Then lay my tott’ring legs so low

??That have run very far,

O’er hedges and o’er ditches,

??O’er turnpike gate and bar,

Poor old horse! Poor old horse!

Somerset Song.
I

Normally the nonagenarian preserved scant memory of the happenings of the present, vivid though his youthful recollections were: But the great wedding-cake, served up at every meal for days, co-operated with the intensity of the scene to stamp his quarrel with Will upon his feebly registering brain. Especially did Nip’s standing supplication for his quota revive and deepen the impression. “On your hands and knees!” he would cry savagely, as he threw the lucky dog a luscious morsel. And even when Nip was absent at meal-times—as his mistress contrived more than once, in her anxiety to pamper neither him nor her grandfather’s resentment—the old man would growl grimly: “Carry him in!” Aching enough at heart from her own quarrel with Will, she had the wretched feeling that if by some impossibility she and her rival could ever again come together, the grotesque oaths of these two obstinate males would keep the family breach unhealed.

But sentiment cannot retain its acuteness under business worries and carking household cares. The rich cake eaten through so monotonously became to Jinny a sort of ironic symbol of the declining fortunes of Blackwater Hall. It contributed indeed no little to the decay of the old business, not merely by the great sum that had to be paid to the confectioner, but through the loss of the considerable customer whose hymeneal festivities its absence overgloomed. Marie Antoinette’s advice to the starving to eat cake did not come into the Spelling-Book, otherwise Jinny might have reflected how near they were come to adopting it. Not that her grandfather had as yet occasion to suspect the bareness of the larder. Unlike Mother Hubbard he never went to the cupboard, the cupboard always comfortably coming to him. Moreover, some rabbits shot by the farmers as the falling crops uncovered them, and presented to the ancient by annual custom, served to postpone the evil day. Jinny was hardly conscious how much she stinted herself for his sake, so poor was her appetite become. It was only once—-when passing the big Harvest Dinner barn where Farmer Gale’s men roared drunken choruses—that she felt a craving for food. This valuable freedom from hunger she attributed to the heat: in the winter, she told herself, she could always stoke for the week at the Tuesday and Friday meals so amiably provided at Mother Gander’s. That worthy lady would also doubtless refill grandfather’s beer-barrel at cost price. It was fortunate he did not smoke or snuff. Methodism had its points.

A more serious problem was presented by Methusalem—growing distended by overmuch grass—and even her goats coveted an occasional supplement to the hedgerows and the oak scrub if their milk was to run freely. But of hay or cabbages her store was small, and these finicking feeders, though they condescended to eat horse-chestnuts, would not even accept a gnawed apple. The poultry, too, must soon be eaten, if they could not be properly fed, and the thought of instructing her grandfather to twist a familiar neck made her blood run cold. With such a varied household to cater for, our little housekeeper began to envy Maria, who, according to Mrs. Flynt, raised her large and frequent families on everything and anything on earth, rhubarb-leaves being the one and only pabulum pigs turned up their snouts at. It was not the least painful part of this novel pinch of poverty that Jinny felt herself compelled to forgo those calls with little presents for the Pennymoles, the Bidlakes, and the poor and the bed-ridden in general, with which she had diversified her deliveries: she did not realize that her mere presence would have been a creature comfort.

But of these pangs and problems the world knew naught, hearing her little horn making its gay music and seeing her still jauntily perched on her driving-board in her elegant rose-pink frock and with the latest fancy whipcord edge to the straw of her bonnet. Her music, indeed, was far livelier than the wheezy notes of the Flynt Flyer’s guard, though otherwise the red-coated clodhopper who had been stuck up on the coach a few days after its visit to Blackwater Hall, lent the last touch to its fascinations. But if passengers, other than Elijah Skindle and one or two equally unbusinesslike young men, were no longer content to crawl along in her cart, that historic vehicle showed scant sign of defeat. Already when the removal of the hoops in the hot weather had threatened to expose too clearly the nakedness of the land, parcels of stones on the model of the swain-chaser had begun to cumber it up, and when one Monday morning the Flynt Flyer came swaggering in new pea-green paint, the Quarles Crawler turned up on Tuesday mountainous with the old boxes and cypress clothes-chests routed out of the ante-room, and emptied of their litter.

It was at this point that the Gaffer had had to be put into the plot. He had long since begun to smell a rat—having a super-sense for his business, however his other senses might fail—and it would have been impossible to heave up the boxes without him, or to explain their removal without imparting some notion of the tragic truth. And the truth did not diminish his resentment against young Caleb’s boy or his vigilance against further robbers. “Carry him in!” he would cackle and croak as he bore out the emptied “spruce-hutches” to the cart or carefully permutated their positions in it. Then with hoarse thunder: “On your hands and knees, ye pirate thief!”

But these ostentated boxes—while they saved the pride of the Quarleses—did but damage the remainder of their custom. The faithful few had been held back by solicitude for Jinny’s livelihood: seeing her now so flourishing, the very tail-board lowered on its chains and groaning under protruding “portmantles,” her last clients save Peculiars lapsed in silent relief, one after another. Daily, poor Jinny expected to see four horses on the rival vehicle and its circuit extended to Colchester. But that would have meant for Will a grandeur inconsistent with the petty commissions which he still deigned to execute: it would have allowed some of her old custom to return to her. And he was sullenly bent on driving her—literally—out of the business. But he enhanced the dignity of his profession by copying from an old inn of the pack-horse days its signboard of “The Carriers’ Arms,” depicting a rope, a wanty-hook, and five packing skewers. These, painted in black on the pea-green, seemed to proclaim his formal annexation and monopoly of the local carrying trade.

Jinny began to think seriously of buying up from the barns some straw from the reaped sheaves and competing with the cottagers in the all-pervasive plaiting industry. Splitting straws was no despicable occupation in the valley of the Brad, where it was done by enginery, and provided even children of six and old men of eighty with the opportunity of adding to the family income. Tambour-lace and other things also entered into her thoughts. The only thing that never entered into them was the idea of ceasing to ply. So long as the boxes and the cart held together, the Flynt Flyer should always see the rival vehicle imperturbably jogging. In every sense she would “carry on.”
II

August was ending aridly. Methusalem’s sensitive nose was protected from flies by green bracken. Calves snuggled in the hot meadows, meditatively chewing, an image of somnolence, their tails flicking whitely. Stooks or manure-heaps had reduced the fields to geometrical patterns. Tall hollyhocks leaned dustily like ruined towers. Bucolic conversation was of the absent rain. Rooks were more destructive than ever. Swedes were doing badly and every one had waited to sow turnips, rape, or mustard. They had no fodder even for winter stock. Master Peartree began to worry over his sheep as they munched the sapless grass. In the waterless little villages the ground was hard as iron, and Bundock strode over the swamps around Frog Farm as fearlessly as now frequently. “A regular doucher” was the general demand upon Providence, though it was couched—for church and chapel—in less vivid terms. These prayers enabled Bundock to work off one of his old aphorisms, saved for a rainless day. “It’s no use praying for rain,” he chuckled to the countryside, “till you see the storm-clouds.” “But you don’t scarce need to pray then,” the countryside pointed out, to his disgust.

In Jinny’s soul, too, there was drought, and she seemed to share Bundock’s view that prayer was waste of breath. Not that her evening prayers were left unsaid, but in her apathy and weariness no private plea was added to the prescribed form, though the Spelling-Book commended the asking for extra mercies, provided also one begged for a perpetual continuance of the Protestant Succession. What deliverance could there be for her? God Himself, she felt obscurely, could not help her, any more than she had ever been able to help little mavises fallen from their nests and deserted by their mothers. Their thrilling-eyed vitality and exquisite flutterings had only made her miserable. But perhaps God was now as sorry for her.

One grown-up mavis, too, she remembered, a victim to the winter battle of life, the neck half severed from the half-plucked body, the liquid eye gazing appealingly at her, the legs stirring feebly in a welter of feathers. She had nerved herself to grant its dumb plea: she had stamped sharply on its skull and seen its eye fly out on the path like a bright bead. Could God do aught less drastic for her? Not that she ever dreamed of dying: she must live on, however mutilated, for it was impossible to conceive her grandfather getting along without her. Consider only his trousers! How loosely they were now flapping round his shrunken calves, almost like a sailor’s. Soon the winter winds would be piping through them. Without her to take in a tuck, where would he be? And who would cut his hair and trim his beard?

It was her grandfather who was mainly responsible for the discontinuance of her chapel habit on Lord’s Day. His increased fretfulness and fractiousness since he was become aware of the rival power, made it imprudent to leave him for long except unavoidably—not to mention the danger to herself of awkward meetings at chapel with that rival power—and there was the further difficulty of getting to Chipstone, now Farmer Gale’s trap was out of the question. But she was not without a nearer place of worship—for to the scandal of the Peculiars, particularly Bundock, she now began to attend the parish church of Little Bradmarsh, whose emptiness with its parade of free seats after eleven o’clock was a standing pleasantry in the spheres of Dissent. The convenience of proximity was not, however, its main attraction for Jinny, and Miss Gentry would have rejoiced less had she understood that a change of heart or doctrine or the magnetism of the Reverend Mr. Fallow had as little to do with Jinny’s apparent conversion; though the fact that Jinny had never forgotten her one childish glimpse of the prayer-absorbed pastor doubtless served to reassure the girl as to the not altogether ungodly character of his edifice.

