As John the apostel sygh with syght,

??I syghe that cyty of gret renoun,

Jherusalem so newe and ryally dyght,

??As hit wacz lyght fro the heven adoun.

“Pearl” (Fourteenth century).
I

Jinny’s passage through Long Bradmarsh with her overflowing freight of fares and live stock was like a triumphal progress. The loungers outside “The King of Prussia” actually raised a cheer. Fresh from the excitement of the Mott inquest, they knew the adventurous significance of her dripping cart-wheels and dry tilt, and were quick to see the symbolic significance of her carrying the disabled driver of “The Flynt Flyer,” though its destruction was still unknown to them. At the instance of Elijah, she went round by Foxearth Farm, so as to put up Maria and the poultry there, as well as to reassure Blanche of his safety. Though the interview with the latter was naturally veiled from the occupants of the cart, it was obvious to them that it was Mrs. Purley who was doing the talking. Her voice, wafted to them through walls which dulled the actual words, was like an endless drone, each sentence fusing breathlessly into the next in a maddening meaninglessness. Elijah returned with a dejected mien: due not merely, it transpired, to the cascade that had broken over him, but to the fact that Blanche was just washing her head (that generation did not speak of its hair) and unable to see him. “As if you hadn’t suffered enough from water,” said Jinny sympathetically.

She had her first view that day of Mr. Skindle’s bridal mansion. Its two stories rose in new red brick on the outskirts of Chipstone, in a forlorn field that was just being “developed,” and its architecture, from bow-window to chimney-stack, was an imitation of the residence of Dr. Mint, the leading human doctor.

“There’s Rosemary Villa!” said Elijah proudly, and Will smiled at the recollection of Bundock’s jape and Blanche’s merriment.

Ere Elijah, leaping down first, could mount his beautifully whitened steps, the door was opened excitedly and a gaunt grey-haired charwoman, with a smear on her cheek, dropped her grate-blacking brush and fell upon Elijah’s neck in a spasm of emotion.

“Thank God! Thank God!” she sobbed.

“Here! Don’t do that!” said Elijah, writhing in her grasp. He was blushingly disconcerted by this assertion of maternity before company: she had so long accepted the position of drudge that he had forgotten that his absence during the flood might reawaken the mother. “You’re all black!” he explained, disentangling himself.

“That’s mourning for you!” Jinny called merrily from her cart, and the jest relieved the situation. She looked curiously at the lank, aproned figure, fancying she caught a hint of grace in the movement of the limbs and a gleam of fire in the dark eyes. But this dim sense of the tragic passing of romance could not even faintly obscure her own happiness, on which the imminent separation from Will was the only cloud. Except for the thrilling contact achieved in helping him to alight, she had to part with him less cordially than with Caleb, who to her surprise and Martha’s gave her a smacking kiss ere he stepped down. “Thank you, dearie—ye’ve saved our lives,” he said. Jinny scoffed at that—the gratitude was due to Bidlake and Ravens. “Well, the missus’ll have to kiss them,” he sniggered. “You do your own kissing,” said Martha sharply. “And keep your kissing for your own, too.” All this talk of kissing but aggravated the pang of the frigid parting with the one person who mattered.

“Good-bye; see you soon,” was all Will said.

“You bet your bottom dollar on that,” she flashed, with a relieved smile, reading into his words a promise to come over the very next day.

“Oh, I’ll pay you next time,” he smiled back, and she had a delicious sense of his meaning to pay his lost wager in the currency with which Caleb had just acquitted his debt. She promised the old people she would come round on Friday and tell them how Frog Farm stood—if it did stand! But though her eyes exchanged with Will’s secret promises for the morrow, an eternity of loneliness seemed to lie before her, as she drove back to the town, magnanimously blowing the “Buy a Broom Polka” to apprise her faithless clients.
II

So many commissions clamoured for her from folk with relations in the flooded area that she had no difficulty in redeeming her dress from the pawnshop that very day. But it was not on account of the many calls upon her that she arrived home in the dark. It was because she had forgotten to command her faithful ferry’s attendance, and been forced to take the amazed Methusalem miles round by the farther bridge. Her grandfather would be anxious, she feared: then it occurred to her—not wholly with satisfaction—that he might have followed her day’s movements by telescope. But she found him as happy as she had left him, and with the hearth blazing like a bonfire, reckless of logs. He had not observed her rescue of the Flynts, for, as she had warned him, his overtaxed right eye had become inflamed and throbbed with little darts of pain, and he had been compelled to fall back on the voluptuous venom of his reflections, supplemented by a text which he had hunted out with his other eye.

“It come into my mind all of an onplunge,” he chuckled, putting a bony finger on a verse. “The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea,” she saw with a shudder. “That won’t be long afore he follows his hoss,” said the Gaffer grimly as he polished his lens for the spectacle. “Oi will sing to the Lord,” he read out, “for He hath triumphed gloriously.”

“Don’t be so wicked, Gran’fer,” she cried.

“Wicked! That’s roighteous—to sing to the Lord.”

“You don’t want people drowned!”

“Dedn’t he want us to starve?”

“Looks more like his starving now. We can afford to forgive. You’re reading the wrong end of the Bible, Gran’fer. We’ve got to turn the other cheek.”

“Sow Oi would, ef anybody was bussin’ me,” he cackled.

Jinny flushed and turned both her cheeks away.

“Why, the day Oi met Annie at Che’msford Fair——” he began.

“I don’t want to hear about Annie,” she said severely. “She wasn’t your wife.”

“That’s why I tarned from iniquity. But she ain’t nobody’s wife now.”

“No, poor thing!” she said. “And it’s a pity she’s Mr. Skindle’s mother, for he makes her do all the chares of his big new house.”

“Well, but she’s a woman, ain’t she?” he asked with unexpected lack of sympathy. “She’d have to do her husband’s chares.”

“Not at her age!”

“At her age? Annie’s a young woman.”

“Compared with you, perhaps,” she smiled.

“Git over me, her having a lad that size. Oi count she’s worritin’ over him, cooped up in Frog Farm.”

“Not now. They’re all safely out of it.”

“What! That pirate thief’s got safe!”

“Thank God!”

“That ain’t God’s doin’—that’s some evil interferin’ sperrit what comes out o’ dead bodies, says John Wesley. Who took ’em off?” he demanded fiercely.

“They came off in Bidlake’s barge,” she said weakly. “And don’t you be so unchristian. Isn’t it enough he’s——?”

“That ain’t right, interferin’ with the texts!” he interrupted doggedly. “Oi never could abide they Bidlakes. Ephraim’s grandfather come competitioning on the canals, wuss than Willie Flynt.”

“Well, Mr. Flynt can’t competition any more, can he? I expect,” she added with difficult lightness, “he’ll be coming round now to make friends.”

“Come round, will he? Just let him show his carroty head inside my doorway—he’ll be outside like fleck, Oi promise ye.”

“But if he wants to make it up——!”

“He’s got to goo down on his hands and knees fust.”

“Perhaps he will,” she suggested. Indeed she had little doubt of it. That wonderful moment, with its climax of mouth to mouth, had reduced this long foreseen obstacle to a grotesque bogy. In the light of mutual and confessed love the perspective changed, and if she had once thought that she could not have borne to see him grovel even for her sake, that it would actually impair the love grovelled for, she had now been uplifted into a plane of existence in which for him not to humour her grandfather seemed as childish as the nonagenarian’s own demand.

The old man now turned on her a red-rimmed probing eye. “He’d never come crawlin’ to me ef he warn’t arter summat. And he’s been tryin’ to git round you fust—don’t tell me! What’s his game?”

“Perhaps—he’d like—a partnership.”

“Oi dessay he would!” he chuckled ironically. “He’s got brass enough for anythin’. Why, the chap was arter you once. Ye dedn’t know it, but there ain’t much hid from Daniel Quarles. Oi suspicioned him the fust moment he come gawmin’ to the stable. And what’ll he bring to the pardnership? Cat’s-meat and matchwood?”

His coarseness jarred every nerve, but she kept to his key of jocosity. “Didn’t you say he had brass?”

“He, he, he!” he cackled. “But it’s the wrong kind o’ brass. Ef he wanted to be a pardner, why dedn’t he come when he had his coach and hosses?”

“He did. Don’t you remember?”

“Did he?” he said blankly. “Then why dedn’t Oi take ’em?”

“That was all my fault, Gran’fer.”

“No, it warn’t, dearie. It was ’cause he said Oi’d made muddles. Oi remember now. He come and swabbled, and chucked a pot at me. And he’s got to goo down on his hands and knees for it!”

Jinny saw it was hopeless to unravel these blended memories of Will and Elijah, as grotesquely interwoven as one of her own nightmares, on whose formation it seemed to throw light. She was glad, though, that the sharp edges of the actuality had now faded.

“Yes, yes—he shall,” she promised soothingly.

