Thou barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted,

Art made a myrrhour to behold my plight.

Spenser, “The Shepheards Calendar.”
I

Pitter-patter was the dominant note of the rest of the year. The prayer for rain had been only too successful, and the blackbirds whistled their thanksgiving over their worms. But humanity grumbled with its wonted ingratitude. There were warm and windy days, and cold and sparkling days, but the roads never quite dried up. The short cuts to Frog Farm became impassable for Bundock; in the coursing season the long-grassed marshlands clove to the spectators’ gaiters, and when the beagles were out, Jinny had the satisfaction of seeing Farmer Gale and breathless bumpkins floundering over sodden stubble-fields or ankle-deep in mud, what time baffled whippers-in piped plaintively, or jetted husky cries at their scattered pack. Glad as she was to eat of the leporine family, she detested sport for sport’s sake, even the fox-hunting, though her poultry-run had just been raided and a dog-fox had snarled fearlessly at Nip from the ditch. Once, when the hare, crossing her cart with the dogs at his very heels, cleared the broad ditch with a magnificent leap, Jinny clapped her hands as though at a Flippance melodrama.

Sport for life’s sake was another affair, and she looked back regretfully to the good old times described by her grandfather, when the farmer, having finished his day’s work, would go out rabbit-shooting to preserve his crop, or when the fox could be shot, snared, or even hooked, as a dangerous animal. Now, when poor old Uncle Lilliwhyte had found Jinny’s vulpine enemy dead in one of his gins, caught by a claw, that rising vet., Mr. Skindle, was called in to make a post-mortem examination, and it was only because he certified that the sacred animal had died of starvation, and not been poisoned, that the old woodman escaped the worst rigours of the unwritten law. As it was, his crime in setting the trap at all on land not his own, and his failing—through a new attack of rheumatism—to examine it before the fox died, almost resulted in his being officially driven from his derelict hut into the Chipstone poorhouse; a fate he only escaped by passionate asseverations that he had always been and till death would continue “upright,” by which he meant “independent.”

That was in one sense more than Jinny could call herself, for her store of barley or rye for her breadmaking was dangerously low, and she had come to depend a good deal on the food brought by this queer raven at prices more corresponding to his gratitude than to market value. She still peddled her goats’ milk for a trifle among her neighbours, the abundant blackberries gave her fruit (though she could not afford the sugar for jam), she had gathered nuts as industriously as a squirrel, she ensured jelly for her grandfather by making it out of her own apples, while by exchanging the bad apples with a neighbour who kept pigs, she got Methusalem some “green fodder” in the shape of tares. But it was an unceasing strain to keep things going in the old style, and Uncle Lilliwhyte’s spoils were more than welcome, for his activities varied from codling-fishing to eel-spearing, and from fowling on the saltings to collecting glass-wort for pickling. His rabbits and hares came with suspiciously injured legs, and Jinny seeing the bloody-blobbed eyes could only hope they had not been long in his wire loops. As she felt the long, warm, beautiful bodies, she had to tell herself how pernicious they were to the root-crops or the young apple-trees.

More legitimate spoils arrived when the old man was well enough to crawl to the nearest salt-marsh with his ancient fowling-piece, for, when the ebb bared the mud, countless sea-birds came to feed, and more than once a brace of mallards offered Jinny a vivid image of her inferiority to the rival carrier, so gorgeously shimmering was the male’s head, so drab the female’s. For while the driver of the Flynt Flyer had been blossoming out in the frock-coat he had first sported for the Flippance wedding, Jinny had been refraining even from her furbished-up gown, reserving it mentally for a last resource and feeling herself lucky that it was still unpawned. But one day when the vehicles met—for despite the heaviness of the going Jinny foolishly and extravagantly continued to plod her miry rounds—she caught Will looking down so compassionately at her spotting shoes that she straightway resolved to buy another pair at any sacrifice. Savage satisfaction at her defeat she could have borne, but this pity she would not brook. Better sell the goats, especially as Gran’fer would need a new flannel shirt for the winter. The animals were not very lucrative, and one out of the three would suffice to supply milk for herself and—by its bleat—her grandfather’s sense of stability. But she had reckoned insufficiently with this last: he admitted he had no great stomach for her goats’ cheese, and felt a middling need for flannel, but he clung to his nannies as though without them his world would fall to pieces. That her shoes were doing so, he did not remark.

In the end—though she shrank from the three golden balls on her own behalf—there was nothing for it but to pledge her wedding-frock under pretence it was a customer’s. But in her dread lest the pawnbroker should recognize the dress, the sharpness which extracted the utmost from him for her distressed clients was replaced by a diffident acceptance of barely enough for the shoes.

This discussion about her live stock, however, gave her an idea. She carted part of her poultry to and fro in a crate, and their clucking and fluttering gave an air of liveliness to the business and made even Will Flynt believe it had woke up again, especially as he saw the smart new shoes on the little feet, supplemented presently by a new winter bonnet, which, despite his experience with his own mother’s bonnet, he did not divine was merely an old one, whitened and remodelled by Miss Gentry.

