Adjoining the dairy was a room, lit from it—to avoid taxation—by a

pane in the door. Jinny sometimes had an uneasy sense that Blanche was

inspecting her through that pane. Otherwise she hardly ever encountered

the vespacide, who betrayed indeed no sense of rivalry, for the

relations between Will and the little Carrier were unknown, and Blanche

would, in any case, have considered so humble a personage negligible or

at least nippable.

For if this handsome creature was—as she had struck Jinny-a shade

overripe, it was not for lack of volunteer pluckers, and the mutability

which Mr. Giles Purley had gently derided in his son had been even more

marked in his stepdaughter. Fortunately Will was unaware of the episodes

that had preceded his return to England. And not only did he regard

himself as the first male that had ever squeezed that fair hand, but,

untaught by its prowess as a wasp-killer, he believed her a passive

victim to his own compelling charm. And the apparent perfection of

Blanche’s surrender was the more grateful to him after the granite he

had kept striking in Jinny. But the mobility which had hitherto marked

Miss Blanche’s affections was now manifesting itself in a novel shape,

for like Miss Gentry, she had come under the spell of Cleopatra, though

a very different Cleopatra from the ardent Churchwoman who revealed

herself to the dressmaker. The Cleopatra who magnetized the

cheese-maker’s daughter, and who, carelessly abetted by Mr. Flippance’s

sketchy promises, filled the ignorant girl with dramatic and palpitating

ambitions, was a queen of the footlights, an inspirer of romantic

passions, and in her unguarded moments—as when you sat on her bed at

midnight with your hair down—a teller of strange Bohemian stories, a

citer of perturbing Sapphic songs, the melodies of which she could even

whistle. What wonder if Mrs. Hemans—Blanche’s favourite poet

hitherto—began to pall! She had been proud enough of her culture,

leaving, as she felt it did, the parental perspectives far behind her;

but now boundless horizons seemed opening up before her, and the _London

Journal_ which Cleopatra swallowed with her meals seemed to Blanche to

contain nothing so alluring as Cleopatra’s own career.

It was by quite accidentally overhearing a remark of Blanche’s, and not

by dint of Mr. Flippance’s repeated invitation, that Jinny was finally

strung up to attend the great wedding. The probability that Will and

Blanche would be at the feast was a drawback that prevailed over the

lure of a good square meal, and even over the glamour of that mysterious

nectar—champagne. But when she heard Blanche instruct her mother that

she would certainly not have to lay a place for “that common carrier,”

in a flame that might almost have consumed her letter-paper, Jinny wrote

her acceptance to Mr. Flippance, and expended his half-crown, which she

had laid by for a rainy day, on a wedding present which would do him

good—a Bible, to wit.

In prevision of the great day she left off wearing her best gown,

cleaned it, and by the aid of Miss Gentry and a bit of lace gave it a

new turn. After the wedding it must, alas, be pawned! Jinny, though she

had hitherto entered the pawnshop only to pledge or redeem things for

her customers, had schooled herself to the inevitable. So had Mr.

Flippance, whose idea of a best man had now sunk to Barnaby. But he was

used to handling unpromising performers, he said, though he regretted

the absence of a dress rehearsal, more especially for Mrs. Purley, who,

having been induced to mother Cleopatra (nothing would induce Mr. Purley

to father her), was unlikely, he feared, to confine herself to a simple

“I do.” That was not, he groaned drolly, her idea of a speaking part. He

deplored, too, that there were not enough bells or bell-ringers in the

Little Bradmarsh church to ring an elaborate joy-peal, as Cleopatra was

so anxious to have every property and accessory of holy matrimony

complete. It was for this reason, doubtless, that Miss Gentry, after

reducing the rival dress to a rag, ultimately emerged as the bridesmaid.

IX

For the convenience of Foxearth Farm, as well as of Will, who, though a

bit sulky about his mother’s waiting on the Showman, was too entangled

with Miss Purley to refuse to grace the festal board, the ceremony had

been fixed for a Saturday at ten, and on that morning Jinny had meant to

rise with the sun, so as to do the bulk of her day’s chares in advance.

What was her dismay, therefore, to open blinking eyes on her grandfather

standing over her pseudo-bed in his best Sunday smock, whip in hand, and

to hear through her wide-flung casement Methusalem neighing outside and

the cart creaking!

“Am I late?” she gasped, sitting up. Then she became aware of a

beautiful blue moonlight filling the room with glory, and of a lambent

loveliness spreading right up to the stars sprinkled over her slit of

sky.

“’Tis your wedding-day, dearie,” said the ghostly figure of the Gaffer,

and she now perceived there were wedding favours on his whip, evidently

taken from Methusalem’s May Day ribbons, which he must have hunted out

of the “glory-hole” where odds and ends were kept.

Bitterly she regretted having excited his brain by informing him of her

programme. He was evidently prepared to drive her to the ceremony.

“But it’s too early,” she temporized.

“Ye’ve got to be there for breakfus, you said, dearie,” he reminded her.

“No, no,” she explained. “The wedding breakfast with fashionable folk is

only a sort of bever or elevener at earliest.”

He chuckled. “Ye’re gooin’ to be rich and fashionable—won’t it wex that

jackanips! Oi suspicioned ’twas you he war arter the fust time he come

gawmin’ to the stable. Ye can’t deceive Daniel Quarles. On your hands

and knees, ye pirate thief!” He cracked his whip fiercely. “Up ye git,

Jinny, ye’ve got to titivate yerself. Oi’ve put the water in your

basin.”

“But Gran’fer,” she said, acutely distressed, “it’s not _my_ wedding.”

“Not your wedding!”

“Of course not.”

“Then whose wedding be it?” he demanded angrily. “’Tain’t mine, seein’

as Oi’m too poor to keep Annie though she’s riddy of her rascal at

last.” He seized her wrists and shook her. “Why did you lie to me and

make a fool o’ me?”

So this was why Gran’fer had embraced her so effusively last night when

she avowed her programme for the morrow; this was why he had given her

blessings in lieu of the expected reproaches for her projected absence;

this was why he had gone up to bed humming his long-silent song: “Oi’m

seventeen come Sunday.”

It was a mistake, she felt now, to have stayed at home for his sake on

the Friday, changing the immemorial day of absence. He had been strange

all day, without grasping what was the cause of his unrest, and Nip’s

parallel uneasiness had reacted upon him. It was not, however, till she

had incautiously remarked that Methusalem too was off his feed, that he

cried out in horror that she had forgotten to go on her rounds.

Smilingly she assured him she had not forgotten: indeed the void in her

whole being occasioned by the loss of Mother Gander’s gratis meal had

been a gnawing reminder since midday. But imagining—and not indeed

untruly—that her work was gone, he had burst into imprecations on “the

pirate thief.”

As she sat up now on her mattress, helpless in her grief, her mind raced

feverishly through the episode, recalling every word of the dialogue,

unravelling his senile misapprehension; half wilful it seemed to her

now, in his eagerness to clutch at happier times.

“It’s nothing to do with the coach competition, Gran’fer. It’s only

because I’ve got to be out to-morrow for a wedding!”

“A wedding! She ain’t marrying agen?”

“Who?”

“Annie.”

“Annie? Which Annie?”

“There’s onny one Annie. ’Lijah’s mother.”

“Old Mrs. Skindle! What an idea! It’s a friend of mine, a gentleman

you’ve never seen.”

At this point she had had, she remembered, the fatal idea of showing him

her furbished-up frock to soothe him, for he was trembling all over.

“Would you like to see what I’m going to wear?”

She understood now the new light that had shot into his eye as he

touched the lace trimming.

“Similar-same to what your Great-Aunt Susannah wore the day she married

that doddy little Dap! Ye ain’t a-gooin’ to make a fool o’ yerself

similar-same. Who’s the man?” he had demanded fiercely.

“You don’t know him, I told you—it’s a Mr. Flippance!”

A beautiful peace had come over the convulsed face. “Flippance! Ain’t

that the gent what’s come to live in Frog Farm? That’s a fust-class

toff, no mistake. Uncle Lilliwhyte should be tellin’ me, when he come

with the watercress on Tuesday, as Mr. Flippance pays a pound a week for

hisself alone!”

That was the point at which her grandfather had kissed her with

effusion, crying: “Ye’ll be in clover, dearie!” while she, licking her

chaps at the thought of the morrow’s banquet, had playfully answered

that there would certainly be “a mort to eat.” The prospect set him

clucking gleefully.

“Spite o’ that rapscallion!” he had chuckled, enlarging thereupon to her

on the way the Lord protects His righteous subjects, and enlivening his

discourse with adjurations to “the pirate thief” to take to his hands

and knees. Had followed reproaches for hiding the news from him,

reproaches to Mr. Flippance for not calling on him, not even inviting

him to the wedding: soothing explanations from her that Mr. Flippance

knew he was too poorly to go that far; assurances she would be back as

early as possible.

She ought to have understood his delusion or self-delusion, she thought,

when he had clung to her in a sudden panic.

“Then ye will come back—ye ain’t leavin’ me to starve! Ye won’t let

that jackanips starve me out?”

And when she had reassured him, and caressed him, even promised to bring

him something tasty from the wedding breakfast, he had gripped her

harder than ever—she could still feel his bony fingers on her

wrist—but of course they actually were on her wrists as she sat there

now against her pillow—“ye’ll live here with me—same as afore!”

“Why ever shouldn’t I?” she had answered in her innocence. “We’ll always

live with you—Methusalem, Nip, all of us.” What unlucky impulse of

affection or reassurance had made her stoop down to kiss the dog in his

basket—all her being burnt with shame at the remembrance of her

grandfather’s reply, though at the time it had touched her to tears.

“God bless ye, Jinny. Oi know this ain’t a proper bedroom for you, but

Oi’ll sleep here if you like, and do you and he move up to mine.”

She had put by the offer gently. “Nonsense, Gran’fer. You can’t shift at

your age—or Nip either.”

