after long listening to a wind that would soon be tossing a ship about.
In those harsh hours she had felt it would be impossible to get up and
go on her round in the morning. But no sooner were her eyes unsealed,
than there sprang up in her mind the thought that, did she fail her
customers to-day, gossip would at once connect her breakdown with Will’s
departure. So far, she had reason to believe, Martha’s guess at their
relations had not penetrated outside. But eyes were sharp and tongues
sharper, and she must not be exposed to pity. Under this goad she sprang
up instanter and did her hair carefully before the cracked mirror and
dressed herself in her best and smartest. She would go around with gibe
and laughter and fantasias on the horn, and whatever was consonant with
celebrating the final retreat of the coach.
The morning was quiet after the blustrous night, but the year, like her
fate, was at its dreariest moment—no colour in sky or garden, no hint
of the Spring—and at breakfast a reaction overcame her. But this time
her grandfather did not observe her depression: he was too full of the
crime of ’Lijah, who—according to Martha—was putting his mother in the
Chipstone poorhouse prior to installing his bride in Rosemary Villa. So
garrulous was he this morning that Jinny—her mind morbidly possessed by
a story of a miner who was found dead of starvation in the Bush with a
bag of gold for his pillow—ceased to listen to his diatribes, retaining
only an uneasy sense that he was twitching and jerking with the same
excitement as when Martha had first come. “And Oi count ye’ll be doin’
the same with me one day,” she heard him say at last, for he was shaking
her arm. “But Oi’d have ye know it’s my business, not yourn—Daniel
Quarles, Carrier.”
Jinny wearily assured him that there was no danger of her ever marrying,
and she felt vexed with Martha for coming and starting such agitated
trains of thought in his aged brain. Possibly the foolish mother might
even have broached to him her desire to rob him of his granddaughter.
“Ye ought to be glad Oi’ve give ye food and shelter and them fine
clothes ye’ve titivated yourself with,” he went on, unsoothed, “bein’ as
there ain’t enough in the business for myself. ’Tis a daily sacrifice,
Jinny, and do ye don’t forgit it.”
The prompt arrival of Ravens made a break, but she had to cancel with
thanks her request for his services with the cart, and then, when the
old man was settled at his Bible, and her bonnet and shawl were on, she
collapsed in the ante-room, sinking down on the chest in which she had
hoarded Will’s provisions, and feeling her resolution oozing away with
every tick of the Dutch clock. Impossible to whip up a pseudo-gaiety, to
make the tour of all these inquisitive faces! And through the lassitude
of her whole being pierced every now and then her grandfather’s voice,
crying “Tush, you foolish woman!” She knew it was not meant for her, but
for an imagined Martha whose texts he was confuting, but it sounded
dismally apposite, and when once he declared “Wiser folks than you
knowed it all afore you was born,” she bowed her head as before the
human destiny.
When the clock struck nine, he came stalking in. “Why, Jinny! Ain’t
to-day Friday?”
She raised a miserable face. “Yes, but I’m going to-morrow instead!”
“To-morrow be dangnationed!” he cried, upset. “Oi’ve, never missed my
Friday yet.”
“But I don’t feel like going to-day.”
“That’ll never do, Jinny. Ye’ll ruin my business with your whimwhams and
mulligrubs. And it don’t yarn enough as it is.”
“There’s no competition—it doesn’t matter now.”
“And is that your thanks to the Lord for drowndin’ Pharaoh and his
chariot and hosses?”
But she put her head back in her hands. “Do let me be!” she snapped.
“Don’t ye feel well, Jinny?” he said, with a change of tone. “Have ye
got shoots o’ pain in your brain-box?”
“I’m all right, but I don’t want to go to-day. I should only make
muddles.”
“We don’t make muddles,” he said fiercely.
“Let me be. I can’t harness.”
“Well, then Oi’ll do it, dearie. You just set there—Oi’ll put the door
a bit ajar and once you’re in the fresh air you’ll be all right.”
She heard him shuffle back into the living-room and thence into the
kitchen as the shortest way to the stable, and then, almost immediately,
she became aware of a little noise at the garden-gate. She was sitting
opposite the clock, and through the slit at the doorway she beheld, to
her amaze, a red-headed figure outside the gate, sitting on a box and
mopping its brow as it gazed sentimentally at the cottage. Even in the
wild leaping of her pulses, the grotesqueness of their both sitting
gloomily on boxes—so near and yet so far—tickled her sense of humour.
But as she sat on, smiling and fluttering, she saw him rise, cast a
cautious look round, open the gate, and steal towards the living-room.
In a bound she was within and waiting by the closed casement, and as his
expected peep came, the lattice flew back in his face and her hysteric
mockery rang out.
“I thought you’d never look on my face again!”
It was almost a greater surprise than when she had appeared with
Methusalem walking the waters, for he had counted her just as surely set
out on her Friday round as the sun itself, and his sentimental journey
safe from misunderstanding (or was it understanding?).
“Oh, don’t cackle!” he snarled. “I might have guessed you’d try to catch
me.”
She gulped down the sobs that were trying to strangle her speech. How
glad she was that she had on her best frock! “I overslept myself!” she
said gaily. “Gran’fer’s harnessing. I see you’ve brought your box!
You’re just in time!”
“I haven’t brought my box!” he snapped.
“Do ye don’t tell me no fibs,” she parodied.
“I mean, it’s going from ‘The King of Prussia.’”
“Really? Well I’ll take it over the bridge for you.”
“Thank you! I’m taking it there myself.”
“This don’t seem the shortest cut to Long Bradmarsh,” she observed
blandly.
He glowered. “Shows how easily I can carry it. I’m having a good-bye
look at all the old places.”
But below this surface conversation they were holding one of their old
silent duologues. Jinny’s heart was beating fast with happiness and
triumph as her eyes told him he would never get away now, and he,
hypnotized by that dancing light in them, dumbly acknowledged he was
self-trapped. Yet how they were going to get out of their impasse, and
how his pride was to be reconciled with their reconciliation, neither
had the ghost of an idea. “I see,” she replied, as if accepting his
explanation of his visit. “But as to _this_ old place, I’m afraid Ravens
has rather changed the look of it with his new thatch.”
He snorted at the name.
“But you’ll find it unchanged inside,” she added affably, “if you come
in.”
“Don’t begin that again! You know I can’t.”
“Dear me! I had forgotten that old nonsense. Well, you can come nearer
and peep in.” Her face shone at the window.
His face worked wildly with the struggle not to approach hers. “I did
have a peep. Good-bye, I’ve got the coach to catch.”
“Well, the cart will be ready in a moment. Gran’fer is so slow
harnessing. Hark! Nip’s getting impatient.”
He raised his hat. “Thank you, but I told you I was my own carrier.”
“Good-bye, then. Pity you came so out of your way.”
He turned, and his feet dragged themselves hopelessly gateward.
She waved her hand desperately through the casement.
“Good luck, Will! Hope you’ll strike plenty of nuggets!”
“Thank you, Jinny!” He opened the gate.
“You’ll let me know how you’re getting on.”
“If you like!” The gate clicked behind him. Her mother-wit leapt to
stave off the moment beyond which all her frenzied questing for some
solution would be waste.
“Oh dear me, Will! Where is my memory going? Put your box in the porch a
moment, will you?”
“What for?”
“I’ve got a few little things for the voyage—I really forgot.”
“Oh, Jinny!” He came back through the gate. “But I don’t need to bring
the box to the door. I’ll take the things from you through the window.”
“But I want to pack them in properly—I can’t on the road.”
“There’s nobody passing.”
“You never can tell. We don’t want Bundock——”
“But I’ll pack them in myself.”
“I’d never trust a man—in fact I expect I’ll have to repack all the
rest. Look at Mr. Flippance.”
But still he hung back. “There’s lots of room.”
“I know. Like a sensible man you’re getting your outfit in London. Bring
it along. Or shall I lend you a hand?”
“No! No!” He hurriedly shouldered the huge box and Jinny heard its
contents shifting like a withered kernel in a nutshell. It was the same
American trunk with the overarching lid, and as he swaggered up the
garden with it, it seemed to her as if time had rolled back to last
Spring. But what comedies and tragedies had intervened between the two
box-carryings, all sprung from the same obstinacy! And yet, she felt,
she did not love him the less for his manly assertiveness: how sweet
would be the surrender when their sparring was over and her will could
be legitimately embraced in his, held like herself in those masterful,
muscular arms.
Her mind was really in her Australian hut as he dumped the box at her
feet. No, it would hardly do for a table, she thought, with that
lid-curvature. Then she braced herself for a tricky tussle.
“Well, where’s the goods?” he said lightly.
“Don’t be so unbelieving—they’re in that spruce-hutch. Four months, you
know, you’ve got to provide against.”
“I know,” he said glumly, unlocking his trunk and throwing up the lid
violently. He would have liked to smash the springs. But the lid, lined
with cheap striped cloth, stood up stiffly, refusing to give him a
pretext for postponing his journey.