Thus the equinoctial season found the little Carrier still upon her seat, defiant of competition and radiating prosperity from the crown of her bonnet to the sole of her shoe. Even the plainness of her skirt and shawl seemed only an adaptation to the weather. But she would have been better off by her log fire, making the local variety of Limerick lace with which she was on other days trying to eke out her infrequent sixpences. Though the rain abated towards the end of October, halcyon days and even hours alternated with hours and days of turbulent winds and hailstorms, and the sky would change in almost an instant from a keen blue, with every perspective standing out clear and sun-washed, to a lowering roof of clouds spitting hailstones, and a gentle wind would be succeeded by half a gale that stripped their flames from the poplars and sent the reddened beech-leaves whirling fantastically. In November these blasts grew more biting, Nip cowered in his basket within the cart, and the calves in the fields sheltered themselves behind the blown-down trunks of elms. Shivering, Jinny reminded herself that the real object of her rounds was the bi-weekly gorge at Mother Gander’s.

They were indeed more generous than ever, these midday meals, so relieved was Jinny’s hostess to find she had not really been baptized into Mr. Fallow’s church. Mrs. Mott even had the Gaffer’s beer-barrel replenished gratis. Not that she had any suspicion of the girl’s straits. Though parcels were no longer left at the bar for Jinny, the poor woman was too taken up with her own troubles to draw the deduction from that. Beneath her imposing blue silk bodice beat a wounded heart, and in Jinny’s society she found consolation for the lack of her husband’s.

For a quarrel had begun between the Motts which was destined to shake all Chipstone with its reverberations. Mr. Charles Mott had profanely refused to be “Peculiar” any longer. The endeavour to draw him to the Wednesday services had proved the last straw. To him religion and Sunday were synonyms, and he had been willing to concede the day to boredom. He was a sportsman and was ready to play fair. But his wife was not playing fair, he considered, when she pretended that ratting, coursing, and dicing remained reprehensible even on weekdays. Expostulatory elders had vainly pointed out to him that it was only the Churchman who made so much of Sunday and so little of every other day, and Deacon Mawhood had been compelled to order several goes of rum at “The Black Sheep” to find opportunities of explaining to its landlord that his cravat-pin and plethora of rings were an offence. Let him note how his admirable wife had given up her gold chain. “Well, I don’t want no chain,” Charley had retorted, and his cronies still acclaimed the repartee. He had, in fact, broken his chain and would not even go to the Sunday chapel.

“You and me have both got our cross to bear,” Deacon Mawhood sighed sympathetically to the distraught lady. “There’s saints among us as won’t even keep a cat or a bird because the thought of them may come ’twixt the soul and chapel. Oi sometimes suspicion it’s a failing in roighteousness to keep a husband or a wife—partic’lar when they riots on your hard-earned savings.”

The grievances which the poor hostess of “The Black Sheep”—now become a keeper of one—poured into Jinny’s ear, fully confirmed all the Spelling-Book had told her of the wickedness of man—its preoccupation with the male gender had left woman unimpugned. But it was more under Mr. Mawhood’s encouragement than Jinny’s that this female pillar of the chapel now sent the Bellman round Chipstone with his bell and his cocked hat and his old French cry, to inform all and sundry that she would not be responsible for her husband’s debts.

It was a procedure which scandalized Chipstone. Since the day when a neighbouring village had set up its “cage” for drunken men in the pound, with the other strayed beasts, no such blow had been dealt at the dignity of man. But Charley and his crew met it with derisory laughter. All Mrs. Mott’s property was his—or rather theirs: he could sell the lease of “The Black Sheep” over her head, if she did not behave herself. Nay, he could sell her very self at the market cross, the bolder maintained, not without citing precedent. By many the Bellman was blamed for compromising the dignity of his sex: by none so contemptuously as by Bundock. For the Crier, not taking his own announcement seriously, had embellished it with facetious gags that set the street roaring. “I wouldn’t say if they were funny,” complained Bundock. “Anybody can play on the word ‘Peculiar,’ and certainly peculiar it is to put your husband in the stocks, so to speak. I don’t deny Charley’s legs sometimes need that support. But what can you expect if you marry your pot-boy? You must take pot-luck. He, he, he!”

To which the bulk of Chipstone Christendom added that however prodigal the ex-potman, he did not waste so much money as his wife lavished on that ridiculous sect of hers. A hundred pounds for the bishop at his jubilee birthday, it was said with bated breath—“a noice fortune!” Really, Charley was only too long-suffering not to take his property, including his wife, more strictly in hand, and when it was learnt that lawyers’ letters were actually passing between the bedrooms of the parties there was general satisfaction. In short, public opinion was as outraged by Mrs. Mott’s treatment of her husband as by her original acquisition of him. The only difference was that Mr. Mott was now a martyr.

The insult to the male sex was especially resented by the tradesmen to whom the martyr stood so profitably indebted, and under their incitement a new ban might have been put on “The Black Sheep” but for the reluctance of Will Flynt, who, though second to none in reprobation, refused to shift the headquarters of his coach to the rival establishment. That would only be hurting Charley’s business, he pointed out, and indirectly themselves. The economic aspects of revenge had not occurred to these muddle-heads, and they were grateful to the coach-driver for the reminder. They did not know that his true motive for sticking to “The Black Sheep” was that Jinny was to be encountered in its courtyard on Tuesdays and Fridays. Nor was Jinny herself aware how profusely she was repaying Mrs. Mott for her meals.

