—she looks taller.”

“That’s because she’s got no legs,” he explained paradoxically. “But

it’s all right—The Loveliest Leading Lady in London.” (Jinny heard the

capital letters distinctly.)

He went on to explain that London didn’t know this yet, and that some

time must elapse before Cleopatra would be in a position to demonstrate

it on the spot, owing to local jealousies. But Jinny came back

remorselessly to her point.

“But surely she was married to Mr. Duke!”

“Hush! Appearances are deceptive. They were just close friends.”

“You couldn’t well be closer—in that doll’s house,” said Jinny

scornfully. And her own words reminded her how he had denounced the

Duchess as a “squeaking doll” whose “golden” hair was spurious.

“Now you shock _me_, Jinny,” said Mr. Flippance severely. “Pure as the

driven snow is my Cleo, stainless as the Lady Agnes, shut up in that

great oak chest on her wedding morn, sweet as her namesake, Bianca, in

_The Taming of the Shrew_.”

“Why does she tame shrews?” asked Jinny, puzzled.

“That’s a play by Shakespeare”—the name not occurring in the

Spelling-Book, left Jinny unimpressed. “A shrew is a vixen.”

This natural history left Jinny still less impressed. “That’s nonsense,”

she said. “A shrew is tiny and lovely to look at, with darling rounded

ears. I buried one the other day, and its eye was as bright as life.”

“It’s only a way of speaking,” he explained, “as you call a woman a cat.

Katharina’s the polecat of the play that her husband has to tame with a

whip, but Bianca is a dove, gentle and spotless.”

“Doves are not so gentle,” said Jinny. “They peck each other dreadfully.

I like vixens better, at least they seem fonder of their family when you

peep down their earths.”

Mr. Flippance, who had never in his life seen either a shrew or a vixen

or a polecat or observed the habits of doves, was taken aback. He had

even a vague sense of blasphemy, some ancient religious images whirring

confusedly in his brain. “Understand this, Jinny,” he said sharply,

abandoning the shifting sands of metaphor, “Cleo gave Mr. Duke her

companionship and her artistic co-operation, but as for marrying

him—bring me that Book!”

He indicated the precious volume which Mrs. Flynt had left in the

parlour for his study of the text-evidence of the Christadelphian

teaching. But Jinny took his Bible oath for granted. Sincerity and

righteous indignation radiated from every round inch of his face, and

Jinny, despite her farmyard experience, was too nebulous in her ideas of

human matings not to be shaken. In truth he had been vastly relieved by

the discovery that the couple had pretermitted the ceremony and that he

was saved the tedium and expense of a divorce suit, though he wondered

why Mr. Duke with his meticulous book-keeping and contracts should be so

loose where women were concerned, while he, so averse from parchments

and figures, had a proper respect for the marriage-tie. Human nature was

devilishly deep, he thought: no wonder a man got drowned if he tried to

fathom himself.

But Jinny, though she now believed she had misunderstood the ducal

_ménage_, was not without an instinctive distrust. “She didn’t want to

live in the caravan,” she protested.

“No,” he agreed, misapprehending the local idiom. “It was that

pig-headed wire-puller who wanted it. Duke’s the villain of the piece,

abusing my darling’s innocence and exploiting her artistic aspirations.

He got round the poor girl, knowing her aunt had left her all her money.

Cleo, my dear Jinny, is the niece of the famous Cleopatra, the Cairo

Contortionist, after whom she was christened, and whose death a year or

so ago eclipsed the gaiety of Astley’s and Mr. Batty’s new Hippodrome.”

“Was she so beautiful?” asked Jinny, somewhat awed.

“I was in love with her myself in my youth,” Mr. Flippance replied

simply. “But though you could gossip with her round the coke-brazier at

the back of the ring, she always made you feel that no man was worthy to

chalk the soles of her tight-rope shoes. And her niece, as you have

doubtless perceived, has the same grand manner.”

“Then why did she keep company with Mr. Duke?”

Jinny returned to the sore spot, Mr. Flippance felt, like a buzzing

bluebottle.

“If you don’t believe me,” he cried, “show me the little Dukes and

Duchesses. Where are they? Produce ’em.”

He looked at her fiercely—as demanding a rain of coroneted cherubs from

the air.

The bold stroke put the climax to Jinny’s obfuscation. Marriage without

children was practically unknown on her round, though the children often

died. “Don’t you see he wanted to compromise her?” pursued Tony

triumphantly, after giving the cherubs a reasonable time to materialize.