Jinny from her doorway gazed at the jumble in the great void.
“Shove it forward a bit,” she said carelessly, moving backwards within.
“What for?”
“Your end of the box is not under cover.”
“Why should it be?”
“It might rain and spoil your things—I’m sure I saw a drop.” She tugged
at the handle and the trunk slid along the porch and some inches over
the sill. Unostentatiously he pulled it back a bit, but she jerked it in
again. “Do leave it where I can see the things,” she said with simulated
fretfulness. “Good gracious!” She drew out the frock-coat he had sported
for the Flippance wedding. “What’s this grandeur for?”
“Oh, for funerals and things like that!”
“In the Bush? And fancy packing it next to the blanket. It’s all over
hairs. I’ll brush it and sell it for you—Ravens will be wanting one for
the wedding.”
“What wedding?” he demanded fiercely.
“Mr. Skindle’s, of course. Weren’t you invited?”
He winced, and unrebuked she threw his wedding raiment over the
provision-chest. “We’d best keep this on top,” she said, drawing out the
blanket, “else you won’t get at it.”
“I expect you’ll be married by the time I’m back,” he remarked with
aloofness.
“Not I. I’ll never marry now. I’ve seen too much of men’s foolishness.”
“Going to be an old maid?”
“If I live long enough!” Her vaunt of youth was dazzling.
“Well, I hope you won’t!” he said fervently.
“Won’t live? Oh, Will!”
“Won’t fade into that. You know what I mean. The sweetest rose must
fade.”
“So will this muffler—fortunately. Haven’t you taken your dad’s
‘muckinger’ by mistake?”
“No, no—you leave that be.”
“What a let of Sunday collars!”
“Weekdays too I like a clean collar.”
“Ow, this onrighteous generation,” she said in Caleb’s voice, “all one
to them, Sundays or no Sundays.” She pulled up his cloak.
“You leave that cloak be!” he said, laughing despite himself.
“But now your sling’s off, you don’t need it.”
“Yes, I do. Let it be, please.”
But she unrolled it mischievously and a packet of letters fell
out—_her_ letters about the great horn.
“Well, didn’t I say men were silly!” she cried. “Fancy taking that to
Australia.” And she made as if to hurl them towards the living-room
fire.
“Give ’em to me!” He reached for them angrily, and that gave her an
idea.
“But they’re mine!” Standing at the end of the box, which made a barrier
between them, she held them mockingly just beyond his reach. He came
forward, then perceiving one foot was right across the forbidden sill,
he jerked himself back violently. Then balancing himself well on his
soles, with a sudden swoop he curved his body forward to the utmost. It
only resulted in his nearly falling athwart the open box. He recovered
his balance and the perpendicular with some difficulty and no dignity.
“Take care!” she cried in almost hysterical gaiety. “You nearly crossed
that time.”
“You give me my property!” he cried furiously.
“They’re as much mine as yours.”
“Not by law. You’ve no legal right to detain my property.”
“And who’s detaining it? You’ve only got to come and take it!”
His anger was enhanced by the sounds of Daniel Quarles returning with
the cart, a carolling, lumbering, barking medley. It would be
intolerable to be caught as though trying to cross the threshold.
“Give it me,” he hissed. “I don’t want to meet him.” And as she
tantalizingly tendered the packet nearer, he lunged towards her at a
desperate angle, and overreaching himself as she deftly withdrew it,
fell prone into the open box, his legs asprawl in the air.
“Curl ’em in, quick,” she whispered, with an inspiration, tucking his
legs in before he knew what was happening. But as the lid closed on him,
he was not sorry to be spared the encounter.
“Get rid of him!” he implored through the keyhole.
“Business pouring in, Gran’fer!” she cried cheerily, as the Gaffer came
up astare. “Bear a hand! No, no, not into the cart. It’s to wait here.
_There is Hey_,” she began chanting.
“_There is Ree_,” came his antiphone, as he grasped the other handle.
“Lord, that’s lugsome!” he panted, dropping it as soon as it was inside
and letting himself fall upon it. “Whew!” he breathed heavily. Nip, too,
all abristle leaped on the box and yapped hysterically, as though nosing
for a rat. This was the last straw. Will, whose head the Gaffer was
pressing through the far from inflexible lid, and who already felt
asphyxiating, gave a vigorous heave.
“Why, it’s aloive!” cried the Gaffer, jumping up nervously. Then as the
lid flew up, Nip was hurled into space and Will’s red poll popped up.
“It’s a Will-in-the-box,” cried Jinny.
“Willie Flynt!” gasped the Gaffer.
“Yes, Gran’fer,” she said in laughing triumph. “_And you carried him
in!_”
“Ha, ha, ha!” A great roar of glee came from the jubilant junior, and in
the act of scrambling up, his knees relaxed in helpless mirth and he let
himself fall forward once more in the box, in a convulsion of merriment.
“Daniel Quarles, Carrier! Ha, ha, ha!”
“And see, Gran’fer!” cried Jinny in still greater triumph. “_He came in
on his hands and knees!_”
Daniel Quarles’s bemused countenance changed magically.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he croaked. “On his hands and knees! Ho, ho, ho!”
Will’s spasms froze as by enchantment.
“Come along, Will,” said Jinny, hauling him out. “It’s a fair draw and
you’ve got to shake hands.”
Will manfully put out his hand. “You nearly squashed me, Mr. Quarles,”
he said ruefully.
“Ye wanted settin’ on,” said the Gaffer, chuckling, and he took the
fleshy young hand in his bony fingers. “Ye sot yourself to ruin us. But
what says the Book?” he demanded amiably. “He that diggeth a pit shall
tumble into——”
“A box,” wound up Jinny merrily.
“Oi never knowed he was there, did, Oi’d a-tarned that key,” said her
grandfather, guffawing afresh.
“And everybody would have thought me in Australia, and then after long
years a skeleton would have been found,” said Will, with grim humour.
Jinny clapped her hands. “Just like Mr. Flippance’s play, _The Mistletoe
Bough_!”
She had closed the house-door. A timid tapping at it, which had gone
unobserved, now grew audible.
“There’s your dad!” said Jinny.
Will’s eyes widened. “My dad?” he breathed incredulously.
“Git in the box!” whispered the Gaffer, almost bursting with glee. “Git
in the box!” His sinewy arms seized the young man round the waist.
Will struggled indignantly. “I nearly choked!” he spluttered.
“Sh!” Jinny with her warning finger and dancing eyes stilled him. “Just
for fun—only for a moment!”
Her instinct divined that to let the old man have his way would be the
surest method of clinching the reconciliation. He could then never go
back on her later, never resent the trick played upon him. It would
become _his_ trick, _his_ farce, it would provide a fund of happy
memories for the rest of his life. And as she cried “Come in!” and the
latch lifted and Caleb’s white-rimmed, cherubic countenance was poked
meekly through a gap, while her grandfather, stroking his beard,
composed his face to an exaggerated severity, Jinny felt that life was
almost too delicious for laughter.
“Hullo, young chap!” was the Gaffer’s genial greeting. “What brings you
here?”
“Oi—Oi happened to be passin’,” explained Caleb awkwardly, while his
puzzled eyes roved from the girl to his senior, and then towards Nip,
who was cowering in a corner, too nerve-shattered to leap on the lid
again. “You ain’t seen my Willie?” He moved forward questingly.
The older man tried to answer, then a guffaw burst from that toothless
mouth, and turning his back he blew his nose thundrously into his
handkerchief, while his lean sides shook like a jelly. “Why ever should
we see your Willie?” cried Jinny, saving the situation. “Ain’t he gone
furrin?”
Caleb rubbed his eyes. “But Oi seen him at this door—he’ll be late for
the coach.”
“At this door?” the Gaffer succeeded in saying, and then his
handkerchief came into play again and he sneezed and coughed and blew
like a grampus.
“Oi seen him just by the sill, swingin’ forth and back like a parrot on
a perch.”
At that Jinny had some pains to keep a stiff lip, and even the box-lid
quivered, but not with laughter, she surmised.
“I’m afraid you must have dreamed it,” she replied.
“Lord!” quoth Caleb, and dropped dazedly on the box. To see the Gaffer’s
face when the lid shot up under his visitor was worth more than Mr.
Flippance’s finest show. The very soul of old English mirth was there.
You would have thought that this crude device had never entered human
brain before, was as fresh as the first laughter of Eden. And what
heightened the humour of the situation was that Caleb was by no means
overpleased to find Will had no intention of catching his coach. Nor did
he begin to enter into the spirit of the thing till, admitting that
Martha would “exult in gladness,” it occurred to him what a surprise for
her it would be to get her boy delivered back to her inside the box.