As if this scandal among the “Peculiars” was not enough, Deacon Mawhood himself came into ill odour more literally. For in carrying out his agreement to clear the Gentry cottage of rats, he had committed the crime of which Uncle Lilliwhyte had been acquitted: he had operated by poison, to wit, and the stench of the dead vermin in their holes nearly crazed the excellent dressmaker, already sufficiently distracted by the silence of her bosom friend, Mrs. Flippance, swallowed up in Boulogne as in a grave. Miss Gentry, like Mother Gander, now wept on Jinny’s shoulder, though it had to be done outside the garden gate, and even there the wafts caught one. If it had not been for the prediction that she would be drowned, did she ever set foot on a boat, she would have been in Boulogne weeks ago with her darling, but, like a ghost, she could not cross water. Indeed she would already have been a ghost but for her strong smelling-salts, her decoction of scabious against infection, and the fumigation of the cottage. Jinny did not shrink from bearding her spiritual superior in his bar and giving Mr. Joshua Mawhood a taste of her tongue. If that was his notion of religion, he ought to be cast out of his chapel, and she would let Mrs. Mott know of what a hoggish “illusion” he had been guilty—(Illusion, Sham or Cheat—“The Universal Spelling-Book”).

But the Deacon, standing on the letter of his bond, was impermeable to reproach—nay, had a sense of righteousness, as having incidentally punished a distributor of tracts no less offensive than his dead rats. Not even the remonstrances of Mr. Fallow, who had arranged the compromise over Mrs. Mawhood’s dress, could bring the Deacon to a sense of sin, still less of compensation. “Her rats were eating the pears like hollamy,” he said, “and Oi’ve cleared cottage and orchard of ’em.” Mr. Fallow was so interested to know what “hollamy” was, that he went away with a diminished sense of failure. But neither dictionaries nor octogenarians could throw any light on its etymology. The most plausible conjecture he could reach was that it must be “hogmanay,” gifts made at the year’s end.
II

But if the Peculiar Faith was thus involved in scandal, Churchmanship did not fail to provide its quota of gossip to the months that ended a fateful year. It was not only that Miss Blanche of Foxearth Farm had collected the scalp of yet another suitor (and one who, as Bundock’s own eyes had witnessed at the Flippance wedding-feast, had been wantonly encouraged); it was that the minx, whose brother Barnaby went about in October saying Will Flynt was not good enough for her, became openly engaged in November to that obviously inferior specimen, Mr. Elijah Skindle. And old Giles Purley, tired of vagaries so incongruous in a churchwarden’s family, was, said Bundock’s father, imperiously hurrying on the match.

Although it was the postman who was the reference on the liberties permitted to Will at the wedding breakfast, it was his bedridden parent who became the leading authority on the new Blanche engagement. That was because Barnaby, disappointed of the wider life of the Tony Flip theatre, with no winter prospect but that of chopping down undergrowth and laying it out in long rows for hoops and hurdles, and receiving no consolation from Jinny when their vehicles passed, had discovered in the postman’s youngest sister a being even more beauteous, and, when he had to take the trap into Chipstone, never failed in devoted attendance on the sick-bed. It was thus that all the world knew that the Flippances had not written once from Boulogne, not even to send on the promised cheque for the wedding-breakfast.

But even Bundock’s father had not the true history of the engagement, constructing as he did from Barnaby’s chatter a facile version of a “better match”: how dear ’Lijah was coining money far quicker than Will with his petty fares and commissions, and fast ousting Jorrow, and with what elegant furniture he was fitting up the bridal bedchamber. Barnaby himself did not know that with the gradual vanishing of his sister’s theatrical and operatic hopes, Blanche, immeasurably more embittered and disillusioned than himself, had sought in vain to win back Will, and had thrown herself first strategically and then despairingly into the arms of Elijah, who, summoned professionally to the Farm, had found unhoped-for consolation for his lost Jinny. Tongues would have wagged still more joyously had it been known that Will for his part was trying to win back Jinny, who in her turn was as adamantine to him as he to Blanche. The two Carriers met not seldom on the miry, yellow-carpeted roads awhirl with flying leaves, or in the rainy courtyard of “The Black Sheep,” and for each the scene at once shifted to a sunny tangled fairyland where the wood-pigeon purred, and oak, elm, beech, and silver birch in ample leaf rose in a crescent, with crisp beech-nuts underfoot, and baby bracken. But not even Nip could effect any visible communication. Much more gracious was Jinny to Barnaby, as soon as she was relieved of his “passing” adoration.

The weather improved for a space in mid-November. There was a bite in the air and the sheep-bells tinkled keenly from the pastures. The morning hoar-frosts held till noon. A great red ball of sun and a pale yellow crescent moon would shine together in the heavens, early sunsets seen through bare branches seemed to fill them with a golden fruitage that changed slowly to lemon, and the haystacks rose magically through enchanted hazes. But the cold only made Jinny hungrier and the earth-beauty sadder. It was as if she had already forgotten the blessing of Methusalem’s return, and as if carrying was not after all the heart’s deepest dream—especially with nothing to carry.