“Oi bain’t so old as Sidrach,” he had retorted, not without resentment,

“and Oi doubt he ain’t left off bein’ a rollin’ stone. And Oi reckon Oi

can fit into that chest of drawers better than when Oi was bonkka.”

But the shrivelled form, with the hollow cheeks, flaming eyes, and snowy

beard, was still shaking her angrily, and her sense of his pathos

vanished in a sick fear, not so much for herself, though his fingers

seemed formidably sinister, as for his aged brain under this

disappointment. “Why did you say ’twas your wedding morn?”

The Dutch clock, providentially striking three, offered a fresh chance

of temporizing.

“There, Gran’fer! Can’t be my wedding morn yet, only three o’clock!”

He let go her hands. “Ain’t ye ashamed to have fun with your Gran’fer?”

he asked, vastly relieved. “But it’s a middlin’ long drive to Chipstone

before breakfus.”

“It’s not at Chipstone—the wedding’s at Little Bradmarsh.”

“Oh!” he said blankly.

“So there’s lots of time, Gran’fer, and you can go back to bed.”

“Not me! Do, Oi mightn’t wake in time agen.”

“I’ll wake you—but I’ll be fit for nothing in the morning, if I don’t

go to sleep now.”

“The day Oi was married,” he chuckled, “Oi never offered to sleep the

noight afore—ne yet the noight arter! He, he!”

“Go away, Gran’fer!” she begged frantically. “Let me go to sleep.”

“Ay, ay, goo to sleep, my little mavis. Nobody shan’t touch ye. What a

pity we ate up that wedding-cake! But Oi had to cut a shiver to stop his

boggin’ and crakin’, hadn’t Oi, dearie?”

“Quite right. Better eat wedding-cake than humble-pie!” she jested

desperately.

“Ef he comes sniffin’ around arter you’re married, Oi’ll snap him in two

like this whip!”

“Don’t break my whip!” She clutched at the beribboned butt.

“That’s my whip, Jinny! Let that go!”

“Well, go to bed then!” With a happy thought, she lit the tallow candle

on her bedside chair and tendered it to him. It operated as mechanically

upon his instinctive habits as she had hoped.

“Good night, dearie,” he said, and very soon she heard him undressing as

usual, and his snore came with welcome rapidity. Then she sprang out of

bed, pulled on some clothes, and ran out to release the angry and

mystified Methusalem from the shafts and to receive his nuzzled

forgiveness in the stable. But when she got back to bed, sleep long

refused to come; the sense of her tragic situation was overwhelming.

Even the great peace of the moonlit night could not soak into her. It

was impossible to go to the wedding now, she felt. When at last sleep

came, she was again incomprehensibly Queen Victoria hemmed in by foes,

and protected only by “The Father of the Fatherless” with his black

whiskers. She awoke about dawn, unrefreshed and hungry, but a cold

sponging from the basin her grandfather had prepared enabled her to cope

with the labours of the day. She looked forward with apprehension to the

scene with the old man when he should realize that the grand match was

indeed off, but she could think of nothing better than going about in

her dirtiest apron to keep his mind off the subject. The precaution

proved unnecessary. He slept so late and so heavily—as if a weight was

off his mind—that when he at last awoke he seemed to have slept the

delusion off, as though it were something too recent to remain in his

memory. As for the scene in the small hours, that had apparently left no

impress at all upon his brain. In fact, so jocose and natural was he at

breakfast, which she purposely made prodigal for him, that the optimism

of the morning sun, which came streaming in, almost banished her own

memory of it too: it seemed as much a nightmare as her desperate

struggle against the foes of Victoria-Jinny. The lure of the wedding

jaunt revived, and the thought of the domestic economy she would be

achieving thereby, made her sparing of her own breakfast. She had a bad

moment, however, when her grandfather suddenly caught sight of the

horseless cart outside.

“Stop thief!” he cried, jumping up agitatedly.

Jinny was vexed with herself. To have left that reminder of the

grotesque episode!

“It’s that ’Lijah!” he shrieked. “He’s stole Methusalem.”

“Hush, Gran’fer!” she warned him. “Suppose anybody heard you!”

But he ran out towards the Common and she after him. His tottering limbs

seemed galvanized.

“My horse is all right,” she gasped, catching him up in a few rods. “I

was too tired yesterday to put my cart away, that’s all.”

He turned and glared suspiciously at her. “That’s _my_ hoss—and my

cart, too! Can’t you read the name—‘Daniel Quarles, Carrier.’ But ye

won’t never let me put no padlock on my stable!”

“Your horse is there safe—come and see!”

He allowed himself to be led to the soothing spectacle.

“But Oi’ll put a padlock at once, same as in my barn,” he said firmly.

“Don’t, that rascal ’Lijah will grab him without tippin’ a farden!”

X

The overlooked cart proved a blessing, not a calamity, for the operation

of padlocking the stable-door before the horse was stolen so absorbed

the Gaffer that Jinny found it possible, after all, to don her finery

and slip off to the wedding unseen even of Nip, who was supervising the

new measures for Methusalem’s safety. Curiosity to see Miss Gentry’s

creation in action had combined with the pangs of appetite and her

acceptance of the invitation to make temptation irresistible, and she

calculated that she could be back by noon, and that, pottering over his

vegetable patch or his Bible, the old man would scarcely notice her

absence.

When she reached the church, she found the coach stationed outside, and

though the liveried guard was lacking to-day, the black horses looked

handsomer than ever with their red wedding-favours, while the pea-green

polish of the vehicle reduced her to a worm-like humility at the thought

of the impossibility of her cart taking part in to-day’s display.

Evidently Will had brought the bridegroom from Frog Farm. Out of the

corner of her eye she espied Will himself, sunning himself on his box,

and her heart thumped, though all she was conscious of was the insolent

incongruity of his pipe with the occasion, the edifice, his new

frock-coat, and the posy in its buttonhole. Fearing she was late, she

hurried into the church. But nothing was going on, though the size of

the congregation—far larger than usual—was an exciting surprise. There

was no sign of any of the wedding-party, not even Mr. Flippance, and

after imperceptibly saluting her Angel-Mother, she sank back into a rear

pew, half pleased to have missed nothing, half uneasy lest there be a

delay. Turning over a Prayer Book in search of the Wedding Service, she

came for the first time, and not without surprise, on the Fifth of

November Thanksgiving “for the happy deliverance of King _James I_ and

the Three Estates of _England_ from the most traitorous and

bloody-intended massacre by Gunpowder: And also for the happy Arrival of

King _William_ on this Day, for the Deliverance of our Church and

Nation.” King William’s arrival struck her as providential but

confusing—for though he had apparently detected the Popish barrels in

the nick of time, how came there to be two kings at once? Suddenly she

was aware, by some tingling telegraphy, that the bride and bridesmaid

had arrived outside in a grand open carriage. Mr. Fallow in his surplice

came in at the clerk’s intimation and took up his position at the altar

rails, the musicians struck up “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” and

then there was a sudden faltering, and a whispering took place ’twixt

parson and clerk, and Mr. Fallow was swallowed again by his vestry,

while the clerk disappeared through the church door. It was realized

that Mr. Flippance was not in the church, and it was understood that the

bride’s face was being saved in the vestry, where, however, as time

passed, the agitated congregation divined hysterics.

Jinny—thinking of her neglected grandfather—was what he called “on

canterhooks.” Had Mr. Flippance not then come in the coach, had he been

carelessly left in bed as usual? Catching her Angel-Mother’s eye, she

received a distinct injunction to go out in search of him, but she was

too shy to move in the presence of all those people, though she had a

vision of herself frantically harnessing Methusalem and carting the

bridegroom to church in his dressing-gown—would carpet slippers be an

impediment to matrimony, she wondered. Mr. Fallow came in again, looking

so worried that she recalled an ecclesiastical experience he had related

to her: how one of his parishioners, nowadays a notorious Hot Gospeller,

had “found religion” on the very verge of setting out to be married, and

had passed so much time on his knees, absorbed in the newly felt truth,

that it was only through his friend the bell-ringer stopping the church

clock that he was married by noon; if indeed—a doubt which ever after

weighed on Mr. Fallow—he was legally married at all. What if at this

solemn moment of his life Mr. Flippance should similarly find religion!

She devoutly hoped the discovery would be at least delayed till he was

safely married. Good heavens! perhaps the Bible she had given him was in

fault! Perhaps she was responsible for his rapt remissness. Disregarding

the congregation’s eyes, she went boldly into the vestry.

Here, sure enough, she found the heroine of the day supported by a trio

of ladies. The outstanding absence of Mr. Flippance left Jinny but a

phantasmagoric sense of a bride, still composed indeed, but so ghastly

that despite her glamour of veil-folds and orange-blossom she scarcely

looked golden-haired; of a bridesmaid hardly recognizable as Miss

Gentry, for the opposite reason that it was she with her swarthy

splendour, opulent bosom, and glory of silk and flowers who seemed the

Cleopatra; of a Blanche so appallingly queenly in her creamier fashion

under the art of the rival dressmaker, that her own cleaned gown seemed

but to emphasize her shabbiness and dowdiness. Acoustically the voice of

Mrs. Purley expatiating on the situation was the dominant note, but

through and beneath the cascade Jinny was aware of Miss Gentry

explaining to the bride that the horses which had brought the bridegroom

were not responsible for his disappearance. Not unpropitious, but of the

finest augury were these sable animals, omens going by contraries. So

they _had_ brought Mr. Flippance!

They were tossing their bepranked heads, Jinny found, and champing their

bits, as if sharing in the human unrest. Will was no longer smoking

placidly on his box, but in agitated parley with Barnaby and his father.

She heard the inn suggested, and saw the Purleys posting towards it. She

herself ran round to the tower, fantastically figuring Mr. Flippance on

his knees on the belfry floor amid the ropes and the cobwebs, but even

the one bell-ringer seemed to have sallied in search of the bridegroom,

or at least of the inn.