“He thought she’d never dare break away with her money, and that he

could spend her last farthing on boosting himself into the legitimate.

He’s all right with the marionettes—a dapster as you say here,” Mr.

Flippance admitted magnanimously. “But as an actor he could no more

expect to please _my_ public than to keep Cleo hidden in a bushel. He

might throw up the sponge and go back to his _fantoccini_—but what

career was that for Cleo? She broke with him on the nail—the

partnership, I mean. And I ask you, ma,” he wound up, with an

appreciative sniff as Martha re-entered, not only with mushrooms but

freshly fried bacon, “what woman of spirit could do otherwise?”

Mrs. Flynt beamed assent, and her apparent acquaintance with the facts

contributed to lull Jinny’s uneasiness. Surely the pious Martha would

not connive at scandalous proceedings. Relieved, she sat silent;

wondering—while Mr. Flippance did jovial justice to the encore

dish—what the Duchess would think if she knew that she, Jinny, could

have anticipated her in the rôle of the second Mrs. Flippance. And what

would Polly have thought of her as a stepmother, she wondered still more

whimsically. Perhaps between them they could have made a man of him. She

had never seen his daughter over her cigar and milk or her sense of

Polly as a pillar of respectability might have been shattered.

“And how is Miss Flippance?” she said.

His face changed suddenly—rain-clouds overgloomed the sun. His fork

fell from his fingers. “You don’t know what daughters are,” he

blubbered. “She’s left me!”

“Left you?”

“Ask ma,” he half sobbed. It was infinitely pathetic.

“Don’t let it get cold again,” Martha coaxed.

“I can’t eat.” He lit a cheroot abstractedly, and the old woman and the

young girl followed his silent puffings with a yearning sympathy, while

Nip begged, unheeded.

“Mad on marionettes is Polly,” he said at last. “The moment I got rid of

’em, she packed up my things and was off.”

“Stole your things?” cried the startled Jinny.

“No—no. She knew I should be moving on for the banns—Cleo likes a

quiet place—so she left me tidy. That was her sole conception of her

duty to her legal pa. But she had always looked upon me as a thing to be

tidied—not a soul to be loved and cherished.” He wiped an eye with the

sleeve of his dressing-gown and asked brokenly for his brandy. Martha

hurried to his bedroom.

“But perhaps your daughter’ll come back,” Jinny suggested soothingly.

“God forbid!” he cried. “I mean they’d be at it hammer and tongs.

Perhaps Providence does all things for the best.”

“But where has she gone?” Jinny’s sympathy was now passing to Polly, as

she began to grasp the true complexity of her exodus.

“To her grandmother in Cork, I expect.” He blew a placid puff. “Did I

never tell you my pa’s real wife—the one he didn’t live with, I

mean—was originally the widow of a well-to-do cheesemonger? Polly

always looked up her nominal granny when we played Ireland. She likes

respectable people.”

“Is that why she won’t come to the wedding?” Jinny inquired cruelly, for

Polly’s refusal to countenance it again stirred up her doubts.

Mr. Flippance was angered afresh. “I tell you, my Cleopatra can hold up

her head with the whitest cheesemonger’s widow in the land. But it’s

hard,” he said, reverting to pathos and flicking his cigar-ash

mournfully into the just-dusted shoe, “to be left without a daughter at

such a crisis. Think how she would have stage-managed everything—even

bought the ring.” The tragedy of his situation mastered him. “Forgive my

emotion—I was always one to wear my heart on my sleeve.” He wiped his

eyes on it again. “Nobody will ever pack like Polly. Ah, thank you, ma,”

he said, as Martha reappeared with the brandy bottle. “Have you half a

crown?” he added, pouring himself out a careless quota. “You see,” he

explained, setting down his glass dolefully, and tendering Martha’s

half-crown to the astonished Jinny, “though old pals desert one at the

altar, Tony Flip doesn’t forget his obligations.”

“But what’s it for?” Jinny took the coin tentatively.

“You lent me it when that wicked Duke demanded money on the contract.”

“Oh, thank you!” Jinny was touched—a half-crown seemed as large as her

cart-wheel nowadays. Half remorsefully she suggested that a far better

bridesmaid would be the girl at Foxearth Farm.

He shook his head. “I’ve been into that. But there are—objections. It

doesn’t do, you see, for the super to be taller than the leading lady.

Now you being shorter——”

“But if Miss Jones were to wear very low heels——”

“But that would only make Miss Purley look still taller,” he said,

puzzled.

“I mean Miss Purley to wear the low heels—_she_ is a Miss Jones, too.”

“What?”