She had entered to cart over to the Chipstone hospital some fruit laid before the altar at the Harvest Thanksgiving by the one prosperous worshipper. For Mr. Fallow was still an unwavering client of hers, almost the last outside her own communion, possibly because having neither family nor flock to distract him from his classics, he had scarcely observed the coach.

In the “Speculi Britanni? Pars,” in which he had once hunted out her genealogy—to his own satisfaction and nobody’s hurt—Essex was compared to Palestine for its flow of “milke and hunny.” And “hunny” was still her staple link with the tall fusty-coated, snuff-smeared figure, stooping over his hives or his Virgil, both sacredly fused for him in the Fourth Georgic. She marketed his surplus, exchanging it for firkins of butter and—O aberrations of the godliest—canisters of Lundy Foot. And it was after disposing of some of his smaller tithes—for the parish had remained outside the recent Commutation Act of 1836—that Jinny had been thus led to set foot in his church. There were in those days no floral decorations to mar the completeness with which the arches and pillars ministered to her troubled mood. The outside she had always found soothing, with its grey old stonework and its lichened tower rising amid haystacks and thatched cottages with dormer windows. But how much cooler the peace that fell upon her, when she passed through the old, spiky, oak door and under the long, wooden, vaulted roof into a dimness shot with rich stained glass. Mr. Fallow had been one of the earliest clergymen of the century to remove the whitewash from the old painted walls of his church, and though the royal arms—the lion and the unicorn—still lingered over the chancel, there was no other jar in the spiritual harmony except the stove, whose pipe went hideously up and along the ceiling. Ignoring that, however, in the effect of the whole and forgetting everything else, Jinny sank upon a pew-bench and abandoned herself to the unholy influences of architecture, so restful after her chapel with its benches and table-desk, ugliness unadorned. Not even a gradual consciousness of neglected duty could impair the divine tranquillity.

But the sober beauty of the place might not have sufficed to draw her again, but for a strange circumstance. One of the stained-glass figures, dully familiar to her from without as a leaden glaze, proved when seen from within in all the glory of art to be an angel of the very type under which her childish vision had imagined her hovering mother. And that it actually was mystically interfused with her mother, as her emotion had immediately intertwined it, was demonstrated by the fact that even when she at last went forward to gather up the plums and apples, the eyes followed her about in protection and benediction. Miss Gentry’s legend of her moving angel lost its last shade of improbability, and it was with a new humility that Jinny repeated to her at the first opportunity her remorse for the permuted pot.

Nor did the angel’s emanation of guardianship prove illusory, for outraged though Miss Gentry had been by the suggestion that her moustache needed a hair-restorer, she graciously intimated—after the second Sunday of Jinny’s attendance—that the debt for the dress could be worked off in commission charges. It was a vast relief, for the Bundock-borne rumour of her apostacy had alienated the bulk of her co-religionists and exchanged the lingering remorse of earlier deserters for a sense of rectitude and foresight. Bundock’s sympathy with the Brotherhood almost reinstated him in its good graces. “But it brings its own punishment,” he pointed out consolingly. “Fancy putting a parson over herself to poke his snuffy nose into everything. That’s a pretty dress, Jinny, he’ll say, is it paid for? Or, that’s a cranky old grandpa you’ve got—why don’t ye put him in the poorhouse?”

It was as well poor Jinny did not overhear him, or she might have doubted whether her load of boxes was so uniformly imposing as she imagined. The Deacon, who did hear him, and who spent his life poking into holes and reprimanding sinners, was even more righteously indignant at the interference of parsons. “Inquisitive as warmin in a larder,” he described them. “Fussing around the poor, but without a drop of rum in their milk of human koindness.” Mr. Fallow—it would appear—had interfered on behalf of his parishioner in the threatened lawsuit with Miss Gentry: he had persuaded the guileless rat-catcher to promise to clear her cottage for nothing, and this although Mrs. Mott was paying her in full for his wife’s silk dress, the responsibility for which he had righteously repudiated.

“Oi’ll clear her cottage,” he added darkly, and it seemed to Bundock that the parson had succeeded only in patching up the feud. But what was to be expected of the canting crew, the postman inquired. The new Chipstone curate had called on his father, and Bundock related with a chuckle how the bed-ridden old boy had patronizingly regretted that, being on his back, he could do nothing to help his visitor. “He sent him away with a bed-flea in his ear,” gloated Bundock. Mr. Joshua Mawhood recalled a bigger flea in the same clerical ear. The hapless curate had offered him a ticket for a lecture on “Economy.” “Come with me Bradmarsh way,” the rat-catcher had retorted, “and Oi’ll show you Mrs. Pennymole’s cottage, and if you’ll show me how she can bring up her nine childer on eleven shillings a week, Oi’ll eat your shovel-hat.” Bundock, unable to find a still larger flea, fell back on hypothesis. “If I’d been a Churchman and a chap in a white choker came to mine,” he said, “I’d tell him to mind his own business, and I dare say he’d be insulted, though I’d be giving him splendid advice. You know where the door is, I’d say, for you didn’t come in by the chimney. Now walk out, or else——!” And carried away by his own drama, Bundock administered a hearty kick to the apparently still-lingering phantom.

Needless to say, Mr. Fallow exercised none of this imagined prying into Jinny’s affairs. Like his pew-opener, whose long caped coat with the official red border found now a fresh justification, he was only too glad of her uninvited attendance, and the considerable accretion she brought to his congregation. Her presence freshened up for himself his old sermons: for her sake he even put in new Latin quotations. But Jinny enjoyed more the three musicians in the gallery—’cellist, flautist, and bassoonist—whose black frock-coats and trousers made them as important in quality as they were in quantity, and when after they had played a few bars the congregation sang:

“Awake my soul, and with the sun

?Thy daily stage of duty run,”

Jinny felt herself rapt far indeed from her daily stage of duty. Even the pew-opener shuffling about in his list slippers to poke up the stove or a small boy, or to snuff the guttering tallow candles on dark mornings, could not bring her to earth.

And another factor than the church and its mother-angel helped Jinny over this dreary time. This was her dog. For only now did Nip emerge into his full caninity, or at least only now did Jinny learn to appreciate him to the full. In howsoever leaden a mood she started her carrying work, Nip’s ecstasy soon tinged it with gold. His blissful staccato barks, his tall inflated tail, his upleapings at her as she harnessed Methusalem, his gallopings and gambollings round that stolider fellow-quadruped, his crazy friskings and curvetings—who could resist such joy of life? Often it seemed to Jinny that he was returning thanks to his Maker for the sunshine or the good smells, rebuking unconsciously her heart-heaviness, bidding her cry no more over spilt milk, but just lap up what she could. “Cheer up, Jinny!” she heard him bark. “Men are brutes and women fools and gran’fers grumpy and customers cruel, but life is jolly and odours numerous and where there’s a way there’s a Will.” And infected by these sentiments of his, she would crack her whip, and Methusalem would prick up his ears and pretend for her sake to go faster, and there would be a lull in the ache at her heart.

Nip, however, was less consoling when the rival carriers met on the road. Then his invincible persuasion that the two were one brought Jinny considerable discomfort. For Will persisted in his later tactics of slowing down, whether to take stock of her appearance or to rub in the odious comparison of their respective equipages, so that while these were in proximity, Nip was able to feel himself shepherding them, and he ran from one to the other, rounding them up. Even when Jinny man?uvred off down the first by-way, Nip, not to be baulked, would travel between one and the other, growing more and more desperate as they grew more and more distant, till at last, fearful of losing both, he exchanged his frenzied shuttling between them for a still more frenzied standstill midway between the mutually receding vehicles—you saw him almost literally torn in two. Finally, after plaintive ululations of protest, he would trot back, with hang-dog look and drooping tail, to the shabby cart, where his mistress throned, grim and pale, amid her manifold mock parcels.
III

But it was neither Mr. Fallows sermons nor Nip’s that gave Jinny her first real sense of religion; not even the bass-viol and flute, though she heard them with ecstasy, nor the collects and litanies, though she perused them with interest. It came to her one pitch-black night when she had too confidently ventured out to bring first aid—a jug of real tea with some bread and butter—to poor rheumatic Uncle Lilliwhyte, whom earlier that day, while gathering mushrooms for supper, she had discovered in a deserted charcoal-burner’s hut.