The churchyard was large and rambling and thickly populated—pathetic

proof there had been life in the church once—and it was in a

sequestered corner behind a tall monument that Jinny with a great upleap

of the heart at last espied the object of her quest, though he seemed

even more unreal than Miss Gentry in his narrow-brimmed top-hat, satin

stock with horseshoe pin, and swallowtail coat, while his face was as

white as his waistcoat.

“What are you doing?” came involuntarily to her lips.

“Reading the tombstones,” he said wistfully. “So peaceful!”

“But they’re waiting for you!”

“They’re waiting for everybody. That’s the joke of it all.”

“I don’t mean the gravestones.”

“Look! There’s a French inscription. And that name must be Flemish,

see!”

“I haven’t time!”

“Why, what have _you_ got to do?”

“I mean, _you_ haven’t got time. It’s your wedding!”

“Don’t rub it in! What long grass! So we go to grass—all of us. Thanks

for your Bible, by the way!”

So her apprehensions had been right. It _was_ religion that was bemusing

him.

“So glad you like it. Come along!” she said in rousing accents.

“All flesh is grass,” he maundered on. “And rank grass at that!”

“It’s only thick here because they can’t mow this bit,” she explained.

“Too many tombs!” She plucked at his sleeve.

“So it’s hay we run to!” he said, disregarding her “O Lord! Mr. Fallow’s

tithes, I suppose.”

“Well, why waste good hay? He’s waiting for you.”

“Well, _he’s_ got plenty of time by all accounts.”

“I mean, _she’s_ waiting,” she cried, in distress.

“Is she there already? Look at that bird cracking its snail on the

gravestone.”

“It’s an early bird—_you’ll_ be late.”

“Don’t worry. Tony Flip never missed his cue yet. Funny, isn’t it, how

it all comes right at night—especially with Polly there! Perhaps

_she’ll_ come, if we give her a little time.”

“But have you invited her? Does she know?”

“If she don’t, it’s not for want of telegrams to every possible

address.”

“But she may be in Cork, you said. You can’t keep the bride waiting.”

“She shouldn’t have come so early—it’s the first time I’ve known her

punctual. The early bird catches the snail, eh?”

“But it’s half-past ten! And there’s a crowd too—I don’t know where

they all come from. Come along!”

“One can’t consider the supers!”

“Well, consider me then. I’ve got to get back to Gran’fer!”

“The true artist always has stage-fright, Jinny. Give me a moment. I’ll

be on soon.”

“All right.” She was vastly relieved. “Have you got the ring?”

“Tony Flip never forgets a property. See!” And whisking it suddenly out

of his waistcoat pocket, he seized her left hand and slipped it on her

gloved wedding-finger. “That’s where it ought to be, Jinny!”

She pulled it off, outraged, and flung it from her.

“On your wedding day, too!” she cried.

“Now it’s lost,” he said cheerfully, “and the bearded bridesmaid will

have to go home with the unblushing bride.”

“You ought to have given it to Barnaby,” she said.

Anxious and remorseful, she went on her knees, groping feverishly in the

long grass. “On your hands and knees” kept sounding irrelevantly in her

brain. Mr. Flippance watched her like a neutral. “I’d forgotten that the

woman runs away with the piece,” he explained to her distracted ear. “I

thought marriage was a show with two principals. But if there’s got to

be a leading lady, why not stick to Polly?”

“You should have thought of that before,” she murmured.

“Correct as Polonius, Jinny. Even when I get the theatre, it’ll only be

hell over again. Why couldn’t I stick to the marionettes? I charge thee

fling away ambition, Jinny—by that sin fell the angels. But you’ve only

flung away my ring.”

“Here it is!” She pounced joyfully.

“Just my luck!” He took it ruefully.

“I thought you said she was so pure and wonderful!” she reminded him.

He winced. “That wouldn’t prevent her bullying me,” he replied somewhat

lamely.

“What about the taming of the shrew?” she asked.

“By Jove! You’re right, Jinny! Petruchio’s the game! Whips and

scorpions, what?” His face took on a little of its old colour. “It’s

getting up so early that has upset me. After all, Jinny, a lovely woman

who loves you and puts all her money on you isn’t to be picked up every

day.”

“Of course not. Anyhow it’s too late to change now.”

“Don’t say that! As if I didn’t want to change before there was anything

to change—oh, you know what I mean.”

“It’s too late now!” she repeated firmly. She stood over him, a

stern-faced little monitor of duty. “Come along!”

“Go ahead—the rose-wreathed victim will be at the altar.”

They moved on a little. He paused as with sudden hopefulness. “You don’t

happen to know if there’s a great oak chest with a spring lock in

Foxearth Farm?”

“How should I know?” she murmured, apprehensive now for his reason.

He sighed. “Well, never mind—it’ll all be all right at night. And

what’s it all for, anyhow? ‘Wife of the above,’” he read out weirdly.

“How they cling on!”

But Jinny had gone off into a reverie of her own. The tombstone formula

he had recited struck a long-buried memory, and in a flash she saw again

a quiet graveyard and a stone behind a tumbledown tower, and Commander

Dap’s black-gloved forefinger tracing out her mother’s epitaph to a

strange solemn little girl. All the wonder and glamour of childhood was

in that flash, all the strangeness of life and time, and her eyes filled

with tears. When the mist cleared away, Mr. Flippance was gone. She ran

frantically around among the tombs like a sheep-dog till at length the

sound of Mr. Fallow’s ecclesiastical voice floated out to her, and

hurrying back into the church, she felt foolish and tranquillized to

find the service well forward.

XI

Jinny had misread Mr. Fallow’s look: it was not fear of dragging on

beyond the legal hour—noon was still too remote—but impatience at

being kept away from his antiquarian lore by such trifles as matrimony,

especially matrimony which was no longer, as in pre-Reformation days,

preceded by the Holy Communion and symbolic of the union of Christ and

His Church. Had there been a care-cloth to be thrown over the couples’

heads, such as existed in Essex churches in 1550, even matrimony might

have interested him. But as it was, his thoughts ran on old cheeses. He

had been comparing his Latin edition of Camden’s “Britannia” (1590) with

the two-volume folio translation, a century later, by a worthy bishop,

and was half scandalized, half excited, to find that the translator had

introduced a wealth of new matter. Incidentally Mr. Fallow had learned

the Hundred was celebrated for its huge cheeses—_inusitatæ

magnitudinis_—of ewes’ milk, and that to make them the men milked the

ewes like women elsewhere. And these huge cheeses were consumed not only

in England, but exported—_ad saturandos agrestes et opifices_—“to

satisfie the coarse stomachs of husbandmen and labourers,” as the bishop

put it. When had this manufacture of giant cheeses from ewes’ milk died

out in Essex? Mr. Fallow had already seized the opportunity of

interrogating Mrs. Purley, whose reputation as a cheesemaker had reached

him. But appalled by the voluminousness of her ignorance, he had taken

sanctuary in his church and was still brooding over the problem as his

lips framed the more trivial interrogatories of the ceremony.

For Jinny, however, it was a thrilling moment when Mr. Fallow

lackadaisically called upon the couple “as ye will answer at the

dreadful Day of Judgment” to avow if they knew any impediment to their

lawful union. That in face of so formidable a threat neither came out

with “Mr. Duke,” though she still half expected him to pop up in person

from the void, was for her sweet stupidity the final proof of the

bride’s immaculacy. And the whole service she thought beautiful and

moving, having missed the gross beginning thereof. She was startled to

hear the bridegroom addressed by Mr. Fallow as Anthony, and the bride

with equal familiarity as Bianca Cleopatra. Otherwise the ceremonial

seemed far too highflown for this terrestrial twain, though somehow not

at all transcending the relationship in which her own soul could stand

towards its spiritual comrade. But the replies of the three principals

came all in unexpected wise. Mr. Flippance’s “I will” was so ready and

ringing, and his countenance so rosy, that Jinny wondered which was the

actor—the Flippance of the churchyard or the Flippance of the church.

The ex-Duchess, on the other hand, still pallid, faltered her

affirmation almost in a whisper, at any rate it was not so loud as his

comment: “I’ve told you always to speak sharp on your cue.” Certainly no

husband could ever have asserted himself at an earlier moment—was he

perhaps already following Jinny’s hint, or was it only the stage-manager

responding mechanically to stimulus? As for Mrs. Purley, she showed even

more stage-fright, her “I do” failing even as a gesture, and having to

be prompted. “Too small a speaking part for her,” commented Tony later,

with a twinkle.

When everything was over and the register signed and Barnaby, breaking

down under the weight of his financial duties, had wished the bride many

happy returns—a felicitation only dispelled by his father saluting her

as “Mrs. Flippance”—that now reassured lady, sweeping regally to her

carriage, her train over one arm and her husband over the other—smiled

at the admiring avenue of villagers and small boys as though they had

thrown her the bouquet she held. When Mr. Flippance, gay and debonair,

had handed Mrs. Flippance, looking golden-haired again, into their

barouche, and been driven off with the hood up and his beautiful doll

beside him, Jinny perceived Will handing the gorgeously gowned Blanche

with parallel ceremoniousness into the coach, where the transmogrified

Miss Gentry was already installed behind the bulwark of her great

bouquet. And then Jinny became aware of Barnaby hovering shyly between

her and the trap which held his parents, and indicating dumbly that the

niche vacated by his sister was now for her. She had a sudden feeling

that they did not want her in the coach beside those grand gowns hunched

out with starched petticoats. As if she would have set foot in it! No,

not for all the gowns in the world! But they were right, she thought

bitterly—what had she to do with all this grandeur and happiness? The

honeymoon was even to be in Boulogne, she had gathered. And she heard

some force, welling up from the dark depths of herself, cry to Barnaby:

“I can’t come—I’m so sorry. But Gran’fer was upset in the night. Please

excuse me to Mr. Flippance.”