“And then there was that weddin’-cake what Mr. Flippance sent us,” burst up now from the labouring depths.

“Yes—wasn’t that a lovely cake?” she agreed.

“Oi offered him a shiver—shows ’twarn’t me as wanted to swabble. But he lifted his whip at me and Oi snapped it in two like my ole pipe when John Wesley stopped my smokin’. Oi don’t want no pardnerships.”

“Of course not, Gran’fer.”

“Daniel Quarles it’s been for a hundred year, and Daniel Quarles it’s a-gooin’ to remain.”

“Of course. Daniel Quarles.”

“And he’s got to goo down on his hands and knees.”

“And so have I,” she laughed, “for we’ve let our bonfire die down. Poor Mr. Flynt—he’s got a great admiration for you, spite that you’ve licked him.”

“Oi guessed you and him been gammickin’. You can’t hide much from Daniel Quarles. And ef that little Willie has got a proper respect for his elders and betters, that shows Oi larnt him a lesson.”

“You did, Gran’fer. He’s a changed man. There! Isn’t that a nice blaze again? He’s broken his right arm, too, poor fellow.”

But here she had blundered. The old man’s face lit up, not from the fire, but with a roaring flame of its own. “Thank the Lord,” he shouted, “as hears the prayer of the humble. The high arm shall be broken, says the Book, and it’s come true. The arm what dreft the hosses is broken like the coach!” He ended with a fresh cackle and rubbed his skinny hands before the blaze.

“You didn’t pray for that?” said Jinny, white and rebuking. “That was unchristian.”

“That’s what King David prayed, Jinny, and he was a man after God’s own heart. ‘Break thou the arm of the wicked’—Oi’ll show it you in the Psalm.”

“I don’t want to see it—King David wasn’t a Christian yet. And we’ve got to forgive and forget, and not bear a grudge for ever, especially when a man’s down. Think of John Wesley.”

“Happen you’re right, Jinny,” he said, softening. “We’ve got to forgive the evil-doer, and ef the Lord’s got him in hand Oi count we needn’t trouble—he’ll git all he desarves.”

And with that Jinny felt fairly content.
III

But though the ground was thus prepared for his advent, Will did not come. “What are you prinkin’ yourself for?” her grandfather asked in the morning. “It ain’t your day.” It was certainly not her day. It was more like a night—a long agony of expectation with every rustle of wind on the dead leaves sounding like his footstep. Towards dusk she even swept the water-logged landscape with the now neglected telescope. If she did not find him, she found—what was almost as soothing—a reason for his not coming. The broken bridge! How could he go all those miles round? Joyfully she called herself a fool, and awaited the letter he would send instead. The letter would fill up the Thursday and on the Friday she would go to him.

But even this milder expectation of a visit from Bundock went unfulfilled. At first she thought with some relief that Bundock was again shirking the circuit. But no! The glass revealed the slave of duty serving Beacon Chimneys. Throwing on her jacket, but bonnetless, she ran across the Common to meet her letter. But Bundock only gave her grumbles at the overstrain on his feet, and leaving him, to hide her dismay, she walked blindly up Beacon Hill till she was startled to come upon Master Peartree in the bosom of his new-born flock. It did not even occur to her that this was a proof he had escaped the flood, and that the occasion called for congratulation. But the sight of his lambs bounding and his ewes scooping out mangolds brought to mind his old account of a sheep that had broken its arm “in a roosh,” and at once a second rush of joy at her silliness and a still more paradoxical pleasure in Will’s broken arm flooded her soul. How could he write, the poor boy? It was not that she had really forgotten the state of his arm—indeed, she had thought of the sling as clogging the springiness of his walk, and making it still more impossible for him to come—only she must be going crazy again, she felt; just as in the days when she had taken home wedding-cakes and brought Elijah hairpins. Her eyes now filled with happy tears and, joyous as the yeanlings whose tails vibrated with such voluptuous velocity as they sucked, she gave chase to a little black lamb and kissed its sable nose.

That brought her thoughts back to the flood by way of Mother Gander’s hostelry and its drowned landlord, and she inquired at last about Master Peartree’s losses. They had been limited to one bullock, she was glad to hear, though no such glow of Christian feeling possessed her as she had recommended to her grandfather, when the shepherd-cowman proceeded to estimate that what with stacks, root-crops, and winter-wheat, Farmer Gale was the poorer by several thousand pounds. Other shepherds had been badly hit, but he himself—thanks to the Almighty—had got more twins and triplets than ever, and taking her round his plaza of straw he showed her the yellow-splashed, long-legged lambkins in the thatched pens, one set of which he would have to feed by bottle, for handsome mothers did not give the most milk, he moralized.

She ran homewards as full of the joy of life as the leaping lambs, though she was living only for the morrow. Through the frosty air she felt a first breath of spring, birds were singing, and even beginning to build, and the flood, she was sure, was falling. But when next day she reached Rosemary Villa, the gaunt drudge informed her that only the old Flynts were in! Her heart turned to lead. So he had not stayed in for her, though she, for her part, had raced to him by the shortest routes, irrespective of business, cutting through Chipstone proper by a single side-street. It was not till she had learnt that he was gone, like Elijah and all the world, to Mr. Mott’s funeral, that her heart grew light again—she seemed to batten on tragedies these days. Of course Will could not avoid this mark of respect, he who had always put up his coach in the courtyard of “The Black Sheep,” and perhaps she ought to have gone to the funeral too, and would probably have encountered it had she not skipped the High Street in her eagerness. She remembered now some lowered blinds in the street she had scuttled through, and a slow booming bell, whose disregarded notes now at last donged their message to her brain. But perhaps it was better so—her redeemed frock was too gay, her winter shawl and bonnet without a single touch of black. She ought to have borne the inevitable funeral in mind though, she told herself reproachfully. In her present guise she could hardly station even in the courtyard. It was fortunate “Mother Gander” no longer expected to see her within. How embarrassing it would have been for the widow to meet the confidante of her unmeasured denunciations! Probably the whole place would be closed for the day, though she supposed the Chelmsford coach with the passengers from London would have to come in as usual.

Apprised by the barking of Nip, the Flynt couple had descended, looking uneasy, for they had been speaking of her not long before. Their hostess-drudge had started the ball as she closed the door upon Will, outward bound for the funeral. “You’d think he’d found a fortune, not lost one,” the melancholy creature had commented, warmed by that youthful sunshine. “I reckon he wasn’t happy hartin’ Jinny’s business,” Caleb had surmised. “And to be happy is as good as a fortune.” Upon which Martha, who was equally in the passage “to see Will off,” had surprised them by a sudden sob. “She’s thinkin’ of that poor drownded young man,” Caleb had apologized, leading her gently upstairs. “Oi do hope Will’ll keep a proper face for the funeral.”

That appropriate face, however, had continued to be Martha’s, and the explanation thereof when they were alone had surprised Caleb more than the sob.

“I knew she’d rob me of Will. I knew it from the first moment she wanted to read his letter to me.”

“Rob you of him!”

“They’re in love. Are you blind?”

“You don’t say! Lord! Little Jinny! Why, she’s a baiby!”

“A cunning woman. Came after him even when you’d have thought he was safe behind the flood! This letter will be all that’s left to me! You mark my words!”

“Don’t, dear heart. You’re wettin’ the letter—it’ll spile. But dedn’t Oi leave my mother to come to you, as the Book commands?”

“That’s different. He’s all I’ve got. I can’t trust him to Jinny—she’s too flighty—always singing.”

“Sow’s the birds, but look what noice nests they make! ’Tain’t as if ’twas that Purley gal as Bundock warned us of, allus lookin’ at herself like a goose in a pond. We ought to be thankful as Will’s showed sow much sense. There’s plenty o’ good farmers along the road, but there’s no weeds to Jinny even three fields back.”

“I don’t wonder you go kissing her! Pity you can’t marry her yourself!”

“Oi’d have no chance agin Will’s looks, dear heart. He takes arter his mother, ye see.”

Dulcifying as this jocose finale had proved, it did not diminish the awkwardness of now meeting Jinny, but Martha, who had not even the consolation of finding an Ecclesia flourishing in Chipstone, was anxious to hear how far the flood had subsided from their beloved Frog Farm. They were both experiencing all the pangs of exile, aggravated by the discomforts of a house with monotonously boarded floors, forbiddingly fine furniture, and light and water coming unnaturally out of taps, and their grievances and yearnings for a return to reality now monopolized a conversation which Jinny strove in vain to divert to Will. She was reduced to looking at her cart for indications of the depths she had splashed through unobservantly, and could extract nothing about Will except that he insisted on paying for their board and lodging, and that this would surely take his last penny. “He’ll have to look for a job now, he’ll have no time or money to think of foolishness,” Martha told her meaningly. But this broad hint conveyed nothing to her. In her affection for the old woman it never occurred to her that she would not make a welcome daughter-in-law, now the competition was over. And knowing as a scientific fact that your ears burned if people had been talking of you—whereas hers had been tingling with the frost—she went away, all unsuspicious, in quest of the coveted young man.