She had not known before that Farmer Gale had carried out his threat of evicting the nondescript from his cottage on the plea of needing it for a labourer, and although she had been compelled to suspend the ministrations which had set Mr. Fallow looking for the Lady Bountiful in her blood, she felt vaguely responsible for Uncle Lilliwhyte’s declined fortunes, so parallel to her own. Would, in fact, the Cornishman have turned him out if Jinny had allowed that all-powerful arm to remain round her waist at the cattle-market; nay, could she not have cheered and nourished a subject countryside?

The unsavoury ancient was lying on some coarse sacking in a clearing still half charred. Literally “sackcloth and ashes,” Jinny thought, as she groped her way along the glade by the twinkle of his candle through the chinks of his ramshackle hut. An old flintlock, some snares, nets and rods, and a cooking-pot seemed all its furniture. She was horrified to think—as she gazed at the gaps in the roof—that the prayer for rain might be granted. But to her surprise the old man was sharing the communal aspiration—“a good rine as’ll make the seeds spear”—though not hopeful of the boon immediately. He did not want to be a “wet-’ead,” he declared paradoxically, but the ground would be harder before the sun met the wind. Such solicitude on behalf of soil belonging so largely to the farmer who had evicted him seemed to Jinny touchingly Christian.

It was only when she had turned her back on his glimmering light and got into the thick of the woods that they became curiously unfamiliar. Great trees that she did not know existed came colliding against her, tangles of roots tripped her up on her favourite paths; she stumbled into unfriendly pricklinesses of every species. She seemed, indeed, ridiculously lost within a furlong of her own door: how this black labyrinth had got there she could not understand, but it looked as if she might be all night escaping from it. She was even uneasily expecting one of the snakes Uncle Lilliwhyte hunted to glide perversely under her feet, she bruising its head and it biting her heel as the curse in Genesis predicted. Of course, if she could spit into its mouth after chewing some Spanish bugloss, it would instantly die. So at least Miss Gentry had assured her. But how find the rare bugloss in this blackness, or how spit accurately into the serpent’s mouth?

Why had she not brought a lantern, she asked herself. Was it really because she was jug and package laden, or had it been only conceit? She asked the question still more self-reproachfully when, after smashing the empty jug in a stumble which left her knuckles bleeding, she heard the gurgle of a water-hen and realized that she was far off her track and nearly into the Brad. She could not swim, but even a swimmer in such a moonless, starless void would not see the shore. Cautiously feeling her way among the willows, she groped towards the pasture-land, paradoxically pleased when she fell over a sleeping cow. She lay there some minutes in the warm darkness, not anxious to move on, for the river wound perilously in and out, one could still hear it rippling deliciously in the reeds, and the odours of the night were as exquisite. And then through the measureless blackness a faint suggestion of grey began to make itself perceptible or rather divinable, so shadowy was it, a lesser shade of black rather than an adumbration of light; it was as if behind the blank firmament some star was striving to shine.

And suddenly, mystically, she felt that this hinted radiance was God, the Light behind life’s darkness, and the words of the twenty-third Psalm came to her mind with all the force of a revelation. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.” How divinely apt was every word! So long as she had not wanted for aught, so long as she had not needed to be led, she had not really felt the meaning of the words: now that she was strayed and a-hungered, she knew overpoweringly that she had a shepherd. He was behind her watching, as surely as she watched over her grandfather. Now she understood what the Peculiars meant when they got up to testify. She must go back to them, bear witness this very next Sunday. Mr. Fallow’s church had no place for such testimonies. Women could not speak even at Morning Service.

And as if to complete her conversion, there was a swift pattering, a joyous bark, and a cold nose in her fevered palm. She had only to attach her handkerchief to Nip’s collar to be guided safely home. But it was Nip that was really her shepherd, she told herself, or at least her sheep-dog: it was Nip that was leading her beside the still waters. Dog was after all only God spelt backwards, she thought, with a sense of mystic discovery. And remembering all that Nip had done to bring her back to faith in life, she felt he was indeed a divine messenger. But then it was borne in upon her that if she testified her true thoughts, the Brethren would deem her irreverent. After all, it was Mr. Fallow who might understand better, he who spoke of his bees with love, and had once cited to her a passage from a Roman poet about bees being part of the divine mind. The Roman writer was not a Catholic, he had explained carefully, seeing her dubious face.
IV

In her gratitude to the dressmaker, Jinny had become more than ever her intellectual parasite, and a wealth of information from “The Christian Mother’s Miscellany” and “Culpeper’s Herbal”—to say nothing of the spinster’s own sibylline rhymes—enriched the walk to and from church, which Miss Gentry graciously permitted her carrier and debtor to take in her society next Sunday morning. They parted indeed inside, Miss Gentry plumping herself unrebuked into the curtained three-benched pew of the dead and gone squire whom old Farmer Gale had dispossessed. Jinny was thus unable to exchange glances with her at the thrilling announcement read out by the cleric, who after the Second Lesson declared curtly—as if it were the most natural thing in the world—that Mr. Anthony Flippance, widower, of Frog Farm, and Miss Bianca Cleopatra Jones, spinster, of Foxearth Farm, both of this parish, proposed to enter into holy matrimony. At once a whirligig of images circled round Jinny and she saw dizzily the explanation of a disappearance that had puzzled her, for Tony had vanished from “The Black Sheep” without leaving a tip, the old waiter grumbled. What had led up to this adventure, she wondered, and how was Polly taking her intended stepmother?

“Isn’t that the Showman you’ve spoken of?” Miss Gentry inquired, as the congregation of seven streamed out, swollen by musicians, sexton, clerk, and pew-opener. “The fomenter of ungodliness?”

“It certainly seems my old customer,” replied Jinny, somewhat evasively. “But I didn’t know he was living at Frog Farm.”

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

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

“More’s the pity,” Miss Gentry surprised Jinny by commenting. She added, “Even a playhouse would do less harm.”

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

“It’s as clear as daylight. The Devil stamps his sign plainly on a playhouse: he forges God’s name on a chapel. And who is this Miss Jones?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of any girl at Foxearth Farm called Cleopatrick—what a funny name!”

“Cleopatra,” corrected Miss Gentry grandly, her bosom expanding till it strained her Sunday silk. “A great Queen of Egypt in the days of old. Born under Venus and died of the bite of an asp!”

“What’s an asp?” said Jinny.

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

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

“Neither horse-mint nor wild parsnip could avail: there is no ointment against suicide,” Miss Gentry explained. “She killed herself.”

“A queen kill herself! What for?”

“What does one kill oneself for?” Miss Gentry demanded crushingly. “For love, of course. But I hope her namesake is more respectable. Cleopatra never published the banns. But how comes this Miss Jones to be at Foxearth Farm? I thought the people were called Purley—hurdle-makers, aren’t they?”

“Yes—it must be a lodger. They do take lodgers. I must ask Barnaby—I meet him on the road sometimes.” She stood still suddenly, going red and white by turns like the revolving lens of a lighthouse.

Miss Gentry stared, then smiled in sentimental sympathy “Is he a nice boy?” she cooed.

“Who? Ye-es, very nice,” Jinny stammered. “But I’ve just remembered Miss Jones isn’t his sister!”

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

“She’s only his stepsister,” Jinny explained desperately. “Mrs. Purley’s first husband was called Jones.”

If the bride should really be the Purley creature—the fair charmer who rode so often in Will’s coach as to be almost “keeping company” with him! What a lifting of a nightmare! What a sudden horizon of rose! But no, it was too good to be true!

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

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

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

“But Bianca is Blanche!” bayed Miss Gentry, like an excited bloodhound. “Only more grand and foreign-like.”

Jinny’s colours revolved again.

“Is it?” she breathed. But she remembered Mr. Flippance’s address had been announced as Frog Farm. If he had thus ousted young Mr. Flynt, she urged, how could he be living so amicably under his rival’s roof? Besides, how should Mr. Purley’s second wife, a matron as famous for her cheeses as her spouse for his hurdles, have christened her girl so outlandishly? No, Joneses were as abundant as hips and haws, and this Miss Jones could only have come to their out-of-the-way parish—like Mr. Flippance—for reasons of statutory residence, though why the Showman should bury himself to be married, Miss Gentry declared to be an exciting enigma. Perhaps he liked a quiet wedding, Jinny suggested, having too many acquaintances in towns, and with that she dismissed the hope from her mind.

But it was not so easy to dismiss the topic from Miss Gentry’s. That lady was rolling the hymeneal discussion under her tongue. She pointed out that Foxearth Farm was not in Little Bradmarsh and was prepared to discuss the romantic ramifications, if it should turn out on the wedding-day that the bride was disqualified. But Jinny cruelly took the sweet out of her mouth. Foxearth Farm was in the parish, she declared. “It’s one of those funny bits, lost, stolen, or strayed into other parishes. I know because of the women from there who come upon our parish for blankets when they’re laid aside——”

“Oh, Jinny!” deprecated Miss Gentry, to whom, maternity was as sordid and surreptitious as matrimony was righteously romantic.