It was a relief to be blocked occasionally by Master Peartree’s sheep, billowing along like a yellow Nile, and to exchange conversation with the shepherd, now at the most leisured moment of his year. Patiently she would hear how the sheep got ravenous in the high cold winds, why he was driving them out of yon danger-zone of rape and turnip, and how the only real anxiety between now and Christmas was that one might fall on its back, or the hunt frighten the ewes: for soon somehow he would be speaking of his next-wall neighbours in Frog Farm, and somehow the family would always narrow to Will. “A grumpy, runty lad,” he described him once. “Sometimes he goos about full o’ mum: other times you can yer him through the wall grizzlin’ and growlin’ like my ould dog, time my poor missus had her fust baiby. He’d ha’ torn the child to pieces,” he went on, diverging into an exposition of how sheep-dogs had to be trained to prepare for babies. But she cut it as short as she dared, inquiring, “But who’d he be jealous of?” “The baiby—Oi’m explainin’ to you!” he said. “No, I mean, who’s young Mr. Flynt jealous of?” she asked, wondering how Will could know that she had been shedding such gracious smiles on Barnaby. And when the shepherd replied “?’Lijah Skindle, in course,” she winced perceptibly. But though the sting of the reply rankled, she was not so sure as the rest of the world that it was true.
III

The abundance of black sloes, they said, foretold a hard winter, and as the winter approached, Jinny’s outlook grew darker. Even to keep a roof over their heads was not easy with the thatch everywhere holed by starlings. Driblets came through the old man’s bedroom ceiling and were caught in a pail. And as for the walls, Daniel Quarles cursed the builder who had put in such bad mortar that “big birds came and picked the grit out o’ the lime.” The rain drove even through the closed lattices. To keep the living-room dry, he had made Jinny purchase putty, of which he daubed no less than three pounds over the rotting woodwork of the window. A stumpy piece of log he also nailed to the bottom of the window to block up the crevices, though he could do nothing with the top of the kitchen door through the little vine that grew over it, and which in some years yielded several pounds of small white grapes.

And if it was high time that her Hall should be patched up, Jinny often thought with commiseration of poor Uncle Lilliwhyte in his leaky hut throughout all these rains. Even from a selfish point of view, his health was a consideration. If he broke up, a main source of supply would disappear, and any day he might be at least temporarily paralysed by his rheumatism, and need provender instead of supplying it. A frail reed indeed to rely on, and Jinny began to wonder if she had been wise in training Nip so carefully not to hunt rabbits. With food and shelter thus alike insecure, Jinny, remembering the formula of her sect, resolved to “ask in faith.” Perhaps too conscious a resolution impaired the faith—at any rate Providence, even with an accessory at court in the shape of the Angel-Mother, proved stony, and the Angel-Mother herself appeared limited in her powers, however limitless her sympathy. She could not even make folks demand tambour lace. Jinny began to wonder if no terrestrial powers remained to be invoked in the old man’s behalf. What had become of all the children, whose names were recorded in the fly-leaf of his hereditary Bible, and only some of whom had their deaths chronicled? Cautiously she probed and pried into corners she had never dared approach before, instinctively feeling them full of cobwebs and grime. And her instinct was justified—each child had been more “obstropolus” than the others. One of the daughters was always “a slammacks” and had married beneath her, another—a beauty even fairer than Jinny’s mother—had, on the contrary, caught a London linen-draper on his holidays and looked down on her father, who would starve rather than eat a bit of her bread. One boy had “?’listed,” another been beguiled into the Navy by that “dirty little Dap,” a third—a lanky youth nicknamed “Ladders”—had gone to London to see the coronation of King William, and had disappeared, while his devil-may-care younger brother had shot a rabbit at night and been transported to “Wan Demon’s Land,” a name that made Jinny shudder. This last was the only son of whose present locality he was even vaguely aware, though, oddly enough, the sailor son had once sent him word that, landing with a boat’s crew upon an island called “Wan Couver,” he had come upon “Ladders” in the service of the Hudson Bay Company, living in a stockaded fort called after the Queen, and surrounded by naked, painted Indians. But as none of these children were ever to dare cross their father’s doorstep again, there did not seem much help to be looked for from any quarter of the globe that might contain them. And Jinny was sorry she had not left the cobwebbed corners in their original mystery, for as the stories multiplied, the old man began to loom as a sort of sinister raven that drives out its own offspring, though gradually she came to see behind all the stories the same tale of a cast-iron religion against which the young generation broke itself. Or was it only a cast-iron obstinacy, she asked herself, after working out that the first at least of these family jars must have occurred before her grandfather’s oft-narrated encounter with John Wesley.

It was with a new astonishment that she learnt he had been careful to make his will, lest Blackwater Hall should fall into the hands of his youngest surviving rascal. “And who’ve you left it to?” she inquired innocently.