The funeral was over now, she saw from the many coaches returning singly or in procession through and from the High Street. Surely the grandest funeral ever known (she thought), doubtless out of consideration for so tragic a passing, though somewhat confusing to the moral of her Spelling-Book. Elijah, whom she met changing from a coach into his trap, confirmed her impression of grandeur, and looked forward—on grounds of special information—to the toning up of the churchyard with a monument as big as money could buy, surmounted by angels, “not weeping, mind you, but blowing trumpets like Will’s.” Elijah wore a beautiful new top-hat, flat-brimmed and funereally braided. “Very lucky I had just got it for my wedding,” he confided to her.

“You won’t forget to take off the braid?” she smiled. “And when is it to be?”

“We’re having the banns read next Sunday. Blanche won’t wait a day longer, though I’m so frightfully busy through the flood—it’s a regular gold-stream.”

“And how’s Mr. Flynt’s arm?” she asked.

“He won’t let me see it now—I never knew such an obstinate pig. He’s gone to Dr. Mint.”

“What, just now?”

“No, no, he’s gone home—to Rosemary Villa, I mean.”

As soon as he was out of sight, Jinny turned Methusalem’s head back to the Villa. She hung about uncomfortably for some minutes in the thought that Will might be coming along or would be looking out of a window. But after ten unpleasant minutes she descended from her seat and fumbled shyly with the new brass knocker, feeling far more brazen than it. She almost cowered before the upstanding figure of the septuagenarian Mrs. Skindle—it vaguely reminded her of Britannia with a broom—but stammering out that she had forgotten to ask if the Villa needed anything, she ascertained that Will had not returned. To pitch her cart at the door was impossible, to go to meet him might lead to missing him, so there was nothing for it but desperately to prolong the conversation till he should reach home. Her tactics proved fatal, for her cheerful reference to Elijah’s coming marriage loosed upon her a deluge of hysterical tears, and she found herself the confidante of sorrows as tragic as Mrs. Mott’s. Poor Mrs. Skindle, throwing herself upon this sympathetic outsider, so providential a vent for her surcharged emotions, vociferated that all her children had abandoned her, that she was to be put away in the poorhouse. In vain Jinny, standing in that bleak passage, her heart astrain for Will’s coming, strove to assuage a grief which irritated rather than touched her. She could hardly bring her mind to bear upon this creature with the broom, so inopportune and irrelevant did the outburst seem, so sordid a shadow on her own romance. With surface words she assured the poor woman that all this was only in her imagination. But Mrs. Skindle, though admitting she had only divined it, kept iterating that a nod was as good as a wink, and that she wasn’t even a blind horse. Her son had gone to see Blanche on the Wednesday and had come back with the announcement of his marriage next month, and Blanche had made it a condition that his old mother should be put away. “She’d pison me, if she wasn’t afraid for her swan’s neck. And so I’ve got to be put out o’ sight. ’Tain’t as if I can’t earn my bread with this broom and duster, but she’s too grand to have me charin’ in Chipstone.”

“Well, then, what prevents you going somewhere else?” Jinny asked impatiently.

“I can’t go traipsin’ about to new places and new faces at my age. And I don’t want to go agin ’Lijah neither—he ought to ha’ been married long since, and wasn’t it me spurred him on to look that high? And won’t he have the loveliest wife in Chipstone? What’s your game, trying to drive me away? Why, if I leave Chipstone I’d never see my grandchicks.”

“Well, but would you see them anyhow, even supposing they’re hatched?”

“I reckon there’s days I’d be allowed out and I could see ’em as they went by in their baby-cart.”

“Well, at that rate you’d be happier in the poorhouse.”

“Yes,” with a burst of weeping, “I’d be happier there. Happen I’d better go there.”

“But I don’t believe your son will let you,” Jinny reassured her, and tore herself away, miserably conscious of a sort of Nemesis for her strategic lingering. She dismissed the scene from her mind. But it added to the heaviness of her heart as she drove slowly about the streets with never a glimpse of the face she sought, and the ache of his absence began to be complicated by the fear that it was wilful, or at least not unavoidable. Surely it was not possible for three days to elapse without their meeting, had he been as keen as she. Even the funeral, she now felt grimly, was not an absolute necessity of life! He could have got out of it. No, there was something behind, more sinister than funerals. She went anxiously over her one brief episode of happiness. Had she done or said anything to offend him? Was it that, on reflection, he had resented the little trick she had played at the flooded farm in luring him outside his door? Yes, that must be it. And she had sillily rubbed it in with her last words: “You bet your bottom dollar on that!” But no, he could hardly be resenting the innocent device without which they would never have known the wonder of their first kiss. The wonder? But was it a wonder to him? Tumultuous thoughts of Blanche and more shadowy others tore at her bosom. He did not really care, did not really need her.

The sport of elemental passions, she drove vaguely around, hoping against hope to espy him. She was a creature of pure feeling—unsophisticated by fiction or drama—and darkling images of death came to her for the first time. And for the first time she let her work go undone. It was no mere apprehension of meeting “Mother Gander” that finally kept her from the courtyard of the inn, no mere sense that with the sweeping away of competition she could afford to neglect for once even the commissions she already held; it was the absolute distraction of her mind. She could have borne final separation more easily than this uncertainty.

As she jogged home, she realized miserably that Will had at last succeeded in stamping out her business, if only for a day.
IV

But on her way to church on the Sunday—thanksgiving was clearly due for her restored fortunes and the fast-falling flood—all her misery, which his Saturday silence had only intensified, melted away in a moment at the sound of his voice and the sight of his sling. To add to her rapture came the thought that, a turning later, she would have encountered Miss Gentry! But his exclamation: “Why, whatever became of you, Jinny? It’s been hell!” radiated so much heaven that the closing of his lips upon hers was almost a retrogression, perturbed as it was by her shyness in the open air. And, of course, she ought to have gone to the inn-yard where he had been waiting, she saw the moment he began explaining; that was the natural station for her cart to have come to. “Do forgive me making you suffer so,” she pleaded. “But I didn’t like to go in, with Mrs. Mott in that state!”

But Mrs. Mott had not been “in that state” he corrected almost laughingly. On the contrary, with her usual unexpectedness and extremism, she had reopened the bar immediately and served there herself in her handsomest dress, with the gold chain heaving once more on the bereaved bosom. Will himself had been forced to clink glasses with her. “He wouldn’t have liked to see us gloomy—like them Peculiars,” she had said. “He was always one for jollity and life.”

The anecdote enhanced the lovers’ own joy of life, and though Jinny steered for church (if by a zigzag path to avoid other worshippers) they never got out of the fir-grove, where a tree sapped by the flood presented a comparatively dry seat amid the sodden gull-haunted ways. Perhaps it was the thrushes that encouraged them—despite the dankness—to “stick to it, stick to it.” It was certainly more comfortable for kissing, Jinny shamelessly confessed, snuggling into the cloak he had bought to cover his sling. “When we stand up, you’re too proud to stoop,” she laughed blissfully. “You make me crane my neck up.”

“That’s only through the sling,” he apologized.

“Never mind—you’re not such a Goliath—nothing so tall as Elijah!”

His eyes blazed fiercely. “Why,” she laughed, “you don’t mind not being tall?”

“Of course not,” he said mendaciously. “Only you haven’t been measuring yourself against Elijah, I hope.”

“Measuring myself—?” she began, puzzled. Then her silvery laugh rippled out. “Oh, you jealous goose! But his size’ll be a bit awkward for Blanche, won’t it?” Then a sudden memory flushed both their faces, and hastily drawing a copy of the Chelmsford Chronicle from his pocket, he directed her attention to the thrilling accounts of the great flood and the greater funeral, and her fitful attempts to peruse them constituted the only rational moments of the morning.

It was odd how the reflection of events in the mighty Essex organ seemed to redouble their importance, and how even Will swelled in Jinny’s eyes when she saw him catalogued among “leading citizens” present at “the last obsequies of the popular proprietor of ‘The Black Sheep.’?” And if Will failed to loom as large as Charley—whose death, fortunate in its journalistic opportunity, instead of being swamped by the flood, came as its climax—nevertheless he appeared in print no fewer than three times. The second occasion was the destruction of “The Flynt Flyer,” and this obituary was so long and complimentary that it almost made amends for his loss, even though he knew the details to be highly imaginative. In the third notice he owed his eminence to his father, who, Jinny learned with surprise, had been the beneficiary of a miracle. “Among the most singular of the effects produced by the Bradmarsh floods,” ran the paragraph that drew Caleb from the long obscurity of his seventy winters and which was as prolix and breathless as a sentence of Mrs. Purley’s, “may be cited the fact of a small cornstack some four yards long, recognized by a shepherd named Peartree as belonging to Mr. Caleb Flynt, of Frog Farm, father of Mr. William Flynt, the lamentable destruction of whose coach and horses under sensational circumstances is recorded in another column, having been lifted from its place by the waters that so suddenly burst upon this remote homestead; and, after floating about at their mercy, like a dismasted and rudderless ship, being deposited in safety in a higher field, wholly uninjured, save by the wet—in as firm and compact a condition as before the flood—and, apparently, without a single blade of straw in its body or its roof having been disturbed from its relative position, while other stacks in the same field, belonging to his former employer, Farmer Gale, were almost totally ruined.”