But Jinny, innocently misunderstanding, persisted. “Why, I remember the fuss when the steam-roller tried to charge our parish for doing up a scrap of the road beyond Foxearth Farm.”

They walked through the sunlit churchyard in constrained silence, Miss Gentry feeling as if the steam-roller had gone over roses. But stimulated by the iron pole and the four steps, by which ladies who rode pillion anciently mounted and dismounted, she began wondering who would be making the bride’s dress. That gave Jinny a happy idea. How if she got Miss Gentry the work—that would be a slight return for all she owed her!

“Why shouldn’t you make it?” she inquired excitedly. “I could speak to Mr. Flippance, now that I know where he is.”

“Hush, child, don’t profane the Sabbath! Men don’t count in wedding matters,” said Miss Gentry in complex correction. “Nor would I care about the patronage of stage people.”

“But she mayn’t be stage.”

“Like runs to like,” Miss Gentry sighed, and Jinny felt the Colchester romance hovering again. But it did not descend. Instead, Miss Gentry remarked that she ought to have known that it could not be a local beauty. No play-actor with any brains at all could be attracted by anything hereabouts, especially when they could not achieve the acquaintance of women of real attraction and intellect, these preferring the company of cats to that of strolling sinners. Nevertheless, far be it from her wilfully to rob Jinny of a commission.

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

“I couldn’t dream of it otherwise. Squibs and I need so little and have more work than we can manage.”

“Squibs?” Jinny murmured.

“The place is overrun with rats,” Miss Gentry explained. “What will it be when the cold drives them in from the ditches? However, fortunately that horrible old Mawhood stands compelled to clear the cottage before winter. That was the compromise our too kindly pastor let him off with.”

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

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

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

“Wretched little rat-catchers!” Miss Gentry hissed. “Setting themselves up against the Church Established. I’m so glad you’re done with them.”

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

“You are, indeed!” Miss Gentry cried, startled. “Do you mean to tell me that after the glorious privilege of sitting under Mr. Fallow——!” Words failed her, and they also failed Jinny, to whom this unfamiliar metaphor conjured up a puzzling picture of the vicar perched on her Sunday bonnet. The girl was the first to recover her breath.

“Gran’fer told me my mother wanted me to be Peculiar,” she explained. “I can’t go against my Angel-Mother.” Then she blushed prettily, never having mentioned the angel mother since childhood, and feeling somehow as if she had profaned a sacred secret.

“If your angel mother was alive,” cried Miss Gentry with conviction, “it’s to our church that she would come—to our grand old church with its storied windows!”

A divine thrill ran through all Jinny’s frame. Her belief that her mother and the painted angel were mysteriously one was sealed. The oracle had spoken.

Miss Gentry, swelling at her silence—Jinny heard the silk crackling—felt herself indeed an oracle. Squibs had his pick of the plates at that Sunday dinner, enjoying a Sabbath rest from rats, and basking in his mistress’s lap, a black curled-up breathing mass of felicity.
V

As Jinny jogged along next Tuesday morning, diverging from her usual beat to take in the hurdle-maker’s home, that lay—like a geological “fault”—in the wrong parish, the plan that formed itself in her mind was to approach the question of the bride and the wedding-dress by way of Barnaby Purley, the youth who had so chivalrously come to her rescue by delivering at Uckford Manor the keg of oil overlooked by her on that memorable journey with Elijah Skindle. It was because Foxearth Farm possessed this hobbledehoy scion and a trap of its own that Jinny had never done its marketing, nor come face to face with the creature of whom with sidelong eye she caught tantalizing glimpses in the Flynt Flyer. “Not bad-lookin’?” was the countryside’s appraisal of her, which was rather ominous, indicating as it did considerable beauty, and conjoined as it was with a rumour of easy conquests, culminating in the coach-owner. But a good square look at her had not been attainable, even on Sunday, for though the family was Church of England—Mr. Giles Purley being even a churchwarden—it preferred to worship in the parish church to which it did not parochially belong. Jinny told herself she was hastening at this first opportunity purely in Miss Gentry’s interest, for fear the bridal gown had been ordered elsewhere. But she could not quite disguise from herself her consuming anxiety to discover whether this everyday Miss Jones was really a Cleopatra, though she called her poignant emotion mere curiosity, and deemed herself as apathetic at heart as the bumble-bees now crawling miserably about her cart, which could be flicked into a feeble flight and drone, but which soon relapsed into their torpor.

In truth the suppressed hope of finding Blanche safely paired with the Showman was now quickening her pulses and restoring the wild rose to her cheeks. The September day, too, for all the long-continued drought, and despite the drowsy bumble-bees, was not devoid of animating influences, especially the delicious smell of burnings from the fields, where men tossed from their prongs brown masses of weed into red and smoking heaps, or carried like merry devils fiery forks from one pile to another. Monstrous fungi clove in pied picturesqueness to the elm-trunks, and a hawthorn grove with its scarlet berries was like a vast radiant smile. Overhead the sun, a shimmery thin-clouded sphere, showed like an eye in a great white peacock’s wing. The hips and blackberries were interfused in the hedges, the ivy flowered on the squat church towers, the Virginia creepers were reddening the cottages, and the dahlias grew tall in the little front gardens. In the orchards the pear-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit. Around them the turnip-fields looked more like spreads of mustard, so thick were the slender yellow-flowering stems pushing between the crop proper. And everywhere was life; pecking poultry scattering before Methusalem’s feet, and little frogs playing leapfrog; swarms of the Daddy-long-legs and gigantic spiders, great quarrelling families of rooks, quiet chewing cattle, pigs nosing for acorns or windfall apples, hares or great rats or weasels scuttling across the road, partridges straying fearlessly in the stubble, swallows darting unpromisingly high, and when Jinny passed over the little brick bridge, at which a black drainage-mill waved what seemed its four crossed white combs, a pair of superb swans hissed their proud protectiveness over a very drab cygnet.

Driving through an avenue of firs and hornbeam, and past a dirty pond with two flagged mounds in the middle, she reached the clearing where the hurdle-maker operated, with his farmhouse for base of his combined industrial, agricultural, and pastoral occupations.

Mr. Giles Purley, a rosy-wrinkled apple-faced ancient, stood in his shirt-sleeves, looking as pleasantly untidy as his farmyard, which was full of felled logs and split wood, and bean and corn stacks, and ramshackle sheds. He was planing off knots with a bill-hook, and as Jinny drove up to the gate of the old timbered red house, he greeted her with a cheery grumble at the drought which forced such winter work prematurely upon him. Jinny was abashed to find no pretext for her visit coming to her tongue, so she stammered out that she wanted to see Barnaby, and the droll look that twinkled across his father’s face sent her colour up still higher. “Always wants a change, they youngsters,” he chuckled benevolently, “whether ’tis of work or sweet-hearts.”

At this point Jinny became aware of Barnaby himself, who, equally in his shirt-sleeves, was smiling sheepishly up at her from the ditch which he was discumbering with a hook. “Lilies of the walley they stick in their buttonholes,” went on his father waggishly, “as if weeds was ever aught but weeds. There ain’t one that showlders his sack o’ corn or sticks to his dearie. Sheep’s eyes they can make, but as for sheep-hurdles——!” The note was now earnest. It seemed an unpropitious moment to tackle Barnaby.

And to make it more impossible, Blanche herself suddenly bounded from the orchard, flourishing a great corroded pear.

“Nipped thirteen!” she cried gaily.

“Not bad-lookin’,” forsooth! To Jinny she appeared in her bloom and colour like a rich peach dipped in cream: overripeness was the only flaw her beauty suggested to this girl in her teens. But the chill at Jinny’s heart did not prevent her crying out with equal gaiety, “What an unlucky number—for the wasps!”

Barnaby laughed adoringly from his ditch, Mr. Giles Purley in simple joy of the slaughter. The pigs, he explained gleefully, had gnawed at the pear-bags and Blanche was “wunnerful masterous” at nipping the wasps as they crawled out of the forbidden fruit. Asps, Jinny found herself thinking, would have a bad time at such bold hands, though they made the Cleopatra likelier—she slued her eyes round to see the rings on them, but the engagement finger was hidden by the big pear, and Miss Jones, her gaiety checked, was eyeing her like the intruder she was.

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

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

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

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

“You won’t be stung if you don’t think you’ll be,” the girl explained more cordially. Then, unable to retain the proud secret longer, even from the Carrier, she burst forth, “I’m going on the stage with it.”

“What!” Jinny gasped.

“Only as a beginning, of course. ‘Bianca, The Bare-Handed Wasp-Killer,’ it’ll be on the bills.”

“Rubbidge!” came explosively from Mr. Purley. “And where will Mr. Flippance get the wapses in the winter? A circus-slut indeed—I wonder what your mother can be thinkin’ of! And what’s Mr. Honeytongue going to bill you as, Barnaby? Not champion hurdle-maker, I’ll go gaff!”

“Wait till you see me,” said Barnaby with sullen mysteriousness. “You don’t know a circus from a theaytre.”