Eagerly the two old men imagined the scene, catching fire from each
other, improvising Martha’s dialogue for her, from her amazement at
seeing the box back, down to the colossal climax, till the mere idea had
them both rolling about in helpless quiverings and explosions. Nor could
Will, though he said he’d be danged if he’d stuff himself in again, and
groused he’d got cramp in every limb, altogether escape the contagion,
while to witness the roisterous merriment of the two hairy ancients gave
Jinny such an exquisite joy of life as not even her lover’s first kiss
had given her. Such an assurance streamed from it of life being sound at
the centre: a bubbling fount of sweetness and love and innocent
laughter. It wiped out for ever the memory of that morbid doubt of the
nature of things that had assailed her as she sat under the gaze of the
stuffed owl in Mrs. Pennymole’s cottage, the day of the rape of
Methusalem. Tears welled through her smiles as Will at last bade his
father lend a hand in transporting the box to the waiting cart. It must
return to Frog Farm, even if he was not inside it.
“And I don’t believe there ever _were_ any provisions, Jinny,” he
grinned, with an afterthought.
“Oh yes, there are,” said Jinny. “Look! And a bottle of brandy too!”
“You dear!” he began, but Jinny cut him short with warning signals. The
sudden revelation of their relations might undo all the good of the
spree, by reviving her grandfather’s apprehensions of desertion. Indeed,
when the hurly-burly was over, he could scarcely fail to ask himself
what this sportive intimacy of the young couple portended, especially as
he had even in the past suspected the answer. The truth must be broken
to him cautiously, and with that reflection came the chilling
remembrance that all this hubbub and laughter had solved nothing, that
the situation, though superficially eased, was essentially the same as
before, that the problem had only been postponed. Putting Will in a box
was not keeping him in England. He would probably have to sail just the
same, and the pain of parting be borne afresh, and even if he remained,
she could not abandon her grandfather. But she shook off these thoughts.
Enough for the moment that Will was hers again.
“Oi’ve never laughed so much since Oi seen that Andraa at Che’msford
Fair the day Oi fust met Annie!” said her grandfather, wiping his eyes,
as she set off on her delayed round, with Will at her side, and Caleb
and the box in the cart, and Nip bounding like mad along the muddy road.
But it was impossible to keep Caleb in mind. Will was too impatient and
too famished a lover for that, and it is not often that you sit at your
sweetheart’s side when you ought to be whirling towards the Antipodes.
Caleb could not help seeing happy backs, circumplicated—in the more
solitary roads—by arms, and the hope, first implanted by Martha, that
he would be relieved of Will after all, and in so desirable a fashion,
grew more and more assured, though the occasional rigidity of the bodies
under observation unsettled him afresh.
“Aren’t you late for the coach?” he heard Bundock’s voice inquire at one
of these prim intervals.
“No, too early!” laughed Will.
“But you’re going the wrong way!”
“The first time I’ve gone right!” said Will, and with magnificent
indiscretion he turned and kissed Jinny.
“Oh dear!” Jinny gasped, red as fire. “It’ll be all over Chipstone by
to-night.”
“I wanted the banns proclaimed as soon as possible,” he said, unabashed.
Then they became aware of a curious gulping sound behind them which
drowned even Methusalem’s tick-tacks. They turned their heads.
Caleb—convinced at last—had buried his face in the famous “muckinger”
mentioned between them only that morning.
“What’s up, dad?” cried Will sympathetically. “Got a toothache?”
“It’s the joy at you and Jinny,” he sobbed apologetically. “And to think
that some folk are near-sighted and can’t see God, their friend.”
“Meaning me, dad?” asked Will, not untouched.
“Meanin’ mother, Willie. Lord, what a state Oi left her in—all blarin’
and lamentation. ‘Have faith,’ Oi says to her. But Oi’m afeared she’s
got too much brains and book-larnin’!”
“Oh, I say, dad!” laughed Will. “Wouldn’t Bundock like to hear that?”
“Bundock’s of the same opinion,” said Caleb, meaning the bed-ridden
Bundock. “‘Few texts and much faith,’ he says to me once. And faith
cometh by hearin’, don’t one of ’em tell us? Singafies the ear can’t
take hold of a clutter o’ texts.”
“Oh, but surely Mrs. Flynt has faith?” protested Jinny.
“She’s too taken up with other folks’ faith,” Caleb maintained stoutly.
“Wanted Mrs. Skindle to break bread with her and look for the New
Jerusalem—she ain’t found much of a Jerusalem, poor lone widder. And
wanted to baptize that Flip gen’leman, but he never would come to the
scratch. And tried her tricks and texts on your poor old Gran’fer, she
let out. But when it comes to takin’ a sorrow from the hand of God, her
friend, she sets and yowls like a heathen what runs naked in the
wilderness. Oi’m done with that Christy Dolphin stuff—it don’t bring
the peace of God, and Oi’ll tell her sow to her head the next time she’s
at me to be a Jew!”
He mopped up the remains of his tears. “And same as Oi did jine the Sin
agog,” he added pensively, “how do Oi know she wouldn’t goo on gooin’
forrard?”
IX
If, in the very heart of the romp at Blackwater Hall, Jinny’s insight
could perceive that this reconciliation of her two males (or her two
mules as she called them to herself) had left her marriage problem
unsolved, still more did afterthought bring home the sad truth. There
was no way of leaving the old man, no way of adding Will to the
household. The latter alternative she never even suggested. It would
bring her husband into public contempt to be thus absolutely swallowed
up by the female carrier, and supported as in a poorhouse. So far off
seemed the possibility of marriage that the Gaffer was considerately
left in ignorance of the engagement—the only man in a radius of leagues
from whom it was hidden, though Will was constantly about the cottage,
having supplanted poor Ravens as a house repairer. But ever since the
Gaffer had clapped him in the trunk—and the old man had forgotten he
was not the first to do so—his affections had passed to the victim of
his humour, and he often recalled it to Will with grins and guffaws as
they sat over their beer. “Ye thought to git over Daniel Quarles,” he
would chuckle, poking him in the ribs, “but ye got to come in on your
hands and knees! Ho, ho, ho!” He seemed to imagine Will called on
purpose to be thus twitted with his defeat, though as a matter of fact
the privation of his pipe was a great grievance to the young man, and
supplied a new obstacle to his taking up his quarters there as
son-in-law. But outwardly Will had fallen into Jinny’s way of humouring
the old tyrant, and this parade of affection rather shocked her, for she
felt that Will was more interested in the veteran’s death than in his
life. Once when, recalling the delectable memory, the Gaffer remarked,
“Lucky ye ain’t as bonkka as Sidrach, Oi count they had to make him a
extra-sized coffin,” she caught an almost ghoulish gleam in her lover’s
eyes. He had indeed lugubriously drawn her attention to a paragraph in
the paper saying that six thousand centenarians had been counted in
Europe in the last half-century. Evidently the age of man was rising
dangerously, he implied. The worst of it was that Jinny herself, though
she would have fought passionately for the patriarch’s life, found
shadowy speculations as to the length of his span floating up to her
mind and needing to be sternly stamped under. For she had told Will
definitely that so long as her grandfather lived, she could neither
marry nor leave England. Gloomily he cited Old Parr—he seemed to have
become an authority on centenarians—who had clung to existence till
152. “At that rate I shall be over eighty,” he calculated cheerlessly.
“Oh, it isn’t very likely!” she consoled him.
“Well, it’s lucky we aren’t living before the Flood, that’s all I can
say,” he grumbled. “Fancy waiting six hundred years or so!”
“I wish we were living before _our_ flood,” she said. “Then you’d have
your livelihood.”
“And what would have been the good of that without you? You’d have stuck
to your grandfather just the same.”
No, there was no way out. Australia resurged, black and menacing, and
finally she even wrote herself to the London agents about his ship,
consoled only by the entire supervision of his wardrobe and the famous
trunk. And the only wedding that followed on their engagement was
Elijah’s. For—according to Bundock’s father—till that had become
certain, Blanche had refused to marry, despite the calling of her banns.
“I didn’t think that a man who once aspired to me could ever keep
company with a common carrier,” was her final version to Miss Gentry.
“It shows how right you were to spurn him,” said that sympathetic
spinster, who had transferred her adoration of the Beautiful from the
faithless Cleopatra to the clinging Blanche, and figured at the altar in
her now habitual rôle of bridesmaid.
And it was on that very wedding-day—so closely does tragedy tread on
the sock of comedy—that poor Uncle Lilliwhyte fell asleep in a glorious
hope of resurrection. Jinny had not suspected the imminence of his last
moments till the evening before, though she and Will had paid him
several visits at his now weathertight hut. But she had become rather
alarmed about him, and returning from her round one Tuesday, she set off
alone, as soon as supper was over. Will had seen sufficient of her
during the day, and it was understood he was to give his mother his
company that evening, for Martha had fallen into a more distressful
state than ever. “Will’s got to go just the same,” she kept moaning when
Jinny came, “and Flynt vows he’ll never be baptized into the Ecclesia,
and turns round and tells me I lack faith. Me, who’ve learnt him all the
religion he knows!”