“Oh, Will, I’m so glad,” said Jinny. “I don’t mean about Farmer Gale.”

“I do. Mean hunks! Think what he paid dad all those years. But is it true about our stack, I wonder. Papers aren’t always correct.”

“Aren’t they?” She nestled closer.

“Oh dear no. You should have been in America! Haven’t you noticed it says Elijah rescued us? Such a mix-up with his housing us. That’s why I didn’t tell poor old dad till I could run up and see for myself.”

She moved back. “Oh, is that what you came for?”

“Of course not, darling. But being here, I may as well have a look.”

“Well, you’ll be able to, while I’m at church. I suppose you wouldn’t come,” she added shyly.

“Church?” he laughed. “Why, it’s nearly over!” He pointed to a pale, struggling sun that had well passed its zenith.
V

Mr. Fallow was, in fact, just at his Fifthly and Finally, with Nip for sole representative of Blackwater Hall. That faithful congregant, discovering that Jinny had dodged him as usual, had set out for church forthwith, and was utterly disconcerted to find her pew vacant. It was noted, however, that he remained awake during the sermon, pricking up his ears at the recurrent word “Methuselah,” which no doubt sounded to him like his old companion’s name. Mr. Fallow’s timely sermon on Noah’s Flood proved no less rousing to the human hearers, though it began unpromisingly with the text: “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.” But Miss Gentry, already ruffled by Jinny’s absence, wondered why so much honour should be done to Mr. Bundock “Why preach a sermon against a postman?” she asked Jinny afterwards.

The fact was, of course, that those “sceptical sophisms” which Mr. Fallow took the opportunity to traverse and confute came from “The Age of Reason,” but as Miss Gentry had heard them only from Bundock, she did not know they were inspired by Tom Paine. At any rate it was satisfactory to have them demolished and the veracity of the Bible vindicated by the very arithmetical tests with which the atheists juggled. They had “set the story of Noah and his ark as on a level with the ”Arabian Nights“ and the ages of the Patriarchs as no less fabulous than the immortality of the giants of mythology.” Well, but here was the text, Mr. Fallow thundered: “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.” A statement splendidly bare—bare as Truth alone could afford to be. But let them follow it, these dear brethren and sisters, into all its ramifications, trace the scattered threads of chronology and exhibit their marvellous congruity. Noah’s grandfather lived nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died. But at the age of 187 he had begotten Lamech, and at the age of 182 Lamech had begotten Noah. Methuselah was then just 369 years old when the hero of the Flood was born. And the Flood came, we were told in a later chapter, in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life; 600 added to 369 made 969. “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.” Had the figures made 970, the Bible would have indeed ceased to be the infallible Word of God, and atheism could have crowed, unanswered. For Methuselah was not in the ark; and every living creature outside was destroyed from the earth!

Whether he himself perished in the Flood, or whether—as the preacher preferred to believe, the aged patriarch had been removed—like his father Enoch before him—from the evil to come, was a minor issue compared with the glorious certainty that 369 added to 600 made 969 and not 970. Had Lamech or Noah been begotten one year later, or the Flood recorded as one year earlier, what a catastrophe for mankind! How the sophists would have gloated over their perverse arithmetic! Happily such discrepancies were the mere dream of the impious. “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.”

Nip refused to sit through the prayer for sceptics that followed. With the cessation of the word “Methuselah” his interest waned, and the dismal conviction overcame him that Jinny had gone back to the chapel. Tearing off at a great rate, he soon, however, scented the truants homing across the Common.

“Why, where have you been?” said his mistress, as if he were the sinner!

But his raptures at seeing united at last the twain he had done so much to bring together, served to suspend a debate that had brought the first cloud on the morning’s happiness. Having to walk smartly to Blackwater Hall with no time for dalliance, they had come at last to a serious talk about their plans, and it transpired that Will’s mind was playing about the new Australian goldfields. He seemed dangerously in the grip of the “yellow fever,” which, spreading from a Mr. Hargreaves and Summer Hill Creek, had circled the world in less than nine months. He recited to Jinny the legends of the new diggings, the quartz that was three-fourths gold, the aureous streams, the nuggets the size of melons. When he spoke of purchasing shovels and blankets, it was not, alas, for their joint home, nor were the “cradles” of his conversation indelicately domestic. How could he talk of going away, she asked, with tears in her eyes, when they had only just got to know each other? Well, of course, he didn’t mean to-morrow, with his arm like that! She needn’t begin to cry yet, but obviously this hidebound old England was no place for a man without capital. Did she expect him to become a farmhand to Farmer Gale? Of course he could go on shearing sheep and doing odd jobs and sink into a Ravens, always singing, with nothing to sing about! But if they were to marry, he must find a decent livelihood. Hard, irrefutable truths! If only—she thought—they had both been less silly while he still had his coach and horses! Impossible to suggest to a man like Will that she might manage to earn enough for him as well as for her grandfather! Of course if he had lost his arm altogether—but that was too wicked a speculation to gloat over! Had Methusalem been younger and stronger, the cart might perhaps have taken on extra rounds, with Will in command. But even that would probably have jarred his pride. No, he was a ruined man, and adventure—as he truly urged—was his only chance. And yet she clung tighter to his one good arm, glad of the respite the other had given her, and hoping that the Angel-Mother would somehow intervene to keep him in the country—if not the county—she hovered over. Sufficient for the day was the good thereof; here was Will, and Nip, and the Sunday pie in the oven—the first good dinner since Christmas, the preparation of which for her lip-smacking elder had served to keep her sane during those days of torturing suspense. How glad she was the meal would be worthy of their visitor!

A faint uneasiness did indeed begin to creep under her happiness as they crossed the rutted road that divided the Common from her gate, but she was hardly conscious what it was, vaguely putting it down to Nip’s dangerous attempts to caress them with his muddy paws.

“Here we are!” she cried gaily. “Lucky Gran’fer never asks about the sermon.”

He drew her to him. Hurriedly ascertaining that there was no eye or telescope bearing upon her, she submitted to the long ardour of his kiss. Then she drew him in turn towards the gate.

“But I’ve kissed you good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye?” she repeated blankly. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“How can I come in?”

Even then she hardly realized the situation. Foreseen as it had long been, it had so softened in her own mind—especially after her comparative success in soothing down her grandfather—that she did not realize it remained in Will’s in all its original crudity. “You’re not thinking of that nonsense!” she said, smiling. “We’ll just lift up the latch and walk in! Won’t Gran’fer be surprised?” But her smile was uneasy.

“You’ve forgotten, Jinny, he won’t have me over his doorstep.”

“Oh, is that the reason you didn’t come all the week?” The greyness creeping beneath her happiness began to spread out like a clammy fog.

“Well, how could I have got to you? I couldn’t stand about the Common in the wind and rain on the chance you might catch sight of me.”

“I’d have stood about for you,” she said simply.

“And didn’t I stand about at ‘The Black Sheep’?”

“Yes, that was my fault, sweetheart. But anyhow we won’t stand about here.” And she tugged at his arm. “Where else could you have dinner?”

“I can get some at ‘The King of Prussia.’ I’ll be just in time if I go now.”

“You desert me to get dinner!”

“You know that’s nonsense, dearest, considering I could get both if I came in.”

“Then why don’t you come in?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Because of those few high words? How absurd!”

“We won’t go into that now.”

“Yes, we will. You don’t want to eat humble pie. But it isn’t humble pie,” she laughed, with a desperate attempt at merriment, “it’s steak and kidney pie! So there!”

“But, Jinny, he forbade me to cross his sill!”

“You old goose! He never thought we’d cross it arm in arm. Like this! Come along—won’t he open his eyes and wipe his spectacles!”

He shook off her arm. “It’s no laughing matter, Jinny. An oath is an oath.”

“An oath!” she repeated dully. The violence of that grotesque collision had blurred her memory of its minuti?.

“You can’t have forgotten? He laid his hand on the Bible—he vowed to the Almighty I should never cross your threshold.”

She essayed a last jaunty smile. “Unless on your hands and knees. Don’t forget that part.”

“Is it likely I could forget such an insult?”

“Well then, that’s all right!” Her smile became braver. “We’ll crawl in together, two little babies. Come along, petsy.” And she stooped down comically.

“How can you be so childish, Jinny?”