“You’ll stick to your shackles and bolts,” said his parent grimly, “and peel the bark off, too!”

At the mention of Mr. Flippance, Jinny’s heart beat fast: she felt hovering on the verge of the revelation, and the Bianca and the stage-project rekindled her hope. But Mr. Purley’s grievance had to be worked off first. “They’re too lazy to peel the wood,” he explained to Jinny. “But that’s the main thing for hurdles—to strip ’em well against rain. Same as you was full-dressed in a pouring rain—the time it ’ud take you to dry! If you was naked now——”

“Oh, dad!” Barnaby remonstrated, to his parent’s confusion, and enjoyed this tit-for-tat.

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

“Oh, he never comes in the mornings,” Blanche replied, and this appropriation of the question seemed to Jinny to continue the promise of Bianca and the stage-project.

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

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

It was a double blow, and Jinny winced before it. In that twinkling of her eye Blanche seemed years younger, diabolically handsome, a nipper of buds as well as of wasps. But a worse blow awaited her, for she had scarcely regained her composure when the distant sound of a wheezy horn and a sense of an impending avalanche brought Blanche into bounding activity again.

“Why, there’s Will!” she exclaimed with a comic, happy start. “And me not dressed yet!” And without a word to the little Carrier, she ran gaily into the house.

Frantically clutching Nip who was about to spring to meet the coach, Jinny cried vague thanks to the hurdle-maker and hurried Methusalem down a by-way so narrow that she could hardly squeeze through the untrimmed “werges” neglected of Barnaby.
VI

When she heard the coach well on its way again on the Chipstone road, with Blanche divined within, she found herself possessed by an unexpected urging towards Mr. Flippance. She had no real round any longer—only the hours to fill and her grandfather to half deceive—and perhaps, despite Miss Gentry’s own opinion, the bridegroom might yet be able to prevent her being cut out by the rival pair of scissors. The truth was, Jinny felt a physical need of the toning up the Showman somehow imparted to life. To drive around the rest of the day with practically no business but her own thoughts would be too dreadful. He must surely babble happily about his bride, and apart from the interest of her identity, some of his glow could not but radiate to her. And there was Caleb and Martha to see, too—how were they faring, these dear, simple creatures, too long unvisited? But then—thought that froze the heart!—had she not declared she would never set foot in Frog Farm again? No, she answered herself defiantly—and no memory of hereditary quibbling, nothing of her sense of humour, rose to trouble the reply—all she had said was that Will should never see her there. And Will was safely chained to the Chipstone road.

All the same she looked round apprehensively and with wildly beating heart before she allowed Methusalem to lift the latch of the familiar gate, and she had somehow expected so great a transformation in the farmhouse under its new and sinister activities, and was conscious of so vast a change in herself since she had last seen it, that its primitive black front almost startled her, so unchanged did it appear. True, the ferrets’ cages were gone, but their absence only made it more its old self, and the moan of the doves was as reassuring as the singing of the kettle on her own hearth. Caleb’s red shirt-sleeves looked for once in keeping with the scene, arising as they did out of yellow flame-tinged clouds from the rubbish-heap which he was burning, and the pleasant pungent smell of which filled her eyes with tears, half smoke, half emotion. Even in that glow the homely hair-circled face was capable of a new illumination.

“Gracious goodness, there’s Jinny!” He ran to the house-door. “Mother! Mother!” he cried in jubilant agitation.

Martha emerged at a hobbling run, apron-girded. Despite the glow, her face darkened.

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

“?’Tis nigh as good,” he retorted boldly, “bein’ as Jinny was same as gone there. And bless me, ef she don’t look ghosty!”

“Good morning, Jinny!” said Martha coldly. “We don’t need a carrier now—with our coach to get everything.”

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

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

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

“You can’t now.”

“The missus means he’s abed,” Caleb explained, rushing to Jinny’s relief, and indeed the information brought a smile back to her twitching lips. “Minds me of a great old tortoise, diggin’ hisself into his blankets. Do him good to be up with the sun, same as when Oi was a scarecrow, soon as the wheat was sown.”

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

“Ef we’re rich now, dear heart, and can ride in our own coach, ’tis the Lord’s hand, not ours. Oi watched over wheat and winter beans, and ’arly peas, and winter oats, and then spring barley, but all the time the Lord was watchin’ over me.”

“Not as a scarecrow,” said Martha severely.

“Oi warn’t a scarecrow ploughin’-time, bein’ set on the middle hoss to flick the whip, and chance times when ’twas too frosty to plough Oi went to Dame Pippler’s to school.”

“I never heard that before,” said Martha.

“Dedn’t like to tell ye,” he confessed, “being as ’twas too cowld to howd the slate-pencil, and the book-larnin’ leaked out ’twixt the frosts. ’Twas a penny a week wasted.”

Martha saw their visitor was amused at this revelation after fifty years of wedlock. “Jinny wants to be going on,” she observed testily. “Look at all her boxes.”

“Oi’m proper pleased to see ’em, for as Oi says to Willie, Oi hope as you ain’t hart Jinny’s business and grieved the Lord. Ye can’t sleep, Oi says, ef ye’ve grieved the Lord.”

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

Caleb had, however, not finished his apologia for his lack of learning, and was to be diverted neither by Jinny’s jests nor his wife’s grimaces. “And in the summer,” he explained carefully, “Oi got to goo out with my liddle old gun agin they bird-thieves, though peas and pebbles was all the shot my feyther——”

“Can’t you try some at Mr. Flippance’s window?” interrupted Jinny, fearful the fretful Martha would soon close her door upon her.

“Oi’d have to stand sideways for that!” He pointed to a hooked-back casement. “Fust he kivers hisself up, then he opens hisself out”—he chuckled contemptuously—“?’tis ‘in dock, out nettle,’ as the sayin’ goos.”

Jinny lifted her little horn to her lips and blew a blast so literally rousing that hardly had its echoes died than from the black casement framework a red unshaven face, like the rayed rising sun on an inn signboard, dawned above clouds of flamboyant dressing-gown.

“Jinny! Hurrah!” cried the apparition in delighted surprise. “The very person I’ve been wanting for weeks!”

In the effulgence of that great rubicund sphere of a face Jinny’s mists began to dissolve—after all, with all his faults he belonged to her rosy past, to the good old times ere black horses or red men had arisen to rend her. “Then why didn’t you let me know?” she smiled.

“Just what I was thinking of doing. So glad you’ve saved me a letter. Never was so hard-worked in my life. Good morning, ma,” he threw to Mrs. Flynt, whose set face now relaxed into a maternal mildness, “do I smell breakfast?”

“Ye could ha’ smelt it afore seven, friend,” said Caleb, growing dour as Martha grew soft. “And the missus a bit paltry to-day, too!”

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

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

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

“Not so much as I hate spoilt food!” said Tony. “Not that a good housekeeper like Mrs. Flynt would really let food spoil—any more than you your wheat-patch.”

“Ef ye had helped gittin’ that bit o’ corn in,” retorted Caleb, “ye’d fare to have more to sleep on.”

“There’s more than one kind of work, Caleb,” said Martha severely. “There’s brain-work for them that have never been scarecrows.”

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

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

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

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

“Getting married. Didn’t you know?”

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

“No such luck. When the lady says ‘Yes,’ you think all your troubles are over. But they’re only beginning.”

Caleb’s face relaxed in a grin, whereupon Martha’s hardened to a frown. “Marriage is no laughing matter,” she said, with a glower at her husband.

“No, indeed, Mrs. Flynt!” endorsed Tony. “What with the forms and questions and ceremonies and witnesses and what not, and rings to buy and bouquets to order—it’s worse than a dress rehearsal!”

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

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

“Me?” Jinny was enchanted at this smoothing of the path for Miss Gentry. “But I’m so busy,” she protested professionally. “I can’t wait till you’re up.”

“Jinny’s too busy,” Martha corroborated. And in her eagerness to be rid of the girl, she unconsciously clucked to Methusalem, and so exactly like Jinny that the noble animal actually started.

“Wait! Wait!” Mr. Flippance shouted down wildly. “Do wait! Such a lot to consult you about. Haven’t even got a best man yet. Find me one and I’ll call down blessings on your head!”

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

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

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

Martha had hurried to her kitchen to bring in the belated breakfast, and the convulsion into which Jinny’s last remark appeared to throw Caleb was left unchecked by wifely grimaces. The veteran alternated between gurgles and roars so continuously that Jinny, flattered as she was by the reception of her jest, began to feel uneasy.

“That fair flabbergasted him,” he gasped, getting his breath at last. “How can Oi, says Oi, ef Oi’m a buoy-oy, Oi says.” He wiped the tears from his whiskered cheeks and blew his nose into his great “muckinger.”