There was a full moon as Jinny set out with a little basket for the
invalid. Nip trotted behind her, and the trees and bushes cast black
trunks and masses across her path, almost like solid stumbling-blocks.
The bare elms and poplars rose in rigid beauty in the cold starry
evening. Death was far from her thoughts till she reached the hut and
saw the sunken cheeks in their tangle of hair illumined weirdly from the
stove, which lay so close to the patriarch’s hand he could replenish it
from his bed of sacks.
“Just in time, Jinny!” he said joyfully. “Oi was afeared you wouldn’t
be.” His excitement set him coughing and, frightened, she knelt and put
her jug of tea to his lips.
“There! Don’t talk nonsense!” she said, as a faint colour returned to
his face.
He shook his head. “’Tis the tarn of the worms at last.”
“Not for twenty years. Look at Gran’fer.”
“Oi can’t grudge ’em,” he persisted. “Oi’ve took many a fish with ’em,
and Oi’ve been about the woods from a buoy-oy, master of beast and bird
and snake, and Oi know’d Oi’d be catched myself one day. And that’s onny
fair, ain’t it?”
“Don’t talk like that—it’s horrible.”
“Ye’re too softy-hearted, Jinny, or ye wouldn’t be here fussin’ over the
poor ole man in the trap. And ef ye’d been more of a sport, ye’d ha’
understood it’s all a grand ole game. _Catch-me-ef-you-can_, Oi calls
it.”
“It’s dreadful, I think—the hawks and weasels eating the little birds.”
“Then why do the little birds sing so? Tell me that! It’s all fun, Oi
tell ye, and they’re havin’ it theirselves with the flies and the worms.
Take your Nip now. [Nip, hearing his name, wagged his tail.] Oi’ve seen
that animal, what looks so peaceful squattin’ there by the fire, stand
a-roarin’ like when you shuts the flap o’ the stove time he tries to git
at a rat-hole. Ten men couldn’t howd him.”
“He’s never got a rat anyhow,” said Jinny with satisfaction.
“More shame to his breed. Oi count he’s frighted away my fox all the
same. There’s one what comes and looks in at me every evenin’ just like
Nip there, onny wild about the eyes like. Oi reckoned he’d be squattin’
there to-night for a warm, too, friendly-like, but he’ll find both on us
cowld soon, the fire and me.” And a racking spasm of coughing accented
his prognostic.
“You mustn’t talk like that. You mustn’t talk at all. I’ll send Dr. Mint
to-morrow.”
He raised himself convulsively on his sacking, throwing off the rags and
tags that covered him, and revealing the grimy shirt and trousers that
formed his bed-costume. His grey hair streamed wildly, almost reaching
the bolster. “Ef ye send me a doctor,” he threatened, “Oi’ll die afore
he gits here!”
“Do lie down.” She pressed him towards his bolster.
“Oi won’t take no doctors’ stuff,” he gurgled, as his head sank back.
“But why?” she said, covering him up with his fusty bedclothes. “You’re
not one of us, surely!”
“A Peculiar? Noa, thank the Lord. Oi told ye Oi don’t believe nawthen of
all they religions. Git over me, the whole thing.”
“But if you won’t have medicine, you must pray, like we do.”
“Ye don’t catch me doin’ the one ne yet the tother. Oi count Oi can git
along without ’em as much as the other critters in the wood. They don’t
have neither.”
“Yes, they do—at least Nip and Methusalem have medicine when they’re
sick. I give it ’em myself.”
“Oi reckon that’s what makes ’em sick—relyin’ on Skindles and sech. Oi
never seen a stoat nor a squirrel take physic, and ye don’t want nawthen
livelier, and Oi never seen a animal goo down on his knees, unless ’twas
a hoss what slipped. He, he, he!”
When the cough into which his gaggle passed was quieted, Jinny reminded
him sternly that men were not animals, that he had an immortal soul, and
she asked whether he would see Mr. Fallow or one of the various chapel
ministers. That proved the most agitating question of all.
He sat up again, his face working in terror. “None o’ that, Oi tell ye.
Oi ain’t afeared o’ the old black ’un. He’ll end all my pains, though Oi
ain’t tired o’ life even with ’em—no, not by a hundred year. But do ye
don’t come scarin’ me with your heavens and hells, for Oi don’t want to
believe in ’em.”
“But I remember your saying once, we’ve got to have one or the other.”
“And Oi told ye Oi mislikes ’em both.”
“Not really? You wouldn’t really dislike heaven.”
He shuddered. “Lord save me from it! Oi’ve thought a mort lately about
that Charley Mott—Oi used to see him drunk with his mates—and ef he’s
in heaven among they parsons and angels, Oi warrant he’s the most
miserable soul alive.”
“Lie down! I oughtn’t to have let you talk!” she said, so shocked that
she charitably supposed his wits were going. This apprehension was
enhanced when, just as her hand had pressed his relaxing form back to
his bolster, she felt him grow rigid again with an impulse so violent
that she was jerked backwards.
“Where’s my wits?” he exclaimed in odd congruity with her thought.
“Oi’ve nigh forgot the teapot!”
She hastened to offer again the half-sipped jug, which she had stood by
the stove. He waved it away.
“Not that! Gimme the spade!”
“The spade?”
“Ay, it stands in the corner—Oi ain’t used it since my old lurcher
died. D’ye think he’s in heaven—Rover—and all they rats we digged up
together?”
“You’re not going to dig up a rat?” she said in horror.
“No fear. But Oi won’t have nobody else ferret it out.” And from his bed
he tried to shovel away the earth near the stove. But his strength
failed. She took his spade. “I’ll do it. What is it?”
“’Tis in the earth,” he panted, “like Oi’ll be. And Oi reckon Oi’d as
soon be buried here as anywheres.”
She turned faint. Did he mean her to dig his grave?
“This isn’t consecrated ground,” she said feebly.
“Oi count it’s got as lovely a smell as the churchyard earth,” he said.
“But let ’em bury me where they will, so long as Oi don’t wake up. Ye
ain’t diggin’, Jinny.”
Mystified and trembling, and wishing she had not come without Will, she
stuck the spade in deeper and threw up the clods. Set her teeth as she
might, she could not shake off the thought that she was digging his
grave, and they began to chatter despite the warmth from the stove. The
lurid glow streaming from it seemed sinister in the darkness of the
windowless hut, and she paused to let in a streak of moonlight through a
gap in the door. But the night outside in its vastness and under its
blue glamour seemed even more frightening, and the cold blast that blew
in made the ancient cough again. She reclosed the door, and with
trembling spade resumed her strange task. Suddenly her blade struck a
metallic object.
“That’s it!” he cried gleefully. “And ye wanted to put boards over it!”
More mystified than ever, she drew up a heavy old teapot of Britannia
metal—never had she handled such a weighty pot.
“Pour it out! Pour it out!” he chuckled.
She held the spout over her jug, which made him laugh till he nearly
died. But by thumping his shoulders she got his breath back. She
understood now what moved his mirth, for though nothing had issued from
the spout, the lid had burst open and a rain of gold pieces had come
spinning and rolling all over the hut. It seemed like the stories the
old people told of the treasures of gnomes and pixies. There seemed
hundreds of them, glittering and twirling.
“All for you, Jinny,” he panted with his recovered breath. “All for
you.”
“Why, wherever did you get all this?” she replied, dropping on her knees
to gather the shimmering spilth.
“That’s all honest, Jinny, don’t be scat. ’Tis the pennies Oi’ve put
together, man and buo-oy this sixty year and more.”
“But what for?” she gasped.
“For you. And fowrpence or fi’pence a day tots up.”
“No, I mean why did you do it?” Her brain refused to take in the idea
that all this fabulous wealth was hers. “Why didn’t you live more
comfortable—why didn’t you get another cottage?”
“Oi ain’t never been so happy as since Farmer tarned me out. To lay on
the earth, that’s what Oi wanted all my life—onny Oi dedn’t know it.”
“Then what was the good of the money?”
A crafty look came into the hollow eyes and overspread the wan features.
“They’d have had me, they guardians, ef Oi dedn’t have money. Oi wasn’t
a-gooin’ to die in the poorhouse like my feyther, time they sold him up.
Ef ye got the brads, they can’t touch ye. Do, the Master ’ould git into
trouble. They put mother and me sep’rit from feyther, and when Oi seen
her cryin’ Oi swore in my liddle heart Oi’d die sooner than stay there
or tarn ’prentice. Oi dropped through a window the night o’ feyther’s
funeral—for the Master had thrashed me—but Oi’d promised mother Oi’d
come back for her, and ’twarn’t many year afore she was livin’ with me
upright in the cottage. Happen you seen her, though she never seen you.”
“Yes, I know,” said Jinny softly. “She was blind.”