At this the bitterness passed from her soul to poor Barnaby’s. Everybody

was pairing off: the Flippances, his parents, Will and his sister: there

was nobody left for him but Miss Gentry.

“But there’ll be oysters as well as dumplings,” he pleaded. “Will

brought them from Colchester.”

Jinny’s famished interior—in making such a skimpy breakfast it had

counted on the wedding meal—seconded his plea desperately. But the

mention of Will was fatal. As a hermit’s sick fantasy conjures up the

temptation he knows he will resist, so Jinny saw yearningly, vividly,

but hopelessly, the spread banquet, the dumplings soused in gravy, the

brown bread and butter for the oysters, the juicy meats, the mysterious

champagne-bottles, the sunny napery, the laughing festival faces, and,

above all, the curly aureole of Will’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated veraciously.

In a panic the youth ran after the receding barouche. “Jinny won’t

come,” he gasped.

“Don’t stop, coachman,” said Mrs. Flippance sharply.

“Tell her,” called back Mr. Flippance, “she must—or I’ll never ask her

to my wedding again!”

Poor Barnaby tore back to the coach. “I say, Miss Gentry, you’re a

friend of Jinny’s—do make her come.”

“A friend of Jinny’s!” It was an even unluckier remark than the

reference to Will. A patron, an educator, an interpreter of herbs and

planets, gracious and kindly, who might even—in private—admit the

little Carrier to confidences and Pythian inspirations, yes. But a

friend? How came Mr. Flippance to commit such a _faux pas_ as to bring a

carrier into equality with her and Blanche? Why had not the adorable

Cleopatra been firmer with the man? “I can’t _order_ her to come,” she

reminded Barnaby majestically. “It’s not like for a parcel.”

As the horses tossed their wedding-favours and the coach jingled off

with its fashionable burden, even the trap moving on under the stimulus

of Mrs. Purley’s rhetoric, the whole scene became a blur to Jinny, and

standing there by the old pillion-steps, she felt herself dwindled into

a little aching heart alone in a measureless misery. How tragic to be

cut off from all this gay eating and drinking! There was almost a

voluptuousness in the very poignancy of her self-mutilation. What a

blessing we all do run to hay, she brooded, in a warm flood of

self-pity.

But if Jinny thus saw the wedding-guests through a blur of

self-torturing bitterness, their feast did not begin as merrily as she

beheld it, despite that Mrs. Purley, as soon as she had exchanged her

bonnet-cap with the net quilting for a home cap, served up unexpected

glasses of gin. Anthony, no less than Barnaby, was upset by Jinny’s

absence, and Cleopatra resented this fuss over a super. But still more

disgruntled by the gap at the table was, odd to say, Will. For his soul

had not been so placid as his pipe. The glimpses he had caught of Jinny

were perturbing. Overpowering as were the presences of the bride and

Blanche, or rather, precisely because they were overpowering, they

struck him as artificial by the side of this little wild rose with her

woodland flavour, and the memory of their afternoon in the ash-grove

came up glowing, touched as with the enchantment of its bluebells.

Blanche, for her part, was peevish at Will’s taciturnity. Miss Gentry,

still rankling under Barnaby’s suspicion that she was the Carrier’s

bosom friend, was particularly down upon that youth’s naïve attempt to

confine the conversation to Jinny, though it confirmed her suspicion of

the state of things between those two. Mr. Purley in his turn had been

dismayed by Blanche’s fineries: the young generation forgot that their

fathers were only farmers compelled to take lodgers in bad seasons. Thus

it was left to Mrs. Purley to sustain almost the whole burden of

conversation. But her preoccupation with her little serving-maid and the

kitchen, plus her uneasiness at eating in this grand room away from her

hanging hams and onions, interposed intervals of silence even in her

prattle, and the theme of her facetious variations—her fear in church

that the bridegroom had bolted—did not add to the general cheeriness.

The old wainscoted parlour, with its rough oak beams across the ceiling,

had seldom heard oysters swallowed with gloomier gulps.

Fortunately the pop of the sweet champagne brought a note of excited

gaiety into the funereal air, and glass-clinking and looking to one

another and catching one another’s eye were soon the order of the

early-Victorian day. Mr. Flippance, acknowledging the toast of the bride

and bridegroom, did not fail to thank Mr. and Mrs. Purley for the

precious treasure they had solemnly entrusted to his unworthy hands, a

being whose beauty equalled her brains, and whose virtue her genius. Mr.

Purley deprecatingly murmured “Don’t mention it,” meaning of course his

share in the production of this prodigy, but Mrs. Purley, fresh from her

church rôle, began to feel that she had dandled Cleopatra in her arms.

In replying for himself and his “good wife”—for the age assumed that

Mrs. Purley could not speak—Mr. Purley could not wish the newly married

couple anything better than to be as happy as they had been. “Literally

‘a good wife,’ eh?” interlarded Tony genially. “None better,”

asseverated Mr. Purley. “I’m close, but she’s nippy.” “You’re thinking

of Blanche,” Barnaby called out gaily, through the laughter. “I don’t

say as your mother’s nippy in words,” Mr. Purley corrected, with a

twinkle. He went on to wish as much happiness to all the unmarried

people present, at which Miss Gentry giggled and markedly avoided

Barnaby’s eye; while Will, reconciled to fate several glasses ago,

squeezed Blanche’s hand under the table. Even when Mr. Purley, becoming

a little broad, referred to the time when his “good wife” had first

ventured into “The Hurdle-Maker’s Arms,” Miss Gentry joined in the

hilarity. Her passion for the church-going Cleopatra had convinced her

that the stage was not necessarily of the devil—_The Mistletoe Bough_,

she had found, was only the same story that had been written as a poem

(“Ginevra”) by a Mr. Rogers, who, she had gathered, was a most

respectable banker, and she was looking forward to her Mistress-ship of

the Robes at the coming Theatre Royal, and even to witnessing her

darling’s debut as Lady Agnes from the front. Several hysterical

embraces had already passed between her and the bride—somewhat to

Blanche’s jealousy—and all things swam before her in a rosy mist as she

now pulled a cracker with Mr. Purley and read unblushingly:

“_When glass meets glass and Friendship quaffs,_

_From lip to lip ’tis Love that laughs!_”

a motto which caused the hurdle-maker to remark that it was lucky his

“good wife” had left the room.

That loquacious lady had fallen strangely silent. The wine which had

loosened all the other tongues seemed to have constricted hers. Perhaps

it was merely the already mentioned preoccupation with her pies or other

dishes still in the oven. Or perhaps it was the encounter for the first

time in her life with a great rival tongue. It consorted with this

latter hypothesis that she could be heard babbling now from her kitchen

like a cricket on the hearth, and her elaboration of a temperature theme

came distractingly across the larger horizons of Mr. Flippance’s

discourse, playing havoc with his account of Macready’s Farewell at

Drury Lane that March, and obscuring the moral of the vacant succession.

Charles Kean? Pooh! Not a patch on his father. Had they seen him in Dion

Boucicault’s new play at the Princess’s, _Love in a Maze_? No? Then

before voting for Charles Kean he would advise them to go—or, rather,

not to go. He had never denied the merits of the manager of Sadler’s

Wells especially as Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, though he knew his young

friend Willie preferred Mr. Phelps in _Othello_. “I say whom the mantle

fits, let him wear it,” summed up Mr. Flippance oracularly, and launched

into an exposition of how _he_ would run “The National Theatre.” No Miss

Mitford tragedies for him with Macreadys at thirty pounds a week, still

less Charles Kean _Hamlets_ at fifty pounds a night, but real plays of

the day—he did not mean the sort of things they did at the Surrey,

which were no truer to life than the repertory of the marionettes, but

why not, say, the Chartist movement and the forbidden demonstration on

Kennington Common? Or let Mr. Sheridan Knowles, instead of talking his

Baptist theology at Exeter Hall, write a “No Popery” play, with Cardinal

Wiseman as the villain. (Hear, hear! from Miss Gentry.) Of course there

was the danger the censor would quash such plays as he had quashed even

Miss Mitford’s _Charles the First_, but then he, Mr. Flippance, knew old

John Kemble, and would undertake to persuade him that times had changed.

Mrs. Flippance, who had displayed some restiveness under the long

appraisal of male talent, displayed yet more when Mr. Flippance was now

provoked to rapturous boyish memories of the censor’s sister, Mrs.

Siddons. But Blanche and Barnaby listened so spellbound that they ceased

finally to hear their mother’s inborne monologue at all.

It was at this literally dramatic moment that Bundock appeared at the

banquet with the explanation that nobody would answer his knocking, and

tendered the bridegroom a pink envelope which he had benevolently

brought on from Frog Farm on his homeward journey. Miss Gentry, unused

to these bomb-shells, uttered a shriek, which more than ever riveted the

postman’s eyes on her flamboyant efflorescence.

“Steady! Steady!” said Tony, opening the telegram with unfaltering

fingers. “Take some more fizz. And give brother Bundock a glass.”

He read the fateful message, and the anxious watchers saw strange

thoughts and feelings passing in lines across his forehead, and in waves

across the folds of his flabby clean-shaven jowl. Then his emotions all

coalesced and crashed into laughter, noisy, but not devoid of grimness.

“Listen to this!” he cried. “_‘Sincere condolences. Married Polly this

morning. Duke.’_”

Mrs. Flippance turned scarlet. “He’s married Polly!” she shrieked. “The

beast! The insulting beast!”

“Easy! Easy!” said the bridegroom to this second perturbed female. “It

isn’t him Polly’s married—it’s his marionettes. Chingford, the telegram

is marked. I expect the caravan is honeymooning in Epping Forest. Give

me Boulogne.”