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

“?’Twas master as called me a buoy-oy,” he explained, his eyes still dancing, “so as to keep down my wages. Oi’ve got three hosses same as the min, Oi says, and can plough my stetch similar-same as them and cut and trave up my corn better’n Bill Ravens as felt the teeth of the sickle two days arter he started and couldn’t work no more, though double-money time, as Oi can sartify bein’ as ’twar me what tied my neckercher round his arm with the blood pourin’ down like sweat, and lucky ’twarn’t his wife, Oi says, but another woman gooin’ behind him to be larnt how, she bein’ in confinement. But master he wouldn’t listen to nawthen. Oi’ll give you easy ploughin’ was all he promised, ye’re onny a buoy-oy, he says, obstinacious like, and Oi stayed on a bit, not mislikin’ the cans of tea the wives brought, all hot and sweet, and the big granary with pillars and fower on us thrashin’ and rattlin’ on the big oak floor, jolly as a harvest supper, and Bill Ravens—that be the feyther of the rollin’ stone as shears chance times for Master Peartree—singin’ like the saints in Jerusalem, all except for the words. But at last, bein’ as feyther wanted the money and Oi needed time to look for a farmer not so nippy, gimme a week off, says Oi to old Skindflint. A week off! says master. What for? Gooin’ to git married?”

At this point the convulsion recommenced, and Jinny, though she understood how the Flippance wedding had set his memories agog, had still to wait for enlightenment as to why they were agrin.

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

It was out at last, the great repartee of his life, and Jinny felt he was right to cherish its memory. She occupied the period of his renewed cachinnation in descending from her seat and giving Methusalem his impoverished nosebag. Her action reminded Caleb to offer to show her the enlarged stables, with the old roof raised to admit the coach. Then, colouring as if at an indelicacy, he hastily inquired how her grandfather was, remarking with commiseration that he must be getting a bit elderly.

Never had Jinny known him so loquacious—the absence of Martha was combining with her own advent to loosen his usually ruly member. And at last the pent-up flood of his grievances against the Showman burst forth. The return of Will, Jinny gathered, had been dislocating enough, even before his new-fangled coach had brought the stir of the great world and Bundock almost daily, but now the house and the hours were all “topsy-tivvy,” worse than in Cousin Caroline’s time. He would do Will the justice to say that it wasn’t his fault—Will had been against putting up a “furriner” in their spare bedroom—but the “great old sluggaby” had come and ingratiated himself so with the rheumatic but romantic Martha, and offered such startling prices—a pound a week for board and lodging—“enough to feed the whole Pennymole family for a fortnight”—that she had forced her will upon both the male Flynts. “The trouble with Martha is,” Caleb summed up, “she allus wants what she wants.” Mr. Flippance, he explained, “got a piper for her from her Lunnon Sin Agog—funny name that for the Lord’s House, even in Lunnon—and that piper fared to be all about the Christy Dolphins and their doin’s—the Loightstand, Martha called it. And she read me a piece out of it how Mr. Somebody, husband o’ Sister T’other, was baptized by Elder Somebody Else; and she wanted me to goo and do likewise.”

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

He looked uneasy.

“Oi don’t want to be baptized a Jew,” he said plaintively. “Martha she argufies as Paul says we are the Jews, bein’ Abraham’s seed in our innards. So long as she calls us the Lord’s people, Oi fair itches to be one, but that goos agin the stomach like to call yourself a Jew. Same as she was satisfied with the New Jerusalem part, Oi’d goo with her. For ef the Book says, ‘No man hath gone up to heaven,’ or ‘Whither Oi goo, ye cannot come,’ that proves as heaven’s got to come to us, and happen Oi’ll live to see it droppin’ down with its street of pure gold same as transparent brass. But Oi won’t be swallowed up whole like a billy-owl swallows a mouse.”

“What’s that you’re saying, Caleb?” said Martha, now perceived back at her house-door.

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

Martha beamed again. “Ah, it won’t be long before that light spreads, though now the world is all shrouded in darkness and superstition. But salvation is of the Jews.”

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

“Salvation is of the Jews,” repeated Martha implacably. “John iv. 22. There’s nine of us now in Essex alone, the Lightstand says, not reckoning London. They don’t know about another that’s on the way Zionwards,” she added mysteriously.

“Meaning me?” said Caleb nervously.

“Meaning a man with brains and book-learning,” said Martha sternly, “and he’s ready to see you now, Jinny.”

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

“We are the salt of the earth,” Martha reminded him. “A pinch of salt goes a long way.”

“Ay, when it rolls in a pill-box,” Caleb reflected ruefully. “And hows the old chapel, Jinny?” he said aloud. “Willy never goos now.”

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

“I’ll see you when I come out, I suppose,” she said evasively, as she followed Martha within.
VII

The parlour of Frog Farm had not the peculiar mustiness which greeted Jinny’s nostrils when last she peeped into it that tragic morning of Maria’s illness, but there was by way of compensation a reek of stale tobacco and the odours of the breakfast bacon and mushrooms, while in lieu of the sacrosanct tidiness there was a pervasion of papers, with a whole mass of scripts sliding steadily from the slippery sofa. The brown-lozenged text on the wall: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?” seemed to shriek for Caleb’s answer: “Friend Flippance.” Other documents bulged and bristled from both pockets of the dressing-gown as from greasy paniers.

“Bless you, Jinny,” Tony gurgled from his breakfast-cup. He eyed her rapturously. “What a pretty pair you’ll make at the wedding!”

“It’s no use, Mr. Flippance,” said Martha, beaming, “I’ve told you before I won’t go into a church.”

Mr. Flippance, who had been mentally coupling his bride and Jinny, replied with but the briefest muscular quiver, that the only thing that reconciled him to Martha’s absence was that she was incapacitated by matrimony from the r?le of bridesmaid. This morning he would not trouble her to wait. “You can ‘withdraw’ from me,” he said jocosely.

Martha was jarred by this profane use of the sacred vocabulary, and moreover felt it almost as improper to leave Jinny alone in her house, even with a budding bridegroom. “Jinny’s got no secrets from me,” she said tartly; and Mr. Flippance, divining his error, remarked blandly, “Nor have I.” And as Martha started to dust the mantelpiece ornaments and to discover cigar-ash in her china shoes, he drew Jinny’s attention to the “beautiful” silk sampler that hung over them. “And all worked with Mrs. Flynt’s own hand! What a wonderful lion—and as for the unicorn, she’s got it to the life!”

“Oh, it’s only what I did when a girl,” said Martha, blushing modestly. “Only I didn’t like to hang it up then, because I’d left no room for the foreign trees like my sisters put in!”

“Well, but you’ve got in the alphabet, big and little, and all the figures! Wonderful!”

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

“Ah, that gay deceiver!” sighed Mr. Flippance. “He told me he was a Yankee, but now I find he’s only a yumorist. Still he’s a chap any woman can be proud of—what do you say, Jinny?”

Jinny, who had seated herself on the sofa, carefully steadied the slipping manuscripts as she replied with a forced lightness:

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

“Ah, that’s the trouble. He won’t take part in a Church ceremony neither, he says he’s got to consider the old folks—at the chapel,” he added promptly. “But at any rate we shall have the best bridesmaid.”

“You don’t mean me?” said Jinny, colouring under his admiring gaze. “Because it’s impossible. I haven’t the time—or the money.”

“Is it the dress you’re thinking of? Surely the Theatre Royal, Chipstone, can run to that?” And pulling a protrusive scroll from a pocket of his dressing-gown, he unfurled it beatifically, exposing a poster with the coupled names of Anthony Flippance and Cleopatra Jones in giant letters.

“Anthony and Cleopatra!” he breathed in a ravishment. “The moment she told me her second name was Cleopatra I knew it was useless fighting against the fates.”

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

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

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

He waved the suggestion away with a jewelled hand. “Only a new Temple of Thespis could live up to Anthony and Cleopatra. We are building!”

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

“Here!” He tapped the other pocket of his dressing-gown. “Plans!” He rolled up his poster reluctantly. “Cleopatra wanted to see it in print. Didn’t I say what a work getting married was? But now that the bridesmaid’s settled——!”

“But she’s not!” said Jinny, more alarmed than when he was trying to cast her for the bride, perhaps because the danger of being sucked in was greater.

“Oh, Jinny!” He looked at her with large reproachful eyes and mechanically threw bacon to Nip, who had at last sniffed his way in, and who, fortunately for Martha’s composure, caught it ere it reached her carpet. “You see she wants to have the thing all regular and respectable, and all her family are in Wales. She hasn’t got a parent handy to give her away. And having led a wandering life, she hadn’t even a parish to marry in. I never thought you’d desert an old pal.”

“But I’m no pal of hers—I don’t even know her.”

“Oh, Jinny!” And just arresting a paper-slide, he extricated a photograph from the imperilled mass. “The new Scott Archer process,” he declared proudly. “Knocks your daguerreotypes into the middle of last week. Good gag that, eh?”

But it was Jinny who seemed knocked into that period; and not only by this new triumph of the camera. For in this wonderful breathing image she recognized—in all save size, for this seemed a Cleopatra swelling to regal stature—the beauteous human doll she had last seen walking down the steps of a toy house, conning a part.