“Cried her eyes out, to my thinkin’. But Oi says to her marnin’ and
night, ‘Cheer up, mother,’ Oi says, ‘so long as we’ve got the dubs, they
can’t touch us, and ef they parish gents tries to lay hands on me,
they’ll git such a clumsy thump with the teapot they’ll know better next
time.’ She never seen the teapot, mother dedn’t, but she used to waggle
her fingers about in it and laugh like billy-o.”
Jinny felt nearer weeping as she culled these spoils of a lifetime. Many
of the coins were curious; mintage of an earlier reign. She was peering
in a cobwebbed corner when the barking of Nip as well as a familiar
footstep in the clearing announced a welcome arrival. How glad she was
Will had not been able to keep away! And then suddenly—at last—came
the realization of her riches, of the solution of her financial problem!
“Quick! Quick!” whispered the old man hoarsely, and signed to her to
hide the teapot. To soothe him she put it swiftly in her basket.
“You’re sure there’s nobody else ought to have it?” she asked anxiously.
“Oi ain’t got no friend ’cept you and the fox. And ye don’t catch _him_
in the poorhouse. But Oi’ll die happy, knowin’ as Oi’ve saved _you_ from
it. Don’t let ’em come in!” he gasped, as a tapping began.
“It’s only young Mr. Flynt.”
“Willie, d’ye mean?”
She blushed in the friendly obscurity. “He’s come to see me home.”
“He mustn’t come in!”
“I’ll tell him.”
She set down the basket and went out into the blue night. It was no
longer terrifying. Will with his ash stick seemed a match for all the
powers of darkness. But she drew back from his kiss. Death was too near.
In whispers she explained the situation, forgetting even to mention the
gold. “I oughtn’t to leave him—he oughtn’t to die alone.”
“Nonsense, sweetheart. You can’t stay all night with a dirty old
lunatic!”
“Don’t talk so unchristianly, Will. You don’t deserve——!” But she shut
her lips. She could not go now into the happiness the “dirty old
lunatic” was bringing them.
“Make him up a good fire and say you’ll be back first thing in the
morning. I’ll come and take you. There!”
“Couldn’t—couldn’t _you_ stay with him, Will?”
“Me? You said he wouldn’t have me! And I haven’t got enough baccy on
me.”
She went back tentatively. She found Uncle Lilliwhyte lying on his back
on his sacks with closed eyes, and there was blood on the bolster. The
earth had been shovelled in again and the soil flattened tidily with the
back of the spade. The superfluous precaution—automatic effect of
lifelong habit—had evidently cost him dear.
“He can come in now,” he said feebly.
“But he doesn’t want anything,” she explained. “You lie still.”
“Oi’d like him to come.” She went softly to the door and called.
“Here I am, uncle!” cried Will cheerily.
“’Tain’t you Oi want. But happen ef your mother ’ud come and talk things
over——”
“My mother?” said Will, startled. Martha, he knew, would have the same
repugnance as he to this feckless, grimy, impossible creature: an
aversion which even the wasted features could not counteract.
“It don’t seem to git over she,” he explained, “but Oi never could hear
proper, bein’ at the keyhole in a manner o’ speakin’. But ef she’d come
and explain——!”
“Yes, she will,” said Jinny. “She must, Will.”
“I’ll tell her,” he murmured.
“He’ll bring her in the morning,” she promised emphatically. “You take a
little more tea now and get to sleep.” She covered him up carefully and
stuck a great log in the stove.
“Do ye take that fowlin’-piece, young Flynt,” he said, opening his eyes.
“And be careful—it’s loaded.”
“Thanks, I’ll take it in the morning.”
“And there’s the coppers and silver, Jinny. That’s at the bottom o’ the
sack Oi’m on. And old tradesmen’s tokens too.”
“In the morning—you go to sleep now,” she said tenderly. But she still
lingered, reluctant to leave him, and was very relieved when Ravens (now
become a woodman with an adze) looked in to see the old man, and,
unembittered by the sight of the lovers, consented to pass the night in
the hut he had mended.
X
Swinging home through the wood, through aisles flooded only with
moonlight, the young lovers soon left the thought of death behind them.
Indeed from the hut itself there had soon come following them the
careless strains of the incurable caroller:
“_’Tis my delight of a shiny night_
_In the season of the year._”
“What a hefty basket!” said Will at last. “Whatever have you been
carrying the old codger?”
“It’s what I’m carrying off,” she laughed. “But give it me, if it’s too
much for your poor arm.”
“It’s not so heavy as my box,” he smiled.
“But it saves carrying that,” she said happily.
“How do you mean?”
“That’s your farm in there—your English farm! Australia is off.” She
enjoyed his obvious fear that the scene in the hut had been too much for
her brain. “Goose!” she cried. “Goose with the golden eggs. Just take a
peep.”
“There’s only your jug and teapot.” He was more mystified than ever.
But her happiness waned again when the riddle was read.
“You surely don’t expect me to pocket _your_ money,” he said, as soon as
his slower brain had taken in the situation.
“Oh, Will! Surely what is mine is yours!”
“Not at all. What is mine is yours.”
“But that’s what I said.”
“Don’t turn and twist—I know you’re cleverer than me.”
Her hand sought his. “Don’t let us have a storm in a teapot!”
But he rumbled on. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow—it’s the man
says that.”
“You’ve been reading the marriage service.”
“And how would you know it, if _you_ hadn’t?”
That suspended the debate on a kiss. “You see I’d be almost as bad as
poor Charley Mott,” he pointed out.
“I see,” she said humbly. Indeed she felt herself so much a part of him
now that she wondered how she could have failed to look at it from his
point of view. Her defeat of his coach—under Providence—had humiliated
him enough. To have turned suddenly into an heiress was an aggravation
of her success; now to make him appear a fortune-hunter would be the
last straw.
“But couldn’t I buy the farm and you rent it of me?” she ventured, with
a memory of Hezekiah Bidlake.
“Everybody would think just the same——”
“Well, but somewhere else—where nobody knows us——?”
“You wouldn’t come somewhere else—not till I’m eighty!”
“Don’t be absurd! Anyhow you’ll look beautiful with a white beard.”
“Why not get him a minder with the money? Then we could go to Australia
together.”
“Leave him to a stranger! He’d die. But so long as the farm was in
England, it wouldn’t be so bad, even if I couldn’t come just yet.”
He did not answer, and as they walked on silently, her daydreams
resurged, her nipped buds began bursting into wonderful flower. They
parted at her door without further reference to money questions, but her
face was brimming with happiness as the pot with guineas.
In that rosy mood—when her grandfather, nid-nodding over the hearth,
roused at her return—she could not refrain from pouring out her teapot
on the table, and changing his grumbles at her absence into squeaks of
delight. She meant to pour out her story too, but he cut her short.
“That’s mine!” he cried, exultant. “That’s the gold Sidrach brought me!”
“No, no, Gran’fer. That comes from——!”
“But there’s the wery spade guineas!” He dabbled his claws in the coins.
“Oh, is that what they are? But there’s heads of Victoria, too.”
“That’s what he saved in Babylon. Dedn’t Oi say as he died warrum?”
“But you _must_ listen, Gran’fer. Uncle Lilliwhyte——” she
recapitulated the story.
“They’re mine anyways!” He scooped them up in his skinny palms and let
them fall into the pot with a voluptuous clang. “Ye gits quite enough
out o’ my biznus.”
This seemed so exactly the reverse of Will’s attitude that she found
herself smiling ruefully at the way she was caught again between her
“two mules.” But she could not thus lose her marriage-portion. “Uncle
Lilliwhyte gave them to me for myself,” she said firmly.
“And don’t ye owe me back all the money Oi paid when your feyther died?”
Jinny was taken aback. “How much did you pay?”
“Hunderds and hunderds. Dedn’t, he’d a-been a disgraced corpse, and your
mother too.”
Jinny was silent. The Angel-Mother seemed rustling overhead. The Gaffer
closed shutters and bolted doors with rigorous precautions, and hugging
the teapot to his bosom stumbled up to bed. Depressed by this unexpected
seizure of her windfall, she found herself too utterly weary after her
long day’s work and excitement to open the shutters again, much as she
disliked an airless room; she had scarcely energy to pull out her chest
of drawers. For a few minutes she watched from her bed the blue
flickering flame of the log, then knew no more till suddenly she saw
above the dead fire a monstrous shadow curling over the chimney-piece
and along the ceiling: in another instant she traced it to something
still more horrible—her grandfather’s legless trunk appearing over the
hearthstone, with his nightlight in one hand and the teapot in the
other. The rush-candle shook in its holed tin cylinder and set his
grisly counterpart dancing. Jinny’s blood ran cold. Evidently some one
had murdered him for the gold and this was his ghost. Then she told
herself it was one of her nightmares, and she looked around for Henry
Brougham, Esq., to clear up the situation. But with a soft thud the
trunk dropped as through a trap-door and there was nothing left but a
great glimmering hole where the hearthstone should have been. Instantly
she realized that it was only a secret hiding-place in which her magpie
of a grandfather was bestowing the treasure—yes, there was the
hearthstone slewed round as on a pivot. This must be that old smugglers’
storehouse he and gossip had sometimes hinted at—with perhaps the long
underground passages of ancient legend, reaching to Beacon Chimneys,
nay, to the parsonage itself.