“Why, who has the nat’ral right to it? Sidrach, in course, as ought to has had it ’stead o’ me, he bein’ the eldest. He’s been cut out o’ the wote, too, what goos with the property and what’s worth pounds and pounds.”

He was so convinced of the righteousness of this will, and appeared so genuinely fond of his brother, that Jinny was afraid to suggest the strong probability of Sidrach predeceasing him. Indeed Sidrach began now to play a larger and larger part in his thoughts, his mind reverted to the early days of the “owler,” and gradually the prosperity of those days shone again over the patriarch in “Babylon.” Sidrach now loomed as a star of hope, and Daniel spoke constantly of paying his long-projected visit to him at Chelmsford, designing apparently to drive the cart himself, and to inform his brother of the magnanimous bequest that was coming to him—a legacy that would suggest to Sidrach corresponding magnanimity in the living present. Afraid the Gaffer would actually set forth on this dangerous and visionary quest, Jinny did her best to discredit the notion of Sidrach’s opulence, and quoted “Rolling stones gather no moss,” but the Gaffer argued tenaciously that if his eldest brother had not been comfortably off, he would have come to seek the shelter of their roof-tree, or at least applied for their assistance, as he must be getting old, or at least (he modified it) too old to work. Jinny offered to write to Sidrach to inquire, but her grandfather could not find the ten-year-old letter inviting the visit. No, he would go over and find Sidrach instead, and Jinny was reduced to pointing out from day to day how unfavourable the weather was for the excursion. As the days grew shorter and shorter, the project, finding no opposition to nourish it, seemed to subside. Jinny was almost conscience-stricken when one Sunday after church Mr. Fallow showed her a paragraph in the Chelmsford Chronicle, stating that “another link with the past” had been broken by the death “last Monday from a fall downstairs” in the Chelmsford poorhouse of a centenarian named Sidrach Quarles, who claimed to be a hundred and five, and who was certainly well over the hundred, his recollections, which were a source of entertainment to all visitors, going back to the days when England was still ruled by a “furriner,” meaning thereby George II.

The shock Jinny received at this was more of life than of death. It made her realize she had never quite believed in Sidrach’s existence, and this sense of his substantiality almost swamped the minor fact of his decease. She saw no reason why he should not remain substantial. Now that she had perhaps been guilty of baulking her grandfather’s last chance of seeing his beloved brother, she did not feel equal to robbing him of his last hope of assistance. He might even agitate himself over making a fresh will, and it was far better to let Providence or the lawyer folk decide on his heir. No doubt when the dread necessity arose, the youngest son would be raked up from somewhere. But that dark moment still seemed far. The longer her grandfather lived, the more she had got used to the idea of his never dying. True, Sidrach had died, though his habit of living had been even more ingrained, but they did not take proper care of you in a workhouse, and besides he had died of an accident. She would keep Daniel from that fate, even as she would keep him from the poorhouse.

As she sat at his side by the fire that Sunday night, knitting him a muffler, her thoughts were playing so pitifully over poor old Sidrach in his bleak pauper’s grave, that she was not at all surprised when her grandfather announced with sudden decision that he would go to see Sidrach the very next day. With a chill at her heart as though a dead hand had been placed on it, she told him gently that it was nonsense and that he must wait now till the spring.

But he shook his head obstinately. “Don’t seem as ef Oi’ll last out till the spring.”

She laughed forcedly. “What an idea!”

“Not unless there’s an election and Oi can buy grub with my wote-money,” he explained. “And Oi ain’t heerd as Parlyment is considerin’ the likes of us.”

“You’ve always had plenty to eat!” she protested, colouring up.

“That ain’t enough in the larder when Oi looks, ne yet for Methusalem in the barn. Ye’ve got to have a store like the beer in my barrel. Where’s my flitch? Where’s my cheeses? Same as we’re snowbound, like the year Sidrach went away, where would Oi get my Chris’mus dinner? ’Tis a middlin’ long way to Babylon, but Oi’ll start with the daylight and be back between the lights, and ef Oi’m longer, why the moon’s arly. Oi’ll be proper pleased to see dear Sidrach again—he larnt me my letters and Oi’ll bring him back to live with us, now he’s gittin’ oldish. It ain’t good for a man to live alone, says the Book, and that’ll be good for us too, he bein’ as full o’ suvrans as a dog of fleas.”

“Nip isn’t full of fleas,” she said with mock anger, hoping to make a diversion. “Why, you scrub him yourself!”

But he went on, unheeding. “Daniel Quarles has allus been upright, and he’d sooner die than goo to his darter or the poorhouse.”

She thought miserably that the poorhouse was where he would have to go to find any traces of his beloved Sidrach, and she set herself by every device of logic or cajolery to discourage this revived dream of the journey. He might not even find Sidrach in such a big city, she now hinted, but he laughed at that. Everybody knew Sidrach, “a bonkka, hansum chap with a mosey face and a woice like the bull of Bashan and as strong too. Wery short work he’d ha’ made of Master Will. Carry him in, indeed! Carried him out—and with one hand—that’s what Sidrach would ha’ done! Why, he’s tall enough to light the street-lamps in Che’msford!”