“Isn’t it all childish? Down you go, Willie!”

But he stiffened himself physically as well as morally. “Give in to such a humiliation?”

“You won’t really be giving in,” she said, with a happy thought. “With only one arm, you can only come in on your hand and knees. So you’ll outwit him after all. Come along, poor little lopsided creature, Jinny’ll help you—and Gran’fer will forget to count your limbs, my poor brave boy!”

“It’s you that are forgetting,” he said harshly. “It’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible?”

“That I should crawl to your grandfather.”

“I see! It’s your pride you love, not me.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.” She snatched her hand from his. “Nothing can bring you to your knees.”

“It’s not true. I’d go on my hands and knees to you, as if I was in chapel, and I’d crawl on ’em across your threshold and thank God for what laid on t’other side—but you see, Jinny, what breaks me up is that I made a vow too.”

“You?”

“You don’t seem to remember anything.”

“I dare say I was a bit dazed at all the silliness. But if you swore too not to cross our threshold, why, I’ll go and let you in by the lattice. And perhaps Gran’fer will be that tickled, he’ll laugh and forget about his cranky old oath. Or perhaps he’ll reckon you have scrambled in on your hands and knees. Oh dear, isn’t it funny? See you in a moment, Will.” She put her hand on the latch of the gate.

He shook his head. “Neither by door nor by window.”

“Didn’t I say I’d never cross your doorstep?” she urged. “And yet I came.”

“You came through the window.”

“Well, I’ll come by the door. There! That’s a fair offer. I’m not going to stick to silliness—when it’s so silly!”

“All very well,” he said coldly. “But you know you can’t get through my door.”

“Goodness gracious! Have I grown so fat?”

“Don’t pretend. You know it’s the flood. Besides, it wouldn’t be any good my going through the window. What I said when I raised my hand to heaven was that your grandfather should never see me in his house——!”

“Just what I said—I remember now,” she interrupted. “I said you’d never see me in Frog Farm. And yet you did—and lost your bet too.” Her face was gay again. “So I gave in first, you see, sweetheart, and now you’ve got to play fair.”

“You don’t listen—you cut into my words. What I swore was that your grandfather should never see me in his house unless he carried me in!”

Her gaiety grew hysterical. “Ha, ha, ha!” she laughed. “Grandfather’s given up carrying ages ago. I’m his deputy now. Oh dear!” She measured him with a rueful eye. “Well, I can but try!” And she put her arms round his hips.

“Don’t make light of an oath, Jinny.” He pushed her off with his left hand.

“?’Twas you that made light of an oath—taking the Lord’s name over trifles.”

“I never took the Lord’s name,” he said sullenly. “I only lifted my hand.”

“Well, you can’t lift it now—and serve you right! You surely never expected Gran’fer to lug a sulky lout over his doorstep.”

“Of course not. I never expected I’d want to cross it. Why, Jinny, though you were there in the room, I was that blind——!” And his hand sought hers again.

“Leave me alone!” she cried. “You and your miserable vows!”

“I’d cut my tongue out if I could unsay the words.”

“You can unsay ’em more easily with your tongue in.”

“A man can’t go back on his sworn word. Women don’t understand.”

“So you said about horses. And nicely you managed yours! Oh, forgive me, I didn’t mean to crow. That was your misfortune. But this is your fault. It’s your pride you’re in love with; not me. Good-bye; Gran’fer will be starving.” She lifted the gate-latch angrily.

“But only good-bye for the moment,” he pleaded. “I can’t cross your threshold, but you can cross mine.”

She answered more gently, but her tone was tired and helpless. “And what would be the good, unless you and Gran’fer make it up?”

“I’m not marrying your grandfather!”

Something patronizing in the sentence jarred afresh. “You’d better go back to Blanche—it’ll be too late soon.”

“I wouldn’t touch Blanche with Bidlake’s barge-pole!”

The magnificence of the repudiation had its effect—it swamped in both the recollection that it was Blanche who had done the refusing.

“You don’t expect me to give up Gran’fer at his age?” she said more mildly.

“We’ll get him a minder—when I come back from Australia!”

Australia put the climax to her weariness. “Oh, yes, I don’t wonder it’s so easy for you to go.”

“It isn’t easy for me to go, even as far as Chipstone,” he protested passionately. “But it’s your grandfather you love, not me.”

“I love you both. Only think how old he is. It’s like quarrelling with a child. And he is in his second childhood almost, though I wouldn’t say it to anybody else. There are times when he seems quite his old self, wonderfully strong and sensible, but there are moments when he quite frightens me. He can’t bear to be crossed, and he forgets almost everything that happens nowadays.”

“Then perhaps he’s forgotten our upset!”

“No, that’s the unfortunate part. But we must just make a little joke of it. Down on your marrow-bones, Willie!” And she laid her hand on his shoulder with a last sprightly effort.

But even as his shoulder subsided, it swelled up again, like a pressed gutta-percha ball. “It’s all grandfather with you, your husband doesn’t count.”

“Husband, indeed!” She withdrew her hand as if stung. “You’re going quicker than your coach ever went.”

“Oh, very well—I’m off to Australia!”

“As you please. I’ll call for your box!”

“I’ll have no truck with a cart of yours.”

“There’s no other way of getting things to Chipstone,” she reminded him blandly.

“I’ll shoulder it sooner,” he burst forth.

“Ah, then you won’t be going just yet!”

“Damn my arm! I’ll not stay in this wretched country another fortnight! I’ll never look on your face again.”

She began humming: “A dashing young man from Canada——!”

His face grew black with anger, and he strode away even before she had passed through the gate.
VI

Righteous resentment saved Jinny from the collapse of the previous week. That dreadful gnawing of uncertainty was over. Whatever she had said, she was sure now that he did love her, even if she came second to his pride. That a way out of their difficulties would soon present itself to her nimble brain she did not doubt: her one fear was that he would find the way to Australia first, and it was a comfort to remember his helpless arm and his empty purse—“no money to think of foolishness,” as his dear old mother had put it. Already on the Tuesday after the unheard sermon, she found a means of communicating with him without a lowering of her own proper pride. For the fourteenth of the month was nigh upon them, and the shops—even apart from the stationer’s—-were ablaze with valentines, a few sentimental, but the overwhelming majority grotesque and flamboyant, the British version of Carnival. After long search she discovered a caricature that not only resembled Will in having carroty locks, but carried in its motto sufficient allusiveness to the quarrel with her grandfather to make it clear the overture came from her. Not that the overture looked conciliatory to the superficial eye. Quite the contrary. For apart from the ugliness of the visage, the legend ran:

To such a man I’d never pledge my troth,

I’d sooner die, I take my Bible oath.

Not a very refined couplet or procedure perhaps, but Jinny was never a drawing-room heroine, and the valentine was dear to the great heart of the Victorian people. Besides, do not the grandest dames relax at Carnival?

Jinny half expected a similar insult from Will by the same post, and though St. Valentine’s Day passed without bringing her one, she still expected a retort in kind the day after. And when Bundock appeared with a voluminous letter, directed simply to “Jinny the Carrier, Little Bradmarsh, England,” her disappointment at Mr. Flippance’s flabby handwriting was acute, though otherwise she would have been excited, not only by his letter, but by the foreign stamp, the first she had ever received. “So he’s still in Boulogne,” Bundock observed casually, lingering to pick up the contents. “I hope he’s sending you the money to pay Mrs. Purley.”

“Why should he send it through me?” she said sharply.

“Well, since he’s writing to you, it would save stamps, wouldn’t it? I do think it was rough on Mrs. Purley, though, a wedding breakfast like that, though I expect he bought his own champagne—and clinking stuff it was, nigh as good as the sherry at poor Charley’s funeral. However, she’s marrying her own daughter now—Mrs. Purley, I mean—and lucky she is too to have escaped young Flynt, who is off to Australia without a penny—looks to me almost as if they’re hurrying on the marriage so that Will may be best man before he goes, he and ’Lijah are that thick! He, he, he! Funny world, ain’t it? You’ve heard my riddle perhaps—Why are marriages never a success? Because the bride never marries the best man! He, he! Well, she came near doing it this time—he, he, he! Though whether she’s the best woman for either of ’em is a question.”

“That’s their own business,” Jinny managed to put in.

“So ’tis, but with ’Lijah a member of the Chipstone Temperance Friendly Society, he’ll hardly like a wife who washes her head in beer.”

“What nonsense! How can you know that?”

“Fact. It’s to make her hair wavy. There’s nothing her brother Barnaby don’t let out to my poor old dad. She was at it the day you all came to the Farm. It wasn’t that she had her bodice off and her hair down after the douche,”—Bundock seemed to savour these details—“she didn’t want him to smell it.”

“Well, you seem to smell out everything,” she said severely.