“But she’s married!” she gasped.

“Not yet. Would to heaven it were all over!” said Mr. Flippance airily, but his great brow grew black for an instant ere he turned it sunnily on Martha. “Oh, ma, could I have more of these marvellous mushrooms?”

“I’ll see, you greedy boy,” she smiled, retreating.

“Well, who could help saying encore to such items?” He turned reproachfully on Jinny. “You nearly shocked the old lady.”

“But didn’t you—didn’t you call her the Duchess?” Jinny stammered. “Oh, but perhaps it is Mrs. Duke’s sister—she looks taller.”

“That’s because she’s got no legs,” he explained paradoxically. “But it’s all right—The Loveliest Leading Lady in London.” (Jinny heard the capital letters distinctly.)

He went on to explain that London didn’t know this yet, and that some time must elapse before Cleopatra would be in a position to demonstrate it on the spot, owing to local jealousies. But Jinny came back remorselessly to her point.

“But surely she was married to Mr. Duke!”

“Hush! Appearances are deceptive. They were just close friends.”

“You couldn’t well be closer—in that doll’s house,” said Jinny scornfully. And her own words reminded her how he had denounced the Duchess as a “squeaking doll” whose “golden” hair was spurious.

“Now you shock me, Jinny,” said Mr. Flippance severely. “Pure as the driven snow is my Cleo, stainless as the Lady Agnes, shut up in that great oak chest on her wedding morn, sweet as her namesake, Bianca, in The Taming of the Shrew.”

“Why does she tame shrews?” asked Jinny, puzzled.

“That’s a play by Shakespeare”—the name not occurring in the Spelling-Book, left Jinny unimpressed. “A shrew is a vixen.”

This natural history left Jinny still less impressed. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “A shrew is tiny and lovely to look at, with darling rounded ears. I buried one the other day, and its eye was as bright as life.”

“It’s only a way of speaking,” he explained, “as you call a woman a cat. Katharina’s the polecat of the play that her husband has to tame with a whip, but Bianca is a dove, gentle and spotless.”

“Doves are not so gentle,” said Jinny. “They peck each other dreadfully. I like vixens better, at least they seem fonder of their family when you peep down their earths.”

Mr. Flippance, who had never in his life seen either a shrew or a vixen or a polecat or observed the habits of doves, was taken aback. He had even a vague sense of blasphemy, some ancient religious images whirring confusedly in his brain. “Understand this, Jinny,” he said sharply, abandoning the shifting sands of metaphor, “Cleo gave Mr. Duke her companionship and her artistic co-operation, but as for marrying him—bring me that Book!”

He indicated the precious volume which Mrs. Flynt had left in the parlour for his study of the text-evidence of the Christadelphian teaching. But Jinny took his Bible oath for granted. Sincerity and righteous indignation radiated from every round inch of his face, and Jinny, despite her farmyard experience, was too nebulous in her ideas of human matings not to be shaken. In truth he had been vastly relieved by the discovery that the couple had pretermitted the ceremony and that he was saved the tedium and expense of a divorce suit, though he wondered why Mr. Duke with his meticulous book-keeping and contracts should be so loose where women were concerned, while he, so averse from parchments and figures, had a proper respect for the marriage-tie. Human nature was devilishly deep, he thought: no wonder a man got drowned if he tried to fathom himself.

But Jinny, though she now believed she had misunderstood the ducal ménage, was not without an instinctive distrust. “She didn’t want to live in the caravan,” she protested.

“No,” he agreed, misapprehending the local idiom. “It was that pig-headed wire-puller who wanted it. Duke’s the villain of the piece, abusing my darling’s innocence and exploiting her artistic aspirations. He got round the poor girl, knowing her aunt had left her all her money. Cleo, my dear Jinny, is the niece of the famous Cleopatra, the Cairo Contortionist, after whom she was christened, and whose death a year or so ago eclipsed the gaiety of Astley’s and Mr. Batty’s new Hippodrome.”

“Was she so beautiful?” asked Jinny, somewhat awed.

“I was in love with her myself in my youth,” Mr. Flippance replied simply. “But though you could gossip with her round the coke-brazier at the back of the ring, she always made you feel that no man was worthy to chalk the soles of her tight-rope shoes. And her niece, as you have doubtless perceived, has the same grand manner.”

“Then why did she keep company with Mr. Duke?”

Jinny returned to the sore spot, Mr. Flippance felt, like a buzzing bluebottle.

“If you don’t believe me,” he cried, “show me the little Dukes and Duchesses. Where are they? Produce ’em.”

He looked at her fiercely—as demanding a rain of coroneted cherubs from the air.

The bold stroke put the climax to Jinny’s obfuscation. Marriage without children was practically unknown on her round, though the children often died. “Don’t you see he wanted to compromise her?” pursued Tony triumphantly, after giving the cherubs a reasonable time to materialize. “He thought she’d never dare break away with her money, and that he could spend her last farthing on boosting himself into the legitimate. He’s all right with the marionettes—a dapster as you say here,” Mr. Flippance admitted magnanimously. “But as an actor he could no more expect to please my public than to keep Cleo hidden in a bushel. He might throw up the sponge and go back to his fantoccini—but what career was that for Cleo? She broke with him on the nail—the partnership, I mean. And I ask you, ma,” he wound up, with an appreciative sniff as Martha re-entered, not only with mushrooms but freshly fried bacon, “what woman of spirit could do otherwise?”

Mrs. Flynt beamed assent, and her apparent acquaintance with the facts contributed to lull Jinny’s uneasiness. Surely the pious Martha would not connive at scandalous proceedings. Relieved, she sat silent; wondering—while Mr. Flippance did jovial justice to the encore dish—what the Duchess would think if she knew that she, Jinny, could have anticipated her in the r?le of the second Mrs. Flippance. And what would Polly have thought of her as a stepmother, she wondered still more whimsically. Perhaps between them they could have made a man of him. She had never seen his daughter over her cigar and milk or her sense of Polly as a pillar of respectability might have been shattered.

“And how is Miss Flippance?” she said.

His face changed suddenly—rain-clouds overgloomed the sun. His fork fell from his fingers. “You don’t know what daughters are,” he blubbered. “She’s left me!”

“Left you?”

“Ask ma,” he half sobbed. It was infinitely pathetic.

“Don’t let it get cold again,” Martha coaxed.

“I can’t eat.” He lit a cheroot abstractedly, and the old woman and the young girl followed his silent puffings with a yearning sympathy, while Nip begged, unheeded.

“Mad on marionettes is Polly,” he said at last. “The moment I got rid of ’em, she packed up my things and was off.”

“Stole your things?” cried the startled Jinny.

“No—no. She knew I should be moving on for the banns—Cleo likes a quiet place—so she left me tidy. That was her sole conception of her duty to her legal pa. But she had always looked upon me as a thing to be tidied—not a soul to be loved and cherished.” He wiped an eye with the sleeve of his dressing-gown and asked brokenly for his brandy. Martha hurried to his bedroom.

“But perhaps your daughter’ll come back,” Jinny suggested soothingly.

“God forbid!” he cried. “I mean they’d be at it hammer and tongs. Perhaps Providence does all things for the best.”

“But where has she gone?” Jinny’s sympathy was now passing to Polly, as she began to grasp the true complexity of her exodus.

“To her grandmother in Cork, I expect.” He blew a placid puff. “Did I never tell you my pa’s real wife—the one he didn’t live with, I mean—was originally the widow of a well-to-do cheesemonger? Polly always looked up her nominal granny when we played Ireland. She likes respectable people.”

“Is that why she won’t come to the wedding?” Jinny inquired cruelly, for Polly’s refusal to countenance it again stirred up her doubts.

Mr. Flippance was angered afresh. “I tell you, my Cleopatra can hold up her head with the whitest cheesemonger’s widow in the land. But it’s hard,” he said, reverting to pathos and flicking his cigar-ash mournfully into the just-dusted shoe, “to be left without a daughter at such a crisis. Think how she would have stage-managed everything—even bought the ring.” The tragedy of his situation mastered him. “Forgive my emotion—I was always one to wear my heart on my sleeve.” He wiped his eyes on it again. “Nobody will ever pack like Polly. Ah, thank you, ma,” he said, as Martha reappeared with the brandy bottle. “Have you half a crown?” he added, pouring himself out a careless quota. “You see,” he explained, setting down his glass dolefully, and tendering Martha’s half-crown to the astonished Jinny, “though old pals desert one at the altar, Tony Flip doesn’t forget his obligations.”

“But what’s it for?” Jinny took the coin tentatively.

“You lent me it when that wicked Duke demanded money on the contract.”

“Oh, thank you!” Jinny was touched—a half-crown seemed as large as her cart-wheel nowadays. Half remorsefully she suggested that a far better bridesmaid would be the girl at Foxearth Farm.