These street-lamps, Jinny gathered, still figured in his mind as of oil, and she was able by dexterous draughts on his reminiscences to put off the evil day of his expedition. But whenever there was visible dearth at table, the thought of his rich brother, flared up again.

Could Blackwater Hall perhaps be sold, she thought desperately, and the money spent on his declining years. The thought was stimulated by a meeting of the Homage Court which came from railhead in the “Flynt Flyer,” and before which Miss Gentry’s landlady as a copyholder had to do “suit and service” in the Moot Hall to the Lords of the Manor.

But Jinny ascertained that Beacon Chimneys, a ramshackle place with much land, had been bought up recently by Farmer Gale for his new bride at fifty shillings an acre, farm and buildings thrown in; a rate at which Blackwater Hall would not even yield the forty shillings supposed to be its annual value as a voting concern—whereas the Gaffer’s view, cautiously extracted, ran: “Ef you spread suvrans all over my land, each touchin’ the tother, you pick up your pieces and Oi keep my land.” Moreover, Mr. Fallow, to whom she had broached the idea, reminded her feelingly that old people could not be moved. He was keenly interested, however, to learn that the tenure was an example of Borough English and hunted up the local Roll of Customs (7th Edward IV) proclaiming that “Time out of the Mind of Man” the “ould auncient Custom of the Bourow” had been for the heritage to go to the “youngest Sonne of the first wife.”

At heart Jinny was glad the idea of selling the Hall was impracticable: for what would have become of Methusalem and the business of “Daniel Quarles, Carrier”? To surrender before the “Flynt Flyer” would have been a bitter pill indeed.
IV

When all but the last swallows had departed, and Christmas began to loom in the offing, the Sidrach obsession resurged, and there being a spell of bright, clear weather, the only way she could devise to stave off the expedition was to pretend to undertake it herself. This was the more necessary as she was not certain the scheme did not cover a crafty design to drive Methusalem back to the knacker’s for the five pounds. She would start very early and go, not to Chelmsford, but to “Brandy Hole Creek.” Instead of waiting her Christmas letter to Commander Dap, she would visit him personally. He was, after all, a relative and would not like to see his brother-in-law starve—of course she would accept nothing for herself. Already she had intended to skirt the subject at Christmas, but to ask assistance openly was painful, while if one was too reticent one might be misunderstood. In conversation one could feel one’s way.

So on a misty morning of late November, when the peewits were calling over the dark fields, she set out, the old man watching her off with a lantern.

“And do ye bring back Sidrach,” he called after her, “sow we can all live happy.”

For answer she blew her horn cheerily, feeling this was less a lie than speech. She would come back with help of some sort—that was certain. Whether she would confess that the help came from Commander Dap or would attribute it to Sidrach, or whether it would be wiser to come back with the discovery of Sidrach’s death, trusting to its staleness to blunt the blow and to the news of Dap’s assistance to overcome it, or whether it would be imprudent to mention Dap at all, not merely because it would be hard to explain how she had met the Commander of the Watch Vessel at Chelmsford, but because her grandfather in his inveterate venom against Dap was capable of refusing his favours—on all these distracting alternatives she hoped to make up her mind during the day. Here, too, she would perhaps have to feel her way. But she now miserably realized the wisdom of the Spelling-Book’s “writing-piece”: “Lying may be thought convenient and profitable because not so soon discovered; but pray remember, the Evil of it is perpetual: For it brings persons under everlasting Jealousy and Suspicion; for they are not to be believed when they speak the Truth, nor trusted, when perhaps they mean honestly.” She meant honestly enough, God knew, but into what a tangle she was getting. She consoled herself with the thought that anyhow there would be no pretending that day in her business—to spare Methusalem on so long a journey the empty boxes had been left at home.

Single drops oozed upon her as she started, but as the mist lifted, though it revealed sodden, blackened pastures on both sides of her route, the underlying betterness of the weather manifested itself, and soon under an arching blue Methusalem was almost trotting over withering bracken and fallen leaves in a world of browns and yellows, while an abnormally friendly robin perching on the cart-shaft, and the scarlet-berried bryony festooning the hedgerows, contributed with the gleaming holly-berries to colour her darkling mood. There was a certain refreshment, too, in going off by this new route, where she for her part was as unknown. It was odd how the mere turning her back on the Chipstone Road transformed everything. Even the path—though this was not so pleasant for Methusalem—had at first an upward tendency, and her mere passing evoked stares and comments. This surprised her in turn till she remembered Will’s disapprobation. She did not realize that the visible emptiness of the cart, with its implication that she was not plying, only driving it to some male headquarters, mitigated the sensation, and she congratulated herself there was no old client to observe the absence of cargo. In the first few miles she met no soul she knew except the taciturn lout who had once directed her to Master Peartree’s shearing-shed, and who was now preparing a feeding-ground for the flock, pulling out mangolds with a picker and hurling them over the hurdled field from a broken-pronged fork. The sheep had to go to this higher ground for fear of floods, he informed her in a burst of communicativeness, and it wasn’t half as eatable.