But nobody was listening to him any longer. The hysterics that had been

only a rumour in church became a reality now. Miss Gentry had produced

salts for her darling and was calling for burnt feathers, and Blanche

and Barnaby, tumbling over each other kitchenwards, only set their

mother’s tongue clacking _fortissimo_. Even Mr. Purley was slapping the

bride’s hands as she shrieked on the sofa—he was deeply moved by her

convulsions, never having seen a doll in distress. Bundock alone

remained petrified, the empty champagne-glass in his hand, his eyes

still glued on Miss Gentry, and the bubbles in his veins re-evoking that

effervescence of the Spring in which even a rear-ward consciousness of

green mud had not availed to blunt the charm of opulent beauty. Through

the tohu-bohu Mr. Flippance calmly scribbled a counter-telegram:

“_Congratulations on your marriage. Condolences to Polly._”

“Pity we ain’t got some of that Scotch stuff to quiet her,” said the

agitated hurdle-maker.

“Whisky, do you mean?” said Tony.

“No, no! That new stuff they should be telling of—discovered by that

Scotch doctor—puts you to sleep, like, and onsenses you.”

“Oh, chloroform!” said Tony.

“Ay, that’s the name. Masterous stuff for females to my thinking.”

“So it is, I understand.” Mr. Flippance smiled faintly. “But not for

cases like this.”

“The parsons won’t let you use it!” Bundock burst forth. “They say it’s

against religion. I suppose they want the monopoly of sending you to

sleep.” He sniggered happily.

“_I’ll_ chloroform her,” Mr. Flippance murmured. He could well

understand Cleopatra’s fury at being replaced by a woman so

superficially unattractive as dear Polly, especially as she herself,

catching at any stage career in her impecunious days, had not even been

married by the fellow.

“Can you read my writing, Bundock?” he asked loudly, proceeding to read

to him in stentorian tones as if from the telegram. “Polly, care of

Duke’s Marionettes, Chingford. Come home at once and all shall be

forgotten and forgiven. Your heart-broken——”

But Mrs. Flippance was already on her feet and the telegram in fragments

on the floor. “I won’t have her here!” she cried. “You’ve got to choose

between us!”

“My darling! Who could hesitate? Try a little gin.” He hovered over her

tenderly. “Take down a different reply, Bundock, please.” He dictated

the message he had really written.

“Condolences to Polly!” repeated Mrs. Flippance, smiling savagely. “I

should think so. I doubt if he has even legally married her.”

“Oh, trust Polly for that! She’s got her head square on.”

At this Mrs. Flippance showed signs of relapse.

“Poor Polly!” said Tony hastily. “Fancy her being tied to a man like

that!”

“I don’t know that she could have done much better,” snorted Mrs.

Flippance.

“But fancy Polly being wasted on a man who packs for himself! Another

glass, Bundock?”

“Not while I’m on the Queen’s business, thank you,” said the postman.

“But you’re not. Aren’t your letters delivered?”

“What about your telegram?”

“True, true. O Bundock, what a sense of duty! You recall us to ours. We

must drink to the Queen! The Queen, ladies and gentlemen——” he filled

up Bundock’s glass.

“I can’t refuse to drink that,” sniggered Bundock. “Wonderful what one

day’s round can bring forth!” he said, putting down his glass. “I began

with a baby—I mean the midwife told me of one—went on to a corpse—and

now here am I at a wedding! It’s in a cottage by the holly-grove—the

corpse, I mean——”

“We don’t want the skeleton at the feast,” interrupted Tony. Bundock

hastened to turn the conversation to the grand new house Elijah Skindle

was building—Rosemary Villa.

Blanche pouted her beautiful lips in disgust: “Don’t talk of a

knacker—that’s worse than a corpse.”

But Bundock was anxious to work off that Elijah called his house

“Rosemary Villa” because rosemary was good for the hair, and having

achieved this stroke, prudently departed before the laughter died.

Blanche seemed especially taken with his gibe at that poor grotesque Mr.

Skindle.

After his departure, flown with stuff for scandal and witticism, headier

to him than the wine, the party grew jollier than ever. They played Pope

Joan with mother-o’-pearl counters and then Blanche sang “Farewell to

the Mountain,” by ear, like—a bird, without preliminary fuss or

instrumental accompaniment, and Mr. Flippance crying “Encore!” and

“Bis!” spoke significantly of the possibility of including an annual

opera season in English in his Drury Lane repertory. Why should Her

Majesty’s Theatre and the Italian tongue have a monopoly? Ravished,

Blanche gave “The Lass that Loves a Sailor,” her eyes languishing, and

this led Mr. Purley on to dancing the old Essex hornpipe, whose name

sounded like his own, with Barnaby banging a tray for the tambourine and

Will’s throat replacing the melodeon. To Miss Gentry, beaming in

Christian goodwill upon the merry company, it appeared strangely

multiplied at moments. But the more the merrier!

When the happy pair had departed for Boulogne _via_ the Chipstone

barouche, what wonder if Will, finding himself alone in the passage with

Blanche, and not denied a kiss, felt his last hesitations deliciously

dissolved. How restful to absorb this clinging femininity, this

surrendered sweetness! With what almost open abandonment she had sung

“The Lass that Loves a Sailor” at him, with what breaking trills and

adoring glances! Marriage was in the air—two examples of it had been

brought to his ken in one morning—and he now plumply proposed a third.

A strange awakening awaited him.

Blanche grew suddenly rigid. Her imagination had already been inflamed

by Cleopatra, clinging to whose aromatic skirts she saw herself soaring

to a world of romance and mystery. She had swallowed credulously the

exuberant play of Mr. Flippance’s fantasy round her feats of

wasp-killing, and was willing to do even that on the stage if it enabled

her soles to touch the sacred boards. In her daydreams Will had already

begun to recede. But now that Mr. Flippance had discovered a voice in

her too, and operatic vistas opened out under his champagne and his no

less gaseous compliments, she could not suddenly sink to the comparative

lowliness of a box-seat. That song which Will had taken for the symbol

of her submission was really the final instrument of his humiliation.

Rejected by the girl who has snuggled into one’s heart, evoked one’s

protective emotions, exhibited herself all softness and sweetness! It

was incredible! He did not know whether he was more angry or more

ashamed, and he was tortured by this warm, creamy, scented loveliness

which a moment before had seemed under his palms to mould as he would,

and was now become baffling, polar, and remote.

“Blanche! Blanche!” he cried, trying to retain her hand, and tears

actually rolled down his cheeks. But underneath all the storm he heard a

still small voice crying: “Jinny! Jinny! Jinny!”

So he had been saved from this fatuous marriage, from this supple,

conceited minx with her imitative scents and mock graces. The genuine

simple rosebud of a Jinny was waiting, waiting for him all the time, the

Jinny round whose heart his own heart-strings had been twined from

mysterious infancy, who touched him like the song of “Home, Sweet Home,”

heard when miserable in Montreal, the darling lovable little Jinny as

pretty as she was merry, no real exemplar of the unmaidenly, only a

dutiful supporter of her grandfather and his business, at most a bit

unbalanced by her mannish role; Jinny the girl with the brains to

appreciate him, and whom he alone could appreciate as she deserved! How

wonderful were the ways of Providence! How nearly he had been trapped

and caged and robbed of her!

“I don’t see what you mean by leading a fellow on!” he reproached

Blanche hoarsely, with no feigned sense of grievance, as he gazed at the

mocking mirage of her loveliness. But underneath the tears and the

torment, his heart seemed to have come to haven.

“Jinny!” it sang happily. “Jinny! Jinny! Jinny!”

XII

On arriving home, Jinny’s first thought after giving the Gaffer his

dinner and swallowing a few mouthfuls to overcome her faintness—her

mood of self-torture would not allow more—was to give Methusalem some

oats extracted by stratagem from the old man’s padlocked barn. She had

scraped together a few handfuls and was bearing them towards his manger

in a limp sack when she perceived that the stable-door was open and gave

on a littered emptiness. Her heart stood still as before the

supernatural. True, the new padlock was clawing laxly at its staple as

if forced open, but then it had not been there at all till that very

morning, and for Methusalem to leave his stable voluntarily was as

unthinkable as for a sheep to abandon a clover-field. Yet there

stretched the bare space, looking portentously vast. What had happened?

She ran round the little estate, as though Methusalem would not have

bulked on the vision from almost any point, and then she peered

anxiously over the Common, as if he could be concealed among the gorse

or the blackberry-bushes. The hard ground of the road, marked only by

the dried-up ruts of her own wheels, gave no indication of his hoofs. It

flashed upon her that padlocks were after all not so ridiculous, but

examining more closely the one that drooped by the stable-door, she saw

that its little key was still in it. Evidently the old man had forgotten

to turn it. The cart was still in its shed, looking as dead to her now

as a shell without its snail, though the image was perhaps a little too

hard on Methusalem.

But to alarm her grandfather before she had made a thorough search would

only confirm him in his delusions. Peeping through the casement of the

living-room, she was relieved to see and hear him at the table, safely

asleep on his after-dinner Bible. With his beard thus buried in the

text, he might sleep for hours in the warmth and buzzing silence. Lucky,

she thought, as she tip-toed past, that he had not made the discovery

himself. He would probably have accused poor Mr. Skindle again, even set

out after the innocent vet. with his whip. Then perhaps actions for

assault and battery, for slander, for who knew what!

Horse-stealing was unheard of in these parts, and who save a dealer in

antiquities would steal Methusalem? No; as in a fit of midsummer

madness—under the depression of the drought and his depleted

nosebags—he had bolted! After all, old horses were probably as

uncertain as old grandfathers. Was there to be a new course of senility

for her study, she wondered ruefully: had she now to school herself to

the vagaries of horsey decay as she had schooled herself to human? But,

of course, she surmised suddenly, it was the dragging the poor horse up

in the middle of the night that had turned his aged brain, and the

hammering-in of the staple had lent the last touch of alarm. He had been

liable to panic even in his prime. Perhaps he had bolted before

Gran’fer’s very eyes, mane and tail madly erect. That might explain the

uneasy look with which the old man had met her return—a sidelong glance

almost like Nip’s squint after an escapade—his taciturnity as of a

culprit not daring to confess his carelessness, as well as his welcome

blindness to the wedding fineries she had been too desperate to remove.