“Blanche Jones is her name—she’s only old Purley’s stepdaughter.”

He started up. “Then Mrs. Purley was formerly Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes.”

“Hurrah!” He seized the surprised Martha by the waist and began waltzing

with her, while Nip barked with excitement.

“Quiet, Nip! What’s the matter?” cried Jinny, smiling.

“A relation at last! Don’t you see that Mrs. Jones can give the bride

away?”

“But she’s not really a relation.”

“All these Joneses are one large family,” he said airily.

“But you don’t need a relation,” Martha pointed out. “A friend will do.”

“Really? I must study the stage-directions—I mean,” he corrected

himself hastily, “yours may be different from the Church of England.”

“But I know all the same, for we weren’t allowed to marry in our own

chapels, leastways not till after Willie was born.”

“Well, anyhow, I’m sure Cleopatra would prefer a relation. Mrs. Jones is

a Churchwoman, I hope. It’s necessary, ma, you know,” he apologized.

“Yes—her husband’s a churchwarden,” said Jinny.

“A churchwarden! Hurrah! Better and better. Then _he_ shall give Cleo

away.” He bumped the beaming, breathless Martha round again.

“But he isn’t even called Jones,” Jinny reminded him.

“A husband takes over his wife’s Jonesiness. Bless you, Jinny!” He

seized her hand and dragged her likewise into the circular movement.

“Now we go round the mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush, the

mulberry-bush——”

Caleb, coming past the door at this instant, stood spellbound. Had Mr.

Flippance been really converted, and was it the joy of the New

Jerusalem? Or had Martha now “moved on,” and was this the new dancing

sect of which one heard rumours?

Martha’s caperings ceased at sight of him. “It’s the wedding,” she said

somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m just going to pickle your walnuts, dear

heart,” she added sweetly. “And Jinny must be getting to her work, too.”

At which delicate hint, Jinny, faintly flushing, rose to take her leave,

and Nip, who had been whining his impatience, was already gambolling

hysterically without, before she remembered she had forgotten the very

purpose of her visit.

“Oh, by the way, Mr. Flippance,” she said, as she followed Nip, “I

suppose the wedding-gown is ordered.”

“Wedding-gown!” he repeated. “You don’t think Cleo has any need of

wedding-gowns! Why the Lady Agnes dress—Act One—is the very prop. for

the occasion, and brand new, for she had just got Duke to put on _The

Mistletoe Bough_. Otherwise I should have been asking you for the

address of that wonderful French friend of yours—the bearded lady, you

know. But if you won’t be a bridesmaid, you’ve got to come to the

show—yes, and the wedding breakfast too—I won’t take any refusal.

It’ll be at Foxearth Farm, and I’m ordering oceans of sweet champagne.

Well, thank you a million times for finding Cleo a father. Good-bye,

dear. God bless you!” He had shuffled without and now kissed his hand to

the moving cart.

“What about a new wedding-gown for _you_?” Jinny called back. “A

dressing-gown, I mean.”

“Yumorist!” came his chuckled answer.

VIII

Though not unconscious of a subterranean hostility in Martha, which she

put down to the new business rivalry, and though still perturbed about

the Duchess, Jinny felt distinctly better for this visit, not to mention

the half-crown, that now rare coin. She was still more heartened two

days later when Bundock brought a letter from Mr. Flippance stating

that, strange to say, Cleopatra did not find the Lady Agnes dress

suitable. It would make her feel she was only playing at marrying, she

said, and she was too respectful of holy matrimony to desecrate it by

any suggestion of unreality: indeed she was already being fitted by the

leading Chipstone artist. The dress was, however, turning out so

dubiously that she would be glad if Jinny’s French friend would call

upon her at Foxearth Farm with a view to preparing a “double.” As for

Jinny being bridesmaid, he must reluctantly ask her to abandon the idea,

as Cleopatra considered her too short.

“That’s the Flippance fist,” said Bundock, lingering to watch her read

the letter, “scrawls all over the shop. I don’t mind your answering by

post,” he added maliciously, “now I’ve got to go there so much. I often

kill—he, he, he!—two frogs with one stone now. So you’re to be

bridesmaid, Tony tells me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Jinny, “and mind your own business.”

“It _is_ my business,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “Didn’t he ask me

to be best man? As if in this age of reason I could take part in

superstitious rites!”

“I don’t see any superstition about marrying,” said Jinny.

“I’m not so sure—tying a man to a woman like a dog to a barrel. But

anyhow, why drag in heaven?”

“Because marriages are made there, I suppose,” said Jinny.