Passing a row of thatched, black-tarred cottages at a moment when the mothers were coming to the garden gates to speed their broods to school, she offered lifts till her space was packed with little ones. The old cart was now alive with youth and laughter, and the flocks of rooks from the elms were out-chattered. The road lay between great fields flanked by broad ditches, along which argosies of yellow leaves went sailing, and there were shooters with dogs, happy duck-ponds, old towers and steeples, black barns, gabled old houses with verge-boards over the windows, quaint inn-signs and mossy-tiled granges, and the ground kept humping itself and dropping more erratically than her home circuit, but never sufficiently to spoil the sublime flatness in which single figures stooping to turn over the soil showed like quadrupeds in a vast circle. She must needs go a bit out of her way to reach the school, which lay in a little town on the estuary, and it was a thrilling moment when from her seat she had her first far-off glimpse of the very waters that had beglamoured her childhood—outwardly it was only the gleam as of a white river with hazy land beyond, and on the hither side a few black huts looking almost like vessels; but over everything was wrapped a dreamy peace, which the clamour of the actual children could not penetrate, while in her nostrils—though it was surely too far off to be wafted to her—there arose the strange, salty, putrid odour of fenland, offensive and delectable. And as the road curved slowly towards the shore, all the charm and mystery of childhood seemed to be in those barges with the red-brown sails, those grassy knolls and unlovely mud-flats, in which rotting boats stuck half sunken.

Before she could deposit her charges in their classrooms some had dropped off and were looking for treasure in the flat, dyke-seamed fields. They had arrived too early for school, they explained. But she felt rewarded for carrying them to the waterside when she espied the long, low hull and great brown sail of Bidlake’s barge. With a blast of her horn she summoned the trio of females, but only the twins mounted to the deck to wave hands at her as the broad wherry came tacking and gliding past, the shaggy Ephraim explaining in an indecorous shout that the missus was to be “laid aside” again, and this time he was looking around for a nice quiet lodging on shore for her and the girls. How handsome Sophy and Sally were growing, she thought, how charmingly they had smiled, just as if she had never left off bringing them presents. What a comfort they were so grown up now; they should soon be fending for themselves.

After the barge was wafted away, she remained on the shore a few minutes, fascinated by the lattice-work reflection of the clouds on the water, which through their scudding over it against the stream seemed to be going in opposite directions at once. She did not know why this phenomenon was agitating the recesses of her being; but suddenly there flashed up from the obscure turmoil the lines of Miss Gentry in her sibylline mood:

When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,

Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,

And Jinny shall then learn Passion’s force.

Of course this was not the Brad, nor was it really going two ways at once, and in any case who wanted a husband or Passion? Clucking so suddenly to Methusalem that his movement scattered some poultry pecking around him amid golden straw, she turned up through the High Street. At a fishmonger’s shop she got down and bought a pennyworth of bloaters for her grandfather’s supper, the man sliding them off a rod where they hung like blackened corpses from a gibbet. She was half minded to inspect the shop of the “Practical Tailor” next door, to see if she could not pick up something cheap and serviceable for the old man’s winter wear, but there was nothing in the little house-window, not even a roll of cloth, except illustrations of men’s clothing so ultra-fashionable and dear that she was frightened to go in. “Pacha D’Orsay Chesterfields, Codringtons, Sylphides, Peltoes, Zephyr Wrappers, etc., etc., every description of Winter Coat”—here was assuredly what he needed. But one pound five? Who was there behind the sea-wall that could rise to such prices? Possibly it was here that Mr. Flippance had got his wedding equipment. She returned sadly to her cart, not even noticing that all these fashionable pictures were simply cut out of the catalogue of the great Moses & Son, London.

The road now led again through great grass-lands under shimmering clouds floating in a spacious blue, and with gentle slopes and hillocks, though little streams had replaced the broad ditches. There were rabbits taking the air that showed white scuts at the approach of Nip. Far to the right she left the saltings with their grazing cattle, but she could still see them from her driving-board, and the marshes stretched, humped and brown and infinitely interstreaked, a mud-maze with purple herbage and motley sea-birds.

Then suddenly there was a thunder and clatter behind her, and she pulled her horse mechanically to the left to avoid a coach, not realizing till it slowed down that this was the “Flynt Flyer’s” day for the district. Her heart beat fast, almost painfully, and she went scarlet with the thought that Will would think she had come purposely on his track. Why, oh why, had she just chosen that day? There was no turning to be seen and desperately she steered Methusalem’s nose towards a farm-gate, prepared to trespass, but it proved to be only a “lift” for wagons, opened by raising the rail from its slots, a feat which Methusalem’s nose could not achieve. She leaped down and tried to pull it up herself, but her fingers were trembling, and in an instant Will was at her side, hat gracefully in hand, the rail lifted up, and the gate held aside for her passing. Blushing still more furiously under the gaze of the coach passengers, she led Methusalem through, and as she passed she said with a sweet smile: “Thank you.”