“I do have a nose like Nip’s!” he chuckled. But although Mr. Flippance’s letter was under it, he was forced to go off without even discovering that it did contain a financial document. Very amazed indeed was Jinny to see it drop out, this IOU, which was for herself and not Mrs. Purley, and represented half a crown! Retiring to her kitchen, she studied the large-scrawled pages.

“My dear Jinny,—I have just read in Madame F.’s copy of her London Journal (which like Mrs. Micawber she will never desert, at least not till the present serial is finished) an extract from the Chelmsford Chronicle about the miraculous saving of a cornstack belonging to our mutual friend, Mr. Caleb Flynt.

“I gather that a flood must have devastated Little Bradmarsh, and I write at once to know if all my friends are safe, especially your charming little self. Strange to think that the parlour in which I breakfasted on bacon and mushrooms in your sweet society may have been washed away! But such is life—a shadow-pantomime!

“We are still at Boulogne, you see. For one thing—to speak frankly—it’s a providential place to be at when funds are for the moment low, and it appears that Madame F.’s fortune—all that the villain Duke left of it—is in Spanish bonds. I need say no more. (I think I told you she was the niece of the famous Cairo Contortionist, and doubtless it was during the star’s sensationally successful season at Madrid that she was thus misled.) The wily master of marionettes must have been aware of this when he got [“her off his hands” appeared quite legibly here, though scratched out with heavy strokes] back his show over her head.

“Our present plans are, before attempting London (which though almost barren of talent calls for overmuch of the ready), to launch an English season in Boulogne itself, where there is such a large English circle, that saves so much by being here immune from sheriff’s officers that it can well afford the luxury of the theatre, not to mention the many French people here who must be anxious to learn English, especially after their visit to the Great Exhibition.

“Between you and I, I fear that Madame F.’s hopes will be dashed by the fact that the French have no eyes or ears except for a Jewess called Rachel, but as they have nothing near as good in the male line, we may yet—between us—show them something!

“If this fails—and I have seen too much of the public to be surprised at any ingratitude—there are always those wonderful new goldfields, where men of our race and speech are flocking, pickaxe on shoulder. Surely after their arduous toil for the filthy lucre, they must be longing of an evening for a glimpse of the higher life—I understand they have only drinking shanties.

“Imagine it, Jinny—a theatre for the rugged miners amid the primeval mountains with a practicable moon shining over the tropical scene. Pity I sold Duke that theatre-tent, but I suppose it couldn’t be transported to Australia as easily as a convict. (Good gag, that, eh?) Admission, I suppose, by nugget. I don’t see how you can give change—unless they take it in gold-dust—and anyhow, flush as they are, they will probably hand in considerable chunks at the box-office, reckless of petty calculation.

“So do not be surprised if one Easter morn you receive a golden egg laid by some Australian goose (I understand it is half a mole). Which reminds me to enclose herewith the half-crown I owe you. I dare say you have forgotten my borrowing it from you in the caravan of my blood-sucking son-in-law. But players have long memories.

“I suppose you see nothing of him or of Polly, for Chipstone is a poor pitch, but I am afraid from a Christmas card Polly sent me in reply to mine that the rascal is making her happy, so I can’t hate him as much as he deserves.

“?‘I hope,’ I scribbled across the picture of the snowy Mistletoe Bough I sent her, ‘you are experiencing all that matrimony was designed for, when this institution was introduced into Eden.’ Lovely, isn’t it? And where do you suppose it came from? It was that delicious Martha’s farewell wish to me on my wedding morning! I fancy she took it out of the number of the Lightstand that I bought her.

“Poor, dear Martha! Do give her my love and tell her there is a branch of the New Jerusalemites in Boulogne—no, best make it two, while you are about it, a French branch as well as an English branch, mutually emulous in ‘Upbuilding!’

“And how is her dashing cavalier of a son who posed as an American? I expect he’s married by now to the queen of the wasp-killers, judging by the warm way things were going at my own wedding-party. If so, pray hand him back his mother’s Christadelphian wedding-wish with my kind regards.

“Oh, and don’t forget to say amiable things (as they put it here) to Miss What’s-a-name, the young and lovely bridesmaid! Tell her I haven’t forgotten about her becoming wardrobe mistress, though if we go to Australia, I’m afraid it’ll be too rough for her at her age, and even Madame F. may shrink from the snakes and the blacks and the convicts and the desperado diggers, in which case we shall have boys to do the female parts and revive the glories of the Shakespearean stage.

“Heavens, how I have let myself chatter on! My paper is nearly at an end—like youth and hope! Believe me, dear Jinny, in this world or the next (don’t be alarmed, I only mean Australia),

“Your ever devoted,

“Tony Flippance.

“P.S.—I am so sorry but I find I can’t find (excuse my Irish) any way of sending the half-crown by post, so I am compelled to send you an IOU, but if you send it to Polly (Duke’s Marionettes, England, is sure to find her some day) I have no doubt she will honour it on my behalf. Safest address for me by the way is Poste Restante, Boulogne, as Madame F. likes trying different hotels.

“P.P.S.—There is a game here called ‘Little Horses.’ Most fascinating.”

Many and mixed were Jinny’s feelings as she ploughed through this bulky document, swollen by the opulent handwriting. Having no notion about investments, she vaguely imagined that Spanish robbers had impounded Cleopatra’s money, and it added to her sense of the unsettled state of the Continent. As for the IOU, she was angrily amused to think that he had already paid her the half-crown on the very morning of the bacon and mushrooms so fondly recalled, and that she had bought him his wedding present—a Bible—with it. To pay little debts twice over while defrauding the big creditors (and she had reason to think Miss Gentry as well as the Purleys had been left unpaid) seemed to her only an aggravation of fecklessness. But perhaps the Flippances had not meant to be dishonest: it was those Spanish freebooters that were to blame, who had captured the gold destined for Little Bradmarsh. The humiliation of his reference to Blanche was hard to bear—it made her want to dismiss Will altogether—but oddly enough a still keener emotion was kindled by Mr. Flippance’s obsession with Australia. Yes, Australia was in the air, it was a net into which everybody was being swept. Will was going from her—and to a place bristling with blacks and snakes and convicts and desperado diggers. Never had she received so perturbing a letter.
VII

In the menacing silence of Will, she began to study this interloping and kidnapping Australia. For it was not only his silence that menaced: through the hundred threads of her carrying career—antenn? always groping for news of him—she learned that his resolve was fixed. Indeed, Frog Farm was almost the only place on her rounds where his departure was not talked of. At the fountain head she could collect no information, for Martha was the only person she now saw there and the old lady seemed anxious, after receiving her parcels, to rush back to the clearing up of the colossal mess of the receded flood: a work in which the scrupulously invisible Will was understood to be lending a hand almost as vigorous as his father’s, albeit a single hand. But if the other was still in its sling, it was getting dangerously better, she gathered from Bundock’s father.

That he would go without another word to her was highly probable. Was there not in Finchingfield a hot-tempered farmer who had kept silence for seven years after his wife’s death? Miss Gentry, who in her Colchester days used to make his wife’s gowns—the lady riding in behind him to be measured—said it was from remorse because he had once used an improper expression to her. And this same Essex obstinacy was liable to manifest itself in less noble forms, as her grandfather’s feuds had proved abundantly. Will would shake off the soil of old England as surlily as he had shaken it off in his boyhood. As he had run away from his parents, so he would now run away from her, though far more unreasonably. But this time she would at least know where he was going, and her tortured soul reached out hungrily to picture his new world. The Spelling-Book was absolutely blank about Australia—how empty and worthless loomed that storehouse of information, with this gigantic lacuna!—but from a bound magazine volume of Miss Gentry’s, borrowed for the first time, she drew confirmation of her worst fears. It was a place that needed many more stations and out-stations of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and there were mosquitoes that could only be kept off by lighted torches, and biting spiders as big as your palm; after frying at 105 in the shade, you might shiver the next moment in the icy blast of the “Southern Buster.” And there were dust-winds to boot. If you went to the cemetery of Port Phillip, you would see that the majority of deaths were between the ages of thirty and forty. This premature mortality was due to the excessive drinking of cold water natural in so droughty a country. What a blessing that Will was not, like Mr. Skindle, a member of the Temperance Friendly Society! Nor was the labour market, congested as it was with ticket-of-leave men and bounty-emigrants from England, really superior to that of the old country, while house-rents were twice as high. As for the interior, another number of the magazine contained a story in which “an ill-favoured man with his arm in a sling” was pursued by a bull amid mimosa swamps in a setting of blacks with tomahawks and whites with pistols. “The Bull and the Bush,” she murmured whimsically to herself, but at heart she was cold with apprehension.