“Stuff and nonsense! And then the rice and the old shoes they throw!”

“I saw _you_ throw one when your sister got married.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t believe in it.”

“Then why did you throw it?”

He hesitated a moment. “They say if you don’t believe in it, it’s even

luckier than if you do.”

Jinny laughed heartily.

“I’m not joking!” Bundock declared angrily.

“If you were, I shouldn’t be laughing,” said Jinny.

“Oh well, _go_ to church!” Bundock retorted in disgust. “And I hope the

beadle will give you an extra prod next Sunday.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend. Everybody knows that church is a double torture—first

the parson sends you to sleep with his sermon, and then the verger wakes

you up with his rod.”

Jinny laughed again.

“Don’t tell me!” said Bundock. “My own father was forced to go—all the

labourers on the estate, poor chaps, dead-sleepy after the week’s work,

and that rod used to puggle ’em about. No wonder dad chucked both squire

and parson.”

“It doesn’t happen in Mr. Fallow’s church,” Jinny assured him.

“Because nobody goes!” And Bundock hurried off with this great last

word, and Jinny saw his bag heaving with the mirthful movement of his

shoulders.

Somewhat to Jinny’s surprise, Miss Gentry from being Cleopatra’s

alternative dressmaker developed into her adorer, it appearing that the

lady displayed not only proportions most pleasing to the technical

eye—“just made for clothes,” Miss Gentry put it—but a positive

appetite for tracts. She loathed Dissent, it transpired, and to be

married by a minister would seem to her little better than living in

sin. A very paragon of propriety and an elegant pillar of the faith,

Miss Cleopatra Jones, spinster, worshipped regularly with the

churchwarden and his family in the wrong parish church. Miss Gentry,

ravished by this combination of respectability and romance, did not once

compel the fair client to attend upon her, travelling to Foxearth Farm

instead in Jinny’s cart. It was impossible for Jinny’s doubts of

Cleopatra’s immaculacy to survive Miss Gentry’s encomiums. While Miss

Gentry ascended to the bedroom of her beautiful and still golden-haired

client, posed in an atmosphere of old oak bedsteads and panelled linen

presses, Jinny would sit with the second Mrs. Purley in her dairy—a

cheerful, speckless room which enjoyed a specially spacious window,

dairies being immune from the window-tax—while that bulkier edition of

Blanche made cheeses and conversation. Mrs. Purley made conversation

irrespective of her auditor, for she needed no collaborator: indeed a

second party coming athwart this Niagara of monologue would have been

swept aside like a straw.

As a great musician can take a few simple notes, and out of this theme

evoke endless intricacies, enlargements, repetitions, echoes,

duplications, parallelisms, and permutations, and then transform the

whole into another key and give it you all over again, so out of a

simple happening, like her feeding of a sick chicken, or her discovery

that a hen had laid her clutch in the hedge, Mrs. Purley, without for a

moment interrupting the milling of curd or the draining of whey, could

improvise a fugal discourse that went ramifying and returning upon

itself _ad infinitum_. It reminded Jinny of Kelcott Wood, where every

day from three to five, on these September afternoons, hundreds of

starlings, perched like bits of black coal on the mountain-ashes, kept

up a ceaseless chattering, shrilling, clucking, querying, cackling.

But she soon ceased to hear Mrs. Purley, was even lulled by the cascade.

Very familiar grew every pan, dipper, vat, tub, press, cheese-cloth, or

straw-mat, while the one readable article she knew by heart. It was the

inscription on a china mug, in which Mrs. Purley sometimes put milk, and

it recorded the virtues of a black-haired, black-whiskered head painted

thereon. “The Incorruptible Patriot. . . . The Undaunted Supporter of

the People’s Rights. . . . The Father of the Fatherless. . . . The Pride

and Glory of his Country” . . . such were a few of the attributes

ascribed, with a profuseness resembling Mrs. Purley’s conversation, to a

certain Henry Brougham, Esq., who, as Jinny learnt from Miss Gentry, was

really and truly “a love,” having defended Queen Caroline when Miss

Gentry was a schoolgirl. Queens were as liable to ill-luck as herself,

Jinny began to suspect, recalling that Egyptian asp, and she became a

little anxious for Victoria, who now came to figure in her dreams, as

defended against French fire-eaters by this black-avised man, with the

protruding nose, retreating forehead, and weak chin. Somehow—it was

unintelligible when she woke up, but quite clear in her dream—the

defended Victoria was also herself, for was not Henry Brougham “The

Father of the Fatherless”?