But no, he would not have sat down under such a loss, or brisked up so

swiftly under the smell of dinner, or pressed the food so solicitously

upon her with the remark, “There’s a plenty for both of us, dearie—-do

ye don’t be afeared.” It would almost seem as if he had been noting her

self-denial: at any rate such an assurance could not coexist with the

loss of their means of livelihood.

It was a mystery. The only thing that was clear was that Methusalem must

be recaptured before her grandfather was aware of his loss. Such a

catastrophe, coming after the scene in the small hours, might have as

morbid an effect upon him as that nocturnal episode had evidently had

upon Methusalem himself.

Bonnetless, with streaming ringlets, in her lace-adorned dress, she

wandered farther and farther in quest of her beloved companion. It was

some time before she discovered that her other friend was at her heels.

Surely Nip would guide her to Methusalem, as he had guided her through

the darkness. But this abandonment to his whim only led her to the

cottages with which he was on terms of cupboard affection, and dragged

her into the very heart of the tragedy retailed by Bundock to the

wedding-party, to the home of a dead labourer.

“His fitten were dead since the morning,” the widow informed her with

lachrymose gusto. “At the end he was loight-headed and talked about

puttin’ up the stack.”

The neighbours were still more ghoulishly garrulous, and the odour of

this death pervaded their cottages like the smell of the straw steeped

in their pails, and as the housewives turned their plaiting-wheels they

span rival tales of lurid deceases, while a woman who was walking with

her little girl—both plaiting hard as they walked—removed the split

straws from her mouth to proclaim that she had prophesied a death in the

house—having seen the man’s bees swarm on his clothes-prop. She hoped

they would tell his bees of his decease. But desirable as it was to meet

a white horse—that bringer of luck—nobody had set eyes on a

wild-wandering Methusalem. Nor was he in the village pound.

She found herself drifting through the wood where she had once sat with

Will, and through the glade where the tops of the aspens were a quiver

of little white gleams. Had Methusalem perhaps come trampling here? That

was all her thought, save for a shadowy rim of painful memory. Bare of

Methusalem, the wood at this anxious moment was as blank of poetry as

the lanky hornbeam “poles,” or the bundles of “tops” lying around. One

aspen was so weak and bent it recalled her grandfather, and the

white-barked birches craned so over the other trees, she was reminded of

a picture with giraffes in Mother Gander’s sanctum. But of horses there

was no sign. Picking up a wing covert of a jay, not because of the

beautiful blue barring, but because it would make fishing flies for

Uncle Lilliwhyte, she now ran to his hut with a flickering hope that he

would have information, but it was empty of him, and she saw from the

absence of his old flintlock that he was sufficiently recovered to be

poaching. She emerged from the wood near Miss Gentry’s cottage. But the

landlady, who had the deserted Squibs in her arms, could only calculate

that Methusalem had left his stable at the same moment as the dead

labourer’s soul had flown out of his body, and that there was doubtless

a connexion. “Harses has wunnerful sense,” said the good woman. Jinny

agreed, but withheld her opinion of humans. She felt if only all the

horses jogging along these sun-splashed arcades of elms could speak, the

mystery would soon be cleared up. For Methusalem was of a nose-rubbing

sociability. But it was only the drivers of all these lazy-rolling

carts—fodder, straw, timber, dung, what not—that presumed to speak for

their great hairy-legged beasts. To one wagoner lying so high on his

golden-hued load that his eye seemed to sweep all Essex, she called up

with peculiar hope: he confessed he had been drowsing in the heat. “So

mungy,” he pleaded. Indeed the afternoon was getting abnormally hot and

stuffy, and Jinny had to defend her bare head from the sun with her

handkerchief. Hedgers and ditchers had seen as little of a masterless,

bare-flanked Methusalem as the thatcher with his more advantageous

view-point. Leisurely driving in the stakes with his little club, this

knee-padded, corduroyed elder opined that it would be “tempesty.” And

they could do with some rain.

That the rain was indeed wanted as badly as she wanted Methusalem was

obvious enough from the solitude about the white, gibbet-shaped

Silverlane pump and the black barrel on wheels round which aproned,

lank-bosomed women should have been gossiping, jug or pail in hand. In

the absence of this congregation Jinny had to perambulate the

green-and-white houses of the great square and hurl individual inquiries

across the wooden door-boards that safeguarded the infants. Only the

village midwife had seen a horse like Methusalem as she returned from a

case. She had been too sleepy, though, to notice properly. From this

futile quest Jinny came out on the road again. But wheelwright and

blacksmith, ploughman and gipsy, publican and tinker, all were drawn

blank.

Beside trees tidily bounding farms, or meadows dotted with cows and

foals, and every kind of horse except Methusalem, past grotesque

quaint-chimneyed houses half brick, half weather-board, the road led

Jinny on and on till it took her across the bridge. Here on the bank she

recognized the plastered hair of Mr. Charles Mott, who was fishing

gloomily. No, he had not seen a white horse—worse luck!—and would to

God, he added savagely, that he had never seen a black sheep. Jinny

hurried off, as from a monster of profanity, for Mr. Mott’s

disinclination for his wife’s society, especially on chapel days, was,

she knew, beginning to perturb the “Peculiars”; and with the sacramental

language of the marriage service yet ringing in her ears, it seemed to

our guileless Jinny ineffably wicked to be sunk in selfish sport instead

of cherishing and comforting the woman to whom you had consecrated

yourself.

She moved on pensively—the road after descending rose somewhat, so that

Long Bradmarsh seemed to nestle behind her in a hollow, a medley of

thatch and slate, steeple and chimney-stacks, hayricks and inn-signs,

and fluttering sheets and petticoats. But the forward view seemed far

more bounded than usual, deprived as it was of the driver’s

vantage-point: to the toiling pedestrian her familiar landscape was

subtly changed, and this added to the sense of change and disaster.

She passed Foxearth Farm near enough to see again the barouche now

awaiting the honeymooners, and to hear the voices of Will and Blanche

mingling in a merry chorus. There was an aching at her heart, but

everything now came dulled to her as through an opiate. Methusalem was

the only real thing in life. She wanted to make her inquiry of the

driver, but her legs bore her onwards to a glade where she could rest on

one of Mr. Purley’s felled trunks. Even there the chorus pursued her,

spoiling the music of the little stream that babbled at her feet, and

the beauty of willow-herb and tall yellow leopard’s-bane and those white

bell-blossoms of convolvulus twining and twisting high up among the

trees still standing.

It was well past five before, footsore and spent, she stopped on her

homeward road at the Pennymole cottage for information and a glass of

water. This must be her last point, for standing as it did at the Four

Wantz Way, it overlooked every direction in which Methusalem could

possibly have gone, had he come thus far, while the size of the

Pennymole family provided over a score of eyes. She found herself

plunged into the eve-of-Sabbath ritual—all the seven younger children

being scrubbed in turn by the mother in a single tub of water, and left

to run about in a state of nature, or varying stages of leisurely

redressing.

But neither the nude nor the semi-decent nor Mrs. Pennymole herself,

with her bar of yellow soap, had seen even the tip of Methusalem’s tail,

and the extinction of this last hope left Jinny so visibly overcome that

the busy mother insisted on her sitting down and waiting for tea. She

urged that “father” would soon be home, as well as the two elder boys,

all at work in different places, and “happen lucky” one of the three

would have seen the missing animal. Jinny felt too weak to refuse the

tea, and though the thought of her neglected grandfather was as gnawing

as her hunger, she reasoned with herself that she would really get to

him quicker if refreshed. The elder lads came in very soon, one after

the other, each handing his day’s sixpence to his mother and receiving a

penny for himself. But neither brought even a crumb for Jinny. Mrs.

Pennymole beguiled the time of waiting for the master and the meal by

relating, in view of the labourer’s death, how she had lost two children

five years ago.

No fewer than four were down at once with the black thrush. Two boys lay

on the sofa, one at each end, an infant in the bassinet under the table,

and a girl in the bed. One of the sofa patients had swellings behind his

ears the size of eggs, but they were lanced and he lived to earn his

three shillings a week. The other, a fine lad of thirteen, died at three

in the afternoon. The girl died at half-past eleven at night—beautiful

she looked; like a wax statue. The undertaker was afraid to put them in

their coffin; afraid to bring contagion to his own children. “Perhaps

your husband would do it,” he suggested to her. But her husband, poor

man, couldn’t. “How would you like to put _your_ childer in coffins?” he

asked the undertaker. The doctor wouldn’t let her follow the funeral,

she was so broken.

But it was Jinny who was broken now. These reminiscences were more

painful for her than for the mother who—inexhaustible fountain of

life—scoured her newer progeny to their accompaniment. Yes, existence

seemed very black to Jinny, sitting there without food, or Will, or

Methusalem, or anything but a grandfather; and the china owl with a real

coloured handkerchief tied round its head, which was the outstanding

ornament of the mantelpiece, seemed in its grotesque gloom an apt symbol

of existence. She was very glad when cheery, brawny Mr. Pennymole burst

in, labouring with a story in which whisker-shaking laughter bubbled

through a humorous stupefaction.

He had begun to tell the story almost before he had perceived and

greeted Jinny, and Methusalem’s disappearance, on which he could throw

no light, served to enhance it. To him, too, the day had brought an

earth-shaking novelty—there must be something in the moon. For thirty

years, he explained, as he took off his coat and boots (though not his

cap), he had risen at half-past four. But waking that morning at one

o’clock, he had got to sleep again, and the next thing he knew—after

what seemed to him a little light slumber—was a child saying: “Mother,

what’s the time?” Half-past five, mother had replied—Mrs. Pennymole

here corroborated the statement at some length; adding that it was

Jemima who inquired, she being such a light sleeper, and always so

anxious to be off to school: an interruption that her lord sustained

impatiently, for this was the dramatic moment of the story. Half-past

five! Up he had jumped, never made his fire nor his tea, never had his

pipe, and instead of leaving home at twenty to six, still smoking it, he

had rushed round to his brother-in-law’s, where fortunately he was in

time for the last cup o’ tea, and then out with his horses as usual!