Then by a strange coincidence she found reassurance. Calling on Mrs. Bidlake in her confinement, she found the mother well and the new child vigorous. But it was not from their condition merely that emanated the novel atmosphere of happiness that radiated over the household: perhaps, indeed, the well-being was only a consequence of the happiness. For the Bidlakes, too, were off to Australia, though not to the goldfields. The cloud over the family had lifted at last. Not that Hezekiah had been proved innocent, but that he was become opulent. Released on ticket-of-leave, the sturdy ploughman had got a position with a cottage and garden in that “splendid suny clim” as he now called it, and then, just as he was about to send for Sophy and Sally, he had won six hundred and forty acres on the outskirts of Port Phillip in a lottery run by the Bank of Australasia! If he could borrow the capital from the bank, as was not improbable, he would be able to cut up his prize into ten-acre allotments and build houses on it—by that you simply doubled or trebled your outlay in a few years. His sister should have a house anyhow, and in the meantime her husband could help him manage or farm the vast estate. As for the “dere gels” there would be no need for them to work now, though if they wanted pocket-money they would be snapped up for service, and get as much as sixteen pounds a year each. He had already sent fifty pounds towards the passage-money, and would raise more when he knew if they would all come out, and moreover he understood that there was a Family Colonization Society in London to which Ephraim might apply for an advance. What a change, this going out of theirs, from that dreadful departure in the prison coach for the hulks and Botany Bay! Jinny, sharing their tears of joy, was vastly relieved on her own account at the paradise the grotesquely spelt letter conjured up, and she rejoiced to reflect that all that ancient barbarous harshness of magistrates and judges had led under Providence to the enrichment of Britain’s new soil with the sweat of her skilled agriculturists, and was even opening up new horizons for their innocent relatives. For assuredly this was a paradise on earth, if Hezekiah’s letter was not a shameless lure for his brother-in-law.

Think of tea at eighteenpence a pound—even a shilling if bought by the chest!—think of sugar at twopence-halfpenny, and neck of mutton at a penny a pound, nay, a whole sheep for five shillings. Think of pork at twopence and the best cows’ butter at sixpence; and after one has been reduced to turnips and dry bread, think of a land where ox-tails can be had for the skinning and sheeps’ heads and plucks by the barrow for the fetching away. A land where, as he wound up rapturously, any man who worked could have his bellyful, and where everything was plentiful except women, so that his girls would be able to pick and choose among the “gumsuckers” and have “cornstalks” for husbands. They shouldn’t marry among the “prisoners,” please God, for he didn’t reckon himself in that set, having done nothing to be ashamed of, though he did see now that threshing-machines were necessary when you had a lot of land.

“If they want women so badly, I might do worse than go myself,” said Jinny laughingly.

“No, no, whatever would Little Bradmarsh do without you?” said Ephraim.

“They did without me well enough,” she said bitterly. Indeed her first fine faith in human nature could not be mended as easily as the broken bridge, nor did the depreciatory allusions of her old customers to the deceased coach, and their compliments at her return, soften her cynicism. And as she spoke, she felt a sudden yearning to be done with them all: the infection of the new world began to steal into her veins too, but she knew her own exodus was impossible while her grandfather lived, and though she played with the idea and asked if she might copy Hezekiah’s instructions for the passage, her real design was to gather information for Will’s sake. It was very worrying though to copy the recommendations in the original spelling. “Of kors i don’t now wot the shipps is like nowerdies, but the nu chums ses they dont give no solt, onni roc-solt (solt is peny a pound here, peper 2d. nounc) and you’ll want thik warm close and moor beding.” There was an elaborate list of provisions necessary to supplement the ship’s dietary during the four weary months—it hardly needed copying, since it embraced a little of everything edible that would keep—but she was glad again that Will was not a temperance man when she found a bottle of brandy recommended as an indispensable medicine for the contingencies of the voyage.

Neglecting even the last instalment of her debt to Miss Gentry—had not the dressmaker given her the alternative of working it out?—Jinny began to acquire the longest-lived comestibles, storing them secretly in one of the ante-room chests. And it was by this concentration on Will’s interests that she managed to live through his dreadful silence, nay, to enjoy long spells of day-dreaming in which these edibles were for their joint Australian larder. The goldfields her imagination dismissed as bristling with “desperado diggers.” It was on the more idyllic images of her magazine article, written before the days of the discovery of gold, that her imagination fed. For though the writer denigrated the urban labour market, he admitted that there was plenty of room for rural labour, and then—with what seemed so uncanny a prying into her affairs that it flushed her cheek and made her heart beat faster—he postulated a young couple without capital setting up housekeeping together, and instructed them to take employment with a farmer while saving up enough to buy a small farm or herd of their own. The system, it appeared, was that the employer supplied rations as well as money-wages, and that while the husband worked on the land, the wife could do the farm cooking. (How lucky she had had so much experience, Jinny thought.) Nay, these rations, said the article (pursuing her affairs to what the blushing reader thought the point of indelicacy) would practically suffice for the children too, and when they grew up—-but her delicious daydream rarely went so far as this calculation of them as independent labour-assets.

The happy couple would also be permitted to keep a few cows, pigs, and fowls. Here the thought of Methusalem would intrude distressfully, and the difficulty of transporting him to the Antipodes. But when he had been left at Frog Farm in the loving hands of Caleb and Martha (become almost his parents-in-law), under promise of leisurely grazing for the rest of his life, with perhaps a rare jaunt to Chipstone market for their household needs, this ideal solution only reminded her of the phantasmal nature of the whole scheme, for Frog Farm could certainly not be saddled with her grandfather. But lest she should remember too cruelly its visionary character, the day-dream would at this point dart off swiftly on the journey through the Bush in quest of an idyllic spot free from blacks and provided with a generous employer.

Fortunate that this journey was to be so inexpensive, there being no inns (not even “The Bull and Bush”), but every settler being compelled by a wise decree of this wonderful State to give the bona fide traveller board and lodging for nothing. What a lovely journey that would be—if only one dodged the blacks and the diggers and the swamps with the alligators. She saw herself and Will bounding along like kangaroos (with Nip of course in attendance, she did not intend to take up with a dingo instead) through mimosa-bushes (like the scrub on the Common, only gaudier), and eating their dinner-packets under giant gum-trees, so enchantingly blue, whose tops, five hundred feet high, one might climb so as to survey the route for signs of native camps or friendly farmers. If there was no settler in sight by the time darkness fell, they would just perch themselves like birds in a nest of high branches out of all danger, and go to sleep under the starry heaven, which she saw vividly with the old constellations.

Closer to the real was her picture of the tenement with which the ideal farmer (when found) would provide his young couple. There would just be a few poles driven into the ground to support the roof of gum-bark, with its hole to let out the smoke. But of course one need not live much indoors in that climate—despite the occasional vagaries of the “Southerly Buster”—and it would be all the easier not to have to spend money on furniture. Why, put in Nip’s basket, lay out Will’s razor and slippers, set out her Spelling-Book and the Peculiar Hymn-Book the young rebel had thrown into the bushes, hang up his hat and her bonnet, and the place already begins to look like home. As for Will’s box—presumably conveyed to the chosen spot by the local carrier in a bullock-cart—it is so large it will crowd out everything else and furnish the place of itself. Decked with a rug it will serve as sofa, covered with a cloth it becomes a table. Lucky she has not brought a box of her own, but has squeezed her things into his—in that wonderful, incredible fusion of two existences!

It was hard to wake from these day-dreams to the wretched reality, and yet Uncle Lilliwhyte profited from one of these awakenings, for her Australian hut had reminded her of his English specimen, and she hurried to see it and him. She found them both in a bad way. His wading overmuch in the flood in quest of salvage had brought back more than a touch of his rheumatism, while the winds and rain had left his shanty leakier than ever. They were both breaking up, the ancient and his shell, and she now did her best to patch both up. Already in her new affluence she had called in young Ravens to mend her grandfather’s bedroom ceiling and redaub the gaps in the walls, and it was simple to turn this Jack-of-all-trades and fountain of melody on to the derelict hut in the woods. The poor old “Uncle” had hitherto built his fire as well as he could on the ground on the leeward side of his hut; Jinny now installed an old stove which she bought up cheap at the pawnbroker’s and conveyed to the verge of the wood. But the hole in the roof that might serve for Australia would not do for England, and after Ravens had re-thickened the walls with fresh faggots and re-thatched the hut with shavings presented by Barnaby, Jinny was amused to find that what seemed an iron chimney turned out on closer inspection to consist of three old top-hats. Where the ancient had picked up these treasures—whether in the flood or in his normal scavenging—he refused to say. “Happen Oi’ve got a mort o’ culch ye don’t know of,” he cackled, enjoying her admiration of his architecture. She wanted to have a floor to the hut, but this, like the exchange of his sacking for a pallet-bed, he opposed strenuously. “Gimme the smell o’ the earth,” he said. “Ye’ve shut out the stars and that’s enough.” He accepted, however, a bolster for a pillow.