She closed her eyes carefully as his shadow heralded his re-ascent. He
came up almost as noiselessly as that giant spectre, and between her
lids she saw him scrutinize her. Reassured to see his shanks again, she
emitted one of his snores, wondering whimsically if she did snore, or if
any other girl had ever heard herself snore, and a smile almost broke
the impassivity of her cheeks. Satisfied with the snore, he stooped down
and she saw the hearthstone veer back to its place. “Well, I can always
get it when I want it,” she thought cheerfully, as his slow stockinged
feet bore him and his more sinister shadow upstairs.
For some time she lay awake, pondering over the fate of her money, which
seemed like Cleopatra’s to be “in bonds,” and wondering whether poor
Uncle Lilliwhyte was still alive; then everything faded into a vision of
Mr. Flippance jogging marionettes for rugged miners who poured out their
teapots at the box-office, reducing it to such a swamp that its boxes
floated in the tea.
At breakfast, finding her grandfather abnormally restless, she asked him
a little maliciously if he had slept all right.
“Oi’ll sleep better to-night,” he said, and chuckled a little. He seemed
indeed very happy at having his treasure so well warded, and though his
exuberance was alarming, she felt that the excitement of happiness was a
lesser danger than that long depression of penuriousness. If the defeat
of the coach had seemed to give him a second lease of life, what might
not his new wealth do for him? He might really become an Old Parr, and
poor Will be kept waiting till the twentieth century!
It was thus with only a moderate uneasiness that she left him, stealing
with her basket to the rendezvous at the hut. In the wood she met Ravens
hurrying to find breakfast, and he sang out that Martha and Will had
relieved him, and that Uncle Lilliwhyte was better. As she approached
the clearing, she saw the old woman come out of the hut with a bottle in
her hand and a face absolutely transfigured. The whining, peevish,
latter-day Martha was gone: a radiance almost celestial illumined her
features—it seemed to transcend even the bonnet and to rim it with a
halo. This was a woman walking not on the dead dank leaves of a
frost-grey wood, but through the streets of the New Jerusalem. Behind
her came Will, with a little cynical smile playing about his mouth till
he espied Jinny, when his face took on the same ecstatic glow as his
mother’s. Jinny could not but feel enkindled in her turn by all this
spiritual effulgence, and it was three glorified countenances that met
on this March morning.
“He’s broken bread with me,” breathed Martha, “and I’ve helped him put
on the Saving Name.” She displayed her bottle with drops of water beaded
on the mouth. She had baptized—albeit only by an unavoidable reversion
to sprinkling—her first convert. The dream of years had been fulfilled
at last, and the apostolic triumph had lifted her beyond humanity, fired
her with a vision in which, a conquistador of faith, she was to turn all
Little Bradmarsh, nay, Chipstone itself, into one vast synagogue. This
were indeed the New Jerusalem. “And it was Will that led my feet,” she
said, kissing him to his disconcertment. “And go where he may now,
Jinny, he can’t take that away from me. And I shall always have his
letter to inspire me to win other souls.” She touched the left side of
her bodice, and poor Jinny, suddenly reminded that her grandfather had
robbed her of her last chance of keeping Will in England, felt envious
of Martha’s exalted source of consolation.
“I’ve got to go now and cook Flynt’s dinner,” said Martha. “But he won’t
have much appetite for it if he’s got any right feeling left, when he
hears that another man, a stranger, has been before him in the path of
righteousness. Maybe you’ll write to the _Lightstand_, Willie, to say
there’s a new brother in Little Bradmarsh.”
“I’ll tell ’em the Ecclesia has doubled its membership,” said Will, with
a faint wink at Jinny, to which the girl did not respond. “Do you think,
mother,” he asked with mock seriousness, “the New Jerusalem will come
down in Australia same as here?”
“Of course,” said Martha.
Again Will winked at Jinny. But she frowned and shook her head. Her
study of Australia had instructed her sufficiently that it was on the
other side of the globe, and she knew that Will was having fun with the
idea of the golden city coming down two opposite ways at once, but she
felt it criminal to break Martha’s mood, and indeed was not certain she
herself understood how the Australians escaped falling off into space.
Discouraged by her stern face, Will murmured he’d put his mother on the
road and be back. She smiled and nodded at the promise, but her heart
was heavy with a sense of inevitable partings as she went in to the
lingering ancient.
The death-bed conversion was evidently a success, for she found him
almost as radiant as Martha, though with a more unearthly light, while
the gleaming as of dewdrops on his dishevelled hair, and the stains of
damp over his bolster seemed to convict his spiritual preceptress of a
dangerous recklessness. But he was probably beyond saving in any case,
Jinny reflected, and what other medicine could have given him that happy
exaltation? The logs roared in the stove, and all was joy and warmth
that rimy morning.
“Oi’ve tarned a Christy Dolphin!” he announced jubilantly.
“Yes, I’m so glad. Drink this before it gets cold.”
He waved it away. “Oi suspicioned all the time as that be the right
religion. No hell at all, ye just goos to sleep, and when the New
Jerusalem comes down for they righteous, ye don’t git up.”
“_You’ll_ wake up—you and your mother,” she assured him, standing her
jug by the stove.
“That’s what Mrs. Flynt says. ‘Ye ain’t done no harm,’ she says, ‘and
when the trumpet blows for the saints, your bones will git their flesh
agen, same as now.’”
There was little enough on them to go through eternity in, she thought,
gazing at his shrunken arms, which he had left outside the coverings in
repudiating the tea. “Won’t that be wonderful!” she said, the tears in
her eyes.
“That’ll be wunnerful wunnerful,” he agreed. “That fares to be what Oi
calls a real heaven—your own body, not a sort o’ smoke-cloud ye
wouldn’t know was you ef you met it, your own flesh and blood, livin’ on
this lovely earth with the birds and the winds and the sun and the
water, all a-singin’ and a-shinin’ for ever and ever. And no bad folks
ne yet angels to worrit ye, no liddle boys to call arter ye—why it’s
just ginnick! Oi reckon Oi’ll choose this same old spot.”
“Yes, it’s a lovely spot,” said Jinny, but she wondered whether he had
not made his own version of Martha’s New Jerusalem, which she herself
had always understood to be more jewelled than natural.
“Your mother will be able to _see_ it too,” she added gently, as she put
the tea to his lips.
A beautiful smile traversed the sunken features. But suddenly a frenzy
of terror swamped it. He sat up with a jerk that dashed her jug to the
stove, shivering it into fragments. “But ef Oi waked, Oi’d need my money
agen!” he shrilled.
What Jinny always remembered most vividly, when she recalled this tragic
moment, was the red lettering on the sacks he lay on, exposed by his
upright posture.
“Gay, Bird & Co., Colchester,” her eyes read mechanically. When he fell
back and hid that inscription, his face was at peace again. That
acuteness of terror—the quintessence of the morbidity of a
lifetime—had stopped his heart.
She was terribly shaken by this sudden and grotesque end. She felt his
pulse, but without hope. She had never seen human death before, but she
had a vague idea that you closed the eyes and put pennies on them. She
had no pennies with her. She remembered there were some in the sack he
lay on, pennies and shillings, but she did not dare disturb him to get
at them. She was obscurely glad she had not to wrestle with the problem
of whether she ought to get his teapot buried with him, for the
contingency of his resurrection. Her grandfather would never surrender
it, she felt, and if she descended into his mysterious underground and
abstracted it, that might upset his wits altogether. Besides, Uncle
Lilliwhyte’s face was now taking on a strange beauty, as though his
pecuniary anxieties were allayed.
But her nerves were giving way—she threw open the door and looked out
eagerly, not for the lover, but for the man who seemed necessary in
these rough moments. The dead must not be left alone, she knew that, or
she would have set out to meet Will. Perhaps if she left him alone, his
shy friend the fox would come trotting in, now he was so still. The
parish authorities must doubtless be summoned to take charge of him. But
ought he to have a pauper funeral—ought she not to steal back enough of
his money to save him from that? But she remembered with relief that he
had expressed indifference as to what became of his body—so long as it
was restored to earth, its good old mother. As she moved a few paces
without, in her peering for Will, she saw the blue smoke rising through
the three top-hats, and in spite of the dead man’s doctrines and
apprehensions, she could not help fancying it was his spirit soaring
towards the abode of the Angel-Mother.
When Will returned, she was relieved to find Ravens striding beside him.
That sunny-souled factotum, who had meant to hie to the Skindle wedding,
now found himself transformed instead into a corpse-watcher, while Will,
taking Jinny a bit of his way, went off by the shortest cuts to
Chipstone Poorhouse, as probably the centre of authority for parish
funerals.
“There’s the coroner, too,” Ravens called after him.