“And _I_ made him tea and sent it round to the field,” gurgled Mrs.

Pennymole as she unhooked her bodice for the last baby. “He had two

teas!”

Mr. Pennymole and Jinny joined in her laugh. “Sometimes I’ve woke at

’arf-past three,” he explained carefully. “But _then_ I felt all right.”

He recapitulated the wonder of his oversleeping himself, as he drew up

to the table, where the bulk of his progeny was already installed, and

it overbrooded his distribution of bread and jam in great slices.

“And _I_ was up at four!” Mrs. Pennymole bragged waggishly.

“Yes, upstairs!” Mr. Pennymole retorted, sharp as his knife, and the

table was in a roar, not to mention the four corners of the room, where

those of the brood squatted who could not find places at the board.

Everybody sat munching the ritual hunk, though for the black strong tea

the adults alone had cups, two mugs circulating among the swarm of

children, whose clamours for their fair turn had to be checked by

paternal cries for silence. Mrs. Pennymole pressed both husband and

guest to share her little piece of fat pork fried with bread, but they

knew better what was due to a nursing mother. Jinny felt grateful enough

for the bread and jam and the tea, cheap but at least not from burnt

crusts, and sugared abundantly, despite that sugar—as Mrs. Pennymole

complained—had gone up “something cruel.” But though such a meal was

luxury for her nowadays, she could hardly help wistful mouth-watering

visions of the wedding-feast, from the known dumplings to the unknown

champagne. It was for a strange company she had exchanged the

wedding-party, she thought ruefully, as she refused a third slice of

bread. She could not well accept it, when each child, solemnly asked in

turn whether it would like a second, had replied with wonderful

unanimity in the affirmative, and Mr. Pennymole, with his eye on the

waning loaf, had remarked that children had wonderful healthy appetites,

though that was better than doctors. She was glad, however, to be given

a wedge of bread and cheese, though when her host jabbed his into his

mouth at the point of his knife, it called up a distressing memory of a

gobbet of wedding-cake thrown to a dog, and she became suddenly aware

that Nip was no longer with her. She remembered seeing him last as she

sat on the log, and she rightly divined that—wiser than she—he had

gone to the wedding-meal!

Before she could get away from her Barmecide banquet, the brother-in-law

and his wife came in, and then the whole story of the oversleeping had

to be laughed and marvelled over afresh. The more often Mr. Pennymole

told the story, the more his sense of its whimsicalness and wonder grew

upon him, and the more his audience enjoyed it. “_I_ made his tea,”

cackled Mrs. Pennymole. “I sent it round to the field. So he had two

teas!” The cottage rocked with laughter. Only the owl and Jinny

preserved their gravity. And even Jinny could not resist the infection

when Mrs. Pennymole boasted to her visitors that she herself had been up

at four, and Mr. Pennymole, with an air of invincible shrewdness,

pointed out that it was “upstairs” she had been. So that though neither

of the new-comers could throw light upon the Methusalem mystery, Jinny

left the cottage refreshed by more than tea, and with the flavour of the

corpse-talk washed away. The humour of it all even went with her on her

long homeward tramp. In imagination she heard the oddness of the

oversleeping and the duplication of the teas still savoured with grins

and guffaws, while the little ones dribbled bedwards, while the elder

boys were scrubbed in the scullery, and while the indefatigable Mrs.

Pennymole was washing the hero of the history down to his waist. Her

fancy followed the tale spreading over the parish, told and retold,

borne by Bundock to ever wider circles, adding to the gaiety of the

Hundred, abiding as a family tradition when that babe at Mrs.

Pennymole’s breast was a grandmother—the tale of how for thirty years

Mr. Pennymole had got up at half-past four, and how at long last the

record was broken!

Speeding along in this merrier mood, Jinny had almost reached home by a

short cut through the woods, when she espied a gay-stringed, battered

beaver and learned the tragic truth.

XIII

Uncle Lilliwhyte was carrying by its long legs the spoil of his rusty

flintlock—Jinny was glad to see it was only a legitimate curlew with

its dagger-like bill. He offered the bird for sale, but she was afraid

it had fed too long on the marsh mud. She was glad to hear, though, he

had called that very morning and sold her grandfather truffles—Uncle

had a pig’s nose for truffles, and her grandfather a passion for them.

“He hadn’t got change for a foive-pun’ note,” Uncle Lilliwhyte reported.

“And Oi hadn’t, neither,” he chuckled. “So ye owes me tuppence.”

Jinny was amused at her grandfather’s magnificent mendacity—his lordly

way of carrying off his pennilessness.

“Never mind the twopence now,” she said. “You haven’t seen Methusalem, I

suppose?”

She had supposed it so often that she took the answer for granted. This

reply struck her like a cannon-ball.

“Not since ’Lijah Skindle took him away this marnin’!”

“Elijah Skindle took him!” she gasped, breathless yet relieved. “What

for? Where?” Had her grandfather’s fears been justified then?

“To his ’orspital, Oi reckon. Trottin’ behind the trap he was, tied to

it. A sick ’oss don’t want to goo that pace though, thinks Oi. ’Twould

be before bever,” he added, when she demanded the exact hour.

“When I was at church! But Methusalem wasn’t sick when I left home.”

“Must ha’ been took sick—or it stands to reason your Gran’fer wouldn’t

ha’ let him goo!”

“But Gran’fer didn’t know——!”

“Arxin’ your pardon, Jinny—Mr. Quarles waved to ’em as they went off.

And Oi’ll be thankful to you for the tuppence, needin’ my Sunday beer.”

She groped in her purse. “But if Mr. Skindle took him back to Chipstone,

how comes it nobody has seen him?”

“He went roundabouts by Bog Lane and Squash End, ’tis all droied-up

nowadays. And took Bidlake’s Ferry, Oi reckon, stead o’ the bridge.”

A sinister feeling, as yet formless, began to creep into Jinny’s veins.

Handing the nondescript his twopence and the jay feather, she ran out of

the wood and then in the dusking owl-light by a field-path, and through

a prickly hedge of dog-rose and blackberry that left her with scratched

fingers, into her own little plot of ground. The stable door was now

locked, though its aching emptiness was still visible through the

weather-boarding as she passed by; the house-door was even more securely

fastened, and all the windows were tightly closed. She rattled the

casement of the living-room and heard her grandfather finally hobbling

down the stairs.

He examined her cautiously through the little panes.

“Ye’ve left me in the dark,” he complained, turning the window-clasp.

“Oi’m famished. Where you been gaddin’ in that frock?”

“Did you send Methusalem away?” she cried impatiently.

He put a scooped hand to his ear. “What be you a-sayin’?”

“Open the door!” she called angrily. “You mustn’t shut me out.”

“We’ve got to be careful, Jinny.” He moved to the door. “There’s a sight

o’ bad charriters about.”

“Yes, indeed. What did Mr. Skindle want here?” she asked, as the bolts

shot back.

“Skindle!” He pondered. “Young ’Lijah, d’ye mean? He brought me a pot.”

“That was long ago—what did he want this morning?”

“This marnin’? Oh, ay”—the sidelong look returned with remembrance and

was succeeded by one of defiance—“That’s my business.”

A terrible suspicion flashed upon Jinny.

“You haven’t sold Methusalem?” she cried.

He winced. “That’s _my_ property. Daniel Quarles, Carrier. And by the

good rights, Oi——”

“You _have_ sold him!” she hissed in a fury strange to herself. And she

found herself shaking the old man by the arms, shaking him as he had

shaken her that very morning in the small hours. And he was cowering

before her, the fierce old man, cowering there on his own doorstep.

“Oi couldn’t see ye starve,” he pleaded.

“Oh, it’s not me you were thinking of!” she said harshly, not caring

whether she was just or not. “You might have trusted yourself to me

after all these years.” Indignation at Elijah’s supposed swindling

mingled with her wrath—the idea of his getting Methusalem, an animal

worth his weight in gold, for a miserable five-pound note! She gave the

old man a final shake, imaginatively intended for Mr. Skindle. “Where’s

the money?” she cried, letting him go.

He recovered himself somewhat. “That’s _my_ money,” he said sullenly.

“But where have you put it?”

Cunning and obstinacy mingled in his eye. “Oi’ve put it safe agin all

they thieves!”

“I don’t believe you’ve got any money!” she said, matching cunning by

cunning. “You just let Mr. Skindle rob you.”

“Noa, Oi dedn’t. Oi got more than Methusalem was worth.”

“Really? More than a sovereign?”

“A suvran!” He cackled with a crafty air. “More than double that!”

“More than two sovereigns?” said Jinny in tones of ingenuous admiration.

“More than double that!”

“More than four sovereigns?” Enthusiasm shone in her eyes through the

dusk.

He hurried towards the stairs.

“You’re not going to bed?” she called with mock anxiety. “You haven’t

had supper!”

“We’ll have plenty o’ supper now. He, he!” His gleeful cackle descended

from the winding staircase. Before he returned, chuckling still, she had

lit the lamp and put out some cold rabbit-pie and a jug of beer on the

tiger-painted tray.

“A foiver!” he cried, waving it.

She snatched at the note and tore it in two and let the pieces flutter

away.

“Help! Thieves! She’s robbed me,” screamed the Gaffer. He scrambled on

his knees after the fragments.

“Hush! How dare you sell Methusalem?” He cowered again before her

passion.

“That was eating us out of house and home!” he whimpered.

“Get up! There’s your supper.”

He rose like a scolded child, clutching the scraps of thin paper. She

put on her bonnet.

“Where ye gooin’?”

“To Mr. Skindle, of course.”