By such interests and devices, aided by her regular rounds, Jinny staved off too clear a consciousness of the inevitable parting, which would not even have the grace of a parting. But the inexorable moment was like a black monster bearing down upon her—and yet it was not really advancing, it was rather something retreating: it could not even be visualized as a shock against which one could brace one’s shoulders. There was the horror of the impalpable in this silent drift away from her.

But when at last the day of departure was named, and came vibrating to her across a dozen subtle threads, the negative torture turned to a positive that was still more racking. It was on the Friday—unlucky day!—that Will was to leave for London, and here was already Tuesday. Some of her threads conveyed even the rumour that, in order to save a little cash for his start at the Antipodes, he meant to work his passage. And here was she unable to pack his box or even to slip her provisions into it; doomed by all the laws of sex and proper spirit to watch—bound hand and foot as in a nightmare—the receding of the mate whose lips had sealed her his. By the Wednesday morning even her grandfather observed something was wrong.

“Ye ain’t eatin’ no breakfus.”

“Yes, Gran’fer, lots!”

“Do ye don’t tell me no fibs. Oi’ve noticed your appetite fallin’ lower and lower like the flood, and now there’s a’mos’ nawthen o’ neither. And ye used to be my little mavis!”

“You don’t want me to eat snails or worms?”

“?’Tis your singin’, Oi mean.”

“There is Hey!” she chanted obediently.

“Ye’re the most aggravatin’ gal—minds me o’ your great-gran’mother. Ye need your mouth for eatin’, not singin’.”

After a sleepless night, unable to bear this inactivity, she ran round to the Bidlake lodgings to suggest that as young Mr. Flynt seemed to be sailing for Australia, it might be a neighbourly action to show him Hezekiah’s hints to travellers. But she gathered from the happy mother that the absent Ephraim had already talked to Will about the heavier clothes and the bedding, and that Will had said how fortunate it was he had sold off his summer suits, so as in any case to get the latest make at Moses & Son’s on his passage through London. Jinny suspected he had sold them off to raise funds for the voyage. Still the bravado of this pretence of a London outfit did not displease her. She learnt too that there had been a question of Will’s convoying the ex-convict’s daughters to their impatient parent, as the Ephraim Bidlakes would not be ready for ages, but it had been thought scarcely proper in view of their age and looks—a decision Jinny thought wise. Indeed, the idea that he was not to be thus companioned almost reconciled her, by contrast, to his departure.

When she got home she found to her surprise that her grandfather was entertaining Martha Flynt, who was far from the spruceness she usually achieved for outsiders of the other sex. She looked draggled and worn after her long and windy walk. What astonished Jinny most was that the old rheumatic woman should have trudged so far, and she opined that her business must be pressing and must be with herself. For it could hardly lie in the Christadelphian texts with which Martha seemed to be battering and bemusing the nonagenarian, whose great Bible lay open between them, and who was disconcerted to find her texts really there.

Martha had never set foot in Blackwater Hall before, so far as Jinny could remember, and very strange it was to see her sitting over her cup of tea which she must have made for herself at her host’s invitation. With all his perturbation over the texts, he seemed only too brisked up by this amazing visit from a female, the first unwhiskered being, save Jinny, he had met for many moons. It was a fillip he did not need, Jinny considered: the old good food again, the sweet security, the satisfaction of revenge, had made his eyes less bleared, filled out his flacked cheeks and given him a new lease of strength and sanity—a sort of second wind—and this visit might only over-stimulate him. She did not like the undercurrent of excitement that showed itself in the twitching of his limbs and eyelids, especially when Martha declared he could not be really accepting the Book as all-inspired if he believed man’s heaven lay in the skies. “Whither I go, ye cannot come,” she repeated.

“We’ll see about that,” said Daniel Quarles fiercely, and clenched his fists as if he meant to storm the gates of cloudland. “And ain’t ye forgittin’ ’Lijah what went up to heaven with a chariot and bosses o’ fire? That won’t happen to ’Lijah Skindle, damn him—he’ll have the chariot o’ fire, but he won’t git no higher. He, he, he!”

Martha was momentarily baffled by Elijah’s ascension, but recovering her nerve, she dealt John iii. 13, “No man hath ascended up to heaven.”

Partly to soothe the old man, partly to give Martha a chance of speaking out, Jinny here intervened with the suggestion that he himself should ascend up to his room and bring down the telescope to amuse his guest withal. Obviously relieved—for he felt himself in a tight textual corner—he hastened upstairs.

It was then that the old woman, bursting into tears, and clutching at Jinny’s arm, sobbed out: “Oh, Jinny, you’ve got to come back with me—you’ve got to come back at once!”

Jinny turned cold and sick. What had happened to Will?

“But what for?” she gasped.

“To Willie!”

Her worst fears were confirmed. “Is he hurt?”

“I wish he was a little,” Martha sobbed. “But even his arm’s all right now.” What Martha went on to say Jinny never remembered, for she was suddenly sobbing with Martha. But hers was the hysteria of relief, and when she at last understood that what Martha was asking was that she should come back and marry Will, so that he should stay near his mother, her heart hardened again. It was not that she made any attempt to deny her love—things seemed suddenly to have got beyond that—but Martha, she felt, knew not what she asked, seeming to have divined from her boy’s demeanour a lover’s quarrel, but without any inkling of the real tangle and deadlock. Even if she humiliated herself, as Martha half unwittingly suggested, it was all a blind-alley.

“My making it up won’t keep him in England,” she urged. “He’s got no money. And no more have I.”

She might have been more willing to make a last desperate dash of her head against the brick wall, had she understood how Martha had fought against her from the first and how pitiable was her surrender now, but no suspicion of that underground opposition had ever crossed her mind, nor did Martha now confess what indeed she no longer remembered clearly.

“But there’s room for you in Frog Farm, dearie. We’d love to have you. We’ve always loved you.”

“I can’t,” Jinny moaned. “It’s all no use. And I’ve got Gran’fer!” Indeed, Martha’s passionate plea had curiously clarified and steadied her mind, reconciling her to the inevitable. To go to Will was exactly what she had been yearning to do. But when the plea for such action came through Martha’s mouth, she could see it from outside, as it were, realize its futility and cleanse her bosom of it. She felt strangely braced by her own refusal.

“But I’ve got some provisions for the voyage,” she said, “that you might smuggle into his box—I know it’s big enough. And I do hope, Mrs. Flynt, he’s not going to work his passage.”

“I only wish he was, for he mightn’t find a ship. But you see Flynt would go and advance him the money and insist he must go steerage like a gentleman. He’s got no heart, hasn’t Flynt,” she wept, “he only wants to settle down in peace after Will and the flood, and sit under his vine and fig-tree.”

“Don’t cry—here’s Gran’fer coming down. I tell you what I will do, Mrs. Flynt, I will call for his box.”

“Oh, bless you, Jinny!” Martha fell on her neck. “If you come, he won’t go! That’s as sure as sunrise.”

“And then I can bring him his provisions,” Jinny pointed out sceptically, as she disentangled herself from Martha’s arms. Then both females were dumbed by the sight of the Gaffer returning in his best smock and with his beard combed! He tendered Martha the telescope with a debonair gesture. But Martha, her mission comparatively successful, departed so precipitately that the poor old man felt his toilette wasted, not to mention his telescope.

“She’s a flighty young woman,” was his verdict, “as full o’ warses as our thatch o’ warmin. Sets herself up agin John. Wesley as searched the Scriptures afore she was born.” And laying down his telescope, he turned over the pages of his Bible, and perpending her textual irritants and questing for antidotes, fell quietly asleep.

He was delighted when she returned the next afternoon, and he played Genesis v. 24, with a snort of triumph, by way of greeting. Martha tremulously countered with Acts ii. 34, and denied that Enoch had gone up to heaven, but it was obvious her heart was not in the game, and Jinny was glad when Ravens’ ladder was clapped against the casement and his padded knees appeared in an ascension of a purely terrestrial character, however celestial the melody that accompanied it. For the Gaffer had grown fond of this bird-of-all-work, now in the r?le of thatcher, and would hasten to hover about him, fussily directing the operations of his club, shears, or needle, correcting the words and airs of his songs, and even joining him in duets. Ravens’ encouragement of the older bird had become almost as alarming to Jinny as his shameless delay in sending in his bill and his positive refusal to charge for Uncle Lilliwhyte’s repairs, but this afternoon his advent was welcome, though the noise and jingle of the duets outside made her conversation with Martha difficult.

“He mustn’t go—he mustn’t go,” Mrs. Flynt sobbed. “It’s like the New Jerusalem coming down and going up again.”

Jinny quite appreciated that. “I thought he wouldn’t let me call for his box,” she said quietly.

“No, the pig-headed mule! He’s going to carry it himself.”

“In what? It’s not easy to get anything but me.”

“He knows that. That’s why he’s carrying it. On his shoulders, I mean.”

“With his arm just healed!”

“There won’t be much inside—he’s going to buy his things in London!”

“But the box itself—why, it’s big enough to pack himself in!”

“............