“Will there be an inquest?” Jinny asked.
“Must be,” said Will, and Jinny, alarmed for Martha’s sake, ran back on
pretence of her basket, and surreptitiously wiped the bolster. As they
left the clearing, they heard Ravens singing in the hut.
XI
When their roads parted, Jinny insisted on returning to her grandfather,
whose excitement now recurred to her mind. She was still a little uneasy
about the pauper funeral, but Will had emphatically agreed with her that
the teapot could not now be recaptured. Nor could it be drawn upon, he
declared: the old grabber would assuredly have counted the contents.
Jinny suspected that Will was pleased rather than sympathetic at her
having ceased to be an heiress. The death of Uncle Lilliwhyte, so much
the junior of Daniel Quarles, could not but set both their minds on the
thought of a similar cutting of their Gordian knot, but the
thought—dreaded or welcome—was not allowed to appear in their
conversation, finding expression only in Will’s aggrieved assumption of
the Gaffer’s immortality. “Even if I was to strike a nugget as big as a
prize marrow, we’d be no forrarder,” he had grumbled, and Jinny, with
jangled nerves, had accused him of selfishness, when that poor old uncle
was lying dead.
As she approached Blackwater Hall, a creepy conviction began to invade
her that their knot was already cut: after that scene in the hut she was
aquiver with presages of death and disaster. The absence of
smoke—surely Gran’fer’s hearth was not already cold—added to her
alarm. She remembered again his effervescence at breakfast; why should
his heart not stop too? And when she saw the broad garden-gate open, and
the house door ajar, her own heart nearly stopped. Her intuition, she
felt, had not deceived her. Yet he was nowhere in the house. Ante-room,
living-room, kitchen, all were empty of him. The fire was out. In the
bedroom lay his telescope, a discarded toy. She was about to sweep the
horizon with it, when she had an inspiration. The smugglers’ storehouse!
He had gone down to count his gold, and the stone had rolled back—_The
Mistletoe Bough_ in another version. Tearing downstairs, she managed,
after much fumbling with the poker, to make it revolve, and peered down
into the dark clammy depths.
“Gran’fer! Gran’fer!” she cried. But only the dank silence welled up. He
was undoubtedly dead, lying there stark among his guineas. She was
scrambling down into the vault. But no! What nonsense! He must be
pottering about with a spud, currycombing Methusalem, or doing some
other odd job his renewed strength permitted. She hauled herself up—at
any rate that would postpone the dread vision—and rushed round to the
stable. That door too was open—Methusalem was gone! So was the cart.
Nor was there any sign of Nip.
In her relief it was almost a pleasure to trace the wheels on the road.
But soon she saw black again. It was his last drive—the last drive of
Daniel Quarles, Carrier. That was the meaning of his excitement of the
morning. He had gone out for the last time on his old rounds, and would
meet Death on his driving-board, face to face, as he had met so many
wintry storms and buffets. Staying only to roll back the stone, she
raced out in his tracks.
But his course led unluckily to the Four Wantz Way and there she could
no longer disentangle his cart-ruts. However, Mrs. Pennymole, reinstated
in her scoured ground floor, had reassuring news enough, though it
carried a new apprehension.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I catched sight of him with the May Day
favours all a-flyin’ and a-flutterin’ on whip and harness, and lookin’
that strong with a great old smile over his dear old phiz, and Nip
barkin’ fit to bust. ‘Where be _you_ off to?’ I cries as he dashes by,
whippin’ past like fleck—I never seen Methusalem go that pace, seemin’
a’most as if he was glad to have his old master back agen, meanin’ no
disrespect to you, Jinny.”
“No, of course not,” said Jinny impatiently. “But what did he say?”
“I didn’t rightly hear, I’m tellin’ you, seein’ how he tore towards the
bridge. But ’twas summat about ’Lijah! I yeard that!”
“Good heavens!” cried Jinny, and thanking Mrs. Pennymole, she tore
equally towards the bridge, wondering if she could get a vehicle at “The
King of Prussia.” It was clear the old wretch—there was really no other
name for him—had gone to sell Methusalem again. Set up with all that
gold, he meant to retire, and, inflamed by it, he could not resist the
extra five pounds offered by the vet. And this time Mr. Skindle would
not risk impounding her horse, he would slaughter instanter. Yes, her
eerie premonitions had been justified, but they were warnings about
Methusalem, not about her grandfather.
At the repaired bridge Farmer Gale’s dog-cart came along with himself
and his wife, but she was too shy to ask for a lift. Nor was there
anything to be got immediately at “The King of Prussia.” She toiled on
through footpaths grey-silted from the flood till she reached the by-way
that branched off to Foxearth Farm. Here she paused, wondering if it was
worth while to go down it on the chance of finding Barnaby’s trap
available. And while she hesitated, there came bowling by from church
the Skindle wedding-party in grand carriages. But though she cowered
into the hedge, their insolent prosperity only soothed her somewhat by
reminding her that Elijah had other work to-day than killing, and that,
in any case, there was now no motive for it, unless perhaps revenge. To
her surprise, in the rear of the procession, sharing Barnaby’s bepranked
trap, rode Will. His face beside Barnaby’s seemed one large smile: even
the unexpected sight of herself would hardly explain such broad
cheerfulness in a man who, though profiting by a wedding, had come from
arranging a pauper funeral, not to mention an inquest. But perhaps he
was rejoicing at his escape from that overblown Blanche.
As if to corroborate this interpretation, he jumped down and caught her
to him in the open daylight, while Barnaby’s vehicle sympathetically
disappeared after the others round the by-way.
“Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” he cried. “Such a lark!”
“But Gran’fer——!” she gasped, extricating herself.
He burst into a roar of laughter. “Have you heard it already?”
“Heard what? I’m looking for Gran’fer!”
“Haven’t you met him on the road? He started back ahead of me!”
She drew a breath of relief. “With Methusalem?”
“And a fare,” he grinned. “I had to go on to the coroner or else I
too——”
But she no longer heard. “I must have missed him on the footpaths,” she
said happily.
“You’ll find him at Mr. Fallow’s,” he said, and then laughter caught him
again and rapt his breath.
“But do speak! Do speak! What’s this mystery?”
“Your Gran’fer’s eloped!”
“What?”
He wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Do speak!” She almost shook him. “Eloped with who?”
“’Lijah Skindle’s mother.”
“Annie?” she murmured involuntarily.
“Carried her off from the poorhouse! I was only in time for the tail-end
of the fun.”
“But how could he get at her?”
“Well, I tell you I only saw it at the point the Master came into it.
But others saw more, and I’ve picked up spicy details from the paupers
and the wretched porter—Jims, you know.”
“Yes, I know Mr. Jims.” A vision of the fat little man in his peaked cap
and blue uniform rose before her. The dismal brick building in its iron
enclosure was half a mile before you got to Chipstone—administered
under the Gilbert Act by half a dozen parishes clubbed together.
“Well, your Gran’fer, rigged up to the nines with his best smock and
beaver, and ribbons on his whip and a bunch of wallflowers and primroses
sticking out of the spout of the teapot he carried, rings at the gate,
and when Jims came to take in the parcel, as he thought, the old man
pushes through and makes for the wards, Jims runs after him, and when he
asks him what he wants, he answers, ‘Annie! I’ve come for Annie!’ ‘Who’s
Annie?’ asks Jims. ‘We don’t keep Annies—there’s only old women, and it
ain’t visiting day.’ ‘Do ye don’t tell me no fibs,’ says your Gran’fer,
and when Jims tries to stop him, he catches him in the stomach with his
teapot and leaves him winded. Then off he scuttles to the stairs, and
‘Where’s Annie?’ he cries to an old pauper woman sweeping them. This
creature happened to know Mrs. Skindle was Annie, so she says, ‘She’s
washing Mr. Robinson in his bedroom.’ ‘What?’ shrieks your Gran’fer,
swelling like a turkey-cock with jealousy. ‘You just show me where that
bedroom is!’ The frightened old woman takes him up the stone stairs to
the little yellow-ochred room where they had stowed the old dotard all
by himself—I don’t think he’s as old as your Gran’fer, but he’s quite a
helpless driveller—and there, the old woman told me, your Gran’fer
gives a great cry ‘Annie!’ and Mrs. Skindle drops the flannel, and there
they were crying and laughing and kissing like two children, and he
calling her ‘My darling! My beautiful Annie!’”
“More than you’ve ever called me,” said Jinny, herself inclined to laugh
and cry and even to kiss.
The story was interrupted by an idyllic interlude. “But I expect
Gran’fer’s rather short-sighted without a telescope,” she commented,
disentangling herself blushingly.