This was all the audience heard or saw, but what was really said and substantially understood by both principals was:

Will: “Oh, my dear Jinny, how pretty and kissable you look in that becoming new bonnet, and isn’t it silly to be trying to compete with me along this road, when, though you get business from goodness knows who, you can’t even keep your old customers on your own route? You haven’t got the tiniest parcel, I see, nor any hope of one. Really you would do better to accept my offer of a partnership, or better still to get off the roads altogether, for the winter is going to be a hard one, and perhaps if we dropped our silly sullen silence and began to find out each other’s good points again, who knows but what we might come to another sort of partnership? Anyhow I am delighted to open this lift for you, but what the devil you are going to do in a field just being ploughed is what I shall watch with amusement.”

Jinny: “You perfectly unbearable Mr. Flynt! How mean of you to come spying into my empty cart! If you want to know, I am not out on business to-day at all, it’s a little friendly call I am making on the farmer. I haven’t, like you, to work all the week round to scrape together enough to feed my horses. Two days a week keeps me in luxury—ay, and Gran’fer too. And don’t pretend to be so gay and happy—I know what a grumpy, runty chap you are at home, and how you’re still hankering after that Blanche Jones who has thrown you away like an old shoe. Or if it’s my refusal to be partners with you that’s rankling, and you are even thinking after all of a closer partnership, then all I can say is, you must be the village idiot if you fancy I’ll put up with Blanche’s leavings. Don’t imagine that silly old coach with the silly wanty-hook and skewers painted on it is very attractive to me. Why, if you were to come to me in a coach of gold like the Lord Mayor of London, with six milk-white steeds spruced up with flowers and ribbons like Methusalem on May Day, and say: ‘I love you, Jinny, come and sit in silks and diamonds on my box-seat,’ I should up with my horn and blow a blast of scorn, for I hate and despise you, and how dare you come ogling me before all the coach?”

And still retaining her sweet smile, Jinny gazed at the shirt-sleeved ploughmen, who though vaguely astonished at the invasion of their field, continued their stolid operations. Jinny arrested her cart to watch with equal stolidity the white whirls and long lines of fluttering gulls that followed the slow-moving ploughs, with such a twittering and circling and looking so beautiful over the reddish earth and under the blue sky. There was beauty, too, she felt, in the youth who from his white basket sprinkled seeds with a graceful motion, and when he smiled at her, she did not hesitate to remark in her sweetest tone on the rainy autumn, spinning out the hygrometric conversation till Will felt it almost a flirtation. Fuming and fumbling with the top rail, he took as much time as possible to readjust it in its slots. But in this game of patience he knew he must be beaten: however amusedly he might pretend to watch her pretences, his passengers would compel him to go on, and so, in no amused state of mind, at a moment when the gulls as by a magic clearance disappeared to a bird, he followed their example. When the whirlwind of his passing had died in the distance, Jinny came back again through the lift, with the feeling that Methusalem must think her a fool, and wondering if he were not right.

Soon after, she fell in with a carter who was going her way with sacks of flour for his master, and as they jogged along, conversing pleasantly, after the failure of his attempt to chaff and flirt, she was surprised to learn that he had till recently plied as a carrier on this very road, but had been ousted by the “Flynt Flyer.” It had never occurred to her that there were other victims, but as he went on to denounce Will, she found herself defending the rights of competition and pointing out the service the coach rendered to the neighbourhood, and the carter fell back upon another grievance about which he was even more embittered. On one of his last journeys a man he had carried from the Creek had got off without paying, and he had foolishly let him go, thinking he was “a Brandy Hole chap” and would be returning by the same vehicle. But he had vanished from his ken. “Oi thought he was a Brandy Hole chap,” he kept repeating plaintively.

She was glad to shed him at “The Jolly Bargee,” a small inn with a sanded tap-room and no visible taps, where, amid a company she saw already gathered over frothing mugs, he would doubtless bewail the competition of the coach and the trickery of the fare he had taken for “a Brandy Hole chap.”

Noon was tolling from the square church-tower when Jinny espied again her treasured picture of it, rising from a harmony of golden ricks and lichen-spotted tiles, just as on that happy, enchanted day when she had journeyed to the funeral of her mother’s Aunt Susannah. How quickly one came—she thought with pleased astonishment—free of the detours and delays of custom, or the pretence thereof! There would be ample time to visit the grave of her father and mother before going on to the Watch Vessel, especially as it was thus on her way. But, remembering with a sad smile the dispute as to whether her grandfather could go to his sister’s funeral in his cart, she took care to draw up her shabby vehicle in a nook beyond the lych-gate. Nip had vanished—like the “Brandy Hole chap”—she found; probably he was also at “The Jolly Bargee.” Leaving Methusalem to his well-earned if not well-filled nose-bag, she returned to the gate.

The monkey-trees and weeping willows were unchanged, though in the path leading to the church-porch there was an avenue of young rose-bushes which she did not remember, and screened by them, to the right, a freshly dug grave which made her shudder. She hastened towards the crumbling tower—still more crumbled now—which her memory connected with the sacred spot. The blackberry-bushes still swathed it, though they were now stripped of their fruit, and in its shadow she found again, not without surprise, the familiar stone, the object of so much whimsical wrangling. Still Roger Boldero lay “safely neaped in Christ.” She was almost certain that her grandfather had sent a couple of pounds t............