“Too late for that!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“But ye won’t git Methusalem back.”

“Oh, won’t I, though!”

“But ye’ve tore up his foiver!”

“I don’t care.” But alarmed at heart over her insane deed, she took the

pieces from his unresisting hand and put them in her purse. “Don’t bolt

me out or I’ll break the window.”

“But listen, dearie, Mr. Skindle won’t be there—the place’ll be shut

up!”

“All the better. I’ll break it in.”

“But what’s the good o’ that? Poor old Methusalem’s out o’ his misery by

now!”

Her heart stood still. “What do you mean?” She was white and shaking.

“’Lijah kills at seven,” he said, “afore his supper.”

“Oh, my God!” she gasped, the completeness of the tragedy impinging on

her for the first time. “You sold him to be killed! No, no!” she cried,

recovering. “He wouldn’t give five pounds just for a carcase!”

“Then ef that ain’t killed yet,” said the Gaffer, “that won’t be till

to-morrow night.”

A sensible remark for once, Jinny thought, subsiding almost happily into

a chair. It had been silly even to contemplate setting out afresh after

all the day’s journeyings. In this weather the doomed horses would be

shut up in Mr. Skindle’s field,—she recalled their joyous

gambollings—the first thing in the morning she would set out to the

rescue. And yet what if her grandfather should be wrong, what if Mr.

Skindle killed before breakfast! No, delay might be fatal, and she

started up afresh and, unlocking the stable-door, brought in her

lantern.

“Ye’re not gooin’ to Mr. Skindle at this time o’ day?” protested the

Gaffer from his soothing tray.

“I must.” She lit the candle in the lantern.

“Well, give my love to his mother!” She thought it sarcasm and went off

even more embittered against him.

She had not gone far before she met the returning reveller. Nip’s ears

were abased and his eyes edge-long, but in an instant, aware she was

glad of his company, he welcomed her roysterously to it. But the

blackness that now began to fall upon the pair was not wholly of the

night. Great livid thunder-clouds were sagging over them, and of a

sudden the whole landscape was lit up with blue blazings and shaken with

terrific thunder. And then came the rain—the long-prayed-for rain, with

its rich rejoicing gurgle. Providence, importuned on all sides, now

asserted itself in a pour that was like solid sheets of water, and the

parched soil seemed swilled in a few seconds. To plough along was not

only difficult but foolhardy. Heaven had clearly thrown cold water on

the project. She crept almost shame-facedly back to her still guzzling

grandfather.

“Got a wettin’,” he chuckled. “Sarve ye right to be sow obstropolus. And

sarve _you_ right too!” he added, launching a kick towards the shivering

and dripping animal. Nip, though untouched, uttered a dreadful howl, and

grovelled on his back.

“Do you want to kill them both?” cried Jinny. She was now sure that

Methusalem was beyond reprieve—the point of Mr. Skindle’s strategy in

purchasing him, so as to leave her no sphere but matrimony, was

penetrating to her mind, and, by the side of such “a dirty bit,” Will’s

frank and blusterous methods began to appear magnanimity itself. To have

found out, too, probably from Bundock, that she would be away at the

wedding! The sly skunk!

XIV

For a full hour after Nip and her grandfather slept the sleep of the

innocent in their beds, she sat up watching the storm, with no surprise

at this unrest of the elements. No less a cataclysm was adequate to the

passing of Methusalem. This sympathy of Nature indeed relieved her, some

of her stoniness melted, and her face—as if in reciprocation—became as

deluged as the face of the earth-mother. All the long years with

Methusalem passed before her vision, ever since that first meeting of

theirs outside the Watch Vessel: their common adventures in sunshine and

snow, in mud and rain, her whip only an extra tail for him to whisk off

his flies withal: ah, the long martyrdom from those flies, especially

the nose-fly that spoilt the glory of July. She heard again that queer

tick-tack of his hoofs, his whinnying, his coughing, saw the spasmodic

shudder of his shoulder-joints, the peculiar gulp with which he took his

drench. How often they had gone together to have a nail fixed, or his

shoes roughed for the winter! What silly alarms he had felt, when she

had had to soothe him like a mother, coax him to pass something, and on

the other hand what a skill beyond hers in going unguided through the

moonless, swift-fallen winter night! How happily he had nibbled at the

beans in his corner-crib or the oats in his manger, what time he was

brushed and combed—would that beloved mane get into rats’-tails no

more? Was she never again to feel that soft nose against her cheek in a

love passing the love of man? Could all this cheery laborious vitality

have ended, be one with the dust she had so often brushed from his

fetlocks? That joy which had set him frisking like an uncouth kitten

when he was released from the shafts, was it not to be his now that he

was freed for ever? Was he to be nothing but a carcase? Nay—horror upon

horror—would he survive only as glove-or boot-buttons, as that wretch

of a Skindle calculated? Would that triumphant tail wave only at human

funerals, his own last rites unpaid? A remembrance of her glimpse at the

charnel-house made her almost sick. Fed to the foxhounds perhaps! Could

such things be in a God-governed world?

And her cart too would go—of the old life there would be nothing left

any more. She could see the bill pasted up on the barn-doors: “Carrier’s

Cart on Springs, with Set of Harness, Cart Gear, Back Bands, Belly

Bands——” But what nonsense! Who would advertise such a ramshackle

ruin? “A Shabby, Cracked Canvas Tilt, Patched with Sacking”—fancy that

on a poster! No, like its horse, it would be adjudged fit only to be

broken up. Perhaps somebody wearing Methusalem on his shoes would sit on

the bar of a stile made of its axle-tree.

She woke from her reverie and to the wetness of her face, streaming with

bitter-sweet tears. The moon rode almost full, and in the pale blue

spread of sky sparse stars shone, one or two twinkling. She opened the

door and went out into the night. What delicious wafts of smells after

the long mugginess of the day! The elms and poplars rose in mystic lines

bordering the great bare spaces. Surely the death of Methusalem had been

but a nightmare—if she went to the stable, there would he be as usual,

snug and safe in his straw. She sped thither, over the sodden grass,

with absolute conviction. Alas, the same endless emptiness yawned, the

manger looked strange and tragic in the moonlight. She thought of a

divine infant once lying in one, wrapped in his swaddling-clothes, and

then looking up skywards she saw a figure hovering. Yes, it was—it was

the Angel-Mother, so beautiful in the azure light. At the sight all her

anguish was dissolved in sweetness. “Mother! Mother!” she cried,

stretching up her arms to the vision. “Comfort thee, my child!” came the

dulcet tones. “Methusalem is not dead, but sleeping!”

At the glad news Jinny burst into tears, and, in the mist they made, her

mother faded away. But she walked in soft happiness back to the house,

and said her prayers of gratitude and went believingly to bed and slept

as when she was a babe.

So long did she sleep that when she woke, the old man was standing over

her again, just as the morning before, save that now he was in his

everyday earth-coloured smock and wore a frown instead of a

wedding-look, and the sunshine was streaming into the room.

“Where’s my breakfus, Jinny?” he said grumpily.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “I must have

overslept myself.” And then she remembered Mr. Pennymole’s story, and a

smile came over her face.

“There’s nawthen to laugh at,” he said savagely. “Ef ye goo out at

bull’s noon, ye’re bound to forgit my breakfus. And that eatin’ his head

off too! Ye know there’s no work for him. Ye dedn’t want to bring him

back.”

“Back?” she almost screamed. “Is Methusalem back?”

“As ef ye dedn’t know!” he said, disgusted.

Disregarding him and everything else, she sprang out of bed, rolling the

blanket round her, and with bare feet she sped to the stable. But she

had hardly got outside before the jet of hope had sunk back. It was but

another of her grandfather’s delusions.

But no! O incredible, miraculous, enchanting spectacle! There he was,

the dear old beast, not dead but sleeping, exactly as the Angel-Mother

had said, not a hair of his mane injured, not an inch of his tail less,

and never did two Polynesian lovers rub noses half so passionately as

this happy pair.

Jinny would have rubbed his nose still more adoringly had she known—as

she knew later—the rôle it had played in his salvation. The threatening

thunder-clouds had made Mr. Skindle put off his slaughtering till the

morning, so that he himself might get home before the storm broke. The

doomed horses he left shut in his field—who cared whether _they_ got

wet? But as soon as the coast was clear of Skindle and his

latest-lingering myrmidons, Methusalem had simply lifted the latch of

the gate with his nose and gone home. Mr. Skindle, oblivious of this

accomplishment of his, though he had seen it practised on his

never-forgotten journey with Jinny, had imagined him conclusively

corralled. Mr. Charles Mott, returning with some boon companions from a

distant hostelry where the draughts were more generous than he was

allowed at “The Black Sheep,” was among the few who saw the noble animal

hurrying homewards, and he told Jinny the next Tuesday that she ought to

enter Methusalem for the Colchester Stakes. His unusual rate of motion

was also reported by Miss Gentry, who, lying awake with a headache after

the excitement of the day, had heard him snort past her window just when

the storm was ebbing. He must have sagely sheltered while it raged and

have arrived at Blackwater Hall soon after Jinny had beheld her vision.

But as yet Jinny attributed the miracle to her Angel-Mother. And what a

happy Sunday morning was that, with the church bells all clearly ringing

“Come and thank God and her!” She did not fail to obey them, though not

without a sharp turn in that padlock, and with the little key safe in

her bosom. And having happily ascertained from Mother Gander that the

five-pound note was valid in pieces, she dropped them into Mr. Skindle’s

letter-box together with remarks that drew heavily on her

Spelling-Book’s “Noun Adjectives of Four Syllables.” _Cadaverous_

(Belonging to a Carcase); _Execrable_ (Hateful, Accursed); _Sophistical_

(Captious, Deceitful); _Sulphureous_ (Full of Brimstone); and

_Vindictive_ (Belonging to an Apology) were among her proudest

specimens. They were not calculated to encourage Mr. Skindle’s

matrimonial hopes.