“I was in the Master’s room,” resumed Will, “speaking to him about the
funeral, and hearing a lot about the guardians and the parish
authorities and such-like grand folk, when in rushes Jims and pants out
his tale, and we all race around till we find the old couple coming down
the staircase with arms round each other’s waists, and your Gran’fer
tells us fiercely he’s taking her away, and opens the teapot to show he
can support two wives if he wants to! ‘Hold hard!’ says the Master. ‘I
won’t stop you, though I ought to have twenty-four hours notice, because
I know the guardians haven’t made such a good bargain with Mr. Skindle
that they’ll try to keep her, but you can’t take away the parish
clothes.’ For of course the old woman was wearing that blue cotton
dress——”
“It’s got white stripes if you look close,” put in Jinny.
“‘Well, Oi can’t take her away without clothes,’ roared your Gran’fer.
He said he counted it unrespectable enough that they should allow her to
wash a strange old man, alone in a room, and that if they didn’t mend
their ways he’d have a piece put in the paper about it all. ‘Well, let
’em give me back my own clothes,’ says Mrs. Skindle. ‘I’ve got to have
twenty-four hours’ notice about that,’ says the Master. ‘Ha, you’ve
stole ’em!’ says your Gran’fer. ‘You be careful what you’re sayin’,’
says the Master, bridling up. ‘Who wants her rags and jags?’ But in the
end it was all settled friendlywise—your Gran’fer buying up some of the
cast-off grandeur of the matron’s (they drove a good bargain with your
Gran’fer, the pair of screws, but he was free and flush with his
teapot), and off the happy pair went at last, the bride as spruced up as
the bridegroom, and I saw him hand her into the wedding-cart with her
bouquet, while the old gentlemen in the corduroys and the old ladies in
blue, and especially the little orphans, raised a cheer. Even Jims
waved. I expect he’d had a drop out of the teapot.”
“Daniel Quarles, Carrier-Off,” laughed Jinny, half hysterically, for
scandalized and startled though she was, a rosy light, whose source was
yet unclear to her, seemed rising on her horizon.
“I went up to the cart under pretence of patting Nip,” Will went on,
“and asked the old boy where he was off to. ‘Home, of course,’ he
answers friendly. ‘You should be going to chapel first, you old rip,’ I
told him. ‘We’re going to be married in church,’ answers Mrs. Skindle
stiffly. ‘I’m Church of England.’ ‘That’s all right, Annie,’ he says,
patting her hand, ‘we’ll look in on Mr. Fallow about they banns,’ and
singing ‘Oi’m Seventeen come Sunday,’ drives off with her.”
But Jinny refused to sympathize with the course of true love. “He’s not
really going to marry her?” she now cried. “But that’s dreadful!”
“You scandalous creature! It would be more dreadful if he didn’t!”
“But at his age!”
“Why, he’s quite young yet,” laughed Will. “One hundred and fifty-two is
his little span, remember.”
She let herself relax under his laughter. “Will they ring a peal of
Grandsire Triples at his wedding?” she asked whimsically. Then with
renewed anxiety: “Oh, but I do hope it hasn’t all excited him too much,”
she cried. “I’d best get home as quick as possible.”
“Home? You don’t mean Blackwater Hall?”
“Where else?”
“You can’t go there. As your Gran’fer remarked to the Master, that’s no
place for a respectable female.”
She stared at him. “Besides,” he said, “you don’t want to interfere with
the young couple.”
“But I’ve not cooked the dinner!”
“Let the bride do that. She’s as strong as a horse. It’s the best thing
that could have happened for both of ’em. After fending for all of us at
Rosemary Villa, Blackwater Hall will be a holiday to her.”
“But I must go and see about things. She won’t know where anything is.
And even if she cooks the dinner, she’ll want my apron. She can’t spoil
her fineries.”
“That’s enough,” he said sternly. “I don’t often quote my father, but
I’m bound to say some people _are_ near-sighted and can’t see God, their
friend. You’ve done with Blackwater Hall.”
“But where am I to go then?”
He laughed. “And what about Frog Farm?” He took her arm. “And we, too,
must get tied up as soon as possible. No, Jinny, we can’t do better than
follow in your Gran’fer’s footsteps. The way he held that grey-headed
old woman’s hand in the wedding-cart, while I—you’re right, I haven’t
called you ‘beautiful’ enough.” He paused to do so without words. “The
old boy’s taught me a lesson, dashing in like that, while I’ve been
sitting growling and grizzling and wasting our best years.”
“But you see, Will, it couldn’t be before. And he _was_ sacrificing
himself to me, poor Gran’fer, if he wanted her so badly all the time.
Just see how he waited till he could support her!”
“On your money! Under the roof you re-thatched for him!”
“It wasn’t my money. And it was Ravens who did the roof.”
“You paid for it!”
“No, I didn’t,” she protested.
“Why not?”
“He won’t send me in the bill.”
“Oh, won’t he!” Will clenched his fist. “I’ll jolly soon stop his
singing if he don’t hurry up with it! And why didn’t you ask _me_ to
mend your thatch?”
“You couldn’t come in.”
“You don’t come in to the roof.”
“That _might_ have been a way of coming in,” she laughed, “it was so
leaky. Anyhow you might have done Uncle Lilliwhyte’s—it is his money
that has saved us all.”
“In a roundabout way,” he admitted.
She snuggled to him. Happiness, which had hitherto seemed like the
soaped pig at village sports, was seizable at last. “Won’t it be
wonderful when we’re in the hut!” she said.
He opened his eyes. “You don’t propose to live in Uncle Lilliwhyte’s hut
with the three top-hats!”
“Of course not,” she said, blushing. “It’s in Australia. There’s just
poles stuck in the ground.”
“Why, when have you been in Australia?”
“Never you mind! You see, I’ve already saved up a little towards my
passage and——”
But her words died on his lips. “I don’t know that we need pull up our
stakes,” he said when he released her. “Farmer Gale’s looking for a
looker.”
“You don’t really mean that?” she said.
“_He_ does, anyhow. I just met him in his dog-cart and he’s mad about
his flood-losses. ‘You should have paid a good man,’ I told the hunks to
his head.”
“Oh, but, Will,” she said, shrinking, “you don’t like Farmer Gale!”
“Well, he’s safely married now, and after all, my father had the place
first. . . . It belongs to the family. . . . Anyhow,” he broke off
masterfully, “I’d pay my wife’s passage-money.”
“Then I’ll be able to buy Methusalem,” she said in cheerful submission.
“He’s only five pounds—I suppose your father would take care of him.”
“Rather! It would be a refuge from the New Jerusalem.”
“But we’ll take Nip with us, sweetheart—it won’t be the goldfields, you
know, just a farm. And we can take over the Bidlake girls too, if you
like.”
“Lord, what a crowd! But I don’t see Nip on an emigrant ship.”
“Haven’t I heard of dog-watches?” she smiled.
“I guess you’d smuggle him in somehow,” he laughed. “I’ve noticed you
generally get your own way. And captains are but men.”
“I thought they were sea-dogs,” she laughed.
“You generally get the last word too,” he grumbled with adoring
admiration. “But I tell you, Jinny, though there may be more money, all
these new countries are terribly raw.”
“I know—‘no longer an egg, not yet a bird, only a smell,’” she quoted
with wistful humour, and these words of his in the English wood last May
evoked again for both of them all the magic of their love at its
dawning.
They walked on in silence towards Frog Farm. After all, with their
united treasure of youth, energy, and love, their livelihood was no
grave problem. Larks were carolling, the little wrens piping, and
ringdoves calling, calling, for the Spring was near after all, and the
daffodils had already come. It seemed indeed a vain snapping of the
heart-strings to leave such a homeland.
“That’ll be winter soon in Australia,” mused Will tenaciously.
“Not if we were together,” Jinny whispered, although the more she
pondered during that wonderful walk the more the Antipodes receded to
their geographical distance, the more shadowy grew the danger of falling
off her planet. But, however they were to decide, she could see no
reason—once her grandfather’s wedding-bells had rung—why they should
not all live—wherever they all lived—happy ever after.
PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS
WEST NORWOOD
LONDON, S.E.
_THE NOVELS OF ISRAEL ZANGWILL_
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO
DREAMERS OF THE GHETTO
GHETTO COMEDIES
GHETTO TRAGEDIES
THE GREY WIG
THE KING OF SCHNORRERS
THE MANTLE OF ELIJAH
THE MASTER
THEY THAT WALK IN DARKNESS
THE CELIBATES’ CLUB
_WITH LOUIS COWEN_
THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER
* * * * *
_NEW NOVELS: 7s. NET EACH_
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
(_In preparation, by the same author_)
JAVA HEAD
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
SOMERSET MAUGHAM
STORM IN A TEACUP
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
THE ROLLING STONE
C. A. DAWSON SCOTT
A SAILOR’S HOME and Other Stories
RICHARD DEHAN
THE OLD MADHOUSE
A posthumous novel by WILLIAM DE MORGAN
THE BONFIRE
ANTHONY BRENDON
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
The list of other works by the author has been moved from the front of
the book to the end. Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the
original. A few obvious typesetting and punctuation errors have been
corrected without note.
[The end of _Jinny the Carrier_ by Israel Zangwill]