He shook his head. “I’ve been into that. But there are—objections. It doesn’t do, you see, for the super to be taller than the leading lady. Now you being shorter——”

“But if Miss Jones were to wear very low heels——”

“But that would only make Miss Purley look still taller,” he said, puzzled.

“I mean Miss Purley to wear the low heels—she is a Miss Jones, too.”

“What?”

“Blanche Jones is her name—she’s only old Purley’s stepdaughter.”

He started up. “Then Mrs. Purley was formerly Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes.”

“Hurrah!” He seized the surprised Martha by the waist and began waltzing with her, while Nip barked with excitement.

“Quiet, Nip! What’s the matter?” cried Jinny, smiling.

“A relation at last! Don’t you see that Mrs. Jones can give the bride away?”

“But she’s not really a relation.”

“All these Joneses are one large family,” he said airily.

“But you don’t need a relation,” Martha pointed out. “A friend will do.”

“Really? I must study the stage-directions—I mean,” he corrected himself hastily, “yours may be different from the Church of England.”

“But I know all the same, for we weren’t allowed to marry in our own chapels, leastways not till after Willie was born.”

“Well, anyhow, I’m sure Cleopatra would prefer a relation. Mrs. Jones is a Churchwoman, I hope. It’s necessary, ma, you know,” he apologized.

“Yes—her husband’s a churchwarden,” said Jinny.

“A churchwarden! Hurrah! Better and better. Then he shall give Cleo away.” He bumped the beaming, breathless Martha round again.

“But he isn’t even called Jones,” Jinny reminded him.

“A husband takes over his wife’s Jonesiness. Bless you, Jinny!” He seized her hand and dragged her likewise into the circular movement. “Now we go round the mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush, the mulberry-bush——”

Caleb, coming past the door at this instant, stood spellbound. Had Mr. Flippance been really converted, and was it the joy of the New Jerusalem? Or had Martha now “moved on,” and was this the new dancing sect of which one heard rumours?

Martha’s caperings ceased at sight of him. “It’s the wedding,” she said somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m just going to pickle your walnuts, dear heart,” she added sweetly. “And Jinny must be getting to her work, too.”

At which delicate hint, Jinny, faintly flushing, rose to take her leave, and Nip, who had been whining his impatience, was already gambolling hysterically without, before she remembered she had forgotten the very purpose of her visit.

“Oh, by the way, Mr. Flippance,” she said, as she followed Nip, “I suppose the wedding-gown is ordered.”

“Wedding-gown!” he repeated. “You don’t think Cleo has any need of wedding-gowns! Why the Lady Agnes dress—Act One—is the very prop. for the occasion, and brand new, for she had just got Duke to put on The Mistletoe Bough. Otherwise I should have been asking you for the address of that wonderful French friend of yours—the bearded lady, you know. But if you won’t be a bridesmaid, you’ve got to come to the show—yes, and the wedding breakfast too—I won’t take any refusal. It’ll be at Foxearth Farm, and I’m ordering oceans of sweet champagne. Well, thank you a million times for finding Cleo a father. Good-bye, dear. God bless you!” He had shuffled without and now kissed his hand to the moving cart.

“What about a new wedding-gown for you?” Jinny called back. “A dressing-gown, I mean.”

“Yumorist!” came his chuckled answer.
VIII

Though not unconscious of a subterranean hostility in Martha, which she put down to the new business rivalry, and though still perturbed about the Duchess, Jinny felt distinctly better for this visit, not to mention the half-crown, that now rare coin. She was still more heartened two days later when Bundock brought a letter from Mr. Flippance stating that, strange to say, Cleopatra did not find the Lady Agnes dress suitable. It would make her feel she was only playing at marrying, she said, and she was too respectful of holy matrimony to desecrate it by any suggestion of unreality: indeed she was already being fitted by the leading Chipstone artist. The dress was, however, turning out so dubiously that she would be glad if Jinny’s French friend would call upon her at Foxearth Farm with a view to preparing a “double.” As for Jinny being bridesmaid, he must reluctantly ask her to abandon the idea, as Cleopatra considered her too short.

“That’s the Flippance fist,” said Bundock, lingering to watch her read the letter, “scrawls all over the shop. I don’t mind your answering by post,” he added maliciously, “now I’ve got to go there so much. I often kill—he, he, he!—two frogs with one stone now. So you’re to be bridesmaid, Tony tells me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Jinny, “and mind your own business.”

“It is my business,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “Didn’t he ask me to be best man? As if in this age of reason I could take part in superstitious rites!”

“I don’t see any superstition about marrying,” said Jinny.

“I’m not so sure—tying a man to a woman like a dog to a barrel. But anyhow, why drag in heaven?”

“Because marriages are made there, I suppose,” said Jinny.

“Stuff and nonsense! And then the rice and the old shoes they throw!”

“I saw you throw one when your sister got married.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t believe in it.”

“Then why did you throw it?”

He hesitated a moment. “They say if you don’t believe in it, it’s even luckier than if you do.”

Jinny laughed heartily.

“I’m not joking!” Bundock declared angrily.

“If you were, I shouldn’t be laughing,” said Jinny.

“Oh well, go to church!” Bundock retorted in disgust. “And I hope the beadle will give you an extra prod next Sunday.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend. Everybody knows that church is a double torture—first the parson sends you to sleep with his sermon, and then the verger wakes you up with his rod.”

Jinny laughed again.

“Don’t tell me!” said Bundock. “My own father was forced to go—all the labourers on the estate, poor chaps, dead-sleepy after the week’s work, and that rod used to puggle ’em about. No wonder dad chucked both squire and parson.”

“It doesn’t happen in Mr. Fallow’s church,” Jinny assured him.

“Because nobody goes!” And Bundock hurried off with this great last word, and Jinny saw his bag heaving with the mirthful movement of his shoulders.

Somewhat to Jinny’s surprise, Miss Gentry from being Cleopatra’s alternative dressmaker developed into her adorer, it appearing that the lady displayed not only proportions most pleasing to the technical eye—“just made for clothes,” Miss Gentry put it—but a positive appetite for tracts. She loathed Dissent, it transpired, and to be married by a minister would seem to her little better than living in sin. A very paragon of propriety and an elegant pillar of the faith, Miss Cleopatra Jones, spinster, worshipped regularly with the churchwarden and his family in the wrong parish church. Miss Gentry, ravished by this combination of respectability and romance, did not once compel the fair client to attend upon her, travelling to Foxearth Farm instead in Jinny’s cart. It was impossible for Jinny’s doubts of Cleopatra’s immaculacy to survive Miss Gentry’s encomiums. While Miss Gentry ascended to the bedroom of her beautiful and still golden-haired client, posed in an atmosphere of old oak bedsteads and panelled linen presses, Jinny would sit with the second Mrs. Purley in her dairy—a cheerful, speckless room which enjoyed a specially spacious window, dairies being immune from the window-tax—while that bulkier edition of Blanche made cheeses and conversation. Mrs. Purley made conversation irrespective of her auditor, for she needed no collaborator: indeed a second party coming athwart this Niagara of monologue would have been swept aside like a straw.

As a great musician can take a few simple notes, and out of this theme evoke endless intricacies, enlargements, repetitions, echoes, duplications, parallelisms, and permutations, and then transform the whole into another key and give it you all over again, so out of a simple happening, like her feeding of a sick chicken, or her discovery that a hen had laid her clutch in the hedge, Mrs. Purley, without for a moment interrupting the milling of curd or the draining of whey, could improvise a fugal discourse that went ramifying and returning upon itself ad infinitum. It reminded Jinny of Kelcott Wood, where every day from three to five, on these September afternoons, hundreds of starlings, perched like bits of black coal on the mountain-ashes, kept up a ceaseless chattering, shrilling, clucking, querying, cackling.

But she soon ceased to hear Mrs. Purley, was even lulled by the cascade. Very familiar grew every pan, dipper, vat, tub, press, cheese-cloth, or straw-mat, while the one readable article she knew by heart. It was the inscription on a china mug, in which Mrs. Purley sometimes put milk, and it recorded the virtues of a black-haired, black-whiskered head painted thereon. “The Incorruptible Patriot. . . . The Undaunted Supporter of the People’s Rights. . . . The Father of the Fatherless. . . . The Pride and Glory of his Country” . . . such were a few of the attributes ascribed, with a profuseness resembling Mrs. Purley’s conversation, to a certain Henry Brougham, Esq., who, as Jinny learnt from Miss Gentry, was really and truly “a love,” having defended Queen Caroline when Miss Gentry was a schoolgirl. Queens were as liable to ill-luck as herself, Jinny began to suspect, recalling that Egyptian asp, and she became a little anxious for Victoria, who now came to figure in her dreams, as defended against French fire-eaters by this black-avised man, with the protruding nose, retreating forehead, and weak chin. Somehow—it was unintelligible when she woke up, but quite clear in her dream—the defended Victoria was also herself, for was not Henry Brougham “The Father of the Fatherless”?

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............